Anglesey Smallholder

Last week, the final remaining chicken had to be put down due to fly strike.  It was very distressing – I tried to clean her up and get the maggots out, but she had a deep abscess full of them.  If I get some more chickens then I will have to bathe them regularly to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  It seems that by the time it’s noticeable, it’s already too late.

We’ve had a few little problems with the new mower – while my brother was using it, a large circlip came loose on the roller and dropped off in the field.  I repaired the metal detector and had a search for it, but to no avail.  I went inside assuming that my brother would either keep looking for the clip or put the roller away, but instead he decided to keep using it.  It should be obvious what happened next – without the circlip to keep it on there, one side of the roller’s axle popped out of the frame, and completely bent the other side of the frame.  I don’t know what possessed him to carry on using it when it was so predictable what would happen.

In happier news, the polytunnel is in full swing.  The cucumbers are growing faster than I can eat them and the tomatoes are ripening.  I just hope we can have some sunshine to ripen them fully, because it’s been a bit gray recently.  I pulled up the pattypans – I ate a couple and they were bitter and nasty, I won’t be planting any more of them!  The courgette plant doesn’t seem to be doing quite as well this year either, they are growing but not getting big for some reason.  It’s putting out huge amounts of leaves though – I have to keep cutting it back to stop it from swamping all the other plants.

A shiny new vehicle was delivered to the house a couple of weeks ago: a Mountfield sit-on lawnmower!  I’ve used it a couple of times now, and it’s fantastic.  Cutting the field with the old lawnmower was a Herculean task involving dragging it backwards around the entire field and restarting it every 50cm because it cut out.  With the new mower, the task is reduced from a weekend of hard labour to an hour of sitting down!

I had my worries about a sit-on lawnmower coping with the uneven ground of the field, but it’s performed admirably.  It does struggle in some of the larger ruts, but overall it makes and extremely good job of it.  The large tyres really help here, as well as cushioning some of the bumps.

The hydrostatic drive is simplicity itself – a single foot pedal allows for both forward and reverse motion.  It has a brake too but I’ve never needed to use it, because there is no clutch and so the hydraulic pressure slows it down when you release the accelerator.  It was a bit more expensive than the manual drive version, but I think it is worth it.  There’s very little to go wrong with a hydrostat, too.

The fields have been a source of worry for me since moving here – I haven’t had the means to keep them under control, but I don’t want to let them go wild.  Now I can finally keep them cut, and prevent them from turning to worthless scrub.

The growing season is well under way.  Strawberries have appeared nice and early and they’re delicious!  There are too many for me to eat by myself, so I’ve already given some to the neighbours.   It’s nice to have enough produce to share!  Everything is growing well, except for the sunflowers which have again been eaten by slugs.  The good news is that the slug damage seems to be less than last year – there’s still plenty of them about, but not an overwhelming number.  This could be due to a few factors:  the tunnel now has a path down the middle that is probably less inviting than bare earth; I have fastidiously removed all the weeds, clearing out the last of the hiding places around the edges; I have used anti-slug grit around the seedlings; and I’ve also noticed what seem to be hedgehog droppings, so maybe there’s a hedgehog eating them for me.  I’m afraid I’ve also taken to squashing them instead of throwing them over the hedge.

Currently growing are: Strawberries, sunflowers, tomatoes, chillies, basil, spring onions, patepans, courgettes, leeks.  I forgot to get any cucumbers this year which is a bit annoying, I’m not sure if it’s too late now.  I think I also forgot the beans, argh!

I spent some time last week clearing the last of the weeds out of the polutunnel and picking the dead leaves off the strawberries, leaving it all neat and tidy and ready for the new season.  At the weekend we added edging to the path down the centre of the polytunnel – nothing fancy, but it will help keep the place neat.  The black felt will stop the weeds coming through, and will at some point be topped with something more durable like bark chippings.  Half the edging used to be a base for my mum’s greenhouse, which was unfortunately destroyed by a gale.  The rest of the edging is just old planks that were lying in the dairy when we moved in.

As well as edging the path we also built a rough brick standing for the doorway and the table – this should help to keep it from turning to mud in the wet autumn.  We even dug a small soakaway hidden under the bricks to try and keep the water from pooling on the surface.

Everything is ready for the spring, now I just need to get some seedlings growing!

Sadly, Victoria the sheep died last night. The kind vet next door did everything he could for her, but she didn’t make it. I will miss her so much. She would always come running to the gate whenever the car pulled into the drive, bleating and climbing up the gate to get a better look at who was coming.

When I moved there and repaired her sheepy house, I made a small slate plaque and affixed it to the gable end.  I think that now I will remove it and bury it with her, so that if some archaeologist discovers her in a thousand years, they will know she was a special sheep :)

The polytunnel is getting into full swing now!  The two courgette plants are doing well, both heavily loaded with fruits and still producing flowers.  Most of them will be picked early, but I think that I will allow one or two of them to go over and swell into marrows.  A few of them have been lost to slugs – once the protective outer skin is nibbled away then they rot very quickly – however there are still plenty remaining.

The very first tomato has reddened.  Some varieties are doing better than others, but all of them have at least some fruit on.  I must keep more careful track of the varieties next year – this year everything was thrown into the border in somewhat of a hurry.  I’ve also picked the first two cucumbers.  I think I may have left it a little late, not realising that early picking encourages the production of more fruit, however I can see that there are several tiny cucumbers on there waiting their turn.  At the time they were planted, I didn’t have any canes for them to run up so I stretched a length of rope from the ceiling for the plant to climb up.  I didn’t have quite enough rope either, so one plant had to settle for CAT5 computer networking cable.  It turns out that computer cable is a bit too slippery for the cucumber’s tendrils, so the poor plant is left in a kind of puddle on the ground.  That hasn’t prevented it from fruiting, however.  The spring onions are ready for eating, and I’ve planted out 40 leeks that are now coming along nicely.

The weather here has been a little unpredictable of late.  The lovely spell of sunshine was broken last week by a short thunder storm.  The wind was fierce, and caused damage to both the chicken coop and the polytunnel.  The coop was pushed off its stand, and the lid was torn off its hinges.  I pity the poor chickens that were inside it at the time, they must have been quite scared.  The damage to the polytunnel was fortunately not severe – some of the plastic came away from around the door frame.  It should be quite simple to re-insert it into the door frame and batten it down.

Egg production is currently way down.  A little while ago I started finding broken eggs, and was blaming one of the chickens, however I’ve since discovered that magpies are going into the coop and stealing the eggs.  I’ve seen them go in there on more than one occasion – cheeky little thieves.  I can’t really think of anything I can do about this, so I’m just trying to check the coop regularly enough that I get there before the magpies do.

The polytunnel has borne its first fruit!  A spell of reasonably sunny weather has been ripening the strawberries, the first crop to reach maturity.  In addition to the strawberries, the polytunnel is currently housing six tomato plants, two courgettes, two cucumbers, some lettuces, spring onions, and basil.  All seem to be growing well, although somewhat slug-nibbled.  I have taken to regularly patrolling the tunnel in search of slugs.  Their favourite hiding place seems to be underneath the lettuce, which at least makes them easy to locate and remove.  I ejected ten of them this morning; they were unceremoniously flung over the hedge… no doubt a thrilling experience for such a slow paced gastropod.

The polytunnel has finally been completed!  Despite the wind being somewhat stronger than desirable, we spent last weekend battling to complete the polytunnel.  Getting the cover on is quite a task, and should definitely have been scheduled for a wind-free weekend.  However, wind-free weekends don’t exist around here so we did the best we could.  It was quite a task even with four people, but result is good and the polytunnel construction is now complete.  The next task is to dig over the soil, introduce some fertilizer, and create a path down the middle.  That means that there’s still a fair amount of work to be done before the fun part of planting can begin.  It measures 30′x10′, so there is plenty of room for growing.

The weather this weekend has been fantastic, so I’ve used the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time in the garden.  After demolishing a small retaining wall in the drive, I reclaimed about 100 bricks.  I took three loads of rubble to the tip, so the driveway looks much neater now.  The grass has had its first cut of the year, and I expect it will be growing like mad soon due to the warm wet weather.

When putting the chickens to bed just now, I looked into the coop and saw one flat on her back. RIP, chicken.

The old chicken coop was beginning to deteriorate – the roofing felt was torn off during a storm and didn’t get replaced.  Now they have a nice new coop to live in!  It’s a bit bigger (it could probably house twice as many chickens as I actually have – they like to sleep all squashed up together in the corner), and has two separate nesting areas.  They were not very keen on going in – chickens aren’t very adventurous at the best of times – so for the last two nights they have had to be carried over to it and put in.  Hopefully tonight they will manage by themselves.