It’s been lovely to have a few sunny dry days – especially when one of them landed on the weekend. It gave us a chance to finish pruning the trees in the orchard – opening up the centre of the trees more and removing some of the canker-infected branches. You’re only supposed to prune 10-20% of a tree at one time to avoid the roots dying back and the tree focusing on leafy growth instead of flowers and fruit – but as we missed last year’s pruning we had so many diseased branches or branches crossing others (both within the tree and across neighbouring trees) that we couldn’t really limit what we were removing. Our bramley apple tree in particular has taken a bit of a beating this year sadly so we hope it survives. Some of the trees have also grown so tall we can’t reach the top even with our extendable fruit picker, which means unpicked fruit stays on the tree and can retain disease spores over the winter. So we made an effort to cut back some of those branches too, to better manage the tree. We’ve now amassed quite the pile of wood to incinerate when the weather gets dry – it’s engulfed our poor cobnut tree.
Our aim is to restore the orchard to its former glory and maximise our fruit crop so we can make more jam for our guests and to sell at our local milk vending machine, Daisy’s Dairy. We try to keep a little stock of jars ready so made another batch of damson jam this weekend – it’s by far our bestselling flavour, we’ve sold 119 jars so far.
We put up our decoy wasp nests this weekend too. Last year was the first year we missed this job and we had big problems with wasps eating our gooseberries, pears and plums. The decoy nests are supposed to dissuade wasps from nesting nearby so we’re keeping our fingers tightly crossed that they work!
And John spent more time clearing the Farmhouse flower beds – this week mostly removing the clumps of grass that had taken over the beds. It looks much less like a wild patch of ground and more like a flower bed now – even if the rain has squashed the crocuses somewhat.
This week John started using our newly-donated ironing machine. It’s made such a difference – there’s a bit of a knack to it but it’s so much quicker than ironing by hand. Plus it means all the ironing is done in the laundry room so our house isn’t full of ironing for half the week now! We’re so grateful to my aunt for donating it to us – what a game changer :)
We managed to get a little bit of time in the Cow Shed to continue priming, although it seems to be taking forever. I’ve been round the beams to tidy up the gaps between the plaster and the beams – one thing we learnt after finishing our own end of the building that it looks tidier without gaps. It has added another job though as we’ll need to re-sand the beams back and clean the edges.
There’s so much to juggle at present with running and maintaining the Farmhouse, working on the Cow Shed, and getting through the highest priority items on our normal to-do list that it’s quite frustrating we’re not making more progress. We still have plenty to finish in our own garden – maybe later in the summer…
Ley Farm Cottages 