January round-up

Still busy in January

Unlike most of the rest of the continent, our mild winter has continued and Jim is still mowing the bottom paddock. When that's done, hopefully he'll get at least six weeks off mowing! Some days we've had 11C so signs of spring are appearing everywhere: rhubarb stalks, rocket leaves, daffodil coming up and even some leaves (elder, rosa rugosa) unfurling.

Celtuce

Because it's been so mild and relatively dry we've decided to forego the DIY projects on the inside and concentrate on the garden while the going is good. We've been moving roses and wildflowers into new locations - this sounds like a pleasant, easy job but involved a surprising amount of stone removal. All the raised beds have had fresh compost added and Jim's already dug over quite a lot of the veg garden. Soon it will be time to lift the first of the large black plastic covers off the three new growing areas for this year. Fingers crossed they won't be as stony as last year's!

Dredging the pond

The big outdoor job this month has been the dredging of the wildlife pond. This has to happen to some extent every year so that there is somewhere for the frogs and toads to deposit their spawn and provide us with lots of slug-chomping offspring. Otherwise the yellow iris and grasses would choke it completely. The more trees we plant the lower the water table in the paddock seems to go. We reckon it is a good six inches lower than when we started. This is good, as it was excessively wet in places.

Celeriacs: funny-looking and tasty

Another large outdoor job we've started is the clearance of the last remaining bramble thicket in the south-east corner of the garden, behind the pond. It's maybe only a third of the size of the bramble patch we cleared last year, but some of them are big, old and tough enough to break a garden fork! This is the corner from which we have occasional mooligan ingress so we want to plant a prickly rosa rugosa double hedge to keep those pesky cattle out. And then we'll have to think about what to do with the remaining space.

Winter veg selection

We've still got lots of winter veggies - oca, Jerusalem artichokes, celeriacs, leeks, swedes, cabbage, kale, Daubenton's kale, chard, perennial onions, rocket, celtuce. Only the parsnips have run out and the squashes are down to two. We have about 16 purple-sprouting broccolis sprouting away so hopefully from next month broccoli will be back on the menu. In fact, we have so many nice green broccoli leaves that we decided to kimchi them (along with Jerusalem artichokes and kale, the two other veg we have most of at the moment).

Preparing kimchi

The kimchi has been a great addition to our diet. We have some almost everyday - just like in Korea! It's very energising stuff and wonderful for the digestion. The other new addition to our diet is homemade ice cream. We acquired a Chilly ice cream maker (non-electrical, basically a double-skinned stainless steel pot with cooling element all around) and it makes wonderful ice cream and frozen yoghurt. We got it in preparation for our berry harvest and now it looks like we'll need to get an additional freezer, too!

Wood chopping under the rainbow

In between the additional garden jobs, work on processing the remainder of our 25-tonne log pile continues. It's going down, but looks like there will be ample for this winter and spring. Another goal for this year is to build a proper wood shed.