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| slow food, artisan food, annette gibbons, lake district food |
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great food, great characters, stunning landscape! artisan, foodie, lake district, cumbria food, restaurant reviews, magazine, lucy, beatrix potter, yew tree, slow farm, Marmalade Festival, Cumbria on a plate
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The wrong type of rain......
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Location: Blogs On the farm at Howbarrow |
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| Posted by: Paul Hughes |
7/12/2006 |
The rain has freshened everything up, but to paraphrase the British Rail saying, "It's the wrong type of rain". The heavy downpours just run off the land very quickly and 1cm under, the soil remains hard and dry. (Cutting docks and thistles I was constantly hitting rock that has been exposed in ground that has shrunk from being dry). We need some good old fashioned Lakeland, raining for a week, type of rain! Actually that’s not what we want this week, as the bore-hole drillers are on their way as I write, and we need dry weather for them to do their job!
We discovered Newts in one of our polytunnels…… and now we often see hares in our hay meadow. Hares don’t live in burrows like rabbits but create a nest (we think its called a scrape?) in a field and since many fields are cut for silage several times in the season they never get a chance to establish themselves. At Howbarrow we have for many years only taken 1 cut in late summer which gives hares time to breed.
The big project
We have for the last 5 years purchased all our electricity from a ‘green energy producer’. The next step, which we have now decided to take, is to remove Howbarrow from the grid. Does anybody out there know anything about grant aid, or loans with preferential rates for home power generation? We are making real progress - planning application going in this week. The project includes a 6kw wind turbine, a 15m2 bank of photovoltaic cells and solar panels. However it seems that while the grant possibilities exist in theory, we can’t turn them into anything concrete! Help needed .
Composting update
The can-o-worms got a bit smelly, so we have added the recommended lime and worm treats and moved it more into the shade and it has now settled down again with lots of worm activity…….
If pesticides were purple
Continuing the theme, how about if all antibiotics used to maintain health in non organic chicken made them go bright green! Or hormones used as growth promoters in beef cattle turned them all bright yellow………….
Finally – what you’ve really all been waiting for
What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?
Pumpkin pi....!
Paul
enquiries@howbarroworganic.co.uk
www.howbarroworganic.co.uk
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