Far Lands

2 eggs this morning. One fell out of the chicken house when I opened its front door. The other was on the ground. Both were very small. No doubt they're from the new chicks. It's taken them 21 weeks. Wise men* predicted it would have to happen one day. * actually, one man and one woman PS I'm back after taking a break! Will be blogging on Tuesdays like usual.

I wrote the following article for the quarterly magazine of the Northern Fruit Group. What’s the point of pears?   They all look the same, they all taste the same and they don’t store well.   This year, however, I was converted. I also found out that they do have a point – a historical one.   My epiphany took place at the end of a cold rainy Dewhurst session – at the close of the Summer. (Dewhurst, for years now, has reliably provided good weather every Wednesday, irrespective of the forecast, the rest of the week, and what it’s doing on my, Hayfield, side of the Pennines.) This year it was different and we suffered on Wednesdays.             So there I was, sitting in my car, engine on, heater on, mug of marmite in my hands, ready to drive away. My car boot was full of wet and claggy waterproofs and tools.             Hilary approach...

We had a stand, near Tree Station and The National Trust. Farlands Smallholding - a greener, more sustainable way of life. For sale:- chicks (by arrangement) comb honey strawberries Sunset apple trees blackberries grafting courses (in March 2018 - spaces still available) At 3pm I gave a short talk  Intro to apples and at 3.45pm I did a demo on whip 'n' tongue grafting. The chickens were a big hit and I almost made it into double figures for my apple talk.

At the weekend we found an unidentified 'thing' in the chicken house. Skin and flesh and hairs, shape of half a finger, and looking like a piece of uncooked chicken. (Not the blue thing - that's a biro.) 'Qu'est ce que c'est?' we asked each other. We now think it's a teratoma which made an appearance a couple of years ago in The Guardian - see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/27/teratoma-tumour-evil-twin-cancer The word teratoma comes from the Greek meaning 'monstrous tumour.' The tabloids as you can imagine ran monster headlines when The Guardian was more restrained. But they have a point: teratomas can include hair and teeth and bone. They are made of cells gone awry. Maybe not something for the BBQ.

I have been busy storing apples in our apple-store and I am now into the overflow zone. The overflow zone is a stack of cardboard boxes in a cupboard. The cupboard seemed quite damp and, as I pulled the boxes out, they were wet to the touch. The reason: 2 boxes from last year! So, if you've ever wondered what happens to an apple in a year, here's the answer:- Whiffiness-wise, not too bad. Certainly not like a burger left under the microwave, a teenage error that my mum still reminds me about.

On Saturday we put the chicks into the main chicken house. At dusk we let the other 6 chickens back into the run, and then said 'Good Night'! Fairly traumatic for them and us. The pecking order is a very literal thing in the chicken house.

The thing about fruit trees – a good thing admittedly – is that even a smallish tree is likely to provide copious amounts of fruit. In particular, apples, pears and plums. Two trees or more, and unless you’re the old woman who lives in a shoe, you’re going to struggle to use them. You’ve eaten them for breakfast, lunch and dessert, and snacks in-between. You’ve made pies and crumbles and tarts and charlotte and tarte tatin . You’ve baked muffins and cakes. You’ve jarred up sauces and chutneys and jams. You’ve made fool, fritters and finicky pastries. You’ve brewed wine and made liqueurs. You’ve stored them on every shelf in the garage and you’ve risked botulism to put them in huge jars. You’ve covered them in toffee and shoved them on sticks. You’ve stewed, baked, puréed and fried them. You’ve bobbed them. Lambasted them. You’ve jumped up and down on them and pressed them into juice. You’ve given them away, lobbed them at the postman and thrown them for the dog.   ...

Just back from a long weekend walking (our) next section of the Pennine Way. Cowling to Hawes, about 50 miles in 3 days. Wet and windy - like being at home.

At the weekend we made a dozen entries into the Village Show. Runner beans, French beans, tomatoes x 2, roses, apples, honey, rhubarb and ginger jam, blackcurrant jam, a cucumber, courgettes and . . . this is like the tray game - there's one more and I can't remember it . . . GOT it: a Turk's Head squash (we debated which category, 'rude and amusing' or 'other' (we opted for 'other' for fear of very rude (and common) deformed potatoes)). These were our results: 1st prizes: honey, courgettes, roses 2nd prize: apples ( Katy / Laxton's Superb , King of the Pippins ) 3rd prize: cucumber Impressive, eh? Not really. Only 9 people and a dog entered, and there was no honey category - I had to phone up and ask for a honey category to be added (only one entry - us).

Three weeks ago we checked our 2 hives and we were not sure we would be taking much honey at all. But three weeks constitutes many bee-hours when there are 60 000 bees or so, possibly more across the 2 hives. The situation on Sunday was much improved. We took 2 frames from the WBC (our new colony which we created earlier this year) and added the porter escapes to the National, our established colony. These are one-way doors which overnight remove most of the bees on the frames in the super. Yesterday, we returned to the National hive and removed 5 really good frames. (The porter escapes had done a good job and only a hundred or so bees remained.) Honey harvesting is a serious business!

Last weekend we kicked (not literally, Lesley) the chicks out of the boiler room and into the Turkey House. During the week I stopped liquidising their feed. Yesterday, I introduced them to the lawn. Two or three are roosting. The book for the male-female ratio is doing brisk business. Please get in touch.

Bilberries or w(h)imberries or whortleberries are the UK's rufty-tufty equivalent of the North American blueberry. You have to collect them yourself, and they're not for the starving hungry. Bilberries grow on wild moorlands, are very small and are difficult to collect in any number. A rake helps. Seriously. At the weekend we met my brother near Llangollen, and went bilberry raking. One drawback with raking: you also rake a lot of other stuff up so processing takes a while.   Scores on the doors: 2 hours of raking, 2 hours of processing, 2.3 kilos of bilberries.   CHICK STOP PRESS *Too smelly for boiler room, now in turkey house.*

Some good news, but really it needs to be a lot warmer if the top fruit's going to ripen well. Top photo shows the espalier ( Cox Self-Fertile ) - showing good growth and in the right directions!   Middle photo is the cordon line - a very disappointing amount of fruit. The apples are Katy .   Bottom photo is a plum ( Marjorie's Seedling ) in the tree nursery. It shows an extraordinary amount of growth - over 5 feet since March (now as tall as me). Behind it are its peers. It will be moved into final position (a cordon on the lawn) in March next year.

I've been trying an experiment with my lawn-mowings. We now have a lot of raised beds for all the fruit trees and they get very weedy and take a long time to de-weed. So, I tried laying the fresh grass cuttings straight on the beds. (Saving time on composting too.) In a few days, they went brown. That was a month ago. Today:- No weeds, no grass, nothing. A (minor) miracle. I'm now going bananas with the technique.   Tell your friends, tell the world! And if you're only reading this to see the chicks . . .

We went to the Great Welsh Show yesterday. Left the chicks in charge.   And an idea for the present . . .   Ice-cream or shearing? You decide. 

One chick is suffering from pasty-butt. I'll let you work it out. They can die from it. In the wild / under a broody, they don't get it because (i) mama sorts it out, (ii) they pick at mama's poo and pick up the necessary bacteria for their stomachs to process things better. Meet the Farlands mama! Photos: - before, after and the pasty-butt chick marked for future reference.

Chick No 7 continued to fluff up yesterday. I tied her bad leg to her good leg but she couldn't stand. I built her a wheelchair from egg boxes. I day-dreamed of a small chair with caster wheels running around the chicken paddock. I even looked up bottle drinkers on amazon (she wouldn't be able to bend down to drink). Sarah came home from work and we looked at the chick and her pathetic leg together. I put her (the chick) down. My range of emotions complete. Today, now . . . I have just opened up the final 2 eggs. One was a fully formed chick, one nothing. Ben really does have something to cock-a-doodle about. And our candling wasn't so bad. We knew one egg had nothing in it, just weren't at all confident about the others. I look out of the window, I think about chick No 7.

Hatching weekend. Incredibly exciting and it's still going on. Up during the night to check and to worry. Just like the real thing! I'll take you through it. Saturday, day 21 9am , chirping. Sarah thought it was in the chimney, then in the hall. But (!) it was the eggs and even before any pipping. Mid-morning - pipping started. 2 chicks started to make holes in their eggs. 8pm , 2 chicks appear Sunday, day 22 8am , Sarah comes into the gym to tell me that 2 more are on the way, then a 5th and a 6th start to make holes 9am , 3 more hatch . . . 5!   8pm , No 6 still no more progress, just a hole and a beak popping out every now and then. We decide to get No 6 out of the 'bator and help! So Sarah gets out her best tweezers and starts to pick away the shell in a line around the middle of the egg. I dab with a cotton bud. Call me 'House.' We put her back. 9pm , still not out. We do some more picking and dabbing.   10.30pm , still n...

A very interesting week. On Wednesday one of our 2 colonies swarmed. (If you remember, we split one colony into the two hives at the end of May.) Probably the busier hive, the National (the hive on the right in the photo - but this photo was NOT taken on Saturday). I was in the front paddock and when I returned to the veg. garden area I could hear a tremendous buzzing. Thousands of bees on the front of the hive but the noise seemed elsewhere too. I looked up and spotted a cloud of them. Not a football, but a cloud, about 5 metres x 5 metres by 3 metres high, several metres above the hedge at the side of the veg garden. Buzzing around loudly, manically. On Saturday , we looked through both colonies, me with a heavy heart. Expecting half the bees in the National and not very much happening in the WBC, possibly laying workers (a nightmare). But, no. The National was busy with bees, had plenty of brood and reasonable levels of honey in the super. If they had swarmed, then they see...

The eggs were a week old at the weekend and we tried candling in the WC (no windows). I watched a lot of helpful YouTube videos which are amazing. Our efforts less so. Ideally, there is an air space at one end of the egg which increases in size as the egg loses weight. The temperature is 38C and the humidity 50% (ish). Too high humidity and the air space will be too small. There should be a central blob (the growing chick) with veins radiating outwards. We saw a lot of blobs, small air spaces and not much else. If you are wondering what's happening . . . After candling we tried canoodling, and we were better at that.

. . . until the eggs will hatch. We've bought an incubator. Following the sad death of our broody bantam chicken and the White Sussex breed being as broody as garden spades and our chicken coop dwindling to an occupancy of 6, we decided we'd have a go with technology. The incubator has a temperature setting (currently at 38.2C) and an auto turner. The eggs need to be turned 5 x a day. Humidity is also important, 50% for the first 18 days and then 70-80% for the last three. The instructions advise adding water at the bottom of the bator (chicken blog slang) and checking daily. But there is no hygrometer - we have just ordered one. We have 9 eggs and we will see. I've been waiting 4 days now. How anybody can wait 9 months, I don't know.

Been away for a week of cold, wet walking in Scotland. Back to hot hot sun, and weeds which suggest we have been away for a month. Doom and gloom in the garden but I've tried to find a positive photo. It shows our broad beans, potatoes and runner beans, all of which look OK. Otherwise, slugs have ravaged our brassicas, the bees in the 2nd hive have not 'made' a new queen, the mower packed up in the jungle-long grass, the early promise of copious blossom on the fruit trees has mainly dried-up and disappeared and a chicken died. So it goes , Kurt Vonnegut would write in Slaughterhouse 5 . And he was writing about the 130 000 deaths in the bombing of Dresden. So, everything's relative.

I'm suffering. Twin complaints of Scyther's Shoulder and Leak Leg . Over the weekend I scythed the entire orchard and planted 150 leeks. The shoulder condition is maybe obvious but I will add that it's only my right shoulder. Not because I am cack-handed with my left hand (I am) but because scythes are uni-directional. My second complaint arose because of stretching my legs wide apart over the prepared bed to drill the holes for the leeks with a dibber, and then again as I teased the bunch of leeks apart and eased them into their holes. Better than a yoga session. Sarah, meanwhile, was on a gardening course learning how to do things properly. Top tip for leeks (if you want long stems) is to put a toilet roll in the hole. (The cardboard bit, she told me later.)

The person who invents the perfect solution to slugs will be remembered in the future in the same breath as Fleming, Jenner and Crick. We are being ravaged. These are (were) courgette plants. Better news in the greenhouse.

A few blogs and weeks back (25 April) I wrote about the strawberry gutter in the greenhouse. Here are the current pictures:- The biggest strawberries in the greenhouse are 50p sized; outside the fruit have not yet formed. Incredible difference over 1 month. And what's more, the greenhouse, is still standing. (My head has a few dents in it.)