The arrival of autumn at Rails Farm
Two days before I wrote this article, we all lost a remarkable human being who took her duty for this nation as seriously as nobody before, her majesty Queen Elisabeth II. I wish our new King Charles III that he continues that incredibly important task and leads this nation into a healing process of the environment and our society, both are broken and at brink of no return.
Record breaking temperatures
As I predicted in my last article, we have managed to break the temperature record to 40.3 degrees in Lincolnshire, and additionally reached the longest recorded drought for 120 years. We had to use tap water for our veggies for the last two month after running out of collected rain water. All the other plants were watered with grey water from the kitchen and the washing machine. Unfortunately, this will be the new norm in the future, thus we need to increase our rain water capacity from currently 14000 litres. One way of doing this is to connect more IBC tanks (about £50, 1000 l)) and decentralise those to places where they are needed, i.e., in the fields and the orchard. It has now rained for about 7 days and we could do with more storage as well. It is all about the shift of weather patterns, short outbursts of very large quantities and longer periods of no precipitation at all.
The harvest so far
On a positive note, we harvested about 63 kilos of tomatoes, 54 kilos of courgettes, 87 cucumbers, 6 kilos of green gages, 10 kilos of plums, 8 kilos of damsons and the apples harvest has just begun. The first 5 gallons of cider have been started and we enjoyed the first freshly pressed apple juice. All apples are smaller this year because of the lack of rain but there are lots. Jam has been made, delicious plum cakes baked and frozen, tomato puree pasteurised, courgettes pickled and grilled and frozen. Hurray the majority of our newly planted trees survived the drought.
Don’t forget our monthly Saturday’s ‘Kaffee und Kuchen’ German chat session.
Gaby & Christoph