Can we go OFF GRID? | How GREEN are we NOW?

Today I look at whether we can go off-grid and whether that is a practical option for us, given our slightly cronky bodies and limited time. I also take a look at what we have on site that is helping us to lead a cleaner and greener life.

Thinking inside the box

Over the last couple of weeks I've noticed that the chickens have been queuing. A little like humans queue, they have been patiently and not-so-patiently waiting in line. But they haven't been queuing for rations, for the sales to start or for a food in short supply, they've been waiting to have access to the nesting boxes.

It seems to me that it's not a good idea for the girls to have to wait to lay their eggs, it must be a difficult enough process to go through without having the stress of waiting for a quiet space. So Mr J and I have been mulling over the best options for adding nesting boxes to the chicken shed. We thought about buying some lovely new plastic nesting boxes which we can attach to the shed wall either on the inside of it or externally, we thought about just putting some plastic boxes on the floor of the shed, but in the end we had a much smarter idea.

The chickens in the field with the chicken shed have access to the stable which we've converted into the chicken condo. It's a double size stable with a smaller section at the back and earlier in the year we had a couple of plastic containers in the back section in which the girls laid their eggs. Then one day I discovered a small rat in one of the containers and we decided to move their nest boxes. Since then we've found a way to keep the rodent population to a minimum (with a highly effective electric rat zapper) and so we could put nest boxes back into that cosy small section at the back of the stables.

We had a look around at what we had available to make some nesting boxes from. I was keen to use plastic containers to minimise the risk of mites finding a safe haven and we also needed something to secure the nest boxes in place. 

We had an old set of shelves made from melamine type boards, so we turned it on its side, secured the shelves back into place to accommodate some plastic boxes between them. Rather than have the shelf unit resting on the floor we put some concrete blocks on the floor to raise the shelf unit about eight inches off the floor.

We found three plastic boxes that fitted very neatly into the available spaces and made do with one smaller stacking box. I prefer the deeper boxes as I think the higher sides will give the girls more privacy while laying, but as I don't want to buy yet more plastic boxes, the stacker box will have to do until we can find either a matching box or something similar. I put some straw into each nest box and placed them into the shelves.

It looked great and certainly Big Red thought this would be a highly suitable place for his girls to lay their eggs. He hopped into one the boxes and started making his lovely little clucking, ticking noise that he does to encourage the girls to lay. Then he tried to jump out of the box and that's when we realised the flaw in our planning. The box tipped forward under his weight and landed upside down on the floor in front of the shelf unit. 

We needed a bar or something to hold the boxes in place. I found some bungee cords in a drawer and some cup hooks and fitted a makeshift holding cord. This didn't stop the boxes tipping forward a little bit as the birds got out of the nesting boxes, but it did stop them falling on to the floor.

The girls were very interested in what we'd made for them, but seemed wary of the wobbly box situation, so we were back to hunting around for a solution. We found the answer in two long heavy wood off-cuts that were in one of the piggeries when we moved in and put them in front of the boxes. This barrier not only stopped the boxes from tipping forward, but gave the girls a step to jump onto to give them easier access to the nesting boxes and to make it even more accessible to the smaller girls, I put this small log as an initial step.

This morning the girls have inspected the nesting boxes, but then returned to their old box in the chicken shed to lay. I am sure that it will only take a few days or so for the girls to start using the new nest boxes, so I have placed a rubber egg in each box as an encouragement.

Mr J and I visited a DIY superstore today, although it wasn't really that super, to buy a few tools that we need. I wanted a new axe and secateurs, ones that I could keep separate from every day use and keep clean for hygiene reasons and they will be added to my bird processing tool box.

We also had a good wander around and looked for things we wanted, like a pair of tongs to use to turn wood in the wood burning stoves although they didn't have any. But they did have the ceramic sink draining boards that I have quietly (and fairly vocally) liked for so long. Mr J and I stood in front of the drainers for a few minutes wishing that they weren't so expensive and then, to my delight, he added one to the trolley and headed for the tills.

 If you like the look of this drainer, here's a similar ceramic sink drainer or this one CERAMIC BELFAST DRAINER (these are affiliate links, please see the small print & disclosure tab above).

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Compost hotbed with vlog

When I went to bed last night I felt as though I hadn't achieved very much in the garden over the weekend, but as I talked it through with Mr J, I realised that I had managed to do quite a lot really. It's strange how our sense of achievement can so often be well under the reality (having said that, I know plenty of folks who also over-estimate what they have achieved!).

On Friday morning I spent a very happy hour in the area behind the piggeries starting to clear some of the semi-wilderness. I had been dreading tackling this, but the recent rain had softened the ground enough to make lifting the weeds a very simple task. Armed with leather gauntlet-style gloves, I was able to pull up stinging nettles, general weeds and brambles. I piled them into separate piles of compostable matter, stinging nettles (to use to make a feed and tonic for the plants in the kitchen garden) and pernicious weeds that I don't want to go into the compost heap and end up in the garden.

I cleared a space about twelve feet square, which hardly made a dent in the chaos, sorry the wildlife area, that we've let grow while we started the kitchen garden and other areas of the smallholding. The soil at the back of the piggeries is probably the best in our garden, years of leaves falling from the trees and rotting down have made the soil dark, rich and friable. So, rather than letting this good soil stay unused, we've decided to plant it up with some oca that I was given. Oca is an old vegetable that was replaced in popularity by potatoes, but in many ways they are easier to grow and less hassle than potatoes. They don't need to be earthed up as they don't go green and they store very well.

I also spotted a couple of nice seedlings in the kitchen garden that have self-sown (volunteers). Amongst the onions I spotted what I believe is a Virginia Creeper. It has just one large leaf and another smaller one just forming, so I'm going to leave it until it's about a foot high and then transplant it into a pot before deciding where it's final home will be.

I also found this seedling, which looks like some sort of fern. It is growing in the pea bed and I will leave it for a while yet to try to work out exactly what it is before deciding whether to lift and transplant it or dispose of it. If you know what it might be, please leave a comment to let me know.

There's a fairly strong smell of 'countryside' in the kitchen garden at the moment and we realised that it is probably coming from the pile of compost made from spent grain, straw and chicken manure with wood shavings that is in the open rather than cocooned in a pallet sided compost bay. So, to tackle the rather unpleasant aroma I decided to cover that compost pile in straw to try to keep the smell contained.

Mr J and I enlarged the bed to fill the allotted space and then to make use of it, as a productive area, before covering it in straw. And below is a short video of what we did. (If you can't view it on this blog page, you can find it on YouTube here).

On Sunday the weather forecast said it was going to rain for a greater part of the day, so we got as many chores done as we could early in the day and then headed to my sister and brother-in-law's home. They had offered us some waste wood as the roof of their house is being replaced and they offered us the old battens from their roof. So after a nice cuppa and catch up, we loaded up the van with two by one battens and then some old fencing posts that they didn't need. My brother-in-law kindly used his chain saw to cut a pointed end to each post so that they are ready for us to use right away and then, to my delight, he also gave us almost a full roll of chicken wire. It's a win-win situation, they no longer want the wood or wire and we do, so their garden is cleared of unwanted materials and we have more resources to enable us to complete even more tasks sooner rather than later.

While we were there, my sister asked me to 'go and have a look behind her shed'. When I'd finished laughing and double checked that this wasn't a euphemism, I duly wandered around to see the area behind the shed. It is absolutely filled with foxgloves and as a result, was alive with bees feasting on the nectar. She has invited me to lift some young foxglove plants for the garden which I will do in early autumn and transplant them to the young hedge that surrounds our plot. I won't put them into the herbaceous border as I have white foxgloves there and would quite like to keep them as white ones as long as I can, so to avoid too much cross pollination, the pink ones will be planted away from them.

After lunch the predicted rain paused for a couple of hours, so I headed back out into the garden to get as many plants as I could into the ground before the next downpour. I have a lot of young plants that have been hardened off outside the greenhouse and they are starting to show evidence of stress as they will have used all the nutrients in the soil in their pots. I planted this lovely ornamental cherry tree that my daughter gave me for Mother's Day. It arrived in the post as a ten to twelve inch high sapling and has now more than doubled in height and is strong and healthy. Around the tree I have placed a layer of cardboard and mulched it with straw, my main reason for doing this is to protect it from the strimmer or lawn mower rather than to reduce competition from weeds (which is also a useful side effect of the mulching layer).

Over the weekend one of the Cream Legbar chickens started to become broody, she sat in the nesting box of the henhouse that most of the chickens sleep in for half of Saturday and most of Sunday. Mr J and I talked through our options, it would after all, be nice if one of the chickens would raise a brood of chicks rather than us being surrogate parents, but we currently have 18 fertile eggs in the incubator which are due to hatch in eight days time and we weren't sure that we'd have enough quiet spaces for this broody hen to live while sitting on some eggs. It was good to talk through our options and work out where we could or would put the chicks from the incubator and a broody hen space. We have a small henhouse that could be used for a broody hen, so very carefully I moved her to the small house and we put water and food in it and left her there to settle down again. This morning, she was scratching to come out, had kicked the eggs all around the little house and was decidedly unimpressed with being in the small house. So for yesterday at least, that was a broody fail. I will keep a close watch on her in case she decides to nest in the large henhouse again and I'll have another try at moving her to a quieter place.

I've just been out to check on the chicken that was in a broody mood, she is back in the larger henhouse again, puffed up, low down on the wood shavings making little bok bok noises. The eggs that were in the small house that I moved her to (and that she abandoned this morning) have been attacked by the other chickens. I have no idea which of them started it, but when I walked around the corner of the shed to see what the commotion was, there were three hens and the cockerel in the small house having an 'egg fest'. They haven't touched the eggs that have been laid today in the usual nesting boxes, so perhaps they pecked at them because they were in an unusual place and there was a small container of chicken food in the house too.

Today we plan to start making the nursery area for the chicks that are due on 28th June. Once they are hatched they spend the first 24 hours in the incubator and will then be moved into the small secluded pen that we have set up in the boot room. This will only be large enough for them for a few days (it was fine for just the two chicks that hatched last time, but it won't be for more than four or five chicks for long) and then we plan to move them to the chicken condo that we've created in the old stables. They can have a slightly larger space with their water, food and the brooder in it (an electrically heated platform that they can nest under to stay warm that acts as a surrogate mother, for the warmth at least). They will live in their nursery area until they are four weeks old and then we'll move them into their own house and run in the chicken field until they are eight weeks old and can join the main flock.

So, it's time to go and start drawing up a plan of how we'll make the nursery coop and of course, have a cuppa!

Broody hen update - she spent most of the day on the nest again, coming out a couple of times for food. Tonight she is still on her chosen nest space with the other hens going to sleep around her, it hardly seems like a restful space. We will think again about finding a dark and quiet place for her to be moved to.

Being resourceful

Yesterday was exciting, not only was it grandson number one's birthday, but I also had two good pieces of news. In the afternoon, Mr J and I went to Bath to give my grandson his birthday gift. We gave him a selection of garden tools suitable for a five year old. My daughter and grandson are creating a small garden area for him to grow flowers and vegetables, so these should help him to create and look after his garden patch.

In the morning I received a message via Twitter (and if you don't follow me on Twitter, you can click on the button on the right to follow me), it was someone who lives reasonably locally asking whether they could come and volunteer on the smallholding.... well yes please! In exchange for a day of labouring, they'd like me to show them how we do everything here. Perfect swap, some physical help for those of us who struggle to get things done and an exchange of ideas.

This is really exciting for me, I am flattered that someone thinks our little smallholding is worth visiting to learn from and delighted that it is someone fairly local. Part of our plan when we moved in was to offer WOOFing opportunities, but I feel that we need to find a caravan or small wooden lodge for people to stay in if we want to do this, so a local resident who can visit for just a day or two without having to stay is the ideal start.

I've been thinking about sources of material for composting to help build our dreadfully poor soil. The compost heaps that I've been making are great and will certainly be useful for improving the quality of the sand and clay soil that we have here. The soil goes concrete hard in spring and at the moment (well over a week since it rained), it is cracked, looks baked, is pale and when I can scrape at the top of the soil, it becomes a dry, dusty powder. When it rains the soil becomes water logged and shows just how compacted it is. Neither of these situations are very good for growing luscious crops. So the answer is to add mulch, lots and lots of compost mulch, the ground is too hard to be able to dig it in, so placing it on top of the soil and letting the worms and microbes do what they do naturally is the best answer to the issue.

What I could really do with is a source of wood chips. We have enough space here to be able to leave large piles of wood chips to rot down and form lovely compost. I've contacted a couple of tree surgeons locally, but neither was terribly interested in bringing chipped trees. I can't find a municipal source (I know that in some places people can go and collect chipped trees for use in their gardens) and so I have had to think about other sources of materials for composting.

Yesterday I phoned a local small brewery to see whether I could have some spent hops and grain. The joy of talking to someone locally is that there is an instant connection because of proximity. I'm also keen to source local materials because there is less transporting. They explained that they currently give their spent hops and grains to another smallholder in the area, but that they would be happy to spread the love and they agreed to give us some spent hops and grain too. The brewery has to keep records of where its waste materials end up and there has to be traceability, so from their point of view a local smallholding is ideal. So now I am waiting for a text to say that they are brewing that day and then we'll need to drive to the brewery, which is just under two miles away, to collect the bags of spent grain and hops. Apparently each brew day will give us about half a bag of hops and seven bags of spent grain.

Spent hops and grain are green materials for the compost heap, rich in nitrogen and other minerals. I will need to make compost heaps by mixing the spent brewery grains with brown materials like sawdust, straw, wood chippings or dried leaves. Looking online, it seems that I will need to make a mixture of about one part spent grains to three parts brown material, so I had better speak to my neighbour and see if they have any more used wood shavings that I can have!

I will need to get the spent grains into compost piles pretty quickly, if I just leave them in a heap on their own after a couple of days they will start to ferment and smell nasty. So, it looks like I will need to find another source of brown material to mix with the spent grain. I am very excited at the prospect of being able to create large amounts of compost over the next few months and look forward to being able to improve the soil not only in the kitchen garden, but also the herbaceous border and shrubbery.

The other thing that I can do with fresh spent grain is to give some to the chickens. Not in vast quantities, but in small amounts to start with. I can offer them some grains in the field and allow them to scratch around to find them in their 'circle of love' - the name that we have given to the area we've made from straw bales and use to put the chicken's kitchen scraps, weeds, wood shavings etc. because the chickens love scratching about in it looking for tasty morsels.

So today, we are off to collect some more straw bales to use to mulch the vegetable beds and in readiness for the spent grains arriving next week.

Long lasting gift of flowers

I first started to enjoy gardening when I was about 22, when my son was just a year old and, as a gift from my parents, the garden of my rented flat was tidied up and made suitable for a small child to play in. It was then, with the encouragement of Geoff Hamilton each Friday night, that I first started to experiment with taking cuttings. Soon I tried taking them of all sorts of plants, cuttings that friends and family had given me, little pieces snapped off bushes over-hanging pavements (don't tell anyone!) and cuttings from plants in my garden.

It was a few years before I realised that there was another great source of material to take cuttings from - bouquets and bunches of flowers.

So, nowadays, whenever I am given flowers, like I was last week by my friend Cath, I have a look to see if there are any flowers that I would like to have in the garden and whether they have enough material for me to take cuttings.

Yesterday, when the roses were past their best, but not entirely dried and dead, I prepared the roses for taking cuttings. Actually, that's a rather glamorous way of saying I pulled them out of the vase starting with the yellow ones.

 Using a sharp knife, I cut the flowers off just above the top set of leaves and trimmed the base the of stem to just below a leaf node. I also removed extra leaves leaving just three to five on each stem, so as not to stress the cuttings while they are forming roots. Then I put the cuttings into an old milk bottle, which allows a long length of stem to sit in water, and labelled each milk bottle so I'd know which was pinky red (and very fragrant) and yellow and placed them on the kitchen windowsill.

They will stay there and I'll top up the water as necessary for the next few months. They should form fragile little roots and towards autumn I will carefully plant them into compost and transfer them to the greenhouse for the winter, before planting them into the garden next spring.

They won't all take root and they won't all survive, but some should and what an easy way to boost the flower collection in the garden, without any cost and most of all, I think this is a lovely way to continue enjoying a gift long after the original bouquet is on the compost heap.