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The great Chuck masacre
Two attacks over three days have seen our much loved hens have suffered badly at the hands of one or more foxes. On both occasions, the attacks were made early evening well before dusk. Whilst the hens have enjoyed spending the days roaming around the woodland the down side is not being able to offer them…
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New season Garlic
Today we started selectively harvesting our home grown garlic which has been grown over winter inside a polytunnel. Whilst we still have quite a bit of last seasons crop left to use up, there is nothing like the taste of new season garlic and this one ended up in an omelette for lunch.
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2016 Lemongrass Plants
It’s a bit late but today I eventually got around to separating out the overwintered clumps of Lemongrass and re-potting them as single stems to make this years crop. All these lemongrass stems are from a one clump which in turn was a single stick of Lemongrass a year ago. You tend to get around…
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Rustic Chopping & Serving Boards
The past few days have taken place in a large cloud of sawdust as we try and catch up on a few bespoke orders for BIG chunky chopping boards. Thick milled planks are cut to best make use of their individual natural grain patterns. All boards are marked out by hand and consequently no two boards…
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Hurrah for Cow Muck!
Cow muck is THE essential ingredient for our big pumpkins and giant vegetables. The delivery of the cow muck always heralds the start of a new growing season. We work one year ahead so this muck heap will be piled up and left to rot for use next year. The muck pile from last year has…
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EU Referendum
Our Chucks have considered all the information in the £9m leaflet and cast their votes early.
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Sourdough Course
Having already completed the Artisan Foodworks ‘Basic Breadmaking’ course at some time ago, the ‘Mastering Sourdough’ course was a natural follow on. David and Julie were again the perfect hosts and the gang of eager students were a good bunch. My haul of my own handcrafted sourdough bread made on the day was impressive: For…
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Our first homemade wood fired pizza
Yesterday we finally got around to making our very first homemade pizza in the wood fire oven. Liam made 1kg of pizza dough and a delicious (secret recipe) tomato sauce and so our first pizza trials began. The oven was lit with some dry brash and a few sticks to warm it up before it was…
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Cooking sausages in a wood fired oven
Having lit some 10 fires of ever increasing size in our new wood oven in order to ‘cure’ the construction (slowly drive out all the moisture) it was nice to declare the oven open and pop in a few appropriately named ‘firecracker’ sausages from Taylors at Lathom. At last… Dinner is served!
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Outdoor Wood Fired Pizza Oven
Having made it all the way from Portugal to Hesketh Bank without damage, it was quite exciting to unpack our new brick built outdoor pizza oven. As it weighs about 600kg, the forktruck was definitely needed to carefully lift it out of its packing crate and onto a pallet. I have been reading up on…