Yes it definitely feels like winter.
Frosty mornings (that I love) and crisp sunny days, logs burning on the fire, entire
families of mice setting up home in the tunnel house and at various choice locations around the property. Perhaps our rodent strategy isn’t working too
well after all, even though we’re no longer storing any chook or pig food. Winter benefits include bacon butties - the
home-made bacon, infused with other home products, is totally delish. We cooked one of the hams when Lucas was home
for a few days. Like Christmas turkey,
it stretched to several meals and is still appearing in sandwiches from packs
in the freezer. When it’s finally down
to just me and Peter at home, a ham will probably last us a fortnight.
I defended my title of the queen of Onamalutu cider and
again won a prize. Unfortunately this
time it was the booby prize – a wooden spoon saying ‘try again’! Not even a bottle of wine with it to drown
my sorrows. In retrospect, I wish I’d
entered the really explosive ‘Silke’s Rough Again’ – at least that would have
provided some extra entertainment. Oh
well, there’s always next year. Maybe then
I’ll even have real cider apples to work with.
The vege garden is peacefully slumbering. A little more tidying up has happened, and
the task of sweeping up the fallen leaves (and also the peastraw that the birds like to flick off the beds) from the pathways is like painting
the Forth Bridge. They are providing
lots of leaf mulch, which is being either added to compost or mixed with pea
straw as surface mulch. Garlic was
planted according to the moon calendar last weekend, some in one of the keyhole
beds, and the rest in the half-wine barrels.
Fingers crossed it grows into fat bulbs, not the spindly specimens I
usually get. On Karyn's advice, we lit a fire over the asparagus patch, burning the old dried asparagus shoots that had become wild and woolly. Managed not to create any disasters in so doing, quite a miracle really. The patch is now covered in a mound made of ashes, pea straw and heaps of horse poo. I'll also start adding the ash from our woodburner too. Is it possible that abundant asparagus treasure might grace our table in spring? Ah the the eager anticipation that is part of the joy of gardening!
Vermicompost has been dug out from Worm Hollow, and another
batch of vermiliquid has been diluted and applied to the olive trees. There were still a few worms in the dug compost,
so it’s been put into a couple of large tubs and stored in the Gin Palace to
keep dry. The remnants of the sheep wool
have been generously applied as a duvet to the worm farm and on the top of both
tubs to keep the worms toasty.
Plans are afoot to create a sanctuary for mushrooms – would
that be known as a Fungery? Next to the
car port and behind Worm Hollow is a densely-planted area that is always shady and cool. Peter’s done a bit of chain-sawing and opened
up access to a space that is dark and damp – perfect for mushroom growing. We’re awaiting the delivery of mushroom-spore dowels (Shii-take) that can be hammered into some birch logs. Later they’ll be joined by some button
mushrooms.
The lowest shelf on Gin Palace has been extended so that it
can now be used as a potting shelf. The
bench in the Palace wasn’t central, and this addition still leaves enough space
to get round. It means that the previous
potting shelf in Madame Cholet has been much reduced, freeing up more sunny,
rather than shaded, planting space. At least it'll be free once I sort out the crap in there. Among the crap are tea plant (Camellia Sinensis) cuttings that I took from two bought plants. 9 out of 10 are still alive, so that's pretty promising. There's also a large tray of onion seed that should be germinating soon.
The cows and sheep still have enough pasture on which to
munch, so we can hang onto winter stocks of hay for a little while longer. There are no obvious signs of pregnancy in
any of them, which is gutting. Whilst we’re
very much hoping to be wrong, it’s not looking good for Leggy – could it be his
last leg as the flock ram? Peter’s
wondering if we should loan a bull for a while.
That wouldn’t give us Speckled Park calves, but maybe once both Hera and
Athena have had a calf, they’ll be easier to inseminate for subsequent
calves. At least that’s what we read.
One of the beehives seem to be holding out against the
cold. The other colony in hive 2 – that
liked to swarm repetitively – was no more when I put in varroa strips several
weeks ago. It’s sad, but a bit of a
mixed blessing really. I was planning to
replace that queen anyway, ideally with one less prone to swarming. Now I’ll be able to split my existing hive in
spring and take it from there. The remaining hive is strong and produces good honey volumes, so it's a good gene pool and hopefully will cope with a split.
Serious work has begun on the sleep out. Now that there are less boys at home, we’re
in with a chance of creating a decent-ish place to accommodate visitors. The walls and ceiling are clean and freshly
painted, and the wall that connects to the garage is papered in blue, using a
textured paper that mostly disguises the rather uneven wall. Unfortunately we managed to destroy our landline whilst wallpapering around a phone jack (I'm trying to live and learn and not just swear loudly). We just need to get hold of a bed and a few
bits of furniture. There’s a thought
that if it works out well, we could make a bob or two by letting it via Air
B&B. Then we could also get on with
Lazy Mazy and add caravan accommodation to the package. It could possibly happen one day, though it’s
fair to say that I’m usually bigger on ideas than action.
The British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand is underway
and Peter is gripped. The New Zealand
Army band is the pre-match entertainment for the three All-Blacks test matches,
and it will be Sam’s first big gig.
We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled in case his bit is televised. He’s going to China twice in September, once
with the Marlborough District Brass Band, and then also with the army. In the meantime, our baby Billy celebrated his 17th
birthday (on June 17th 2017).
He was a millennium baby, which has always been very handy because it allows us to calculate how old everyone else is by comparing their date of birth to his. In moments of quiet reflection about the massive world terror events, I wonder what the world will be like for them when they're old and wrinkly. Will there even be a world at all? Martin Luther King has the best words:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
