Feeling virtuous

For years now, five at least, I've been talking the talk and carefully avoiding the hard work.


We have four flower borders on the lawn which I created about 10 years ago. My parents were selling their house and I was taking some plant cuttings from the beautiful garden. I did a trip to England and came back with about 80 cuttings all potted up. Most of the cuttings came from the borders in the picture on the left but I've included the picture on the right as it is the pond I fell into when I was about four and my brother insisted on taking his brand new watch off before he pulled me out - the watch had been a Christmas present so the water was COLD!

Nearly all took and many have seeded and developed. Anyway, I dug the flower beds in a hurry and although I was pretty good about clearing the roots I was working in a field that had recently been cow pasture. So very fertile but full of perenial weeds.

The borders in June showing many of the imported plants.

I realised very quickly that the only solution would be to start again but as the beds developed it seemed a real shame to empty them out. I also didn't fancy more back breaking digging and no-one else wanted to do it! Clearly a rotation was required and today we cleared, more or less, the first bed. More or less means that as there are two pear trees, one at each end, we've cleared between them. We solemnly dug up old friends and split them up and replanted elsewhere. We took out as many weed roots as possible and we have covered it in wonderful manure from the farm next door (same cows!).

Finally, so that we won't be tempted to put plants and flowers back in before the autumn, I've put in some seed potatoes. This is my cunning plan for improving the soil and it also uses up a few more of the seed potatoes. I'm hopeless at mounding up potatoes and instead I put "stuff" directly all over the potato beds. "Stuff" includes, in no particular order, garden compost, manure, leaf mould, straw. Usually about three doses is enough to keep the tubers covered and prevent them going green and the result is that once all the potatoes have been removed from the bed the soil is absolutely wonderful.

Once this first bed is replanted we can clear the second bed - more potatoes if my plan works! - and so on until all four are done. I just hope it isn't like painting the Skye Bridge!

A Mixed Week

The list from last week is definitely shorter but not as short as I would like. However, one reason is because I was working on a client's chair and that is better than no work at all - therefore no complaints!

We haven't got around to putting more chicken eggs into the incubator and I still haven't bought the broad bean seeds. Still time so no worries.

However, the first lot of potatoes (Maris Piper and Aloe) are in. The figs are pruned and the bees food (sugar candy) has been topped up where required. We bought far too many seed potatoes so we will start work on a second potato bed this week. We also need to fence off this whole area against the rabbits. Anyone tried doing this with an electric wire?

I also did an experiment fluid sowing some carrot seed. It's still too cold to sow them outside so I scattered some on a piece of paper and left them covered in the window for a few days. As soon as they started to show signs of development I put them into a mix of cornflour and water and now they are sown in the greenhouse. I've started off the second lot and hope to have them in by the end of the week. I've read about this technique for years and have never tried it - I'll let you know.

One sadness to report. The second goose (Dipstick to his friends) hasn't survived. I came down on Thursday and Donald was making a dreadful racket. His little friend was lying lifeless on the floor of their temporary home. We were not totally surprised. Dipstick took a long time to get out of his egg (hatching time I mean) and despite running around with Donald and seeming very happy he wasn't growing as quickly as his big brother. Donald is growing visibly by the day. Two days ago we were very worried about the attention he was getting from Tickel - Ralph's Teckel or Dachsund. Today however, Tickel actually ran away from him. Whether this was fear of Donald or anticipation of trouble from Max or me I don't know; it won't be long before Donald is the bigger beast though.

Jobs for this week: The extra potato bed; fix the pigs' fencing as they arrive in two weeks time; finish weeding the flower beds and put the manure on them. That should be enough for the time being!

This week...

This week will be busy so let's hope the weather keeps warm as I really don't like getting cold fingers. Jobs to do:

Turn the potato patch again - Ralph spent nearly two hours putting a covering of manure on it as it's a new patch with no oomph in the soil at all.

Weed the flower beds - there's a fair few of them. They need a really good clean out of invading unwanteds too. Some grasses that seed far too quickly for example. They also need a heap of manure this year.

Prune the figs - every book gives a different piece of advice but we're going with February

More eggs, chickens this time, into the incubator. A fox took one of the cockerels and a hen earlier this week and we need some replacement back ups. We are also getting low on meat birds.

Buy and sow the broad beans - the packet I'd stored in the kitchen drawer had been bored into by some sort of weevil, reducing the packet mostly to sawdust!

The potatoes are chitting but it won't be long before we start putting them in.

And finally, the bees are out in force. It's too early to open the hives up yet but during the warmth of a sunny afternoon we watch the workers bringing back enormous amounts of pollen - probably from willow and perhaps hazel? I don't know.

Cleaning up

Once a year I clean the windows in the house - usually in the spring but if we have a celebration coming up (last year it was a cousin's 65th birthday) I time it accordingly. If you only do them once a year they might as well be seen.

Last year, thanks to my son's ant farms being sited just in front of the kitchen window, I never managed to clean the kitchen window. On pain of death would I move those ant farms and the windows stayed grubby. Today we were looking at the difference two years' dirt makes compared with only one year's. This reminded me that the greenhouse glass had never been cleaned and it's been up for nearly seven years! So this afternoon Ralph (the same son) and I went up with buckets, sponges and one of those rubber window cleaning thingys and set to. A few bulbs coming up outside the front of the greenhouse suffered the inevitable boot treatment but I'm sure they'll forgive us.

The result is amazing. I had no idea how dark the inside of the greenhouse had become! I am now determined to replace the glass that was lost during a tornado that swept through our garden about five years ago. The plastic we put in (temporarily!) has long since lost its transparency. Unfortunately, whenever I mention new glass to Max he mutters about not having enough clips to hold the glass in and the cost of the glass will be more than the price of a new greenhouse (well, ok then....!).

I also spent some time taking out all the old plastic flower pots that have been shredded by time and goodness knows what insects. Also, all my seed packets have been shredded - my fault for leaving them in there but what on earth is in the paper and foil casing that provides such irresistable nourishment for these insects?

So the greenhouse is looking almost pristine and I have a great feeling of a job well done! I've already put some mesclun seeds in there and in a few weeks time I'll put some early carrots in there to try and get an early crop.

Outside in the veggie patch I've weeded all the beds and planted all the remaining onion sets. For anyone who's interested we've put in: Red Comred, white ones that I've lost the name of, and two types of shallots: Longor and Mikor. All the garlic, onions and shallots that I put in last autumn are coming up nicely.

This weeks jobs include weeding the flower beds and turning the potato plot again - this time with manure on it. Photos later in the week as there's nothing to see yet!

New Life, New Noise!

A couple of people have asked me how the gosling is getting on. He is very sweet and has become very attached to our 15 yr old son - or perhaps it's the other way around! I took him out of the incubator after 24 hours; our house is always on the colder side of no heat at all and I thought the incubator would at least keep him warm. I then transferred him to a box and put him next to the Everhot where again, he was snug as a bug.

However, he has grown in both strength and stature at an alarming rate. I realised the box was too small when I caught him trying to jump out of it. In addition, the noise...oh the NOISE! Cheep, Cheep, Cheep, Cheep. All day, all day. And I do spend a lot of time in the kitchen! So yesterday we bought in the pen we made for baby chickens and put him in there in the playroom - next to the kitchen so I can still hear the noise but it is one step removed from the oven! He wasn't pleased at all but seems to be resigned to his new home. In the meantime, the second egg has started to hatch and perhaps tomorrow or Friday there will be two of them in there together - I just hope the bigger one doesn't bully his baby brother!

One thing that is worrying us - and if anyone has experience we'd be grateful for advice - is when to put them outside and introduce them to water. I feel that for the next month it will be too cold but I'm well aware that if they had a goose mum they'd be wandering around already and probably following her onto the moat. So, any ideas? Max thinks we should start with the bath but I've told him if I catch him in the bath with a real live goose I'll post a picture on here!

New Year, New Life

Needless to say, when push comes to shovel I prefer to be a warm weather gardener which isn't very good if you are trying to be self-sufficient! However, we are enjoying enormously the fruits of our 2008 labours: vegetables from the freezer, apples still in the boxes and of course pork in the freezer. We also have a number of chickens in the freezer as we had a large number of cockerels and, finally, we have been given a leg of wild boar by the local gardien de chasse. And of course we are getting plenty of eggs from the hens.

At the end of last year I put some onions and garlic in the vegetable plot and now it's about time to plant the next lot of onions. But it's so cold out there that the motivation factor is dreadfully low! However, we have started to prepare the new potato plot. Against all advice we have rotavated this area and I am quite certain that we will be regretting this for a fair few years as all the chopped up roots of bindweed come back to haunt us. But Max can't dig at the moment (he's just had his carpal tunnel operation) and I dug so much last year that I just couldn't face it. So out came the rotavator.

We still need to fence this second vegetable plot area. We have a large rabbit population here and I am not happy to plant one for me and twenty for them. So the fence is on the "to do" list. We have, however, bought our potatoes and onions for planting and this year I'm also going to plant some Jerusalem Artichokes. I thought I would put them at the end of the pigs' enclosure so that when I've dug them up the pigs can take whatever I've missed.

But things have been happening up the garden path despite my laziness. To our astonishment one of the hens became broody over Christmas. We found her tucked away in an outhouse between the drying machine and the wall, well hidden and out of the wind but still very cold. We left her alone and on 24 January she suddenly appeared with four chicks. (That mean that she kept them warm in temperatures of -10 degrees during the night and not much warmer during the days.) Sadly, only one of the chicks survived beyond three days but it is wonderful to go out and see them wandering around the yard, mother hen gently lifting her wing whenever the chick needs to warm up or get away from some terrifying object; a human being for example!

Soon after Christmas also we were given two goose eggs, one at the beginning of the week and one a few days later. We put them both into the incubator on the days that they were given - in other words there was a gap of about five days. This morning I was tidying up the room and suddenly noticed one of the eggs had a hole in it. On further inspection I heard wonderful squeaking noises and sure enough a couple of hours later the gosling popped out. I might say that he (well, he's a he until he proves otherwise!) is a lot stronger than the chicks we've hatched and a lot bigger too!

An hour old

Two hours later

I have left the second egg in the incubator in the hope that it will hatch in a few days time.

So there's new life at Gennetay and very soon it will be warm enough even for me to stop making excuses and "get out there".

First socks

Well, I've finished them. My very first pair. Read the post here.

I wouldn't normally post them here as they are made of bought wool (oh no, shock horror!) that I found at the bottom of a drawer; but for some reason Typepad won't let me post the picture. I don't think it's offensive but it's for you to judge!

All right so they're not perfect but I think they're fantastic!