Middlest is always saying she wants to be a baker. Well this weekend she got her first taste of it. She had a commission to make a birthday cake for a friend of hers.
they requested a chocolate cake with chocolate butter icing on top. Butter icing in the middle and homemade jam.
Fair play to her as she baked it after spending the day with me at the craft fair and decorated it that evening. She was super pleased to be asked to make it though and you could tell she was proud as she dropped it off on Sunday morning (where they were having a D&D party with a professional dungeon master!
She did had to listen to my sales patter all day though! I took two types of tomato seeds that I'd saved this year with me to give away, all my children helped me package them up on Friday night - over 120 packets in the end. Having something like seeds to give away is a great way of drawing people in, and starting a conversation with them. I also had a lot of my monthly newsletters printed out and I hope people will sign up to that as well as people seemed to be enjoying them.
I sold enough to make it worth while, my only problem with giving my time to go to these fairs is just how much I could make hourly as a carpenter on site or as a jointer in my workshop and just sell online. It certainly boosts sales for this month a little bit, but it was time away from the workshop not making things. That said I do enjoy going out and talking to people, and it's lovely to receive face to face feedback about the products I make.
I did love having my gooseberry scoops on display and had quite a lot of conversations about them, I think I sold three during the day. Something a bit different and a great present for a gardener that might be tricky to buy for.
I need to do one of these a year to remind myself that although they're fun they're probably not the best use of my time. My daughter had a great day though and it was lovely to share it with her.
We got put in contact with the lady that helped us with the rescue hedgehog from earlier in the summer. they had a cat that had come in with a broken leg, it was still quite young, but very calm and friendly. Apparently it had come from a house that had 30 cats, but they couldn't afford to put it's leg right. The Vets did the job for free but decided that maybe it needed to be rehomed.
So we visited this cat in the vets and all the children fell in love with it. He's very friendly, and the children enjoyed interacting with him. As his leg is pretty much better now we've got him back at home and he's settled in pretty much straight away. He won't be allowed outside for a good while yet and due to his leg we're trying to keep him in rooms he won't jump too high in.
Show's how not used to cats that I am because I just can't get over how lazy he is! He does very little, considering I'm in and out the house all day. He does play with the children, and has his mad moments, but most of the time he's happy to lie around.
I love how much the children love him already and they've split up the jobs associated with him, so far I've only picked up one poo out the litter box, they've done all the rest!And his name? Varjak Paw. After the book about the Kung Fu cat with the same name (a favourite in this house), I'm sure he'll have lots of adventures on the smallholding.
A couple of weeks ago we drove up to York to see some friends. With a long drive I do quite like something sweet to nibble on.
I keep thinking about my challenge of a years self-sufficiency and how I need to start growing more staples. I'll need carbs and dried goods to see me through lean times and to provide enough fuel for what I do day to day.
The main one is bread. I need lots of bread, and for that I'll need flour, and for that I need to grow wheat (and possibly rye, but I'm not there yet). A good wheat that will make a good loaf.
I am sometimes guilty of being an idiot, I may sometimes shout my opinion and this may have ripples that I don't foresee. I'm certainly guilty of that last week where I tweeted my life would have been easier if I had inherited a farm and just had to pay the inheritance tax. Understandably this upset some people in the agricultural industry, so looking more into the subject, and reforming my views, I have issued an apology.
I would like there to be more routes into farming, I don't think it should become a closed shop that you have to be born to, but I also think the new tax limits being set currently are too low and will affect too many small farms, and chances are they will be bought up by the really big farms or by corporations, so any change of landownership wouldn't be in the direction I had initially thought.
There does needs to be some change of law to make it less appealing to people buying it for tax avoidance purposes that keep the prices of land so high.
Anyway, off to hide for a bit!
A bit later than some years, but I've got my garlic in.
Last year I planted a huge selection of garlic cloves from a lot of varieties. this was partly for flavour and partly to see what did well here.
This year I've decided to just plant the best blubs that I got from this years harvest, I'm not worried what type they are, although I will try to plant a selection of different ones to make sure that when we have a very different year then others might thrive instead.
This I wanted for the chicken bedding and a few wet patches where I walk daily. I find that even though I produce loads of shavings they work best when I put down a bed of straw first, otherwise it'll just sink away.
A quick walk around the homestead, looking at what we've growing and harvesting. Also sneak peak at the area of the garden I'm giving over to growing wheat this year!
I also talk a bit about my business, and how things are going.
It will help to save a bit of money (only about £7 if I bought two packets! but every little helps) and will mean I can plant a decent patch next year.
This is the whole video in one big long upload - all five parts totalling over 1 hour and 15 minutes! My longest video to date and me trying something new by combining old ones to make a longer one.
It has the five parts - the base, the brood box, super and crown board, roof and hive stand! Plenty to go at and hopefully gives some quite clear instruction on how to do it.
For me it was fun to make and I just hope some people find it useful.
This year we tried a new (to us) variety of cucumber. I wanted a mini type that would be good for lunch boxes. This one was said to be great for small cucumbers, and would grow on a small plant.
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| Not them in their best light - this is the end of the season and these would have been for seed saving had I thought they were worth saving. |
They grew pretty well, making very compact plants. However the cucumbers didn't go down very well with the children, this was because they had bitter skins.
I know I could have isolated the male flowers, but the plants were such a short tight compact mess that it was impossible. The children did eat them when peeled, but that hardly made them good for lunch boxes.
Not one we'll be growing again.
I shoved these plants in late in the year really, and forgot about them. I honestly thought they were dead, shoved in behind the coriander, which somehow made finding them all the sweeter (if you'll excuse the pun).
I've saved the seeds from these and I'll be trying again next year. Our boy is trying to convince us that we should grow a whole greenhouse full of them!
Who else grows watermelons?
Only one more part to go - the hive stand! But I have also done a video where I talk about whether it's worth making your beehives from scratch or not.
I was lucky enough to get tickets to go to a day with Joseph Lofthouse, who has written the book Landrace Gardening - Food security through biodiversity and promiscuous pollination. Although he has since used the term "adaptive agriculture" as one that maybe better catches what he is trying to achieve with it.
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The second in my video series on making a National Beehive from scratch.
Making the brood box - this is where the queen lays her eggs and probably the most important part of the hive. It's essential to get it right!
The strengthening bars in this are what make it tricky to make from scratch, I know other hives lend themselves much more to being made at home. I needed a full workshop of tools to make these quickly.
It was still fun and rewarding though.
Give it a watch and let me know what you think.
Since I started my bee keeping journey I really wanted to make a beehive from scratch. I'd already made one a few years ago - A Warre hive - but I wanted to make a national hive as they're what the club use and what I've decided to start with.
Last week I managed to give myself the time to make a few hives up from scratch. It was good fun, but I have to admit that the National Hive is not an easy build. I learnt a bit through doing it though, and got to put my newly made router table through it's paces.
I've split the build into 5 videos (I think so far) with part one being the building of a standard open varroa mesh floor.
Part two will be out soon where I build a brood box, then super, then roof and crown board. I'll finish on building a folding hive stand for two hives.
Watch the video - I hope you enjoy!
Our job was to get stuff cleared before Dill the builder turned up. Wall down and gone!
I do love this gathering in of crops though. And I know the more energy I put in to it now, the more benefit we'll have for the rest of the year.
Carving letters like this is a nice way to personalise something, and this piece of oak had been in the shed for over 10 years I think, so about time it got used up.
I made a fun project on Friday for a future article - I carved a little bird box for a house sparrow.
It's nice as the woodworking project around it is really simple, and the relief carving is fairly simple as well.
I'm getting older (I'm in my 40s now) so bending down becomes more of an effort! Lol. So I decided it was time to make a bootjack for the house.
I wanted one that looked nice and had a bit of grip for the other boot. That made the production of it quite fun as a bit of something extra to work out.
As usual I filmed the production process, so you can watch the video below.
The week before last I had a semi panicked phone call on the Thursday, from my friend who was getting married on the Saturday.
The person making her cake stand had let her down all of a sudden and couldn't do it. Leave it with me, I said.
Luckily a month or so before I'd been given an old table. Well two old tables, but one had some very interestingly turned legs. I thought they'd do nicely.
It's fair to say I bake a lot of bread these days. We don't buy any. I do love baking though.
One I bake occasionally is rye sourdough, only me and my middle daughter eat it, but it's just so wholesome and filling, it's also dead easy to make.
I use 100g of active sourdough starter, mixed the night before. The next morning I add 200g rye flour (light or dark, I'm not fussy), a teaspoon of salt, 15g of black treacle, a tablespoon of caraway seeds (both my daughter and I love caraway seeds in our bread), plus 150g of water.
It's so simple, mix this together in a bowl, I use a silicone spatula as this is a very sticky dough. Then when well combined together put in a 1/2lb loaf tin, I normally line mine with greased baking parchment as it's not the best tin in the world. Dust the top with a little more rye flour, because as the loaf rises in the oven this cracks and makes it very photogenic!
Leave this on the side for 3 to 5 hours to prove. Fire up the oven to 200 degrees, then pop it in with steam (boiling water on a shallow tray in the oven). Cook for about 40 minutes, take it out and check the bottom is cooked, if not turn the loaf over and cook for another 10 minutes.
This bread is one of those rare exceptions where it's better eaten the next day, so try to leave it before you cut it. I tend to slice up the whole loaf and pop it in the freezer. My daughter will often come home from school and have this as a snack, she'll get two slices from the freezer, toast them and have it with a big lump of goats butter on top. Perfect.
Who else loves a rye loaf?
A part of beekeeping that really excites me is making a lot of the things I need from scratch. Last week I got my new router table organised and I thought I'd have a mess around with it.
Last Thursday I took mum for a morning out to see a local garden that houses the National Collection of Michaelmas Daises. I've always been meaning to have a look round so it was really love to take mum.
Now although I love flowers and plants there was a few things that I really loved in this garden, things that stuck out to me.
The first was this beautiful potting shed. The colour of it, the rusty tin roof, it just looks so "right" in the garden, I love it!
So last Thursday (the 5th) was the final beekeeping lesson for beginners at our club this year.
It's been a really fun year when it comes to learning about beekeeping and I feel like I've landed on my feet with this club, so I was a little sad to see the season finish.
This issue of woodcarving magazine I also write the opening letter for the issue (always a fun bit), I got to interview am amazing carver from America called Bob Yorburg, and I carved up some vegetable fridge magnets (more about them in another post).
This year I thought I'd have another go outside here, having failed in the past. I planted two types, one Primabella, is a late blight resistant tomato that I you can save the seed from. The other is Crimson Crush, also blight resistant but an F1 (so no seed saving) and also not the most tasty tomato you will ever eat, but still streets above the supermarket ones.
My plan with any fruits that I like and that grow easily here is to try and have the longest season possible of fresh fruit.
Now this can be done in a few ways. I can take advantage of any micro climates my plot offers, so taking advantage of suntraps like sunny walls or places under glass. The other is with variety.
It' really with variety that I've doubled down on. I've been slowly collecting and planting as many varieties as possible with apples, pears, plums and damsons. All grow really well here and all have so many interesting types.
What I really look out for when building my collection is the earliest to crop and the latest to crop. For me this is most important in the plum harvest. Plums just taste the best when fresh off the tree, and yes we preserve lots each year, but that fresh harvest really takes some beating.
The earliest I've put in is Herman, but that is yet to fruit here. Then I have quite a few more early plums, with opal being trained against my shipping container to try and ripen them even sooner (although again no fruit yet).
I'm looking froward to a year all my plum trees fruit and then I can really see how long a season I've managed to create for fresh plums. So far so good though. Looks like I have a few weeks left yet!
This little box of peaches!
They were incredible, grown in the polytunnel and hand pollinated with a brush by my Middlests and me. We were going on holiday in Wales for a week, so rather than miss them I harvested them to take with us.
Sweet, juicy and an amazing treat. My neighbour (now into his 80s) was telling me how the "big house" here used to grow them in the one glasshouse, and how 'd always be given some, and how he could never to give into temptation of just taking one.
Having a tree like this down one end of the polytunnel seems like a good use of space, a taller crop, with roots that must extend down below where I'm watering other crops.
Who else grows peaches?
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.
As I've mentioned before I really like having dedicated stations in my workshop for different operations. It means I don't have to spend time setting each machine.
A while ago I build a small router table that I use just for rounding over, this gets used multiple times a week and makes life that much easier.
One job I end up doing is trying to smooth over the tops of my scoop handles. I make a range of different scoops and making them all in batches when I do the ends of the handles it's hard on my hands to hold them while sanding them. I thought a jig on the router table might work well. Then I thought that another router table just for this job would be better.
Small routers aren't much money (about £100), so I got one, a No Volt Release Switch and a new plate to fit in the table. It didn't take too long to knock up a router table for it.
This one is mounted vertically to save on bench space, and I'm already loving it. In essence it's an electric pencil sharpener. You drop the dowel in, turn it around and the end gets rounded over evenly. Really simple but makes a boring task a little quicker and the end result even better.
I know some think it's dedicant to have multiples of the same tool, but with what I do time is money, so the more I save the more likely I am to make a living.
I made a full video on how I made it up above, so give it a watch and let me know what you think.
There is a phrase about how you should get your enemy's to thin your fruit.
But mine are busy, so I have to do my own.
It's been interesting this year seeing a new area become heavily fruitful for the first time. When I used to graft a few apple trees (something I need to get back into) I put some trees down in the coppice.
This year they've cropped really well. In fact they've cropped just too well. I waited for the June drop, but it just never happened, so last week I took to knocking some fruit off the trees. It always feels wrong, but I know it's for the greater good.
I love being able to have different areas for fruit growing, all with different microclimates and quirks. These seem to have faired much better this year with being a bit of open light and air, unlike the orchard which is tucked away a little bit.
Lovely to see these trees to start coming into their own. Hopefully this should help fill the pantry for winter if they get to ripen.
Who else as thinned fruit this year?
They take an age to dry though. Probably nearly two days in the dehydrator. The video above shows the process I went through. Cleaning them is often the hardest bit, but I discovered I could winnow them once dry, using an old bouncy castle fan I own. It worked well and blew out all the bits we didn't really want to store.
Do you dehydrate blackcurrants?
What's your favourite store cupboard ingredient you make yourself?
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So I had a think about how I could improve this process. I knew a bench mounted disc sander would be the right answer, as well as a bobbin sander for all the curves I cut on my work.
Last weekend we had a break in the weather and decided to quickly get outside and do an inspection on our two hives.
I was keen to make sure the bees had settled into each hive from the two swarms we caught last year.
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The girls were really keen to come and help (the boy not so much). So they donned their suits and came with me.
Have a watch of the video to see how they get on.
It was a really lovely thing to share with them. Both very enthusiastic and really keen to learn.
