Have you ever seen the rain?

Wonderful wet walk around feeding the animals this morning, with that old Creedence tune running around my head. The burn is up and raging, over the dam but still following the bypass round the hydro intake, which is now basically complete and ready for an initial testing. Quite the conditions for this - a baptism of fire? It should be fun letting this kind of flow through the sluice, and then slowly turning the wheel to close it up. I will wait for wait for Jonathan the Wwoofer to appear, and we can enjoy putting our work to the test.
The black hen is not proudly leading her new brood around today. They are all tucked into the back of the broody coop, with the older chick from the last brood, 'the teenager' as Polly calls it. Actually I think she is a hen rather than a cockerel as she is already displaying some impressive maternal protective behaviour, seeing off the brown hens three times her size! Of course everyone is enchanted by the five little chicks: two silvery yellow, one black and two ginger. All will be some mix of Light Sussex, Buff Orpington and Marran.
I now have the treadle pump up and running. It needed to be drawing water from higher up the burn (so not raising the water so far), to be fully air tight, and to be generously greased. It now fills a large butt just above the polytunnel, and so into a hose. Water seems such an easy commodity now after months of carrying sloshing buckets up the hill. Although the pump requires treadling, it makes pretty quick and easy work of it.
And as Lou so sagely sang, always back to the rain...

This beautiful weather continues. We were thankful for some good heavy showers the other day though. Crops are coming on well - beans swelling, more mange tout seeming to appear overnight, lettuces superb. I've heard complaints about slugs this year, but no real problems here - they can't be liking the dryness. In the polytunnel the pumpkins and squash are starting to take off (so to speak), and it's becoming ever more obvious that they are far too close together. I will have to bite the bullet and take plants out, painful as it will be.
Everything else is also growing away fast. We got a good crop of hay in last week, and the trusty scythe slashed through hundreds of nettles, thistles and docks this morning. The pigs are putting on the pork too. We will home slaughter and get bloody in July. Black hen's broody again, and is sitting on a mixed bag of 6 eggs from a neighbour with a fine cockerel and a variety of hens.
Much to do - a quince, a mulberry and some shrubs from a plant sale to go in just now...

Tunnel of Love

I had that song swimming around my mind the other day as I went about planting up the polytunnel, and failed to notice the connection until some time later. It is strange how we can be one step ahead of ourselves like this, and I suppose the lesson is to trust in your intuition, as it is sharper than you are.

So, naturally acting intuitively, we began the merry task of designing and planting the tunnel this week. For the main path we have a broad sign wave blending into a spiral at the top end. Perhaps not that practical, but it is beautiful, and I want the space to be pleasing, relaxing and meditative as well as productive.

The north-west side is planted with the three sisters: sweetcorn, the oldest, beans, the middle one, and squash, the youngest. These plants have been grown together for generations by some Native American people, who, incidentally, have apparently expressed a preference for being known as 'Red Indians' - better I suppose to be named after the invaders' error, rather than the invaders themselves. The three plants are good companions for each other. The nutrient hungry corn enjoys the nitrogen fixed by the beans, while providing them with something to climb. The squash provides a living mulch, covering the ground with its broad spiky leaves, keeping it cool and moist, and deterring pests. The produce from the three plants is also compatible, each providing vitamins and amino acids lacking in the others.

On the south-east side is a bank of tomato plants with parsley, cabbage, coriander and basil nesting around. In the middle is the achocha (exploding cucumbers) with a lattice of woven bird cherry for them to climb. I am determined that one door of the tunnel will not be visible from the other, so that as far as possible one can get lost in there. The yakon, a tallish South American root crop, should help, as will the sunflowers and french beans.

Around the doors I have planted onions to deter rabbits and insect pests, and asters to attract pollinating insects. Marigolds will follow.

It is such an uplifting time to be outside with the world spring up all around. As Jack Torrance so wisely said, "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", so I guess for everyone's sake I'd better get back out there...

May we have some warmth?

If the last time I posted it felt like summer, well it's winter again. Persistently cold, and dry. The burn is low, the soil dusty. So unsurprisingly growth is slow - much of what has been planted out (peas, beans, carrots, potatoes, greens etc) is just sitting there, apparently shivering. It's mid-May for goodness sake!
On the livestock side, the two Tamworth gilts are happily digging, munching and growing. The last of the cockerels has finally, finally been 'dealt with'. He had taken residence in a garden in the centre of the village, and could not have been better placed to annoy more people, or to be harder to take out. Thankfully he decided to come crowing back here on Thursday afternoon. Asking for it really.
I collected 6 point of lay hens on Tuesday. I'm not exactly sure what point that is, as we have yet to see a single egg! I expect they will come. On the positive side the black hen has now a tiny chick, we think a guinea fowl. Quite enchanting it is.

Sunshine

What weather! It feels like summer, and remembering last year, maybe this is it. Time to be making the most of it.
Of course we have been busy planting seeds and planting out seedlings these past two weeks - lettuce, beans, peas, kale, tomatoes, chillis...
The polytunnel is nearly built now. Having managed to mismeasure from the word go I am lucky to have got away with not having to undo anything, and have ended up with a bigger tunnel! Thankfully, able help is on hand this week from Vivian, a Chinese wwoofer. She has been great both physically and with her ability to quickly understand and problem solve this giant puzzle of many parts.
I'm away now to visit the school garden and see if anything still lives there.

We said goodbye to two wonderful wwoofers this morning, sorry that they could not stay longer to see the polytunnel put up. Their help, humour and conversation will be missed as we complete that task without them. Tom and Angelika spent much of their week with us digging over the area and picking out couch grass roots. It was tedious and laborious, and we were all greatly relieved when the final row was finished. We have created an enormous pile, perhaps 3 cubic metres of solid couch grass! Of course as we then began to level the site those roots still popped up everywhere - I suspect they will for some time yet. Yesterday we marked out the footprint with pegs and string, and got two posts cemented in. Now we await Ron and his John Deere to lift the ton of sand up the hill, and so save us alot of back-breaking haulage.
Today was a day of rest, other than planting seeds, cleaning out the chicken house and hunting the web for a human-powered water pump. I like the look of the treadle pumps popular in India, and various bicycle powered pumps, any of which should do the job of bring water up the 5 metres or so from the burn to a reservoir above the tunnel.
Our first eggs began appearing this week, first duck eggs left all over the place, often in the burn, then lovely brown chicken eggs left in the nesting boxes by our otherwise errant hen. Maybe she can stay after all. The cockerels have been hunted almost to extinction now, bringing a quieter life (and a tasty casserole).

Polytunneling

It's arrived - piles of galvanized hoops and rolls of polythene, plus a plethora of other bits and bobs. It's like a giant mechano kit - hooray! Tom and Angelika arrived last night to wwoof for the week, and are currently in the sunshine digging out the couch grass roots that the pigs left behind. And there are alot of them, especially up the latrine end - those tidy Tamworths were careful not to dump and root in the same areas. So, one more going over and it will be time to build the frame.

There are suddenly a thousand other things to be getting on with now the spring has finally arrived. Amy, another wwoofer planted a good many seeds last week (lettuce, cabbage, beans, sprouts, some flowers) but there's more to get going now. We also got most of the trees planted last week - two sweet chestnuts, the wonderfully named hawthorn 'Ellwangeriana', a Shipova (a cross between a rowan and a pear, with a plum-like fruit), some honeysuckles and a fuchsia with edible berries, a holm oak, and optimistically, an almond. In fact I am being optimistic in planting many of the above at 225m in central Scotland, but with our favourable micro-climate, and a bit more global heating perhaps we'll get some exotic fruits for a while before meltdown.

Other jobs include finally ridding ourselves of the last of the roaming feral cocks, who's competitive adolescent crowing begins a little after 5am now. No neighbours have complained as yet, but I can't help but think someone must be grumbling angrily over her porridge.

The holding is alive with life - buds are bursting, birds are singing, and I'm away to be a part of it all.