Chick chick chick chick chickens!

I can't believe I didn't get around to posting about the chickens! The Summer was busy and the start of term has been even busier, and time is flying by. They've been with us for 10 days now and seem to be settling in nicely. I've not noticed any problem with them establishing pecking order, they did peck each other a bit at first but nobody got hurt and it seems to have calmed down for now. They eat well (I think) and drink well. They like tipping their water feeder over and making a big muddy patch. They enjoy scratching around in the dirt, the Easibed I put down looks awful already and I'm not entirely sure what its purpose is! The roof is keeping them nice and dry when it rains. I haven't seen a fox yet. They went fairly nuts when they saw Phoebe the cat so I can imagine they will alert me if I'm around when a fox comes to call! I haven't let them out of their pen yet, but I think I probably will at some point.

 This is Lucy with Bellatrix. She's *gorgeous* - she's black but her feathers have a sort of metallic green tinge to them.

 Hermione at the front and Ginny at the back. Ginny is quite nervy and looks like she's going to be absolutely massive. She still has some of her white juvenile feathers which I'm hoping won't all fall out, because they're quite distinctive! The Omlet man said she looks more mature than Hermione despite the feathers. Hermione is a character. She's forever trying to peck at my red Crocs. How they can look tasty I don't know! She also adores sweetcorn.

 On Saturday, just 4 days after the chooks arrived, the girls found an egg! It absolutely made their day, we were all SO thrilled. Sadly it's been the only one so far an I'm beginning to wonder if we imagined it.. but when they're properly laying it's going to be AMAZING and I can't wait. It will make all the poo worth it :)

I love this one :)

35g! Aww.

Allotment plans..

I would like to grow:

Maincrop potatoes, anything that roasts & mashes well because that's what I mainly use spuds for
Garlic - thinking of elephant garlic
Red onions and normal onions - not crazy amounts, although I will make red onion marmalade with some and dehydrate the rest
Squashes and pumpkins. Perhaps something giant to keep the girls interested, plus butternut squash (surely they have to grow for me at some point?!) and crown prince, my favourites
Beetroot
Sweetcorn
Sunflowers, again to keep the girls interested!

There will no doubt be more when I get the Spring seed catalogues. Can't wait.

And in other news.. 8 days til we get our chickens!! Sooooo excited! 

Allotment!

I finally got down there for another nose this evening. I'm so thrilled. OK, so it's a lot of work, and getting the weeds and bolted things up isn't going to be much fun. But all that growing space will be brilliant. Also it has an existing fruit cage and a big rhubarb plant, and a little strawberry patch. I'm a little paranoid that the old (still just about existing) owner will come and remove everything, but I think the chances are pretty low.

The fruit cage is home to a load of raspberry canes with lots of lovely ripe untouched fruit on them, and what appears to be 2 gooseberry bushes and 2 blackcurrant bushes! I'm SO HAPPY about this!!!










I'm also considering investing in a food dehydrator. My current top choice is the Stockli model, as it's not extortionately expensive but seems a decent one. I'll be buying some of the fruit leather inserts because fruit leathers are amazing and we all love them. I must admit that my primary reason for considering getting one was the leather aspect, but it seems you can also dehydrate things like onions and courgettes, and then rehydrate them for use in cooking throughout the year. It seems an ideal way of coping with gluts of things (ha, fat chance of that this year!) and takes way less space than trying to store things in a 'cool dry place' or the freezer. It might end up gathering dust like so many of my other gadgets, but so far I'm hopeful :)  Especially now I'm going to have lots of different kinds of berries to experiment with!

It's been a while..

I have been a little disheartened to be honest, but it's not all bad. The beans seem to be doing very well since I bought a rainbow coloured twirly bird scarer thing from Poundland..

We've also had a decent supply of cucumbers, although the latest ones are very strangely shaped!

I don't think it will be long before our apples are ready. Some of them are very tiny, but that's OK. I can't wait to try them!

 Scrumptious

Broadholme Beauty

I harvested my red onions yesterday. I didn't have room to plant many of the set, so it was a bit of a waste of money, but.. yesterday I met my allotment for the first time! It's VERY weedy but huge and my mum assures me it has good soil. And it only costs £4.50 a year! So next year I will be growing loads of things :)

We've been blackberry picking twice over the Summer holidays and have made a few jars of bramble jelly and a batch of fruit leathers. The leathers are delicious and have proved so popular that I'm seriously considering splashing out on a dehydrator, as our oven doesn't go low enough to cook them without burning within minutes, and unfortunately my friend's oven took *3 days* to dry them sufficently which is a bit of a pain if you want to cook anything else! 

And in even more exciting news, CHICKEN RUN!!!

15 days until the chickens arrive :)  I hope our girls like their new home!
More chicken and allotment news to follow :)

The garden is disappointing me this Summer. It seems very slow to take off and I don't know why. My bean flowers are disappearing as quickly as they appear and I don't know what's eating them. The dwarf beans are a lost cause. Lettuces bolted ages ago, although there are a few still out there. I only have 2 peppers growing out of about a zillion plants (perhaps time to close the greenhouse? I've left it open all the time for a good month or two now which probably defeats the object).  Melons, chillis and watermelons have no flowers yet, squashes are slow to grow. I'm sure they're normally enormous trailing plants by this stage of the Summer. Beetroot is a lost cause. It's so disheartening. Tomatoes are really slow too, although I'm harvesting a few of the Tumbling Toms at last. Bit fed up to be honest.

Plums..

While I was putting the tree netting up I had a quick count of the plums on our tree. I counted 85!!!!! I'd better get researching plum recipes :)

Failures so far this year: lettuce (as usual), dwarf beans, beetroot.

Home grown cherries..

Are the single nicest thing I have EVER eaten in my life, ever. Even nicer than Christmas dinner and chocolate and birthday cake and trifle and strawberries and cream and all my other favourite foods.

We don't have many, again. Last year we had around the same amount but all but 5 were eaten by birds. This year the birds did start pecking at them before they got ripe, so a few had holes in and went mouldy, but there are a fairly decent number left considering the tree's only on it's second year.

Pudding!

The remaining cherries, still ripening

Millie with her cherry. Yes, she does have one plait and one pigtail. I was using her gorgeous Rapunzelish hair to practise fishtail plaits on, and her other side was inaccessible ;)

Posing, with cherry juice on her face. And in her teeth. And down her top.

In other news, this weekend we went raspberry picking at Our lovely local fruit farm. We picked from the tunnels and they were amazing. I am definitely going to attempt to avoid supermarket fruit where possible because it's nothing like the freshly picked stuff! Anyway, I made the raspberries into a jelly, and got my standard 2.5 jars out of the batch (I seem to get this number no matter how much fruit I use!)  Jelly making is so satisfying. I'm going to try and stockpile a load to get us through til next Summer. I'll try strawberry and redcurrant next, also from Primrose Vale fruit :)

The garden is enjoying all the rain. I am not. Where's Summer?!

Today Millie and I harvested the first bag of potatoes. These are actually the 'second earlies' and shouldn't have been the first ones we harvested, but the plants had died and rotted away so I thought we might as well get stuck in. I tipped the contents of the potato bag out onto a binbag and Millie gathered all the spuds. She loved it :)

We've begun to harvest quite a few things. I've been helping myself to sugarsnap peas for a couple of weeks now. They're quite yummy but I think I should probably try cooking them to tempt the children with.

The fruit is doing well. The cherries have started to turn red all of a sudden, which is a pain because I still don't have my fruit tree nets (they're on order). Some of them have been attacked by birds already :(

I can't tell if the plums are looking any bigger or not. I had hoped that the photos in this blog would make slow growth more obvious, but I'm not convinced!

 The mini cucumbers are almost ready to pick. They're SO cute! Apparently each plant (we have 2) can produce up to 20 of these per week. I hope that's a gross exaggeration because the three of us can definitely not manage 40 mini cucumbers in 7 days. The guinea pig might help though :)

June Drop hit the apple trees quite heavily, but as my dad has pointed out, I'm very lucky to be getting any baby apples at all in the first and second years of planting. I think we'll have enough to enjoy, anyway, and only the pear and Bramley haven't produced anything this Summer.

Finally, look at the cute little tomato! I moved the three Tumbling Toms out this week, and planted out the Super Marmandes. I hope not to have to buy any tomatoes at all from July-September/October (wishful thinking I know, they're bound to sucumb to blight as usual)

Hopefully it won't be too long before I actually get to make something out of all this lot. I'm hoping to go raspberry picking at the PYO place soon, and then to make raspberry jelly which is probably one of the nicest foods I've ever tasted.

Garden photos

 Cherries! Almost fully grown, but there's no sign of them turning red yet. Must buy tree nets.

 Uh oh, an apple cordon that's growing at a 90 degree angle because all the fruit is forming at the top..

 The strawberries are mostly being protected from birds this year. These little beauties were hiding under the enviromesh :)

 Potato flowers

 Mini cucumbers! I really hope these are going to grow into fruits. They do look slightly bigger than they did two days ago..

 I have a new plan for the future chickens. I think the best option is a walk in run at the bottom of the garden (here, in place of the shrub and along the fence) with an Eglu coop inside it. I'm hoping to have this in place by my birthday (August 31st)!

 Blueberries!

Fattening plums

Well, I was wrong about the blueberries. The things that withered and died were the flowers. They've left hundreds of little green berries in their wake. Blueberry muffins are on the horizon after all! Hooray.

Our first strawberries are beginning to ripe, but typically something is eating them. Birds, I think. It's so frustrating. I always forget just how frustrating growing our own can be over the Winter, and each Spring I sow seeds and plant seedlings with 'oh it will be fine this year' thoughts and it never is! It is still fun overall, though. I think I'm at that annoying stage where I seem to have been growing things for ages and I'm getting very little fruits of labour. I'm sure things will pick up in another month or so.

We have rats in the garden. I've known about them for a few weeks but was using the 'ignore them and they'll go away/the cat will eat them' approach to pest control. The cats murdered 3 rats for me and then gave up. The little blighters are helping themselves to the guinea pig's food and have even gnawed a hole in the top of the compost bin and stolen anything that looks tasty. I've ordered some bait boxes and poison blocks. Otherwise I can just tell that we'll be in for a Summer of rats stealing all our vegetables.

And in other news, I think I've decided to get chickens! I'd like one of these for ease of cleaning:

It's an Eglu Classic. I REALLY like the look of the Cube but sadly I think it would take up too much space. I could keep 3 hens in the above, although I'd like them to be free range when I'm at home, so I'll need to protect my trees and veggies from them. I'm sooooo excited at the thought of having our own eggs. I think I'll be waiting until the end of August/beginning of September because we'll be away a few times over the Summer and I don't want to leave brand new hens behind. This will also give me a chance to save, something that I am not very good at when I have access to a credit card!

Bloody caterpillars

This is what they are doing to my apples. :(

Garden update

Things are coming on well. My greenhouse is full of seedlings..

The things on the floor are sweetcorn and beans, and they're threatening to take over the world. I think I may have to plant them out at the weekend and hope the temperatures stay as they are (or above!)

The fruit is growing very well, although the blueberries are all withering and dropping off the bush, so I think I need to plant a little friend for them.

Sunset apples

 Scrumptious apples

Strawberries

Not so baby plums

Alpine strawberries. These have done SO much better than I ever thought they would.










 And in other exciting garden news, we ate our first cabbage of the season yesterday, and it was so yummy that even the girls cleared their plates! The others aren't quite as 'solid' in the middle. I hope they'll fatten up soon because I need the space they're in for the epic corn.

Note to self

In future, do not let rainbow chard go to seed. Then, do not plant beetroot in the *exact* same spot that rainbow chard will try to re-establish itself. I have no idea which is which!

A learning curve

A little over a year ago, Amelia and I planted a blueberry bush in a tub of ericaceous compost.

 It grew a lot, and produced leaves, but not a single blueberry did it grow that Summer. We were very disappointed.

Fast forward to now, and it's covered in hundreds of little pinky purple buds. I've been watching them closely, expecting them to open into flowers and turn into blueberries in much the same way that our other fruits do. But apparently that's not how blueberries grow! They are currently looking like this:

 

 The buds simply inflate into hollow, white spheres. They remind me of those round paper lightshades people have on their ceilings. I pressume they will get plumper and purpler over time.

I'd better look into netting them so the birds don't get to them first! Hopefully we'll have enough to make a batch of muffins as well as eating them raw. Yum.

In plum tree news, I am very excited because some of the flowers are now looking like this (excuse poor focus, the camera was very confused!):

BABY PLUMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Blossom

I've been very busy over the past six weeks. I think I've started off all of my pot grown vegetables now, although I'll need to keep sowing things like carrots, lettuce and beetroot every so often. My garden is under threat from weeds. I have never, ever seen it so bad and I'm sure I've weeded more this year than ever before! I must get out there and sort it out properly. It's been unseasonably warm, but apparently the nice weather is over now and it'll be much cooler and wetter for the forseeable future. I think the garden needs the rain.

The most exciting thing is that my fruit trees are waking up and blossoming, so I thought I'd share some photos.

A snail going for a slither on the plum tree, which was the first to blossom.

This is what it looks like now, two weeks later. I'm constantly inspecting the flowers to see if there's any sign of some little plums growing!

Cherry blossom. I MUST get this covered in netting this year. I'm not losing all the cherries to pesky birds again!

Apple blossom. This is the Sunset variety (excuse the weeds in the background!). Two of the newest apple trees, Red Devil and Scrumptious, are also starting to flower, but Broadholme Beauty, Bramley's Seedling, and the solo pear tree are only producing leaves this year.