Blight...

Despite spraying with Bordeaux mixture in June, I noticed several stems wilting and turning black over the past week or two. The warm damp weather are perfect conditions for blight spores to increase and even on Sante, a foliage and tuber resistant potato, they found a good breeding ground. So I have pulled the tops of all our spuds, the second earlies that we'd just started digging, and the mains that I was hoping would see us through the winter. Probably not this year. I am dismayed at this turn of events, particularly as potatoes are my staple food, and I was just getting to the stage of being able to grow enough to last a year. So what to do when disaster strikes? Dig what we can and hope they survive.

The daggy end of the stick...

It was a glorious morning this Sunday, the motorway was full of people off to clog the highways and byeways of the Lake District, and arriving at the farm at 7.30 is lovely. Quiet apart from the song of birds, the occasional passing car, the bleat of sheep or goats. The sun shone and it was so pleasant to walk through the fields, marvelling at the wood anemones, pausing to pick some wild garlic / ramsom leaves. They made lovely soup the day after and are excellent mixed with mayonnaise and used as a dressing for potatoes.

I put the collected leaves in a bucket and was in a world of my own when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Fozzie charging down the field at me. Naturally, I shit a brick, as you would when a 100kg ram is making straight for you. Thankfully it wasn't me he was after, but to see if there was anything in the bucket. One sniff of the ramsoms and he was off again, uninterested. I was much more alert after that.

After milking we put the Dorpers through the foot bath, something that we now do every week (when they don't undo the gate and let themselves out as they did this week) and it seems to be keeping their feet nice and healthy. Then we rounded up some of the ewes running with the ram. They were due for fluke drenching and, while we had them in the shed, we crutched a couple of dirty ones.

Crutching, dagging, call it what you will, it is one of the dirtiest jobs I've done so far. Basically, dagging is removing the dangleberries from a sheep's rear end, the accumulated dung that, due to scour or illness, sticks, like the proverbial to a blanket, and has to be cut off. Now, I am all for learning new skills and techniques and if I want sheep I have to do this, so I didn't complain when I was given the dagging shears and told to get on with it. But what a job. Thick, black lumps of dried muck stuck to the fleece. Cutting it out was a slow process, but essential if the sheep isn't to be the target of flies which, attracted by the smell, lay eggs and then on hatching, the maggots burrow into the wool and skin of the animal.

So could it get worse? Hacking at dried cack? Well it got worse when the largest lump turned out to be warm and slimy on one side; it got worse when the ewe decided the shears were too close to her bum and started flicking her tail; and it got, finally, worse, when she decided that now would be a good time to add further dung to the stuff already there. Textbook.

Ten minutes of cutting and trimming, though, did the job and she must have been relieved to get rid of the extra weight. Too much information?   

 Later that afternoon we went to do my favourite job of the year: planting the potatoes. This year we have earlies Annabelle, and maincrop Sante. I think Sante are what we had last year, but a memory lapse and poor bag marking means I don't actually know what we've almost finished eating. I'll be better this year, I made a note in my book.

And over that potato-field, a lazy veil of woven sun...

The most important job of the growing year was tackled yesterday – the planting of the potatoes. This year we are trying a different tactic to try to avoid the poor cropping and heavy eelworm infestation of last year. I am trying a couple of new types and planting only earlies or second earlies to give us a chance of getting them out of the ground before the destructive insects get to them. Yesterday was the turn of Accent, three rows of first earlies, 53 tubers.
It was the perfect day for planting: sunny, warm-ish and bright. The robin was bobbing about in the hedge and a blackbird was singing from a tree. The only downside was the constant noise of a motorbike scrambling somewhere on the other side of the railway. When they stopped it was bliss, just the wind and the birdsong, the scent of woodsmoke and the knowledge that a job has been well done. We’ll see how well the spuds do this year.
From Spraying the potatoes:

He turned my way. 'God further the work'.
He echoed an ancient farming prayer.
I thanked him. He eyed the potato drills.
He said: 'You are bound to have good ones there'.

Weihnachtsmarkt mit wurstchen...

A combination of greed and high prices has scuppered a trip to Poland for Christmas. Flights that cost £100 in the second week of January suddenly rise to almost £1000 for the week around Christmas.

It’s depressing that we can’t please everyone and be with them for Christmas and I feel terrible Agnieszka can’t be with her family at this time as the Polish Wigilia is much more about a meal with family than the consumerist-obsessed Merrye Olde English feast.

So to get a bit of Christmas spirit we went to Germany for a weekend of Christmas markets. The markets themselves were lovely, with Trier in particular being very pretty.

It seems a nice town, on the banks of the Mosel, with a lovely pedestrianised centre; the markets plonked in the main square and in front of the squat, stone cathedral. On the way we went through a very snowy Ardennes but this disappeared by the time we reached Trier. The days were cold and crisp though, and perfect for wandering around clutching glühwein and eating either Bratwurst (Agnieszka and my dad) or Reibekuchen (me and my mum).
Köln was packed, as it was the last time I was there. How anyone can enjoy the constant shove and crush of people, making it almost impossible to see or do anything, is beyond me. It took a bit of time to get used to the direct (read ‘shoving’) way the Germans push through the crowds, and the way young mums thought nothing of pushing a pram through, jabbing at the heels of the people in front if they didn’t go fast enough.

To make the best use of the time we had, we took the U-Bahn from the cathedral down to Rudolfplatz and from there walked back, taking in three other markets. Unfortunately, we just weren’t given enough time there. Although the drink of ‘Kölsch’ we had wasn’t rushed, neither was it relaxing – or followed by a second.
One thing Trier has that impressed me immensely was a restaurant dedicated to the humble potato. For me it was a dream come true. Almost every dish was potato-based, except for the schnitzels and steaks but even they came with… potatoes. The food was fantastic and choice excellent and the service was good, although we had eight different people come to the table. I was able to practice, plenty of times, my crappy Deutsch but everyone was very patient and listened to me and in most cases I got what I asked for. There was only one wobbly moment, when the woman in the cake shop asked if one teapot was big enough for two people. I still don’t know what words she used but she lost me completely. The tea was so weak it didn’t matter anyway.

Left out in the cold (frame)...

The back yard in Farnworth is a wind-blown chiller for plants, even the white painted wall hasn’t made it much warmer and drier although I think it has helped in some small way. what has been useful is the option of planting things out on an allotment and it was there I took the ogorki last week to place in the cold frame. This is a bit of a rickety structure but solid and with a plastic roof should keep out the worst of the weather and let the heat build up to produce, we hope, a bumper crop of pickleable fruits.

We have two types of ogorek: gruntowy and zaprawowy. Both should yield plenty of small, knobbly cucumbers that are perfect for pickling. Fresh they are among the best things I’ve ever eaten and would be purchased almost daily in Poland. Usually bought with strawberries although, I must point out, not eaten simultaneously.

To finish off the day at the plot, we decided to try some early potatoes. Not many to a plant, so obviously not quite ready, but the ones we did get were very tasty and lasted as long as it took to get them home, wash, boil and eat them. As the seed potato was still solid, we put it back in the ground. It might not give us any more spuds, but you never know and part of the fun of gardening is doing things that seem right at the time.