Crops & Compost
Garden Established 2021
Gardening for Beginners
We are still very much beginner gardeners, experimenting each year with what we can grow and the best way we can grow it using methods sustainable both by ourselves and by the planet. We are making lots of discoveries and embracing failure.
We’ve started out concentrating on growing food for our family, and in 2023 my focus is on trying to find a balance between growing crops, caring for nature within our space, and living within the space as a family.
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Keeping Chickens
For three years or so, Ma had been saying that we ought to get chickens. Yes, we ought to. We have the space, and it would be lovely. But, if I am honest, I was never going to get around to it. There were always other things that seemed to take precedence. So I made agreeable noises and let the idea drift comfortably into the background. Then she sent a chicken coop and the basis of all my excuses fell away.
Ma lives vicariously through me. She has an idea of something she’d like to imagine me doing and suddenly it happens. I don’t mean she forces these things upon us, but she says a thing would be nice, I say yes, I may do that thing one day and then that one day is suddenly happening for real and I’m just sort of watching it all transpire as if I was more the audience than the star of my own show. She is the ultimate enabler.
So now she has enabled hens. Five healthy girls.
Dame Eggatha Christie
Eggatha is a White Star (Hybrid white leghorn) hen. She is very good at solving mysteries, but also planning them.
She lays white eggs and only tells white lies, mostly for plot development.Not a fan of broccoli.
Dame Eggna Featherage
Eggna is a Needwood Blue hen (Legbar style hybrid). She is a very refined lady of excellent character, who loves to hang around the gladioli beds in the garden. Her favourite colour is lavender.
She lays blue eggs with what she terms as a ‘wisteria hue’
Not a fan of broccoli.
The Right Honarable Baroness Floegga Henjamin
Flo is a Needwood Jade hen (similar to a Bluebell but with a nice little topknot). She is brilliant with children and one of her best friends is a giant egg.
She lays olive green eggs, all of which are named Humpty.
Not a fan of broccoli.
Sandi Toksvegg, OBE
Sandi is a Blacktail hybrid hen (a Rhose Island red and light Sussex cross). She is hugely entertaining and wonderfully clever. A little on the diminutive side.
She lays brown eggs that she questions incessantly.
Not a fan of broccoli.
Dame Thora Bird
Thora is a Needwood Chestnut (Copper Star/Copper Comet) and she is a comedic hen of great comic timing. Nothing short of a national treasure.
She is extremely short sighted.
Lays dark chestnut eggs, when she can find them.
Not a fan of broccoli.
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Shed Improvements
Revamping the outside of the old lean-to shed was one of the jobs that I first tackled not long after moving in. By March I had taken the dark brown exterior of Alan’s Shed to the bright pink of Mimi’s Shed, which is really a shed for us all, but I spend time in there,
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Slate Plant Labels
I made a set of slate plant labels to finish the set up of the new herb bed in the garden and to replace the plastic labels that some of them started out with. As spring arrives and we start to spend some more time in the garden I want to bring our recent additions
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Growing Saffron
At then beginning of October last year I was browsing online, looking for something to plant and grow in those days when the summer harvests were coming to an end and I wasn’t yet quite ready to embrace the shortening days. Quite by chance I found some discounted saffron crocus bulbs online, and the impulsive
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Garden Planning 2023
Late January feels bitterly cold, with snow still on the ground and new layers of frost that build upon each other with no relief from a thaw. It’s a time when I want to be out in the garden more as a new year is calling, but the cold this year is a painful one