It’s shaping up to have been a pretty good year at The Secret Acre, despite the very dry weather.
Where crops simply failed in last year’s unseasonable rain, at least the gardener has the chance to water things, especially, if like us, you live in a well-managed area like Severn Tent Water, which rarely needs a hosepipe ban.
So most things are back to growing reasonably well, even if the fruits are a bit undersized from the lack of rain.
Continue reading
As I write this, the UK is being battered by the second named storm this winter. Already ground sodden all last spring has returned almost instantaneously. It never really went away.
The year has basically been too cold and too wet. In record breaking amounts thanks to climate change, and the moving, possibly collapsing Gulf Stream.
England has suffered its second worst harvest on record because of the weather. If you think the damage from growing number of storms and floods in bad, just wait until we hit global food shortages.
Continue reading
It’s been a difficult year for plants and wildlife suffering the stuck weather systems of climate change. A worry for the extremes to come.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
While Extinction Rebellion are rightly taking to the streets, inside The Secret Acre kitchen this autumn, things haven’t been hotting up, so much as becoming constantly warm.
Our local climate change has been the result of the purchase of a dehydrator, as another bow to our harvest preservation options.
So far our initial tests have involved plums, pears, apples and beetroot. Continue reading
No sooner had we made our ‘Beauty Bath Spiced Apple Chutney’, than August’s harvest arrived en masse.
Suddenly every spare minute was taken up in the kitchen with the preserving pan. The Blaisdon Plums were our biggest crop, with Emma heroically creating over 100 jars of various plum based jams and chutneys for the storeroom. Continue reading
The Secret Acre 