Ale Farm

Summer is well and truly here, hence the hiatus in blog updates!  We're sorry about that.  There's just so much to do outside at this time of year.   We've been surrounded by fields of rape seed and now they're full of wheat. The verges of the narrow roads here have had the pretty white flowers of cow parsely. Even the motorway central reservations have had red hot pokers, fennel and hollyhocks.            We're excited to have been given a swarm of bees.  So it's been a steep learning curve, even though I've been studying beekeeping for two years.  There's nothing like experience and good mentors.   A few weeks ago, at the end of May, we switched on the Merlin bird song recognition app.  We were astounded to find out there were 16 different kinds of birds singing away.   They were:  European Robin, Eurasian Blackbird, Common Wood-Pigeon, European Goldfinch, Great Tit, Barn Swallow, Common Chaffinch, Eurasia...

  We may not have had snow but we've had some frosty days recently.   The snow drops and primroses seem to have survived fortunately.        The orchard looks bare but there are buds on the trees and even four tiny Gala apples (see below).            The pathway out of the badger field is easily passible now and there don't seem to be so many rabbit holes being dug. Our lovely walnut tree is bare and so it lets the sun shine through its branches to the house.   I wonder whether we'll have snow before winter ends?

  This will be our first Christmas at Ale Farm! We've managed to get some lights up outside, even if they don't cover the whole house.   Inside we've decorated but we haven't bothered to put up our 40 year old plastic tree as we're still looking for the box of baubles!      We certainly have a lot of greenery on the farm that can be used for decorations.  We have a lot of wild rose hips too for that touch of red. This is one of our fields with our lovely big walnut tree overhanging in the foreground. We plan to turn this into a wildflower meadow.  As it's chalk downland it should eventually have some interesting plants. First we need to remove some of the grass.  We planted some yellow rattle to help with that. Here's our new orchard, planted in March this year.  So far all the trees have survived and we've even had some tiny, tiny apples on the gala and discovery trees. The orginal cooking apple tree is doing well and has supplied us wi...