Spring 2022 at Rails Farm
The War on Weeds
The last two weeks have demonstrated how much an impact warmer nights and overall higher temperatures have on photosynthesis and therefore the growth rate of vegetation. Unfortunately, the winners are the weeds. Being organic makes it so much more labour intensive to free up the newly planted trees and vegetables to give them a good start. Additionally, flying and roaming enemies (fluffy) doing their bit and eating all the young shoots.
Full Nests and Empty Beehives
On the positive side beautiful flowers emerge, enriching the garden with a lovely scent and a white carpet of flower petals from the apple trees. We can listen to buzzing noises in the fruit trees and the melodic songs of black birds, song thrushes, wrens, blue tits, robins, chiff chaffs, chaffinches and gold finches. We are also extremely happy to offer our barn to the swallows again who returned recently and immediately occupied their last year’s breeding place. Unfortunately, our bee residents are down to only one very small population, probably due to very unfavourable winter conditions, that has been reported by many bee keepers. Hence, if anyone has a swarm to give away, we would be very happy to offer it one of our empty bee hives.
More on Our Sustainable Power Plans
The wind turbine has been tested and seems to work, but we realised that it needs to be raised in height to catch more undisturbed wind layers. This is the next step and will be done soon. I am more and more inclined to purchase 2nd hand PV cells and build the stands from timber to be more sustainable. Anyone, who knows good quality second hand PV cells, please contact us.
Don’t forget our monthly Saturday’s ‘Kaffee und Kuchen’ German chat session.
Christoph/Gaby