The farm won two awards in the Nottingham Post Environmental awards last night – winner in the Land Use and runner-up in the Coping with Climate Change categories.
After a brief break to bask in self-satisfaction I’d better get back to work. That environmentally friendly compost isn’t going to turn itself.
I’ve written a short blog (the one about the Peacock butterfly), answered a few emails, cleaned the fridge out, made a few sandwiches for lunch and proof read the monthly newsletter for spelling mistakes and typos. Seems a short list to say that it’s taken all day.
Oh, I’ve also – eaten lunch, sung Happy Birthday, served up 20 pieces of birthday cake, repaired the card reader I dropped, looked for a lost mobile, checked the bird table for life (still not seeing anything), taken the fridge and freezer temperatures, leafed through Farmers’ Weekly and dealt with a dozen enquiries whilst trying to concentrate. It’s all becoming clear now.
No wonder there never seems to be time to do anything.
We were clearing up yesterday afternoon when Julia saw a Peacock flying past. It was a damp day with a temperature around 10 degrees Celsius, not classic butterfly weather. Peacocks do hibernate so I hope it managed to find a good place to shelter. I imagine this is the last butterfly we’ll see this year, but at least it gives me a chance to use one of the summer photos.
That’s some of our group at the war memorial. The village war memorial is just a gravestone engraved with the names of the two men from the village who died. I believe there is also a plaque to a WW2 casualty in the church.
This one is the memorial to the air crash in April 1944.
A Lancaster from nearby RAF Syerston collided with an Airspeed Oxford from RAF Wymeswold, with eleven airmen dying.
We have a link to the crash on the farm, apart from one of the aircraft coming down on our land. (I’m not sure where the other fell – must check). Margaret Rose, the mother of farmer David Rose, was out playing when she heard the crash and saw the aircraft falling.
Flight Lieutenant Bill Reid won the Victoria Cross whilst flying from RAF Syerston – read this if you want to see what it takes to be a hero. After the war he worked in agriculture, including British Oil and Cake Mills (BOCM), where my father also worked. Just goes to show that all the best people work in farming.
As I suspected, the noise generated by a couple of our clients working in the garden scared all the birds away so I will have to try for photographs another day.
I decided that I’d go for something a little slower and easier to capture in a picture. So here they are – the late hatch of caterpillars that have been laying waste to our nasturtiums for the last week. They are still there today, chewing voraciously. Somehow, despite the lack of fins, they remind me of Great White Sharks.
After trying the caterpillar identifier and calling up a number of species that I’ve never heard of (who ever thought of calling something the Lead-coloured Lichen Moth?). The fact that the moth isn’t lead-coloured and only seems to be found in North America merely add to the mystery of moths.
Of course, it isn’t a rarity. But for just one moment, rather like the instant just before you check your lottery ticket, there was a world of potential awaiting. They are just the caterpillars of the Large White. Hungry ones at that. You’d have thought that the birds could have made an effort and eaten them. So much for permaculture…
We moved the bird feeder last week and the visitors have been building up nicely. For some reason we never seemed to get many birds in the old location but within a few days we have had chaffinches, a robin, blue tits and great tits.
We have house sparrows, greenfinches and goldfinches around so I’m hoping we will see them before long. There are also dunnocks and a wren but they aren’t great visitors of bird feeders so they may not bother.
I’ve seen yellowhammers a couple of fields away and we get occasional visits from long-tailed tits. It would be good to see them visiting too. With my luck we’ll probably have a visit from a sparrowhawk.
They fly over on a regular basis and we suspect that they have taken a number of young poultry over the years. One morning a female sparrowhawk emerged from a gateway as we drove along the road. She had a pigeon in her talons and was making heavy work of trying to carry it away, being unable to gain height with her burden. I’m not sure who was most surprised by the meeting.
We will set some time to one side on Monday for bird recording and see what comes. One of the group did well identifying birds when he visited a nature reserve last week so we want to maintain his enthusiasm. We might even get a photograph.
In the meantime here is a picture of a grouse from the moors on our break last week. It’s not the best photograph of a grouse ever taken, but it’s a start.
Cold and windy today, with more than a hint of rain in the air.
Seems like a good time to put up a summer photo. Also good time to do some pruning to limit the effects of wind rock. A gardener’s work is never done…
I was out taking a few pictures for future use (you never know when you’re going to need a photograph of borage) when I realised I had a visitor in the picture.
I’d never have managed the shot if I was trying but it’s amazing what you can do by accident.
Before you ask, this isn’t a new scientific concept – the two things are linked only in my head. Sorry if you are a mathematical ornithologist, but this isn’t the exciting breakthrough you were hoping for.
Tuesday morning dawned in a foggy fashion and we headed off through heavy morning traffic to a retail park on the other side of town with Hobbycraft as our target. Half an hour later, and £40 lighter, we were back in the car.
Now that Halloween is over our next big thing is Christmas. We will make Christmas cards two weeks before Christmas and have Christmas dinner the week before. A range of design and build skills will be on show, ranging from excellent to dreadful and there will be endless rows about who gets the best stuff to work with, and that’s just the volunteers. The members of the group behave slightly better, though two of them do base their design work on the Pareto Principle – trying to stick 80% of the decorations to their 20% of the cards. We’re working out a method of rationing for this year.
It will be a lesson in cooperation, and maybe even an exercise in maths if we organise it properly.
On a different subject we had a phone call while we were on the way here – we have someone else interested in joining the regular group. He’s coming tomorrow to see how he gets on with the rest of the group and if he likes us. I’m hoping he will as he adds a new dimension to the group, having developed dementia as an adult rather than being born with learning difficulties. He has a practical background so I’m hoping we will be able to get the nest box plan going again.
Finally, when we arrived the parakeet was in one of the trees behind the kitchen. It’s the third time we’ve seen it perching there and the fourth time we’ve seen it in total. We couldn’t get a photograph and couldn’t pick up the colour because the sun was behind it but it did look and sound very much like the ring-necked parakeets we saw when one of the kids was playing rugby in Middlesex. It was a surreal day to say the least – parakeets flying over, aircraft landing at Heathrow and the after-match meal cooked on barbecues under the trees at the edge of the field. I imagine that ours is an escapee rather than a visitor from down south. I hope so because they are they are a nuisance when you get too many of them, as Esher Rugby Club found out.
After touring Kendal Farmers’ Market and a number of farm shops (a story which might crop up in days to come) I thought this might be a good time to say that we do sell stuff on the farm. As you can see above, we sell apple juice which we press on the farm. We also sell honey, but we don’t do much with that – just rob bees and shove it in jars.
Though I’m a determined omnivore I have to concede that vegans have a point when it comes to bees. We run them ragged all summer pollinating crops and flowers then when they have filled their stores for the winter we steal the honey. However, I like eating honey and don’t have any immediate plans to give it up. Having said that, when I consider how hard they work to make honey it will give me cause to think next time I eat honey.
A spoonful of honey represents the life’s work of 10 worker bees. It takes the work of 7,500 workers to fill one of our jars and in doing this they visit 1.5 million flowers and fly 40,000 miles. It’s little wonder that they only live six weeks.
We’re open for sales from 9.00 – 1.00 on Saturday mornings when the Community Cafe can also provide you with drinks, cakes and breakfasts. Directions can be found here. Due to the international nature of the internet that means that most people reading this won’t be able to visit – sorry about that, but if you are ever around you will know where to find us.