The breadmaking machine might be condemned as the lazy way to bake but the current fashion for them is encouraging a lot of people to eat better, healthier and fresher bread. Load the machine in the evening and set the timer instead of your alarm clock. Waking up in the morning to the smell of freshly baked bread has got to be the height of decadence!
The distinctive rich flavour of this bread is similar to the traditional sour-dough common in Germany. It requires a little more time than wheat bread but the result is worth it. The caraway is optional, but when I dared suggest this in conversation with an elderly man whose father’s rye bread had been his staple food as a child growing up in Czechoslovakia he put up his hands in horror as if I had blasphemed and cried “But you must use caraway: you can’t make rye bread without caraway!”.
It’s May; in recent years the weather has been practically summer, and could be the best sun we get until September, but in terms of growing food, we are still in the notorious “hungry gap”. And if we were careless or unlucky we’d be at the end of our stores as well.
So what is the hungry gap, and is it still relevant to us today? It is the gap in crops between winter and summer. The time when Continue reading
Soda bread is a traditional Irish wheat loaf, but we like to use rye or barley for ours. These flours don’t rise easily with yeast as wheat does but using a soda bread recipe works well to make a firm and tasty loaf. Soda bread is very quick to make and needs to be eaten fresh.
This is the easiest and quickest bread ever. It was publicised widely during the war by Doris Grant to encourage working women to eat well on rationing. The loaf is dark, moist and delicious.
For us April is all about lambing, about new lives blinking at the world for the first time, learning to stand and to skip and taking joy in exploring it all.
We lamb in Spring to coincide with when the grass is rich and growing most strongly. Many farmers organise the date of their lambing for the winter and have the ewes indoors when they lamb. This is because there is a price premium for lamb ready for the Easter market, and also because being indoors makes it easier to keep an eye on any ewes that might need help. Indeed, we used to do this ourselves, starting lambing in January, taking shifts in the lambing barn to ensure that help was on hand if it was needed 24/7. But years ago we decided to change to April, using the warmer weather, the spring grass and longer days to lamb out of doors as deer and many other animals naturally do – and we’ve never looked back.
We like it because Continue reading
Taking on a National Trust tenancy of 200 acres immediately adjacent to our farm 20 years ago was a chance for us to expand our arable production. Perhaps we should have been warned by the name of the farm, Labour in Vain, and better remembered the history of it: more than 30 years of continuous intensive grain production had eroded the top-soil and lost organic matter so that over most of the area the soil had become a glue-like clay.
We knew it would be difficult to improve, but taking on this land meant we could increase the arable rotation from the 20 acres we had on the home farm so we were keen to try. It has worked for us in many ways Continue reading
Winter is the quiet time for a mixed farm. Next years crops are either safely in the ground, or, like our spring barley, waiting until spring to be sown,? and the ewes and cows are still pregnant for another month or two. It’s the lull before the storm: of late nights, early mornings and constant supervision of calving and lambing.
So winter is a time to catch up on other jobs that have slipped by throughout the rest of the year: clearing gateways and footpaths, tidying the tools and workshops, repairing fences and stiles, cutting back hedges. Perhaps most excitingly, it’s the season to plant trees. This may seem confusing – why plant during the cold season? Surely it wants to be sunny and warm to help them grow? Trees go dormant during Continue reading
