December Update

Well, you don’t need me to tell you it’s been bitterly cold for the past few weeks. Personally I think it’s great though I do understand it has it’s unpleasant side, we’ve had a few dramas here ourselves. I do find the snow is great for hiding all the mess around my house and leaving everything looking clean and white, though it will nice to be reunited with my shovel which I suspect is buried somewhere in the garden! We have no mains water at the home farm so the last few weeks have been an education learning how to defrost pumps and freeing up frozen valves. It’s funny how warm the well water feels when it’s minus 8 or 9 above ground. I’m now quite the expert on foot valves, pressure vessels, impellers and the like....... Wild animals are naturally feeling the pinch and unfortunately Niall has had a pine martin and a fox taking their dinner in his chicken coop. My piglets have taken up bird watching and for some reason stand transfixed looking at the finches and robins eating the left over barley around their trough. Do keep an eye on your birds by the way, contrary to popular belief a hard winter does not wipe out garden pests but is particularly tough on your feathered friends. You’ll be happy you kept them going when they start hoovering up your slugs in the spring. There isn’t much you can do in the garden this time of year so why not put the feet up? This is a great time of year to kick back with a cup of tea (or perchance a hot whiskey?) and peruse the seed Catalogues for next year. I love looking at dierent varieties of favourite crops, am looking forward to growing a white beetroot Dermot Carey head gardener at Lissadell introduced me to this summer. I have a bit of a favour to ask this month in a request to roll out a questionnaire. We’re giving away some free seed packs in return for giving us your opinions on what we do, we want to make Quickcrop the best vegetable grower website in Ireland and the U.K. and need your help! I have included the questionnaire as an attachment, if you have 5 minutes to ll it in we would really appreciate it. We are working on some exciting new changes to our website over the winter with some great new resources, I can’t tell you about our latest coup right now but I’m sure you’re going to love it when we announce it in the spring.