We expanded the herb patch last year following a fragrant, fascinating, and rainy excursion to one of the Jekka’s Herb Farm open days. We returned from our trip, smelling strongly of every herb imaginable, with two huge, damp, paper bags full of baby plants. Salad burnet, caraway, chervil, lemon verbena, orange and lemon thymes, winter…
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Chickens: Creating a Dual-Purpose UK Easter Egger Flock – Part 3
The third in a series of posts about creating a dual-purpose, free-ranging, organic flock of chickens that lay multicoloured eggs and produces some of the finest meat we have ever tasted.
Shetland Sheep
An overview of Shetland sheep characteristics, benefits for small-scale sheep keeping, and the story of how they arrived on the smallholding.
Rainbow Chard with Fennel, Chilli, Wild Garlic and Rosemary
It has been a rather unusual weather week. Most mornings started with frost, icy water buckets, and gloved windscreen scraping. Then fierce daytime sunshine took over and our winter coats were swiftly replaced with t-shirts and sunglasses. As night descended, so did the temperature, which meant lighting the log burners remained essential in our stone…
Apple Pie
Apple season is in full swing here on the smallholding. It is a favourite time of year for the geese, whose morning routine now begins with an extremely loud and flappy visit to the base of their favourite apple tree to see what windfalls have come down overnight. They appear to have a strict finders…
Wild Blackberry and Rosewater Cake
Wild blackberries are very much at home on the smallholding. They wind their way through hawthorn, ash and nettle hedgerows, providing a welcome barrier from the country lane and home for a multitude of wildlife. Unfortunately the brambles also pop up in less welcome places. This year they have made an appearance in the middle…