Paddy’s Day
March 17, 2026
lamb
Happy Paddy’s Day everyone! Luck to you all. Our ducks are laying again as of three days ago and we have been enjoying fantastic egg fritattas (fritatti? fritatte?) many mornings of the week. One of the new girls, Shania, looks as though she might start laying any day now, unless we have another Holly situation, and she has already started laying somewhere in secret Mathilda continues to be the little runt, and I try to make sure she gets plenty of side treats to keep her wee comb looking healthy - it’s very wee, and quite pale. If she never lays eggs I won’t be surprised, nor will I feel in any way upset, I’m just glad we got her and not someone who culls birds who have RSS. The ducks made it the whole way round and into the sheep field again the other day and ended up being butted about by the lambs - despite being in the middle of a remote work meeting, I had to go and do a search and rescue for them and bring them back home.
We continue to make and subsequently eat far too many sourdough based delicacies - this morning I baked off some caper and olive ciabatta minis, and I currently have cinnamon rolls proving. I am considering growing and cracking my own wheat and rye this year, and find myself often wondering why the flour at my nearest shop is produced 3,500 miles away, when we grow a lot of wheat in this country.
I see more birds by the day, occasionally whistling back to them but more often I quietly say their names while I go about my work in the garden. The names of those I don’t know, I make a point of searching for when I remember.
We recently listened to the Braiding Sweetgrass audiobook during our drives to and from the city, in which the writer poses a fascinating question - does the earth love me back? Of course I love my garden, but considering does my garden love me back is a wonderful and beautiful experience. I walk around touching leaves and petals, thinking about how my garden loves me as much as I love her, and feel this phenomenal sense of belonging and symbiosis.
We started beans, some peas, potatoes (it’s lucky to plant them on St Patrick’s Day), sweetpeas, and generally feel a lot of excitement.
As I suggested last post, we have been making huge batches of kimchi (which has become much easier since using a huge metal basin) and cannot wait to make kimchi with food we’ve grown. We fixed two of our waterbutts and hope to fix shed roof in coming week (Hello it’s my from the future! We got a few dry days and did in fact fix the shed roof and we are DELIGHTED).
We would love a goose but cannot get one until we build a new pen. The location of the current pen looks as though it used to join two existing streams, as it has started connecting to the stream in the next field during our ever frequent floods. In the spirit of listening to the land around us and trying to understand it, I feel I should allow them to reunite as one stream and just put my goose pen somewhere else.