Movies
I'm having trouble getting the videos to work please go to you tube to see our videos. http://www.youtube.com/my_videos?feature=mhee
Mother hen teaches her (2 days old) chicks to eat and drink
First boat trip in sepia
Late April in the Veggie Patch
Late April Brasica Patch
Planting onions
Transplant broad beans
Home Made Propagator
Making a Wildlife Pond
Making Compost
Russell adding a batch of vegetable peelings collected from the kitchens of The Creggans, Loch Fyne and The Bay Cottage, Strachur. We make a lot of compost so have straw for the dry component neccessary to make compost you can use scrunched up paper, egg boxes, toilet roll innards, junk mail, cardboard boxes try to leave lots of air pockets by scrumpling up stuff or leaving boxes uncrushed.
Feeding hens evening gets them back
Russell feeding the hens some wheat and oats in the early evening helps get them back into their electric fence enclosure from the field where they get to roam free while we're in all day. The wheat and oats in their crop overnight helps keep them warm.
mid feb view of field.....entrance area, drainage ditch, dry stone wall/dyke, wildlife pond, insect/hedgehog hotel, trees for bird and bat boxes, caravan - handyman needed to fix up, then to let or free for work in field, polytunnel, loch fyne, german mound
Drainage Ditch with the Hens
About to dig the Drainage Ditch with the Hens scratching around - it's lovely seeing the hens busy all over the field but I don't like them eating all the big juicy worms revealed as I dig the ditch, I want to try farming big earth worms. The stuff I dig out can go on the garden beds or on the German Mound experiment and perhaps into polystyrene boxes to make worm farms - it's worth a try - we have a New Zealand Flatworm problem so may need all the worms we can get cos once they're gone there's not much hope for the soil
The Pigs get moved (26 sep 11) their patch was pure mud so we moved them to veggie patch 2
Unfortunately the brassicas were too tiny and the slugs (who thrive in our newspaper/straw mulch) ate the lot - oh dear! We will persevere with this method as the books say eventually the weeds will go and the mulch will not be needed. In the meantime the lesson is to keep the seedlings somewhere safe like pots or a seedbed till they are big enough to withstand the slug attack.
I was making a bog garden box for watercress and cranberries in our stream when I met this frog I think it's a common frog. I love the fact that our field and garden are home to so much wildlife. Frogs and toads are excellent as they eat slugs, mine have a lot of work to do as I appear to be breeding slugs.
The Insect Hotel
The Insect Hotel is a layered pile of old wood with spaces filled with hollow canes, straw, squashed up chicken wire it offers a variety of potential homes for flying polinating insects to live in. I also left a space at the bottom where a hedgehog might live.
Watch the incredible adventures of Houdini Frog!
End of May 2011 tour round end of the field, the mounds failed - parsnips didn't germinate and the pumpkins all got eaten or died - hey ho - better luck next year.
It's mid august 2011 the pigs play with some twigs. In the wild pigs live in forrests and our pigs often take twigs into their house presumably some instinct to make a bed.
Here you see Making The German Mound and a bog garden.
This area is naturally boggy so we dug a hole, lined it with plastic put holes in it and planted out some cranberries and Lingonberries.
Mid April '11 Around the polytunnel and field before pigs.
Round the Field and Hens Early May 2011
Inside the Polytunnel at the end of May 2011 the lettuces look good. All those tomatoes were unhealthy and we got very little fruit - perhaps due to the poor weather we had. The pumpkin seeds were all eaten by mice so had to quickly buy a load more and sow them. All germinated but again due to the poor weather less than half succeeded in growing outside.
The German Mound nearly finished
