What a blessing it has felt to have such mild weather at the end of October. I have spent a part of each day this week in the garden, some days more than others, but I've enjoyed every moment that I've been outside.
A local tradesman has been applying rendering to the external wall of our bathroom this week. When we bought the house the previous owners were going to put cladding on the small extension, but as it would have been the only part of the house with cladding on it, we asked them to leave it as blockwork and agreed that we'd get it rendered. Moving in during the stormy winter months, it didn't get done for the first few months, but we were keen not to let it sit exposed to the rain and wind for a second winter. So a couple of weeks ago, I got several quotes for the job and the local plasterer completed the job this today. And it looks great!
What surprised me about the rendering task was the difference in the quotes that I received. I asked four local tradesmen for a quote for the job, each was given the same information about what we wanted done, but the quotes were wildly varying. Three of the quotes were for over £800 and the last quote was for a little over £310. Needless to say, I declined the higher quotes and saved us well over £500. Normally at this point, I would rant about why tradespeople feel it's okay to charge so much for a job when clearly it can be done for less than half the price, but I guess I must be mellowing as I don't want to waste my energy getting cross about it.
Outside I have continued to move wood chippings into the young Food Forest to cover the pathways and build up layers on the planted areas.
The planting beds have now had the weed suppressing membrane cut away from them, cardboard placed on the ground and composted wood chippings and topsoil put on top of the cardboard.
I've placed wood around the edges of two of the beds which should rot down over the next few years, but in the meantime will provide some definition and support for the wood chippings as I build up the depth of the beds.
I also placed some sticks in the body of this planting bed, they will add to the compost in time, but it was a useful way to dispose of some of the larger twigs and sticks that we have lying around.
Then the fruit and herb plants were planted. I had intended to leave the membrane down for a couple of years and then lift it around the plants that have been planted through the membrane, but I changed my mind and decided that doing this process now would stop the plants from being disturbed after they have put down a good root system. The Food Forest area is now about 30 feet by 70 feet and I'm very pleased with how it is beginning to look.
I've started to plant the trees that we bought last week. I've put in two cherries, a plum and three apple trees and have decided where the others will be planted. The soil is so poor and the ground highly compacted, so digging the hole for each tree is taking far longer than I'd like it to. I've also discovered two self-sown plum trees, one of which I think is a mirabelle (because of where it is growing). I'm using RootGrow mycorrhizal granules on the roots in the hope that this will help the trees settle into their new places more rapidly. The trees that are planted through the membrane and have chippings around them won't have to compete with weeds, but those planted into the other parts of the paddock are at risk of being swamped by clover, thistles or stinging nettles. So I have placed cardboard around them and covered it in a deep layer of wood chippings (taking care that it isn't touching the stem).
I've also continued to build up the layers of material on the most recent raised bed in the vegetable garden. Today I have added a layer of composted straw and brewery grains which have spent the summer in a compost bay with some summer squash growing on the heap. They aren't completely rotted down yet as I can still see some of the grains and the straw, but they are mostly decomposed and can continue to break down on the raised bed. The last layer to go on to the raised bed will be some topsoil, but the heap of topsoil got very wet in the rain last week and I've found it very heavy to move, so the final layer will have to be moved little by little as I have energy or will have to wait until Mr J can help me.
Elsewhere on the smallholding, the young chickens and ducks continue to grow but the chickens have all but stopped laying. Diesel is still laying around five eggs per week, Jack stopped laying some weeks ago and is now in full moult and starting to look rather sad for herself. The Cream Legbars have also stopped laying and are just starting to moult. For the winter period we have moved the Cream Legbars back into the main chicken field so that they can sleep in the large shed with the rest of the birds. This has two advantages, that more bodies in the shed will help keep it warmer and that there will be fewer houses for me to muck out.
The Australorps will stay in their own section of the field until they are less in number. We currently have one female and six young males in the Australorp field and over the next couple of weeks Mr J and I will decide which two we will keep for breeding and the others will be our meat birds for the next couple of months. The young female and two males will either join the flock in the main field or we will move them, together with the older female Australorp to a new site on the smallholding.
Next week we are due to have some leggy trees cut down and removed from behind the piggeries, which will give us another area that the chickens could move into. I am quite keen to let the Australorps run through the area behind the piggeries because they have proved to be excellent at clearing weeds and scrubland. In the meantime, I will spend a little time over the next few days clearing some of the debris that is behind the piggeries. I haven't really done very much in that area since we moved in and there is plenty of rubbish that needs to be taken away from the back piggery before any chickens live there.
I am looking forward to a weekend of pottering in the garden and with luck we will have another evening like today, when I can sit outside with a cuppa and watch the sun go down.
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On Monday a dear friend came to visit. Kim lives in Mid Wales and when I lived there we became very good pals. Kim's work and home commitments mean that she rarely has a chance to get away for a day or two, so it has been a long time since we've seen each other.
She arrived here shortly after noon and I showed her around in the light rain. Luckily the weather improved all the time she was here and by the time she left on Tuesday afternoon it was positively scorching hot. Kim is another of those friends with whom the conversation can have a six month pause, but when we chat again we immediately get back to laughing together.
As with everyone, she was very taken with the ducklings and as she hadn't spent time close up with chickens before, was fascinated by the girls behaviour. She sat with me in the chicken field and fed spinach and kale to the older birds. Little White has such a gentle disposition that it hard not to like her, she is always happy to come for a cuddle (or at least she tolerates me cuddling her!). With still at least a couple more months of growing to do, she is going to be a splendid bird.
Early on Monday morning I organised a space at the back of the piggeries to use for dispatching chickens. This is not a task that I have been looking forward to, but having made the decision and the undertaking to raise our own meat birds there is an inevitable task that needs to be done to provide us with home raised organic meat. I did the deed. It wasn't a very nice process, but I am happy that it was done humanely, kindly and calmly.
As it turns out, a young Cream Legbar cockerel has very little meat on its bones, but he did have some fat, so I am comfortable that the birds are getting a good balance of food out in the field. We had decided that he was going to be dispatched because all of our birds need to serve a purpose, he was supposed to be 'servicing' the girls but they just weren't interested in him. I think it was because although he was potentially a splendid specimen, he only had one wattle and I suspect that is what put the girls off him. He also had a rough technique with the girls and they really objected to his attention. When he did try to tread them, he was so rough that they girls would squeal with pain and run away. It seemed to us that this arrangement was unlikely to produce many fertile eggs, so he has gone and one of the young cockerels can now take his place as the lead male of the flock and we just hope that he will have a better technique!
Last night we talked about the best way to put the youngest chickens to work in the garden. The older girls scratch through their 'circle of love' (the area where we throw weeds, food scraps, wood shavings and straw from their houses and wood chippings) turning it into rich compost for the vegetable garden. We felt it was time for the young ones to pull their weight too.
Over the weekend I had removed the perennial weeds from a raised bed and lifted the last of the onions that had been growing there and the next task is to improve the soil before a winter crop goes into the bed. So today I have made a make-shift run in that raised bed.
Pushing bamboo canes around the edges and using a couple of tube arches I created a structure to wrap in chicken wire. Once I was happy that it was secure I put the Four Horsemen into the run together with their water dispenser and they will spend the next few days in there scratching amongst the straw and soil. Each evening I will move them back to their hen house so that they are safe from predators over night.
Well, I've seen some stroppy children in my time, but these young chickens looked for all the world like they'd been slapped in the face by the proverbial wet fish! I gave them some spinach and chard (their favourites) and sprinkled some of their organic chicken feed onto the ground to encourage them to scratch about, but no, they were just not very interested in earning their keep.
Early evening I got them out of the chicken wire raised bed confinement and put them back in the field that they think of as home and no sooner had I done that than they ran off out of the field, squeezing through the flexible chicken fencing to their new favourite place on the smallholding - the shrubbery near the front of the house - and started scratching amongst the bark chippings, flicking them all over the drive!
I marched them back to their pen in the chicken field and locked them in for the evening. I could hear them crying to be let out as I headed back to the house, but none of others are allowed to destroy the shrubbery and neither are they.
After supper we put all the birds to bed, the chickens put themselves of course, but we close the doors to their houses and make them safe for the night and we headed back inside to watch The Great British Bake Off. The start of the new series signals to me that we are coming to the end of summer and starting to transition towards autumn. The fruit and vegetables in the garden are indicating the same thing. I think I have picked the last of the green runner beans and will leave the remaining pods on the plants to ripen and save to use as dried beans or as seeds for next year's plants. The blackberries that grow so well around the perimeter of the smallholding are ripe and I have been picking handfuls every couple of days and even the apples on the trees are starting to look ready to pick. I am now regularly awake and pottering around downstairs well before dawn and yet the weather for the last couple of days has been positively glorious.
Anyway, it's all change week for the younger chickens. The Four Horsemen are now eight weeks old and the Dirty Dozen are four weeks old. This means that the Four will move into the main chicken shed to live with Jack, Diesel, Big Red and Little White until we separate the birds into flocks of their own breed at some point in the future. Then I can deep clean the enclosed hen house and pen ready for the Dozen to move into from their nursery pen in the stable.
So, after we'd watched an hour of television and it was fairly dark outside, we headed out with torches to move the Four Horsemen. Good grief, they still hadn't gone to sleep and while a bit dozey, they certainly weren't in a deep sleep. Mr J was on door opening duty while I lifted the wriggly little Horsemen from their house and carried them to the chicken shed. I popped them onto the floor just inside the door and when they wake up in the morning they will be part of the big girls flock. Or at least, that is the theory. The chances are that there will be quite a bit of squawking from the shed as the sun comes up and the Four will race off, squeeze through the flexible chicken fencing and make a bid for the freedom of the shrubbery. At which point, I will scoop them up and take them over to the raised bed so that they can continue to scratch there, turning the soil and fertilising it, ready for the next crop to be planted in it.
The ducklings have already moved to their outside home, they have been sleeping in their house for a couple of nights and seem to be quite happy going up the (fairly steep) ramp to bed each evening. Once the Dozen are out in the house in the field the stable will be empty again, giving me the chance to empty and clean the chicken's nursery run and close it down until the spring and to prepare the duck nursery run for new arrivals. We have one last batch of duck eggs in the incubator which are due to hatch early next week. I know that it is quite late in the year to be hatching more ducklings, but we wanted to raise a couple more before next spring if we could. My guess is that they will spend longer inside before moving out if the weather get suddenly cool or, if we are lucky and have a mild autumn, they can move outside at four weeks old as the current ducklings have done.
It is now Thursday morning, the sun is just starting to lighten the sky and I am going to head outside and try to curtail any unpleasantness in the chicken shed, but first, as always, it's time to make a cuppa.
After my night out on Wednesday, I knew that Thursday would have to be a gentle day. In the end I slept for over four hours in the afternoon, but felt refreshed and recovered after the much needed restorative sleep.
Even a gentle day requires some basic tasks to be done, the chicken houses need cleaning out (a task that I do daily with a deep clean weekly), plants in and around the greenhouse need watering and weeds need lifting as and when we see them and (yuk!) the continuing treatment of the new rooster's legs needed attending to. They already look much improved and the poor little chap can't help that his legs are in a grim state.
The girls continue to be less than impressed with him and I have noticed that even Jack (who is usually super-keen for the attention of a gentleman bird) is declining his advances. One of our neighbour's chickens however is eager to meet him and Friday afternoon, she wandered into our yard and made a bee-line for the field. Blocked from reaching him by the large fence and gate leading into the chicken's field, she mournfully wandered around our back garden until the neighbour and Mr J gently guided her home again.
I've also continued to move compost from the oldest heap in the chicken's field to the raised beds in the kitchen garden, just doing a little at a time so that I didn't overdo it. I'm finding it very difficult to pace myself slowly to conserve my energy because I am so excited about creating our kitchen garden, about developing the perennial bed and giving the whole place our own stamp.
The postman has delivered some citric acid, which I had ordered online after a failure to find it locally. Neither the village chemist or the two in the local town stocked it, one told Mr J that they had stopped stocking it after it had been discovered that someone was 'abusing' it. This caused much merriment in our home, what on earth was someone doing to it, calling it names, hitting it? Obviously, it is actually a serious thing if someone was using it for illegal purposes, but the 'someone was abusing it' statement tickled us.
Anyway, the reason I wanted the citric acid was simple, I wanted to make some Elderflower Cordial and while I have found lots of different recipes that include and don't include citric acid, I decided to include it. So, Saturday while the sun was warming the elderflowers on the tree, I picked the open flower heads and took them inside to prepare them. The cordial smells lovely and tastes even nicer. I have filled a couple of bottles with the cordial to keep in the fridge. The remainder of the cordial has been put into ice cube trays in the freezer and then when we want a drink, it will just be a matter of popping one cordial cube into a glass and topping up the glass with water.
I watched several 'how to' videos about making elderflower cordial and all of them baffled me in one way or another. Mostly because they all talked about keeping out of the mixture anything that may make it taste bitter and then they promptly included the very things they said to avoid! So this recipe is the one I've used taking elements of several other recipes that I've read and seen.
Elderflower Cordial
25 to 30 heads of elderflowers, collected on a warm or hot day when the flowers are fully open (beware - the pollen may get all over your clothes!)
1kg unrefined sugar (caster or granulated)
1ltr water just off the boil
1/2 ltr cold water
50g citric acid
One unwaxed lemon
Prepare the flowers by shaking them gently to remove any insects, check them over and remove any brown bits and unopened flower buds. Remove the flowers from the stems using a fork, pick out as many of the flower stalks as possible, leaving just the tiny, fragrant flowers.
Put the sugar into a large glass or earthenware bowl and add the hot water, stir using a wooden spoon to help dissolve the sugar, then add the cold water to help cool the mixture.
Add the citric acid and finely grated zest of one lemon and stir in gently.
Remove all the pith and cut the ends from the lemon and discard. Then slice the fruit and add it to the mixture.
Add the elderflowers and stir gently again ensuring all the flowers are moistened. Cover and leave to 'steep' or 'mash' for 24 hours.
The next day, strain the mixture through a fine muslin cloth to remove all the flowers and lemon from the cordial and bottle and keep in the fridge or freeze.
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So, Friday evening Mr J and I went to Hay Festival in Hay on Wye to see David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd fame) and Polly Samson (his wife and an author) talk about their song writing partnership and the process that they use to write songs. This outing was my birthday gift to Mr J and I wasn't really expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, so that was just a bonus! Hay Festival offers a wide variety of events and although I haven't been very often, I've really enjoyed it when I have. It runs this year until 5th June.
On our journey to and from Hay on Wye, Mr J and I talked about our options for chicken rearing. We have ordered some hatching eggs of White Jersey Giants (like 'Little White') and some Australorp hens, which are black feathered, fast growing dual purpose birds and will be ideal as meat birds. I'd had a long talk with Merv, the gentleman who had supplied us with the Cream Legbar chickens, the cockerel (that passed away) and a second hand brooder for the chicks. Merv suggested a couple of different breeds that we might want to consider as meat birds and most importantly, which ones in his opinion, were less good. I value his opinion, he has a wealth of knowledge about chickens and I am keen to learn as much as I can from someone with experience. This, I hope, will help us avoid making too many mistakes.
Merv kindly offered us a young cockerel to replace the Cream Legbar (CLB) that died. We are keeping the CLB chickens to supply us with eggs as we both particularly like the blue shelled eggs that they lay. A cockerel would not only allow us to increase the CLB flock but to offer fertile eggs for others to hatch.
We could then also have a small flock of Australorp birds to supply us with meat. Once we have a few eggs hatched we can select the best of the cockerels to keep for breeding more meat birds and any other cockerels can go into the pot.
The white Jersey Giants will, we hope, form a small flock. I had located a second seller of hatching eggs of these birds so the bloodlines should be different enough to allow us to breed from them too.
We could then also have a further small flock of hybrid birds to supply us with more eggs and meat. So we think we have a plan. Three or four small flocks run in different areas of the chicken field and back garden. It will require us to fence off areas for each breed and supply each area with a suitable henhouse, but we can do this fairly easily.
The next thing to think about is how we will feed all these chickens as to make them economically viable, we can't feed them solely on organic layer's pellets. So the plan is to assign an area in each sectioned off part of the field and back garden to grow additional greens for the chickens to eat. We have plenty of seed and seedlings that we can plant now in preparation for the birds moving into their areas. Then as we feed the birds each day, we can use some of the greens that are growing in their area to supplement the layer's pellets. At the start of each season we can let the birds in to the small growing area to clear the soil of weeds and uneaten veg and section off a different part of their enclosure to grow in for the next year. The birds will have scratched over and fertilised the new area during the previous year making the ground rich and ready for planting. These are simple and basic permaculture principles, which we believe will work for us.
Saturday morning we went to the garden centre, pretty much as it opened to look for scrap wood (as they have a pile of wood that is free to take away) and for cardboard boxes. There was no wood that would be useful to us, but we struck gold on the cardboard box front. These larger boxes are not much use to people purchasing a few plants and the staff at the garden centre were very happy for us to take these away. I think that the early Saturday slot may have to become a regular feature for us while we are still laying out the kitchen garden.
Each raised bed and every pathway has a cardboard layer beneath it to help kill off the grass, The cardboard rots down over time, feeding the worms in the ground and then eventually feeding the soil. Creating the kitchen garden is being done on a very tight budget. Having purchased the wood lengths from a reclamation site, the cardboard, compost and path coverings need to be acquired free of charge. So, the cardboard is coming from the garden centre, my friends, neighbours and family and just about anywhere where we can find free cardboard boxes, the path coverings are chipped conifer trees from our garden and my sister's home, and the compost is being made in large amounts just as fast as I can gather the materials to make it. Having bought in one ton of top soil, I think we may need to buy in some more to complete filling the raised beds.
So, the compost making continues, I now have 5 compost bays to use, I'm using one to store chipped conifers until I've laid down the cardboard boxes for some of the pathways. One contains wood shavings, newspaper and chicken manure from my neighbour's chicken shed. One has the start of the next compost heap and one is empty at the moment. The other one has the last compost heap that I made on 16th May.
I added some more layers to it yesterday and then noticed that the bottom of the compost is starting to look brown, so perhaps I will have made three week compost again. It is now a relatively simple affair to put a three to four inch layer of straw in the base of a compost bay and add layers of green and brown materials. Each time Mr J cuts some grass I add it to a heap in layers, alternating with a layer of the wood shavings from those stored in one of the bays. This hot composting makes for fast compost, but I am slightly concerned by the lack of worms in most areas of the garden, a slow compost would give the worms a chance to breed. feed and multiply again.
Yesterday afternoon my daughter and her family came to visit bringing with them some cardboard boxes and three bin liners of grass cuttings. Some mothers like flowers or chocolate (and I like these too) and other mothers get excited about cardboard and grass clippings. Grandson number one helped me to pick more elderflower heads to prepare to make some elderflower wine while my daughter, her partner and grandson number two were settled on a blanket in the front garden. He and I talked about bugs, butterflies and stinging nettles and how to tell if a flower is open or still in bud. He also had a ride around on his tractor and his father took him around to inspect all his favourite birds. Jack (the hybrid chicken) was his when they lived at my daughter's house, so he is always keen to see how she is and he seems delighted that Big Red is Jack's offspring.
It's bank holiday Monday today and as seems to be a tradition, the weather is not as warm as it has been for the last few days. There is however, still plenty to be getting on with, so before I head out into the garden, I think it must be time for a cuppa.
