May, 2010:

You can tell I have a 2 year old because everthing is baby chicks or baby kittens…but anyway 2 weeks ago we bought 5 chicks at the market to fatten up over 3 or 4 months, to then eat.  Organically reared chickens…tasty dinners for the meat eaters.  However, the chicks came with feed which has something nasty in it as it says you can’t eat the chickens within 6 days of them having eaten the feed…just a reminder of the dodgy practices in the meat industry.  At least we will know what these ones have eaten, their food miles will be low and they will have been treated and killed respectfully.

Welcoming the chicks in to their new home

Baby Chick

Unfortunately something got in to their pen and took one last night so we are down to 4, but Matt is currently securing the enclosure so it won’t get seconds.

Quite a few of our earliest-planted courgettes are starting to grow fruit. We should be eating our first courgettes later this week!

The sun is shining, the rain has stopped and our gardens are starting to get down to the serious business of growth!

Wwoofer Aaron has cleared some of the weeds from beds in ‘the hot end’ of my garden, and yesterday we bought lots of pepper, aubergine and piri-piri plants at market to be transplanted through the thick layer of horse manure.

Lettuces are amazing this year, thanks to the incrfedible amount of rain that has poured into the ground. We grow lettuces all through the winter, outside, but they all tend to reach readiness at the same time, regardless of how much we stagger the plantings! So we have been giving away lettuces and the chickens have to get a taste for them.

I also planted a whole bed of Hopi Indian blue corn with trail of tears cherokee climbing beans and a long thin bed of sunflowers, over the weekend.

The summer glut of food from the garden feels like its about to start – the first courgette flowers are starting to open and some of the redcurrants are ripe, while some tomato plants are also flowering.

A solar drier is on our list of jobs, to be done before we need to start drying for the winter.

Our terraces are absolutely covered in yellow flowers, mainly corn marigolds interspersed with chamomile.

We need to strim all the brambles that have appeared over the winter, and many of the pathways that we use, but we try to wait until after the wildflowers have seeded, guaranteeing the bloom of colour again next year.

The bees have been returning to their hives completely covered in bright orange pollen from the marigolds – another good reason to leave clearing them for a few weeks.