End of summer planning

 As I type it's very warm, we've had a couple of days of summer in mid September and it's due to continue for a few more days, but without a doubt the summer is coming to an end and the activity in the garden reflects this.

I've harvested the borlotti beans, popped them all out of their colourful pods and left them to dry on the kitchen windowsill. They will be a useful addition to soups and stews in the winter. I won't be able to use them as seeds for next year as they are F1 hybrids, so I will need to buy fresh seed. Now I know that we like these pink marbled beans I will source some organic seeds that are not F1s so that we can save the seeds year after year.

The freezer is being filled up with vegetables and fruit from the garden, our neighbours' fruit trees (windfall apples) and from the hedgerow. There are pounds of runner beans, broad beans, mangetout, patty pan squash, rainbow chard, apples, blackberries, white currants, elderberries and chopped herbs. There's a paper sack for potatoes that is being filled a little more each day as I lift the tubers. And the larder cupboard is being filled with jars of jam and sauces and bottles of wine.

 The pumpkins are turning bright orange and look like they will be ready for us to give one to my grandsons and another to a friend's children for Halloween and we will be able to have pumpkin soup, roasted & mashed pumpkin and sweet pumpkin pie. Root vegetables will stay in place as long as possible and leeks will be lifted as we need them.

Most of the brassicas should be fine until we need them. 

Some of the first January King cabbages look ready to cut.

 And the red cabbage won't be too far behind. Many of the leafy vegetables will stay in the ground throughout the winter and be harvested on a 'cut and come again' basis. There are also crops that I've grown specifically to give to the chickens to supplement their pelleted food in the cooler months.

My daughter gave me some seeds last Christmas and has offered to do the same again this year, but she has asked me to select what I would like to grow. This means that I need to start thinking about next year's vegetable garden before too long. I had a plan for what I was going to grow this year (it can be seen here) and inevitably, it didn't quite work out that way. 

What we actually achieved looked like this.
The 'empty' sections are places were we haven't created the raised beds yet. Given that this was our first year here and that we were unable to rotavate the ground as we had anticipated, I am very pleased with how much we have achieved, especially as now I've realised that churning up the ground would have been a bad decision. I've learnt a great deal about the garden, the way the wind blows throughout the year, the sunniest spots, the driest places and the subtle slope of the site. 

The appalling soil that we started with is already improving having added tons of compost made in our compost bins and bays, wood chippings, well rotted horse manure and top soil. The health of the soil life is improving too, it now has masses of worms, bugs of various kinds, fungi and bacteria. 

The chickens have played their part in improving the soil by scratching at the surface of the ground and fertilising it as they go. Their used bedding materials have gone into the compost heaps and into the circles of love, which in turn have gone into the ground. Even the young chicks have been working hard in the garden. 

These seven week olds are now free ranging daily and go to their own house at night. Next week I will put them into the chicken shed with the other hybrid birds. Two of these four are female and will remain with the flock as they mature to become part of our egg laying flock, the two males will be dispatched before they reach maturity as for the next two years we don't need more cockerels in Big Red's flock.

The seven week old Austrlorps are huge in comparison to the hybrids, they now live in an enclosure and house of their own and before too long I will add the older Austrlorp into this group. Our plans for the chickens next year is to have four areas in the field, each one having a separate flock of birds. One each for the Cream Legbars, Australorps, Jersey Giants and the hybrids. By keeping them separately we will be able to offer hatching eggs for sale and also young birds for those who can travel to collect them from us. We have been careful to ensure that we have birds in each flock from different bloodlines to keep the offspring strong and healthy.

We've decided that next year we will aim to have a larger hatch of ducks earlier in the year rather than several smaller hatchings. This way we won't need to have lots of small poultry houses to keep ducks of different ages in, but can use one or two larger houses for a shorter period. If I have to clean out smelly duck houses I would rather do it for more birds for a shorter length of time than a constant need to clean throughout the spring and summer that would happen from multiple hatchings. 

So our planning for next year is beginning to take shape, little by little. Next step is to have a good look through the seeds that I have left over from this year, decide which crops I want to grow again and order any seeds that have run out and any new varieties that we want to try. I am going to start this process today, but first, of course, it's time for a cuppa!

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A sociable weekend

On Friday morning my daughter came to visit. It's been several weeks since we had a chance to just hang out together, doing nothing in particular, but sharing our time and chatting all things family related.

She was enchanted by the five littlest ducklings, although not as much as I am besotted with my grandson number two, who at ten months old has developed a lovely personality and is now getting speedily mobile.

She went home with a food box filled with vegetables from the garden, chutney and sauces that I've been making and an organic butternut squash that came from a local shop. She hadn't cooked a whole butternut squash before so I gave her a recipe suggestion and a few hours later she sent me photo of the roasted squash filled with goat's cheese and pumpkins seeds, which she said was delicious.

In the afternoon I continued to plant out the perennials and shrubs given to us by Jane and to transplant young plants that I have raised from seed. I started to think about which plants to take cuttings from so that they have time to form root systems before winter stops their growth. It's such an easy way to propagate plants and every year I forget to spend the short amount of time it takes to take the cuttings. This year I will get around to doing it before it's too late.

Saturday morning was spent in the kitchen, my neighbours have kindly invited me to collect as many windfall apples as I'd like and I've taken them up on the offer and have been collecting a bucketful a day. So, I made apple sauce (to accompany pork) and froze apples to make crumbles from in the depths of winter. The kitchen smelled delicious.

I have had some poor nights of sleep this week and have become very tired, so Saturday evening by the time we had got the birds safely tucked away in their houses, I was ready to sit quietly for an hour before I went to bed.

On Sunday we were up and about bright and early and after doing the morning chores, I baked a lemon and poppy seed cake. We were going out for the day and I was very excited to be heading off to Carmarthenshire. Ten minutes before we were due to leave the Dirty Dozen made a bid for freedom and more than half of them escaped from their run. Mr J phoned me from the chicken field to request my help in rounding them up. Over excited chicks who are hell-bent on being outside their run are not the easiest to herd back into their confines, but with a bit of extra coaxing and a lot of bribery with armfuls of green leaves from the vegetable garden, we got them safely back into their run.

We hadn't got very far in the car before I fell asleep (which is why I am not driving at the moment - falling asleep at the wheel really wouldn't be too clever) and I woke up just as got the to sign that read 'Welcome to Carmarthenshire'.

We were headed to the smallholding of Annette and her partner. I 'met' Annette via Twitter and a few weeks ago she invited us (and several other smallholders who tweet) to visit their home for a barbecue. And what a lovely smallholding they have! 32 acres of Welsh hillside and a pretty house nestled into it with beautiful views across the valley.

The barbecues were lit and heated up while we all took a tour of the smallholding. Their flock of sheep in one field were lovely as was the dog Edwin who was very well behaved. They have eight chickens and a number of ducks free-ranging around the back garden. 

 We ate a feast of food (everyone brought something to share) including burgers, lamb chops, roast pork, rabbit, vegetable kebabs, salads followed by cake, brownies, Eton mess and New York cheesecake. It occurred to me that any gathering of smallholders was bound to have fabulous food and Mr J ate so well at lunchtime that he only had a few biscuits with cheese for supper.

Mid-afternoon we said goodbye to the new friends we'd made with promises of having another get together before too long. I was more than happy to offer to host the next one here on our small patch.

After a much wanted cup of tea, I headed out into the garden and pottered for a while, planting some herbs and moving some more of the huge pile of wood chippings from the front garden into the area that will be the food forest.

Once the birds were all in bed, we curled up on the sofa and switched off our brains for a while by watching television.

It has been a lovely weekend and I'm looking forward to getting to know the other smallholders better as time goes on. Today we are starting to make an improved run arrangement for the Dirty Dozen, but before we begin it must be time for a cuppa.


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Lemon Drizzle Cake (improved)

Having practiced this Lemon Drizzle Cake many times, I have adjusted and improved my old recipe.

Lemon Drizzle Cake (improved)

Ingredients

4oz lightly salted Butter

2oz unrefined Caster Sugar
2 Eggs
Finely grated zest and juice of unwaxed Lemon
1 tspn Vanilla Extract
4oz Besan Flour (or chick pea flour)
2oz finely ground Cornmeal
1 level tspn gluten free Baking Powder
1/2 tspn Xanthan Gum
pinch Sea Salt crushed

For drizzling

2oz Icing Sugar

Finely grated zest and juice of unwaxed Lemon

6 fl oz hot Water

Method

Preheat oven to 375F, 190C, 170 fan, gas mark 5.
Grease and line or flour a 9 inch round tin or flan dish.

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs and vanilla extract and mix well. Stir in grated zest and juice of one lemon.

Sir in cornmeal, besan flour, baking powder, xanthan gum and salt and mix well
Pour into prepared tin or dish.
Bake in the centre of the oven for approximately 25 minutes. Check that it is fully cooked using a skewer (if it comes out clean, the cake is ready).
Prick the top liberally with a cocktail stick or fork.
Prepare drizzling liquid by combining the icing sugar, zest and juice of lemon and hot water.
Drizzle the liquid over the cake while it is still hot (it should absorb most of the drizzle very quickly).
Leave to cool.
Turn cake onto a serving plate or serve from the flan dish.

Variations

If I don't have fresh lemons I substitute the lemons with Sicilian Lemon Extract or bottled lemon juice.

This cake also works well with 2 large tablespoons of lemon curd stirred into the cake mixture just before putting into the flan dish or tin.

You can use limes or oranges rather than lemons.

Served hot it makes a great sponge pudding.

o-o-o

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Moving the ducklings

 

This week I am being the guest tweeter on SmallholdersUK account on Twitter. Each week a different smallholder is featured, celebrating the diversity of smallholders' lives and this week I am taking a turn at sharing my plastic beads of experience (it feels like I haven't advanced to pearls of wisdom yet). I didn't have a grand plan of what I was going to write about, but I did make some notes of subjects I knew I wanted to include.

I am surprised at how much additional energy I have used up in tweeting throughout the day, how tired I am in the evening and how quickly I'm getting off to sleep. Sadly though, I am still waking up at silly o'clock in the morning and lying in bed wondering if it's too early to get up. This morning that process of waking, staring at the ceiling, getting over hot, then too cold, dropping back to sleep and waking up again started at 1.25 am. So by 5 am I gave up and made my way downstairs and, as I often do when it's too early to start rumbling around outside, I put the television on.

I spend quite a lot of time reading and researching. YouTube has become my go-to learning resource as I can find so many really helpful vlogs and films. Obviously I don't take the word of just one person who's posted a film on the internet, I make sure that I watch several (or lots) of films about any particular subject. The more that one certain topic is covered in the same way, the more I can trust it to be likely to be true. But in the end, there's nothing quite like first hand experience. 

The experience has once again been of making compost, raised beds, preserving food for the late autumn and winter and putting in a new fence.

On Monday Mr J banged some fence posts into the ground in the duck enclosure so that we could start to section off part of it for the ducklings to use. The posts were recycled ones from my sister's home. She had replaced her fencing and these posts were of no use to her any more. My brother in law had kindly cut points on the bottom of each post to make getting them into the ground more easily.

I then stapled chicken wire to the posts and used heavy duty ground staples to secure it along the base.

 We hung a gate that I had found lying around on the other side of the of paddock (there have been some very useful bits and pieces that I've found that were left by the previous owners).

 We moved the two ducklings from their outside nursery pen into the new enclosure and watched as they revelled in the additional space that they suddenly had. Frederick was less than impressed at having two new neighbours, but over the last couple of days he has calmed down and now seems more miffed than cross.

The vegetable garden is filling out even more as the squashes make a last ditch attempt to produce their fruit before the days get cold. The purple sprouting broccoli(on the left) is an early variety, I hope that it will withstand the howling autumn and winter winds and flower early next year.

 Mr J and I created the next raised bed late on Tuesday afternoon when the strongest heat of the day had passed. I had put down a layer of cardboard in the morning and we covered it in topsoil and then in composted wood chippings. 

I will plant this up today with some purple curly kale seedlings and rainbow chard seeds (because the chickens like the leaves and we like the stems).

I was delighted to find that the compost pile made in early July is now a deep brown colour and although it's still quite soggy and I think I may move it to around the base of some fruit trees and cover it in composted wood chippings to help feed the fruit trees which have been working so hard to produce lots of apples. I've made another compost heap using chicken manure and wood shavings given to us by our neighbours, grass clippings, kitchen waste (uncooked fruit and vegetable waste), spent brewery grain and straw. I also turned the drier materials from the previous compost heap into the new one. The last heap is starting to rot down, I can still see the individual components but the centre is going brown and I will top the new heap with the partly decomposed material to add microbes to it.

I've made several trips into the field that borders our smallholding to pick blackberries. I've been careful to walk on the scrubby edges of the field to avoid damaging the clover crop that the farmer has growing there. The field is buzzing with the sound of our neighbours' bees, so hopefully there will be some delicious clover honey available later in the year.

  I have also been gathering windfall apples from my neighbours' garden. They have invited me to collect as many as I like as they feel overrun with cooking apples. Their cider apples are also ripe and they will be pressing them in the next week or so. I like it that the neighbours have a surplus to different crops to us and that they make different products to us. We are starting to swap surpluses and produce which gives both of us a wider choice of food.

I have now ordered some bare-rooted fruit trees and more hedging trees to complete the hedge planting from The Woodland Trust, who have a Welsh Farm Tree Pack scheme, which enables those who farm in Wales to buy trees to create more woodland at a reduced price. They also offer help to other parts of the UK. You can find out more information here. 

It's time to put the kettle on.

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Beetroot & Apple Relish

I made some relish today, so thought I'd share the recipe.

Beetroot and Apple Relish

Ingredients (all measurements are approximate)

1lb raw beetroot, peeled

1lb cooking apples (I used windfalls)

10 medium small green tomatoes

1 large onion

large handful of flat leaf parsley

3oz sultanas

1lb unrefined granulated sugar

9 fl oz balsamic vinegar

cold water

1/2 inch cube fresh ginger

1tspn sea salt

1 tspn coarse ground black pepper

optional -

2 tblspn cooking brandy

2 tblspn ground cinnamon

Method

Wash the apples, core and chop into pieces approx. 1/2 inch in size. 

Chop peeled beetroot to similar size as apples.

Finely chop onion.

Roughly chop parsley.

Put all chopped ingredients and the sultanas into a heavy based deep pan and add enough cold water to cover the base of the pan and not quite cover all the ingredients.

Add the salt, pepper, very finely grated ginger

Bring to the boil stirring regularly with a wooden spoon and then add the sugar.

Once the sugar is dissolved add the vinegar.

I also added the cooking brandy and cinnamon, but it would be fine without them.

 Boil (but not too fiercely) until the beetroot and apples are soft and most of the liquid has evaporated, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. 
Be careful when you stir the mixture as it may splash.
Once cooled serve as an accompaniment to cheese or cold meats.
Can be stored in the fridge for about a week or up to 6 months in the freezer.


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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!