July 2022

Diary

Peas / Sweet peas / Last course

Monday 4 July, 2022

by Rosemary at 10:24am in Smallholding Comments closed

Monday 27^th June

Wish we’d done the sheep yesterday. It didn’t rain but there’s rain forecast for much of the rest of the week. I need to get my head down and get through a pile of office stuff. No excuses. No diversions.

Wednesday 29^th June

Today was all about peas – sweet and sweeter. Strawberries are coming well now and we have raspberries round in the wood. Not where we planned, but we’ll happily take them.

Grey / Cabbage / Blueberries

Monday 11 July, 2022

by Rosemary at 11:40am in Smallholding 2 comments Comments closed

Monday 4^th July

Dry, some sun and a rather brisk breeze. I don’t know what happened to last week, but my To Do list is scarily long. Keeping too many plates spinning.

After tea, we gave the lambs their second Covexin vaccination, did all the sheep with Clik and tagged the lambs going away on Thursday. I put Spotinor on all the cattle this morning. The flies are awful. Smokey needs two good coverings with repellent every day.

Tuesday 5^th July

You take your eyes of the garden and the weeds are rampant. The peas are especially bad because they cling to the weeds making harvesting difficult. Anyway, made a start.

Flowers / Kirrie Show / Birthday

Monday 18 July, 2022

by Rosemary at 3:02pm in Smallholding Comments closed

Monday 11^th July

Pulled all the beetroot – a good crop from a metre or so of bed. The variety was Moneta on a seed tape. Got them all cooked and pickled and I’ve sown another three half rows – that was all the tape I had left. Would definitely do the tape again. Having said that NONE of the parsnips on the tape germinated.

Beetroot Moneta from seed tape .

Bovine Love Island / Bricks / Roses

Monday 25 July, 2022

by Rosemary at 10:10am in Smallholding Comments closed

Monday 18^th July

Hot. But not as hot as forecast. The media does love to create a crisis. Folk go on holiday to enjoy temperatures like this.

Alistair, our vet, was out just after lunchtime to jag the four female cattle with a hormone to bring them into season – sadly, this means they will slip any calf they are carrying, but we don’t have the facilities to calve indoors, so we just have to bite that particular bullet. I asked him to do an internal on Baby and on Blizzard. I’ve never seen Baby what I would call “properly” in season. She wasn’t in calf, not surprisingly, but ovaries, tubes etc were all present and correct, so hopefully she’ll come into season and get in calf now. Blizzard was about six weeks in calf, which is a bit sad but also good news – if she can do it once, she should be able to do it again. I wanted Alistair to check all was well after quite a difficult calving last year – and it was.