There seem to be a lot of flowers appearing just now and it is 2 weeks since we saw the farm so the change is marked and very, very pretty.
I used to know all the names of everything that has a flower and certainly had more confidence in picking what could be eaten than I do now.
Even so, it is lovely to see the hay meadows and pond surrounds filled with daisies and poppies and grasses and harebells and so many other pretty floral things.
The oil seed has finished flowering but the linseed is casting a gorgeous bright blue caste over some of the fields, there are flag irises at the pond and grasses on the bank.
The summer is all about the vegetation, be it the salad variety, harvestable vegetation or the hedge rows. It seems that the winter is all about the wildlife (easier to see!!), but we may not be seeing the deer that we have become accustomed to but we have seen some of their very fresh deer slots around the pond after the rain has made mud; even though a sighting of them they elude us when the wheat and barley are so high.
It is nice to know that quietly they are still, so things don’t change that much even though they seem to and they are still around. I keep threatening to camp over night with night vision to see the badgers, foxes and deer, we’ll see if I get my way…..
I have missed the hawthorn blossom by about a week so my blossom brandy will have to wait until perhaps next year but I satisfied myself with a lovely round of toasted freshly baked bread spread with ‘hedgerow jelly‘ and a cuppa tea. JC opted for the first batch from Barry’s Bees Lincolnshire Honey and was as happy as I.
The honey is luscious and all of our friends seem happy to receive a jar but Barry tended his bees into making that whereas tinyinc’s hedgerow jelly was made by me!! It is a lovely flavour of haw berries, crab apple and damsons picked by me, cooked by me, sieved by me and jarred by me. I haven’t given much away. It was hard work to make compared to just jam but it is very much worth it.
The colour alone made yesterday’s breakfast a bit special!
