Dad's been gardening again

Our garden (how can I put it) usually fluctuates between wild meadow and wilder meadow. However recently I have been able to strim the grass down, and keep it down, which suddenly makes planting out veggies a more likely option.

Over the past few weeks we have been growing the following from seed:

Basil
Chives
Rhubarb
Courgettes
Cauliflower
Mint
Swedes

We have also been kibbling some spuds to plant and today I cleared a corner of the garden of nettles and couch grass and got to plant out 6 the Courgette plants and about 13 spuds (the swedes were already out).

Regarding the other things, the chives and basil are doing well on the window sill, the Rhubarb seedlings are about 95% successful, the mint is 0% successful and the cauliflower seedlings are about 5% successful (only 2 made it to the surface but those 2 are doing well).

To balance the loss a kind freecycler donated an aubergine plant and a pepper plant which need planting into 5 litre pots but which look healthy. We also were given a crown of Rhubarb from a freecycler 2 years ago which has really settled in and this year has a good yield.

The swedes which were sown directly into the growing position a couple of weeks ago have already been thinned for me by over enthusiastic gastropods (slugs and snails). I have now resorted to Slug Pellets (die vermin, die).

Now if you are anything like me as a gardener, you work more on faith than know-how. Because of this I find the BBC website (so diverse in its usefulness) very helpful:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/basics/techniques/growfruitandveg_index.shtml

Even as a novice, and in spite of having to clear ground every time I want to plant something, it's fun to do and see things growing. Now just have to keep things ticking over. Gardens are natural systems, there is no rushing it at the end, it takes consistent application of effort.

Zos Chikins Are Crazee!

Some of you may know that we keep chickens. Well allow me to introduce them to you (before they end up in the pot). I can't introduce them all, they don't all have names, but here are a few of the prominent characters:

Captain Hastings

Captain Hastings is our rooster. Named after the character from Poirot, on account of his demeanour and general ineptitude when he first arrived, Hastings has come on in leaps and bounds and now really rules the roost. Funny how they figure it all out without any training.

Fortunata

Fortunata is one of our few remaining original hens. Apart from Hastings it is Fortunata that is in charge. She often has to be chastised for her treatment of the younger hens, but seems a lot better these days. Her superiority is well deserved however as she is by far the most inquisitive and intelligent of the entire lot (even Hastings - but no suprises there). If a hen is going to escape this is the one to keep your eye on. She is first to the food especially the special treats, like black berries, when she will easily manage to get three times as many as any of the others just by being quick. Her self interest in this regard means she will probably live a long time. As a mother she is excellent and uses her higher chicken intellect to the advantage of her brood - until the become adolescent, when the competition is back on.

The Weird Sisters

The Weird Sisters are a pair of black hens, named after the pop group in Harry Potter, these hens are psychotic egg sitters if ever there were any. Happy, or miserable, they will sit for weeks on unfertile eggs and literally have a fit if you oust them and take the eggs from under them.

This Weird Sister eyes the camera warily, she is wondering whether this is the same fellow that takes her eggs.

Random Hen

This is one of the newest arrivals. Bred here in the coop, this girl has not been given a name, though I am toying with the idea of calling her "office girl". We had 3 hens with this colouring a while ago all with crazy hair-do's that we called the Office Girls. We gave them away to a friend and it would be nice to have another set of office girls back again.

Lunch Break

Here you see a few hens milling around under the ever watchful eye of Captain Hastings, our rooster.

So there we have it. I can't say that chicken keeping is always easy. Especially when mucking out, though the droppings make great compost activator if your compost bin isn't doing it's job very well. But in summer when they are laying eggs like mad there is something satisfying about collecting your own fresh eggs.

Harvest Season

While Lije was bouncing away merrily, I took a look round the part finished garden and found that the year has moved on. The signs of the season were all around me.

We have apples growing on next door's tree, but leaning into our garden - yum.


We have wheat, ripening in our compost heap, no doubt leftovers from mucking out the chickens have grown.


We have blackberries in our jungle behind the chicken coop - yum yum.


Well, I picked some apples, (left the wheat) and collected some blackberries to make a crumble. I prepared the fruit and put it in the oven for stewing, in prep for the next stage of the crumble. I then forgot about the fruit in the oven and burnt it to a cinder.

Maybe I will try again tomorrow - at least the ingredients were free.

Mad birds lay 23 eggs in 1 week!

The mad birds in question being our hens. We spent weeks wanting them to lay, wondering if they were all broken. Then we realised that they were in "sitting" mode, with 4 hens squeezing into 2 nesting boxes to hatch a bunch of totally unfertile eggs. "Psycho sitters we call them." No wonder they stopped laying.

However, experience had led us to build the coop in such a way that we can in fact partition off the nesting boxes (for when chicks do actually come along). So we ousted 3 hens, and partitioned them off leaving only 1 hen to sit on the eggs.

The rest spent a week getting over their irkedness at being ousted but now we get between 3 and 4 eggs a day. (They layed 7 between Saturday evening and today). at last they begin to prove their worth outside of the oven.

The King is Dead... Long Live the King

It is with a certain amount of sadness that we report the passing of 4 of our roosters. Not by freak accident or passing predator - Dad stretched their necks.

While Dad is able to perform the execution, it is with sadness rather than glee. The thing is, we had 3 of our 8 surviving hatchlings turn out to be male, plus we were given one, resulting in 5 roosters in 1 coop. This is a bad situation for any chicken population. We waited until they were big enough to eat (by which time they had all started crowing together first thing - and I mean 5am - in the morning). Culling was therefore necessary.

Dad had not bothered to name or build a relationship with the new hatchlings knowing their fate would be the dinner table, however, regretably the decision was taken that the King rooster for the last 3 years should go, to make way for new genes in the gene pool. Dad felt genuinely sad about this one - but he had a good innings, and sired a fair few hens and competing young roosters. He is now crowing in the chicken afterlife.

You certainly have more respect for the meat you eat when you have to kill it yourself.

The carcasses were taken to a YM activity where Steve P showed us how to skin (because it is tidier than plucking) and gut them. Dad let someone else prepare the "King" and someone else will be eating it. We did however keep 2 of the un-named birds ourselves and will report back on the comparison between home grown and shop bought in a later post.