We grow our own food in a suburban village in the North East of England. Follow us as we keep up the battle to be self-sufficient.
Friday 25 October 2019
Eating the hedge
We recently cut back the hedge around the Whinnies Community Garden car park. This wasn't just a trim, it was a major cutback with the height of the hedge halved.
Everything chopped back was fed to the goats over a 10 day period. They ate the leaves, twigs and bark.
We now have a large pile of sticks, twigs and branches. Our big task now is to extract everything of value. In effect, much of what is recoverable in fuel, though not for our stove at home. The sticks will be fuel instead for the outdoor oven. We have been given permission to use one belonging to a friend. The sticks we are saving now will be dried for a year so when we get round to using the oven, which hopefully will be soon, we will be using fuel we saved last year.
So watch this space and see how we get on with baking outdoors. Meanwhile, I had to stop cutting the branches this afternoon. The rain had arrived!
Thursday 24 October 2019
Our first crop from the smallholding
Tuesday 22 October 2019
New land
We are now the proud owners of 2.5 acres of agricultural land near to where we live. We have lots of plans and will be starting work on them shortly. We want the site to be wildlife friendly so there will be hedgehog boxes, ponds, bat nesting boxes and so on installed. The hedgehogs and amphibians will eat the bugs so there is an economic return for us with less damage to crops.
The video above was filmed last week and in it I explain some of the plans for the site.
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