Just before sunrise on 5 March, low on the south eastern horizon, search the eastern pre- dawn sky and you’ll find tiny Mercury (now at its maximum distance from the Sun) will be just above gas giant Jupiter. This conjunction between the Solar System’s smallest and largest planets will occur in the constellation of Capricornus, known as the Sea Goat. You will probably need binoculars, but be very careful using them close to sunrise! Mercury takes just 88 Earth-days to orbit the Sun, while Jupiter takes 11.87 Earth-years.
Mercury – Shutterstock
By the 9th of March, the Moon will reach its full moon phase – look towards the south-east in the early evening to see it. This month’s full moon will be a supermoon – in fact one of several supermoons this year. Because the Moon’s orbit isn’t a perfect circle, its distance from the Earth changes as it orbits the Earth. If the Moon comes within 90% of its closest approach to the Earth and it coincides with a full moon (or a new moon) it is called a supermoon. Due to its closer proximity the moon can appear 14% larger and 30% brighter compared to when it’s at its most distant. The April full moon will present the closest supermoon of this year, and because there are no official definitions about what constitutes a supermoon, some are counting the February and May full moons as supermoons too.
After dark on 19 March in the southwestern night sky, having drawn away from the Pleiades, Mars will be visited by a 32%-lit crescent Moon. Around midnight, from February all the way through to May, high in the southern night sky you will be able to view the ‘Beehive Cluster’ which is an open star cluster about 520 lightyears distant in the constellation of Cancer, the Crab. It is one of the best-looking open clusters of stars and one of the nearest to the Solar System. Also known as the Praesepe, it appears as around 60 stars in a pair of binoculars, though a dozen or so really stand out.
The March equinox occurs on 20 March. It marks the first day of spring (vernal equinox) in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of fall or autumn (autumnal equinox) in theSouthern Hemisphere. At the equinox, the Sun will shine directly on the equator and there will be nearly equal amounts or hours of daylight and night throughout the world on this day.
I’m not going to get into the debate of jam then cream or cream then jam, but however you layer them, nothing quite beats a scone fresh from the oven, closely followed by some homemade cakes.
If you are looking for something to make for your Mum this Mother’s Day, or for a loved one for their birthday, then here are some recipes for you to try, both for some scones and for two flavour versions of a sponge cake recipe that looks decadent but is actually super easy to make.
If you are looking for some local ingredients to add to your Cream Tea, then we are spoilt for choice for local tea Dorset… but I recommend checking out Its Tea in Poole if you are looking for something hand blended. They have a huge range of teas, from the standard English Breakfast to the more unusual.
You can find Dorset clotted cream in many farm shops but if you are looking for something a little different, Dorset Dairy Co sell their Cultured Cream which is a slightly tangier version. From Dorset with Love have a wide range of their handmade curds as well as delicious jams.
Fruit Scones
Fruit Scones : Image Heather Brown
Ingredients
8oz self raising flour 2oz butter (soft) 2oz caster sugar milk egg to glaze fresh raspberries or blueberries.
Method Line 2 x baking sheets with greaseproof paper and preheat the oven to 180 fan/gas 6.
Add the flour and sugar to a large bowl. With your hands, add in the butter and rub it into the flour and sugar mixture. This involves rubbing your fingers together amongst the butter and flour mixture until the butter is worked in and the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
Stir in the fresh fruit (you can leave this stage out if you would prefer plain scones). Then pour in the milk a little at a time. Stir the mixture together with your hands and continue to add the milk until the mixture forms a soft dough (you don’t need to knead the dough).
Tip out onto a floured surface. Gently press out the mixture so that it is about 1inch thick. Using a cutter (or your can just use a knife), cut out the scones and place on the lined trays. You can gently reform the dough and repeat the cutting until all the dough is used up. It should give you 6 – 10 small scones (depending on how big your cutter is).
Beat the egg in a small bowl with a fork and then brush the beaten egg onto the top of the scones. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes or until golden brown on top.
You can leave them to cool, but they do taste fantastic straight from the oven.
Mini Victoria Sponge
Mini Victoria Sponge : Image Heather Brown
Ingredients:
For the sponge mixture
8oz butter
8oz caster sugar
4 eggs
8oz self raising flour
Flavours… To make vanilla cakes – 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract. You will also need 2oz butter and 4oz icing sugar for the icing and a little raspberry or strawberry jam. To make lemon cakes – grated zest of 2 lemons, the juice of the 2 lemons, some lemon curd and then 2oz butter and 4oz of icing sugar for icing
Method: Smear some butter around the base and sides of 2 circular baking tins 8″ in diameter. Then place a circle of greaseproof in the base of each tin. Preheat the oven to gas 6 or 180 degrees fan. In a stand mixer, with an electric whisk or with a wooden spoon, beat together the butter, sugar and vanilla or lemon zest in a bowl really well. The mixture will change to be light and fluffy and the colour will turn pale. Add in the eggs one at a time, beating well between each egg. If the mixture curdles, you can add one spoonful of the flour and beat well. Slowly stir in the flour. Take care not to beat hard and knock out all of the air that has just been worked into the mix. Spoon the mixture into the 2 tins evenly and level the tops so they are mostly flat. Bake in the oven for 22-25 minutes. Check the bakes after 22 minutes, you may need to swap them around in the oven so they cook evenly. The cakes will be done when the cakes have come away from the edges of the pan and the top of the cake is springy to the touch. Leave the cakes to cool. To finish the cakes… remove the cakes from the tins and remove the parchment from the bottom. Using a 2 inch circular cutter and cut as many circles from the sponges as you can from the 2 sponges. You should be able to get at least 12 little sponges, to make 4 x 3 layer cakes. In a bowl or stand mixer, beat together the butter and icing sugar until you have a light and fluffy mixture. You can add a little lemon juice to the lemon icing if you wish, or add vanilla extract to the vanilla cakes.
Spread a thin layer of your jam (if vanilla cakes) or lemon curd (if lemon cakes) and a thin layer of the icing between the layers and stack the cakes together. Dust the top with a little extra icing sugar.
Extra tips…
For the lemon cakes – you can brush a little lemon juice over the sponges before stacking for some extra zing.
If you want to go that bit extra, rather than making buttercream icing, you can make Italian meringue and use that for a more lemon meringue style cake. To make Italian Meringue, heat together 1 cup of caster sugar with 1/3 cup water until it reaches 240degrees fahrenheit on a thermometer. Beat together 2 egg whites until stiff and whilst the mixer is still running, slowly pour in the hot syrup mixture until it is all combined. Keep the mixer running until the bowl of the mixer is cold. You can then pipe this onto the cakes with the lemon curd.
For the Vanilla cakes – you can use whipped fresh cream instead of icing and add some fresh fruit to the top of the cake. This won’t keep as well but if you make just before your are ready to eat, they will be delicious!
Are you a qualified or newly qualified Nurse looking to work in a District Nursing team? Look no further…….
Dorset HealthCare is all about progress and innovation and ensuring we achieve the best possible patient care and health and wellbeing outcomes for all our communities.
We are looking for individuals with excellent communication skills, who pride themselves in the quality of care they provide to patients to work within our District Nursing teams. Currently we have vacancies in
Sherborne
Sturminster Newton
Blandford
Gillingham
Full or part time positions available depending on what you are looking for.
The successful applicants will participate in the delivery of skilled autonomous nursing care to patients within their own home, and will gain an understanding of primary care including the management of long term conditions. You will have an opportunity to broaden your range of skills and knowledge in managing the nursing care or people in their own home or within local clinics.
If you are interested in discussing opportunities in Sturminster Newton or Blandford please contact Vicky Whittingham for an informal conversation on [email protected]
If you are interested in discussing opportunities in Sherborne please contact Caryl Hill for an informal conversation on [email protected]
Despite the job description on my contract with Westleaze Farm stating ‘Assistant Avian Production Manager’, working on a family-run farm means that you have to be prepared for anything any day. Which, in my opinion, is one of the numerous positives of dedicating your working days to the outdoors and animals. Most mornings are spent tending to the farm’s main source of income, our free range layer hens, that at the moment are producing over 7000 eggs a day. Come the afternoon, however, continual lists of seasonal jobs rotate to fill up the remaining duration of the week. Time flies when you jump between TB testing our herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle, rearing calves, delivering eggs or tending to the fences and hedges around our farm on the top of the picturesque Beaminster Downs.
Lohmann Brown – image by Andrew Livingston
It is for this reason that when speaking to a farmer, if you catch them as the sun begins to set, they are most likely to exclaim in their Dorset accent the immortal words of ‘there really ain’t enough hours in the day!’ This March, for us, there really won’t be enough hours in the day, as on our poultry unit that we rent on the outskirts of Weymouth we have period known in the industry as ‘turnaround’. In the space of four weeks, we will bid farewell to our current birds and clean and sanitise every inch of the shed that houses them, ready for a new flock of 8000 birds that will hopefully produce around two and a half million eggs over the coming year. The weapon required to lay that quantity of egg is the Lohmann Brown Classic. The bird, which is a crossbreed of the Rhode Island Red and White Rocks, is a finally-tuned athlete and for them to perform at their peak, the conditions of their environment need to be perfect. E. coli, Salmonellosis, Blackhead, Newcastle Disease, Coccidiosis and Avian Influenza (AI) is just a selection of possible health issues for our feathered-friends, if we do not ensure that their new home is bio secure. The latter, AI, has been prevalent in the UK for the last few months and has required for all poultry to be kept indoors to protect them for mixing with wild birds who could be carrying the disease. To ensure the health and welfare of the birds are satisfactory, my month of March will be spent attached to the end of a pressure washer as the ceiling to the floor and the walls to the nest boxes are all cleaned and sterilised. I am hoping for an upturn in temperature as past winter turnarounds have been havoc with the additional stress of frozen water and even deeper frozen fingers.
All the time and dedication will be worth it on the 22nd of the month as the new pullets will begin to populate their pristine shed. Like a child on their first-ever day of school, they will be apprehensive at first, but will soon range and explore their environments. Like the proud father of 8000 squawking girls… I wait in anticipation to find that very first egg.
An exciting opportunity has arisen for two exceptional and experienced beauty therapists to work in the Spa at the Eastbury Hotel in Sherborne.
We are looking for a Full Time Head Therapist for 45 hours per week plus a Part Time Spa Therapist working 30 hours a week. Our Spa works with Caudalie products, previous experience preferable but full training will be provided. Must be willing to be fully flexible and work weekends, Christmas, bank holidays etc.
Required:
Qualified NVQ level 3 Beauty Therapy/complementary therapy or equivalent. At least 2 years spa experience.
Start Date: April for full training.
The Hotel will reopen with the Spa on the 17th May 2021
Competitive rates of pay: Head Therapist £22Kpa
Part Time Therapist £9ph
Dependant on experience, plus commission and excellent staff benefits.
Please contact Gemma Wells on 01935 813131 or email your CV to [email protected]
With a break in the weather, Spring on its way and Boris soon allowing us out to play we can again look forward to the attraction of the outdoors. I have put together some titles to entice and entertain. Wayne
Critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith pulls Nick Carraway out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this exhilarating imagination of his life before he became the The Great Gatsby. Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby’s world, he was at the centre of a very different story – one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick delays his return home, hoping to escape the questions he cannot answer about the horrors of war. Instead, he embarks on a transcontinental redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence. An epic portrait of a truly singular era and a sweeping, romantic story of self-discovery, this rich and imaginative novel breathes new life into a character that many know only from the periphery. Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak, and profound yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden age scribes, Nick reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades.
The famous yellow ‘bible’ for anyone interested in gardens and the 2021 edition is now available. Its 744 pages contain descriptions of the 3,700 gardens opening to visitors throughout England and Wales this year, and offers people unique access to the most beautiful gardens in the country.
From the bestselling author and rewilding pioneer Isabella Tree, When We Went Wild is a heartwarming, sustainably printed picture book about the benefits of letting nature take the lead, inspired by real-life rewilding projects. Nancy and Jake are farmers. They raise their cows and pigs, and grow their crops. They use a lot of big machines to help them, and spray a lot of chemicals to get rid of the weeds and the pests. That’s what all good farmers do, isn’t it? And yet, there is no wildlife living on their farm. The animals look sad. Even the trees look sad! One day, Nancy has an idea… what if they stopped using all the machines, and all the chemicals, and instead they went wild? The author’s own experience of rewilding her estate at Knepp has influenced conservation techniques around the world that are bringing nature back to the countryside and bringing threatened species back from the brink.
In 2022 Winstone’s will celebrate 10 years as Sherborne’s Independent Bookseller. Winstone’s has won the ‘British Book Awards South West Bookseller of the Year’ four times and was winner of the ‘Independent Bookseller of the Year’ national award in 2016. Owner Wayne Winstone was previously one of the three judges for the Costa Prize for Fiction. This year Wayne was selected as one of the top 100 people in the Book Trade’s Most Influential Figures listing.
