Starting a Food Forest

Friday 2nd Spetember. I've been researching ways to increase our harvest whilst also improving the land on which we live. Time and time again I come back to a permaculture idea of a food forest. It seems to me to make absolute sense to work with nature, not against it and emulate it as it is so successful at being self sustaining.

The idea of a food forest is that just like any forest there are several layers of growth from tall canopy trees to root crops, each layer is comprised edible plants of some sort and as leaves drop from trees and annuals die off, the forest floor becomes richer with organic matter feeding the plants for the next year. This is a long term plan. We can't plant fully grown trees and shrubs, so we will plant young trees and plants and over time they will grow to provide the layers.

Image source: Permaculture a Beginner’s Guide, by Graham Burnett

 By recreating a forest with it's multi layers of growth I can have a highly productive area of edible plants that doesn't need constant tending and planting each year. It will become more productive as years pass and will build better and better soil. We want to leave this small space in better condition and with more trees and vegetation on it than when we arrived.

 So I've identified an area that would be ideal for a food forest. Ideally I would lay down a very thick layer of cardboard and cover it in around 30 - 40 cms of wood chippings, but I don't think we will have access to that volume wood chippings and so, to start off with, I am going to put down a weed suppressing membrane and a 15 - 20 cms layer of wood chippings and then in a couple of years remove the membrane disturbing the soil layer as little as possible and let nature take over.

 I ordered some membrane which arrived yesterday and to keep myself distracted from the latest hatch that was happening in the incubator I started to lay the membrane.

This first section of membrane is six and a half feet (2 metres) wide and approximately 40 feet (12 metres) long and it seems to hardly make a dent in the area that I've earmarked for the food forest. I am excited by this project, I like the idea of creating something more permanent on this land. It won't replace the raised beds which I will continue to use for growing annual food crops, cutting flowers and herbs, but it should add a new dimension to the smallholding.

 As luck would have it, on Wednesday evening the tree surgeon delivered another load of composted wood chippings. This is by far the most well composted material that he has dropped off. Much of it is a rich almost black colour, just like the soil found on a forest floor, so will be ideal for the food forest area as well as being used to enrich the soil in the raised beds.

Once I had lightly pegged down the membrane I loaded a wheel barrow to overflowing with wood chippings and tipped it onto the membrane. As you can see, it hardly shows on this large space and this sheet of membrane is only the first of many. It's going to take an awful lot of wheel barrow loads to cover this area! I thought that I'd cover the areas that I want to put plants in first and leave the pathways clear until later. As we are having some tall but spindly sycamore trees taken down from just behind the piggeries before too long, I will use the chipped upper branches to cover the pathways as these don't need to be composted chippings.

I already have some fruit shrubs and perennial herbs that I can plant in the food forest and will propagate as many more as I can from these small plants.

I've recently started reading the blog of a couple who live not too far away from us who have outgrown their garden and two allotments and are taking the plunge to become even more self sufficient and are buying a smallholding in Orkney. James and Dee's blog about their adventure to self sufficiency and living in a more environmentally friendly way can be found at Happy Homestead. It's well worth a read. 

I've been chatting with them via social media and invited them to come for a cuppa and to have a look at what we are doing here (what this really means is that I'm going to pick their brains and ask them for lots of advice). To my delight they have offered to give us some of their fruit bushes and herbs that they have growing in tubs and that are too large or too many to take with them to their new home. They will be ideal for planting in the food forest and I am extremely grateful for their generosity.  We are also going to rehome their chickens which they feel would be too stressed by a fifteen hour car journey to their new homestead.

Saturday 3rd. Yesterday I continued to add barrow loads of composted wood chippings to the first stretch of weed suppressing membrane and planted it with a tayberry and loganberry given to me by my daughter's father in law. I also put in some autumn fruiting raspberries which came from Mr J's mother's garden, a rowan tree that my daughter gave me for Mother's Day, some herbs that I grew from seed and some currants that came from the local garden centre. I am starting to think that the food forest will be filled with plants that came from, and therefore remind me of, friends and family.

I've identified a small area that is lower than the surrounding soil and it seems to be a perfect place to have a small wildlife pond. In heavy rain it fills with water and creates a puddle about four feet by three feet and around four inches deep. If I line the base of this area with waterproof membrane, it should fill up in no time which will give us a pond that ends up about seven or eight inches deep. It won't be very big, but it would be nice to have an area that attracts frogs, toads and other wildlife. There is a large sheet of bitumous liner at the back of the piggeries, I think it is what was used to line a large surplus water store as I can see a circular outline on a concrete base by the rear piggery and the liner seems circular, so I will use a piece of that as a liner for the small wildlife pond.

As I am creating pathways through the food forest area I will make sure that a path goes around the potential pond and that I leave some space for planting around the edges of it. The good thing about the location of the pond is that it will be away from the chickens and the ducks so that the wildlife won't be a sitting target for their beaky attentions.

It is very wet today, I have tried laying out the next section of weed suppressing membrane, but the wind has picked up and is blowing it all over the place. Instead of working outside, I am doing more research and firming up ideas about the food forest and catch up with reading a few of my favourite blogs. I'm looking forward to an afternoon curled up on the sofa under a quilt reading. It must be time to make a cuppa! 

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If you want to know more about food forests, this article on the Permaculture Research Institute is useful.

August round up

While I'm waiting for the eggs in the incubator to hatch I thought it would be an ideal time to have a good look around and see what we've been up to over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
The Four Horsemen chickens have been badly behaved. If you are a chicken, I imagine that you'd think it was super-dooper behaviour, but I'm not and I don't appreciate the chickens escaping to the front garden and then promptly kicking the chipped bark off the shrubbery and onto the gravel of the driveway and yard.
The answer to this problem was simple, I needed to finish putting the wind reducing netting onto the wooden fencing around the paddock. It's one of those tasks that I keep meaning to do, but had also found dozens of other things to do instead. So I stapled the green netting into place and blocked off their access to the metal five bar gate which then did a good job at keeping them in the paddock.

However, I had spoiled their fun and so instead they looked for something else to amuse them. It turned out that a kitchen garden filled with lush green leaves was the place to have fun. So each time they made a bid for freedom, they headed straight for the rows of spinach and chard. This was also an unsatisfactory state of affairs, we can't have four small birds eating the food that I am growing for us and all the chickens for the autumn and winter. 

The solution was to create a small pen by the chicken shed for them to live in during the day until they are too large to squeeze through the flexible chicken netting. They aren't very happy about being enclosed in the small space (it's about 12 feet by eight feet), but the alternative is that they go into an even smaller chicken run.

The Dozen are growing rapidly and have seem to have spent the weekend sorting out their pecking order. They have squabbled and argued a lot for the last couple of days and I need to research whether this means that they don't have enough space or whether that's just what they do. It wasn't noticeable with Big Red and Little White or with the Four Horsemen. They are at that awkward stage where they are losing the last of the fluff on their necks as their feathers grow through and it makes them look like funny little punky creatures.

 We have found a very local farm shop that sells straw. It costs 50p more per bale than the straw we've bought previously but it's an awful lot of closer, which saves us time and petrol. On Saturday afternoon we collected eight bales of straw so that I could refresh the circles of love. I am slowly moving the Cream Legbars towards the rear of their field, a few feet at a time so that the change doesn't upset them too much. I moved their shelter first and then built a new circle of love for them. In the circle I will dump all the wood shavings from their houses, weeds, greens, old straw and vegetable plants as I lift them. They then scratch through it and turn it into rich compost. The Legbars haven't really got the hang of keeping the material inside the straw circle, so I will add one more bale to make the access opening much smaller. I then plan to add a second layer of bales which should provide them with much needed shelter from the wind in the autumn and winter. The field shelter (a glamorous name for two pallets held together with baling twine and an old rug thrown over the top) is fine for providing a shady area in the summer, but the wind whips across this field and I want to offer them some shelter from the relentless gusts.

The area that has been the circle of love for the last few months is ready to be sectioned off and planted up. I will put some kale, chard and spinach in this spot that will be fed to the chickens (and possibly us too) in the cooler months.

 In the older girls' side of the field I moved their circle of love in May, so it is staying in approximately the same place until spring. Big Red and Little White know exactly how to use the circle of love and together with Jack and Diesel can spend hours scratching through the material finding good things to peck at and eat.

The vegetable garden is looking quite full in some beds and I am very pleased with how well some of the crops have grown in the not-very-good soil that they have in the raised beds. For our first year and given that we have had to make the raised beds and import soil and composted horse manure, I am rather proud of how much as been achieved in just a few months.

 The hedge that we planted with Jane in late winter is starting to spread nicely, I noticed that a couple of the wild roses had flowered and are now forming fat little rose hips. It will take a few years for the hedge plants to merge and form a thick dense hedge, but I can see the beginnings of it already.

 In other areas the weeds from the field next door have dominated. I understand that in the past the farmer who worked the fields that surround our smallholding had managed the weeds, but there is a new farmer working the fields and he seems to be leaving the weeds to grow. Unfortunately I think that they may well smother the hedge plants in a few areas and short of making masses of extra work for myself in managing the weeds outside our boundary, I may just have to accept that in these patches we will have to put up with massive clumps of thistles and thorny brambles.

Elsewhere in the garden some cultivated plants seem to be running amok. The pumpkin plants are looking very healthy and I now have six good size pumpkins and about a dozen smaller ones developing on the plants.

 It looks as though I will have a pumpkin that I can proudly give to my grandsons in October for them to use at Halloween. The next thing that they need to do is turn a rich orange colour as they ripen.

We've moved Frederick and Mrs. Warne's duck house to a more sheltered spot and turned it so that the doorway isn't facing towards the direction that the wind blows for most of the autumn and winter because having soaking wet bedding won't be much fun for them.

The young ducklings (that have stolen our hearts) continue to grow rapidly and on Sunday I extended their run to give them an extra three feet to play in. I have started leaving the cat litter tray filled with water in the pen. They are old enough now that they won't just sit in the water all day long getting cold, but will paddle in and out at different times during the day. We have identified an area in the duck enclosure that we plan to separate off so that the ducklings can have a lot more space to run around before they are large enough to join the adult birds free ranging in their space. It took us a little while to get the set up right for the chickens and chicks and we are just starting to get a set up sorted for the ducks and ducklings.

In between sorting out the birds and pottering in the garden I have continued preserving fruit and vegetables from the garden and have been blackberry picking in the hedgerow of the fields surrounding us and yesterday we made a trip to see our friends Jane and Dave. Jane has been a friend for the best part of thirty years, our children played together when they were young and Jane and I share a love of gardening. They have a small garden around their house and Jane has started an allotment area with a friend this year (I have parsnip envy having seen photos of her crop). Jane had kindly collected some poultry carriers for me from someone nearby to her who was selling them and it was time we picked them up from her and got them out of her way. While we were there she also gave us several plants to boost the perennial border, shrubbery and a fabulous fig tree which I'm hope will settle nicely in the new food forest that I will be planting over the next month or so.


The warm weather has brought with it some hazy dawns and beautiful sunsets, I wish my camera could do them justice. 

Now I need to go and check on the progress of the hatching eggs and of course, it's time for a cuppa!

Abundance and Fruits of the Forage Jam recipe

As   we head towards the end of the first summer on our smallholding, the rhythm of my days is changing. Although I am up at around five each morning, I am no longer out in the garden right away because it's still dark. So for the first hour I'm now reading, watching and researching instead of doing that in the midday heat.

I've been gathering as much food as I can, to eat fresh and also to preserve. I have frozen kilos of mirabelles, fat juicy plums, elderberries, blackberries from the hedgerows, sliced runner beans, broad beans, chunky rainbow chard stems and mangetout.

In  the piggery I've stored the garlic bulbs and the onions will join them once they have ripened. Yet to come are the apples, potatoes, carrots, parsnips and a myriad of other vegetables. Some crops will stay in the ground over winter and should give us freshly picked vegetables throughout the winter and early spring.

By  sheer good fortune, my neighbours have a glut in some crops that either have failed in our kitchen garden or we haven't very much of and we have a glut of crops that haven't done too well in their garden. Being the sensible bunnies that we are, we have started to swap the excesses meaning that both families now have a wider selection of foods to eat now and to store for the winter.

Yesterday evening our neighbour dropped by with a carrier bag filled with plums which were a swap for runner beans that they have been having for the last few weeks. 

They've also said that I can help myself to windfall cooking apples which I am delighted about as I have been foraging blackberries from the hedgerows and can now make blackberry and apple pie filling to freeze. If there are enough cooking apples I will also make some blackberry and apple jam or jelly. The apples on our young trees are eating apples and there are not very many of them as yet because the trees are only four or five years old.

The success of some vegetables has inspired me for next year. I will plant many more beetroot (Boltardy) which have been very sweet and flavoursome this year, to make wine from next year. In the area between the perennial flower border and the vegetable garden I had planned to have cut flowers and herbs, but I will now have fruit instead. I will plant some fruit trees, underplanted with currant bushes, fruit canes and strawberry plants together with some complementary herbs. Some mint in a pot buried in the ground to go with the strawberries, some sweet cicely to help take the edge off the rhubarb, some licquorice roots, tarragon to go with the raspberries.

This afternoon I have made some of my favourite mixed fruit jam, which I'm calling 'Fruits of the Forage' Jam.

Fruits of the Forage Jam

Ingredients

3lbs of foraged fruit (I used 1lb cored windfall apples and 2lbs of stoned plums, blackberries and elderberries)
Juice of 1 Lemon
2lbs unrefined granulated sugar
1 glass red wine (optional)
7 fluid oz boiling water
1tblspn ground cinnamon
1tblspn ground ginger
2 dried cloves (ground in pestle and mortar)
1/2 tspn grated nutmeg

Method

Wash jam jars and put in heated oven to sterilise and put lids in a pan of boiling water, boil for 10 minutes to sterilise and leave in water until ready to use.

Wash and prepare the fruit, squeeze lemon juice over the fruit and put in a heavy based large pan with the glass of wine and boiling water. 

Cook until the fruit is soft stirring regularly to prevent it sticking to the pan. 

Add cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. 

Stir in the sugar until dissolved.

Cook rapidly stirring to prevent sticking until setting point.

Remove jars from oven and leave to cool a little.

Spoon or ladle the jam into the jars (be careful because the jars will be hot).

Wipe the outside of the jars if necessary to remove any spilt jam, but avoid putting your cloth into the jar.

Using tongs, remove the lids one at a time from the pan of water and seal jars.

Once the jam has cooled in the jars, remember to label them to help avoid confusion later.

Use a deep pan to avoid splashes

Ready to put jam into jars

Use tongs to remove lids from hot water

Don't forget to label your Fruits of the Forage Jam

Putting the chickens to work

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.

How far do I go to get a cuppa?

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at my morning routine as it has changed considerably during the last year. Today should be a fairly typical day, nothing special is planned, the torrential rain and howling gale have stopped and it promises to be not too bad a day (not great for August, but it is what it is).

I don't use an alarm clock, I don't need to, I have the boys outside informing me quite eloquently if I have slept too late for their liking! But regardless of them, I usually wake around five and stumble around finding my dressing gown and make my way downstairs. We have a door at the bottom of the stairs which I close carefully to try to minimise the noise that travels upstairs. Just because I don't sleep so well doesn't mean that Mr J should be woken at silly o'clock too. This morning I woke at 5.15 and lay in bed for a few minutes contemplating the weather, no I couldn't hear rain, good, no I couldn't hear the wind rattling the solar panels, marvelous, the sun wasn't streaming through the curtains, it was too early for that yet. I couldn't lie there any longer, I needed to get moving. 

I am very stiff when I sit or lie around for a while, so each morning my back and legs seem to take a lot longer to wake up than the rest of me. Hobbling downstairs is inelegant, but once I've been moving around for about ten minutes I am fine again. I visited the bathroom, took my tablets and put the kettle on.

Then I headed outside to sort out the animals. First stop, the piggeries to collect their food and then out to the chicken field. I opened the chicken shed and said good morning to four bleary-eyed chickens who are only just getting used to having a darker shed (I blocked out the second shed window just before the storm arrived so that if debris hit the window, it wouldn't break onto the chickens). Big Red had been singing his morning song since he'd heard me open the gate, he's getting loud, really loud and he has a very deep voice. I put out their food and then went to house and run of 'The Four Horsemen'. 

They are seven and a half weeks old and I am looking forward to putting them into the chicken shed later in the week. I put their food into their run, let them out of their house, opened up the run so that they have full access to the field, checked and refreshed their water. That was them sorted for a while.

Going into the next part of the chicken field means untying a fiddly gate arrangement or just climbing over the flexible netting, which is almost always the first choice. So this morning I climbed over the netting and was reminded that it had been raining heavily for the best part of twenty-four hours. There's nothing quite like a jolly cold splash of water between the thighs to help wake one up! I opened the hen house of the Cream Legbars and said good morning to each of them as they came rushing out. It's not so much that I say hello, but I check the birds to make sure that there are no signs of illness or discomfort. It seems to make sense to know the birds well enough to be able to spot problems before they become too big to treat. Anyway they all looked fine, so I refreshed their water and headed to the duck enclosure.

Luckily I had topped up the duck's water as they went to bed last night, so only had one bucket of water to lug around to replace the one that they drank from and washed in before going to bed. A quick chat to them, who are much less pleased to see me in the mornings than the chickens and I headed into the vegetable garden. I walked up and down the rows of brassicas doing my twice (or three times) daily ritual of picking off caterpillars and slugs. I also checked to see how much damage the high winds had done to vegetables and fruit. I straightened a few canes that were leaning at a jaunty angle and took up the mangetout and pea plants that are now over. They have both produced a good crop, but the peas were drying out and looking very sad and the mangetout were both crispy and soggy simultaneously (a clever trick). 

There were a few peas and mangetouts that had grown very fat in their pods so as I put the plants onto the compost heap, I took them out of their pods and threw them to the ducks, who suddenly and miraculously were now my best friends. Cupboard love is not a wonderful thing, but if that's all those ducks are offering in terms of spending time with me, I'll take it.

I noticed that the pumpkins are coming along well and the squashes which up to now have failed, are starting to look like they may just provide us with some small fruits. I found one patty pan that would be a suitable size to have with breakfast and then got side-tracked again and lifted a couple of carrots to see how those are doing for size.

Then I headed to the old stable to check on the chicks and ducklings. They have been confined to barracks for the last couple of days and weren't terribly impressed at not being allowed to go outside. I filled a bucket with about thirty litres of water and put a cat litter tray into the ducks pen, transferred the water into it and watched as the ducklings ran and jumped into the water in sheer delight. I could lose hours watching these little creatures, they display their pleasure so readily and dive under the water, scaring the other one as they bob back up, the both leap out of the tray and then run back into it again. This is repeated over and over again until they get tired and just sit quietly in the water. As I didn't want them to get too cold I removed the cat litter tray filled with water after about ten minutes and turned my attention to the chicks.

'The Dirty Dozen', like the ducklings, are now three and half weeks old and are almost ready to move to their outside accommodation. Once the Four Horsemen have moved into the shed with Jack, Diesel, Big Red and Little White, I can clean that hen house thoroughly and move the twelve chicks into it. Because the chicks still have some of their baby fluff, it's quite easy to tell them apart, although they are often just a bit of a blur as they race around their pen. As they get all their feathers it will become more difficult to tell them apart as eight of them will be plain black. I opened their pen and put in the cat basket, as they are now used to it, they came rushing over to it ready to go outside and inevitably as soon as I started to pick them up to put into the basket, they all decided to run around the pen and not be picked up. They are such contrary little creatures! So after a few moments of being bent over almost double try to scoop up small birds and transfer them into the basket (with one trying to fly out of it each and every time I opened the lid), I took them outside. I moved the run that they were going to go into to a fresh patch of grass and made it secure, then had the reverse proceedure of getting them into the basket. All wanting to come out at the same time, but none of them wanting to be picked up! 

Eleven went into the run easily and one made a bid for freedom. And here's the dilema, do I spend the minute that is needed to tie the end panel on their run to make the eleven safe or do I race around the garden trying to catch the one that's got away? I compromised and made a makeshift security gate on the run and then using my super-stealth powers, I sneaked up on the escapee and caught it at the first attempt. With all twelve safely in the run, I returned to the stable to get their water and food bowl to put in the pen with them.

I had started rumbling and I was getting rather hungry, but there was still the ducklings to get outside, so I moved their outdoor house and run to fresh grass, actually I carefully chose an area with less grass and more clover as the ducklings seem to love it. And them it was back to the stable with the cat basket to repeat the catch a small bird routine. The ducklings were delighted to be outside again and I returned to the stable to get their water, food and some straw to put at the end of their run for them to rest on. One more trip back to the stable to get a couple of old cotton rugs that we are using to drape over the runs to offer some wind protection to both the chicks and ducklings and that was them sorted out for a while.

On the way to the kitchen I opened the greenhouse door, which I had closed before the storm arrived on Friday. While I was there I 'just' watered the tomato plants, refilled the large water bin and checked for ripe tomatoes. Then I went back to the stable to pick up the squash and carrots that I'd collected earlier on and headed inside.

Two and a half hours and the best part of a mile since I first put the kettle on, I finally made that much wanted cuppa!

Perhaps I should know

I spend a lot of time wondering why I don't know some basic information that I feel I should know. These aren't jaw dropping facts and figures that I don't know, they are some very simple basics that I need to find out about, but somehow along the way I haven't learnt them. My head is full of all sorts of (useful and useless) information, but now I am working on our smallholding, I need an additional set of knowledge. It occurs to me that if I spent less time wondering why I don't have this knowledge, I could actually spend that time looking up the answers! So here are some of the things that I don't know.

In the garden

What do wasps eat?

Do slugs eat caterpillars?

What are earwigs for?

How do the first few insects get to a new pond?

How do pea and bean weevils get to the garden?

Why do ducklings eat their own poop if they poop in a pond?

How do I tell if an apple is ripe while it's still on the tree?

Why do weed seeds grow more strongly than the seeds I've planted?


In the kitchen

How long can I store eggs in the freezer?

Is plastic really safe to store food in?

What is xanthan gum? (I use it so perhaps I should know what it is)

Why does my homemade gluten free bread look like fungus and taste not too dissimilar?

How do I clean the residue of 'stuff' from the ceramic top of the cooker?

How do I cook spinach and chard so that they don't taste so much like muddy water?


In the poultry field

Can I put one month old ducklings in with the two month olds?

What's the latest time of year that I can hatch chickens' eggs?

And so my questions go on and on. As the weather is due to be fairly unpleasant again tomorrow, I may just spend an hour or so looking up some of the answers!

On an entirely unrelated subject, but one I want to share anyway - I'm not a technophobe exactly, but I can get muddled now and then. There are so many ways to add bits and pieces to a blog or to put features that may or may not be of interest to readers that sometimes I feel frustrated and confused by it all. 

Anyway, after some trial and error I think I now have a widget gizmo thingy that will allow you to receive my blog straight to your inbox. If you are using a pc, you can find it in the right hand column just below the About Me section. If on a mobile phone, you'll need to go to the bottom of the page, click on 'view web version' and again you'll find it below the About Me section on the right. Eventually I might work out how to add the sign up section to the bottom of each blog, but until then, please feel free to sign up to receive my blog directly to your email.

Nice surprises

The sun has shone on our corner of the world for a few days now and it is lovely here. It's been too hot to do much heavy work, so I have pottered early mornings and then stayed inside with the windows and doors wide open during the hottest part of the day.

The dozen chicks that hatched three weeks ago are now spending all day outside in a run in the front garden, but I'm taking them back into their pen each evening. Having fresh air around them and grass under their feet seems to have brought them on in leaps and bounds.

Likewise the ducklings are outside each day, going back to their pen in the shelter of the stable each evening. They are almost off the heat now, but I'm being cautious (and probably over-protective) as they are our first ducklings.

Yesterday Mr J put together a set of shelves that we found on FreeCycle and we put them into the corner of the kitchen. These will house the homemade jam, pickles, sauces and wine that I don't have space for elsewhere in the kitchen. A new freezer is being delivered on Thursday which will give us plenty of space to store the vegetables that I am gathering from the garden together with bulk cooked meals that we can then defrost and use immediately when we are too tired or don't have time to cook a meal from scratch.

I have been finding some interesting shaped tomatoes in the greenhouse, three of these are an Italian variety of plum tomato and they have a distinctly square shape. I picked them while they were still quite small, smaller than a golf ball, because they were deep red and ripe and I'd rather eat a small tomato than let it go to waste.

We've been enjoying the borlotti beans again, they are very attractive on the plant and equally so when the beans are taken from the pod. It's a shame that they don't keep the colouring when they are cooked.

The four chicks that are now seven weeks old are starting to explore the chicken field in earnest. The are on the same side of the fence as Jack, Diesel, Little White and Big Red and although they mostly keep themselves to themselves the older chickens are bossy and have been letting them know who's in charge. They are still small enough to escape through the flexible fencing and a few times we have had to encourage them back into their allotted space, but it won't be too long before they are restricted to their side as they grow too large to squeeze through the fencing.

Most days I am gathering enough food for our supper and some for the freezer. The best way to harvest crops like beans and peas is to take little and often, so that the plants keep producing more and more. This trolley load of vegetables were roasted with garlic and the runner beans were sliced and frozen.

I had a plateful of the roasted vegetables and Mr J had some homemade meatloaf with his. The colourful selection was very pleasing to the eye as well as the palate.

When it was time to put the chicks and ducklings to bed last night, we gathered the twelve chicks and took them to their secure run in the stable. When we went to collect the ducklings we found that they had managed to climb the (rather steep) ramp up to the house that is attached to their outdoor run and they had put themselves to bed. Oh my little lovelies, I am so enamoured with these ducklings. They are growing so much each day that it is noticeable, but they still look like babies (which of course they are) and we are delighted with how well they seem to be doing despite us.

I am feeling very blessed at the moment and to celebrate, I'm going to make a cuppa!