This Farming Life - November

The Castlefarm orchard looks bare. We spent the last few weeks of October picking quince, apples, pears and hazelnuts. This month I will be busy transforming this fruit into jams and chutneys. We planted our orchard four years ago, with fruit trees from Seedsavers and English’s Nursery. There are so many types and varieties of each fruit. Anyone thinking of planting fruit this winter should consider autumn raspberries. In my opinion their fruit are larger and tastier than the summer varieties and they are much easier to pick.

With the help of some farm shop customers we picked half a tonne of apples for juicing. Eating apples and cooking apples, of all varieties go into our apple juice. It makes the taste a little bit more interesting. We bring the apples down to The Apple Farm (www.theapplefarm.com) in Tipperary, where Con Traas pasteurises the juice and bottles it for us.

This year I made an effort to plant enough root crops. These are now sitting in the soil and are easily dug up for the shop when needed. We have had to put extra soil on top of our potatoes because the crows were pulling them out of the ground by the stalk.

Our polytunnel has just about wound down for the winter. The last of the cucumbers, courgettes, peppers and tomatoes are being harvested. With the lack of sun at the end of the summer, a lot of our tomatoes did not ripen. These will be made into green tomato chutney, if I have the time! When the last of these are gone I will remove the old plants and cover the polytunnel with manure and black plastic for the winter.

We butchered our pigs at the end of last month. Hammy and Happy had a very nice life on our farm, and especially enjoyed the windfall apples of the autumn.

Otherwise at Castlefarm we are nearly finished calving down our autumn herd. There are 20 cows in our autumn calving herd, making it much easier than our spring calving herd of 80 cows. This month they will be housed by night and outdoors during the day.


------------------------

This November we are open 10am-6pm Friday 25th and Saturday 26th November. On Saturday customers are welcome to join us for egg collecting at 2.30 and a farm walk at 3pm. Remember as always dress for a farm!

To receive our newsletter, news of new products & cooking tips by email please contact Castlefarm Shop, Narraghmore, Athy, Co Kildare, Telephone 087 678 5269, Email jenny@castlefarmshop.ie, log onto www.castlefarmshop.ie or telephone +353 (0)59 863 6948

Follow us on facebook http://www.facebook.com/castlefarm