If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest… have a really dry year apparently… certainly some things on the smallholding have enjoyed it more than others… and not necessarily the things you might expect.
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Kitting out the new outdoor kitchen continued this summer with the arrival of a wood-fired outdoor cooking oven.
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While we were enjoying our spring equinox BBQ earlier in the year, we were also getting round to starting the final transformation of our rebuilt ‘lean to love shack’ into a new outdoor kitchen.
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Last week saw the arrival of the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The UK enjoyed an unseasonably warm day, including Wales’ warmest spring equinox on record, as the early impacts of the coming climate chaos continue to make themselves felt.
Naturally, here at The Secret Acre, we took the opportunity for a summer BBQ. Our earliest on record, after none at all in last year’s continuously unseasonable cold and wet.
We ended up enjoying three seasons in one day! A summer BBQ on the warmest spring equinox, having dug up the last of the winter leaks, to char on the BBQ coals, and eat with an excellent romesco sauce.
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And we hope you like jammin’ too… because another thing that seems to have enjoyed our unseasonably wet and cold spring/summer period is the soft fruit. Or at least some of it!
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January tends to get a bad rap as a month.
We blame Pilot for letting the rot set in when they sang in their 1975 No1 hit single “January, sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me”.
But as Josephine Nuese, author of The Country Garden pointed out, gardening really begins in January, with the dream. So come last year’s cold snap, or this year’s unseasonably mild weather, we kind of quite like January here at The Secret Acre.
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As the September harvest with its late summer sunshine gave away to increasingly damp and cool autumnal weather, we gathered in the last of the crops at The Secret Acre and started clearing down the veg beds.
Here are a few pictures from October and early November’s gradual decent into autumn.
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Here’s our quick pictorial look at some of September’s harvest season action at The Secret Acre.
As is so often the case now under climate change, awful August gave way to warmer days again in September, as soon as the school had gone back (September was second warmest on record for the UK), before autumn could return again properly in October.
In the garden, flowers, fruit and veg all continued in abundance as we moved into this harvest festival and apple pressing season.
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You might remember that last year, Emma tied on points with another competitor for first place overall as ‘Best in Show’ at our local Fruit and Veg Show.
We are nothing if not competitive here at The Secret Acre, so as the start of Village Produce Show season loomed again at the end of August, Emma was plotting to go one better this year.
And that she did, claiming the ‘Best in Show’ trophy as outright winner this year, picking up the section winner cups for Best Baker and Best Brewer en-route.
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Followers of our adventures at The Secret Acre will know that we go wild for Wild Garlic.
It’s usually one of our first big forages of spring, and one of the easiest for beginners, growing profusely in woodlands over a long period, and not easily misidentified, smelling and tasting of, well, garlic.
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The Secret Acre 