A rhubarb plant for £2 was too good an offer to pass up, don’t you think? We were passing by the gardening stall on the market (which at this time of year is always full of seedling plants for those who were too lazy or too late to start their own) when we spotted them tucked away in a corner.

Normally we’d pass by the seedlings without even a sideways glance, but something like a potted rhubarb is different. This is a plant that will grow year on year and provide us with more and more fruit the longer we leave it.

A bean plant, on the other hand, will be gone by the end of the season, and besides, it’s a bit late to be starting with seedlings just now.

We already have two rhubarbs, but one of them has never been happy. Twice now it’s grown a couple of shoots that have since disappeared, so I bought one to replace it and happily took it home on the bike.

They’re not difficult to plant, enjoying semi-shade and regularly watered soil. They also need to be kept out of reach of the chickens, despite being planted behind their coop, as the leaves are poisonous.

Digging up what I assumed to be its dead predecessor, though, I found some signs of life below the soil. The root itself had been hollowed out by woodlice, but the top of it was sprouting a little yellow leaf on a tiny, perfect stalk. Far too small to eat, but an amazing achievement when you consider it was growing in total darkness.

It would have been a shame to bin it, so I moved it to another position, reburied it (with the stalk above the ground) and gave it a good watering, then covered it with a plant pot to try and force some growth.

If it takes, we’ll have three productive rhubarb plants by this time next year, and with its propensity for spreading, it should only get better in the years to come.

The rhubarb shoot we thought was dead

Related posts:

1. A surprise showing from the ‘dead’ rhubarb
2. We’ve planted some rhubarb
3. The rhubarb is shooting

The chickens are still not happy. One of them in particular. In short, the old chickens haven’t yet forgiven us for bringing home three newcomers. Rather than taking it out on us, though, they’re blaming the invaders.

Two of them are half way to being accepted, but one poor chook, the smallest of the three, is being pecked to bits. It’s lost the feathers from the middle of it’s tail, its wattles and one ankle are bleeding and now its face is turning blue as the bruises come out.

We’re trying all we can: we’re sectioning them off, shutting the old ones in early in the evenings, lifting the new ones out of the house when they take refuge… for that one poor little pecked chicken none of it seems to be working, and now I’m starting to worry that it’s not getting to eat or drink unless we’re standing beside it.

How can we teach it to peck back? Just once?

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1. Barbara chicken falls off her perch
2. How cosy is a chicken coop?
3. Margot the bow-legged chicken

The new chickens, poor things, are getting royally pecked to bits by the older members of the flock. They’ve spent the three days since their arrival hiding and perching, trying to keep out of the way of their tormentors.

Things came to a head today when one of them pushed itself so far under a log that it got wedged and couldn’t get out. I had to pick up the logs to free it, at which point four of the five older chickens all descended on it. In the excitement, big Bertha, the most vicious of our feathered ladies, accidentally laid an egg that clearly wasn’t ready to come out. The shell was all papery and it split open like a water bomb. The other chickens leapt in to gobble it up (one of them even slurping down the floppy shell like the skin of some custard) while the new ones beat a hasty retreat.

So I’ve removed the high perch and I’ve strung the raspberry netting across the compound, separating the new from the old but leaving it so they can still easily see each other.

It’s working so far. The new ones quickly realised they were safe and dug into a big trough of food like they’d not been fed for a week, while the old ones kept running into the netting, trying to get through and failing miserably. They kept on getting their combs caught.

They’ll still be sleeping together as we’ll be lifting the new hens into the coop at night, which hopefully means they’ll all get to know each other a bit better, but in all honesty, settling in these three is proving to be a lot more difficult than it was settling in the last three. Back then, I suppose, it was three new versus three old so the two sets were better matched. This time around it’s three new versus five old and the poor things are finding themselves seriously outnumbered.

Related posts:

1. Margot the bow-legged chicken
2. Three hens a-laying
3. Oyster shell

I didn’t think I’d be writing this again quite so soon, but we’ve added three new chickens to our flock. Another three Rhode Rangers, which have proved such a success for us. Poor things are out there now getting pecked as the flock of eight establishes itself a new pecking order.

Normally we’d shut them in the greenhouse for the day and then drop them into the coop when the rest of the hens had gone to bed, but there’s no chance of doing that now. The temperatures outside are pushing mid-thirties and it’s even higher in the greenhouse. Besides, it’s full of tomato plants.

So we’ve had to put them straight in the compound with the five established hens, who have quickly chased the incomers up onto the new high perch that I built the other day. They’re keeping them away from the food and water, so we’re periodically going in there and chaperoning them towards the drink. The poor things are parched and panting like they’ve just finished a marathon, as you can see in this video (sorry for the quality – I shot it on my phone).

We’re hoping that by morning they’ll have got to know each other a little better, but we’re prepared for a couple of weeks of pecking and squawking. That’s what it took last time, which we didn’t think was so bad.

Related posts:

1. The new chickens are settling in
2. Introducing new chickens to our flock
3. We’re getting some new chickens

Our redcurrant bush is quite a bashful little thing. All leaves and shadow, hiding the best it has to offer. Pull back some of that foliage, though, and look what you find – an enormous bunch of brilliant scarlet redcurrants.

Just as the strawberries are coming to an end and the raspberries are being a bit slow about getting going, these lovely little berries look set to bridge the gap.

Making our own plain yoghurt, as we do every week, means that our flavours aren’t determined by the whims of the supermarket producers, but whatever is in season in our garden. I rather like that.

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1. How to freeze fruit
2. I think our yoghurt has died
3. We try our hand at homemade yoghurt

OK, so it’s not quite a climbing frame, but it does involve several different branches and a ladder, so it’s about as close as you’re going to get.

Our chickens have been doing so well lately. They’ve been laying like never before, and we decided they deserved more of a treat than just their daily portion of scraps.

We’ve had some long branches stacked behind the chicken compound for about a year now, having cut them from an oversized elm tree last year. They’re the perfect thickness to make a nice chunky perch for a chicken, and some of them are forked, so ideal as a support.

I picked the strongest of the forked pieces and cut it down to size so that after digging a little hole in the floor of the compound I could wedge it in between the floor and one of the roof struts, then secured the top with a single long nail. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Then I took another of the branches and laid it horizontally between the y-shaped join in the vertical branch and the lattice that they currently use to climb up when they want a better look down the garden. Again, I secured it with a couple of nails and then I tied yards of string around all of my joins to make sure they weren’t going anywhere.

It was surprisingly easy and all done in about half an hour, ready for testing by the chickens.

To say they loved it would be a bit of an exaggeration. To be honest I’m not sure they knew what to do with it, despite having a couple of similar perches much closer to the ground already. I’m hoping that after a few days of living with it they’ll get used to it, though, and head up there on their own.

Until then we’ll just keep lifting them.

Related posts:

1. The chickens get a new home
2. Introducing new chickens to our flock
3. The new chickens are settling in

Our beans have come on very quickly. I’m really quite impressed at how speedily they have found their way up the canes and wrapped themselves securely around the bamboo. Two of the plants are now so tall that they are straying off the top of the canes and blowing in the breeze.

More importantly, though, they’re also bearing fruit (or should that be ‘bearing vegetable’) and tonight we picked and ate the first seven beans off two of the plants.

They were delicious.

Now I know seven beans isn’t all that much, but I’m rather ashamed to say that it was better than this year’s entire cherry harvest. I re-sited the tree at the end of the winter and to be honest I think it’s just getting over the shock of its new surroundings. This looks like being all the cherries we’re going to get this year.

A lonely cherry

Related posts:

1. Harvesting the beans
2. This year’s beans are in the ground
3. Broad beans

The nettle wine has been quiet for a few days now. It’s spent three weeks in the fermenter and for most of that time it’s been bubbling away like a little geyser, but since the weekend it’s been suspiciously quiet.

So, time to test it. I dug out the hydrometer, poured some of the wine mixture into a measuring tube and dropped it in. As I suspected, the specific gravity reading was below 1.000, so it was ready for the next stage.

You can only know this for sure with a hydrometer, which is an essential piece of brewing kit, whether you’re making wine or beer. The idea is very simple: you float it in a tall, narrow tube of brew and read off the scale where the liquid reaches when it comes to rest.

Using the hydrometer to test the nettle wine

At this stage we could start bottling it, but after some of our plum wine got contaminated with sediment I’ve decided to rack it off twice before bottling, leaving it to settle for a couple of weeks between each one. That meant getting out the syphon and a second fermenter into which it could drain and setting them up on the outhouse steps to get a good differential between them. I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing that before – it’s much less hassle than balancing them on boxes or chairs like I always have in the past.

Anyhow, after running it through the syphon we ended up with three and a half gallons in the second fermenter and a lot of smelly sludge in the first. It was clearly a good thing to have done.

Now it just needs to sit for a few more weeks while it settles, although as we don’t want it to keep on fermenting I’ve dropped in three and a half crushed campden tablets – one per gallon – and stirred them in.

Campden tablets

Nettle wine is a bit of an experiment for us, but so far it seems to be going well. Fingers crossed it continues.

Related posts:

1. Making our first batch of nettle wine
2. Bottling the plum wine
3. Moving on the plum wine

One of the downsides of living right next to a nature reserve manifested itself this morning. Well, actually, it probably manifested itself a few days ago but this morning it came to a head.

We spent yesterday in France and by the time we got home it was dark. We crept out into the garden to shut up the chickens and the whole place reeked of bad fish. Really bad fish, like it had been rotting for days. We couldn’t see anything, of course, so we shut up the house and went to bed, thinking nothing more of it.

Coming in from his run this morning, Rich went out to let them out again and that’s when he saw it: a dead fox on next door’s lawn. It was in a terrible state, the poor thing. There was no obvious sign of how it had died, but most of the fur had come off its back and it was decaying quickly, which isn’t surprising when you consider it’s been pushing 30 degrees for more than a week now.

This wouldn’t usually be such a problem, but our neighbours are away at the moment so it was up to us to deal with it. It was too big to put in a bin bag, and anyway the bins aren’t going to be emptied until Friday. By then the whole thing would be moving around on its own courtesy of the seething mass of flies that would have hatched. Being a Sunday there was no point calling Environmental Health, either, as there would be no one there.

So we did the only thing we could: we put one of the plastic recycling crates over it to contain the thousands of maggots that were devouring the poor creature and anchored it down with two logs from the stack they’re seasoning for their wood-burning stove.

We’ve left them a note. What a nasty thing to find on your return from holiday. If you want to see what it looks like, click here, but be aware that it’s pretty gruesome.

I hope we’ve done the right thing. At least this way they can arrange for Environmental Health to come around when they know they’ll be home.

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1. The chicken bomb in our garden
2. How to make your own cloche
3. Keeping bees in the garden

The chickens are more than paying their way now. We haven’t paid for chicken food out of our own pockets for a couple of months, which is another small step down the road to self-sufficiency.

Why? Because we’ve been selling our eggs. We have a good base of three customers who each buy half a dozen eggs a week. It doesn’t sound like much, does it, but with only five hens in our flock it’s all we can manage.

That chart at the top of the post shows how our egg production has grown this year. We’ve gone up from three hens (of whom two were productive) to five, all of whom are laying, and it’s paying off in more ways than one.

More interesting still is to compare what we’re getting this year with five hens to what our flock of three was laying through the first six months of 2009. The difference is pretty marked.

So, we’ve taken the decision to buy three more at the end of the month, and with a little stash of coins piled up on the kitchen windowsill from our egg sales, we probably won’t have to dig into our own pockets to pay for them, either. The chickens, quite apart from being cute and a nice addition to the garden, are now pure profit.

Of course, if they were smart they’d slow down on the laying, as the more they lay the more incentive there is for us to buy new hens with whom they’ll have to share their house, and we know from experience that they’re not exactly keen on new arrivals.

Related posts:

1. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining
2. Building up the chickens' calcium
3. We’re getting some new chickens