How to start beekeeping for free (almost)

I'm really pleased with the progress being made by my bees this year. Having started the year with no bees I now have two thriving colonies, one nucleus of Carniolian bees which I bought, and the other a swarm which came in of its own accord. The swarm is doing extremley well, and has filled up a box and a half with eggs and brood, and almost a full super with honey. I forgot to put the queen excluder on and they seem to be doing so well that I thought I would just let them get on, and they have kept the brood to the bottom and the honey stores in the top super, so all is well. They also seem to be very good tempered bees and I almost feel I could handle them without gloves and bee suit. The carniolian bees are making plenty of brood but have not yet filled up the brood box although their wax is a beautiful pure white.



I have been doing quite a bit of research about bees recently, and have come to the conclusion that I will change my way of keeping bees quite radically in view of what I have learned. Most people are aware of the concern about the welfare of bees worldwide, and many suspects including pests, disease, global warming, poor husbandry, and pesticide use have been suggested. I think it quite likely that most of these are contributory factors and that bees are indeed the "canaries in the coalmine" early warning to us all about the dangers of not caring for our environment. It was interesting to me that when this problem first appeared in the press and on the news some time ago, it was suggested that the difficulties were largely caused by "bad beekeepeers", messing about in their back gardens and not doing a proper job. There were "inefficient amateur beekeepers" allowing the varroa mite to run riot in the population. This reminded me of the way that amateur poultry keepers were set up to be the scapegoats for last years H5N1 or bird flu, before the danger turned out in fact to be closer to intensive factory farms like Bernard Matthews. And then of course this year's great profit making scam for Roche and Glaxo Smith Kline, H1N1 or Swine flu and so on and so on... Sorry, I'm digressing into Rant Mode... Amateur poultry keepers, beekeepers, and gardeners are not the culprits in these scenarios but more often the last bastions of common sense, traditional and local knowledge and practice, many of whom make a substantial contribution to the future of healthy food production and protection of the environment. OK rant over, but to get back to bees - there are similarities between keeping poultry and bees, and it's not just that they both have wings.

Picture from the Barefoot Beekeeper by Phil Chandler showing the author and one of his home made Top Bar Beehives


Before the Reverend Langstroth invented the modern wooden framed beehive so familiar to us all, bees were kept in basketwork skeps where they were free to make whatever kind of honeycomb they wanted. But in return for the wooden framed hive we now give them we have taken away their freedom to live in the way they have chosen to live for thousands of years, and it seems to me that if we keep them like chickens are kept in battery farms, it will all be for the worse. We put them in homes not of their own devizing, try to control and alter their natural behaviors to suit ourselves, transport them around the countryside to pollinate various different crops, sprayed with chemicals, robbed of their precious honey for which we substitute refined white sugar. It's no wonder bees are suffering, it would be amazing if they were not with this kind of treatment. We now largely accept that keeping chickens in tiny cages gives us an inferior product, causes harm to the environment, is less healthy to eat, and is immoral. It's pretty much the same for bees. If we think bees are "just insects", and consider them in welfare terms, we must at least consider the consequences to the wider environment of their being abused.



I've been keeping bees for a few years now and it has always seemed somehow not quite right to me in some way. Now I know why. I now find it appears to be entirely possible to keep bees in a much more natural and "non interventionist" way, by using simple Top Bar Hives and giving up the slightly obsessive control freak style of the modern hive. I'm definately going to give it a try and anyone who is interested in finding out more about these issues should take a look at the Barefoot Beekeeper by Phil Chandler, and the associated web site for natural beekeeping at http://www.biobees.com/ And if you are interested in keeping bees in a simple, natural, and (not the least important consideration these days) inexpensive way, have a look at Phil's book. He describes how you can start beekeeping without any of the expensive equipment you may have thought you needed and how to make what you do need yourself, if you're even a tiny bit handy or have access to someone who is, neither of which applies to me, unfortunately.



And as a final sad footnote, it even seems that the very people who have been entrusted with looking to the welfare of bees, the BBKA The British Beekeepers Association, are in league with chemical companies like Bayer who produce agricultural chemicals and pesticides of proven danger to bees!! See http://vimeo.com/1158245 I have written to the BBKA and will not be renewing my membership.

Loadsaweeds! And a Mystery Egg Thief?

I have been away at an exhibition "up north" so have a bit of posting to catch up with. Like most people with livestock I have to rely on friends and neighbours to help out when I go away, so I try really hard to make the arrangements as foolproof and user friendly as possible. However I've noticed that my idea of foolproof seems to not always hold up to daily scrutiny by other people, and so my long suffering neighbour and friend Alison comes round before I go to see what kind of Heath Robinson contraptions I have come up with this time, guaranteed of course not to go wrong, break down, fall apart, allow escapes, fox attacks etc etc. The neighbours all know when we're going away with the incessant racket emanating from our garden, of hammering, sawing, and generally banging about for the whole of the previous week. Anyway, this time I spent a few days making some proper automatic feeders and drinkers with components from the Solway Feeders whom I highly recommend - website http://www.solwayfeeders.com/ -they sell all the bits and pieces you need for various options, and I also found a small industial unit in Cirencester who sell off used plastic barrels cheaply. (Contact Rachel at MJP Casings Cirencester http://www.naturalsausageskins.co.uk/ - also an excellent contact for anyone wanting to try sausagemaking at home) The large containers make excellent water butts and the smaller ones are useful for making large automatic feeders, and they are safe to use for livestock as they are approved food use containers. I will try to post some more construction details and photos later.


All this does mean that every time I go away I spend the preceeding two weeks preparing to go, then a week away, and when I get back there's a months weeding to do. And boy can those weeds grow in three weeks! The veg garden looks like a jungle! But at least there were no serious problems this time for Alan and Alison, and my new automatic feeders and drinkers worked pretty well. Even the automatic greenhouse watering timer seemed to work. Amazing!The weather up north seemed quite cool and rainy, and I think it was similar down here, which has also contributed to the weed overgrowth situation. Anyway, I set to, with help from the chickens, - I did the weeding, and they ate the insects - here they are tucking into an ants nest they found in the woodchip path.




One interesting thing Allan mentioned whilst I was away that he saw what he was fairly certain was a ferret in the garden. I have noticed the remains of some stolen eggs in the garden recently and had put it down to crows or magpies entering the duck house and dragging out eggs before I had collected them. Now I'm thinking it maybe another culprit, so I have brought the defunct squirrel catching cage out of retirement and baited it with an egg - nothing so far, but we will see.
This is a picture of one of the eggs, not broken as you can see, but opened on one side and completely emptied. So quite a delicate job really, I would love to hear from anyone who has seen anything similar.

Life is just a bowl of cherry...

In view of my much vaunted Tesco Plastic Carrier Bag Anti Bird System, I thought I would post a photo of this year's fantastic crop on my Stella cherry tree. Yes, this is the total crop, not an example of a choice fruit, not one of the biggest fruits, but the complete and utter total crop. It's all I was able to find when searching this morning,.. Oh no , tell a lie, the total crop is more like double that at least......

Hmm, well of course it's my own fault, for not keeping an eye on proceedings, and being too busy doing other things, but it's a disappointment, since there were very many more fruits on the tree before the birds got to them. By way of excuse, here is an example of a mere fraction of

my strawberry crop for this year -

so it's not all bad news. Even the Tesco carrier bags can't be expected to do the job on their own, and I should have a) put out more of them, and b) kept a more careful watch on them. So where I had been intending to offer you a lovely recipe for the famous and delicious French cherry pudding Clafoutis Aux Cerises, or in my case Au Cerise, I felt that a single cerise in a large plateful or Clafoutis was going to be a bit heavy on the carbs. I was going to offer the recipe, not because I particularly love it, although it's nice, but because it reminds me of the yorkshire version of it that we used to have as children, which was I suppose Clafoutis Au Rhubarb. My dad used to make a Yorkshire Pudding, strewn with chopped rhubard just as it went into the oven then sprinkled with sugar as it came out, and served with cream or more likely evaporated milk. In fact my dad was quite a fan of batter in general, quite apart from the compulsory Yorkshire Puddings, he often made us apple or banana fritters, - just chunks of fruit dipped in batter, deep fried and sprinkled with sugar, - I think he felt it was good value and filled up three hungry children at little cost, (he was a Yorkshireman after all) the rhubarb being doubly beneficial being a garden crop that was effectively free.

Anyway, to gloss over the lack of cherries, and concentrate on my surfeit of strawberries, I feel I could effectively drown my sorrows with a Strawberry Daiquiri, a delicious if old style summer drink that I thought of when looking for ideas on what to do with strawberries besides ice cream, jam, and well, just eating them. I came across Hugh Fearnley's recipe for Strawberry Granita - as strawberries don't keep very well, you can use up some less than perfect ones (chuck the mouldy ones though) by making his Strawberry Granita and using a scoop of it to make my Strawberry Daiquiri thus ..

1 cup of Strawberry Granita ( basically you put some sweetened strawberry puree in the freezer and when it's nearly frozen solid you scrape it up with a fork to make a kind of strawberry snow)

Half a cup of white rum

Juice of half a lemon or lime

An assortment of umbrellas and other vulgar 50s cocktail decor

If you use Hugh's proper granita you can just stir in the rum and lemon juice and that's all you need to do, apart from drinking it, or if you're using frozen strawberry puree just whizz it all together in a food processor,and tip into suitably 50s style cocktail glasses.

Drink through a straw whilst putting your feet up and enjoying some old Fanny Craddock cooking programmes, ( don't worry you're not required to actually eat any of Fanny's gruesome confections, it's entirely for amusement) or if you're not up to that, Marilyn Monroe in the Seven Year Itch would do as well. Perfect summer entertainment. But then, as must be apparent by now, I am very easily amused.

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?

As I was saying, lock the poultry up safely.....

As I said in my last post it's the job of the chicken or duck keeper has to ensure to always lock away the stock safely at night. So make sure you do as I say, not as I do, as unfortunately, I somehow managed to leave the white duck shown in the picture on the right of the page, exiting the veg garden, out overnight and she was no doubt taken by a fox. She had developed a tendency to hide in the shrubbery over the last few days instead of going into the duck house like her two sensible duck sisters. I wondered if she had started to go broody, and was hiding a clutch of eggs somewhere,but I went out late to shut the duck house door without checking that they were all inside. Well at least the loss was only the one, and I have the four young ones coming along, but I still hate to lose birds to the fox, always makes me feel like I failed to do the job properly.
Of course, I was extra careful tonight to ensure they were all safely locked away, especially the 14 table chicks withe the broody, but that's just Stable Door Syndrome kicking in...

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.

Seeing the wood for the trees

I'm lucky enough to have quite a large garden here in Wiltshire. We've been here ten years, so it should by rights be looking how we want it to look by now. But gardeners never get to be satisfied with their garden - for a start it's always growing. And there's only one thing worse than things growing, it's things not growing, and naturally the ones that grow are always the ones you want to slow down a bit, or indeed stop altogether, and the ones that don't grow are the ones you really really want to get on with the job. Why is that? I expect it's Nature, or Karma or something, but anyway, it's really annoying. Especially when it comes to trees. Of which we have far too many, far too big. Some kind of control is going to have to be exerted, or we will have to start leaving trails of breadcrumbs to find our way from the back door to the gate.

Now don't get me wrong, I like a tree as much as the next woman, in fact I am a Tree Warden appointed by the Tree Council, no less, and I have a badge to prove it (I don't really) but whereas you can keep a rose bush or a shrub in tip top condition by judicious wielding of the secateurs and hedge cutters, and you can weed and thin and fertilize your herbaceous border, when it comes to a tree that's too big and casts shade over half the garden, it has to be dealt with by a professional, ie you have to "get a man in". Enter said man, the lovely James the Tree Man, who has just been round the garden with us and is going to spend a couple of days next month thinning out our forest of overcrowded trees, removing dead trees, and generally sorting out the problem for us. I doubt whether we will use all the logs in our log burner should the climate turn Sub Arctic and we live as long as Henry Allingham!

Anyway, even after the Lovely James and his merry men have done their professional best, we will still have a large number of large trees, casting a large amount of shade. So things have to be planted that will thrive in such conditions. If you don't plant things that will thrive, they will plant themselves, according to what Nature prefers to grow in your particular neck of the woods. In ours, it's mostly cow parsley. Cow parsley is lovely in the hedgerows, a delight in late Spring with its froth of creamy white flowers along the roadsides, but it's not what you want in your garden, so I have tried to replace most of it with slightly more suitable subjects. Top of our list is Pulmonaria, or lungwort which seems to do really well in dry shady conditions, and as an additional benefit is an excellent bee plant. Its pinky lilac flowers come early in the season, and when it's finished you can just get your husband to run the hedge trimmer across the foliage, which gets rid of the fading often mildewy leaves and it goes on to renew itself for later in the season. I must admit to getting a bit bored with having it all over the place and have recently tried a few different cultivars in particular "Blue Ensign" which has much brighter blue flowers, so I will see whether they do as well as our common type. I also have a large patch of Epimedium, which is on my to-do list to spread around under the trees as it does quite well there.Again the delicate yellow flowers come quite early on, but the leathery leaves remain and will see you weed-free through the rest of the year. I get my plants from all over the place, but I do recommend Peter at Just Perennial Plants on Ebay as a very good and knowledgeable supplier of well grown plants at reasonable prices.

The other usual culprits are variegated ivy, and the little periwinkle, Vinca minor. These two together make a thick carpet under the dense cover of the Cotoneaster tree and its neighbour a huge Euclyptus Gunii. A brief word of warning on this latter which grows quite close to the house, and was, I suspect, originally planted as a shrub, as the juvenile foliage is different from the mature leaves, and is much loved by flower arrangers. But be warned, if you fail to prune, and leave it for a year or two it will head for the sky, and you'll end up having to phone the Lovely James to come and rescue you from the 60 foot monster.

True Blues

When my mother describes someone as "a bit above themself"she means someone is pretending to be something that they're not. Similarly while the blue rose, the blue tulip, and the blue daffodil have something of the Hyacinth Bouquet about them, the blue poppy is an entirely different kettle of fish. The blue is the colour of a clear blue sky, not unlike the Heavenly Blue of the Morning Glory vine, of which I have a few coming along in the greenhouse for later in the summer. Its true blue colour is probably related to the fact that it's not actually a poppy at all, and so is not a red flower trying on an unsuitable blue frock, ie it's not a member of the Papaver family, but is a Meconopsis.

The picture is of one of my Blue Poppies, which are quite

special to us, as our business is called Blue Poppy Art, (although if we'd known how pernickety they are to grow we might have chosen something easier, Dandelion Art though, doesn't have quite the same ring... )

Anyway, there are two well known members of the meconopsis family , our own Blue Poppy -Meconopsis Betonicifolia,and the little yellow welsh poppy Meconopsis Cambrica, which turns up in the oddest of places, seeding itself about, much like a proper poppy in fact. The Blue Poppy although lovely in flower, like many poppies it grows on a less than lovely plant, - mine look like rather hairy grey-green stalks with a series of flower buds at the top which open in succession. They have a deserved reputation for being short lived, even though they are perennial, and the trick I think, is to ensure that you don't let the plant set seed. If it does, it seems to think its allotted time is up and promptly turns up its toes. So just enjoy the flowers and nip them off as they fade. And since I saw plants for sale at Dobbies the other day for £10 each it certainly seems worth trying to extend their earthly spell for as long as possible.

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.

garlic scapes

I've been growing garlic for a few years now, and I find if you plant it early enough it's pretty easy to get a good crop. Last year I grew the variety "Music" and it kept me in garlic for most of the year, with loads to give away as well. It's what's known as a hardneck variety or sometimes called porcelain garlic; it's said to be the best flavour, but not the best keeper.
I harvested it in August I think, last year and it lasted well into the new year, but then it gets that little green shoot in the middle that you have to poke out with your knife because it tastes a bit bitter. I find most garlic from the shops goes like that though, so it's not so much of a hardship to do, especially when it means your garlic supply is free. And this year it's doubly free because I kept about a dozen or so heads for replanting this year. I put them in last Autumn, in late September and they are looking good so far.
One interesting thing about hardneck garlic is that it produces what are known as "scapes" - a peculiar looking curly shoot which is really the flowering shoot and must be removed to allow the plant to concentrate it's energies into the bulb and not into flowering. If you grow onions, you might be forgiven for thinking that your garlic had "bolted" but this is the normal growth habit for this plant and the scapes can be used for a number of gourmet treats. They can be steamed and served with melted butter like asparagus, but the best way to enjoy their fresh flavour is to make them into a pesto. Just chop the scapes into pieces and throw into the food processor with some olive oil, parmesan cheese and pine nuts. You can adjust quantiities to your taste. The pesto keeps in a jar in the fridge for ages and is delicious with pasta as well as spread on bruschetta with a glass of wine before dinner and also perks up plain grilled chicken or chops.
Oh and they're also good added to a stiry fry. If you want to try garlic scapes you'll probably have to grow your own as I've never seen them in the shops, or maybe find a garlic growing friend - I always have more than I can use.