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)

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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.

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Saving seeds from courgettes/marrows

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 July 2010 in growing | 1 comment

As I mentioned in passing in my last post, we’re in the middle of a courgette-glut. Unfortunately the glut started in the second busiest week of my year (the summer showcase at drama – meaning I work about 60hrs instead of the usual 35hrs) so the courgettes didn’t get picked on time – and they stayed on the vine growing into marrows. I’d intended to let some of the fruits grow to marrow size anyway to collect seeds for next year so it wasn’t the end of the world.

I harvested one of the marrows yesterday – it weighed in at 1.8kg (just under 4lbs). I managed to slice a good number of the seeds in half while cutting it open (doh!) but still got 30 or 40 good size seeds from it. I’ve not saved the seeds from marrows before so I’m not sure whether or not it’ll be a success – the ones I’ve kept look fully formed and are the roughly the same size as the ones I bought this year (there were a lot of smaller ones which I discarded), but only time will tell if they’ll germinate.

When saving seeds, you’re supposed to leave the fruit on the plant for as long as possible to allow the seed to fully develop. Over ripe but not rotten is the usual guideline. This marrow was probably just edging toward over-ripe from ripe – still edible but the skin was tough (it’s over-ripe if you can’t push your thumbnail easily into the skin).

Anyway, I’ll see how these seeds dry and will try growing them next year – it feels like there is little to lose. I’ll let another couple of fruits stay on the plant longer to see what the difference is.

(Surprisingly/frustratingly, the chickens don’t seem to like courgette/marrow – a shame because there is a lot of it to go around!)

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Lessons from our garden so far

Posted by louisa on Friday 16 July 2010 in growing | 0 comments

As we only moved into our house last autumn, our first growing season has been one of experimentation – see what grows here, what doesn’t, and what else we have to contend with.

Here’s some of the lessons I’ve learned so far:

Butternut squashes take longer to germinate that most other things. I planted six seeds and a few weeks later, when everything else was well underway, I had just one sprout poking through the soil. Oh, I thought, that’s a really poor germination rate. Damn you, eBay seeds!. Then I planted another 40 (…) seeds with the hope of getting half a dozen plants. And a couple of days later, the original other five seeds sprouted. And then about 30 of the second sowing. I have a lot of squash plants this year.

(Ditto, to a slightly lesser extent, courgette plants. I had seven in my original planting then got some free seeds from BBC’s Dig In project and planted them too. After giving some away and losing some to one thing or another, I think we’ve currently got about 14 plants fruiting or about to fruit. Unsurprisingly, the self-germinating ones have been a lot more productive so far.)

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First courgettes from the garden

Posted by louisa on Monday 5 July 2010 in cooking, growing | 0 comments

We picked our first courgettes from the garden on Friday night – the first thing we’ve harvested other than herbs and salad from the garden this year.

They’d been ready for picking for a couple of days but we weren’t ready to eat them – but on Friday, we picked some to have in our Mexican-ish dinner. I thought they tested a bit more courgettey than normal and stayed firmer during cooking. John was too busy cramming his mouth with nachos to say much about anything. Here, they’re frying with some cumin seeds and garlic – yum!

These were the first batch of seeds I planted – an early fruiter, although I’ve lost the seed packet so I don’t know exactly what they were. We’ve got five plants of those though and another five of the second batch, which have flowers on but no real fruit yet — there is a strong possibility we’ll be overrun with courgettes later in the summer!

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