Far Lands

Reports (so far, do let me know) are very positive, and Christmas-lunch discussion in our house included building a new turkey house in 2017 for 10 birds! Turkey Club goes global! Best wishes for 2017!

Yesterday, Turkey Club had its first meeting of the year. One plucker commented on the old plucking magic coming back, another that she wished she had not added Vaseline to her lip beforehand as feathers kept getting stuck.

We have decided to enclose our veg plot (the main area we grow veg in our badger-proof potager) with sleepers and create one huge raised bed. Ever since we moved here we have fought with the grass in the potager as it is difficult to mow / scythe / strim for fear of damaging the fence or the veg. This way, at least, I will be able to strim against the sleepers. We chose ex-railway sleepers made of tropical hardwood which are supposed to last 100 years. A guarantee that we will not be able to check, unfortunately. Last week they landed on the drive. The veg garden is perhaps 50 or 60 metres away, down a slippery slope. The packing sheet showed a delivery of 26 sleepers weighing 1.95 tonnes. Sparing your blushes, that is 75 kilos a sleeper. Just me on my lonesome. I tried picking one up. No way, Jose. Problemo! Ideas?

The digging (see blog 300) had been going so well, and I had almost finished the second cordon. But nothing for nearlies - 8/11 dug and I hit a large rock. Himalayan-sized. A Rock of Gibraltar piece of rock. You get the picture. And here is a picture: I have removed large rocks before but this one was not moving at all. I wondered about just putting compost on top of it - no-one would know. But the fruit trees would, and 5 or 6 years down the line, poor growth would be the tell-tale. I wondered about dynamite, re-siting the cordon (no way!), a digger . . . In the end I settled on this:- A roadworks-type breaker and a compressor to power it. Hard work but effective, and I've now got enough stone to patio the lawn.

This week I planted a jostaberry. I can't think why I have not done so before, as it is a hybrid between a blackcurrant and a gooseberry. The berries look like large blackcurrants and the taste is similar too. Seems almost too good to be true. However, they are, according to my colleagues at the Northern Fruit Group 'big, thuggish plants that can take over.' We will see how it copes at Farlands. Meanwhile, Christmas is coming!

1 One man went to dig, Went to dig a cordon-line, One man and his trug, Doug, Went to dig a cordon-line of fruit-trees. 2 One man (still) went to dig, Went to dig a cordon-line, One man and his trug, Doug, Went to dig a cordon-line of fruit-trees. 3 One man (still just one man) went to dig, Went to dig a cordon-line, One man and his trug, Doug, Went to dig a cordon-line of fruit-trees. 4. One man (still just one man, quite tired now) went to dig, Went to dig a cordon-line, One man and his trug Doug, Is still digging. The details of the digging . . . I am digging 3 new cordons for fruit trees and currently I am halfway through the second. Eventually there should be space for about 50 trees. Each cordon will be11 metres along, and I am digging them in 1-metre sections, one per day. After removing the turf I remove the top soil (putting it in the trug). Then I dig out 3 or 4 half-sacks of stone and very poor subsoil (which gets disposed of - ie dumped behi

Like a doctor doing his rounds, I have started on the pruning. First, a month or so ago, the raspberries and then over the last week the blackberries, tayberry and blackcurrants. Gooseberries can also be done now or can be left until March when it's time for the red and white currants. With our blackberries I decided on an easier plan this year. Cut down and out anything that has fruited, and then tie back in this year's growth. The photos (same plant) show my beloved Tyn Dwr blackberry (see previous blogs) which has grown up to three metres this year.

Snow fell for the first time this here, and I overheard the turkeys discussing it:- 1st turkey: 'So that's what Miss Smilla has been going on about.' 2nd turkey: 'Both her and Pamuk.'

Last week we almost lost the turkeys. I came home at dusk to find only 2 turkeys (we should have 6) still in the paddock, in the bottom corner next to the gate. When I walked down to them I saw that 2 more were just the other side of the fence. They had flown or jumped over. I climbed over the fence, caught 2 of them and put them back into the paddock. I then heard a flapping noise, and I turned to see, incredulously, that one of the turkeys was on the far side of the river. Somehow it had waddled down to the riverbank, jumped / flown the six feet down to the river, waded / swum the river and climbed out onto the other side. I followed it, waded the river, and somehow managed to capture it. That made 5. As I herded them back up the paddock, head-torch now on, I spotted the 6th. It had settled down for the night on the ground and was rather annoyed at being disturbed. So, we still have 6 turkeys. At the weekend we clipped their (right) wings for a second time. And, if

Winter is now here. Early. We are breaking the ice on the water for the chickens and the turkeys, we are burning our log burner hard and snow is forecast tonight. We decided that a duvet would be a good idea for the bees. Our main colony is in the National beehive (LHS) which is single-walled; the WBC colony (you do the math) is very small and not viable to last until the Spring. Of course, sod's law, they are camped in the double-walled WBC hive.

Summer Pudding with its raspberries and blackcurrants and redcurrants and blackberries is well known, and to a lesser extent so is Autumn pudding (crab apples, sloes, blackberries and elderberries). S'autumn Pudding is even less well known. I invented it a few weeks ago, a hybrid between the two and a name that sounds like you would want some! Anything really goes, but in this one I had blackberries, crab apples, a few elderberries and redcurrants and blackcurrants. I'm hoping it might take off - on the scale of Marlon and the ketchup sandwich (he invented this during an episode of The Perishers if you go that far back).

With the inexorable approach of Winter we took a week off and headed for the sun. Like last year we went to Majorca which gives great sea swimming and surprisingly good walking (mountains of 1000m plus). We swam and we walked but, true to type, we also foraged and checked out their chickens. Foraging spoils included walnuts (left two trays), dates (top right), a pomegranate (no pic), almonds (middle right), medlars (middle, bottom), figs (right, bottom) and satsumas (you can probably work it out).  The chickens roosted in an orange tree!

With the leaves changing colour and starting to fall, it may be a good time to think about Winter jobs. Big jobs. Long, tiring jobs that can warm you up and can be done in rain and snow. For example, digging out the compost heaps, manuring the land, building wood stacks and one-off construction / digging jobs. For me this year the one-off job is to construct 3 new cordon lines for apple trees. The design and location was discussed at some length during the Spring and finally received wifely approval. The new cordons are 10.6 m long and should provide enough space for 50 varieties of apple but also some pear and plum. My aim is 100 varieties so I may need some family trees. Like any big job, it always feel good to start.

At the weekend I picked another apple from our new cordon line of fruit trees. It was a good size - 230g when I weighed it - and I was quite proud of it. The first apple from that tree. A James Grieve , said my labelling system. I picked it for Saturday lunch, to be shared and discussed with my wife. To be lauded, both the apple and me. It did not look like a  James Grieve . I checked a second book. Its eye was meant to be closed or part closed. This apple's eye was open, wide open. I was unsure, and when I cut through the middle with a knife, even more so. Hard, culinary apple hard. I checked the pictures in the two books again. Nothing had changed. I bit off a piece and chewed. Slowly, sadly. Disappointedly. It was a culinary apple; a cooking apple. Possibly a Bramley ; it looked like one. I hung my head. And I thought about the chain of actions from harvesting the scion to transplanting the grafted sapling. Where had the mistake been made? By the person who had gi

Developing our fruit trees has taken a lot of hard work; a lot of digging and carting manure. Then a lot of waiting (3 years) as my first grafted trees grew. This year the cordon line has rewarded us with 5 trees bearing fruit. James Grieve, Katy, Rosemary Russett, Laxton Superb and The Big Purple. Katy had 6 apples and over the weekend we ate one. Our first apple from a grafted fruit tree. A big moment. Delicious! Which left 5 on the tree. This morning I walked past the cordon line to find 2 apples on the ground, the results of a hungry badger. £!&%***!

Last night on NW news there were picture of fly-tipping on a massive scale - whole barns of illegally dumped waste. The problem of course is that we as a society produce too much waste. John Seymour, the guru of self-sufficiency, states that zero waste should be the goal . And that starts when you buy / obtain things in the first place. One good idea is to have multiple bins in the kitchen and few bins elsewhere in the house. That way all rubbish gets sorted the first time it goes into a bin. As the photo shows our rubbish bin (black-bin rubbish) is about a standard ruler high, we line it with old cereal packets and fill it about once a week. Sometimes, not even that. Can anyone beat that?

At the weekend we picked up the turkey poults from Stafford. This year we have six, four females and two larger males. So far so well-behaved. Names are immediately an issue. For the two we are responsible for we have decided on politicians again (making the Christmas hatchet that much easier). Having previously had a Gove, this year we are having a Cam and a BoJo. Other names please!

Following on from the previous blog . . . We returned to the hive a few days later and looked in at the heavy super. Only about 50 bees remained so the porter escapes had done their job. I removed the super, brushed off the bees and went into the house to find some scales. The super weighed 18.5 kilos which accounting for the box and the frames meant 15 kilos of honey. We have decided to use it all as comb honey - rather than have the very messy experience of extraction in a centrifuge. Of course, cutting it up is also very messy! But this is the result. We checked on colony again yesterday and found that the brood box has plenty of stores, a laying queen and also the half-filled super that I gave back to them. Somehow, we have achieved a honey harvest and a happy colony!

Much to our surprise when we looked at the bees a few days ago we discovered a very heavy super. A quick look at the frames showed that much of the honey was capped ie ready to harvest. Although we are mindful that the bees will need about 25kg of honey to take them through the Winter, we decided to add a second super with a mixture of bare frames and frames with plenty of uncapped honey. We put the new super just above the brood box and the heavy-with-capped-honey super at the top. Between the two we put a clearing board which is a crown board with two porter escapes. The porter escapes allow bees to exit downwards but not return into the honey-filled super. Photos below show how a porter escape works and a crown board with two of them in place. We have now left the bees for a couple of days, the idea being that when we return no bees will remain in the super we want to remove. That's the idea, anyway. We shall see!

If you didn't know I run smallholding tours - see the orchard, bees, chickens, veg garden etc whilst I wax lyrical on grafting fruit trees, trying to be self-sufficient in fruit and veg, permaculture, seeing ourselves as stewards of the land  (as opposed to property owners), attuning to the seasons and the simple joy of being outside . . . See sister blog for details http://farlandsholidaycottagepeakdistrict.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-cottage-is-part-of-smallholding-of.html Recently, anticipating a Summer rush, I put a notice in the village shop. Which to my surprise quite a few people have seen. Yesterday I did a tour for a five year-old and her grandmother. And it went quite well . . . she collected eggs, sampled snap peas, tomatoes and purple podded peas. She (the five year-old / 'nearly six') told me she liked mint tea so we picked mint and black peppermint too. We explored the veg garden, the greenhouse and the fruit trees. To finish I put her in Sarah's bee suit

. . . even if no-one else has. One of the implications of much of an apple's goodness (minerals and vitamins) being in its seeds is that to benefit they have to be eaten. And not just eaten but chewed up as apple seeds tend simply to be passed. I then remembered something about apple pips containing cyanide. I began to look into all this . . . There are hundreds and hundreds of web snippets on the benefits of eating apples, an apple a day keeps the doctor away and all that. But quite difficult to shore it up with trusted sources. A medium-sized apple weighs 150g - 200g and contains half that number of calories. 80% is water, 10% is carbohydrate, 0.5% protein and 4% minerals and vitamins. Half the minerals and vitamins and fibre are in the peel and the core. Apple pips contain amygdalin which can release cyanide when coming contact with digestive enzymes. According to the http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/contact-us/about-us/  (Cambridge University group) about

It's a bit late for thinning fruit even up here in the North of England; late June / early July after the 'June-drop' is better. But I came across the reason for thinning (the underlying reason) and I thought it was so interesting I wanted to blog it. Thinning involves removing some of the excess fruit; for apples, the advice is usually to thin to one per cluster and 1 or 2 fruit every 10 cm apart. More space for culinary apples which grow larger. Less space for pears. The reasons for thinning include:- the remaining fruit should be larger and better quality to lessen the chance of biennial cropping by saving the tree some energy to reduce the risk of branches breaking to reduce the risk of some diseases, including brown rot to allow more sunlight to reach fruit and improve ripening and taste Now to the underlying reason! The reason (thanks to Bob Flowerdew) is that the tree produces fruit for different reasons to us. The tree produces fruit for the seeds and

We are picking lots of soft fruit at the moment. Some strawberries, lots of raspberries, a few gooseberries, red currants, black currants and a couple of hybrid berries. We grow loganberries and tayberries. It is difficult to tell the two hybrids apart although size is an indication (here anyway) as is their frequency. Tayberries (left on the top photo, above on the bottom photo), tend to be larger and give us a far better yield. They taste quite similar. They are both a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. As with any fruit that does not come true from seed (which is everything that has different cultivars (for example in apples, Katy and James Grieve ) an infinite number of hybrids are possible. Hence, one day there may be as many hybrids of raspberry and blackberry as there are cultivars of apple.

On Sunday we inspected the bees and found some queen cells; they were capped which means a swarm is imminent. There are various options including doing nothing but that would mean you are likely to lose half of the bees when the old queen flies off with them. Another option is an artificial swarm, and after midnight discussions with Sarah, that's what I tried today. With one slight modification! We are unable to spot our Queen (v hard in 50 000+ bees when she is not marked) so rather than move the old queen as you are supposed I moved the queen cells. Before the move  ( empty WBC on left, full colony in National on right):- I placed a new brood box to the right of the old colony, then smoked the old colony like mad hoping to drive the old queen down to the bottom of the hive. Then took the super off the old colony and placed it to one side. Then took the half brood box (containing the queen cells) and put it on top of the new brood box to the right. Put its roof on.

You may remember me planting the foraging hedge in March 2013 (see blog No 103); if you don't it consists of over 100 trees, the idea being to provide food for the bees and us. There are 9 nine types of tree / plant but when I am doing my smallholding tours I can never remember all 9. So when we were flogging up and down in the Alps recently, I came up with the ABC of the foraging hedge . . . A - Apple B - Blackthorn C - Sea Buckthorn D - Dog Rose E - Elder F - funny tasting fruit, Medlar G - go and eat your hat, an admittedly oblique reference to a Pear, the explanation being that on an already in-situ hawthorn bush I have grafted a pear ( Beurre Hardy ) and if it produces any fruit then Sarah said she would eat her hat H - Hazel I - I-shaped growth, Willow The QUIZ for you is to work out / remember why I have planted those 9 varieties ie what type of foraging each provides and for who. After 3 years the hedge now looks like this . . .

. . . I'm talking chickens. Our two chicks (left and right, below, and then together) are now ten weeks old but we are still not sure what we have got. Sarah thinks one of each and her top tip is size of feet. According to her, boys have much bigger feet! Please get in touch with your predictions, suggestions and theories.

Just back from our Summer hols. Garden looks like we have been away for several months, not just two weeks. Apples starting to form on the cordon, knee-high spinach and shoulder-high broad beans. But also very long grass, carpets of weeds and sausage-length slugs. Already, the holiday is disappearing, but at least we have the photos (we did a circuit around Vallonpierre near Gap in the Alps) . . .