April has passed in a flurry of daffodils. I love April. It's my birthday month, but it's not just that. April is when it warms up enough to spend time in the garden most days, to sit outside with a cup of tea with the chickens, and to start planting seeds. I've planted seeds that I already had, some out of date. Rainbow chard, curly kale, leeks, turnips and beetroot so far, and my sister bought me membership to the Heritage Seed Library for my birthday so I now have several others to plant too - carrots, swedes, peppers, celeriac, radish, and something else that I now can't recall. In other garden news, I've mowed the grass a couple of times - I'm trying to keep on top of it with the push mower this year, but it means getting out there a couple of times a week or it gets too long. And finally I finished the compost bin. While I had the wood preserver out, I re-coated the table and benches, and the most exposed parts of the chicken run. The plum blossom is out (and so far still on the trees), and the apple blossom has started to emerge too. Inside the house I've been cleaning. And yesterday we acquired a dehydrator, so we're looking forward to a summer of preparing and preserving more food. Of course, we lost Mildred chicken over the Easter weekend, and now it's looking like we'll lose her old pal Maud too, the last of our original chickens. We're devastated. Mostly though, April has been taken up with walling. This field wall fell down over a year ago, and I finally got round to stripping out the fallen stone early this year. In April I started rebuilding, and while it feels never-ending, I have made good progress. I'm planning to finish this short stretch before I go back to work on Monday, but there's still a gap of twice the size of this to do.
What's in store for May? I'm hoping this wall will be finished, and we should see the arrival of some new pregnant cows from the local dairy farm. I've bought a fence to keep the chickens out of the veg beds, so I need to put that up, and create the beds themselves. I hope there will be some plants ready to plant out in June.
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Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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