Being around flowers from a young age, arranging vases of flowers and flower arranging was just something I did and I loved helping mum when she did wedding flowers, it was hard work up half the night making button holes and corsages, I do miss all that so I decided last year to plant a cutting garden, a specific patch that would be grown to be cut and would have varieties that work well in arrangements, it was only a small patch at home last year but it worked well so this years task is to create a medium sized bed on the nursery as a display for anyone wanting to try the same and also so that my lovely little café, which for anyone who hasn’t visited yet is a converted train carriage on the nursery called Thyme, will have beautiful cut flowers all the time.

As I’m writing this in my little café which is just warming up after a very hard frost it half past eleven in the morning and I’ve just finished making the soup that I was working on so hopefully by the time I’ve finished this it will be ready and so welcome after spending the first part of the day making sure that all the animals have water and that our newest members are all okay in the frosty mornings. The last of our Hampshire Down lambs was born this morning, no intervention at all needed the young ram lamb was bounding around before we arrived this morning thankfully doing really well, this years lambs were all singles so big strong lambs and so have needed a fair bit of help lambing. Hampshire Downs are a wonderful breed that we graze under the trees, cutting down the need for chemicals and manpower to keep the grass and more importantly the weeds down and the land clean underneath the trees and also leaving behind and valuable commodity of manure. We now have a flock of over forty so they are doing a great job under our sixty plus acres of trees in production.  Our sows are all in pig and should be having young within next 3-5 weeks so plenty of piglets, we have mainly Middle white pigs which are the rarest breed in this country and they are fabulous looking pigs with sweet natures, our two sows Mint & Evie greet you from a good way away and are always delighted to have a tummy rub. We then have one Mangalitza sow, Curly, who is also in pig and she is a very strange looking pig, being sometimes mistaken for a sheep herself with her long hairy coat. Our pigs keep our fallow land fertilised and root it all up putting back nutrients into the ground better than we could wish for.  

Our goats are our newest arrivals and just haven’t been allocated a field yet on the nursery as they aren’t keen on staying where they are put and have been bunking in with a friends horses, somewhere where they can’t do the same damage as they can on the nursery but they will be coming home soon as we have a more secure place for them as they are such characters, we have two older males, one pygmy called Tony and an Angora, DJ and then two Saanen females Ruby and Betty. The two boys are very affectionate and just want to be rubbed and Ruby is kind and gentle, Betty is our showoff and just loves being the centre of attention, she climbs on gates and fences and if she thinks that she has your attention she walks across the field on her hind legs, such a character. We adopted all four of them from Airfield House in Dundrum where they were all attractions.

We have huge amounts of chickens, ducks and geese with some favourites like the Orpingtons and Rhode Island Reds as well as some more rare breeds and we usually have a good selection for sale on the nursery. We are putting in a small pond on the nursery too this year for our fish that are getting too big and for the ducks and my son is so excited at the prospect of frogs so we’ll see.  Our cattle don’t have a job as such on the nursery except for keeping our two wettest fields clean, they are Highland cattle and are just magnificent, we have eight now with one still to calf hopefully within next week or so and three of them that should have been put back into calf by our magnificent bull, Roddy last month. They’re amazing creatures and so gentle and quiet, unlike some of the commercial breeds that we see down at the Mart, next to our Carlow nursery.