Chris and Steve’s Weblog - City Chickens

Its Matthews birthday and he’s in France on a school trip for five days. Have a good time Matt!!!

Its been a red letter day today at home as well as Rob has been busy in the kitchen, a very unusual place for him to be. First he tried his hand at ice cream, then made his own breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast, then finished off by making his first Victoria sponge cake. He used up eighteen eggs from our own chickens and some of our own strawberry jam for the filling of his cake. Didn’t he do well!

We have been very busy at the allotment for the last few days, mostly weeding, watering and harvesting. No watering required today though as we have had torrential rain. We did manage a visit to the tip though so the plots look even tidier now as we have thrown away a lot of stuff.

So far this has been a better year than last and I have been busy after every visit to the plots preparing, cooking, freezing and preserving etc. oh and eating. Everything has done well so far with the exception of spring onions which have refused to appear despite being sown several times.

Here it is but now what do I do with it?

This afternoon we planted the brussell sprouts, Brilliant, now we need a bit of gentle rain to water them in. Rob fixed up the cage we built for them last year and it looks fit to face the winter now.

We emptied out one of the potato bags, Rocket I think, and half of them are bubbling away in the saucepan now.

The strawberries have exeeded all expectations, we have eaten them, given them away, frozen them and made jam and there are still loads left to pick.

Yesterday I cut a lettuce, a butterhead, my favourite, it was the best we have grown so far.

No. The circus hasn’t come to town. For a week I have been trying off and on to find the site of the weblog of the young couple who were the last to take on a plot at Bob’s Coppice. Then I had a flash of inspiration, if they had seen our weblog then their url would be in the statistics for our site, and there they were with just a forward slash and a wp at the end to confuse the search engines. Their address in now in my blogroll and they are well worth a read. Though it is a new site they are obviously not so new at growing as they have a thriving garden at home. They have very kindly given us a Chillie Pepper plant and after reading through their site I am wondering if it is a Pinocchios Nose as I see that they had some of those. I have it at home on the window sill so it will be interesting to see what develops.

Although the breeding season should only go from February to May Jemima is once again nest building and has two eggs in there already. I hope for their sake that they have at least one success this time.

We ate our first new potatoes last Sunday. It was the white pot, the first I planted up with three Charlotte seed potatoes on October 28th last year and started them off in the lean to. They were lovely. We also had broad beans from the plot and loads of strawberries too.

The onions that we bought from Focus in October last year have all come on very well and we brought a couple home last weekend. I am not sure whether we should harvest them all now or not I shall have to do a bit of research. They went in the 9th October last year and from what I have read should be harvested in 22 weeks so now seems about right.

Sean and Deb have bought a greenhouse for their garden and have done a good job of building a secure base for it. Well done both of you.

On Monday night we cut the first Cucumber from the Carmen plant. We are hoping for more but who knows.

Here comes the sun and here come the strawberries. We had quite a poor crop last year but this year we have an abundance of fruit so if we can beat the slugs in the race to harvest we should have enough to eat, preserve and give away. yummy….

A disappointing time for Puddles and Jemima as not one of their clutch survived but we are just grateful that Puddles survived his illness and has proved his fertility to us as there were three fully formed ducklings in the eggs. Unfortunately none of them made it out which was heartbreaking for all of us.

The chicks and growers are doing fine and are now all outside in their respective pens.

Sadly we lost two of our big rescue girls within the space of five days so only one lonely girl now in the eglu.

Tonight we plan to go down to the plots to plant more beans both runner and dwarf french and to water the plants that are under cover.

My Neice is forty today. She is a lovely girl and I hardly ever see her. Happy birthday, hope you had a good day.

Here are the four latest chicks. One Bantam Brahma and three Pekins.

Today I have sown more beans in pots to start off at home. Runner Bean White Lady, Climbing Bean Blauhilde, Black Bean Delinel and some unlabelled small white beans sent to me by a forum member last year.

Yesterday I potted on some Tomatoes Sweet Millions given to us by a friend along with a Cherry Belle and an Alicante.

Puddles also seems full of beans as he waits patiently for Jemima, who is sitting on a clutch of eggs, to produce his offspring.