I love Spring

Spring is such an exciting time, warm breezes full of promise, the smell of damp compost in pots on the windowsills, palm-fulls of little seeds. It's a real time of expectation. This year it's especially important to me since I've found out I'm having a baby in the early Autumn! Enough about me though, on to the gardening!

This year I've bought some v exciting sounding seeds from The Real Seed Catalogue and here are my Russian tomatoes (above)! Named Urbikany they are an early tall bush variety. Last year due to the damp we suffered badly with blight, and these toms are apparently faster to mature in our 'glorious' English climate, so they may avoid blight which often strikes later in the growing season.

Other plants sown at the moment are an Italian green knobbly pumpkin, a spherical courgette, a weirdly shaped squash, a cooler climate melon and some butter bean type runner beans. Also I have seeds for sweet violet and a lovely bush sunflower.  This weeks job is get those potatoes in!

More excitement came this week from the first egg from our Crested chicken, Rosie. The Crested are (I think) the same as a Columbine, they are part Cotswold Legbar which is an old free ranging breed with cool pompom head feathers which lays blue/green eggs.  The hybrids are being developed to produce a smaller hen that will lay plentiful blue/green eggs.  I think the ratio is 80% blue/green to pastel. Look it's blue/green, This pleases me greatly as I really really wanted a blue egg layer!

Another brill thing that's happened lately is that Nath's dad gave us some money to buy a space for more chickens, so we purchased an Eglu Cube in pink.  It's very spacious and the hens seem to love it although the oldest ex battery chciken is having a problem getting back up the ladder in the evenings, bless her.

Chicken Update!

This year we went from two ex-battery hens down to one....sad huh. Ruby our third chicken was unfortunately very poorly n while recuperating died last year. A month or so ago Clara got poorly due to a crop/intestinal issue and despite the loving attentions of Nath, and our fantastic avian vet (Amicus Vetinary Centre), she had to be put to sleep as she could no longer digest. This left only Nessa who was a sad chook because chickens are flock creatures who do very badly alone. As there was no ex battery rehoming event coming up soon enough, we opted for point of lay chickens. I am a rescuer by natural inclination so I did feel guilty buying new friends, but given the urgent need for company for an increasingly depressed looking Nessa, I think in this case buying younger birds was justified.

Off we went to Merrydale Poultry who I'd read good things about on the web. They had some blue egg layers on their site I'd been eyeing up, as they were sold out I decided I rather fancied the Copper Black Marrans, and maybe a white egg layer. After a chat with one of the owners we opted for a Copper Black and a 'Merrydale Snowbell' which is a White Star hybrid. I'm told ears are good indicators of egg shell colour....more on that in a future post. The birds have been named Gracie (the Copper Black) and Isabelle (the Snowbell). We released them same day into the Eglu with Nessa. That is normally a bad strategy due to territorial chicken fights! Popping them straight in worked great for us because Nessa was so lonely and was just very happy to have some new friends. Within 3 minor comb pulling squabbles the pecking order was agreed amongst the girls and n peace reigned. Fab!

March...on Spring! (hohoho*cough*)

I think....it might be Spring! Since my last entry I have lightly dug most of the garden in preparation for planting. Since I was totally disorganised at buying the green manure on time (plants that grow overwinter and keep the nitrogen in the soil) mostly the soil was bare over winter, save for the autumn/winter veg. This means that in 2 beds I have allowed the nitrogen to be leached out through the soil over winter, the other had peas, and their clever nitrogen fixing roots that I left in after I chopped my peas down will have helped to keep the nitrogen in. On that bed I added some leaf mold that I made from the leaves collected on my drive last year. On the other 2 beds which are very sandy I have dug in some of my compost from the compost bin, which is now bursting with worms (great for the compost...not so great for me *twitch*). I discovered this when I opened the bottom hatch and 5 shiny red worms dropped out and squiggled across the concrete, "Naaaaath...heeeeelp!?".

Last Saturday I went to The Edible Garden Show it was a fun day out and I did come back with a few ideas and lots of tips on chickens. Worth going for the animal tent alone, it had pigs and goats and many different types of chicken (I wish I had room for a Orpington). I also came back with an Oak Paper Potter. These are very handy little tools allowing you to create 4 small paper pots from one sheet of newspaper (no glue or water required, just roll it round the roller and scrunch the bottom in the press), I have already made a nice tray full of pots to plant my seeds and seedlings into (as you can see above). I intend to buy the watering rose tops you can buy for old drinking water bottles (bottle top waterers) so I can water my indoor seeds without washing them away (how clever!). I've planted some lettuce and baby carrots seeds directly in the ground, but I do plan to start off as many plants as I can in mini pots to avoid early slug damage when the seedlings are too small and tender to cope with being munched, and so I can replace things as we eat them...that's the plan anyway!

Mushrooms are growing in my walk in wardrobe...brown closed cap, and intentionally of course. Actually they aren't growing yet, they have just had the casing layer added and I'm waiting hopefully. They're in the walk in wardrobe bit as it's an outside wall in there, and so much cooler than the rest of our terraced house, so a good temperature for shroomies.

On the chicken side of things, I had to show you this. Nessa laid us a mini egg a week or two ago, sadly it wasn't chocolate (shame) but it is freakily small. I thought chickens only laid this sort of egg when they were just at 'point of lay', but the web tells me this isn't the case. It's known as a 'wind egg' and can also happen to older hens. It's an egg without a yolk. An interesting site about abnormal eggs can be found here.

It's hard to imagine that last year in March the garden looked liked this:

February - Of eggs and chickens

February's going fast! Most of January was spent getting over December. The weather is starting to warm up, the first planting has began and the chickens are looking cheery. Over the winter period Nessa, our big cute friendly chicken had stopped laying. As Clara was still in lay we assumed that Nessa was probably not having a break for winter and she had reached chick-opause (menopause for chickens, geddit?!). Hmmm, I thought. Disadvantage - the halving of egg production, and no more recognisable speckly brown Nessa eggs. Advantage - not squating once a day to lay a torpedo must seriously narrow down her chances of dying a premature death (egg peritonitis is nasty, and caused when the eggs slightly leak inside the chicken, the bacteria multiplies and makes them poorly). Well now it's February she's decided that that's her winter rest over and she's started laying again! The new style egg she's going for this year is more compact and less eye wateringly huge than last year. Clara must be green with envy as the ones she is laying at the moment are very much torpedo-tastic whoppers, I am presuming the required face for the delivery of the egg pictured above was >_< . You can see the size comparison (top pic)!

At the weekend, if the weather is dry I will let the chickens wander over the now mostly empty veg patch, and they can clear the ground of any unwanted grubs.

Here's a nice chicken cuddling picture for you. Proving the ex-batts are the most lovely pets, this is me with Nessa. Excuse the picture quality, that's iPhone's for you.

Chinese Tea Eggs

I have found something to do with my spare eggs. Chinese Tea Eggs are a chinese snack food and are made by smashing up the shell of hard boiled eggs before boiling them in a liquid made from star anise, 5 spice powder, salt and black tea and then leaving them to soak for 2 days in the fridge. The result is....interesting.... Not to my tastes, but then I don't like my eggs hard boiled, Nathan likes them though. The taste is a lot like mulled wine, and the flavour soaks right through into the eggs yolk.


Chinese Tea Eggs

4 eggs
water
2 tablespoons salt (can be quite liberal with salt)
1 tablespoons Chinese Five Spice powder
1/2 star anise
1 tea bag (black tea)

Hard boil the eggs, when cooled tape the shells to break them (without breaking the egg itself). Put back into the water and add the ingredients and simmer for 15 minutes. After this time bottle with the spices and water and leave in the fridge for 2 days.

Huge Egg!!

Short update, can you tell I am enjoying my week off!? This huge thing came out of Nessa after several days of not laying...I bet that hurt, it's so big I can't shut the egg box!

I other news, I made plum jam with the Victoria plums from my parent's garden