First Grain Harvest

Very exciting day today as I've harvested, by hand, our first oats. The photo doesn't look very impressive but the wheelbarrow is full of organic oats on their stalks. The oat seed were from taken from the Rabbit feed and were then planted in an unused piece of rotovated land just to see what will happen. The biblical sowing technique worked but it made harvesting very hard as the random pattern combined with weeds meant that it was easier to uproot the whole crop then attempting to swing a scythe or sickle.

I'm not going to thresh the harvest but feed everything to the rabbits who will have a field day munching through this.  Overall, this has been a success and I will be dedicating more land to growing traditional farm food including alfalfa, sunflowers, oats to help lower our animal feeding costs. In order to realise this, I'm probably going to have to invest in a small seed drill to ensure straight lines of dense crops which will reduce weeds and hopefully improve yield.

Thinking about Defeat, death and new life

Following on from my tweet today about mediation (here), I been thinking about defeat and bouncing back from this post. I'm not sure how I am coping with failures, how I (if I) pick myself up after another problem, set back or defeat. Maybe I'm too much of a scientist and not enough farmer, too analytical and not enough "next season will be better".

Today as I was preparing to repair my internal fence for containing Goats. My friend pointed out that the potatoes which I thought I have killed in spectacular style, with lack of water would actually produce new potatoes. Armed with a garden fork and shovel, We dug up our first potato harvest which were 100% organic free-range spuds. They were really tasty boiled as part of our lunch. 

This was definitely a seizing a victory from the jaws of defeat

Wild oats

Whilst setting up the washing-up table for the end-of-term party at the farm, I noticed we have some wild oats growing  These must be seed from where we milked our goats which we borrowed for a month last year. The oats are actually ripe, taste similar to the rabbit food oats and are 100% organic, free-range and unintentional. I hope our planted oats grow similarly

The Wet April has paid divends to our Sunflowers, corn and fruit trees. Our roses old and new also love this weather