We have had lots of rain recently and this inevitably leads to lots of mud as the poultry churns up the ground so readily. In the chick run we have come up with a simple solution to keep the birds and the ground dry. We have made a lean to shelter from two transparent plastic roofing sheets. They work very effectively.
Over the past couple of weeks we have collected nearly a tonne of apples and pears grown in people's gardens locally. What we collected was surplus to requirements and most would have ended up in the garden waste bins if we hadn't collected them. We have started to feed the most bashed and damaged apples to the goats as they won't last long. The rest will go into storage over the winter to be used as goat food. Thanks to everyone who swapped their fruit for our preserves and in some cases simply gave us their fruit. It will all be used in a sustainable way. Nothing wasted!
Once we have sorted the storage of the half tonne of apples we've gathered from local residents for goat fodder over winter, we shall get the whole of the potato crop harvested.
He is making a good recovery. When I checked him today, there were fewer scabby lumps. He and Sweep however will remain in the paddock away from the other animals until he is fully recovered.
We are still collecting surplus fruit - indeed tomorrow I will be making more calls. We also have more apples to collect from the tree on our Farside plot. We have 6 sacks already but there are still some apples on the tree. We will now sort the fruit and use up the bashed ones in preserve making. The rest will go into storage for the winter for the goats.
It looks like we are heading for a good apple crop this year. We've started to collect the apples from the large tree on our Farside plot. 5 sacks collected yesterday and lots still more to come. Most will be used over winter as feed for the goats but there will be ample opportunities to make pies and preserves.
We had a big gooseberry crop this year, enough to allow us to experiment with creating new recipes for preserves. We have lots of rowan (mountain ash) growing near us. They produce bright red berries which are packed full of pectin, so any preserves set well. They have a bitter taste so I decided to combine them with gooseberries to make a jelly. The result was better than I expected. The video takes you through how I made it.
A couple of weeks ago we came across an injured deer near our smallholding. She had got caught up in a barbed wire fence next to a public footpath. She was still alive but there was a deep slash across her stomach. It was clear she wasn't going to survive. We removed her from the fence and made her as comfortable as we could. Phone calls to wildlife charities to get someone out to put her to sleep turned out to be unnecessary. She died an hour later.
We took the carcass home rather than leaving it to rot next to where people walk their dogs. We found a game butcher in Acomb near Hexham and booked them to butcher the carcass though we had to gut her first. We got the meat back last week, most of which has gone into one of our freezers. We passed a venison joint on to the friend who pointed us to the game butcher.
Expect us to post about venison dinners, game pies and game sausages over the coming months.
It's that time of year when are inundated with marrows. Some will be made into curries and into chutneys. But first, we stuffed one with pigeon meat and baked it. It was then topped with cheese sauce. We've been having it for the past couple of days with a dessert of trifle which includes an old sponge cake made some years ago using duck eggs. It had been in one of the freezers for years and was rediscovered when we defrosted the freezer over the weekend.
We have a new addition to our smallholding. This is Rex, a Texel ram which we bought last week. He is about 16 months old. He will service the 4 sheep we have - two of which are Texels. I'm looking forward to lamb next year!
