Sunday, 22 February 2009

A very productive weekend

The sun has been shining all weekend and its been great to work outside with just a T shirt on.
For a while now I’ve been thinking about making the chicken a bigger pen as they’ve made the lawn look like a soil and sawdust bomb has gone off, as you can see from the picture. I move them everyday, but every day they dig another hole! So I got my brother to come over (before he goes travelling) to help me make a secure pen in an area of the garden I have just left to weeds.
In a weekend we turned this area:
Into this area (Digging the wire into the ground properly as well to stop Mr fox).


And the chickens seem to love their new pen and here they can dig as many holes as they want! I will build them a new coop in the week or next weekend to go with it, on stilts to discourage rodents, and hopefully make it so we can collect the eggs without going into the pen.

To make sure it wasn’t too much too soon for the poor hen we put their old pen in with them but with the door open, this also means they’ve still got somewhere to sleep. The new enclosure measure 18ft by 7ft so it should be plenty of space for them.
I think I might use the ark for some quails in the summer (might even use the incubator and hatch them out!)
Also planted up four biggish tubs with round carrot seeds and put them in the green house (it seems silly to have it nearly empty except for a few slow growing radishes) so should get to eat those in a few months!

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Well the last month has been eventful but sorry I haven’t written anything but there is very little going on in the garden.
My onion seeds haven’t come up, although the radishes have in the green house. And I’ve had no luck with my mushroom kits which is sat in our dinning room doing nothing.
Outside I’ve put some black plastic down on a couple of the raised beds to try and warm the soil for carrots to grow earlier in the season, and I’ve been using up the parsnips, Swedes, brussel sprouts, leeks and kale whilst waiting for my purple sprouting! The shed is coming along slowly, got the windows and one door in (the one set of hinges were missing and I’m still waiting for them to come!). Started to clad the shed the weekend just gone, so it’s looking pretty good (if I do say so myself), and managed to insulate about one third of the inside so it feels a bit warmer!