Well its been a while since I lasted posted an update but today is Easter Bank Holiday Monday and its pouring with rain and blowing a hooley so time to look back over the past few weeks.
This Winter has been a season of contrast; cold with more snow and ice during March, the local weather buff reports that it has been the snowiest winter since 1997. Despite the cold it hasn't been too wet and we have had some lovely sunny days. Wearing tee shirts in early March was great with temperatures on the patio reaching 23.7 degrees centigrade - not bad for Cornwall!
We have lost another chicken to a dog, this time our next door neighbour's dog who spotted one of the hens in our woodland and managed to get through the fence and killed it instantly, it still had food in its beak! Our lovely neighbours were very upset and have replaced the hen, however it was not welcomed by the others and we had to take drastic action to stop them killing it. All three hens were aggressive towards it, one jumped on its back and tried to peck it's eyes out! two had to be isolated as they were such bullies, one was liberated back into the hen house after a few days but the other one took nearly four weeks to accept it. It is no longer attacked now but is obviously way down the pecking order.
Following last years disasters in the garden where we fed the wildlife rather than ourselves we have been busy preparing the various vegetable and fruit growing areas by erecting rabbit and deer proof fencing - just the pigeons to deal with now! It was a big decision to make to do this as it was expensive to buy everything - the cost of fence posts and wire is high and drastically increases our production costs but hopefully will last a long time especially after all Steve's hard work.
These plots have also needed digging over and as they are so large Steve hired a rotavator which reduced the workload but was still back breaking, since then we have bought a tiller to break down the soil even more and speed up the process. He has also added four tons of compost bought from a local recycling farm; the delivery of this was like a comedy show itself. It was dropped literally, with one dumpy bag landing up-sided down, at the gate and then had to be wheel-barrowed to the plots.
The poly-tunnel has had to be recovered as the polythene had gone very cloudy and very little light got through to the plants. This was another job that was more difficult than we first thought; rectangular sheeting and curved frames are not compatible when trying to get it all taut and it took us all day to get it as-good-as we could, many thanks to Rodger for his help, he thought he was just coming for some supper - he earned it! Steve has also dug out all the old soil and replaced it with a good layer of compost.
The greenhouses survived the winter storms but took me ages to clean all the grot off the glass. They are new slowly filling up with all the seeds that I have planted and potted on and we are hopeful that we will have a good variety of crops this year.
I have planted strawberries, pruned fruit bushes, potted up bare rooted fruit trees of oranges, lemons, peaches and apricots. I am planning on replacing some huge dogwoods with dwarf fruit trees. I have started by digging out a couple of the dogwoods that have spread many feet from the original plant with numerous rooted layers and planted a Victoria plum and a Sunset apple tree on dwarf root-stock.
Gradually all the seeds and plants ordered have arrived and I am now just waiting for the asparagus plants that I ordered in February to arrive, the bed is ready and waiting! So fingers crossed for a warm sunny spring and summer.
