Coffee (right) and Cream (left)
Our depleted chicken numbers didn’t last long – we’re now up to five. We fancied getting some chickens that lay blue eggs and the two choices are Araucanas or Cream Legbars. Cream Legbars actually have some traces of the Araucana gene in them, and as blue eggs are a dominant trait anything that crosses with it will lay a blue egg. Read the rest of this entry »
Rum in happier times
We’ve had a bad start to the week. Yesterday, we decided to dispatch Rum, one of our Black Rock chickens. She hadn’t been well for the last week, and yesterday she could barely stand up. We gave her one last check over to make sure we hadn’t missed anything like a stuck egg or any swelling but found nothing, so decided to do the deed there and then. Read the rest of this entry »
Sunday morning lie in
It’s pouring with rain here today, so what better way to spend your Sunday morning?
Strawberries galore!
We’re in the middle of the first glut of the season. The warm weather is doing wonders for the strawberry crop, both inside the polytunnel and outside. I’m having to scour the internet for strawberry recipes (I’m not a big fan of strawberry jam so can’t use them up this way) but one solution may be to try making some strawberry wine (more on this another day). However, despite a good crop, the strawberries inside have got whitefly (Trialeurodes vaporariorum). Every time we go to pick some fruits clouds of little white specks come flying off the leaves. I’ve planted French marigolds as a deterrent (but clearly this hasn’t worked or I was too late), so my next option was to try a biological control. Read the rest of this entry »
Lush new grass...but for how long?
I don’t know where the time has gone. May is always a busy time in the garden, but it seems more so this year. I think the main reason is the amount of watering I’ve had to do. This dry weather couldn’t have come at a worse time for gardeners when lots of seeds are relying on damp soil to germinate. Our water butts (including our two 1000 litre tanks) had almost run dry, until a few days ago when we at last got a deluge of rain. However, even with a few hours of rain the soil was still pretty dry underneath. It looks like the dry spell is coming to an end (at least in this part of the country) and we’ve had a few days of rain. Read the rest of this entry »
Time to relax in the (mud) bath
These last few weeks of warm dry weather have been lovely for relaxing in the garden. Even the chickens and pigs love to have a good sunbathe and feel the warmth of the sun on their backs. However, the pig’s skin has been suffering a bit, so we decided this weekend to take some action and build them a wallow. Coincidentally a report was recently published highlighting the need for pigs to be able to wallow. The report suggests it’s not only a way for them to cool down (they don’t have any sweat glands), but that they just enjoy it, and it is hard-wired into them. Read the rest of this entry »
First of many...I hope!
I just managed to sneak the first harvest of new potatoes into April. These are the potatoes in bags I planted in the polytunnel back in February. They haven’t produced the most abundant crop, but there’s enough for a meal. Now the potatoes in store have just about run out, it’s good to be able to run seamlessly into the new potatoes. Definitely an experiment I will try again next year.
Asparagus crowns
Now we’ve got plenty of room in the garden, I thought I’d have a go at planting asparagus. As a perennial vegetable, it stays put year after year, so it isn’t something that many people can find the room for in an average sized vegetable garden. It’s also a bit of an investment, as the plants aren’t cheap, but hopefully once they’re established we should be rewarded with a good crop of asparagus spears for the next 20 years or so. I earmarked a space for them in my perennial veg plot, where they should get plenty of sun and the soil is (relatively) free of stones. I worked in some manure over the winter to try to enrich the soil a bit, and I’ll add a mulch of manure or compost each year. Read the rest of this entry »
Bracket fungi
It seems that foraging is the in-thing to do at the moment. With people having less money to spend and wanting all things natural, foraging for food seems an obvious way to get a free wholesome dinner. We’ve been foragers for some time, and used to go on many a walk armed with Richard Mabey’s Food for Free pocket book, looking for something to take home for our supper. We seem to do less foraging now, even though we’re in the heart of the countryside. It’s probably because we now have a bigger garden, so there’s less need or desire to forage for food. However, at this time of the year when not much is available in the veg garden, we like to see what we can forage from our own fields and hedgerows. Read the rest of this entry »
This year's crop in the making
It’s been a busy few weeks. The start of spring means things are starting to happen in the garden, and there is a flurry of activity at the potting bench. The recent warm weather has seen shoots appear where they should and shouldn’t have. So it’s now the start of the battle against the weeds and slugs to make sure the garden is as productive as it can be. I usually start my morning rounds off now with a slug hunt, some of which are fed to the chickens, and the rest are given a salting. As long as I keep up the routine for the next few weeks I should be able to keep the worst of the slugs at bay. I’m also leaving a few strategic pieces of wood and rotten vegetables around the place, as the slugs will hide under the wood once the sun comes up, and also gravitate to the smell of the rotting vegetables so can usually be found in its vicinity. Read the rest of this entry »