Last week the weather turned nice so I thought I'd get out and do a tour of the smallholding.
As per usual the garden isn't looking great, but the fruit and everything else is. I filmed me walking round and during the whole thing I'm finding things to eat!
I just love this time of year! Such abundance everywhere.
What's your best crop at the moment?
With the seed swap I help at each year in Hereford, my talks, where I give packets of seeds rather than a business card and the items I sell, that each have a free packet of seeds with them, I end up giving away a few thousand packets of seeds each year.
This is such a big thing for me that I have to plan the garden accordingly. I want plenty of seeds and of things people want. for me the ones that seem most popular are the packets of tomato seeds. You only need a few in each packet so it works out really well for me, and I love growing new varieties each year to give away.
Okay, to conclude my series on my business "waste" is the last bit - the bits that are truly unusable. This can be for many reasons, split, knots (dead knots fall out), too small to work safely. the list goes on. I try to keep it to a minimum, and being a one man band I know the amount of wood that gets to this point is really small.
But I've loaded us up with enough kindling to last a year (and I tell everyone here to burn a lot of it when starting a fire) and our elderly neighbours have politely asked me to stop bringing it to them.
Instead, I'll see if I can sell it in bags locally.
As a carpenter of 20 plus years I can assure you I never aspired to make bird feeders. Nor did I ever think I could compete with cheaply made ones made in the third world.
But the same with the scoops, when making things, this time with reclaimed pine, I end up with lots of small bits. The tree put some sort of effort into growing that, so I think it's only fair I try to use it all.
That's where these bird feeders come in. Not only do they use the small bits of pine, they also use up the small strips of mesh I end up with when making my baskets.
There is something incredibly satisfying, even after 20 plus years of being a carpenter, of taking a pile of wood and turning it into something.
Of course when you make things every day you end up with a lot of offcuts. I don't like waste, it hurts my pocket and it hurts the environment. There's a lot of energy gone into making all these materials that I make my income from.
So I have a habit of saving up all the regular sized offcuts and putting them to one side. This works well with my potting trays that produce a strip of ply waste and sometimes the 9x1 redwood boards are split and unusable for them.
My girls are keen to expand our bee keeping operation, they have their sites set on using it to help make their pocket money rather than a Saturday job (although people are already asking them about baby sitting and cooking).
So my plan with the bees is to make sure theyre trained up as much as i am. If we can do inspections quickly, with the three of us looking we could have more hives and more possibilities for them.
This week was a fairly simple inspection but it's great to look through both hives and get a feel for what the bees are doing.
I'm really pleased with how they're taking to it, it really reminds me of how I was with sheep growing up. And their young eyes really help when having a look for different problems.
The video is more for my own record as I record this journey, but hopefully makes for interesting watching.
A few Sundays ago I suggested we should have a camp out in the field. Unplanned, it made it quite fun for the children.
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| The kids set up both tents and the fire, I topped a small patch first. |
The only tent we own is one from before we had children (maybe before we got married to be honest. I didn't fancy buying some just to use a couple of nights a year, so instead we borrowed the ones from scouts.
