Full of beans

What an exciting time of year this is! We are now gathering food from the garden every day, some to eat and some to store for later. Most of our meals start with a selection of vegetables and I then decide what to cook once I've seen what we have available. 

This meal included homegrown onion, rainbow chard, garlic, peas, borlotti beans, kale, spinach, beetroot and tomatoes.

And became a tasty chicken stir-fry with a wine, lemon and ginger sauce, served with jasmine rice and a garnish of fresh cream. It wouldn't have won any prizes for beauty or presentation, but it's taste was superb.

Until recently I had been concerned that the bean crop was going to be miserably small, but to my delight the runner beans have come thick and fast and I can now freeze plenty for us to have during the winter months. I've grown both White Lady and Flavourstar varieties, but next year I will grow just the White Lady and perhaps an orange flowered variety. The Flavourstar have been okay, but I am picking about three times as many (or maybe more) of the White Lady variety. I will also allow some beans to mature fully and then dry them and save them as seeds for next year. Mr J and I thought that next year it would be nice to make a bean tunnel along the length of the kitchen garden as they are so decorative. I read somewhere once that runner beans were originally grown as an ornamental climber, but I am jolly pleased that someone tried the beans and that they have become a part of our diet. I am not very keen on the kidney beans on their own, I prefer them as a sliced green bean, but I know that they make a useful additional to meals like chilli and even in cassoulet. So, if we have enough frozen sliced beans and enough saved to use for next year's seeds, I will then use some to dry the kidney beans for rehydrating and eating.

I have already harvested a couple of kilos of broad beans and frozen them and have bought some seeds for autumn sown broad beans (Aquadulce Claudia) which should mature earlier than spring sown ones so that next year we have two crops of broad beans.

I hadn't grown (or eaten) borlotti beans before and although they look pretty in their pods I was sceptical about how they would taste. Well, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that they taste delicious and have a rich creamy consistency and next year, I will be planting many more borlotti beans. There are both dwarf and tall varieties, so I will give both some space in the garden and compare how they taste.

The most important tool in my garden is not actually in the garden at all, it's in the kitchen! I keep a garden diary, this is so that I can keep all my notes and observations in one place, this way I don't have to try to remember what was planted when and how it grew and whether I like the taste enough to grow them again next year. I'm using one page per crop, so that I can keep adding to it as time goes on. A more organised person might use their computer for this, but I find it easier to have a pen or pencil lying around on the kitchen table and jot down notes as I need to. It also means that I can take the book out to the garden if I want to wander around writing down my observations as I go.

I also keep a poultry manual along the same lines, dates of birds arriving, where I got them from, any that have hatched or been dispatched and most importantly of any medicines that they have had and how long we need to exclude their eggs or meat from our diet. As a smallholder, this is an essential requirement.

I've been wiped out for a couple of days this week and apart from ensuring that the birds had sufficient food and water, I have done very little else on those days, leaving Mr J to put the animals to bed and secure them for the night against preditors. It's becoming increasingly frustrating to have days where I am unable to do much, I am so excited and enthused by life here that to be stuck indoors struggling to stand up and move around is irritating to say the least. But the good news for me is that I am starting to feeling myself again and as long as I have sufficient rest (I slept for three hours today) I can crack on with the tasks that I want to achieve.

The birds seem to be growing rapidly at the moment. Big Red and Little White are now fourteen weeks old and are huge! Big Red is likely to continue growing for at least another six weeks, he is already much taller than Diesel and Jack (who is his mother) and a couple of inches taller (to the shoulders) than Little White, who will when fully grown be much larger than him because of the breed that she is. I took this photo of Big Red about two weeks ago and he is considerably larger now. I love his colouring and markings, the offspring of a Crested Cream Legbar cockerel and Warren hen (Jack) he has a her colouring mixed with the Legbar's flecking and not a full crest but a small Mohican style tuftiness arrangement on his head.

The four chicks (that I have collectively nicknamed The Four Horsemen) are now six weeks old and growing well. They are very timid and particularly nervous of Diesel who is at the top of the pecking order and for much of the time is quite bullying in her behaviour to all the other chickens. This little chap is the Jersey Giant cockerel, or at least I am pretty sure it's a cockerel, who will eventually be the size of turkey and will live in a separate area with Little White and the other female Jersey Giant. Presently he just looks a bit sorry for himself and scruffy, but I have not doubt that he will become a graceful bruiser of a bird over the next few months. Jersey Giants are slow to reach full maturity so it will be interesting to watch them as they develop into the large birds that they promise to be.

The youngest chicks are two weeks old now and most of them have about three quarters of their wing feathers formed. This little one has been nicknamed The Colonel and using lots of old wives' tales to try to work out its gender, I think it is a male. We will keep a couple of males to decide which will be the best for breeding and the other males will be meat birds.

I was talking to Mr J this evening about how best to describe my feelings about caring for animals that will become food for us and decided that the best way is that I care for them without caring too much about the birds. Those that I have come to care about will be very difficult to dispatch when the time comes. I've found that it is easier to care for the birds without getting attached to them when there are larger numbers of them. It was inevitable that we would become attached to Big Red and Little White as they were the first birds that we hatched ourselves. There were also only two of them, the Four Horsemen are nice enough but I haven't got to know their personalities or quirks and the latest brood are almost too many to be able to spot the differences between some of them. Of course I can see one is champagne colour and another is white, there are eight that look similar to The Colonel with varying degrees of white and grey patches and they will join the Australorp (one of The Four Horsemen) in their own area of the paddock when they are large enough.

We have finished hatching chickens for the year, we have about 10 meat birds which won't keep us fed throughout the winter, but will provide us with some food. I can make a chicken provide four to five meals for the two of us, so they will go a long way to filling the freezer.

The ducklings continue to be ridiculously cute and somehow I can't imagine that we will want to part with them, but the reality is that we can't have more than one drake on the smallholding, there simply isn't enough space to run several flocks of ducks and it would be an indulgence rather than a practical decision to keep the drakes. As we have no way of telling as yet, what gender the ducklings are, we will carry on enjoying their funny behaviour for some time to come. 

One day last week one of them was very poorly, it was twisting its head to the side and racing around in circles backwards. I scoured the internet for causes and more importantly, for a cure and we went to the local farm supplies and bought vitamin boosting drops. This seems to have done the trick, within twenty-four hours it was significantly improved and it is now bright and happy again with no sign of having been unwell. It has become a great swimmer, dipping time and time again under the water of it's washing up bowl pond. (If you can't play the video on the link, you can see it here on YouTube)

The week is running away from me again, there is so much to do and, it seems, so little time. Today (Thursday) I will be processing the fruit and vegetables that I gathered this morning, but first as always, it's time to make a cuppa.

What a wise mother knows

My mother was a funny old girl, private to the extreme and I never really got to know her very much as a person. We spent great swathes of time together, in her home, in my home, out for lunch, at the gym and we went on holiday together (out of choice!). For her last two years we spent a goodly chunk of the day together every day and yet still, she never offered to share much of herself with me. 

This morning I had a big wave of missing mum, I had made a batch of scones for elevenses and as I sat and ate a couple (or three) of them, I thought about mum.


Mum suffered from depression for many years and most days when we got home from school she was in bed, curtains drawn and not wanting to see anyone. But as we got older and her spirits lifted (the two may have been connected, but I don't think so) we saw more of her. She was an excellent cook and a progressive one too. I remember her introducing us to this fancy new food from Italy called pizza when I was about nine years old. My parents had held a fundraising 'at home' lunch and she made pizza from scratch, most of the people there didn't know what it was. How enlightened and globally aware we were in the early seventies! To this day I haven't met anyone who can make roast potatoes as good as mum's were, nor lemon meringue pie as tangy, rich and sticky, although her experiment with rice pudding topped with jam and meringue was never a favourite of mine.

She had promised to share with me her secret recipe for egg custard, her version of a large creme caramel, but she didn't and so that fabulous recipe has gone with her. But she did share some valuable life lessons with me and here are some of them (please don't take any of these as good advice, they are simply things that my mother used to say often).

'Expect less of other people, then you won't feel disappointed. She also advised me to expect more of other people because folks often rise to the challenge.

Cook with love in your heart, it makes the food taste better.

Always bake small cakes (fairy cakes) when the children aren't home, they can have some when they get back, but in the meantime they don't know that you've eaten a load of them yourself.

Your house doesn't need to be clean to be welcoming, a warm smile that comes from the heart is worth a thousand cans of furniture polish.

Practice making chocolate bon bons or petite fours about a month before Christmas, make at least three batches before the final one. And it's best not to tell anyone that you made the practice ones, just eat them.

If you iron nothing else, iron your pillowcases, it makes the bed look properly made and feels nicer when you get into bed. 

Teach your family that the drawer of your bedside is out of bounds. Then keep your chocolate in it.

If a job's worth doing well, it's probably worth paying someone who knows what they're doing to do it for you.

Small cuts, grazes, bumps and bruises can all be made better by a bit of mother's spit on a tissue applied to the affected area.

Guilt-free food contains no calories.'

(Disclaimer - NB. This is not a list of advice, nor is much of it accurate, it is purely a list of things my mother used to say.)

Mucho gusto

It's been a very positive couple of days, I've started harvesting more and more vegetables and on Tuesday evening we had a meal made from ingredients entirely from our garden. This included onions, patty pan squash, peas, beans, spinach, chard, herbs and eggs. It felt rather special to have a our first completely home grown meal.

Yesterday morning after I'd let the chickens and ducks out for the day I started to create the next raised bed. I laid cardboard across the pathway, for the base of the bed and the next pathway. I've found that it is easier to put the cardboard down for the pathways as I go rather than to go back and try to tuck it underneath the soggy cardboard at a later date. Or worse still, don't go back and cover the paths with cardboard and then have to deal with long grass and weeds growing all around the beds which, I have discovered, becomes a home for countless slugs and snails which then feast on seedlings and young plants.

 On the cardboard I put some hops and then some composted wood chippings in readiness for the top soil.

Earlier in the week I finished planting up the last raised bed with young leek plants that had been growing in a nursery bed. 

The vegetable garden is looking colourful and productive (which it is) and although we won't have any butternut squash as all the young plants were eaten by slugs, we may have some pumpkins. I am not as keen on pumpkin as butternut squash but it will help to give us additional food in the winter months as they store quite well.

I've also been having a battle with creatures that like to eat the brassicas. They seem to be being devoured from slugs from the surrounding ground and caterpillars from above. Each morning I walk around picking slimy slugs and green caterpillars from the cabbages, kales and purple sprouting brocolli. I hope that it's not too late to plant out more as I don't think there will be much left of the cabbages at the rate that they bugs are getting through them. Many of the cabbages look like lace doilies and the black kale looks like little cream sticks where the green of the leaves has been completely stripped away.

We've put in hoops and covered them with netting to deter the cabbage white butterflies, which made me very happy until I noticed that they can fly through the holes in the netting and lay their eggs on the purple sprouting brocolli before flying off again. Protection fail! So the next batch of brassicas will be covered with fleece to try to keep those pesky butterflies away from them.

While I was starting the raised bed yesterday, the wind started to get a little breezy and by nine o'clock it was blowing quite strongly and the rain started in earnest. So I turned my attention to tasks indoors.

I disinfected the incubator in readiness for the next batch of eggs. Mr J and I are so taken with the two ducklings that we have and have had several requests for ducks and so, in light of this, we've decided to incubate a batch of duck eggs. I've bought two sets of six Aylesbury duck eggs (so I'm not relying on one breeder to have fertile eggs) and we have three from Frederick and Mrs Warne. Our hatch rate for ducks last time wasn't very good, just two from six eggs. I was very disappointed with this as two of the unhatched eggs were moving around from day twenty-five onwards, but the poor little things just weren't strong enough to break through their shells. So working on a similar basis of hatch rate, I hope that we have five or six ducklings hatch from this batch, but we shall see. The eggs are due to hatch at the end of the month.

During a pause in the rain I moved the chicks from their box in the boot room to the nursery pen in the stable. It was still very windy and the rattling and banging of plastic sheeting and other bits and pieces in the stable made them even more wary of their new environment, but after a couple of hours, they had settled in well and were running around and trying to fly with their tiny half-feathered wings lifting them a couple of inches off the floor.

I could spend hours watching these little birds, they have a natural curiosity and are surprisingly quick to learn. It didn't take them very long yesterday to discover that they can't quite all fit into their food dish at the same time.

As the day continued the wind speed increased and the forty mph gusts became more and more frequent, so I decided that I wouldn't be doing much more in the garden for the rest of the day except to gather some vegetables to roast for supper.

The stony poor soil here means that carrots and other root vegetables are unlikely to grow straight and just as expected I lifted several twisted and curly carrots. I like to think of the yellow carrot as doing press ups and the white carrot as being a member of the cast of The River Dance.

The cylindrical beetroots are now about four to five inches long and have a delightful marbling through them. They are very sweet and not too earthy, I boil them for a few minutes and then roast them in the oven with a little sea salt, coarse ground black pepper, garlic and rosemary.

Late yesterday afternoon I noticed that one of the ducklings was behaving oddly and I suspect that all is not well. I have searched for information on the internet and it could be one of two things. Neither are brilliant but one has a better prognosis than the other. The treatment for both is the same and so later today I will ask Mr J to take me to the farming supplies stores to buy some additional vitamins and minerals to supplement the ducklings' feed. It could of course, be neither of the things I suspect but I feel I need to do anything I can to help it. I will update if there are any changes in the duck's progress.

This morning the broody hen has decided that it's chick is now old enough to start exploring outside the confines of the hen house. I walked around the corner of the stable this morning to go to the chicken field, to see whether the girls have laid any eggs, to find the broody hen and the little pale yellow chick pecking away at the grass in the run of the hen house. It feels rather special to see mother and baby in these first exploratory moments.

I am tired today, I've been trying to do as much as I can between rain bursts for the last few days and tackled several tasks indoors but as so often happens, I have over-done it, so this afternoon will include the quick visit to the farming supplies shop and some sleep. Mr J will be home from work shortly so I'm going to put the kettle on and make a cuppa.

Tons of wood chips in the garden

After months of searching I have finally found a tree surgeon who is happy to give us some wood chippings and this week we took delivery of the first trailer load. It was mostly newly chipped wood, so we used it to cover the weed suppressing membrane in the area between the perennial border and the kitchen garden.

Much to my delight Mr J commented that it is like walking through on forest floor and that is exactly what I was aiming for. Over time I will remove the weed suppressing membrane and replace it with cardboard, but for the next year at least the membrane will stay in place.

As Tom the tree surgeon had contacted me to say that some more chippings would be arriving on Saturday, I wanted to clear the first pile before the next load arrived. It is probably the only time that I will race to clear one before next arrives, but when the first load arrived I asked them to dump it on the grass near the driveway and now more was arriving I really wanted it dumped nearer the back of the same grassy area, so I needed to make access for the trailer to put it at the back.

I can't overstate how grateful I am for this gift of wood chippings, there is no way we could afford to go out and buy enough bark or wood chippings to cover the pathways and now they are covered with just the cost of our energy and effort. I know that I've done too much and pushed myself too hard to get the chippings onto the pathways and that in the next couple of days I will need to take some seriously long breaks and rest more than I'd really like to. But it is worth it as they look fabulous.

The second load to arrive was very exciting, it has some more recently chipped wood in places but most of the load is very well composted wood chippings. So now we have a pile of rich black fine crumbly compost to add to the topsoil and to mulch the vegetable beds with. As time goes on and we get more loads of chippings I will create the rest of the raised beds and cover the pathways with the most recently chipped material.

I've already used some shredded leaves and chippings in the latest compost heap to combine with the spent brewery grain, straw and chicken house waste. The relentless compost making continues and sometimes I get bored of thinking about it, but as soon as I start the next heap I get a burst of renewed vigour and interest. It is after all, the stuff that will help to feed us in coming years, so for that alone I know it is worth continuing to create as much as I can.

Over the next few days I will move some of the semi-composted wood chippings to the chickens' field and give each group of chickens several wheelbarrow loads to scratch through and work on. I will put it in the 'circle of love' that is now on each side of the field. Next year, each circle will be fenced off from the chickens and a new circle made for them to turn over. In the fenced off area I will grow crops that the chickens like to eat and it will form a part of their diet in the winter months when the pickings of green matter in the field isn't as rich as it is now.

Today has been a rainy day, but first thing this morning I spent a couple of hours in the garden before breakfast and before the rain started. I transplanted the last of the leeks into the newest raised bed and popped others into spaces in several of the other beds. I lifted a few weeds, the annuals went into the compost bins and the perennials into a garden sack.
Then I picked some runner beans and headed indoors for most of the day. 

Using my trusty 1960s Spong's bean slicer I prepared the beans for the freezer. Whilst we would prefer to eat them fresh rather than frozen, I want to make sure that we have some beans for the dinner table in the autumn and winter months.

Much of each day seems to have been taking up with watching the birds. I lose great chunks of the day just watching them busying themselves. The little chicks are now five, six and seven days old and have started growing wing feathers and a few now have tiny little tail feathers. They are light on their feet although not entirely accurate as yet, there is quite a lot falling over, but they pick themselves up again immediately and try again. 

Neither Mr J nor I had been prepared for how endearing ducklings are. They have had their first dabble (and dibble) in water. We set a paint roller tray in their pen and part filled it with water and it didn't take very long for them to find their way into it. As they dibble in the water with their tiny bills, they make bubbles and then chase the bubbles. It's delightful to watch them playing for a few minutes at a time before we take the water out again. We didn't spend too much time with them for the first few days so that they didn't imprint on us as that can cause problems later on. It's been hard not to spend hours watching them, but we have stayed away so hopefully they don't think of us as parents and have identified with each other as fellow beings.

Mr J now has a part time job, so for a part of each week it will just be me working on our smallholding, but he will also have plenty of time for being at home, pottering outside with me on a variety of projects and creating his radio shows (you can find out more about these on his blog page here).

I am sure that over the next few days I will get back into the rhythm of blog writing on a more regular basis again. The arrival of the baby birds spread out over four days consumed my attention last week, but I am now getting into a steady routine with cleaning their living space, topping up their food and water. I think that for this year we have (probably) hatched our last batch of chicks, but we are going to incubate one more batch of duck eggs in the hope that we have a few more ducks. Several people have asked whether we have ducks available and it seems to make sense to have some to offer.

As I type, Mr J is closing the hen houses making the birds secure for the night and encouraging the ducks to go to bed. It is time to put my feet up, watch a bit of telly and, as always, have a cuppa!

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A baker's dozen, Hatchwatch July 2016

It's been a jolly exciting few days. The eggs in the incubator were due to hatch this week, as were the eggs under the broody hen. I've spent a lot of the week finding distractions, so that I didn't just sit on a chair in front of the incubator willing the eggs to hatch, because as we have learnt, staring at the eggs doesn't make the chicks come any faster.

We had some more topsoil delivered on Monday, so I have created the next raised bed by putting down a layer a cardboard and covering it with topsoil and compost.


Into this bed I have planted some winter squashes, which may just about have enough time to produce some small squashes to store for winter. I've also put in a few perennial herbs too. 

The last of the broad beans have been harvested, blanched and frozen and the garlic has been lifted and is now ripening and drying ready to be plaited or stored in netting bags for use throughout the year. Mr J and I eat a lot of garlic, I like it roasted we so can easily use two or three bulbs of garlic a week.

On Wednesday the first little chick hatched, it was one of the Cream Legbar's eggs (crossed with the bantam cockerel that we had for a few weeks). It is tiny, a tiny little ball of fluff, it looks like a black fluffy small golf ball, but it's feisty and was ready to come out of it's little egg (and it was little in comparison to all the other eggs). 

Later in the day another chick arrived. I am assuming that it is one of Jack's eggs, but we won't know until the hatch is completed and we can check which eggs have or haven't hatched. It is the colour of champagne and looks like a typical Easter chick, now we are a tad confused because we don't have a white or champagne colour hen so can only assume that it's colouring comes from the parents of the mother. Whatever the reason that it is a pale one, I am delighted because I have a preference for white birds.

Following these two hen's eggs hatching, our first duckling hatched. Mr J and I sat quietly watching it emerge from its shell. I wasn't prepared for how sweet it would be and in comparison to the chicks, it was huge! 

On Wednesday afternoon we went to collect another batch of spend brewery grain and hops which I will use to create another compost heap or two. I've decided that I need to use a better mixture of green and brown materials with the spent grain to encourage faster composting, but we are struggling to find much brown material at the moment.

However in the evening we took delivery of our first load of wood chippings, hopefully it is the first of many. As a thank you to the tree surgeon who is giving us the chippings, I made up a veg box and included a few eggs, which he took with him when he left. The first pile of wood chippings included quite a lot of Leylandii, which we had discussed beforehand and I was happy to take them as they will be used on the pathways and so shouldn't be a problem for our soil and plants.
The wood chipping pile also has a large section of broadleaf tree leaves, which I was delighted to agree to having as I can use them in the compost piles and of chipped broadleaf tree branches which will be ideal to mix with the spent grain and some straw from the duck house in the compost heap.

When I got up on Thursday morning I immediately checked the incubator and was delighted that a second duckling had hatched. I went out to open up the henhouses and when I came back in another chick had hatched and by nine o'clock in the morning, another one had hatched. They were both Australorp chicks and will be companions for the one that hatched in the previous batch of eggs and is now four weeks old. I headed back outside and moved some of the wood chippings onto pathways between the vegetable beds and around the perennial border, when I came back in an hour later, chick number four had hatched.

Trying to keep busy, I bottled up the elderflower wine that we made. We now have 21 bottles of wine stored away that will be ready to drink in a few months.

 As the day went on, more chicks pipped (made a small hole in the shell) which was very exciting as we were already happy to have so many healthy looking little chicks. 

We finished setting up the secure pen for the ducks in the stable, complete with a heated lamp to keep them warm and got the nursery box ready for the chicks in the boot room. Late afternoon we moved the two ducklings and the oldest two chicks to their new accommodation. The little chicks immediately looked at home, snuggling under the brooder, cheeping away to each other. 

The ducklings however, looked cold and forlorn, so Mr J ran to into the house and found a suitable soft toy to put in with them. Almost as soon as they had the soft toy in the pen, they ran to it and sat down beside it. Snoopy toy is offering them comfort. But they still looked cold, so I placed towels over the top ends of the pen which would stop so much heat being leeched into the atmosphere and very quickly, the ducklings started to look warmer. It's a constant learning process here and despite being able to read masses of information and watch countless videos giving me a good idea of what to do, it is only with experience that we actually learn what works and what doesn't.

So by bedtime on Thursday we had eight chicks and two ducklings. We moved the two chicks that had hatched on Wednesday to the nursery box in the boot room, which made a little more space in the incubator and overnight another Australorp chick hatched.

Friday morning (today as I type) my daughter, her partner and my two grandsons came to visit us on their way home from a few days in Mid Wales. Grandson number one was very good about being quiet and not frightening the chicks and very good at counting them in the incubator. 

It was great to be able to show him a photo of the tractor that had come to deliver the wood chippings, but I suspect Mr J and I had been more excited about the tractor than he was.

After they had left, Mr J and I checked on the broody hen in her house and she had moved off the eggs to the main body of the hen house (leaving the eggs in the nesting box). Knowing that she couldn't have been off them for too long, I decided to remove them rather than let them go off and potentially cause an infection in the hen house. As we lifted one out, it cheeped! So we raced back into the house and put it into the incubator. We quickly candled the other eggs which were infertile so we disposed of those ones.

Within five minutes, the egg from the hen house had hatched. Another of the pale champagne colour, which was now the third one this colour. One in the nursery brooder box, one in the incubator and the hatched egg in the broody hen's house.  

We were beginning to lose count of the chicks and it was getting too crowded in the incubator, a lesson that I have learnt for next time (to put in fewer eggs at a time if we are going to have large breed birds in there), so we took six of the Australorps out and put them into a bucket to transfer to the nursery brooder. 

Didn't take them too long to settle in and find their food! 

To ensure that the incubator didn't become too dry, I sprayed some warm water on to the broken eggshells which increased the humidity without getting the chicks that were still in there damp. We noticed that there were two more eggs pipping and one was looking very dry. So I took the gamble and sprayed some warm water on to that egg in the hope that this would soften the membrane that had started to dry out. And about half an hour later the 'dry' egg was broken open by a small but perfect looking Australorp. We were now up to eight chicks in the nursery brooder box, three in the incubator and one under the broody hen.

The chick in the last egg that has pipped is still struggling its way out of the shell. It is heartbreaking to see a bird that is strong enough to break through the shell then fail to actually get out. But, I have come to realise that if it is not strong enough to hatch, then it's probably not strong enough to survive. 

I will update this blog as and when I have further news from the incubator.

Photographic distractions

The next batch of hatchlings are due any day now and I have been looking for ways to distract my attention. Sitting in front of the incubator really doesn't make them hatch any faster, but it has allowed me to see that some of the eggs are starting to move. So I've taken a wander around the garden and taken lots of photographs.

This is my favourite part of the herbaceous border, which is mostly a jumbled mess of field weeds and young perennials.

The daisy like flowers which would normally be considered weeds have lifted this border and although I will take them out before they seed too much, I have really enjoyed their sunny little flowers.

The Patty Pan courgettes are now setting fruit and the first will be ready to eat in a week or so. I pick them when they are about three inches across so that they are still sweet and have very few seeds in them. Sliced and tossed in a little butter in a pan they are delicious.

The giant pumpkin Howden that my grandson gave me the seeds of has now taken off and seems to be growing six inches or more a day. Plenty of male flowers have appeared and I think I've seen a female flower developing, so fingers crossed that there is a big pumpkin by autumn.

The nasturtium seeds were sown to provide some companion planting in several of the vegetable beds. I'm not sure that I like the mixed colours and next year I will look for some more simply flowered seeds instead.

Marigolds, also planted as companion planting, have created a brilliant display. The bright orange splash of colour in the vegetable garden is attracting pollinating insects aplenty.

The borlotti beans have produced some nice looking pods. I have no idea how I am supposed to cook them (do I slice them like runner beans or pod them and eat the seeds?), but I will look it up in due course. Unless they taste amazing, I don't think I'll bother with them again. There aren't many pods per plant and I feel that there are better uses of the bean poles in terms of cropping.

 Rainbow Chard, with its colourful stems are providing us with lots of green leafy food with the bonus of the chickens loving it too. Neither Mr J or I were terribly keen on chard, but steaming it lightly with plenty of black pepper added to it, we are learning to like it (or at least tolerate it knowing that it's good for us).

Each morning and evening I check over the brassicas for eggs laid by cabbage white butterflies and where it's obvious that I've missed some eggs, I remove the caterpillars. They can hide pretty well and when I went back round the garden this morning to take these photos I found several that I had missed during my early morning search for them.

The January King cabbages are just starting to form hearts, this is one of the few that hasn't had it's outer leaves chomped away by caterpillars and slugs.

In the same bed is the purple curly kale, the chickens are particularly keen on it. We haven't eaten any of it, but it's been a great supplement for the chicken food, even the small chicks squabble over it and Big Red and Little White will come to sit on my lap to eat it on an almost daily basis.

The ducks came to see what I was doing with the camera, they have become much more trusting of us over the last few months. When we first got them they ran away from us all the time, now although they don't like us to get within a couple of feet of them, they do come to see us and watch me as I potter in the garden.

I couldn't resist taking a photo of this little chap who was merrily flying from flower stalk to flower stalk on the lavender hedge. If anyone can identity the species, I'd be interested to know (please leave a comment below if you recognise what it is).

This gorgeous little field bindweed (convolvulus arvensis) has popped up all over the place, I like the delicate pink of the flowers.

There are some mighty thistles all around the smallholding, I am torn between leaving the flowers to go to seed (to feed the birds in the autumn and winter) and cutting them all down soon to prevent them spreading even more. In the meantime, the rich purple flowers are being visited by insects and I'm enjoying their stature, shape and colour.

The brambles are now fruiting well and I'm looking forward to gathering the first fruits in the next week or so. Once they have fruited I will cut them back to the ground before our hedges turn into spikey thickets.

 In the greenhouse, the tomatoes are growing well. We've picked half a dozen deep red tomatoes and there are lots of green tomatoes on the vines waiting to ripen. I've grown several varieties to help me decide what I'd like to grow more of next year.

These simple flowers are of MoneyMaker, the plants have grown tall, strong and healthily. They are a must for next year and have clusters of medium to large tomatoes which I know that I like the taste of.

This more elaborate flower is on a Russian black tomato plant, given to me by our friend Merv who breeds Cream Lebgar chickens and has supplied us with our girls and the cockerels. Merv had more plants than he needed so gave me a dozen plants for the green house.

The garlic has been lifted and is now drying off before I plait some of it and store some in the freezer. Mr J and I eat a lot of garlic, I like it roasted and can happily eat a whole clove of garlic with a plate of vegetables.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new hydrangea to go into the shrubbery, I particularly like the large pale flower heads against the deep green, almost shiny foliage. And, as a way to continue my distraction, I am going to plant it tomorrow.

But for now, I am going to check on the broody hen in our house to see whether her eggs have started to hatch and then, as always, it's time for a cuppa!