Freezing after all!

January 2012 was balmy! We sat on the deck in the sun most days and the veg harvest from the Patch kept on coming...brussel sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli, leeks, and loads of salad from the greenhouse sown in September last year. I love picking salad at this time of year, rocket and mustard greens and valdor lettuces...so fresh and so good and so tasty compared to the shop bought stuff!

Herbs and sweet peas are thriving in the warmth of the sunny greenhouse. I have not had parsley and coriander and parcel (tastes like celery) before in the winter. It is wonderful to be able to reach for my own coriander at this time of year!

Sweet peas and cuttings...a fuschia and a hebe cutting which I took from a  huge plant I grew on from a cutting four years ago.  I picked the original cutting from a wild hebe on a special piece of coastland in South West Ireland that means a lot to me. It has beautiful purple flowers and has survived several house moves with me.  I love multiplying and I love the slatted bench in my greenhouse. I can fiddle away to my heart's content. 

Ballo sitting on his post in the reeds assuming a 'King of the Jungle" position for the camera ...I am sure he thinks he is being filmed for Big Cat Diaries.

This is the day the 'ladies' went for their scan. If they are found to be having twins then they are given special treatment and brought in to the barns earlier. The ones with just a single lamb foetus are returned to the field with their bottoms shaved in readiness for the lambing to come. The three below look well used to this trip for their unltrasound. 

The Aquadulcia Claudia broad beans are thriving too - or they were - here is a picture of them now that the snow has fallen. I am just hoping that they will recover....poor things.... it was a great shock....

Its February and the snow has fallen big time. It has been icy cold, a freezing north east wind here and we have had frozen pipes and record low temperatures. We got used to this last year and within a day the water was flowing again, pipes lagged, the shower hot and we settled down to enjoy the beauty of the white landscape. The kabin is warm, it has a swedish wood burner in it and we have plenty of wood. The Airstream is also well insulated (built to survive at -20 degrees when new!) and so we are quite cosy. We had deep snow which drifted in the biting wind, lovely powdery stuff covering our windows and doors for a couple of days. Not much to do on the Patch...even getting leeks dug was out of the question. Time to dig into the freezer for peas and broad beans and fennel and into the boxes of sand for carrots and parsnips...

When it snows it is 'pasty time'! When my kids were young I would wrap up a warm pasty in a napkin, wrap them up warm and put it in their gloved hand and send them out into the snow. I make them with beef skirt, onion, swede and potato and freeze them for those cold, busy days when you don't want to cook or stop for lunch. I make the pastry too, with not too much fat (there is none in the filling) ...and they are so cheap....

and so utterly scrumptious!

Everything is quiet, so, so cold and grey and the sheep are like shadows coming out of the mist. The salad in the greenhouse survives, completely protected and the sprouts stand like soldiers in the frozen ground....

The sun is trying to break through this morning and the old oak tree is etched against the cold grey mist - my little patch is surrounded by white light and silence...everything has stopped growing, stunned -  as still as a statue. 

Making a break for the sun....

but bowed down under the crystals of snow...

the narcissi huddle together waiting for the thaw.

And the purple sprouting broccoli seems like a rocket emerging from the clouds of ice.

The cats were anxious on the discovery that their world had changed - their routes, the familiar smells had disappeared and the depth of the snow caused a bit of stress initially; until their familiar baskets and the warmth of the log burner in the kabin soothed away their fears! But to us it was magical.