Wishing you a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year with love from The Secret Acre
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Author Archives: paulrainger
It’s beginning to look a lot like Winterval
Sadly it’s turning into a Christmas Horribilis for us. More about this at a future date when we feel we can write about it.
But before the proverbial hit the fan, we were busy preparing for a happier, socially distanced Yule.
The Christmas tree arrived on a tractor, delivered from the farm a few hundred yards down the road, where we had often walked the dog past the field where it was growing.
Just six inches needed trimming off the top to get it in. Continue reading
The Parsnip of Promise
Much excitement on The Secret Acre winter veg patch.
“Look at the size of this parsnip” Emma calls over pointing at the giant disc sitting surrounded by topsoil.
“That would be a great one to dig up for Christmas.”
So we did….. Continue reading
Winter Clearance in the Orchard
Regular readers will know that our usual approach, as slovenly smallholders, is to do everything about two to four weeks too late.
Hence writing about some of our winter clearance work in December, instead of in March, feels slightly wrong. We blame it on lockdown 2.0! Continue reading
Leaping into Leaves
Autumn, according to Winnie the Pooh, is “A time of hot chocolatey mornings, toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves.”
And who are we to argue with the great Tao of Pooh?
So all three have been enjoyed at The Secret Acre this autumn, while England endured its second Covid lockdown as you can see!
These autumn months always just seem to whiz by in a flash. Continue reading
Harvest 2020 – Part 4: Squeezing the final Pips
Last month saw some of our final summer harvest pickings as the decent into autumn gathered pace.
It’s been a long lockdown summer in the garden.
From the early broad beans, onions and garlic, through the traditional gluts, and welcome summer helpers.
Here’s another pictorial roundup of the final action. Continue reading
Fun Guy?
It hasn’t just been biodynamic tear peas that we experimented with this year, our plans for a mushroom bed progressed too.
The idea germinated some years earlier when we visited GroCycle in Devon to see their project growing mushrooms on recycled coffee grounds, as a possible business idea for The Secret Acre. Continue reading
Cash Crop?
Like most smallholders we still work part-time, the holy grail of living off the land proving elusive in the current unsustainable era of cheap industrial food which hides the true costs of production. Continue reading
Best in Show
Regular readers will know that autumn’s harvest season also brings forth the village show.
We have form, stating with some urban practise, and then some baby steps, before gaining experience for a successful all-out assault on a whole section last year.
To be frank, I didn’t think it could get any better, and along with the uncertainty around the virus this year, I doubted we would enter. Continue reading
Harvest 2020 – Part 3: Summer Holiday Helpers
August is always a manic month of harvesting and preserving, and our ongoing Harvest 2020 was no exception.
If anything things have been even busier this year with the unseasonal climate change affected weather meaning everything has been ready at least two weeks early, and some crops badly hit.
Continue reading
