Notes from the country with Vicky Turrell

  I have now spent nine months in isolation. The new year should be a second birth for me, like a pregnancy ending and a fresh life beginning. And that is what I am looking forward to, but of course it is not as simple as that. I heard that someone’s new year resolution was to go out of the front gate more often than their wheely bin. I like this one and have adopted it for my own. I am not sure that it will be any time soon. But you never know what could happen in 2021. To keep us going until then, we have bought ourselves a kestrel nesting box. It can be situated near a road because the kestrel does not fly low like the owl. So it is even safe for the kestrel to hover over the motorway to find food. It eats voles and I have seen the kestrel many times, this winter, on the wires above our Oak Meadow, patiently searching. There are lots of voles in this field. The RSPB instructions say that the box must face the towards the east, away from water and with a clear fly-in for th...

  I always feel that there is hope now that we have gone past the winter solstice. Until this week the daylight hours have been getting shorter and shorter by the minute, but that is all over. We have turned a corner, now that the darkest day has gone, and we are working towards shorter nights and longer days. It is only little by little, but on 21 st December the solstice sun set here in the afternoon at 15.38, by the end of the week the sun sets at 16.01. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I remember my grandmother saying that after the winter solstice the day was a cockerel stride longer each week. Three minutes seems about right for the stride of a cockerel. I have made two marks on the grey slate of our sunroom floor. They show where the sun reaches on the summer and winter solstices. On the shortest day, the sun is low and can almost touch the far wall. But it will never get there because, from now on, it will be getting higher in the sky. And, by the summer, the sunshine ...

Did you know that if the UK tried to be self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables, we would run out by this month? We import much of our fruit and some vegetables. There are lots of factors involved, but one thing is clear, we need to eat fresh fruit and veg. to keep healthy. We have been lucky here because, from lockdown, I have not had to buy any vegetables and we have had enough fruit for the last two months. The only fruit I have bought is a small bag of lemons. A few months ago, I used the lemons to make Shrewsbury biscuits. The sharp lemon tang was excellent along with old sultanas that I had left over from the winter. It was at the time when the internet was full of activities for children and one of them told how to grow lemon trees from pips. There is always a warning not to swallow the pips. When I was young, we were told that they would lodge in your appendix and you would need an operation. Or, worse still, the pip would grow inside you and sprout into a tree, presuma...

A surprise welcome party was waiting when we arrived back home from our holiday. Speckles, the hen, had grown tired of waiting for us to return and had somehow escaped. She was on the drive to greet us. She has everything she needs in her pen, plenty of food and water and an automatic little door to her shed, which lets her out at 7.30am and locks her in at dusk. A friend visited to see all was well but Speckles got out, all the same. The young robin was there too, on the field gate next to the drive. He has not yet fully developed his red breast and still has a pale brown front. He followed me to the door and then flew off. I expect that I will soon see him again in the fruit cage where he searches for some juicy berries. As I looked around the garden everything was so familiar and yet so new. One of the obvious changes was that our blueberries were cropping at a phenomenal rate and needed picking. The robin, who came into the fruit cage after me, does not seem to have developed...