Wonderful stuff.
There are three fields to make this year, and it's a lovely thick crop after the mild wet winter and hot summer. The sheep are a bit pinched for grazing in this heat, but I have to look ahead to the winter too.
This year, as last, Nick from Monmouth is making it for me. He did time at an agricultural college, worked on a farm for years, still misses it. Even so, I have to pay him! So half the crop of bales will be stacked in one of the fields, under a tarpaulin, until I can find buyers for it. I can advertise it as "lighter bales very suitable for ladies" - because that's how I need them to be.
After my "winter horribilis" I still haven't got round to buying in any pigs, and the veg garden is sparsely planted this summer, but I have had a brilliant idea - of moving most of the veg growing back down behind the house (the proper permaculture place for it) where it's more easily available for short spells of work or picking. The poplar windbreak has got so overgrown that the air behind the house there is often stagnant and laden with spores in a hot summer, which is bad for veg. One, I will have the poplars severely cut back (thereby providing myself with large quantities of firewood and wood chips for mulch), and two, I will just have to live with that! This means, too, that I can alternate veg and hens out there, utilizing the hens' fertility - a very good thing.
In this pic you can just about see the faces of two house martins peering out of the nest, awaiting the arrival of the parents with beakfuls of insects. They are nearly ready to fly. I am thrilled about this, because they're the first house martins to have fledged in all my 26 summers here. Twice, a pair has tried, and each time the magpies waited till the eggs hatched and then struck. This year it was the magpies who got struck; by the jackdaws. I cheered, I'm afraid (anthropomorphism at work. But if I provide a lovely soffit for house martins, I don't see why I shouldn't have the result . . . . . ).
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