The Chickens Have Landed!

The next stage of our self sufficiency, good life master plan, is chickens. This has been on the slow burner since before christmas, and started with a chicken keeping course at Stonebridge City Farm.

It then took us til this long to sort out buying some sort of house for them and build a run.

Finally though, two Warrens (Beatty and Cicero), a black star (Pam) and a Columbine (Oona) arrived in our garden. We bought the Warrens first and after a couple of days went to collect the other two. The two Warrens are in the picture on the left. The other two are in the photos below.

I thought it would all be straight forward from then on. Feeding, cleaning out, and collecting eggs. Oh, no! The Warrens are about 6 months older than the other two and chased them onto the roof of the hen house, where they stayed for a couple of days - I did grab them and put them into the house at night. Gradually they began to get braver, and hungrier but were still chased about by Beatty. Me and Matt decided to intervene, and extended the run and put more feed bowls around, so that the bullying Warrens couldn't guard all the food. It seems to have helped, and they are getting along a bit better now. Next problem - no eggs. The two Warrens are moulting, and chickens don't lay when in moult. The other two are a little too young to be laying yet.

On a brighter note, our cat Smiley got bored of them after one evening, and has wondered past them in the garden without raising a claw! Out Staffy Beth is a little more excited by them, but has figured out that she can't get to them when they are in the run and leaves them alone. However, if the chickens are loose in the garden, Beth is not!

They are also very relaxing to watch, scratching about on the ground. And they are every allotmenteers dream, I threw a slug in front on one the other day and it was gobbled up straight away!

Next time at the allotment, I will be collecting slugs, bugs and dandelion leaves to bring home for them!

I might try them on sticky weed tonight, even if they don't eat it, it will be funny to see them wandering around with sticky weed on them!

So much to do, so little time...

I know, I am a bad blogger. Despite all my promises about blogging more regularly on my new blog, I have slipped into old habits. They really do die hard!

It's not that I haven't been working away, I've just been too busy to write.

Life on the road to self sufficiency has been good, as you can see by the photo. Well truthfully I haven't had much to do with any of the produce in the photo, but still the frugal life is all about sharing and taking part!

Two weeks ago, I took part in a brewing day at Stonebridge City Farm. The Saturday consisted of Nettle Beer, and the Sunday that me and Matt went along to was about using other items from hedgerows and verges to make some home brew. We decided on Hawthorn Blossom wine. A week later, some of the nettle beer was going spare, and as we had taken part on the Sunday, we were offered some nettle beer. The only thing we could find to put it in to transport it home was a plastic bucket with a lid. Needless to say, my car now smells of nettle beer! However, I did manage to save enough to fill two two litre water bottles. I only have another week to wait until it is ready for drinking.

In front of the nettle beer, is a couple of jars of curried onion chutney, and three jars of rhubarb and vanilla jam. All of this was made by Matt, who has suddenly really got into all this growing, preserving, brewing idea. I think it was the brewing, that sparked his interst personally! Either way, it is great to have some more enthusiasm and planning input at the allotment and home.

Speaking of the allotment, we now have a shed. We had to carry it from the main gates ourselves in the pouring rain, but after a struggle to nail a warped roof on and a trip to Wickes to change the damaged roofing felt, there is now a wodden shed at the back of the allotment. No more dragging lots of tools back and forth to the car each time I go.

Before the shed arrived, I did a bit of weeding in the onion bed, they all seem to be doing well, although the garlic hasn't grown quite as much as it should. I think this might have been due to the dry spell we had before, as garlic tends to prefer lots of water. In the potato bed, things aren't quite as good. A number of plants have got brown dead leaves, I feared it might be potato blight so dug out my vege books and had a look. I didn't take any photo's but it appears that another likely cause if frost damage. A friend mentioned there had been  a frost a couple of weeks ago, so I am hoping it is that, rather than potato blight.