Spring has certainly taken hold and the sound of lambs bleating mixed in with birds singing is certainly confirmation.
Last weekend was a tasting at The Granary Shop at Weston Park. The park was open for Easter and we were asked to provide tastings of the cider that we sell there. Lovely weather and there appeared to be a good turnout. A lot easier than doing a show for us and I of course enjoy meeting new people. Three other producers were there and I thank them for allowing me to graze their produce for the entire day for sustinence!
Thanks also to my great buddies in Newport for entertaining me again for the friday night!
We are continuing with spring jobs including the lopping of overhanging tree branches around the fields. We are doing this for two reasons - overhanging branches damages the tractor with any field work we have to do and also to continue with the quest for collecting wood for next year. The small twigs and branches are the pain but our old silage grab helps to remove them. Essentially it is a mechanical grab with prongs on and and can be used as a large meachanical hand. The brash can be buldozed into a pile and then picked up and put onto a trailer to take away for burning. One field boundary has been completed and probaly we have managed to get a ton of decent size logs.
In the last cople of days I have managed to grab some spare time and go for a couple of walks around the Wildlife Site on the farm. An ideal time of the year as the vegetation is minimal. Managed to take some lovely photos, identify some more potential wood to harvest as well as considering a new potential project to do -more on this if anything happens.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First drop of rain this morning for quite a few days. More birdsong in the morning which helps to reinforce that spring is just around the corner. No yellow daffodils quite yet - still just the leaves poking up out of the ground. Fencing went quite well yesterday despite the Land Rover deciding that it had had enough at the end of the day and refused to start. I am hoping that this is because I did not use the tedious 'warming up' of the plugs for long enough AND I have started and stopped it about 8 times during the day and it never really had a good chance to charge. Apart from this I think the Land Rover is going to be quite a success as it enables me to get to the more remote parts of the farm to do jobs. Today I am loading up the van and heading off up to Telford for this evening. Stopping the night and cracking on with the farmers market at Telford for the weekend. Looking forward to a couple of nights out in Newport but not so much the early mornings.... Had an intense l...
Read more

Spring 2013

Ok I am certainly guilty of not staying on top of this Blogging BUT my little life has been ram packed with stuff going on since January... I am now a new dad to a lovely little boy born in March! Urgent plans had to happen to make more space in the house which involved building some sort of outside office for me to function. It has taked for ever to build and went fiercely over budget but not only do I have a boy but I am a proud owner of an official man cave in the garden. Wow! - its great and so much space to at least feel prepared to get sorted and to plan for the next few months. So apologies to everyone but I am slowly getting back to normality again! So we have had one of the most awful start to the year with the weather.. but finally we are starting to see some sun again albeit sporadically and the cider drinking season is now well under way. We have only been to a couple of shows but we were very lucky with the weather and there were good turnouts for both shows. No real ...
Read more

End of year post

Well at last we have finished making cider for another year. It has been an unusual and somewhat challenging cidermaking time for us for various reasons. The local apple crop did not do particularly well despite reports nationally that it was a bumper year for apples. Lack of rain throughout the year saw a marked decrease in size of fruit. One orchard owner which we have had apples off over several years let us down badly. Despite the communications we had concerning the time of when we were going to come and pick it them up, we phoned them up to inform them we going to come in the next few days and they said it was fine... THEN they rang back to say that someone had already picked them... astonishing behaviour. When I said that we had contacted them etc and their come back was 'well I can't change the past can I???' Errr no sir but you do remember the past. We move on... Anyway we are pleased with our slight tweak to the cider making process which has made it a lot easier ...
Read more