Most days this week I tried to film a video and each day the weather had other ideas. This is a collection of the footage from a mid winter week on our homestead.
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About Us.
Byther Farm is a small organic homestead, being designed and managed using permaculture practices. We aim for self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables for increased self reliance and better resilience to the modern world. I recognise that we are unlikely to be truly self sufficient, but do the best we can. I share our home with my loving husband, Mr J and our cat, Monty.
We are a fifty-something couple who live on a smallholding in Carmarthenshire, Wales. We are going green and creating a gentler, cleaner and more healthy life for our family.
Having had a highly successful smallholding in Monmouthshire, we hope to recreate the abundance at our new home. There will be a large organic kitchen garden with no dig gardening raised beds and young food forest in which to grown our fruit and vegetables.
We keep a few sheep and Aylesbury ducks.
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‘Breathe’ by Kafkadiva. www.kafkadiva.com
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35 Comments
Wow, I am so sorry to hear this happened to you.
I lost one of my freezers – not a power issue like yours but it just died. When I realised half of the food had defrosted including piles of boysenberries. I jumped into jam making but making wine would have been a much better idea!! I'll know what to do next time – thanks Liz😄
Sorry for your crisis. How blessed you are to have such kind & helpful neighbours!
Great video, sorry bout your troubles. Would love to see more sheep and duck content 😊
Glad you are safe guys. That’s what important as you say Liz. Stay safe and all the best now. Hope the wine 🍷 goes well 🙌. Take care .
Oh dear! 😮 I certainly hope your freezers recover after they dry out!
Ask neighbors if they like the Cozettes. And then remember that that food not only makes great compost but it makes great eggs and compost if you have chickens.
Oh no Liz that's awful! Thankfully you have nice neighbours to help you out!
How easy is it to make wine? Do you have any videos on making it please?
Oh you two,I'm so so sorry,its awful when things like this happen. 😢
Fingers crossed for the freezers. I'm in New Zealand with mainly 20 – 30c temp each day, it's really bizarre watching you all in England snowed in or iced up. Hopefully the thaw will set in soon. =-)
Hope you save it all lovely neighbour to the rescue.
Awww I've missed seeing the ducks. One of my favourite parts of your videos was when you would let them out at your old farm. (release the quakens!) How long is "flockdown " going to continue?
thunder and lightning storms during winder happen but very rarely, did i see a robin ???
really bad luck sorry for you
I live on the Black Mountain overlooking Ammanford/Glanamman so experienced the same snow, lightning and thunder as you!
In vest in a generator incase of power cuts…hope you manage to save your food…
Pleased that it looks like you’ll be saving most of the food one way or another 😊
It has been so windy! And I think your like us where you are surrounded by field so YOU are with wind break as it were! It s scary in the storms. Stay safe ❤
Hi Liz greetings from Lancashire. Glad to see you managed to save most of the food. Do you have a video on how to start a planting plan?
Very nice Liz, I can’t weit to see ur daffodils. I have a small space but I did plant around 1000 bulbs of daffodils and allium and another 1000 of muscari and crocuses, basically replacing my grass with bulbs. 😅
OH NO what a bad luck situation! Compliments for how you handle the situation, make wine from the fruits, neighbours to the rescue and also a chance to clean out the freezers and compost what you're not going to eat anyway. Hopefully 2023 is a fruitfull year so your freezers will be stocked at the end again ^^
Always a joy to watch you taking care of your farm babies Liz. Please take care and stay safe and warm.
Liz, could you make us a vlog on your wine making from fruits? I'd love to learn that! As permaculturists we all know: the problem is the solution! 😊
One of many reasons why bottling all kinds of food is far and away superior to freezing.
liz fit RCD trips to power outlets if the fridge blows it will not take out the house
Thank goodness for kind neighbors! I can't wait to see your daffodils in bloom!💕
Here in our small valley this spring we experienced an unusually hard frost which destroyed all the emerging and mature fruit blossom. This has meant the summer season fruit which would be starting to get ready to pick now does not exist. No peaches, nectarines, plums, almonds or the ever reliable apples, at all, this year. We have lost a season of crops. Only the late flowering fruit will be available, fingers crossed. So the persimmons, chestnuts and fejoas may, pest and disease willing, be harvested this year.
The other huge impact on the spring flowering fruit trees was flocks of Kaka and Rosella birds which ate the leaf and flower buds.
Managing unusual low temps and the birds is nigh on impossible on this property, bird scarers would be ineffective as we are surrounded in bush and frost protection ridiculously expensive as its ten acres of hilly land.
If I'm lucky enough to get fruit next year with such little fruit this year there maybe a reduction of insect pests such as the brown beetle next year, we'll see.
I hope your freezers are savable!
Dry ice. Will save your food and keep it frozen if you have it available to you.
🦆 Loved seeing the ducks making themselves heard! Gutted about the water in the barn knackering the freezers 😢I remember a freezer failing here and having nowhere to put stuff. I now have two but they are both rammed with garden produce.
have you looked at Mehu Lissa steam extraction for fruit and more. They are a great way to convert fruit to bottles so saving freezer space. They are wonderful
Such rotten luck, hope it’s all fixable. Our village used to get regular power cuts when we first moved here, we kept a freezer log so we could claim on the insurance. Luckily we had new power lines installed eventually and the freezer log has long since gone….
This is why I can or dehydrate and vacuum seal so much of my food storage . Our power is somewhat unreliable.
So where did the standing water come from? If you close up your freezer tightly, all frozen foods in it will last for about a week.
On the farm, when our fridge or freezer overflowed we'd put our food outside or on the porch for our freezing temperatures in the winter.
Wow thats some weather change in a week we lost a freezing a few years back we was on holiday and our solar trip out we had no chance of saving anything bet the snow storm was amazing to watch 😀