Category Archives: Countryside

Buzzards, bees and bird song

It feels like summer has finally arrived, though I do realise that I’ve said that before.

The weather station reports and outside temperature of 19 degrees C, the sky is clear and the wind is little more than a baby’s breath (or 2 km per hour from the south, if you prefer facts to fancy).

We tidied up for Open Farm Sunday and the farmer’s mother is having a significant birthday (and party) towards the end of the month, so there is a lot of gardening going on. She’s actually having two parties (one for family and another for people she likes, as I keep telling her) and I hope I have that sort of stamina when I’m 80.

The downside of all this uncoordinated activity is that the thistles earmarked for goldfinch food and most of the “wild” poppies have been removed. We have some great self-seeded poppies, including shades or red and mauve, and quite a selection of doubles with big pom-pom flowers. Correction, we had some great self-seeded poppies.

The paths between the “trees” in the “woodland” are cut (which means we have mowed between the sticks in the field), the wheat is beautifully green (probably the result of too much rain – you know how farmers are) and the trees in the agroforestry scheme are looking good in their rows.

The general effect is one of standing in the parkland surrounding a stately home.

When we arrived I stood and watched for a few minutes. A buzzard was wheeling overhead, the bees were buzzing in the flower beds (their first major appearance this year) and a blackbird was singing from the hedge.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Wild flowers

A grumpy goldfinch was twittering as it perched on a virtually empty feeder. It stared at me accusingly. I stared back, and did not refill the feeder. I do like birds but I’m not going to be bullied by something that weighs less than my watch.

Bread, butter and Brownies – Part 2

8 Replies

Well, I’ve updated the gallery page with a slideshow, if you’re interested, and I’ve re-read Part 1 and realised that I may have been slightly less than accurate in my comments on butter making. It’s easy, as I said. However, twice it has proved to be impossible. I did it as a unit of a PTLLS course I took some years ago – the cream was hot from being in the back of the car and the evening was humid and the classroom unventilated. After half an hour of shaking, as I showed signs of passing out, they decided to let me off that bit. It still took me an hour after that to stop shaking. The other time was similar, hot and humid day, trying to make butter at a care home. Fortunately, with a clientèle that were all around 90 we were able to nip to the kitchen and substitute butter from the fridge without anyone spotting it.

So, butter making is generally easy. Apart from when it isn’t.

I’ve just been run into the ground by 23 Brownies. I don’t think I could cope with being a Brownie leader – the enthusiasm is great, but I don’t have the energy to keep up!

It’s also trickier doing the visit on your own, but as Julia was working at her “proper” job tonight we didn’t have much choice. What is a seamless performance with the two of us working like a well-oiled machine (I may be exaggerating a bit here), becomes a touch fraught as you have to prepare everything in advance and go from one to the other hoping that it all fits together. It just about did. I forgot the picking of herbs and chillies for the soup until I had them all washing their hands in the outside sink so I had to alter my choice of herbs to sage and golden marjoram – those being the ones they could see from the sink.

There was also a bit of a gap where I needed to serve up the soup, but the leaders covered that for me with a song about gorilla snot. Yes, it was a surprise to me too.

😉

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In the end it all went reasonably well, kids and leaders seemed happy, we had no accidents, the animals behaved (OK, apart from the goats) and I’m left with a feeling of well-being as we head into tomorrow and the fifth day. I’ve a few points to improve on but nothing too bad.

List for tomorrow – cream crackers, fly spray (it’s not good weather for those of us with waterless toilets), air freshener (ditto), long bamboo skewers (for our November Project), and bread for lunch.

I think that’s it…

Free seed and nature watch

9 Replies

Julia had a quick word with the man we refer to as The Gamekeeper today.

Before you run away with the idea that we’re bankrolled by a rich farmer (as several local projects have stated),I’d better point out that we aren’t, and that we are very far from a sporting estate. Go somewhere like the Elveden Estate, as we did a while ago on our trip to Thetford, and you will see a big difference. Elveden is brilliant and clearly well-un and well-financed. You also have an immediate feeling for the generations of forelock tugging that have gone into making it what it is. No criticism, not (much) jealousy – it’s just like being in a different world compared to the chaos and cheese-paring that is my daily life.

Our shoot is run by a man who pays to run a shoot on the land and, with a group of shoot volunteers, controls vermin, plants hedges and wildlife cover and does a variety of odd jobs around the place at weekends and in the evenings.

He’s more a nature warden than an old-fashioned type of gamekeeper, though he does make a hole in the magpie, fox and rabbits populations.

Considering that a fox killed 40 chickens in one night a few years ago, have trimmed the free range guinea fowl flock and ate Nelson the one-eyed cockerel not so long back, I don’t have a lot of sympathy with them. I wouldn’t like to exterminate them, I wouldn’t chase them to exhaustion and rip them to pieces with a pack of hounds but I don’t see that it’s my job to maintain the population by feeding them my poultry.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Same with the rabbits – they are nice enough, but I’m not here to provide them with a banquet of salad every night.

Magpies – the jury is out. Some people think they are responsible for the decline in songbird species, some don’t. They have certainly spread over the years, being common now in places I never saw them as a youthful birdwatcher. Like buzzards and curlews they were birds I only saw on holiday or visiting grandparents in the north-west.

Anyway, it was a fruitful conversation (to get back to the main subject) and he has offered us free bird seed for the winter, which is good.

He also told her that he saw a large group of young blue tits on the feeders a few nights ago, so at least someone has seen them since the nest box went quiet. We thought it was a bout time they went but weren’t quite sure. He also said he sees little owls at night – they roost on the rails of the fence that runs behind the feeder – something else to look out for!

Hatching egg report – we now have 5 so we are on stream to start hatching next Wednesday.

Open Farm Sunday (2)

5 Replies

It’s moving into evening now and things (including me ) are slowing down.

Even now I can’t believe how smoothly the day went, though this is probably just setting me up for a horrible surprise next year.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

One child bumped his head during the course of a trailer ride.

We lost a number of our salt dough flowers. You could consider it theft or you could consider it a compliment.

Somebody asked for their money back because they didn’t like the pizza (and it wasn’t me cooking this time!)

There were several complaints at queues for food.

As far as I know, that’s the lot.

I feel it’s a little ungrateful to complain about queuing for food.

The kitchen team gave their time for nothing and several of them also gave a couple of days to preparing food. Considering our limited facilities I think they did a brilliant job, and so did many of the people who provided feedback. People also liked the education/activity area and despite my record of upsetting parents and teachers I survived the day unblemished.

We have a list of things needing improvement, even if none of the visitors spotted them – number one being more paint on the bread-shaped shed, which looks a bit anaemic. However, when you consider that Men in Sheds did the bulk of the work in one afternoon, and still found time to make the finger posts and various other things, it worked quite well.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We used over 300 salt dough shapes and 120 spoons for scarecrows, so guess what I’m making on Wednesday?

Tomorrow? Day off. 😉

NEWS FLASH: all three eggs we put in the incubator have now hatched. All chicks now doing well despite my misgivings about one of them.

The Joy of Lists

2 Replies

There just seem to be too many Fridays in my life.

At this point I ought to add that I don’t want to relinquish any of my remaining days, just that it would be nice to slow things down a little.

That’s why I’m spending some of my precious time writing plans. Things tend to get done when you write them down, whilst things in your head tend to slip by. Things like the Wild Food page, which has been dismally neglected of late.

I’ve now started a catalogue of plants to be foraged, as I want to eat more wild food next year and run more sessions about foraging. The result is that I find I know about a lot more plants than the ones I normally talk about, but I’ve also discovered a new plant in the garden. What I had thought was just another colour of dead nettle is in fact ground ivy. I’m pretty sure, looking at the pictures, that we also have henbit around the place. I really need to pay more attention.

Ground Ivy

In this case it doesn’t make much difference, they are just three more sets of small salad leaves with a few medicinal uses, though if you ate a lot of ground ivy it may prove toxic. Like so many things “a lot” is probably more than you’re likely to eat, like the toxic dose of chickweed, which I’ve seen listed as “several kilos”. I would have trouble eating several kilos of anything, even bananas, so I should imagine that if you manage to eat that amount of garden weeds you have more problems than poisoning.

I’ve also found some more wood sorrel. I think it’s the purple variety of creeping wood sorrel – Oxalis corniculata var. atropurpurea – as we foragers say. I tried some that was growing in a pot in the polytunnel earlier in the year and it is remarkably clean and lemony in taste. If only all foraged leaves were as nice.

Creeping wood sorrel – purple variety

After two days of making sure I work on my foraging knowledge for a couple of hours a day I already feel like I’ve accomplished as much in two days as I did in the preceding two weeks.

I’m going to be making a list of recipes to try too, so the Recipe page should start being more active too.

And before anyone says it, yes “typical man” and his lists.

Community Apple Pressing and a Tale of Accidental Cider

7 Replies

It was the first Community Apple Pressing Day of the season today (a day important enough to justify capital letters even if I wasn’t a Member of the Society for Unnecessary Capitalisation).

The rain came, though it was meant to stay away and the Community stayed away although it was meant to come. (When I say the Community, I mean the people with apples to press).

Sometimes life is like that. However I did give away some free samples, sold a bottle straight from the press, arranged a community visit and was offered free apples. I’ve also arranged for people to come to the next day (26th September if you’re around).

We were all tooled up to produce a hundred gallons but with the apples we had available we only managed five. Looking on the bright side, if we’d pressed 100 gallons I’d be pasteurising through the night.

Not feeling terribly wordy just now, and my shoulders are aching from the press (another reason I’m glad I didn’t do the 100 gallons!).so I’ll leave the photos to do the talking.

Meanwhile the unpasteurised juice we bottled on Wednesday has already started to ferment and has a nice crisp cider taste to it. Knowing my luck the accidental cider from that batch will probably be the best I manage…

Nothing much to report

3 Replies

When I looked in the polytunnels just after lunch it sounded like it was raining. The pitter pat of raindrops was actually coming from hover flies in the tunnel flying into the roof in an attempt to get out. I tried to shoo a few out of the open door but they weren’t very cooperative.

That was pretty much the only thing I saw of interest as I toured the grounds looking for things to photograph. I need pictures of white butterflies for the butterfly page (see under the Resources tab) but the only ones I can get lack detail (a) because the white doesn’t show up well and (b) because they rarely open their wings when they are feeding.

I also find them a bit more skittish than most other species: years of been attacked by angry

cabbage owners has obviously made them more alert than the Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell.

I’ve just taken another walk round but evening is drawing on and there’s not a single butterfly in sight. There is a lot of noise from an aeroplane practising aerobatics somewhere above the cloud level and I got a couple of shots of a pigeon perching on one of the statues but there’s very little happening at all.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It’s not as if I’m a whirl of activity either, so I can’t really lecture the world for being quiet.

Inside I’m buzzing, but in terms of actual work being done I’m not showing to advantage. I have too much to do at the moment and at a time I’d like to have had a day or two to slow down I’ve been given more to do.

However, if there’s one thing that’s certain in life it is that things change. It may seem like my head is about to burst at the moment but in a couple of weeks it will be back to empty, so why worry?

having written that, I can feel everything falling into place. The mind is indeed a strange thing.

Wild? Yes, I am

6 Replies

That’s chickweed in the picture – also known as winterweed because it was a mainstay of the Mediaeval diet through the winter. It’s fatal if eaten by the kilogram, but trust me, you wouldn’t want to.

Last night I went to the supermarket and in a moment of weakness spent the best part of £4 on a magazine that purported to contain an article on eating wild salad (or weeds as I call them). Having been talking about them all Sunday, and forcing them on members of the public I thought I’d like to learn a bit more. As I like reading off paper I thought I’d treat myself.

Turns out I needn’t have bothered, I seem to know more than the writer. Considering that I’m a mere novice compared to the dozens, if not 100’s, of people who write about foraging on the internet I feel seriously cheated. It took me two minutes to find several better articles on the web this morning.

As the title says, it wasn’t just the salad that was wild.

I’m going to start a new page on the blog about foraging. There may be one or two unprofessional entries, because I’m not at all sure I want to eat sweethearts/cleavers/goosegrass/stickyweed or whatever regional variation you call it. It looks stringy and it has hooks on. If you’re so interested in it YOU eat it.

The party day

1 Reply

The threatened children arrived, took the farm by storm, had nettle soup (in large quantity in one case), thoroughly enjoyed themselves and then left. The floors are actually looking cleaner than when I arrived to set up, thanks to parental input. Despite the noise and squeakiness and jollity I actually quite enjoyed it, though I am grateful to my kids for taking up martial arts and rugby rather than going to parties.

I was also able to take money off four passing ramblers and give out a number of leaflets for Julia’s Easter Event (biscuit making and Woodland Treasure Hunt).

If you’re about on Tuesday 7th April it’s 10.30 – 3.00, ages 5-11 and £7.50 per child including ingredients and chocolate. Bring wellies and a packed lunch.

Sadly many of my readers come from a long way away but if you don’t ask you don’t get.

We also had a visit from the Goat Lady, who was much cheerier and less bearded than the name suggests. She’s generally happy about the goats so we must be doing something right.

All in all, a happy end to the week.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm

Category Archives: Countryside

Buzzards, bees and bird song

Bread, butter and Brownies – Part 2

Free seed and nature watch

Open Farm Sunday (2)

The Joy of Lists

Community Apple Pressing and a Tale of Accidental Cider

Nothing much to report

Wild? Yes, I am

The party day

Lambing starts!