A harvest of lemongrass and a family of deer

Wednesday 9th January 2019

I finally got round to harvesting some lemongrass today.
One of the more unusual crops I have grown and this year was very much an experiment.

You can buy stalks from the shop and root them in water to grow on, but this year I sowed seeds instead, not expecting too much. But by the autumn I had seven very sizeable clumps of lemongrass several feet tall.

I am not quite sure what to do about winter though. The lemongrass is in the polytunnel. Three plants are in the soil and four in pots. I know that lemongrass is not frost hardy and the pots which were nearest the doors have begun to die back.

I am not sure if this is just an annual die back and if new shoots will come back in the spring.

So somewhat belatedly I cut a big handful of stalks today while they were still healthy and green.

This will be plenty of lemongrass to last through the winter and spring. If the existing plants don't come back, I have plenty of seedl eft over to raise some more plants. If that does happen, I'll bring one or two pots inside next winter.

In the afternoon I took the dogs on a very long walk. There is a sizeable field of rough ground which has not had a crop for a few years. It is possible that it cannot be ploughed for archaeological reasons, for the whole area used to be a fleet and a centre of Roman saltworks. It may just be that the farmer is using it for game cover for the many local shooters to come along and blast a few freshly released gamebirds.
Whatever the reason, this are holds quite a large flock of linnets, a sadly unusual sight in the countryside these days. I extended the usual route to skirt round this field and to take in a new stretch of river. As well as the linnets there were buntings and several snipe. If only more land were like this rather than the intensively exploited surrounding farmland.

Until recently this owl box was nestled in a clump of bushes. Unfortunately this was far too messy for the farmer's liking and probably competed with a fraction of a percentage of his field. The owls seem to have abandoned the box now and they have sadly become quite a rare sight on late afternoon walks.

Bird of the day was, however, not a bird but the family of roe deer which appear irregularly in the fields around the farm. Last week we watched them swim across a river. They have been in the area since we moved in and numbers have fluctuate between four and seven.

Anyway, I think I have found where they live most of the time, for as a reached the edge of the rough land there they were. They looked up but allowed remarkable close approach, close enough for me to get some sort of photo with my phone before they went leaping off across the fields.