Fruit, veg, chickens and rabbits If it ain't edible, it's not allowed in! 

Our new batch of seeds arrived a few weeks ago and now we are well into February, its time to start planning who is going where.

With our areas split between us, we each decide where to put our own seeds. Trying to remember to take into account the important factors of sun, wind, shelter and the most important – are the leaves of the outer most plants big enough for the chickens to eat them through the fencing

We emptied out the compost bins a couple of weeks ago and dug the contents into the soil to breakdown even more. When those plants go out, they’ll have loads of nutrients to suck up and make us lovely big fruits and veg.

seeds,seeds,seeds - Courtesy of vegetableseeds.net

Around Christmas we had some bad luck with our fence which took too much battering from the wind and unfortunately collapsed. We have taken this apart and decided to make a ‘living’ fence (more commonly known as a hedge).

The old fence has been cut down to size, fixed and changed into a large planting box that now covers the length of our back wall (some 18 feet long). It has already been filled with compost and we await the arrival of our hedge plants. Being an edible garden we couldn’t just have normal hedging though, everything we have picked can be eaten or used in drinks.

Plum, Quince, Sloe and Elaeagnus Ebbingei are the varieties we have chosen. Inbetween these will be strategically place black berries, hopefully these will produce massive fruits for us and put off any unwelcome visitors with their thorns.

Hedge Box behind the Bee Hive

Finally, what we’re planting

First into the indoor greenhouse for this years harvest go:

Broccoli, Broad Beans, Aubergine, Lettuce, Carrot and Sweet Peppers. The radish won’t the luxury of the indoor greenhouse, they are going straight outside.

More to come as the year goes by.

We want to wish everyone luck with the coming year, hope you all have huge harvests and bountiful crops

Lin & Chris

This Christmas has been a good opportunity to make the most of the extra crops, and mix them with the seasonal delights in the shops. Making some in to presents, and some being turned in to festive delights for family gatherings.

For the present front, our family and friends were on the receiving end of hampers and gift bags containing dried apples, pears, pineapples, and bananas. We also made carrot and courgette crisps, pear vinegar, apple cider vinegar, green bean chutney and some home made pasta. All put in to jars and covered in red checked fabric.

The garden is looking muddy and bare with large amounts of rain and wind taking their toll. The bees and the plants are more than a little confused as to what month we are in, as the mild 8-10 degrees have lulled them in to a false sense of spring. On the upside, it looks like we will be getting another crop of potatoes as a result, and the hardy greens like kale, and parsley have been thriving.

The brussel sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes have made for a wonderful addition to the Christmas feasts, with garden herbs adding extra flavour, making our meals a great success.

The chickens have been moulting for the last 3 months, so eggs have been scarce, and the chickens have been looking more than a little sorry for themselves. The rabbits however have been upgraded to a new luxury bungalow, as poor Fudge’s arthritic back was making it too hard for her to get up the ramp of her old hutch for food. Since the change over she has been much happier, and much plumper!

We have been going through last years seeds sorting things out, and we are now starting to look forward to the fun of spring and beginning to plant again over the next few months.

Lin and Chris

It has been a while since our last blog (we apologise) and so much has gone on since then.

Obviously the last 6 or 7 weeks has been harvest time for many plants. The last of our broad beans have come out, but Lin’s rolling programme of constantly planted peas is still going strong. The strawberries look like they’ve finished now, as are the blueberries. We got huge amounts from those beautiful plants and hopefully the late fruiting raspberries will provide us with a few more berries.

We have had great success with some nice fat broccoli, large amounts of purple sprouting broccoli, and kale, even though the caterpillars did their best to destroy them. Luckily they weren’t interested in the many carrots and french beans. The new damson and victoria plum trees we purchased earlier in the year bore us a few fruit (which is always nice from a new tree). Our courgettes have also brought us a bountiful harvest until they developed a fungal infection which, despite our best efforts, finished them off.

A handful of the enemy

A couple of courgettes

Our second and third bags of potatoes have been emptied with a nice large crop (only 5 more to go haha). We have been enjoying a steady supply of beetroot, both red and yellow varieties. However, we have come to the conclusion that if we have a bladder or bowel problem it wont be picked up till winter when we have run out of them! All the garlic has been dug up, producing over 100 bulbs, which should last us till next year (or see us through 1 vampire attack).

We have been lucky with the globe artichoke. We thought that it had finished for the year, but the cheeky plant has produced another 2 globes for us to feast on. We have stripped one of the sunflowers of its seeds, with several more almost ready. Talking of almost ready, we have a nice forest of chilli peppers that are looking nearly there, as well as the lemon grass which is thriving after being resurrected from the Thai food store. The late batch of lettuce and spinach are nearly ready, and the shallots will be coming above ground soon too.

Great harvest

And as the finished product, served with fish

In the middle of this wonderful time of year, some new gadgets have made their appearance in the kitchen. Some of the new ways of working with food are so great.

The superb masticating juicer (careful of the pronunciation, especially if trying to show off about your new purchase when drunk) has made a great addition, destroying fruit and veg into lovely juices (Lin has found herself creating breakfast juices from all sorts of items). The pulp makes great food for the chickens and rabbits as well.

A lovely glass of juice from the new juicer

The second mechanical addition is a massive dehydrator. This oven like contraption heats food at a very low temperature to dry it out. We have had great fun sampling various dried fruits, vegetable crisps, raw cookies and fruit leathers. It has made snacking so much healthier (not that we ate anything unhealthy before *cough*).

Fruit roll-ups made with the dehydrator before slicing up.

In the middle of the great summer harvest we had ourselves a little break and a trip to visit family in Somerset.

This trip yielded many excellent items both through foraging and the discovery of a HUGE garden nursery. We couldn’t resist a few new additions for the garden and ended up with an apple tree, a late fruiting raspberry cane, a second fig tree and a kiwi bush. We are hoping for good things from them next year (although the apple tree already has a dozen fruits on it). The interesting part came on trying to bend the tree (over 6ft high plus the pot!) into our little corsa, quite the contortionist act, but we succeeded with no harm done. Hopefully the kiwi wont be too upset by our more Northerly weather.

Our little trip also bore many many fruits from family, namely multiple bags of lovely Somerset cider apples (yes these have already been crushed, juiced and are fermenting – next year should have some gorgeous cider to consume). A tree from next door was being rude and bending right over the driveway and throwing damsons all over the floor. We figured the only safe thing to do was to lighten this huge tree’s load and fill our bags with almost 2 stone of damsons (half of this has been fermented and squished into wine, while some damsons have been frozen for jam making later on).

Fermenting damson wine before it makes its way into Demijohns

With our car full of goodies we headed back north for the free harvest that many people wait for each year, time for foraging. The old ways of gathering food from the public lands.

We have done 2 foraging trips this August and both have given us great rewards.

First trip out saw us loot some 1 litre tubs of blackberries (4 in all) a bag of hawthorn berries and some rose hips. (We have spotted some crab apple trees and blackthorn trees with rather yummy looking sloes on them, but unfortunately these are not ready yet). We have turned the hawthorn berries into one wine, and combined the blackberries with some left over cider apples to make another wine (Yes we did have to buy more demijohns to hold our growing wine collection). Although we have now been accused of being alcoholics several times, we would like to point out that if we are, we are massively organised ones, as this wine will feed our habit in 2 years time!

A local bull licks Chris' hands (while he holds Lin's bag) - must have had blackberry juice on.

For our second foraging trip we went to another undisclosed, secret site (always helpful to know your landscape to find a wider range of goodies). Again we brought back many blackberries, 3 tubs in all have gone to the freezer. We also spotted a huge amount of Hazelnut trees. We were a bit disappointed that many of the trees were quite sparse, but managed to come home with a small bag full of nuts (with potentially another 6 weeks of ripening nuts left in the season, we’ll be going back again and again). Unfortunately the Elder berries had been foraged by someone (or something) else. But another growth of sloe berries has been spotted, so later in the year looks hopeful (unless another bunch of foragers steals them first).

Hazelnuts

In other news, the rabbits are moulting like crazy, the chickens are cheeky as ever, and Belle (the Bluebell chicken) has laid her first egg (and another 9 since then). All 4 chickens continue to lay well. The bees are busy buzzing around, having had a second super with frames placed on their hive for them to build on.

Over the next few weeks, we shall continue to forage for the freebies that nature provides and of course harvest what we have grown ourselves.

Lin & Chris

The first new potato harvest has been under way, and has yielded a good sized pile… yum yum. Unfortunately some of the main crop potatoes took a bit of a hit when the rabbits figured out just how tasty the leaves are.

New potatoes

The broad bean production is starting to slow down and there is a bit of a lull in vegetables until the french beans and courgettes start taking over the dinner table. Luckily the summer berries and leafy salad are still coming through nicely.

The bees are settling in well and look to be travelling further and further away, although it is still the bumble bees that have the monopoly on our garden. We await civil war!

Bees

Unfortunately, “dusty” our cream legbar chicken has been experiencing egg laying problems. We are not sure if it is the result of a mild virus that she has recovered from or she has damaged herself whilst laying, but she has been unable to lay a normally formed egg for over 6 weeks and we have been informed she is unlikely to be able to rectify this. As a result, she has entered into early retirement and has become a friendly meeter-and-greeter at a poultry and egg sales paddock, whereby she immediately took a fancy to a rather large orphington cockerel. We laughed as the owner suggested the cockerel might be able to sort her out.

Unable to leave empty handed, we have adopted a bluebelle chicken which has been named “Bella”. So far she is preferring to spend her time in our company than with the other chickens and her preferred places to sleep are on Lin’s lap and on Chris’ back. We are sure that she will become part of the flock in no time. We look forward to watching her comb and wattle grow and redden, then the excitement of finding out what colour egg she will lay.

"Bella" The Bluebelle Chicken

Lin and Chris

Our garden farm has had an explosion in population size by over 5000!! … The bee hive has arrived!!!

Ordered some time ago, and bred specially to order, we eagerly, but nervously collected our bees and beautiful cedar hive.  Sealed in a humming and vibrating travel box, we drove them back as slowly as possible to avoid any chance of them being knocked over and becoming bad tempered, or worse… escaping in the car.

After giving them time to calm down, we adorned our brand new bee suits; pointed and laughed at each other, then went out to brave the bees.

opening the box of bees

Having been told that bees get very annoyed when you mix their rooms up, we made sure to keep the frames in order. Lifting each frame and holding it high we played “wheres wally” looking for the queen. Thankfully she had been marked, otherwise we wouldn’t have stood a chance. We then bribed them not to fly away with copious amounts of sugar syrup. Good job bees are not diabetic!

bees in a box

One of the bee frames

For the first few days the bees were very nervous about their new surroundings and only flying a couple of meters from the hive. But, after a week of settling in, they are happily soaring over the houses and returning with little yellow sacks of pollen. Unfortunately for us, they have yet to figure out that there is more than enough pollen in our garden. Maybe they are saving it for a rainy day.

After a couple of the chickens were caught chasing bees, we decided that it would be best for everyone if we netted the hive off for them, and as a rather nice side effect of that, the horseradish is now thriving!

Living in harmony either side of the net

We hope that the bees fill up on their honey reserves soon so we know they have plenty to survive winter and we can enjoy their mesmerising little dances at the hive entrance next year too.

Lin & Chris

Finally the sun is shining down upon us and the fruit and veg are starting to come thick and fast. In fact we are sure we have seen the courgette leaves sneaking a growth spurt in, every time we turn our backs.

Courgette

This month has been most bountiful on the berry front, with strawberries, raspberries, black currants and loganberries. We are eagerly awaiting the slowly plumping blueberries that are appearing too. We are building up a nice freezer stash, which means we are contemplating how much we need another freezer to fit the rest of our harvest goodies in. Unfortunately we must report that many a berry fell before reaching the freezer …. into our mouths!!

Berry Fest

Loganberries

Raspberries

Strawberries

Blueberries

The broad beans have gone mad and the surplus is also starting to take over the freezer. Following on behind are the peas, although these are lucky to make it to the kitchen let alone the freezer… yum yum!

Broad Beans

Peas

All this nice weather has also made us think of wine, and after finding a rather nice wine rack courtesy of freecycle, we bottled 3 gallons of 2009 vintage! Thoughts now turn to refilling lonely looking empty demi-johns, so we have been saving all the rose petals, and throwing them in the freezer with the rest … so far we have about 2 demi-johns worth of rose petal wine in there!

Roses for wine

Between the occasional radish to harvest, we are now starting to see a couple of carrots and beetroots ready. We also had 2 globe artichokes which were very tastey… yum yum! The Jerusalem artichoke patch on the other hand looks like it will be more of an abundance than an occasional crop.

Jerusalem artichokes

The sunflowers are coming out, and this year we have squirrel proofed them. Last year the squirrels sat on the fence and ate them as if the row of sunflowers was their all you can eat buffet. This year they are several meters from any fence and surrounded in netting. Although this may sound extreme, you haven’t seen our commando squirrel! (Who we recently found out is also the reason why we haven’t had the internet for a while as he chewed half way through the phone wire on the roof!)

Sunflower

The edible flowers are in full bloom with nasturtiums and borage attracting all the bumble bees. This also means that it is that time of year when we are getting funny looks for having flowers in our packed lunches at work.

Nasturtiums

The herbs are doing well in their never ending struggle against the chickens who are intent on digging and dust-bathing in their roots. The bronze fennel however cannot be destroyed and is now taller than the shed, meaning fish dishes are in season!

Bronze Fennel

Chris found he had a bit more space than he expected after the death of all the melon plants in The Great Wind of 2011, and so threw down handfuls of seeds hoping that some might survive. As the weather turned beautiful, germination went wild and so now there are turnips galore and cauliflowers overflowing into pots. When more root veg gets pulled up, I’m sure we’ll find space to accommodate them

All in all, we are enjoying our dinner side garden.

Harvest Time

Lin & Chris

Alas, there have been many casualties to the great wind of spring 2011. Unfortunately, living where we are, this is likely to be bettered again in winter. We have had weeks of gusting wind battering the plants. Many branches and stems were broken, and most of the sweetcorn battered into submission.

As we couldn’t risk transplanting anything new out into the garden, we were forced to buy plant feed to keep our indoor forest alive. We made the most of our lack of gardening with a few foraging trips, and have happened across some beautiful areas.

Our Foraging Friends

With these newly foraged ingredients (not the birds!!!) and the few bits that were surviving in the garden, we have had more time to play in the kitchen. We dried fresh herbs from the garden and used a couple of last year’s dried chillis to make some experimental flavoured olive oils.

Flavoured Oils

The radishes have gone a bit mad. So, in the search of new uses for them, we experimented with radish leaf soup and radish chutney. Both of which came out surprisingly beautifully.

Radish Gluttony

Because of this, the chutney fever took over, and several more chutney experiments followed. To name but a few, the cupboard now proudly sports courgette and apple chutney, bean chutney, pepper and chilli chutney, tomato and courgette, and marrow chutney. Yum yum…

Chutneys Galore

The strawberry season is also now upon us, where we are glad we added more plants in march as there are now many fruits appearing, and especially glad that we fenced off the chickens from eating them! Hopefully it wont be long before all the other berry types follow suit, and end up in our bellies too! Yum yum…

Strawberry Season

Having scoffed all of these, the greengrocer had to provide more strawberries to play with my new sugar free jam pectin. We made rhubarb, strawberry and rose petal jam, which came out a beautiful bright pink colour and set perfectly, as did the plum jam we also made with it. Yum yum yum!

The chickens are feeling the joys of spring and Suzy has decided she wants babies. Having read that lowering the body temperature of a chicken helps to put them off broody behaviour, we strategically placed frozen water bottles in the egg box. Only to come back later and find Suzy had pulled out more feathers to insulate them and was trying to hatch them… Daft bird! Before she got this crazy idea in her head, we had all 4 chickens laying together for the first time and filled our first large egg box. Yum yum!

The First FULL Egg Box

The bunnies are bumbling along and don’t think much of the wind. They have hidden sulkingly under the potatoes every time they have been put out, yet still protested every time we wanted to catch them to bring them back inside.

We are looking forward to the promised heatwave so we can take the jungle outside and lay broken plants to rest, and enjoy a summer of home produce.

Lin and Chris

With the arrival of the beautiful warm weather, we took pity on the plants looking longingly outside and organised a mass migration. We have gone from a barran looking half empty garden to strategically planning how to fit everything into the raised borders. Linda even had to get out her ground plan to ensure she had left space for everything. Chris just hoped for the best and threw his in. Considerable weeding was completed to make way for the many, many seedlings, and the garlic appears to have multiplied so was split up… requiring a re-plan to figure out where to accomodate it. Some of the radish was also ready for harvesting, which was lucky as it freed up some space!

White Radish

The heat has tricked some of the plants into an early summer and therefore flowering, including many berry and fruit bushes and trees, and the broad beans.

Broad Beans

Luckily we haven’t needed to mow the grass thanks to the many mouths of the chickens and rabbits. But sometimes the heat got too much for the rabbits and they have spent a large amount of time retreating under the shady bench.

Bunnies Chilling

Where our garden is still immature on the food front, we have been out on a couple of day trips in search of edibles elsewhere. The first trip was to satisfy essential requirements… a refil for the wine rack. We collected enough dandelion flowers for 2 gallons of wine!!! This time next year our seedling planting out may feel like it went a bit quicker, although May might bring with it a hangover!

Dandelion Wine

The second trip was planned around the purchase of River Cottage’s “edible seashore” book. We are very lucky to have a category B sandy beach on our doorstep. With the book in one hand and a bucket in the other, we hit the shore. Even we were surprised at how much we found to eat. There were 2 types of abundant seaweed on the book’s top list, as well as mussels and crabs. Unfortunately starfish were not in the book, which was a shame as there were thousands at the water edge and we spent half our trip trying not to stand on them.

One of the billions of starfish

From our trip we made traditional chinese crispy fried seaweed, seaweed bread, somerset cider mussels, steamed crab and crap soup. Yum Yum!!!

Somerset Cider Mussels

Steamed Crabs

We are hoping that the warm weather continues so the seedlings don’t go in to shock, and we can get the melons, chillis, peppers, sweetcorns, citrus trees, aubergines, cucumbers and courgette plants out soon before they take over the house.

Courgettes

Melon Jungle

On a last note… congratulations to phoenix the chicken for FINALLY figuring out where eggs come from!

Lin & Chris

It has been a busy fortnight with 2 major construction projects started and almost finished.

We have realised that in order to grow all the tasty vegetables obtained using our £25 voucher courtesy of vegetableseeds.net , we will need more space to put things outside. So our first project has been a new raised boarder.

To make way for this new raised monster, a poor, unsuspecting strip of lawn was ripped up and removed. This was made all the trickier when the chickens tried to stand on the spade or pecked across where you wanted to dig. The new boarder is a plastic kit we found on the internet, very sturdy and easy to put in.

It took lots of compost to fill the bed, but will save a lot of digging later, and be worth it when all that food goes into the ground

New Raised Boarder is almost complete

A break from annoying the digger to search for worms in the discarded lawn.

Our second big project has been the back wall and fence. This stood as an incomplete wall with a heavily propped up, rickety fence on top of it. Linda had given up repairing it, and Chris has lost count of the number of times he’s had to fix the fence after a windy day.

The incomplete wall was built up, then on top of this 4 big brick pillars, each holding some wooden beams tightly in their cemented clutches. To complete the fence, many smooth new planks of wood have been nailed to the beams, making a lovely looking (and much securer) fence. All that stands to be done is to add some coats of wood treatment to keep our fence in good condition against the elements of nature.

We plan on making some boxes from left over planks and attaching these to the beams of the new fence. All because we need more growing space than we have at ground level.

The completion of the wall has meant that Linda can put out her Veggies right into the corner of the garden, without fear that some may fall out through the hole in the wall and into the walkway behind.

To finish the week off, Linda has decided (because we are short on ground space for our veggies) to put some grow bags on top of the chicken’s run and coop, creating a nice little garden above the main garden. Growing in these are, lettuce, rocket, Flamingo beet and spinach – all freshly sprouted from the free seeds.

Lin & Chris

March is in full swing and so are the seedlings. Various plants have moved around and emerged. Some seedlings have upgraded to bigger and better pots, and new shoots have quickly taken their spots in our hot houses.

In Lin’s mini greenhouse, 4 of the brussel sprouts came up, 3 aubergines seedlings are poking through, and the nasturtiums went mad and are already awaiting a new home outside. The herbs are now big enough to retreat to the kitchen and the lemon grass is slowly starting to develop roots. The radish and turnips have turned into a small jungle that will soon need re-homing, and 4 hot peppers have come up. Unfortunately though, no sign of the sweet peppers.

Radish Jungle

Also into the mini greenhouse we have some very swift growing courgettes and sweetcorn.

Sweetcorn

Courgettes

Into both of our mini greenhouses we have added some peas and sunflower seeds in a competition to see who can grow the best. Any midnight sabotage counts as immediate disqualification.

In Chris’ mini greenhouse the broad beans have been and gone. The have already been moved out to the veggie plot outside. 2 purple cauliflowers came up, but one was not willing to share the pot and forced the other seedling to lay down and die. The kiwi must have seen this as they have decided not to come up at all. The strawberries are plodding along at their own pace and will be rushed by no man. The melons however have stolen the show. Having outgrown their starter pots, they have now been re-potted and are taking over the mini greenhouse.

Canteloupe Melon

New plants that are being squeezed alongside the melons are 3 types of carrot… sugarsnax carrots, big fat carrots, and little ball carrots.

Carrots

We have decided not waste any waste, and so have employed hundreds of new workers in the kitchen. They seem happy to sleep together under the kitchen table, being as they are all worms!

Wormies

In time we are hoping they will be providing us with superfine compost and liquid ferterliser.

Sadly “Pigeon”, our araucana chicken contracted a virus and unfortunately passed away. We had to move swiftly to make sure the remaining trio didn’t get too comfy with all the extra space, so a cream legbar chicken has moved in to join the gang. She has been named “Dusty” due to her Dusty Springfield hair do. Picture available in “meet the chickens” page.

We enjoyed the spring sunshine with the chickens taking communal dust baths together as we debated where to move the herbs to make way for another raised border. Watch this space…

Communal Dust Bath

Lin & Chris