The Birds and the Bees

-

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, Eurasian Blackcap, Common Chiffchaff, Eurasian Blue Tit, Song Thrush, Eurasian Collared-Dove, Carrion Crow, Stock Dove, Greater Whitethroat and Dunnock.

We are so lucky. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We've moved in!

-
Image
  We moved in on 5th March but it's been so busy I've only just found time to update this blog.  We still have boxes to unpack, furniture to arrange and more things to take to charity shops.   Outside is still a bit of a building site.  However, we love it.   It's so quiet apart from noises from wildlife.  When there are no clouds at night we can see the stars clearly.  The photo below is the moon behind our walnut tree. The trees in our new orchard are coming into leaf and we've planted potatoes between the trees.  We hope to have a forest garden there eventually.  The greenhouse is being cleared, thanks to Rachel and Adam.  More on that in a future post. Our new second hand mower is wonderful.  A friend gave us a trailer and it's been so useful moving things around, especially up the hill.  There's so much to look forward to and now the weather is improving we can't wait to do more outside.
Read more

Winter on the Farm

-
Image
  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...
Read more

Walking around the neighbourhood

-
Image
Last Saturday was one of those beautiful, crisp, sunny autumnal days.  We decided to explore some of the footpaths around Ale Farm and head for one of our closest pubs, The Lantern.  We were spurred on by the prospect of enjoying their special brunches. You can just see our greenhouse in the trees of this photo.  The sunny white cliffs of Thanet (Ramsgate) are in the distance.  We could see the sea for a lot of our walk.     This is one of the farms we passsed through.  The pathway goes past the house on the right and up the hill.  In addition to goats they had horses, cattle and chickens.    After leaving the farm we got a little lost and ended up walking along a road.  The roads are narrow and very quiet. It's sometimes difficult to find the well trodden footpaths when the fields have been recently harvested.     Eventually we found our way to the village of Martin.  It's a quiet village with some attractive houses....
Read more