With the worst of the winter theoretically ahead of us, I have been ordering wild animal food to get us and our visitors through the hard times ahead.
We have flaked maize, peanuts and chicken pellets for the badgers: mixed grains and pellets for the pheasants – which is also eaten by some birds especially the yellowhammers who only seem interested in the mixed grains: feeder seed and peanuts for the seed eating birds: dried mealworms especially for the wrens and robins: fat and seed balls: fat and insect pellets for the ground- feeding non-seed eating birds: and mealworm crumble with added fats for anyone we may have missed out on, which is scattered along the tops of the stone walls and amongst plant stems and roots for the shy visitors.
Thus we have a lot of feed to store and sacks and plastic tubs were piling up in the porch and making the outhouse difficult to negotiate. A couple of hours’ work this morning and we have it sorted into old feed tubs from the ponies, labelled and shelved.
Shelf of apples above:
At the same time we had a sort out of the outhouse which has helped make things more logical and easier to find.
Now we can get into the chest freezer without first lifting off piles of dog food and trays of stored apples!
The hay loft is stacked with hay, and the spare bay in the barn has tins of horse feed and tubs of garlic powder.
The freezers are full of cooked pears and apples, blackberries, soup, turkey in gravy, leg meat for curries, red cabbage cooked with juniper berries, apples and onions, as well as some bread, butter, cheese and fish, and some veg, etc. The pantry shelves are groaning with tinned goods, home made jam, chutneys and sweetcorn relish (a wonderful American recipe) so we are ready for whatever the weather throws at us, I hope.
Although it rarely happens nowadays, I find it difficult to forget the days as a child when not only was our cottage snowed in and we had to jump down from the first floor to dig out to the front door, but the whole village was cut off for over three days. Some days after walking across the fields with hot bran mashes for the horse we had to sit with our wellies in the stove oven to melt the snow inside our boots so that we could pull them off. Oh, the chilblains!
Our first winter in this cottage our lane ended up with twelve foot snowdrifts partly caused by snowploughs trying to get through and merely pushing the snow to each side of the lane, causing more problems, as they never got through anyway. Last winter the worst problem were the icy layers within the snow which often made walking impossible and driving out of the question. Our lane was never cleared or gritted.
This year we have probably over-compensated but we begin with a warm feeling of preparedness as we look over our stores.
But – pride comes before a fall! No pun intended.
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River of Stones – today’s pebble: “Tiny puffa jacket on antennae-fragile ‘pins’: no teenager in ‘heels’ but – just a wintry Robin”.
stopping by woods 