The Picking It all started out with a sunny day, as it usually does. Unless it’s raining, which hasn’t been that often this year, really. Cider No.2 has typically been a “pick the apples mid October, press them end of October” thing. This year the condensed but intense growing period in the summer has forced the […]
Last Year’s Cider No.1 This time last year we picked around 30kg of fruit, and considered it a horde worthy of Crown intervention. From that we ended with 30 litres of apple juice, which turned into 50 pints of lovely cider about eight months later. It took about five hours to make that, with the […]
It’s that time of year once more, when thoughts turn to apples dropping on heads and littering the orchard floor, and the 2018 cider mixes. Indeed, it’s been a rather strange year – amazingly cold until quite late, we were thankful when the sun finally made an appearance. Three months later with hardly any rain, […]
I’m just sticking this up here as an aide-mémoire from our trip to Normany three years ago. Stumbling across one of the many cider makers, I got to chatting with the son of the owner and asked him what varieties of apple they used. I lost my scribblings, but found them at the bottom of […]
The spring weather continues to be glorious, and as the earth warms up, more seeds can be sown and indoor growers transplanted to outdoors. Today we began with the task of potting on. Vegetable growing is a continuous production line; plants needing a long growing season, such as aubergine, begin inside in a warm place […]
Asides from lots of mowing and general tidying up, the beetroot (Boltardy) and sweetcorn (Ashworth) were the only things that went into the ground today! Mind you – it *is* looking a lot tidier isn’t it!
…I love those days where there’s no pressure to anything in particular, because you know full well that there’s always a list of things to complete. As the weather’s warming up, it seemed like an opportune time to get the good old squash going, so in we popped the squash, to start in the house, […]
After the late start to spring, with the ground finally un-soggified, Suz and I took the day off to make use of the sunshine and get the patch into some sort of order. There’s a list of post-winter jobs that still need doing – the grass had its first cut on Saturday, electric fence lines […]
Following on from yesterday’s start on getting some sort of order into the outside, today was spent mowing and strimming, to make sure the electric fence surrounding the orchard and poultry was running at full capacity. The Marsh Daisy parent flock are happy in their current home, but the difference keeping chickens makes to […]
Today I made use of some spare time to strim under the electric fencing I installed over winter. With the sheep netting acting as the earth, it was a relatively simple task to string four strands of positive cable along the front of the fencing. The lower strand is solid steel, mitigating and strimming accidents. […]