Tag Archives: market

Close, but no banana…

10 Replies

It started well with Three Fruit Marmalade and granary toast. We’ve just finished a jar of cheap marmalade (Number Two went shopping last month and, in true student style, bought the cheapest he could find).

I’m seriously thinking about my diet, and can’t shake the idea that a grimmer breakfast would probably be better for me – porridge or bran flakes for instance. (I’m expecting a Scottish backlash about the porridge, but it’s grey and with the traditional water and salt it’s hardly luxurious.) It’s always tempting to say that porridge is the world’s only grey food, but according to this link there are others.

We moved on to collecting cardboard from a market stall. Julia had arranged that on Saturday as she needed cardboard to supress weeds in the polytunnel. There’s an area at the back of the raised beds which isn’t easy to reach so she’s choking the weeds with a mulch of cardboard and wood chip.

As it was a nice day, and  we then set off for the coast. The curse of the mobile phone then struck, and to my dismay I heard Julia arranging a meeting for the evening at a time that we couldn’t possibly make if we went to the coast first.

I don’t think she really understands the concept of “day off”.

And that was how the day failed to live up to the promise of the Three Fruit Marmalade start.

Fyffes old warehouse – Nottingham
Bananas at Sneinton Market

The Sneinton market area has been a busy centre for the fruit and vegetable trade since the 1850s when the original market was built on the site of a clay pipe works. It was improved in 1938 andmore buildings added in 1957. That was when the Fyffes warehouse was built, complete with its sculptural bunch of bananas. Julia has been meaning to take a picture of the bananas for years, so here they are.

The wholesale market was relocated again in the 1990s, leaving a small remnant of a market and a numbr of small business units.

Lambing starts early

4 Replies

We had our first lamb yesterday. We knew the accidentally pregnant ewes were near term, but weren’t quite sure. Now we know just how close. Mother and baby are doing well but they are outside and it isn’t practical to bring them in without causing additional stress so it looks like we might be lambing outside for this batch.

These are pictures from last year, most of the people shown cuddling lambs found out why farmworkers wear overalls…

That’s what happens when you buy a batch of ewes at market that have been served by a tup that escaped and passed on his genetic material two or three months early. While it’s a good thing, in evolutionary terms, for the tup at least, it’s not necessarily good for anyone else. And no, I’m not sure why we bought them, unless it’s a cunning plan to make lambing even more hard work than usual.

There are all sorts of lambing programmes when you start to look into it but “random lambing” doesn’t seem to be one of them!

You have to remember two things in analysing this, two things that could form the basis of a set of farming laws.

One, when something is going cheap at the local market there is usually a good reason for this and you should think hard before sticking your hand up. Good things seldom go cheap. Apart from chickens, but that’s a very old joke.

Two, a man is generally a farmer not because he is distinguished by intelligence, but because he is the eldest son of a man with a farm. My grandmother, who was the eldest daughter of a man with a farm, had strong views on the process. Her younger brother, on the other hand, had the farm.