I’ll get the wheelbarrow

Posted on January 19, 2026 by james

Or perhaps even a forklift might be required for this second early (Charlotte) potato 😀

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged | Leave a comment

Will the real Newcastle Brown please stand up?

Posted on January 19, 2026 by james

My son asked if we could brew a Newcastle Brown clone and I managed to find a recipe online so decided to give it a go.

This is one pint of the clone and one of genuine Newcastle Brown. Looks like the colour is spot on, thought perhaps the clone isn’t quite as clear 😀

In terms of taste they were also very close, though perhaps the genuine article had a little more body than the clone. I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference if I weren’t tasting them side-by-side however.

I’d post the recipe, but I found it once on the interwebs and I don’t feel it’s fair to post someone else’s work without a credit.

Posted in Beer-making, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

I have a ream

Posted on January 19, 2026 by james

Quite a few, actually. All imperial, again.

Perhaps I should find some old imperial plans for making steam engines or something?

Posted in Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

A matter of mere days

Posted on January 19, 2026 by james

after the slimeball Robert Jenrick raised the level of competence at Reform 2025 Limited by, well, absolutely nothing whatsoever, the Tory MP for Romford follows suit claiming that the views of his constituents are being ignored. Then bangs on about the Chagos Islands being handed to Mauritius.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I suspect that if you asked most of his Romford constituents where Diego Garcia was, they’d probably guess “Does he play at left back?”

Posted in Random | Tagged | Leave a comment

A new chicken house design

Posted on January 18, 2026 by james

We’ve had our current chicken houses for at least fifteen years and they’re really starting to look tired now. I’d been mulling over designing my own for a while because the style I’d used previously turned out to have a few issues. In particular they were hard to clean because it wasn’t possible to get inside them, the roof had to be removed to clean them and chickens sometimes pecked at eggs in the nesting boxes. I also wanted something that stood well off the ground to discourage rats from nesting underneath. The entrances on the old design had a sliding door, but this often clogged up with mud in wet weather, or even froze closed in cold weather.

This is what I came up with.

The entire house sits on posts driven into the ground giving a gap of about 30cm underneath. The posts can be levelled by themselves, which means the house sits level without any bother. The door now hinges upward.

It’s also quite tall and there’s a full-height side door allowing access for cleaning.

The nesting box has a sloping floor (about 15°) so the eggs roll to the back when they’re laid, and a partition stops the hens reaching them when they do.

It’s an improvement, but not yet perfect. I think the nesting boxes may need a mesh floor to allow droppings to fall through. It’s possible that they would benefit from a hinged roof too so that the divider can be lifted out. My wife also thinks that the slope on the roll-away floor needs to be steeper.

Posted in Chickens, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

More confused plants

Posted on January 18, 2026 by james

These photos were taken at the start of October. Ripe, ready-to-pick beans on the plants and, err, flowers?

Posted in Environment, Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged | Leave a comment

This tyre probably needs replacing

Posted on January 18, 2026 by james

Fortunately (ish) it was only on a trailer and I spotted it before there was a problem.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

I think these might be a bit past eating

Posted on January 18, 2026 by james

Not much chance of recovering the potatoes with the shoots intact either. One for the compost heap…

I suspect they may need to be kept somewhere colder.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged | Leave a comment

Lord of the files?

Posted on January 18, 2026 by james

Honestly, I just don’t know where all of these came from. I suspect they’ve been inherited more than once.

I need to sort through them and work out what’s worth keeping, but at least they’re all in the same place now.

Posted in Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

Thursday’s disaster

Posted on January 18, 2026 by james

As I’ve already posted, I made a 350 mile round trip to collect an electric honey extractor last Thursday. It was a pretty horrible trip of about 110 miles up the M5 with poor visibility and things hadn’t improved much by the time rejoined it to make my way south again.

The journey then went from bad to worse, as the coolant level warning light started flashing about twenty miles from home. Fortunately I was only a mile from Sedgemoor services and managed to pull in there before the engine showed any sign of overheating. As the junction for the A38 at Burnham-on-Sea was only a couple of miles further south, I decided to allow the engine to cool for an hour or so, then refill the coolant system with water and see how far I could make it down the A38. Perhaps if I was lucky and carried some more water I might even make it home. I couldn’t really diagnose the problem any further as it was already dark.

Sadly not. I made about five miles. Fortunately the warning light came back on about a hundred metres before I reached a pub with a car park that I could pull into. Unfortunately they were on the point of closing, so I couldn’t get food and a drink. It was however a convenient place to organise recovery of the car to home.

Initially the suspicion was that something had been kicked up off the road, passed through the grille and punctured the radiator, but after looking in daylight I think it’s more likely that the radiator has just failed and sprung a leak. As far as I’m aware, replacing the radiator requires removing much of the front of the car, so I’ll be leaving it to a garage to deal with.

Posted in Random | Tagged | Leave a comment