Ale Farm

  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...

This year we joined the Deal Hop Farm.  Deal is one of our nearest local towns.  In more than 300 sites in and around Deal, people grow hops in their gardens, balconies, allotments, etc.  We got two hop rhizomes and twine from the friendly, helpful people who organise the hop farm. At home on the edge of our new orchard Greg put in some poles and over several months the hops grew up the twine.  As it's our first year we didn't expect a lot of growth, however we were pleasantly surprised - and that was after the initial shoots were chewed off in the spring.  These first two photos are from August.   In September we harvested our hops, along with everyone else involved in the Deal Hop Farm.  We all brought our hops to the Captain's Garden (Deal's community garden) where they were weighed, put into big sacks and sent off to local breweries. We were proud of our little bag of hops, even if some people had massive sacks of hops. 😊 It was great working with...