We've had lots of folks staying over Christmas and New Year including Kerri and Russell from Hervey Bay, Oz. They followed our blog last year and were pleased to be able to see the house for real.

Catching up with our crops

Its a funny thing - as with conversations with friends when you haven't written your blog for ages you just don't know where to start..."what have you been up to?"..."ooh not much really, y'know just the usual".

So despite it being December here's a harvesting the potatoes photo. We had great success with the red Desiree and will still be enjoying those 'til well into the New Year, they taste good, were quite prolific here and very few had any sort of damage or rot of any kind. The Kerrs Pink were tasty but much more prone to damage and much less hardy, as you might expect really. In late Spring I was given some diddy wee broccolli seedlings, planted them very late and just stuffed them between flowering plants as I hadn't prepared a proper bed, haven't a clue what type they were but they turned out just grand. The peas we planted just got lost or nibbled to the extent there was no crop to speak of this time. The apple trees were fairly sparse in production but thats neither a surprise nor a worry. The Golden Spire which is an old Lancastrian cooker, also well suited to cider production, did quite well and produced large firm fruit which tasted delicious in crumbles etc. The Ribston Pippin and the Thorle Pippin both produced some small eaters but they were a bit on the sharp side, presumably because the sunshine wasn't abundant in the middle summer months. I've just been mugging up on pruning the trees which is a good winter task.

We're back!!

Hello from us! The blog is being reborn....with this photo which was taken in July.
We're online in the house which has taken countless agonies with BT and we're looking forward to catching up with progress and news from our part of the world.

Food production underway

The fruit is forming on this Golden Spire apple. We could really do with some rain as we've had around 7 weeks of significantly dry weather which is mighty unusual. I'm not expecting too many apples this year as the stock is only a year old and I'll need to learn the best way of pruning apple trees to ensure good healthy growth. In the border between the hen enclosure and the stone wall we've planted peas and broccolli amongst the cottage garden flowers and greenery.

We've planted Desiree and Kerrs Pink potatoes this year, both good Scottish stock, the former producing firm red skinned tatties and the latter for salads. Although we thought we'd just plant the 3 bags this year I bought far too many seed potatoes and after giving away loads to friends we've planted the remainder in fairly rough soil behind the top of the long stone wall. Despite planting late they're coming through nicely. We aim to create our raised bed veggie garden this year with plans for it to mature into an attractive parterre style affair over time. We'll be using joists from the old house to create the structure and hope to get that underway in the school holidays which start here next week.