Fracture Friday

Forgetting the parable of the tortoise and the hare I slammed my fingers in the big iron sliding door of the tractor shed as I rushed to get several jobs done before lunch.  About 20 minutes of primal wailing followed and a trip to Witney minor injuries unit, where it was revealed that I have broken the top of the ring finger on my right hand.  Typing this is a lot slower than usual as are many farm jobs.

Truth and reconciliation for victim and perpetrator!



The word 'fracture' has an onomatopoeic quality to my ear, something rather crunchy about it, though perhaps it summons more the cracking of a creme brulee than bone and blood!

Above an elder cutting that expired in the mini-drought.

The Easter weekend was indecently hot and I spent much of it like the hunchback in Jean De Florette straining my ears and eyes for signs of rain. Recently there has been more of a temperate chill in the air but still no waterworks.

Although we farmer/gardener types grumble about lack of rain, I suspect it is a happy sort of grumble as the rewards of nurturing our plants are much of what draws us to this work.  If our crops did not need us to care for them by watering, weeding etc, our relationship would be more distant.  We would not be called to know them in the way that we are.

The blackcurrants are already moving from flower to fruit and would be happy of some water to swell them.  So far I have concentrated on keeping the smaller cuttings alive but I may soon turn my attention to the larger plants.  In bush years the one above is in early adolescence.

Foul Play!  A teething hare or rabbit the most likely culprit.

The dandelions are as rampant as ever and most have now moved into their fertile clock phase.  Meanwhile the field's weed du jour is buttercup.

The dry weather meant that last year's raspberry canes, which I cut down at the beginning of the year and then rather embarrassingly failed to set ablaze in front of one of the wwoofers last month, went up like a flame thrower with only a single piece of lit paper stuffed into their heart.

 

Turned to a circle of ash in moments, quite a vanishing act!

ENTER THE DRAGON!



It's that time of year again, the field has become thick with dandelions, tough couch grass and deep rooting cow parsley.  If they are not to overrun the berries and currants I must reignite my seasonal love affair with the Massey and its topper attachment.  'Our survey says' second most photographed entity on this blog is likely to be my red reaper. 

I have a friend who used to be the librarian at the Scottish Agricultural college and she told me that one quiet afternoon she found a group of students staring lasciviously at one of the computer screens.  She expected to have to deliver a lecture about viewing 'adult' material on University property only to discover as she drew closer that the images being leered at were those of large farm machinery.  These days I get where they were coming from, though my ardour is directed towards a small engined compact tractor, which would probably be regarded as the equivalent of nursing half a shandy through an entire night out with the rugby club.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!

Before

After



Once I've mown down the lanes in between the rows, I come back again with the light infantry, strimmer or scythe, to reckon with the weeds that have grown too close to the mulch mat for me to get with the topper.  Bits of juicy dandelion and cow parsley stem spit in my eye as the strimmer rages.

The secret farmer - silhouette of a strimmer man in the shepel window.

The extraordinarily hot and dry weather has meant that the grass et al has not been too prolific in my absence but this also means that what I want to grow needs watering which is a laborious hose pipe process as I don't have a fancy irrigation system in place.  Strangely, given how freely they grow in the wild, the elder cuttings seem to be the first to perish in dry spells.

Nothing will kill these tough nuts though, whose charms I tend to be blind to as I spend much time trying to keep the fruit free of them.  These are far enough away to admire.  I have tried to make use of the flower heads by turning them into wine, but the results were v poor tbf (too be fair) - really quite bitter and needed a lot of disguising in cocktails in order to offload.

The sword and the harp

96% alcohol 100% legal

HENMANIA!!  Declan the local customs and excise officer has just told me I have the thumbs up to become a Trade Facility warehouse.  This means I can buy in the 96% proof organic spirit that I need to fortify the liqueurs 'in duty suspension'.  This is a big advantage business wise, not least because a 25 litre tub of spirit costs approx £880 duty paid but only £112 sans duty.  I still have to pay duty but only on my finished product rather than on the raw ingredients so anything I lose in the making process will be a lot less costly.

It has been an extremely long and muddled 'journey' getting to this point in which I have received contrary advice/instructions from different departments at national level, which people at local level have, in turn, contradicted.  Declan, however, has proved to be the acceptable face of the taxman, finding a way to apply the spirit of the law without getting eternally bogged down in the letter of it.

The final piece of the jigsaw is now in place and when I return from holiday I will begin fermenting my first commercial batch - a raspberry liqueur.

Not thrilled with this potential capsule for the blackcurrant - a tone too on the lurid side of Imperial.  What do you think?

In the field I've conducted the first mini-inventory of the season, with slightly disappointing results for the currant tricolore row.  50% of the blackcurrant cuttings are showing no signs of life, despite the blackcurrant cuttings in the next two rows being 100%.  Happily the red and white of the tricolore are faring better scoring 79% and 69% respectively.  I have back up for all of them in a separate cuttings bed which I can use to replace those who have fallen in the line of duty at the end of the growing season.

Must try harder!

These currant cuttings are not ready yet but I imagine it an important rite of passage for a young stem when a bird first deems them robust enough to perch on.  I was not quick enought to catch it but below witness an elder cutting that's recently 'been there'!

Meanwhile as the wild plum sheds its petals the blackthorn takes over as belle of the ball..

And finally a panorama from the high point in the field

The shepel featuring as a distant anchor.  I will return my dear!

Spring storms

The weather has been out of sorts the last couple of days - blustering, grey, some needed tears and the occasional ray of sunshine.

A Wwoof-er has arrived to help out for a week.  Morgane from France.

A bona fide beret, malheuresement no hooped shirt or necklace of onions!

The WWOOF network links farmers with people who want to volunteer on organic farms.  I did it on and off for a couple of years which helped me to decide what I wanted to do here and to a certain extent how to do it.  Most of the Wwoofers I've had however are more motivated by wanting to learn the language and by the chance to see a different part of the world.  Morgane attended an English language school in Wales, which explains why the conversation is not quite fluent!  But I have been very lucky with the volunteers who have come here so far this year who have been bons oeufs without exception.

In the wet weather yesterday I put Morgane in the winery to touch up the walls where the paint was flaking off.  I think this will need to be an annual job due to damp.  Non-peeling, easily washable walls was one of a long list of requirements laid down by the environmental 'elf team.  The less said about these the better if relations between me and West Ox District council are to remain cordial.

                                                             SATISFIED!?

Nodded off in the shepel this afternoon or "fell into the arms of Morpheus" as my grandmother had it.  It is her old armchair that I have in the shepel and the experience of some head lolling shut-eye while wedged between its stubby arms fully justifies her poetic description.

The shepel is watched over by a trio of silver birches

As you can see two of these are being seriously scaled by ivy - the sap sucking alien.

Before

I decide to completely clear a patch around both trunks.  I hope this will kill off the stuff that has climbed higher but am not convinced that it will.

After

The liberated bark has a rather beautiful snake skin print appearance.  "This is my birch bark jacket.  It's an expression of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom".  A bottle of liqueur to the follower who can place which cult early 90s film this is an adapted quote from...?

And finally..

a precocious primrose that has decided to seed itself next to one of the rows of autuman fruiting raspberries.  The cardboard is there as a weed suppresant (or mulch) and will also acidify the soil slightly when it rots down, which is good for the fruit as it prefers a pH of about 6 whereas the soil here is very alkali, around 8.

Three thousand Italian bottles

Witnessed some first-class rural tooth sucking on Friday when two pallets of bottles were delivered but the lorry they came on couldn't get through the gate into the yard - 'sorry mate but if you'd advised you were limited access I would have brought the seven and a half tonner'.  Being identified as 'limited access' fits ok with my self-concept, but at the time was displeasing as he threatened to leave the bottles by the side of the road.  In the end we dragged them on his pallet trolley into the farm shed but couldn't get them the extra twenty metres over the gravel into the winery.  I need to find a friendly neighbour with a forklift in the next few weeks!

I cracked into this new haul to make some mock up bottles.  I'm hoping to launch in the summer with a raspberry and blackcurrant liqueur.

Paul at Agenda Design has done a lovely job on the labels and has been very patient with all the changes required by the Soil Association and Trading Standards.  The last decisions to make are whether to go for a signifying colour at the base of the label ie blackcurranty or raspberryee, or a more subtle grey.

And then whether to stick with the gold capsule (bit that goes round the cork at the top of the bottle) for the blackurrant or try to source some sort of purple capsule, this could look rather Imperial (Blackcurrantus Organicus) or a bit naff.  Watch this space...

HOOOAAAA!!  Check out the blossom on this wild plum tree!



You can keep your daffodils and your lambs, for me, this is the ultimate emblem of spring.  And if you don't agree, gentle reader, then you are a plum!   The bee bottom centre is clearly on message.





Moonshine in the sun - 24th March 2011

Day Woon (Geordie accent) in the shepel* from where I will be making most of my posts.  The intensity of the bird song coming through the thin wooden walls is as if I'm sitting in a small garden beneath a tree full of nightingales rather than on the edge of a 15 acre field.  Good work blackbirds, finches and assorted unidentified others!  (Must swot up on my ornithology).

This is my favourite time - the sun's descent well under way and the stillness a blank but vivid canvas for the aforementioned twittering and fluting of my winged companions.

Spring was leapfrogged today and we were straight into summer.  We've not had rain here for a while so I decided to water and weed this year's currant and elder cuttings.  I have three new rows of currants directly in front of the shepel.

This is a rather hazy view of them from my armchair.  They've all been planted in my 'Lazy Boy' style: rows rotavated, mulch mat laid over them and hardwood cuttings taken from existing plants and slotted straight through the mat at one leap's spacing.  Conventional practice is to nurture your hardwood cuttings in well tended beds, dig them up the following year once they've rooted and then plant out where you want them.  All too much of a pavlova IMO and I've had success with my Lazy Boy style in the past.

The row closest to the shepel is something of vanity project - Currant Tricolore, in which I have planted alternate black, red and white currants.  Favouring this row I make sure that the holes in the mulch matting are big enough not to pull against the stem of the cuttings.  Flaps of matting created by increasing the hole sizes are carefully weighed down with stones so as not to leave room for weeds.

Surprisingly, elder cuttings have proved to be a bit less robust than blackcurrant ones and where these have died off in the rows I replaced them this winter.  I go round watering these.

Here is one of the little blighters, just a few months old.

FYI here is a cousin, two and a bit years old. 
More about wine less about plants in the next post, but now the shepel is calling to be known...

* Shepel: Half shed/half chapel on the northwest boundary of the field where the fruit is grown.

Peeping shepel

INT shepel