Is it that time already?? May was rather soggy. The fourth wettest winter on record, I read somewhere. It certainly felt damp, and like it never stopped raining (although my photographs suggest otherwise - there was at least one flurry of snow at the start of the month). I spent much of May with my head down racing to meet a work deadline. I didn't emerge til about the third week, and everything else was ignored. Still, as usual, time marches on, and progress is made, sometimes despite my efforts. Let's see what happened. Making hay I didn't plan to make hay in May, but I never quite finished scything the meadow last summer, and the remaining grass had collapsed and become soggy, so I wanted to remove as much of it as possible. This was hard work, and I didn't finish the whole thing, but I'm pleased with what I did. Of course, the chickens 'helped'. The resulting 'hay' isn't dry enough to be stored, so it's being used as mulch round the apple trees and in the edible windbreak area. Cutting the grass While I was in scything mode, I cut some other grass too, in a bid to feel less like I was living in a jungle. Don't worry, we're in no danger of a scalped lawn round here, and there is still plenty of uncut grass. In the veg patch The veg patch was looking rather bare at the start of May, so I dug out the chicken run and used the rotted down woodchip and chicken droppings as a mulch. The chickens were very interested. We had a last flurry of snow in the first week of May, so the seedlings in the greenhouse were still being kept cosy at night. The weather did start to warm up after that though, and everything started growing properly. Nothing made it out of the greenhouse before the end of May though. DIY I attached a couple more panels to the kitchen ceiling, but otherwise May was lost to work and the first stirrings of gardening. Oh, and the start of a new project - an extension to the chicken run. We were planning some kind of extension last summer, and with one thing and another it didn't happen. We tried again when the bird flu restrictions were in order over the winter, but were thwarted by the snow. A couple of weeks ago we spotted a fox in one of our fields, in broad daylight, while the chickens were out, and it's spurred us on to make something bigger but also safe and luxurious. We've always just left them to roam free throughout the day, unless we were out all day and not back til after dark, but now we just don't feel safe doing that, so they're in the run unless we're here pottering about. Obviously we have elaborate plans, and will be trying to make something mostly using materials we already have, which probably means a lot of swearing. A couple of friends have been helping us, which is great - I'm not sure we even would have got started otherwise. So that was May on our little homestead here. Not much to report really - everything was feeling a little overwhelming and unfinished (or not even started), the weather wasn't great, and I was too busy to enjoy being outside anyway. Onwards to 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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