Monthly Archives: July 2016

Two Birthdays and a Pizza

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When you look at my titles you can see why Richard Curtis is considerably more successful than me, can’t you?

We had a school come out for an enhancement day  so just a short post.- working with livestock, making pizza and eating a foraged salad.  I’m hoping they felt suitably enhanced by the end, though I’m a little  concerned that a couple of them looked slightly shell-shocked by the end.

At lunchtime we had a party for Emma, then after filling the incubator, we went across to visit Margaret, the Farmer’s mother. She was 80 today. We had tea and cake. Then it was time to clean up, wash, change and go to the other party – the one with the canapes and cheese board. We finally left there as dark fell.

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All in all it was a good day, but I’m tired and full now (possibly even replete) so just a short post. More tomorrow.

It’s now even hotter…

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We’re back from the bread session, and the temperature has risen to 31 degrees. There’s a light breeze, but it’s not really helping.

In the care home everyone was so hot, despite the application of medicinal ice cream, that they found it hard to raise the enthusiasm. I didn’t get an ice cream, despite my sterling efforts at bread plaiting and various other forced jollity. However, as you can see from the main photo, I have now gathered my hot weather survival kit (fan and ice cream) and am feeling much better.

Only one lady could raise the enthusiasm to comment on my plait.

“I don’t like plaited bread.”

That put me in my place.

Another lady had been a sausage-maker in the family butchery business and many others had baked in school, so we did do some good by bringing back old memories.

However, “From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success” as they say.

Next time we are going to make sure we have a cooler day (as if we have a choice!) and we will make pizza. If there’s one thing I can do well for an audience, it’s make pizza. And, when we have our (yet to be) famous afternoon tea sessions with Quercus we are going to invite them out to the farm. Some have been to a bread-making session here and enjoyed it, others prefer not to travel. They might travel for tea and cakes. I know I would.

I’d better get planning those afternoon tea sessions…

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Day Lily
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A matter of Loaf and Death

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It’s hot (29 degrees C according to the weather station) and it’s still (wind between 0 and 2 mph). Fortunately I bought a fan that works from a USB port whilst in Scarborough last week. As a result I am not actually a lot cooler (what do you expect for £2.99?) but I am quite smug.

So, sitting here smug but warmish, what am I going to blog about today?

How about telling you about my plans for the afternoon? As I was in the shop this morning I looked longingly at the cider section, imagining the bottles lightly jewelled with condensation from the fridge. What could be better than an afternoon spent in the shade sipping cold cider?

Imagine that the picture goes wavy now, as my dream disappears and reality takes hold. Instead of sunbeams, dappled shade (even a touch of boskiness) and a cold cider, we are left with reality. That reality is sun pouring in thorough windows in the stuffy communal room at a local care home.

There will be tea afterwards, and though I am quite fond of tea there will be preliminaries. These include making dough, loading it in the car and travelling to work in a strange kitchen, knead dough and turn ovens on to bake bread. Yes, my picture of cool perfection is replaced by one of hell.

Don’t judge me, I do like the ladies in the care home, and I do understand that they need something to keep them occupied. I just don’t want to bake on the hottest day of the year. Actually I don’t want to bake at all in a borrowed kitchen with limited time and resources.

It’s Julia’s idea. You may notice a pattern emerging here – any dull, grinding, boring, hot, virtually impossible, ill-conceived idea that needs putting into action usually comes from her.

Any dull, grinding, boring, hot, virtually impossible, ill-conceived idea that becomes reality is usually as a result of me getting bored, hot, annoyed, homicidal…you get the picture.

Yet she is the one with the reputation for delivering difficult and innovative projects.

She has just told me to man up and get on with it. She says that nobody has ever died from baking bread, with the implication being that fatality is a distinct possibility if I don’t do what I’m told.

 

 

Monday Miscellany

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We’ve just had fruit and ice cream – fruit from the garden and ice cream from a local dairy. That’s some of the fruit in the picture – I’ve been trying out the macro facility on the camera. It’s not as good as the old camera for close-up work and though the super macro setting produces great results it isn’t that good with butterflies, which tend to fly off.

The lavender in the allotment area is dying back but I have made a start to the Big Butterfly Count. Small Tortoiseshell (5), Meadow Brown (3), Gatekeeper, Large Skipper (2), Large White (2), Small White. I’ve done better, but I’ve certainly done worse.

There are a couple of pictures from the Friday trip too – a herring gull perching on a lamp post which has had spikes fitted to stop gulls perching and a bug hotel/pollinator nest box from the Sainsbury’s at Bridlington.

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The final picture is of a jackdaw at Bempton Cliffs. Yes, a jackdaw. We spent two and a half hours travelling just over 100 miles. We braved idiot drivers, motorway roadworks and a fried breakfast, and at the first viewing platform someone was in raptures at the sight of jackdaws on the cliffs. I suppose it all depends what you are used to seeing; I thought the Tree Sparrows on the feeders were great at Bempton, but they didn’t rate a second glance from most of the people there.

The Poppy Fields

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On the way back from Scarborough on Friday we passed a couple of fields full of poppies. They may have been growing organic grain, or they may just have forgotten to spray. I don’t suppose it matters in the end, because it was the poppies, not the husbandry system that I was interested in.

I’ve been looking for some good shots of poppies for a month or so now, since deciding on the Big Autumn Project. From that you may deduce that we are going to be doing something on poppies.

Did you know that  poppy seed can lay dormant for over 50 years? Some people go as far as to claim 80 or 90 years and it’s recently become popular to suggest they may be able to lay dormant for 100 years. I can believe that; there isn’t a lot of difference between 80, 90 and 100 years. Of course, the figure of 100 years lines up nicely with the centenary of the Great War, and this may have more to do with the 100 year figure than any botanical fact.

Despite this suspicion it’s interesting to think that poppies may be germinating now that were laid down as seeds whilst the war was still on.

Anyway, here are some photographs. The light was just going and the wind was getting up, so they aren’t brilliant, but at least the Big Autumn Project will have some photographs to support it. Julia has promised to do a bit of messing about with the photos – they won’t look sharper but they will end up looking brighter.

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An auksome day out

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We had a day off today; it’s getting to be a habit. We decided on Scarborough again (well, Julia did, I just drove), but started off sooner and dropped in at Bempton Cliffs on the way. They seem to have spent a lot of money since we last came, with nice flat paths making it easy to walk round, even for a fat man with arthritic feet.

Unfortunately this also allowed all sorts of undesirables to access the reserve and get in my way. There was one particular woman who seemed to make it a point of honour to get in front of me and block the best view. When I got fed up and walked on she seemed to immediately give up and slip in front of me at the next good spot.

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If it had been an episode of something by Agatha Christie the third occasion would have seen a body spiralling into the sea, hundreds of feet below. I can see the shot now…

However, that’s more of a comment on my favoured reading matter rather than the Bempton Cliffs experience.

We only saw one species of butterfly on the cliff top – ringlets! Would be wouldn’t it? They flew low, sheltering in the tops of the grass from the stiffish breeze so I couldn’t get a decent photo. The breeze was quite handy, as it was blowing out to sea, and taking the stench of fishy bird excrement with it. On a hot windless day, this can be a memorable part of the visit.

Here are some pictures – I’ll let them speak for themselves. Puffins are looking a bit dull after rearing a family – next year we will visit sooner.

 

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A funny old day

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It started with an early morning shopping trip for pizza ingredients.

When we got to the farm a Common Blue fluttered by, which seemed a good omen.

Sadly it didn’t continue and in the absence of a mixer I ended up making 30 pizza bases by hand. As a result I now have an arthritic hand that feels like a baseball glove. When the mixer finally arrived I managed to do the next 60 bases in half the time the first 30 took.

Meanwhile I had a few incidents with clingfilm whilst wrapping the individual portions. If you’ve ever had dealings with oiled clingfilm you will know what I mean. If you haven’t, I’m sure you can imagine it.

I converted to foil for the last 60 – far easier, though it also had its moments. It was a surprise, on knocking the roll off the work top, to find it hit my foot like a an iron bar. When you look at the thickness of foil wound onto a catering size roll you can see why this feels so heavy.

I did grab a few minutes in the middle of the day – seeing three Small Tortoiseshells on the buddleia – it’s just coming into flower and the weather is coming right for butterflies.

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take photographs.

I used the new Hobart mixer today.  Once we got it in the kitchen, and once we worked out the way to fit the guard so that the fail-safe let us switch on, it worked well. Our old one doesn’t have much in the way of safety equipment so this was all new to me.

Then the new incubator arrived. More about that later.

Finally, we rushed off and got Julia to work with four minutes to spare. She had been on the farm all day preparing a grant application and we had hardly seen each other. It’s the European grant, which is now corrected, completed and polished. We had an email yesterday telling us the fund may not exist now, but nobody is sure, so all that work may be for nothing.

It’s not quite the relaxed lifestyle we were hoping for, though at least the goats didn’t escape today.

 

 

 

Nanny McFlee

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Well, it was either that or Billy and Clyde. tarnegolita has suggested a few others so I’m in  a good position with titles now.

Even as I was writing the last post the goats were out again. The only one that doesn’t escape is the youngest one: she just stands by herself and bleats. We think it’s possibly because she’s the youngest and may have been weaned too early. The rest of them are now fully recovered from being taken from their mothers and are enjoying a rebellious youth.

The mothers all seem happy and relaxed now the kids are off their hands.

On the subject of goats and relaxation, the Kenyans are coming at the weekend. They will make a big fuss of the goats, which is one of the reasons we keep them, as they feel it is a way for children to keep in contact with their culture..Although we never use the term I suppose the goats are culturally appropriate livestock. I may start calling them that, as it sounds more important than goat. Being constantly outsmarted by culturally appropriate livestock also seems more respectable than being outsmarted by goats.

One of the big attractions on Saturday will be the traditional nyama choma.

That’s the other reason we keep goats.

So far nobody has told them they are invited.

 

 

 

Running out of titles

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We’ve had The Goat Escape and we’ve had ‘scapegoats so I’m running out of goat-related escape references.

That’s the trouble with goats, they can escape quicker than I can think of new puns. I’m thinking of Kidnapped and Do Androids Dream of Electric Fences? but neither of them are quite right.

We were on the way home last night. I stopped and looked left to check it was safe to drive out and…

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…I was close to driving off, but my conscience got the better of me. At 7 pm I have better things to do than round up livestock for farmers who can’t keep their fences in order. On the other hand it isn’t fair on the goats or passing drivers to let livestock wander free.

Once we got them trapped and moving they went back in the field without too much trouble, which was good because they had escaped via a neighbour’s orchard and it could have been complicated to get them back. Instead we just got them moving in the right direction and waved a few branches (broken from nearby hedges) at them. They love eating hedges so they just followed Julia back to the field to chew on the branches.

It’s simple when you know how.

I’ve included a couple of pictures of the village pinfold. Under the 1959 Highways Act it is still lawful to detain an animal in the pinfold if it is found wandering on the road. This happened to us once – we had a phone call to say there was a goat on the road but couldn’t find it. When we did track it down someone had shut it in the pinfold, where it was busily chomping its way through the floral display. We were multiply unpopular after that.

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Poppies and Partridges

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Sorry it’s a blurred photo of the partridges, but they made off as soon as I stepped outside. After a season of being shot at they are a bit sensitive about people pointing things at them. They pottered across the yard, but were disappointed to find that we are now keeping the poultry food more secure – no more free feeds!

They are eating grit from the roadway to help with digestion. Because they don’t have teeth birds break their food down by using grit in a muscular stomach known as the gizzard. This grit eating behaviour is used in medicating red grouse.

As a result of that link I now know much more than I want to know about gizzards and their traditional culinary uses. Having only ever used them in making gravy I’m amazed at the variety of uses. I say “amazed” but maybe in the case of pickled turkey gizzards “appalled” may be a better word.

The grit used to grind (known as insoluble grit or flint grit when you feed it to poultry) is different from the grit fed to laying hens to help with egg shell production (known as soluble grit or oyster shell).

Yes, as I wrote that I too was wondering what sort of person knows these things.

And then there were the poppies. I’m trying to photograph poppies at the moment but wind and rain and poor light are all making it difficult.

Poppy and chamomile
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