First of the Summer Veg and Poultry Update

I decided to get some fertile eggs for the white duck, and was a able to obtain six mixed Indian Runner Duck eggs from Mark Henham on Ebay, which I slipped into her nest this morning. and I must say she was remarkably unappreciative of my efforts on her behalf, giving me a good pecking and hissing like Sid, as I slipped the six eggs under her and removed the dummy ones I had left her with for the time being. I still have my doubts about her ability as a broody, but I decided to put all the eggs under her and hope for the best. It might work, but it might not, we'll see.


The broody hen, on the other hand, is doing extremely well with the fourteen table chicks. and I have let them out over the last few days, to explore further afield she's very good and strolls authoritatively around the garden with them, clucking all the while, so that they know where she is, and they chirp and chirrup so she knows where they are, and if someone gets into difficulties, stuck behind an obstacle of some kind, the volume soon ratchets up, so that she knows whats happening and where and can take appropriate action. It's amazing really that she manages not to lose any of them, considering that there are fourteen of them and she, being a chicken, can't count. It's quite difficult for me to count them actually, as they' re always on the run, but they're definately all still there, They don't look quite so cute anymore, as they've grown a lot and lost their downy fluffiness, and are starting to get feathers like proper chickens. Just as well really, as I must keep clearly in mind that they are Table Birds. even though I do want them to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs and to have as good and as natural a life as possible enjoying a plentiful diet of worms insects and hopefully weeds.

From this.......


to this in three weeks.....




Artichokes


I do so love artichokes, - my son once picked one in a field for me when he was on a cycling holiday in France as a young teenager and brought it all the way back on his bike, ah what a perfect gift that was, and tonight I enjoyed the first one of the season from the garden with dinner. I was quite prepared to share it with David, but he regards artichokes as just an excuse for eating loads of butter, and as he's supposed to be on a diet and can anyway take them or leave them, that suits me just fine as I can have them all to myself.

I prepared this one by slicing off the tops of the leaves, and scraping out the hairy choke in the middle, and then boiling it until tender, about ten minutes in this case as it was quite a big one but very fresh from the garden. When cooked, I drained away the water, and set the artichoke into a dish. I then melted a large knob of butter in the pan, added a good dollop of the garlic scape pesto I recommended to you last week, ~(see recipe) , a good squeeze of lemon juice and poured this over the artichoke. We had this with the last of our venison steaks that our Game Man Sid brought us in the winter, and some of my home made foccaccia style flat bread, spiked with rosemary and more of the garlic scape pesto. I will admit to a certain tendency around this time of year to garlic scape pesto creeping into every dish, it's such s versatile thing to have in the fridge and so delicious, it's hard not to add it to everything, pasta, bread, salad dressing ( just add olive oil and a squeeze of lemon), spring veggies, the list is endlless. It's also lovely on courgettes and we had the first of the seaon tonight, always such a treat. The variety I have grown this year is Nano Verde di Milano, an Italian variety which should give a regular supply of baby courgettes through the season, although no doubt I will forget to pick at some point will find myself with a supply of large marrows for chutney making. Once courgette plants get into their stride they can be so generous in their bounty that they appear on the dinner plate with overwhelming regularity and summertime suppers are referred to by my daughter's boyfriend Ian as "Courgette Surprise" - the surprise being of course when there's no courgette in it.

The White Duck Lives!

After carefully locking away my ducks and chickens last night, having apparently lost my white duck, you can imagine my surprise when I came out into the garden this morning and found - you guessed it - my White Duck disporting herself joyously on the pond!

I decided I had better keep an eye on her to find out where the nest was that she had obviously been secretly sitting on for the past few days. After a hearty breakfast and an extensive toilette, (her not me) I followed her round the garden at a discreet distance wearing a brown overcoat and spying through a newspaper with a hole in it, and in the best detective tradition she gave me the slip when I nipped into the kitchen to get a quick coffee.

Here she is taking a short cut through the sweet corn...

..and slipping unobtrusively through the swiss chard..

However, I knew the general direction she was headed and was able to head her off at the pass and discover her and her ten (yes ten!) eggs in the michaelmas daisies in the vegetable garden. So I had probably been walking past her nest for the last week and not seen her. I always seem to have a patch of michaelmas daisies in a corner, well they just get away when I'm to busy really, and they are in any case a good late nectar source for the bees.

I left her there for the rest of the day and after dark moved her into a spare small duck house and she seems to be happy sitting on the eggs. Of course, I have no drake so her eggs won't hatch, and I'm considering getting some fertile eggs for her to sit on. Ducks don't usually make very good mothers so I was surprised that she's sitting so well. Although I remove chickens who try to sit in the nest boxes, I hadn't the heart to take the duck away from her nest since she's gone to such a lot of trouble, it seemed a bit mean, but do I really want any more ducklings, do I have the room that's the question?

Fight the Good Fight

The veg garden in June.
My friend Alison down the lane, has had to call in the Lovely James the Tree to cut down a dead horse chestnut in her garden. So she now has a nice load of logs for the winter, and I have a ton of chippings,which she kindly donated to me and which I have used to renew the paths on the veg garden, smartening up its appearance no end. Note the cherry tree at rear illustrating theTesco Carrier Bag and Old CDs Bird Scaring System. see below for further details.
But beneath the apparent calm and order of the early summer allotment, lurks the incipient threat of-

cue scary music - THE WILDLIFE.

I'm very fond of a raspberry, or two, and indeed a strawberry, as I've mentioned before, and peas jump straight from the pod into my mouth.... In fact it's fair to say that a substantial amount of our crop doesn't even make it to the kitchen at all. But it's not just me -I'm not the only culprit who's eating the crop in the garden, in fact there's an veritable army out there, just lying in wait to steal the hard earned crop from my very plate, or hand. I'm talking about the birds of course, and the slugs, snails, caterpillars, mice, squirrels and all manner of Gods Good Creatures that are hoping to share in our bounty. I'm fortunate in that I have relatively few problems with slugs and snails, mostly because I turn the hens and ducks into the veg garden in the winter when there's more space, and less crop and they seem to keep it relatively clear. The trick is to keep them out when you don't want them in there - they don't always go along with this arrangement, so you have to watch it. I realise this isn't a realistic proposition for everyone, but if you can do it, it really does make a difference. They eat your slugs, clear lots of the weeds, and fertilize the ground as they go along. Turning slugs and weeds into delicious eggs is, let's face it, nothing short of alchemy. And it saves you on pelleted food too. Certainly seems like a deal to me.

I'm not a greedy person..

However, there is still the problem of wild birds. I'm not a greedy person, well I am a greedy person actually, but anyway the point is I don't mind sharing a reasonable amount of crop with the wildlife, but they just don't know when to stop. Birds don't just have a cherry or two, they strip the tree, slugs don't just nibble a strawberry , they ruin the whole crop, and don't even get me started on foxes. If a fox took the occasional chicken I could live with it, but I've had fox attacks in the past and they just kill every bird the run, whuch of course is in their nature and can't be helped,but it's nevertheless a terrible thing when it happens. You just have to accept that it's the foxes job to eat the chickens and it's the gardener's job to stop him. So just make sure you do your job as well as you can.

Apart from chicken keeping, there are the other traditional anti-pest devices such as my scarecrow pictured here. This is a somewhat basic design, but quite effective, featuring once again, the good old Tesco Carrier bag this time stuffed with straw as a head with an old woolly hat from goodness knows where and sporting a natty if rather holey red fleece jacket. Now I haven't got round to putting a photo of myself on this blog profile yet, but when I do I'm sure you will agree that I bear very little resemblance to this fellow, even from a distance. But you would be amazed at the number of people who see the top of Mr Scarecrow's head behind the fence, think it's me, and then after giving a cheery wave, stomp off down the lane muttering about miserable old bats who never speak... I can only say I have never worn a blue woolly hat and my face is not remotely like a Tesco carrier bag, except on a really bad day. However I am seriously thinking about a bit of a makeover in the Gardening Apparel Department.

Pretty well all creatures hate plastic bags, except humans. Clearly animals realised the danger from the start, - my dog refuses to walk with someone carrying a plastic carrier bag unless they have it on the other side to her, and I once rode a horse that could spot a discarded carrier bag in the ditch at 500 yards and would judder to an immovable halt in the middle of the lane until someone removed it. No amount of prodding, kicking or urging on would entice her to pass near to the Scary White Flappy Thing in the ditch. And so drawing on this experience ~I have designed my Patent Tesco Plastic Carrier Bag Bird Scarer, illustrated here. I admit, it doesn't add anything to the ornamental appearance of the garden, but it does work. I intend to have at least some cherries this year!! ~Old CDs are also liberally dangled around the tree and work by reflecting sunlight at odd angles which also scares birds effectively.

I will make brief mention of my efforts with firearms, well an air gun actually, which became necessary when the whole of last years crop of hazelnuts was lost to grey squirrels, not to mention the bird feeders and strawberries. My husband is very fond of hazelnuts.

I have so far bagged two squirrels and three wood pigeons from my hide by the bathroom window, which affords me a reasonable view of the bird table where said grey squirrels are most often to be found, (out of hazelmut season of course) We ate the pigeons and they were delicious, I did think of trying the squirrel, a la Whittingstall, but decided against it - the resemblance to large rats with tails makes it just a forage too far for now- maybe another time.

I am of course extremely careful to ensure that I am aiming downwards and that nothing is in the possible line of fire

And if all else fails an impenetrable barrier of chicken wire or plastic mesh or both will keep most attackers at bay, even if it means you can't pick a strawberry every time you walk past, because it's trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Raising Chickens for the Table

Note this truly middle class hen serves up her chick crumbs in a Le Creuset dish!

I wanted to try a few table birds last year, but didn't get round to it, so this year I've been busy researching the best breed to try for this new venture. There appears to be some disagreement, not to say ferocious argument, between afficionados of Sasso, and Hubbard, which are both modern hybrids developed for slow maturing and increased flavour. And then there are the traditional and rare breeds such as the Ixworth that others swear by. Anyway I decided to go for the Hubbard hybrid and picked up a dozen day old chicks (actually 14 because I got two free!) from a specialist organic breeder FAI Farms near Oxford.

Raising chickens for the table isn't something to be taken on lightly, for the fairly obvious reason that you will have to deal with, or make arrangements for, slaughter and preparation of the birds for consumption. I have killed the occasional surplus cockerel in the past and although I found it challenging at first, I did find the satisfaction of producing my own roast chicken very rewarding. And tasty. However, I now have a secret weapon in the form of my good friend Sid, a retired and skilled butcher and sometime smallholder has kindly offered to deal with my birds for me. He still does quite a bit himself by way of supplying game from the local hunt, and has a plucking machine, so I'm hoping that will make everything easier,come D-Day (Dispatch Day).


I brought the chicks home in an insulated picnic box and slipped them surreptitiously under the broody hen, or at least as surreptitious as you can be with a hen who is doing her best impersonation of Sid Vicious and giving a good peck at anything that has the audacity to come within beak distance! I was a bit worried that she wouldn't accept them or that there would be too many for her, but as you can see from the picture she's taken them all under her wing. They are accomodated in an ark, and she brought them out after a day or so, and all is going well so far. It's so much easier raising young birds with a broody than doing it with a heat lamp and so on, the broody does the whole job for you, and I think the chicks are better for it too. My four little Indian Runner Ducks are doing fine on their own, I've put them outside now with a small lamp in their ark for warmth if they need it, but they have taken me much more time and effort than if they'd had their own mum.

Bees Bees Everywhere

My one remaining bee colony gave up the ghost earlier this year, and so I decided to invest in a nucleus of Carnolian bees from the lovely Mike at EasyBee in Gloucester. Carnolian bees are supposed to be gentle and non aggressive, so I was very happy to pick up the new bees this morning, and was looking forward to transferring them to the new hive later in the day. "Feed 'em and keep 'em warm" was Mike's advice as I drove off with the box of buzzing bees in the boot of the car.

Imagine my surprise when I went to get a couple of bits from the "bee area" of the hen run, to find the old beehive fully occupied!! A swarm must have come in during the last day or so. and taken up residence in the old hive. I had a quick look at them, and couldn't find the queen, but then I never can, there were no eggs or larvae, but then there wouldn't be if they had just arrived. So I quickly closed up the hive and left them to it, hoping for the best. I've put my new Carnolian bees down at the other end of the vegetable garden, just to avoid any antagonism between the two new sets of bees. So I've gone from no bees to loads of bees in the space of just a few days. I'll have to see how the two hives compare.

The four baby ducklings that hatched out in the incubator a week or so ago are doing well, and eating for England. Their home has moved from the side of the Aga, where it was really in the way, to the other side of the kitchen and then today out into the hall by the front door. I'm hoping they will grow a few feathers soon and can go outside in the run and eventually join the three other adults. If one at least of them turns out to be a drake we might be able to breed from them next year. My two adult black ducks are real stunners and I'm hoping for a good black drake to go with them.