Winters harvest

Little growing on the allotment right now, thought the snow is melting so I hope to be able to dig over a bed and put in some garlic. We should still get enough cold weather for them to get cloves. I might wait with part of the garlic until the end of March, or beginning of April, these will most likely end up as large single bulbs.

We do have some vegetable growing at the farm, although a bit less then other years. To my great disappointment, we didn't get around to planting kale last summer, which is one of my all time winter favorites. I'll be making sure that this year we'll plant kale both at the allotment and at the farm, to make absolutely sure I will get some next winter!!

Late in October we planted some winter-salad, though it was even quite late for them. The red variant doesn't seem to be doing too bad, but we will have to be patient for a little bit longer if we do not want to harvest the whole row for a single meal.

It seems we have had some uninvited guests eating them as well, maybe some mice which are currently quite abundant since the cats have moved over to different neighbors after some minor 'disagreements' with the dog.


The green salads are doing less well, and are much more victimized by the vermin ... I guess we will have to take our losses, they get the green salad and we will eat the red leaved ones.



We also planted less of the green salad, at the back of the row the leeks are visible. We grow a couple of handfuls every year, they are being harvested throughout spring.



Considering their size, I assume harvesting the broccoli also won't happen anytime soon.


Some garlic has already been planted. A tad bit early to our taste, we normally plant in February and actually earth them up like potatoes. It seems to be the only successful way of getting a decent harvest. A friendly family member that was visiting while we weren't there, planted some back in November. They don't seem to be doing to bad for now.


We will still plant our normal batch in February, at worst we will get a large garlic crop.

Some farm photos

We have been rather busy the last couple of days, but nothing interesting to blog about. I have a couple of spare minutes right now, so figured I would update the blog and add a couple of photos taken about two weeks ago while we were staying at the farm.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn't great (well, what else can you expect around January 1st....?), hence, dull skies and boring lighting.

One of the reasons I greatly enjoy spending time at the farm is that there's always something to do. Apart from the daily chores and 'big time projects' there are also many small tasks that normally don't get done because they are not urgent enough, but are nice to fill 15 minutes or half an hour that otherwise would have been spend doing nothing useful.

Two of those half hours were spend removing dead leaves, branches and other waste from the small pond.


It is evident that it is not ideally situated in this regards since both the leaves from the two oaks on the left and those from the walnut tree on the right drop in during each fall. The trees, however, have been there since quite a while and the pond has been dug around a small natural source that keeps it filled year around.


Although I had fished out most leaves and other muck last year around the same time, I was once again truly amazed at the quantity that had ended up in the pond. Standing on the side of the pond I used a standard hay fork, leaning over to scoop up the muck from the bottom of the pond, that at it deepest is around 1,5 meter deep. I managed not to fall in, though there were several narrow escapes!


About two and a half years ago I spend a lot more time cleaning out the pond, since over the years so much rotten material had accumulated in it that it blocked the source, and the pond had fallen dry. I dug out about 50 wheelbarrow loads of muck that we used to fill up holes and trenches all over the property. Now we can still easily identify those because the dug up material functions as a very efficient fertilizer and causes the grass there to grow higher then anywhere else.

In the old days the pond was used by a flock of geese that were relatively successful in breeding. When things were downsized due to the advancing age of the permanent inhabitant the geese were moved to the other side of the main house where the chickens were. Like this it was easier to take care of them and feed.

After an unidentified predator had a feast meal on our chickens about two years ago, we only have some geese left. Due to the lack of water they do not breed, so each spring we tend to buy two or three goslings that join the two old timers.



The source feeding the pound is definitely not the only one on the property since we have a well close to the main building. It is rather deep (14 meters) but provides a steady supply of high quality water.

On some of our pieces of land a bit further down the road we have two additional ponds, I will try to post some photos of those another day.

Back home

After a rather long trip, I am back home now. Fortunately, traffic wasn't too dense so the voyage was uneventful. We have spend the last two weeks in France with my in laws, and have been lucky enough to spend a couple of days here and then at their country side farm. It is quite remote and I truly love being there and doing the odd jobs that need doing.

Since the current sole inhabitant is in her mid eighties, the last couple of years we have cut back on the size of the garden and live stock. There used to be sheep, rabbits, geese, chickens and even further back one or two milking cows. Currently, there are some geese -- not too much work and the rewards in form of a dozen or so geese eggs per year and the main part of the Christmas dinners.

Apart from cutting down two dead trees in our small forest, most of the weekend was spend hauling sheep manure from one of the outlying pastures and spreading it over the garden. As we do not need the pasture currently one of the local farmers uses it occasionally and put a 'bit' of sheep manure there for our garden about three years ago. We used a bit last year, since it was already nicely rotten then, but this year we made a serious attempt.



This is the state of the pile after we we took about 60 barrow loads to the garden. Fortunately we have a small tractor, so that we didn't have to use real wheelbarrows.



Here is an image of the manure in the garden. We managed to get a 100 barrow loads into the garden, and then had the 'joy' of spreading it evenly around. Although it was -5 °C (25 °F) we had to take of some layers of clothing!


I made quite a few more images and will be posting them over the next couple of days, with the associated explanations and stories.