Rural Life

Eating broad beans

Finally after months of agony and hard work, the crop is ready to eat.

To remind you, I planted the seed in early November, intending on an early crop to reduce losses to black fly.  The beans were germinated and up in early December and in February I posted a picture of two elegant wide rows of young plants, despite some frost damage.  In late April they were covered in flowers and I was worrying about whether there were enough bees avoiding the best efforts of the cats to keep them away from the job of pollinating.

We need not have worried - once again we have a bumper crop and only have two plants with a bit of black fly (which the chickens think are totally the best thing ever - they are odd!).  We are currently enjoying young and tender beans so they just get boiled for a short while and then a little butter and mixed with whatever else we are eating.

Soon they will become a bit more coarse and then we will have to peel the beans as well as taking them out of their pods to make a lovely dip that rivals guacamole or cooking them gently for about 4 hours with smoked bacon to make a lovely rich and satisfying paste that goes well on French bread.

Naturally we will also be saving a number of prime pods to save the seed for the next crop - this strain is developing so well, we would be mad to lose it.

See how wonderful the fresh beans look, and 8 beans in one pod too!

The problem of a broody chicken

It hasn't happened to us before, partly due to the type of chickens we have had before I suspect, but White has gone broody.

For the past week, she has been clamped to the nest bit of the coop, only coming out to feed and poo once or twice a day before rushing back into the coop and continuing her vigil.  We have removed, over the past week, about a dozen eggs from under her.  She has given up laying, but steals Black and Spot's eggs and sits on them.

We aren't quite sure how to deal with this.  The special boxes and coops for broodies seem a bit cruel and also a bit of a pain in a small area like ours.  We have tried to make life uncomfortable by removing more and more of the nesting straw (but we have to leave some as Black in particular is a bit rough when laying eggs) and replacing the eggs with freezer blocks from the freezer (as a substitute for ice eggs which we hear are effective).  We also open the roof of the coop all day and are threatening to send in the cats, but still she sits.

A photo of the brooding one will follow when we get it off the camera - but think of our nice standard Light Sussex, then double her size as she puffs up in anger at being disturbed!  Finally, as she flies out of the coop for her second feed of the day, picture her flying straight into the chicken wire fence - she has done that every day for the past week too!

And here is the picture of White in all her broodiness!

Peach Leaf Curl

We have one main peach tree and a few ferals around the place.  When the main peach tree has fruit (and it is itself a feral grown from a mouse's winter food store), they are lovely white peaches and because they are fresh off the tree and not picked until they are ripe, have the most wonderful flavour.  One year we had 40 peaches!

Last year was a disaster for fruit like peaches as it never really got warm after April, and this year will be just as bad.  The blossom got frosted, there wasn't much of it anyway, and when there were flowers, there were no bees.  I think I have found 1 tiny fruit ready to develop on the tree, so will use this year as a year to do the formative pruning I have had in mind for a while.

With all the rain around this spring as well, all the local peach trees, not just ours, are suffering badly from peach leaf curl.  While there is a spray remedy, I don't like to use it because of the wild and not so wild life in the garden.  The British remedy of taking the plant into a green house or covering it with protective fleece doesn't work here, where the trees get big.  However we have found that after the first flush of nasty and distorted leaves fall off, you do get a nice flush of normal leaves to nourish the tree.

In case you have never seen it, the photo below shows the ravages of peach leaf curl - a rain borne virus.