I went on a little tour of the garden earlier this afternoon with the camera and Erica in order to show you lovely lot how our first attempts at growing our own produce have gone. The vast majority of our garden has been trashed by the chickens (and admittedly by us) but we’re slowly plotting out the garden and getting things the way we want them to be. With luck, we’ll have done the majority of the work by the end of the Summer holidays and I’ll be able to show better photographs

We have an old coal shed at our back door and recently built a fence using the coal shed as the corner. This gave us a patio sealed off from the hens and once we’d laid turf this has given us a lovely area for the kids to play safely. This in turn has released the pressure on us as we couldn’t let the kids out to play before we’d done that. So! Without further ado…

We had to move this rhubarb from the bottom of the garden as it was flooded there, as a result we have the smallest rhubarb shoots in the world! Little person for scale.

This is one of our raised beds, the netting is to keep the hens out. The plants at the front are carrots, with two varieties of lettuce behind that and then onions.

In the next raised bed we have brocolli!

We went into the greenhouse to have a look and found some tomato plants…

…and some herbs…

..while Erica posed…

…and admired the peapods.

We took a photo of a few of our hens

and also our beautiful fuschia

The cherry tree that was planted after we had Greer is fruiting too!

Then we had a look in the coop to see if the hens had laid today

before heading back up towards the patio where we looked at the strawberry plants

and Erica posed again

We looked at our blueberry and blackcurrant “bushes” which were unfortunately damaged a few months ago by one of the children and therefore are unlikely to flower and bear fruit this year. Statler and Waldorf look after them

and finally our spuds. Our local authority recently gave us wheelie bins dedicated to glass after running a pilot glass recycling project which left the old sacks redundant. So! We’re growing potatoes in ours.

Next year we hope to add another 4 raised beds but of course this is all dependant on our successes this year. I shall keep you posted! In the meantime – are you growing anything? If so, what are you growing and what do you hope to achieve?

Posted under self-sufficiency, with the kids

I always forget to post about the hens here, someone must prompt me and I’ll remember!

Anyway, my lazy girls went off lay in November so we haven’t had any eggs at all until the last couple of weeks. Their return to form is taking time and so on Monday I bit the bullet and bought eggs. Of course, today we’ve retrieved four eggs from their nesting boxes which isn’t a bad days haul from eight layers. Three of our girls are pekin bantams and lay very small eggs on a sporadic basis so they don’t count.

The timing couldn’t be better after I bought a snazzy new egg holder from Lakeland on Tuesday. A small prize shall be awarded if you can tell me which row of eggs are the store-bought eggs. I’ll draw a winner and award the prize on Sunday 1st February (don’t get eggcited, it won’t be anything outstanding!). Competition is now closed, winner will be announced on Tuesday!

I’ll be back soon with more crafty goodness – I really am plodding away but can’t post anything as my recent work has been for the owl swap. I do, however, have lots of new purchases to show off including the wool for what will be my first ever adult garment.

Posted under self-sufficiency

As the stereotypical auld wifey statement goes, “Och the nights are fair drawin’ in” and as a result, our hens are moulting. As a side effect of the lack of daylight and moulting, our hens have also gone off lay so despite having a dozen hens we’re having to buy eggs. I’m not happy.

That hen is Buffy the Buff Orpington who has recently left our flock to live with my good friend Steven. I dropped her off last week and Steven has worryingly cast aspertions on her sex, so I’m waiting to hear if (s)he starts crowing. Oh dear.

In other news, I finished my contract at work on Friday and have decided to take a few months off to consider my future and to be a Mammy for a wee while. I don’t think I’d really realised just how exhausting work was for me, and with all the drama we’ve had going on lately I’m so tired all the time. My husband and kids need me alive and well! But plans are afoot for a new career path which I may share at some point over the month dependant on how discussions go. How cryptic, eh?

Posted under self-sufficiency

I’ve neglected this poor blog of late; not through choice, just sheer lack of time. I haven’t really been crafting or experimenting with cooking recently because I’ve been back at work since January and we’ve had various family crises to deal with, including my lovely hubby being hospitalised this week for a suspected heart attack. Fortunately for us, it was in fact a nasty bout of pericarditis and he will make a full recovery as long as he listens to his Doctor and spends the next two weeks relaxing.

One aspect of our life I haven’t mentioned lately is that we’ve started keeping hens. Towards the end of March we collected our hens from a local breeder who has been very good to us in terms of support and providing us with advice (and hatching eggs!) and at the same time we collected some eggs. We now have seven hens, two ducks and 10 eggs in the incubator!

Last Sunday we got our very first egg. It was laid by our Silver Laced Wyandotte bantam and as such it’s the smallest egg I’ve ever seen, but the children certainly seemed to approve! I promise I will post some photographs of the hens, chicks and ducks soon but in the meantime I’ll leave you with our very first egg, and the happy recipient of that first egg.

Posted under family, self-sufficiency