Yep, that is what this blog will be about, more pictures than chat, we seem to have got quite a lot done lately and I thought I would share some of it with you all. To start with I have started to use my Macro lens more in the garden to look at the things I get to see, in more detail, first picture is of Maria’s bees at their drinking hole and they do drink a lot of water for little creatures.
Then a very small hovering insect called a Bee Fly or Bombyliidae in Latin, they have an amazing proboscis for getting into flowers on the rockery.
Talking about which, the rockery has really taken off this year, it is now 4 years old and has gone from strength to strength, from this,
To this
The sheep are now much bigger and have a larger paddock area as we bought another electric fence, it means that we don’t have to move them so often, they are looking good.
The vegetable garden is getting well planted, we are not having any potatoes this season as we had quite bad blight last year, to compensate we have planted 180 garlic and so many onions I can’t remember but we do get through a lot in a year, Maria is trying out some more seeds on strips, carrots and leeks mainly, the top of the bed is full of beans, in more ways than one and lastly the poly tunnel is up and hopefully stays that way.
Now a couple of projects, for the past three years I have been making liquid fertilizer with Nettles and or Comfrey and the method I use came from a site in the USA and is really good, this is the way I do it. Find an old piece of waste pipe 100mm dia is good and about 2m long, fix some sort of metal mesh in one end and a way to hang it up at the other end, I use a piece of wire and hang it on a nail on the shed. Then go out and find some nettles, take rubber gloves to pick them unless you are impervious to pain or daft, stuff them into the top end of the pipe until it is full.
Then hang it up somewhere in the sun, away from people as it chucks up a bit (stinks) as it gets going, pour about half a litre of water in the top to start the rotting process, place a bucket underneath and I put a bag around the pipe and bucket to stop rain getting in to the finished product like so.
As it gets going you will have to top it up with Nettles or Comfrey but last season from this one pipe I got 15l of fertilizer which diluted at a rate of 1 : 10 with water I used on the lawn and around plants with great success, here it is thick and brown and smelly…………
Finally, I started to make homemade wine last year and hope to make more this year, to start me going I am making dandelion wine using a recipe from this site Allotment Heaven: Dandelion wine easy recipe and as you can see we do not have any shortage of these amazing plants due to the wild flower meadows in our area, more of which I will tell you in future blogs, at the moment they look like this
and soon they will be full of Orchids and amazing, also Maria has been picking St Georges mushrooms by the basket and here are some with the dandelion petals ready for the wine, till next time enjoy your days, we certainly will……….Oh and nearly forgot to say that the idiots below us with the ridiculous garage look like they may be moving eventually….Whoopeeeeee…..