Our blanket of two colours is now a blanket of three. Well, not quite a blanket, of course, as it’s not all sewn together, but the red and blue squares have now been joined by muted green, and it’s coming along rather nicely.

The blue ones, mysteriously, are still generally larger than the reds and greens, despite being the same wool on the same needles. I suspect that’s going to make stitching them all together a bit… ‘interesting’.

I’m now pretty much half way through, having used one ball of each colour, with one ball of each colour left. The question is, do I stick with just three colours, or buy some more wool in the same range and add a fourth – perhaps a deep cream to make it a third as large again?

Home-knit blanket

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1. Now I’m knitting a blanket
2. A stash of retro knitting needles
3. I’ve finished my scarf

I‘m starting to understand why you can pay so much for a good cheese if you buy it in the shops. Our first homemade cheese – a variety called House Cheese – has now been maturing in the outhouse for four weeks, so we could technically take it out and cut into it. But we don’t want to. Yet.

It’s starting to smell like cheese now, which is encouraging. It’s a bit like a pair of dodgy feet, and it’s getting a decent skin on it, rather than green mold, which I guess will be a nice orangey rind by the time we come to eat it.

That time will probably be about six weeks from now.

Why? Because if we want a decent mature cheese we’re going to have to age it for a full ten weeks. Two and a half months!

We’re only making a single round in this first instance, but think of commercial cheese makers. They have to find enough room to age a lot of cheese for a long time – often a lot longer than ten weeks. And of course our little round of cheese, which is about five inches across and two inches deep, took five litres of milk to make. Multiply up that quantity to a commercial scale and you’ll need a fair few cows at your service.

This whole process has been an eye-opening experience, and one that has taught me to treat cheese as a luxury that should be enjoyed little and often, rather than en masse from a cheap block.

That’s probably a good thing as it’s not exactly healthy stuff, is it.

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1. The cheese is out of the press!
2. We have a cheese-making deadline
3. How to make cheese starter

Our beansprouts still aren’t doing much in the sprouter. They’ve been in there for more than a week now, and we had been hoping to eat them in a stir fry last Monday. At this rate they might just about be ready this Monday coming.

The sandwich mix, though, is another story altogether. The seeds for this are much smaller than the mung beans used to grow beansprouts, and really seem to have taken well to the twice-daily rinsing.

Look at them in that picture – they’s good and stringy and look exactly like we’d expected. They’re now ready for slipping into a sandwich, assuming we could keep them from slipping out of the slices.

The beansprouts aren’t much longer than them, but they are a bit fatter and have benefitted from being moved onto a windowsill above a radiator where they’re getting both more sun and a bit more warmth. Overall, though, they haven’t been a roaring success.

Nevertheless, we’ll try eating these, and give a second batch a second chance.

Perhaps it was beginners unluck.

Related posts:

1. We’re growing our own beansprouts
2. Our beansprouts are stunted
3. I think our yoghurt has died

I have to admit, our sourdough starter doesn’t look very appealing at the moment. I think that’s probably a good thing, though, as yeast doesn’t look so hot when you’ve started it on the road to fermentation, either.

It’s been growing for a week or so now, and every day I’ve been adding some more flour into the mix to feed the developing culture. Looking at it this morning, it looks rather advanced, and although it doesn’t smell quite as beery as I’d been expecting, it has turned a bit brown on top, as you can see from the picture.

Unfortunately this weekend is a busy one for us so we’re not going to have time to make any bread (missing the point of choosing this way to make it as it’s inherently slower) but now that it looks like it’s pretty much there I’m itching to get needing.

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1. Starting to make sourdough bread
2. How to make cheese starter

Well, the chickens seem to have calmed right down. The old and new flocks are still not integrating, but I do believe the pecking and squabbling has all but come to an end. Even Gabrielle, who was suffering the brunt of it, seems to be more or less off the hook now.

Proof of that fact is that she is finally putting herself to bed every night, so all we’re having to do is head out and shut up the pop hole after dark, rather than retrieve her from the roof of the coop and slip her in among the other chickens.

Considering we’ve had them less than a week I think that’s fairly impressive.

This could be just a lull, though. Our first three chickens didn’t develop any kind of pecking order until they started to mature and grew their combs. That’s when they start laying eggs. By my reckoning our new birds are still six or seven weeks off that, so in a couple of months things may be very different.

For the time being, then, we’re going to enjoy the relative peace and calm, and keep a close eye on proceedings.

Related posts:

1. How cosy is a chicken coop?
2. We’re getting some new chickens
3. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining

This seed sprouting business isn’t as quick and easy as we’d been led to believe. That picture shows our beansprouts after five days of growth. By six days they should have finished growing, but to my eyes they look nothing like a regular shop-bought beansprout.

We started them off in a jar of water, as the instructions dictated, and then transferred them to the seed sprouter the next day. Since then we’ve rinsed them through twice a day every day and kept them nice and warm in the kitchen.

Now admittedly, in terms of sheer bulk, they are a lot bigger than they were when we started them off – probably four times larger or so, but they’re nowhere near the healthy, long, slender beansprouts pictured on the front of the packet.

Either we are doing something wrong or the packet picture lies.

I’ll keep them going for another couple of days and see what happens. If there’s not much more growth perhaps we should just try eating them.

Related posts:

1. We’re growing our own beansprouts
2. The seed sprouter has worked its magic… sort of
3. A stunted harvest

The new chickens are not getting quite the beating I was expecting. Despite the fact that we are keeping our three new and three old hens together in the same compound they are still acting as two separate flocks, but nonetheless the pecking and squabbling has almost come to an end.

Each group is being mutually ignorant of the other.

Sundown is still a little bit problematic. On the second night, which was the first on which they put themselves to bed, we found one chicken half out of the pop hole, with its head in the hen house and its bum on the ladder. Another was roosting on one of the wheels of the coop, and the third was on the coop’s roof. Last night – second night – things were better with two of the new chickens making it into the coop with the three old ones. Gabrielle, though, still went and put herself up on the coop roof, tucking her feet underneath her to keep them warm.

I’m hoping that tonight we’ll get a full house. Literally.

I don’t know what goes on in there over night, but the new ones are still getting herded into the nest box by the time we open them up the next morning.

Either way, so far it’s been a lot easier to integrate three new hens into the flock than I’d expected. Long may it continue.

Related posts:

1. Introducing new chickens to our flock
2. How cosy is a chicken coop?
3. Peace has broken out in the coop

Sometimes you want to slow right down. That’s half the fun of making your own food, growing your own veg, making clothes or keeping chickens, where you have to wait for the eggs to arrive, rather than running to the shop and picking them up.

I’ve decided to apply this philosophy to bread.

We both eat a lot of bread, making several rounds of sandwiches for our workday lunches, and toast for our eggs and the weekends. So I’m going to start making our own. Rather than regular bread, though, I’m going to try sourdough bread, which requires a bit of time and patience.

To start with, you have to grow the starter culture that will make it rise.

Everyone’s starter will be unique, as it is affected by the air in your house, the chemicals in your water supply and what kind of flour you use. Once you have got it going, though, it is a living organism that you need to look after and feed and, if you do, you could keep it alive for months, years or, if you were to live long enough, centuries, as it keeps renewing itself.

Today is stage one, then. I’ve mixed a cup of plain flour with a cup of warm water in an old sweetener jar, mixed them well and am leaving them to stand. Tomorrow I’ll remove half of the mixture and replace it with more flour and water to feed the naturally-occurring yeasts that will be starting to form.

This will go on for a week or so until, if it all works, about this time next week it’ll be time to start baking our first loaf.

Check back to see how we get on.

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2. How to make pastry
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Our new chickens are here! We picked them up yesterday afternoon and brought them home in a cat basket. I’m ashamed to say it, but we have already fallen in love with one of them and, despite the fact that we insisted we weren’t going to give any of them names, she has one.

We settled on three Rhode Rangers in the end, largely because we used to keep them on the farm when I was a kid, but also because they’re good layers. They should average 320 eggs each in their first year, so the three of them combined will more than pay for themselves with close to 1000 eggs between now and next spring.

A Rhode Ranger chicken

The breeder had suggested three Black Rocks instead, and they’d all been caught and caged ready for our arrival, so we did end up leaving them there (and feeling a bit mean about having done so). I’m glad we did, though. These ones are so much prettier.

We kept them in the greenhouse all afternoon (it’s still cold, so they didn’t overheat) and then put them into the coop last night when the three other birds had gone to bed, sitting them on bars by the door. By this morning, when we opened them up, the new ones had been corralled into the nest box and the other hens had taken up the whole of the rest of the coop. The old hens flew down into the compound as usual and then stood looking up menacingly from the bottom of the ladder as the new ones gingerly looked out.

Gabrielle chicken

As we expected the newbies are getting fairly savagely pecked by our three existing hens.The one we gave a name to – Gabrielle, on account of her dodgy eye – came out of the coop this morning with blood on her comb, and this afternoon she has some on her beak. Things are improving, though, as the day goes on, and at least the new ones aren’t hiding under the hen house all the time any more (they would have been hiding in it had we not closed the door).

The fighting will continue as they work out who is top chicken, but I’m hoping that it won’t go on for much more than a few days. Fortunately we’re both working from home tomorrow, so we can keep an eye on them from the window, but I suspect it’s going to be a bit fraught.

Nik and Gabrielle chicken

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1. The new chickens are settling in
2. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining
3. We’re getting some new chickens

Our poor chickens. They don’t know what’s coming. We’ve arranged to pick up three new birds tomorrow to add to our little home flock, effectively doubling the number of hens in our garden. I suspect we’re going to have a bumpy few days as they settle in and work out who is top chick.

Of course, we’re not getting rid of Gerry, Barbara and Margo just because three newcomers are on the way. After a disappointing winter it looks like they’re starting to show more interest in laying eggs, and pretty much since the start of March we’ve had two eggs a day, every day. They’re still not up to full speed, but it’s an improvement. February was another terrible month, of just 29 eggs – the same as January this year and significantly less than February last year.

February egg count

I think we’re going to have to keep a close eye on all six birds when the new ones arrive as it is pretty much inevitable that there will be some pecking and bullying as they try and establish a new pecking order (that’s where the phrase comes from).

We’re probably going to get three Black Rock, and we’re not going to give them names this time around.

We learned our mistake last time: chickens are poultry, not pets.

Related posts:

1. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining
2. Introducing new chickens to our flock
3. Peace has broken out in the coop