Looking forward to a new year:  Times are hard in the country generally at the moment.  However we are keeping the chin up, and are confident that peoples' desire for top quality tasty and healthy food will enable us to keep afloat.  Anyway, I love what I do, and that is half the battle!  We have a busy and interesting Spring ahead of us. Soon we will be getting our various new fruit trees, and when the weather starts to warm up a bit we will be planting new orchard plots and a new vineyard plot.  The new field is looking nice and fresh, and the mild winter so far has enabled the newly sown pasture to establish nicely.

Planting of new Strawberry plants:  Towards the end of this month we planted up just over a thousand new strawberry plants to grow in the polytunnel.  These plants should start flowering in March, and all going well, they will give us the first ripe strawberries from mid May, picking through until end of June.  The polytunnel still remains a naked frame through the winter, since the windy day back in September when the cover was torn off.  We won't be able to re-cover the tunnel until we get some calm and warm weather in March.  Until then, we have to borrow some space in a neighbour's glasshouse to grow them  temporarily.

Poultry slaughter:  This month, for the first time, we had a sudden attack one night from a predator which killed about half of our chickens.  We got up in the morning to find slaughtered birds strewn all around the chicken coop. We didn't know whether it was a fox, a dog, or possibly a mink, until a week or so later, when I concluded that it must have been a fox.  In the 10 years we've been here, I had never seen a fox or heard a fox barking at night.  I decided to set up a detection system near the chicken coop, which enabled me on several nights to spot a fox, confirming my suspicions.  The next step was now to deal with him somehow, as he appeared to be coming around almost every night, and he was too much of a threat to the safety of the poultry.