Nettle ale, recipe 1

Nettle pasta

I’ve also made nettle soup and nettle brose, but haven’t yet put the recipes on the blog.

I’m just finishing a late breakfast, late not because we had a Bank Holiday lie-in, but because I was out planting tatties from 7.15am. And did the croft chores, the washing and set the breakfast out before that. It’s a glorious day here, so I didn’t want to wait for breakfast before getting out and getting stuck in.

Very nice folks I’ve worked with near here. They may know someone in the UK that teaches similar classes.

I so, so want to take the “Basic Oxen” course

I finished about 6.30pm and came in to find my slow roast leg of pork was just about done (had been cooking since 1.30pm). We enjoyed that with mashed potato, chow-chow and a glass of potato wine.

I should have caught up with some paperwork and wrote a post here after that, but crashed instead! Now I’m off to bed as there’s a lot more to do tomorrow—more planting, whitewashing the farrowing pen, more weeding, the scythe to peen, the last vegetable bed to dig, and on it goes.

Horse skills, don’t know if it still exists, but, there used to be a heavy horse center down forfar ways that offered teaching in ploughing, I spent a fantastic 2 weeks down there many moons ago, simply for nostalgic reasons, my father passed away before I was old enough for him to teach me how to handle horse & plough, which was at that time, all we used on the family farm, so when I got to mid twenties, I went off & learned.

It’s not all that long ago since this island stopped using oxen to haul ploughs & carts.

Anyhoo, spring has sprung, with much skipping & bucking & general enthusiasm we let the cows out of the byre today & into the lower paddock, byre scrubbed & hosed out (yippeee no more fighting heavy bales of silage at 6am for 5 months !) & ready to be whitewashed for another winter.

Its funny how smells get you with memory’s when you least expect, while scrubbing down the byre, that lovely fresh clean smell made me turn round to the door expecting to see my mother walk through with a big pail of warm milk ready to pour into the skimming tray’s. Touch wood, our future house cow will take with calf this summer & come next spring it’ll be me walking through with pails of milk to pour into skimming trays. Ohh I cant wait, real butter & clotted cream.

The main obstacle to us growing even more vegetables (and to growing cereals at all) is the lack of a tractor or a horse. I grow a vast amount by hand, but even I have my limits.

I’d slightly prefer a horse all things being equal, but I have no horse skills whatsoever and it’s proving extremely difficult to find anyone up this way with horse farming skills at all. There are a few people in England, but distance plus the cost of training makes that prohibitive.

So I’ll keeping looking for a little diesel tractor and if I do get one, I’ll run it on vegetable oil or biodiesel.

But that said, we have far cheaper electricity costs up here as the island has its own electricity & provided 100% of our power using 2 windmills & if there is no wind, there are diesel turbines. Our average electric bill for the year, is just under half of what a year cost us in mainland scotland.

We also have thriftyness on our side, in the 2yrs we’ve lived here we’ve only put out a single black bag to the garbage collection, everything we can gets re-used, re-cycled, composted, paper is shredded & used as animal bedding, we try our very best to waste nothing if it can have a use of some sort just so we can afford to raise our animals & produce something very decent for market.

In regards to cheap goods there is no doubt that spending that bit more and getting a quality item is the way to go. But most people want, or rather buy, cheap stuff and then moan when it is not much good.

If only there was a lot more thought about what we buy and what benefit we therefore gain from the better quality items. However human nature being what it is that is unlikely to happen.

Things we factor into our cost per piglet:

Cost of the sow
Cost of the boar
Transport costs to get both here
Trailer (capital cost)
Housing (capital cost)
Fencing and gates (capital cost)
Troughs (capital cost)
Maintenance costs for four immediately above
Electricity (for fencing, lights and heat in the farrowing pen)
Mains energiser (capital)
Lighting/heating consumables
Rotavator (capital, maintenance and running costs)
Grass seed (for re-grassing pens)
Lime (for re-grassing pens)
Fodder crops seed
Vet
Medicines
First aid/farrowing consumables (for pigs)
Tools (capital costs and maintenance)
Tagging
Slapping
Ear notching
Detergents
Disinfectants
Bedding
Bought-in feed
Advertising
Phone bills
First aid consumables (for us)
Clothing (particularly steel-toed wellies and waterproofs, the pigs tend to tear the latter)
British Pig Association membership (for herd book and birth notification)
Berkshire Breeders Club membership
Pigworld subscription
Regulatory requirements (eg transport certificates)
Knacker for fallen stock

And more!