Sun, a storm, more sun and a good rain.

Five Days of Diary Entries.

It's been a lovely start to the month weather wise. Although the lack of rain for watering is starting to cause worries as we have nearly got through the 9,000 litres we had stored from the roofs of the 2 farm buildings.
Some of my time has been spent here

underneath the walnut tree, always the coolest part of the garden when the weather is really hot. A few walnuts growing but no doubt the squirrels will pinch them as usual.


Wednesday 1st
Very hot but with a bit of a breeze.I picked more gooseberries on and off all day and put them out for sale. With 4 bags of freshly dug potatoes, 2 cucumbers, 2 bunches of flowers, a bag of courgettes and a bag of green beans our gate income was £45.50. - Handy. Herb omlettes for dinner, with a home made bread roll and salad of lettuce and cucumber. Col turned the hay on both fields. Kate-who-had-my-goats came to collect the feed bin and hurdles she has bought from us - another handy £90 in the kitty. I forgot to say that last weekend a friend from Suffolk Smallholder Society came to look at our 2 movable chicken sheds and will buy both which will be a bonus of £400 sometime in the next couple of months, when they are ready to have them delivered.

Thursday 2nd
It was hotter here today than yesterday through the morning, but cloudier later. Col had been checking the forecast and decided to small bale our field late morning. We had one helper to load trailers and sold 28 bales straight away. The rest has gone into the horsebox trailer, the big car trailer  ( parked in the workshop) and the old caravan chassis trailer (  parked in the hay shed). We were done by 1am with 150ish bales out of the weather just in time because there was a short downpour at 1.30 which would have put off baling. We had our first cauliflower as cauliflower cheese for dinner and planned to do a few thin sliced chips with it but the deep fat fryer decided to give up the ghost. Another thing that I won't replace. I managed to watch some tennis but had to pick more gooseberries so missed most of the Nadal/Brown match which apparently was very entertaining. Gate income today £25. Plus £56 for the hay.


Friday 3rd
 Picking gooseberries several times again. I've not kept a count of how many punnets have been put out for sale this year - just couldn't be bothered. Also out for sale today-- a cucumber glut (found 10 lurking under the leaves so sold them for 25p each and they all went), a giant marrow that must have grown overnight as I'm sure it wasn't there yesterday and potatoes. Gate income today = £37.  I popped to Tesco first thing for the main July shop. There were some things on my list that would have been cheaper at Aldi, until you factor in the cost of a 50 mile round trip. We only shop at Aldi when we have several places to go in Ipswich and there is nothing we need from there at the moment. Col did odd jobs here. He  sent for a handle bar extension for his bike so that he can sit a bit more upright and got that fixed, he now needs to build up some strength so that we can cycle together. I find biking easy but he has always found it hard work, especially  before he knew he had angina and  had the stents put in 2 years ago.
My copy of Home Farmer magazine arrived. If bought from a shop it's £3.95 but you can buy online for £3.45 inc. postage. I subscribed for a while but couldn't really afford to keep it going for the amount of information I was getting from it, so now I look online to see what's in it and buy an occasional copy. This month there was a recipe for courgette and cheese patties ( although they called them rissoles) which I thought was worth a try. We ate them with our first broad beans and first small calabrese.

 They were  a mix of  softened finely chopped onion, grated cheddar, grated courgette, dry crumbled bread and a little ground mixed nuts, seasonings and an egg. The mix was very wet so I rolled them in some dry breadcrumbs before shallow frying and it was only as they were cooking I thought that I could have added a few porridge oats. The verdict - not a lot of flavour but very crispy! ( a bit overdone!) The nuts added nothing to the mix so I would use a little extra cheese and bread next time.
That was our third home grown veggie meal in 3 days.
Also in the August  Home Farmer an article about keeping chickens on a budget ( i.e not spending a small fortune on a dinky little chicken house) and building a dehydrator, from an old fridge for drying food which sounds better  than splashing out over £200! I'm a real skinflint when it comes to  gadgets. To me they are just one more THING that needs cupboard space, cleaning and replacing when they break. My idea of self-sufficiency is to do without things and eat with the seasons as much as possible but I know others swear by them so I'll shut-up!( Especially because of my Sunday confession!)
Several new arrivals on the campsite today - we have a busy weekend but then just 2 pitches in use all next week and NOTHING in the bookings diary for a whole week later in the month, which is worrying.

Saturday 4th
Fantastic storms overnight with sheet lightning illuminating  everywhere.We had what sounded like a lot of rain but turned out to be  just ¼ inch or 5 mm. At least it will have put a little bit more into the storage tanks.
The hay bales which were on the old caravan chassis trailer had to be taken off into the hay shed today when Col had a phone call from a friend who had a friend wanting to buy the trailer to use it for carrying a man powered hovercraft! Something I had never heard of. Pedal-powered apparently!
He paid £50 for it.
 After picking enough gooseberries to put out 10 punnets this morning and digging enough potatoes for 3 bags full, I decided to have a day off from harvesting and selling as  there was a tennis-fest on TV. Then the temperature crept up and it was soon too hot to stay inside  as we had our hottest day of the year and even the breeze was hot. The sun had moved round by the time Andy M was playing so I came back in to watch him win.
 We are now digging the Charlotte potatoes, just so delicious in a potato salad, which is what we had for dinner with some ham and salad. I usually use chives and parsley in potato salad but the dry weather has almost killed off the chives despite watering whenever I remember. The parsley is just inside the poly tunnel so gets watered early every morning when I do the 50+ tomato plants.

Sunday 5th
The weather was sunny first thing but thankfully not so hot as yesterday.
CONFESSION - I am a car boot shopaholic! Despite the house being for sale I'm still going to boot sales and spending ................................................£2.50!
I was really pleased to find this Framecraft ceramic bowl with lid for putting some cross stitch in.      (the picture you see is just an illustration not stitching)

The very old label on the box says £18.99 and I paid £1.50. There's no cross stitch fabric or threads with it which doesn't matter as the chart was for 18 count which is too small for my eyes, so I'll find a picture of something that will fit on 14 count Aida.It looks as if Framecraft don't even sell these any more. The large book -  A Slice of Organic life was just 50p and I think there is a profit to be made there when we have our yard/barn sale to smallholders. The Robert Barnard book, also 50p, is one I've not come across and is small enough to fit in a bag of books to take if we do go off in a caravan. I shall now go and put some more books from my shelves into the car boot/yard sale boxes to make up for this frantic buying madness!
The clouds came over during the morning making it cool enough to work in the big poly-tunnel and lots of the bottom leaves on the tomato plants have been taken off, de-shooting done and weeding plus tying up finished. By 10.30 we had good steady rain which carried on right through the early afternoon.
We cut each others hair and then settled down to watch the British Grand Prix,it got so gloomy that I needed a light on to cross stitch.
Later the sun came out again, a beautiful summer evening. Time for more Gooseberry picking.

Back in a day or two
Sue

Gooseberry Sawfly

It's time to start checking your gooseberry bushes for Gooseberry Sawfly Larvae.

I've been thinking I must get round to checking for the last week or so but if you read last weeks post you will know why I only managed to find time on Friday afternoon.

Look in the middle of the bushes near the top for the telltale sign of small holes in the leaves.

 Underneath will be a small caterpillar/larvae  eating his way through the leaf, you can just see this teeny one on the edge of the hole.

 They grow at a great rate, this one's nibbled a bit more and doubled in size!

I found several so it's a good thing I didn't leave it any longer. These little things can eat their way through all the leaves on a bush in a couple of weeks, no leaves = a dead bush! We can't afford to lose a bush to sawfly, the gooseberries we pick and sell each year equal at least 2 months housekeeping money.

I will check every day if I can to squidge as many as possible so that I don't need to spray.


Welcome to Missingangel 1966 and SimplyHappy who are new followers on Bloglovin'

Back soon with a diary update
Sue

Mondays catch up

Goodness me, there were  23 comments on the Cost Effective Self Sufficiency post. Thank you to everyone for reading and commenting. It's interesting to find other people who have had a go at various ways to be more self sufficient. For so many years we thought we were odd!, now it seems we were not the only ones :-)

On Saturday morning we had decided to take a trip to a car boot sale that's only held once a month from May to September. The weather was a bit iffy and we had some thunder early but we thought we would go and have a look anyway. Unfortunately the uncertain weather had put off lots of people so the sale was smaller than usual. All I bought were 5 packets of seeds for £1 the lot.
2 of the packs were runner beans which we have put out straight away to replace a whole bed that have been eaten by mice ( I guess, as there is no sign of any beans anywhere under the ground). We will be short of beans for selling if this new sowing doesn't grow. Next year I shall have to put the whole lot into trays inside. I did 5 big seed trays full this year which is enough to fill one bed. The one bed planted out are looking really sad with yellowing leaves, as are the climbing French beans.
This year seems to be a constant battle with disease and pests in so many areas. We have an invasion of huge black aphids on our big Christmas Tree, these are producing lots of sticky excretions which I think is called Honeydew and it has attracted every bee and wasp for miles. As this tree is right next to our sitting out patio it's all a bit off putting. Our neighbour said it's a good thing she no longer keeps bees as they will swarm to any tree where this happens.

Our son and girlfriend were here overnight on Saturday after going to yet another wedding of one of his school friends. He has kept in touch with so many of the lads he was at school with and being a popular fella has been invited to what seems like dozens of weddings. Next year he will be a best man to his best school friend just two weeks before his Sister gets married, busy boy!
Our youngest daughter  and her bloke came round to join us  for a family lunch on Sunday and, having picked more than 4lb of strawberries, of course we had enough strawbs and ice cream for 6 people ( plus some to spare for us for today and a couple of small punnets out for sale). The children were reminiscing about the years here when we grew even more strawberries than now, and how after about 3 weeks having them every day they would begin to go right off them. I love it when they talk about things I've long forgotten.

We ( mainly C actually) got some bits of weeding done early Sunday morning, we are slowly catching up on that never ending task. We've run out of space for planting out the sweetcorn and leeks until  the first potato bed has been cleared. 

Did anyone else watch the mens Tennis Final from Paris? It was a good match I thought, although I was a bit worried about Rafa  who looked just about all in due to the heat. Probably a good thing Andy Murray didn't get through to the final, with his fair Scottish skin he would have been frazzled.

 Today C has been doing some more work on the shed, it's coming along nicely and I have been

The roof is half plastic and half metal sheets over felt.

  catching up on housework and having a go at Elderflower Jelly which was one of the recipes in the Home Farmer magazine that I picked up last week ( also on someones blog recently but not sure who - apologies, let me know and I'll edit and link you in here). The Elderflowers had been soaking in water since Friday. I hadn't got special jam sugar but I did have sachets of pectin, which I thought would do the same job. But maybe not! Even though I boiled for several minutes after adding the pectin the blinkin' stuff still didn't look like setting. So I potted it up anyway to see if cooling it would work. Mmm, No it didn't!
Then I had a choice, I could pretend that I meant to make Elderflower Syrup which I think will be lovely with some lemonade added or poured over ice cream. Or I could tip it back into a pan, bring it back to the boil and add more pectin.
I tipped most backed into a pan, brought it back to the boil added half a sachet of pectin and then waited for it to reach setting point, which it seemed to do ( tested on a cold plate). So I poured it all back into the jars and guess what............it still didn't set. I give up!

In between everything else I've been picking gooseberries, just a slow start this year because although they are huge I'm still not at all sure they are really ripe enough. So I pick about 4 punnets full and put them on the stall without putting out my blackboard sign with GOOSEBERRIES writ large. (Once I do that the cars stop to buy so many that I have to pick all day to keep up).
 12 punnets sold today at £1.50 each, plus 4 bags of potatoes at 50p, 3 bunches of flowers at £1 each, 2 small pointed cabbages at 30p each and a couple of small calabrese heads in a bag for 50p. Not forgetting 16 boxes of 6 eggs at £1 each.

I caught a few minutes of tennis from Queens Club - the build up to Wimbledon had begun.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

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7th of the month Following a tree link + other stuff.

Joining up with Lucy at Loose and Leafy blog to follow a tree through 2014. My tree is our pink flowered  Horse Chestnut. Someone planted a conifer hedge behind the tree and it's also near the hedge boundary with some Ash trees on the third side, which have been cut back frequently because to the right of them is the fruit cage where we have raspberries, red currants and gooseberries.

Pink candles from a distance

and closer

A shady spot underneath

I think lichen shows we have lovely clean air here on the edge of Suffolk

I've decided that after I've saved up for my new Roberts Red Retro Radio, I'm starting a new fund for a digital SLR camera. I just don't get on with the little Canon digital. I'm old fashioned, I want a camera I can look through. I had a cheap Russian SLR camera way back in the 1970s and it took lovely photos until it got sand inside.

Now onto today's news
Both of us had more energy today so C started the day loosening the soil on last years Brussel sprout bed and then after an early coffee he went to our neighbours for grass cutting. I did the ironing then wheel-barrowed some compost onto the bed, ready for him to rotovate in.
We then  got 10 courgette plants out, it's quite windy today so we've put an old tyre round each plant until they get established. Wind can do them a lot of  damage - twisting the stem.

Later he prepared the bed for the climbing French beans and got some canes up ready. The beans have been moved from the conservatory to the cold-frame to harden off but we will still wind a bit of fleece round them when we plant them out in a few days time.

It's going to be a bad year for bugs, caterpillars and other nasties. I've been checking the gooseberries for sawfly caterpillars every couple of days and there are lots and greenfly too plus we've already destroyed one wasps nest this year and it's only May. If you have gooseberry bushes it really is worth looking for any half eaten leaves which will usually have a caterpillar underneath. Varying from the size of a dash like this - to about a centimetre long they can eat their way through the leaves on a bush in next to no time  I usually squash them by folding the leaf around them and squishing.

Back Tomorrow
Sue