It has been quite a while since our last post which we are sorry about however life on the "farm" has been busier, more crazy but more fulfilling than ever and there are only so many hours in the day.
We have enjoyed a summer of visits from lots of family and friends (some of them house sitting during our holiday in July and others coming to stay) and we hope everyone enjoyed themselves and we would like to thank everyone for their ideas, inspiration and help around the place. You now know when to come and when to stay away depending on what you like to pick and eat! Also, apologies to Josine our Dutch cousin after her little niece renamed Rosie the pig "Rosine". What that's expression about working with children and animals.....??
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| Meet Rosine |
Readers of previous posts may recall our lack of water in the mill leat due to a broken sluice gate. Thankfully just before leaving on holiday we managed to get the new sluice gate installed with the help of our neighbour Didier and our house sitters Karen & Denis. A few weeks previously, Al had ordered a new 3m long metal plate and took it to a local agricultural engineer to have it drilled to fit the lifting ratchet and welded with re-inforced bars. The old sluicegate, which was cut into pieces to get it out, served as a model to fabricate the new one and then Al scratched his head for a while to work out how to lift it into position.
Various tree pulley systems were proposed as well as simple muscle but we value our health and those of our friends so we finally decided to rent a 13m telescopic forklift to get the plate installed and after getting down and dirty with a large pot of grease (to prevent rust of course) it slid into its frame with little resistance.
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| Up a bit! |
About 1 hour later a veritable tsunami headed along the mill leat washing flotsam and jetsam with it and by the following morning, the canal was full again; just in time for the serious business of irrigating our crops - phew.
The weather has been the usual hot and dry of July and August - but thankfully our drip feed irrigation system has been keeping the veg patch in full growth. Everything grows like crazy with the 40 deg heat and beautiful sunshine and despite a few glitches, we are generally pretty happy with the vegetable production.
Since our last post, we have been harvesting fruit and vegetables non stop, notably;
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| Sundried tomatoes |
- several hundred kilos of tomatoes which we turned into passata, ketchup and sundried tomatoes.
- plums and damsons which we turned into jam and bottled plums.
- french and runner beans - all now blanched and frozen. We are nearly sick of the sight of them.
- borlotti and tarbais beans - all now dried and stored in paper sacks
- garlic and onions - these were a bit disappointing as we planted them too late but they are now hung up under cover to dry.
- beetroot - all now in the freezer
- courgettes - frozen, pickled, BBQ-ed and the monsters that were missed were stuffed with pork
- aubergines - they enjoyed the polytunnel. They ended up mostly in Moussaka and tapenade
- cucumbers and gherkins - eaten fresh, pickled and enjoyed by the pigs too. These plants turned into a jungle in the polytunnel.
- red hot chilli peppers - drying outside - looks like a Tex Mex round here...
- sweet peppers - so far eaten fresh but we may preserve some too
- lemon verbena and mint - we are drying it like mad to keep us in herbal tea over the winter
- potatoes - attacked by worms but the damage is more annoying than serious; all bagged and ready to see us through the winter
- peas - a pitiful harvest (too hot in the summer) although the kids enjoyed shelling them.
- peaches - very small but 12 crates harvested - destined for bottles, jams and getting the kids sticky
- apples, pears and cherries - disappointing harvest this year perhaps caused by the harsh pruning that was necessary last autumn.
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| Red and yellow onions drying before storage |
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| Garlic hanging under the carport |
The animals have been keeping us amused (?!) lately with several escapes. A couple of weeks ago, a wild boar broke down the gate to the donkey and sheep field overnight - the animals got spooked and a silent stampede ensued which lead to a day of frantically scouring the local fields and woods for the mini herd.. We sounded the alarm via smoke signals (well we just spread the word via neighbours which was a bit embarrassing) and through the grapevine we heard they had been seen at 0430 that morning at an irrigation lake around 6kms away. A farmer eventually corralled them into his yard and got word to us. After a little struggle, the sheep went into our trailer and Al walked the donkeys back to the mill. On the way home he met a couple who asked if he was on a pilgrimage!
The hunting season for wild boar has just started and unsurprisingly, the boar tend to get more aggressive and bad tempered when they are being chased around and shot at so we can expect this every year. What was ironic about the whole episode was that a permanent fence had just been completed effectively encircling the animals within the river, canal and fence boundaries. An impregnable gate is now under design. In truth it has just been added to the "to do in the foreseeable future" list....
Earlier in the summer, an itinerant shearer turned up to shed the animals of their fleeces. They really did look way too hot in 3 inches of wool in July. Post haircut, they all looked pretty confused and didn't recognise each other. They took a while to get used to each others new image but they all seemed relieved to be rid of their fleeces. The wool is being gradually used to mulch around fruit trees and bushes but is not good enough quality to sell or knit into woolly hats. Watch this space - we may have a spinning wheel this time next year although the kids have told us we must be careful not to prick our fingers in case we fall asleep for a hundred years....
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| Before |
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The chickens have been opportunists this summer and managed to escape through a mysterious hole in their fence but thankfully they are fairly easy to round up and don't tend to stray too far. Cooper (the border collie) who is bullied by the sheep enjoys herding the chickens so has now been renamed a chickendog. Amazingly, the pigs have been the best behaved lately.
Now that the harvesting has calmed down a little, we have plans to get back into the house and try to get the mill room habitable as a living room. We need a second living space as the kids are growing as fast as the plants and the kitchen is feeling small. We also have plans to create a better designed pig run with two paddocks (with the shelter split between the two) in order to move the animals from one to the other (to rest the land). Needless to say we are going to be using blueprints from Alcatraz to ensure its escape-proof. This will give us a space to put Rosie in when she gets impregnated by a boar (in the next few weeks we hope). On that subject, we lent our ram to a neighbour to get friendly with his ewes and the ram is now back and getting remarkably chummy with our 6 so hopefully 5 months or so from now we will have little lambs frolicking about. A new era of animal husbandry beckons!
