How DO they make up those scientific names? A small group of waxwings (sidensvans) in the garden with 4 hawfinches (kjernebiter) provided entertainment (distraction) this afternoon….waxwings are berry eaters (e.g. the flesh of rowans / rogn) and hawfinches eat hard tree and fruit seeds (also rowan, eating what the waxwings disgard!)
I try to “grow” as much food for birds as possible in my garden. This includes leaving some fruit, planting various species of rowan (Sorbus), not tidying the garden until late winter, so that, for example, seed of nettles and burdock is available for finches. I also don’t feed the birds with bought in sunflower seeds until it gets properly cold, until then there’s plenty of natural food available. There’s nowadays a large acreage put down to non-organic production of bird seed in other countries which is certainly detrimental to birdlife in those countries and there is evidence that providing bird seed during the breeding season can have a negative effect on some species! So, is feeding birds a good thing or just for our entertainment? A bit of both I think!
Hawfinch and waxwings towards the end…taken from the living room /office!
2. Waxwing on apple. It was a bad rowan berry year and there are unusually few waxwings around (perhaps good news for an invasion further south, e.g., in the UK?). This is one of the apples I left for the birds…the video was taken from the living room!
1. Blackbird (svarttrost) and great spotted woodpecker (flaggspett)
2. Bullfinches (male and female; dompap) on plum buds (not too happy with this), there were 8 birds altogether….hopefully they won’t do too much damage… :(
At the apple moon coring and cutting apples is a must..processed a couple of hundred apples today, now drying over the wood stove and in the oven. It’s a it more urgent than normal as -8C when I finally managed to harvest them was a bit too much and they won’t be able to be stored long this year (all have brownish blotches on the outside), a bit like the supermoon picture I just took, see below ;)
Good to meet Randy Gunnar Lange and Ingunn Bohmann of Eikeløkka in Hurdal on Sunday! Eikeløkka is a permaculture farm under development on the island group Hvaler in the far south east of Norway!
Randy and Ingunn are currently doing the PDC course in Malvik!
Astonishing how much an apple tree can produce here year after year after year with zero input! It looks like this year will be no exception. Perennials for ever <3
Late April 2017 and I finally got round to visit some folks in South Hampshire who I’d met at the Walled Kitchen Garden Forum weekend at Croome in 2015! I love enthusiastic people who are willing to take risks…Tim Phillips is one of these…in his own words “His once abandoned 19th century kitchen garden in Hampshire provides a fantastic environment for…Chardonnay, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc vines. The combination of gravel soils, Lymington’s maritime climate and the thermal properties of the walls offer a unique vine-growing opportunity from which both still and sparkling wines are crafted”.. (see http://www.charlieherring.com/)
On the day of my visit, Tim had been up all night keeping his vines from freezing by burning wood fires in the vineyard….this strategy seems to have saved the crop from a complete failure of the 2017 vintage :) This problem wasn’t restricted to England but also famous wine growing areas in France: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/29/in-pictures-french-farmers-use-fire-to-try-to-save-their-vineyards.html
I look forward to returning in a few years to view you sea kale production areas ;)
I first met Tim’s world at the Walled Kitchen Garden Forum weekend at Croome in 2015…here’s him adressing the enthusiastic crowd!
Tim produces Charlie Herring wines from the vineyard!
…and I was lucky enough to be given a couple of bottles of Hampshire wine, here shown atop my own walled garden (the world’s lowest) which used to serve as the base of my greenhouse…
Arriving at the vineyard..it is much higher on the outside than the inside! A couple of old bricklayers are working on restoring the walls, removing the invading ivy!
Tim had been up most of the previous night burning wood in various places in an attempt to drive the frost away…Tim told me after that about 80% of shoots had survived, so not as big a disaster as had been feared…
The beginnings of Tim’s Hampshire Tea enterprise!
A great old organic apple tree at one end of the walled garden!
Windows would have been used here to ripen fruit early..
Tim told me that this Swiss chard kept on coming back…perennial or seeding itself?
Another apple tree
This is where we’ve decided Tim will grow Sea Kale ;)
Cardoon and nettle infested compost heap :) I teached TIm how to eat raw nettle ;)
The raspberries had been frosted…
There’s a wonderful sunken greenhouse in the walled garden
The greenhouse…
…with a Robin nesting at one end!
Ongoing wall restoration…
Perennial vegetables fit well with the perennial vines, tea and apples!
Charlie Herring wines…
After lunch at a local pub, when we were joined by Susan Campbell, who I was visiting in the afternoon, Tim took us to his winery and adjacent land!
I loved the wallpaper, old maps reflecting Tim’s unexpected past of motorbike racer (Isle of Man) and mountain walking maps
…including a map showing my next stop at Susan Campbell’s wonderful house and garden (including sea kale yard) on the Solent!
Tim’s pond with Yellow flag, Bulrushes (supermarket of the swamps), water mint etc.
Susan found some St. George’s Mushrooms, although a bit old!
Tim wanted to show me this amazing hop that he’d used for making a wild hop beer!
….and edible hop shoots coming up all over the place!
Hop shoots
Hops climbing over the hedge
…and Hampshire’s Secret Garden…and, no, I didn’t get to see what was beyond…I can imagine though :)
My first (of many) loads of apples drying over the wood stove!
I’m 100% self-sufficient in fruit and never buy bananas, oranges etc. and don’t use a freezer. When the apples are properly dried, they can be stored for several years (so if there’s a bad apple year next year I also have fruit next year…it’s a good year this year so I dry as much as possible). When fresh fruit isn’t available (typically from February to June), I use only dried fruit. Dried apples are fantastic to eat as they are and are popular with guests as snacks and also a perfect present for family and friends. I eat a home made muesli for breakfast every morning – large organic oat flakes that I buy in large sacks and I mix with various nuts. I soak a mix of dried fruit (apple, cherry, bilberry, plums, saskatoons etc.) and use them on the muesli.
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
