I have been (and am continuing) working like a complete madwoman. So this is just a quickie.Beavering away, chained to a laptop is not so bad when it’s a bit dull and dreary as it has been over the past week or so. But when it’s a glorious day like today - not too hot, fresh breeze, scattered clouds in an otherwise brilliantly blue sky - it’s really rotten. I could sit in my conservatory and work, but it gets really hot and I can’t see the screen properly. Believe me, I try and after a while have to give up and retreat into the darker depths of the house.

So to cheer myself up in a brief interlude after my lunch (hastily gobbled cheese baguette), I’ve decided to do a little list. I love lists.

5 Things I Love About Summer

1. Flowers. This is glaringly obvious, but when you think to some of the dreariness of winter (if, like me you’re yet to grapple with the skill of seasonal planting for colour), the riot of colour bursting forth everywhere is a joy. I think it really does make you feel more cheerful.

2. Bees, Moths and Butterflies. OK, glaring obvious again and linked to flowers, but these guys are not only beautiful and fun to watch, they’re also vital to THE SURVIVAL OF ALL MANKIND. Not completely vital, but they do play a heck of an important role in pollinating many of the foods that we rely on. As do other pollinators, but butterflies, moths and bees are pretty too. So pay homage to these wee beasties and plant lots of pollen and nectar-rich flowers and shrubs: buddleia, echinachea, foxgloves, verbena bonariensis, cosmos, sedum, lavender, borage - in fact, any flowering herb - and achillea are just the tip of the iceberg.

3. Eating my Own Veg. If you read this blog regularly (and if you do, thank you SO much) you may know that when it comes to seasonal veg growing, I’m rubbish. I just don’t pull my thumb out. I make charts and diagrams and all sorts, and then don’t take action. So most of my veg is produced during the late spring, summer and into the late autumn. Around this time of year in summer I am enjoying the fruits of my (limited) labour. There’s just no comparison to food that’s done food metres and not food miles. And yes, you do feel a bit smug when you tell everyone about how you made the most delicious meal with your own home-grown veggies and fruit.

4. Lots of Sunlight. Well yes - we get more sunlight in summer, everybody knows that. But although I’m not adverse to winter evening tucked in front of the fire with a blanket and flanked by a few cats, I do enjoy the extra energy and vitality that the extra hours of sunshine bring. I feel better, and I think I look better. I have quite pale skin, and in winter sometimes I can look a bit like the walking dead. Summer brings a glow to my skin, and I’m pretty sure I can feel the extra benefits of increased Vit D production. Also, having the extra time to work later into the evenings is a blessing.

5. Being Able to Visit Lots of Places. In the summer, if you want to visit somewhere or just go out, you don’t have to contend with wrapping yourself in sixteen layers to make sure you don’t feel uncomfortably cold (unless of course you live in London, where my friend Ben assures me you can walk around in a t-shirt all year round). I, probably like most females, feel the cold very easily and I become a grumpy, whinging lump if I’m forced to be outside when I’m feeling cold. So trips out can be a trial for Rich if I’m not happy about being there. In summer though, it’s more of a delight. Visiting parks, gardens, the beach, your local cafe - it all seems so much more carefree and easy doesn’t it?

I’m all about balance, so here’s another list:

5 Things I Don’t Like About Summer

1. Flies. I won’t use the word hate, but I intensely dislike flies. In summer, they’re everywhere - hovering around chicken poo pretty much as soon as they plop it out, scavenging around any microbe of cat food that’s left in the food bowl seconds after the cats have moved away, buzzing around my bin (especially since ruddy Council has switched to bi-monthly bin collections) and laying mangy maggots in it. YUCK! They’re just the most irritating thing about summer. And the worst part is that they can cause real damage in the form of flystrike. Pattie has been unwell lately, and her botty gets a bit messy. No sooner do we give her rear end a wash and blow dry, she squits another one out and messes the area up again. The other night we’d checked her bum whilst she was dozing in the nestbox. By mid morning the next day I was horrified to find she had flystrike and the maggots had hatched and were causing blood and general havoc. Pleased to say we got it cleared up, but it can really happen that fast - they only need around 12 hours to hatch and start feeding, so check your animals at least twice a day - particularly rabbits and chickens. Hedgehogs often fall foul of flystrike too. If you see one with fly eggs or a wound get it to a wildlife hospital or to your local vet quick sharp.

2. Heat Waves. I’m probably even more rubbish on intensely hot days than I am in the deep depths of winter. When I get too hot I get a massive throbbing headache, and everything seems to take thrice the amount of effort. So on really hot days where the temperature approaches or breaks the 30 degrees celcius mark, I simply lock myself away in our cool house and wait for it to be over. Of course, I have to tend to the animals as well and make sure they’re comfortable. The chooks hate hot weather and retreat to the back and side of the shed, were it’s perpetually shaded and cool. The rabbit house and most of the run is always in the shade as they’re not sun worshippers at all. They also have milk bottles filled with water that have been frozen in the fridge. They like to lie next to or on top of them until it’s cool enough to start hopping about again.

3. Ice Cream Van Jingles. I think our ice cream van men are in the midst of a turf war. From about Feb To Oct each year we are subjected to the incessant jingle jangle of ice cream van Muzak. I wouldn’t complain if it was once every now and then, but wherever they go, it seems to resonate around the whole town. So you end up with ‘Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside/Camptown Races/English Country Garden’ etc. going round and round in your head for days afterwards.

4. Dawn Choruses. Well, I don’t dislike them entirely. They are spectacular. But when you’ve been working late and you’re awoken by an overzealous blackbird, sparrows that must have little megaphones and booming woodpigeons, sometimes it can grow a little thin. And why is it that just as you’re dropping off…they start all over again!

5. Early mornings. Sort of in line with dawn choruses. If I wasn’t magnificently tired in the mornings, I would love them. In principle, I do. Dewy grass, blue skies, the quiet and calm (apart from dawn chorus). But in reality, in the throes of summer I have to drag myself out of bed between 5:00 - 5:45am to let chookies out. If we leave them too long, they start making alarm calls and shouting from inside the henhouse. Bunbuns come out then too. Cats are usually climbing over me to wake me up for breakfast. Rich and I take turns to get up, but sometimes you can’t help but long for the relatively later mornings in winter when you can have a lie in until gone 7.

How about you?

NB: Was supposed to be a quick blog entry. Somehow it’s turned into a mammoth post. Best get back to work now…

I try not to kill anything. I don’t swot flies, I try to not provide ants with ideal nesting sites, and with 4 cats on site, mice don’t tend to make themselves known. I am with Chris Packham on this one - live and let live. Which means that things like aphids can become a real problem. I don’t like to use the word pest, because I suppose in some cases, one person’s pest is another beast’s fodder. Or something.

I suppose the answer to successfully growing vegetables and wildlife planting without using standard pest control is to implement and encourage natural predators. Ok, so this is me passing the buck and getting other wildlife to do my dirty work, but I think it’s the lesser of two evils. It also means that I can put more time into productive vegetable growing and gardening!

I’m a release site for Bedfordshire Wildlife Rescue’s rehabilitated hedgehogs, so naturally the Smallest Smallholding is a hedgehog friendly environment. And guess what - I don’t have a problem with slugs or snails. However, the aphids came out in earnest earlier this month, sucking away on the ivy and Paul’s Himalayan Musk rose, steadily making their way to the greenhouse. Well, in fact, they were in the (unheated) greenhouse until the hard frosts and snow came back. They’d sucked the life out of my chives. So this year I have to really look at ways to discourage them and the other munchy munchers both here at the Smallest Smallholding and down on the allotment.

A solution is to undertake some companion planting to deter unwanted beasties - things like marigolds and basil next to the tomatoes, planting onions and carrots together, bay leaves next to the beans (get away Mr Weevil!) and any alliums near the fruit trees. We also have dill growing here and there, a favourite for the aphid-eating machines that are hoverflies.

Another solution is to wildlife garden to enourage the natural predators such as hedgehogs, hoverflies, ladybirds and lacewings. Supplying them with shelter spots and habitats, as well as food is vital. At the moment we have buddleia coming through - the equivalent of an open bar to a butterfly - lavender and rosemary, cosmos to be planted (flowered through to Novemeber last year), and I imagine a lot of the attractive annuals such the borage, cornflowers and verbena bonariensis will have reseeded themselves this year. But I definitely need to do more.

The birds help - sparrows in particular love to pick the aphids off the orange blossom. And of course the hens are also a great help in this respect too. They go fly catching on warm afternoons, cluck and shriek with delight when they unearth grubs, and love to pick at the really small slugs. Last year I let them have the run of the veg plots, and apart from decimating my lettuces (my mistake for uncovering them) and the odd nip at a carrot top, everything was left in place.

The only solution I haven’t managed to find yet, is how to deter Mr Moth from my damson and plum trees. Not sure if alliums deter moths, and I certainly don’t want to put up any of those indiscriminate sticky traps either.

I love snow, but it makes me feel guilty.

I love the peace and tranquility that follows a whiteout, where everything looks clean and bright, and sounds are muffled and cushioned. But I find myself worrying about how the wildlife copes. How the birds can feed and drink, how other animals can graze or scavenge. So when I let the hens out this morning (and they took an age to emerge from the relative warmth and comfort of their henhouse), I busied myself clearing patches of ground amongst the fallen snow and scattered down bird food for the ground feeders and topped up the hanging bird table for the others. I scattered out some cheese for the starlings and blackbirds too.

Ground feeding birds that visit the Smallest Smallholding include:

• Robins (although they’ll go to hanging bird tables and standing bird tables too)
• Woodpigeons
• Stock Doves, Collared Doves, Rock Doves
• Starlings
• Blackbirds and other thrushes such as Mistle Thushes, Redwings (who overwinter)
• Carrion Crows and Jackdaws
• Sparrows

Because we keep hens, we have to be careful about hygiene between wild birds and our hens. Using ground feeder trays can help to keep mess to a minimum. Sunflower hearts are also great because they’re not only one of the richest sources of energy for birds (around 600 calories per 100g), but the whole heart is eaten and you’re not left with mounds of discarded husks that can go mouldy. They are quite expensive, but there is next to no wastage and they’re enjoyed by such a wide variety of birds.

Here at the Smallest Smallholding we have the following sunflower heart-earting wild birds - some like to ground feed, some prefer the hanging tables, whilst others frequent the hanging seed feeders:

• Goldfinches, Greenfinches, Chaffinches and Bramblings
• Great Tits, Blue Tits and Coal Tits
• Robins
• Blackbirds, Mistle Thrushes and Redwings
• Wrens
• House Sparrows
• Goldcrests (rare)
• Doves and Woodpigeons
• Carrion crows and Jackdaws (rare)
• Pied Wagtails
• Starlings

If you’re just starting out feeding birds (and I thoroughly recommend it), try sunflower hearts first, making sure that a clean source of water is available nearby. Obviously it’s best to have a variety of foodstuffs on offer - suet, niger (also spelt nyger) seed, peanuts (only in feeders or crushed during breeding system as chicks and young birds can choke on whole peanuts), or special mixes that include insects.

But it may take a while for any regular avian visitors to appear, so it’s not worth spending a fortune if there’s no one around to eat it. As long as you’re frequent enough with topping up your feeders, you should be dually rewarded. It’s really important to keep feeding the birds not just in winter, but throughout spring when they’re busy with their young, and in summer, especially during droughts. Fresh water and good hygiene practises are also essential to minimise disease.

Here at the Smallest Smallholding we also have a special V.I.B. (very important bird) at the moment - a racing or homing pigeon has stopped over and has been hanging around for a few days. I have yet to get close enough (but not too close, don’t want to encourage it to stay!) to see the number on its tag. I hope it’s just resting. Mind you, I wouldn’t be heartbroken if it decided to stay…but there’s no way of knowing whether the owner would just wring it’s neck or give it a cuddle if/when it returns.

Here’s a little quickie for you from RD.com

“12 ways to become an environmentalist and increase home energy savings without changing your lazy lifestyle”

 1. Skip A Trip

2. Hire Someone To Seal Up Your House

3. Work from Home (check!)

4. Drive a Fuel-Efficient Car

5. Use Cruise Control

6. Cool Your Water Heating Bills

7. Don’t Wash the Dishes- use a dishwasher (check!)

8. Use a Laptop, Let it Nap (check!)

9. Drink Tap Water (check!)

10. Stay Married - live together (check! sort of!)

11. Consider Carbon Offsets, but Be Careful

12. Support Carbon Taxes

I’ve been running a chat forum for a few months now. It’s basically a place where like-minded souls can chat about many subjects including green living, foodie subjects and recipes, rural issues and politics, smallholding, sustainable living and allotmenteering, arts, crafts and traditional trade skills, health & wellbeing, or just partake in a bit of random general chat! We currently have members from around the globe, as far reaching as Germany, South Africa and Australia, as well as a core of English folk.

The hope is that I’ll be able to expand the website to include a proper online magazine in addition to the forum. There will be articles covering subjects such as rural crafts, ethical shopping, seasonal produce, recipes, wildlife, hen and bee keeping as well as gardening tips and ways and means to live the good life. Some members have already volunteered their services to write articles on their specialisms, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting contributions. I’m also currently compiling a (free) business listing for anyone that has a service to offer or products to sell, and is a member of the website, or related to a member of the forum. The hope is that this will grow in time to provide a really comprehensive list that will prove useful for both country and town dweller.

The forum is called Rural Muse and can be found at www.ruralmuse.co.uk

For those of you that view my blog using Internet Explorer - well good grief, only tonight have I realised what a garbled jumbled mess you’ve been seeing. Got Mr Programming Guru (Rich) on the case! Really, my advice is that this blog is best viewed in Firefox, where it looks decidedly more ordered and a hell of a lot prettier.

Whoops.

As far as I know, part of the Smallest Smallholding is sited on the remains of an old orchard, most of which has vanished in the intervening years. We have a very old, knarly Victoria plum tree, two damsons and crab apple. The crab apple, when uncovered after years of struggling to grow under 6ft brambles and bindweed, flourished and every year has provided us with a pretty impressive crop of apples.

Thing is, we never really knew what to do with them.

A few years ago the main bough had split, but as the three fruit trees were in a handy triangular position, we used them as interim washing line posts. The washing line kept the crap apple together and it seemed perfectly happy like that. It seems though that the wind and rain of late (typical English summer weather), as well as this year’s quite frankly ridiculously large crop of apples had taken its toll, and today I discovered that the largest branch was precariously hovering and swaying about. So Rich did the manly thing and sawed the bough off, leaving me to contend with breaking the branches down into firewood for the winter. Handy!

But it seems we should have really bolted the thing together as now, we’ve lost a good third or half of the tree. Still, it seems pretty happy with what’s left. And I have less apples to contend with.

Apparently crab apples have a high content of pectin - great for jams and jellies. But to be honest, I usually leave them for the birds in the late autumn, and any left overs get slung on the compost heap. This year I was hoping to use at least some of them, so any tips or ideas of what I can do with crab apples, beside crab apple jelly, would be greatfully received!