Five days Five Eggs!!!

At long last we are starting to see eggs at the Farm. We have had an egg a day for the last five days. Sadly the other 12 chickens have not started to lay yet!

The eggs are still small but over time they will get larger.

We enjoyed eggies in their baskets this week even if they where tiny baskets!

CSA 2010

With the season drawing to a close, and only two more weeks left for the Stirling Farmers Market we are already looking at 2010.

In the next week we will have 2010 CSA Brochures ready for you all. As ever there are a limited number of places. We are offering two different types of shares. A whole share weekly and a whole share bi-weekly. If you are interested in CSA Boxes for next year please do e-mail or call and make sure we have your contact details so we can get the applications to you.

We will be increasing our range of Heirloom Vegetables for next year and if I am left in charge of seed orders again you can trust to see some weird and wonderful Veggies in your boxes or at the farmers market.

Friends have already made suggestions of some additonal vegetables they would like to see, so if you have a favourite that we have not grown this year please do let us know and we will see what we can do.

Name our new arrivals!!

We are very excited to share pictures of our new arrivals, our two nameless Tamworth Piglets. Ham & Bacon have become foster parents and are doing a great job at looking after the piglets. The Tamworths have a much longer nose, and longer body than the Berkshires. They are also a little more vocal!

If you can think of any pork related names for our two Tamworths, then please e-mail your suggestions to us.

Fall Harvesting, Planting & a Frosty Weekend..

Fall is truly on its way when you see the pumpkin patch start to die back. With this comes the joy of finding out what delights have been growing through the summer in the patch. So far we have spotted some lovely Butternut and Acorn Squash the Cinderella Pumpkins are turning the most fantastic blood orange, and we have a few Howden's in the field. Sadly the stink bugs did kill several of the plants! We also have varieties of ornamental gourds that have grown well.

We have started to harvest the cabbage this week and these will be stored in the cellar of the house. Potatoes will be next!

If you ever need any of the staple vegetables during fall & winter it is always worth calling to see what we have in the cellar.

We have managed to find the most amazing Organic Music & Fish Lake Garlic. Planting will start towards the end of September, once we have decide where to plant the 500 cloves!

We did have a bit of a shock very early on Saturday morning as we left the house to pick veggies for Market. Small areas across the garden and been hit by a Frost! We lost several rows of tomatoes, Eggplant, Okra, sweet and hot peppers.

We where happy to see it did not hit all the plants, not sure if this is due to the garden running over a slight hill? We will take any break we can get!

Gurning....

We spent most of Sunday harvesting and processing , but did get slightly distracted when we found a few Zucchini that had got a little large in the garden. This of course led to Michael then partaking in his own Gurning competition.

Gurning contests are a rural English tradition. They are thought to have originated in 1297 at the Egremont Crab Fair, when King Henry III granted the fair a Royal Charter. Crab apples are bitter, and so in celebration of the event, people pulled faces. Gurning was born. The competitions are held regularly in some villages, with contestants traditionally framing their faces through a horse collar known as "gurnin' through a braffin'." The World Gurning Championship takes place annually at the same crab fair in Egremont, Cumbria. Those with the greatest gurn capabilities are often those with no teeth, as this provides greater room to move the jaw further up. In some cases, the elderly or otherwise toothless can be capable of spectacular gurns covering the entire nose. Peter Jackman became England's best-known gurner, winning the world championship four times, beginning in 1998 with a face called the "Bela Lugosi." He had his teeth removed in 2000 to make his features easier to manoeuvre. Three years later, he died playing golf in Spain when a cliff face collapsed underneath him.

Our little helpers..

These are two of many little helpers in pest control on the farm.

We have had our fare share of pests this year. From hornworms, stink bugs to aphids but we also have a great team that helps fight the battle. Michael and I have become quite the pro's at spotting Hornworms and the Chickens get rather excited at the extra protein they are about to receive.

We are very lucky at having lots of toads on the farm and I have several in my greenhouse who have got rather large over the summer and today we where delighted to find a Praying Mantis in the field.

Bee Mazes..

Today Michael placed the bee mazes on two of the hives. The mazes can only be left on for the next two days this gives the bees time to leave the honey super and doesn't give time for the wax moth to take residence.

We hope to start extracting on Friday, not sure how much honey we will have from the hives as we made the decision to leave a super on each hive to give the bees extra honey for their winter stores.

Sunrise at Strattons Farm

Thought we would share with you the sunrise we got to enjoy over the farm this morning as we did our morning chores.