2014 The Year Begins

Or "How the back garden was won"

Happy New Year to everyone. 

Among the many things I do working in retail during the festive season has rather interrupted the flow with this blog. SO time to catch up a little.

There are still bees in the hive. Their numbers have dwindled though the number of tiny corpses on the garden has diminished. We can still see the bees flying around on warmer days and when I hefted the hive a couple of days ago it still seemed heavy. There is nothing we can really do for them till mid February when, if the colony has been unusually active and used it's stores, we may have to feed them fondant. This is a solid sugar based food that rather resembles the ready roll icing you put on Christmas cakes but with a few more nutrients added.

Amazingly we have had very little cold weather so far. Largely in the UK we've had heavy rains and high winds. The chickens and the bees are reasonably well protected and the chicken run remains mud free. The same cannot be said of the garden. I'd just like to tell any new allotmenteers that a more effective way of clearing rough ground than digging or hiring a rotavator is to corral chickens in a confined space and leave them to it.

We had a little help in clearing the back beds from Joel however the chickens turned the soil over meticulously in their search for succulent morsels. Furthermore I am certain that insect life poses no further threat to our crops. Nor do grass or other plant life. More accurately we have a barren wasteland of mud with isolated outcrops of chicken poo. I'm sure that when it drier it will be both fertile and receptive to seeds. So will the chickens. No doubt battle will commence shortly as Bob came home with fruit tree saplings and the first vegetable seeds earlier today.

The chickens are hardly recognisable compared with the scrawny featherless creatures we collected from Brinsley Animal Rescue. They are fully feathered and strut around the place as though they own it. We have discovered a distressing tendency for them to head directly for cat food at the first opportunity. They have also made it clear that Layers Pellets are not their first choice of food. Layers pellets retail at between £13 an £20 for a 25 kilo sack in the uk. They prefer wild bird seed and dried meal worms Dried meal worms retail at around £8 for a 500g bucket. This is, frankly, taking the michael however since Bob says I can't take the lid off his worm farm if the chickens want extra meaty treats that wont cause mad chicken disease we'll have to suck up the cost of the dried worms.

Perhaps our greatest delight has been the sudden urge that first Henrietta and later John had to fly up onto our shoulders. We both felt honoured that our new feathered freinds liked and trusted us enough to come so close. As the garden has turned into a mud bath their urge to wipe their feet on something warm and dry has grown. It has become necessary to don head to foot protective clothing in order to exit the back door because the moment you do one or other of the feathered delights is stood on your lovely clean clothes, skin or hair proudly leaving their mark on you. The other day I was serving a customer in the shop when I realised I had muddy chicken foot prints on my wrist. Luckily I work in a soap shop and the customer saw the funny side.....

I hope each and every one of you had a wonderful festive season and that the new year is treating you well.

Love and Hope

Katherine