The windmill and bakery at Great Bircham

Following Sunday's black and white photo of Bircham Windmill, today I'm sharing more from my visit there back in September. Mum and I arrived just as the farmers market was packing up but undeterred we headed for the mill shop and bakery, before looking into the tea rooms. 

The windmill was built in 1846 and was a working mill until the 1920s when the sails were removed and the tower abandoned. The windmill fell into a state of disrepair and the current owners undertook its restoration with a new cap going on in 1979, followed by the sails in 1981. 

Bircham Mill opens daily from Easter until end-September and each year has a full programme of activities which they publish on their website and they reopen next year on 28 March.  It's a five storey tower mill and the interior was also restored with all the machinery and stones gathered from farm sales and other derelict mills. You can climb to the top and go out on the fan deck - we didn't as I don't have a good history of mills or heights. There was the school trip to Outwood Mill and a trip to the very top of St. Paul's Cathedral, going up was fine - coming down, less so!

The tower is 52 feet high and has a diameter of 25 feet and the walls are 2 feet 6 inches thick.  So I think I made the right choice, I made it to the first floor for a peek and more importantly back down again safely too!

The bakery still has its original coal-fired oven but the bread made today is cooked in the electric ovens. The bakery was operational until the 1950s, 30 years after the mill had stopped and many people used to walk to the mill to collect their bread.

There's some great original signs and artefacts in the bakery, and in the shop next door which sells locally produced products, as well as flour and cakes. I bought cheese on this visit and flour from the mill on a previous visit, and I'd buy them again.  I'd go back though just to admire the enamelware and signs, and to eat cake of course!

So back outside, there was time for another glance skywards and time to admire the Hovis lettering and the old mill stones before heading back to Hunstanton for another cup of tea and a slice of cake...

The mill also has some animals - guinea pigs, rabbits, sheep, goats, ponies and a donkey, which we skipped on our visit. So if you're ever near Great Bircham over the summer and are stuck for something to do then pop along and take a look at the windmill. 

Volunteering to plant the #TowerPoppies

Towards the end of the summer I received an email from Team London with volunteering opportunities and one of those was to plant poppies at the Tower of London. I'd already seen them once - see The Poppies at the Tower of London - and had seen how remarkable the installation already was, so I was keen to volunteer some time to be part of this and to get up close to the poppies too. 

So at the end of September we headed to the Tower of London for our four-hour volunteerng session starting at 9am on a misty Sunday morning.  And that's early for us to be in town on a Sunday morning! 

After queuing with the other volunteers to enter the moat, we picked up our volunteer t-shirt and commemorative badge and having been split into groups of around twenty to thirty we watched a short film explaining the story of the poppies and how to to assemble them. Then we picked up our protective gloves and headed out into the moat - somehow, I don't know how I managed to pick up a pair of left-handed gloves! Luckily I'd brought my gardening gloves so quickly swapped to using those. I'd also brought some foam pads to kneel on and our knees were soon very grateful for those too!

Each group of volunteers split into two teams with half assembling the rods - small washer, large washer, spacer, end-cap which became our mantra - and the other half planting the poppies. We were assured the groups would swap over so everyone would be able to plant poppies (and we did) so we started assembling the rods. 

It wasn't quite as easy as it sounds. Some of the washers were quite hard to get onto the steel rods, which came in three lengths. Soon the gloves were abandoned as we knelt around the makeshift pallet tables and tubs of washers, spacers and end-caps.  

There was a knack to assembling the rods and it did (mostly) get easier, although there were some that I passed over to MOH for expert attention! The atmosphere among the volunteers was friendly and amicable although we were aware of the significance of each poppy, and each poppy was planted with the respect it deserved. 

We swapped to planting poppies, and clearly we needed the poppies which were stored in boxes at the edge of the moat to do that. To add the poppy to the assembled rod we needed to remove the end-cap and the spacer, add the poppy and then replace the spacer and end-cap. 

Then wearing the safety glasses - by now over our sunglasses as the sun had seen off the mist and it was a lovely day - we planted the poppies. There's a method for the three differing heights too, every half a metre there's a mid-height poppy and every metre there's a tall poppy. The majority of poppies are on steel rods approximately 50cm tall and we were encouraged to plant these so the poppies were touching. They looked better planted closely together, but I imagine there was also the need to fit in all of the 888,246.

The empty poppy boxes were returned to the workshops and used to deliver more poppies to the moat

We swapped back to assembling rods and if you saw my Black and White photo this Sunday - see Black & White photo 18: #TowerPoppies - you'll have seen that it was tough on our thumbs. We each had blisters and the cuticles on my index finger were split however this seemed a small inconvenience given the sacrifice that each of the poppies represented. 

There were plenty of opportunities for photos, including when one of the Beefeaters visited the moat

In each four-hour volunteer session they anticipate planting between five and seven thousand poppies. Just before midday, so about three hours into our shift the team-leaders said we could start packing up as in that session the volunteers had already assembled and planted seven thousand poppies! There were a lot of volunteers there that morning - perhaps a hundred or so, but that's a still a lot of poppies planted.   

MOH and I among the #TowerPoppies

And so, I'll leave you with a few more shots of the poppies taken from within the moat:

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

Our "twiglet" Sycamore trees

You may remember back in the summer we had a couple of branches down from our Sycamore trees, which was causing concern rather than damage - although the greenhouse did have a lucky escape, see Timberrr! Again. And pesky wildlife.  After a couple more smaller branches came down we decided it was time to call someone in to look at them and tell us what might be causing them to shed their branches. 

The tree surgeon made short work of diagnosing our issue. Squirrels. Yes, the pesky wildlife (although thankfully not the digging sort, see How my garden fared for itself) had taken things to a new level, quite literally and had been stripping the bark off our sycamores so they could get to the sweet, milky sap. And where they'd stripped the bark the whole way round, that branch died and eventually fell down.  Timberrr!

To resolve this, and to prevent any further branches falling we needed all three trees pollarded. And planning permission. Luckily the tree surgeon could sort this out and so last week the big cut took place.  Here's one of the trees before the work started:

And with the first tree - the one nearest the house - complete, I was amazed at how much more light there was now in our conservatory. 

Two done, one to go. The first tree had suffered quite a bit of squirrel-chewing - it's most noticeable on the central branch. And don't they look like twiglet's now?

There was quite a lot to cut off, and there was only one way for it to go. And that was down!  

I didn't fancy their job at all, but did manage to climb the stairs indoors to get this photo of the man in our tree, who looks as if he's completely engulfed by one of our cherry trees - he isn't, it's just perspective playing tricks on you. 

They had a nifty way of avoiding muddy footprints through the house though, which I'm grateful for!

And they did a fab job of tidying the garden afterwards too. 

And they left us with a heap of leaves and a pile of logs from just one of the trees.  With our leaf bin already full we spent an afternoon putting leaves into black sacks for even more leaf mould and ferrying the thinner branches mixed in with the leaves to our green waste bin. Three full black sacks later and a full wheelie bin and we've hardly made a dent in this pile.  On the plus side most of the leaves are down so while there's still more to do, once it's done, it's done!

Most of our garden had a covering of sawdust too, the hostas seem to be carrying it off well!

But all is not sawdust. The Fatsia is in flower and it's looking beautiful. I'm hoping to spend some more time with it and my camera so if the photos turn out well there could be some Fatsia infatuation in a Thursday or two. All the photos in this post are iPhone photos as I was trying to avoid getting in the way - but not always managing it!

In my raised beds the rainbow chard, parsley and beetroot are still going strong. But in the last week my rhubarb has slumped and I hope it enjoys its winter mulch. 

The berberis is beginning to show signs of autumn with the leaves starting to turn red. But my garden's still confused as the dahlia is still in flower. 

I couldn't resist snapping these parsley seed heads, I really should pull them up and compost them, but not just yet...

And I think this little fella probably agrees with that!