Two years ago – almost on a whim – I told Bob I wanted to start keeping hens, never expecting him to agree. Within a month we had our first two and fairly soon after that we began hatching chicks. In all that time we’ve always had hens in the garden. We’ve also had turkeys, ducks and a trio of quail during that time but the hens have been the staple.

Last night I let the hens run around the garden and since it was still light when we headed to bed, I told Bob just to leave them to put themselves to bed. Our garden is completely enclosed by a 6ft+ high fence and wall combination so I stupidly assumed that they’d be safe – after all, last year we never locked their coop up – but this morning we discovered a fox had got all six of our lovely hens. I’m absolutely devastated, guilt-ridden and horrified.

For two years we have happily co-existed with our lovely feathered friends. Our children know no other way. At Nairn’s preschool assessment a few weeks ago he cheerfully blethered on about his hens who live in his garden and I think of our four children, he will be the one who misses them most. Maybe we’ll get some more in time. Maybe.

Posted under self-sufficiency

Following on from my ramblings about our family’s environmental impact and our attempts at self sufficiency I thought you might like to see these photographs. First off, this is the first broccoli that we’ve harvested from our garden. We ate it in a vegetable lasange and it was amazing!

And these are my girls in their cloth nappies. We ran out of disposables last week and I realised that I had 20 bajillion* nappies that could be pressed into service, so I popped them back into cloth and remembered just how easy it is to deal with them when you’re in the house. My only criticism of cloth nappies has been how awkward they are to carry when I’m out and have more than one child because I have to lug the dirty ones around with me but when I’m at home there’s really no excuse.

Posted under self-sufficiency

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

Very quick little update from me today, I’m going to bullet-point for speed and efficiency.

• This is my 90th post. 90 posts! NINETY! For my 100th post I’m going to have a very special giveaway featuring some handmade goodies so tune in. I anticipate the 100th post to arrive within the next four weeks.
• I have finally bitten the bullet and opened my very own Folksy shop. There’s only some owl stitch markers listed right now but I’ll expand that with time. I am very nervous about this and hope it pans out because I need to start recouping some of the money I spend on crafty things!
• For the fifth week in a row, Erica is too sick to go to nursery. I can’t even explain in words of more than two syllables just how frustrating this is for me. Is it selfish to crave some time on your own? I have one day a week where everyone is at work/school/nursery and I haven’t had that day for over a month and I resent losing that time. I don’t resent Erica because sure it’s not her fault, but I really needed today. Ah well.
• I decided against using the cookie dough. It probably would have been fine, but there were eggs in the mix and with Erica being ill with seemingly no reason I just didn’t want to risk it. I am quite annoyed at the waste, truth be told.
• You can now become a fan on Facebook! Click the link to go to our fan page on facebook – I promise you won’t be bombarded by updates etc.
• We also have a web presence on Twitter and Flickr
• You may have noticed at the bottom of each post now there are a row of little icons. Can I encourage you to explore what they do and how they work for both you and I? Any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them
• Finally, I was wondering why whenever I leave a comment on your blogs I have no avatar that shows up beside my details**. Turns out that there’s a very simple way to do this – just go to www.gravatar.com, register your email address and the picture you’d like associated with your comments et voila! If you already have a wordpress.com account then your gravatar should be linked as long as you’ve registered the email address you use to comment. I know there’s a fair few of you who comment here but don’t have a gravatar set so go go go!

Today is going to be a day in the car. I have to get Nairn to nursery, Erica to see her Doctor, take our growhouse back to a large nationwide DIY store after it blew away Wizard of Oz-style last week destroying all our seedlings (nearly a month’s worth of planting and the DIY store in question are refusing to replace our seeds, making out like they’re doing us a favour by replacing the growhouse. I am unimpressed to say the least!) then we have to get some food in and finally take the cats to the vet before I can sit down. Happy days!

**Edit to add – the ever-lovely Ryan tells me that the gravatar thing doesn’t work for every blog as the blog owner needs to enable that option. For the most part it should work though!

Posted under general crafty updates, site stuff