Diary

A new season beginsRSS feed

Posted: Monday 31 January, 2005

by Rosemary at 7:06pm in Anything goes 1 comment Comments closed

Well, the new season has begun. This weekend has been wonderful. The weather has been superb - dry and sunny and tolerably warm if you were working.

Our new strawberry plants arrived, along with the redcurrant and whitecurrant bushes, onion and shallot sets and a pile of seeds. For obvious reasons, the live plants were the priority. On Saturday, Dan built a new raised bed and filled it with top soil. The hens gave it a good going over before the plants were put in and netted. We're putting in two varieties of strawberries - Pegasus (midseason) and Florence (late). We chose these varieties (from The Organic Catalogue) because of their resistance to a number of diseases, as well as good yields of well flavoured fruit. We're planting ten of each variety - Pegasus this weekend and Florence when they arrive.

The redcurrant is Redstart, chosen because it flowers late and shoudl be OK in these northern climes. The white currant is White transparent, again a late flowering variety.

The shallots will go in next weekend. The variety we're using this year is Longor, a traditional French shallot with a lovely mild flavour (I quote). We always pickle shallots (courtesy of Delia Smith's Christmas book) and use them when pickling beetroot (also a la Delia). We've bought a kilo of sets- about 50 sets. We expect to get 5-6 shallots from each set. If we get a good crop, we'll save some for cooking, but the pickles come first.

Dan completed the extension of the second of four large raised beds on Sunday. We'll get topsoil delivered this week, and once it's in the bedds, give it a good load of FYM or compost. In fact, it must almost be time for Dan and his Dad to make another trip to the stables...

We've also been doing some work on the fruit trees. Dan's done a bit of pruning - we left it too late last year and some of the trees looked a bit odd. I took the tree guards off to let the hens have aroot around, then cleared the grass from around the tree, top dressed with bonemeal, added a good mulch of bark and replaced the guards. Even in the few days the guards were off, the bunnies had a good nibble. We've 13 trees - one died last year - and I got four done, so I'll get the rest done next weekend.

The hens are looking well apart from one who seems to be moulting, and she seems fine apart from looking a bit dishevelled. We'll have to think about additions soon.

Other than that, I had a bit of a tidy up, sweeping and pruning. One of our climbing roses was hammered in the recent gales, so it's been tidied up.

It was still light (ish) tonight at 5.30pm, so things are looking up. Soon we'll be able to get an hour in after work. So at least we'll have something to post on the website!!

Comments

Snowbabies

Wednesday 2 February, 2005 at 12:09pm

Nice to hear from you again :-)

Debbie & Paul

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