A few days off

Posted by louisa on Monday 16 August 2010 in cooking, frugal, growing, wild food | 1 comment

I’ve just had a few days offline to clear my head a bit – I spent a lot of time reading, resting & DSing so it wasn’t as productive as four days off work usually is, but there are a few things to report:

Massive egg update
The supersized chicken egg we got on Monday has been repeated on a few days this week – not a scientific test but definitely more likely to happen after they’ve had a good portion of green treats the day before. We’ve had a couple of them and they’ve been double yolkers – which is a worry as it hints that there is something wrong with the fine lady’s reproductive system (even though they’re still young, I think they’re a bit too old for it to be a “really young and still learning” quirk). Will keep an eye on the situation.

Foraging & fruiting
Took Lily-dog for a long walk around Otley Chevin on Saturday – found the most wild mushrooms I’ve seen in one place but unfortunately didn’t have our identification books with us, doh! Took lots of pictures for post-hoc identification – means we can’t forage them but the identification part is the more important bit at this stage in our learning really.

We also found the dregs of some wild raspberries – so ripe it was hard to pick them because they’d fall off as soon as we went nearly them.

Speaking of which, the bramble bushes in the woods next to our house are just about ready to give up their first glut – John had some as a pre-breakfast snack while dogwalking this morning and declared them delicious. Have to go picking soon.

Read More

Experimenting in the garden: leeks & tomatoes

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 10 August 2010 in growing | 0 comments

As I mentioned in my “lessons from our garden so far” post, this year is about experimentation in our garden. It’s our first growing season in a new place, with very different sun, light & soil conditions from anywhere I’ve grown before so it’s interesting to generally see what works and what doesn’t. I know what the books say will work and what the books say I should do, but sometimes that doesn’t mean squat ;)

There are a couple of areas where I’m experimenting a bit more specifically.

Leeks
A number of respected sources recommended lopping off the top thirds of the leaves and the bottom third of the roots on transplanting. Other equally respected sources recommended transplanting them as they are and “not mutilating them”. So I decided to half-and-half my leeklings – or rather third/third/third them because I ran out of space, and had to plant the third in another spot. So my leeks experiment is:

• some leeklings top & tailed
• some leeklings left intact
• some leeklings in a bed where they’ve been trampled on by the cats & my clumsy boyfriend.

I think it might be between the first two about which is more successful.

Read More

Preparing for winter

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 27 July 2010 in growing | 1 comment

I claim to be rather disorganised (usually as a bluff for why I haven’t done something I don’t want to do…) but gardening – and more simple life in general – forces you to plan ahead. Despite it being the middle of the summer (in the calendar, if not observably from the weather), I spent most of my gardening time over the weekend thinking about the late autumn, winter and next spring.

I planted on leeks, tended to my many, many winter squash, sowed spring cabbages & attempted my third batch of kale (the first lot got too hot, the second lot got too wet…). I also fretted slightly about where I’m going to plant my garlic when the time comes later in the year – I was hoping to have a good chunk of a bed for it but I’m not sure there will be room. Lack of decent bed space is one of the biggest problems with our garden but I don’t have the time to tend to both our garden and an allotment (if I could get one…) so I’m going to have to keep working around that. I’ve also got mental calendar notes for starting autumn-sowing cauliflower and over-winter lettuce.

Read More

Busy Sunday

Posted by louisa on Sunday 25 July 2010 in cooking, eating, growing | 0 comments

Today, I’ve:

• Built a cold-smoking cabinet/mini-smoke house
• Cursed the sun because just as I finished the latter, it came out and made it too hot to cold smoke cheese without it melting all over the place
• Cleaned out the chicken coop
• Hung out a load of washing, which, of course, caused the sun to go in
• Jumped for joy because the lack of sun meant I could start smoking
• Started smoking three types of cheese (more on this in another post)

Read More

Growing vegetables for chickens

Posted by louisa on Thursday 22 July 2010 in chickens, growing, wild food | 1 comment

As I mentioned in my post about the economics of getting started with chickens, we’re hoping to feed the chickens a combination of bought-in food (nutritionally balanced layers pellets) and “free” food – scraps, foraged stuff and things we’ve grown especially for them in the garden — and it’s the latter I want to think about now.

Before they moved in, I had started growing some stuff for them (specifically radishes because they’re such a quick crop) and I’d left some lettuces in the ground for longer than I would have done normally, because I thought they’d like them as a snack. They didn’t. The radishes were slightly more successful but only for the green tops, not the red roots – which would be great if we liked radishes because we could easily share but since we don’t, it seems inefficient to grow them.

So anyway, I’m trying to find crops that I can grow for them to supplement their pellets. They’re currently snacking on borage (which they’re eating in the somewhat blurry pics here) and bolting spinach. I’ve got some perpetual spinach & chard growing too – we’ll use some of it, but it’ll be mostly for them. I should be able to start picking those in a few weeks. Around the same time, we’ll be harvesting carrots so they’ll be able to have the tops from those. For late winter/next spring, I’ve sown kale & spring cabbages, and there should also be lots of brassica leaves/surplus — but there is a bit of a gap in the middle between the autumn and late winter/spring harvests.

Next year, I’ll be more on the ball and have early winter cabbages ready to feed them then but now I’m trying to plug the gap with quick-grow stuff. Any suggestions? I’m too late for planting comfrey for them but there still maybe a little time for clover?

I am going to keep foraging for them too, with the rule that unless I can identify something so definitely that I’d be confident to eat it myself, I won’t feed it to them. It’s a cautious route to take – probably missing out on a lot of good stuff for them – but I’d rather be cautious than have a poisoned chicken. They very much like nettles which is a good thing given how many we have around here! I’ve been wilting them to lessen the sting but I’m tempted to dry a lot now to have for over the winter.

Read More

Using up the glut: Marrow cake recipe

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 July 2010 in cooking, growing, recipes | 25 comments

In my previous post about saving marrow/courgette seeds, I mentioned that the marrow I had was just going from ripe to overripe. I had no particular plans to eat the marrow – we like courgettes a lot but thought, since the variety was billed as a courgette, it would be tasteless as a marrow. I was happy just using it as a seed nursery – but when I’d stripped out the seeds, it seemed a waste to throw it in the compost. If the chickens liked courgettes/marrows, I’d have given it to them but they’re strangely fussy birds so I was left with pounds and pounds of edible flesh.

I test fried a slice and judged it to be alright – not as flavourful as its younger siblings but certainly not bad. Tough skin though – edible but tough, so that had to go. I used half of it to make a cheesy-bacony comfort food bake thing (a variation on this recipe from the Indy but with mixed cheese – parmesan and jarlsberg – because that’s all we had in and also goats cheese makes me gip) – I had some on its own last night and we’ll have the rest tonight with pork chops in a tomatoey sauce. The other half, I used to make a marrow/courgette cake.

Read More