Rural Life

Growing Globe Artichokes

I have been particularly fond of eating globe artichokes since I tasted my first one at a restaurant at Cros de Cagnes in the Alpes Maritime back in 1975.  I have been trying to perfect growing them since we got our allotment in Worcester back in 1996.

For Worcester I bought a number of plants from Marshalls, having had a spectacular lack of success at trying to grow them from seed.  Of the 10 Marshalls plants, 5 survived the worst of Worcester weather and two in particular just took off, producing a number of heads each per year, plus loads of offsets, that we never got round to doing anything with.

With this house, the urge to get a few artichokes going came very quickly and in the first spring we had the house, I bought four from a guy in Bourgeuil market, all of which were particularly happy planted close to a south facing wall and in well drained soil.  They don't produce heads every year - they are probably too closely spaced.

This year we dug one up and and divided it into 8 plants which have been planted in another equally well appointed border - 6 of those plants have survived the tender ministrations of cat bottoms and seem to be doing fine.

Of the three that remain, one has taken advantage of the extra space to produce 2 totally perfect large heads and one smaller one.  The first of the large heads is shown in the photo, and I am told was lovely with melted butter (I was away on business when it got to its perfect ripeness).  The second and third were eaten a week ago, and very good they were too - this time with vinaigrette.

The remaining plants will be lifted and split at the right time to improve their productiveness and increase our stock of plants.

Baby Newts

I might have mentioned before that this is the fifth wettest year on record to date, so it is hardly surprising I guess that the two seasonal pools in the One Acre Wood are still full of water.  When I say water, I think I really mean brown oak leaf tea or even primordial soup - it doesn't bear any resemblance to what comes out of taps or wells, that's for sure.

It might look disgusting, but it contains a lot of wild life, including mosquito larvae (I have the bites to prove that Mum at least is still around) and daphnia.  The real novelty for us however, is that these old clay pits are actually ancestral ponds for common newts.  We can't prove it, but there are also some more colourful versions knocking around that could be fire salamanders, but they are impossible to photograph.

The pits were dug to take advantage of the clay that the watershed is made from, also explaining the mix of trees we have in the One Acre Wood - chestnut for firewood for the kilns, oak for building, service for brewing and a very little pine for tapping for resin to give the local tiles their lustre.

This is the first year we have had water in the ponds until June, so the first time we have been aware of having newts.  Very soon now their external gills will fall away and they will scatter through the woods and fields around to do whatever newts do.  We caught this one to identify it and take a photograph and then gently released it back into the pond, to carry on doing what baby newts do - ideally eat all the mosquito larvae they can find!

Feeding chickens

There has been a bit of dialogue going around about how we feed our chickens.  For the record, this is what we do.

They have a morning feed made up of a mixture of 3 yogurt pots full of layers' pellets to ensure they get all the nutrients they need to keep their egg-laying bits working in good order - they eat these but find it perhaps the least exciting bit of their diet.  The rest of the feed is a half yogurt pot of cracked maize, a half yogurt pot of grain and a half a baby feeding spoon of poultry spice.  This last was due to the fact that Black has taken a long time to get into lay from whatever bad experience she had before us.

Their water is changed every morning as well - it is a bottle drinker so keeps quite well - and that is tap water with a half a teaspoon of cider vinegar in it.  They have bird grit available at all times, but generally seem to ignore it.

In addition they get fresh vegetable waste (tomato innards, melon innards, cucumber, lettuce, spinach), some cooked vegetable waste from time to time (potato peelings, carrot peelings, courgette, mashed potato but only if they are very good), and very occasional treats of other cooked waste - spaghetti is a particular favourite, and most chickens like the odd crust of baguette, but not our current three.

As well, when we are working in the garden, they get non-poisonous weeds to work through, including grasses but not lawn mowings, spent bits of plants (broad bean stems and leaves, cabbages, Swiss chard), slugs and small snails from the beer traps or that we find when we lift anything up, worms, over-ripe cherries and strawberries that are past their best. 

They eat anything they can catch too.  Don't be surprised to see your chickens eating flies and butterflies for example.  Perhaps the most disgusting things they eat are baby birds and any mice that they can get their beaks on, but as hens have no teeth, you can imagine that this is a pretty disgusting process.  We don't give them those, but if they catch something, we don't stand a chance of getting it back off them.

We never give them meat scraps (beef, lamb, pork, poultry, etc) or eggs.

In return, the eggs we get have yolks the colour of Sunny Delight, but are much nicer tasting to my mind.

Wild French orchids

As June starts to crank up the temperatures here, the orchids are ending their spectacular flowering season and dying back.  They started quite early this year with loads of common purples at the Jarze wood, and in the One Acre Wood - which was sadly neglected through May due to rain and other projects - seemed to have had two fine examples of the genre, which are now just dessicated flower spikes.  Next year we hope to see them in bloom once again.

With John doing a lot of lawns currently and doing several of these by walk behind mower rather than ride on, he has been able to spot the rosettes of orchids and not mow over them but has given them a chance to flower.  A few people who didn't know they had orchids, or suspected but didn't know what they had got, have had pleasant surprises.

Perhaps the flashiest of the lawn based orchids, though not the most colourful, is the lizard orchid - this example is nearly 2 foot high!

Rather prettier but smaller and harder to spot is the bee orchid, shown here, and small at less than a foot high.

Breaking a broody chicken

Well, we have managed it.  White is no longer sitting in the hen house looking like a rather classy tea cosy, she is up and about, making a lot of noise and back laying eggs.

In a previous post I described how White had gone broody, and having been full of good advice for friends in the same situation, we were now facing it ourselves.

Firstly I should point out that we never had this problem with the beige battery hybrids that we used to buy, but then White, Black and Spot were purchased with the idea of not having to replace a worn out hen every 18 months.  It seems that Light Sussex are inclined to have a brood from time to time, being a somewhat more natural bird.

At first we did ask around to see if anyone needed any eggs hatching or if there was any wisdom among the local peasantry.  Either I expressed it badly or the local farm chickens know that if you sit still too long, you are for the pot, but no one had any advice and nor did anyone need any eggs hatching.

Plan B was to make sitting uncomfortable.  For about 10 days we had White happily trying to hatch cool blocks from the freezer.  As it was the hottest it has been this year so far when we tried that, she seemed to rather enjoy it, so eventually we gave that up.

Plan C was rather less cunning.  Once Spot and Black had had their chance to lay their eggs, and for those eggs to be stolen by White for hatching, we would lift White out of the hen house, deposit her in an open bit of the run and close up the hen house until the evening.  This lead to some awful noises as she tried to burrow back into the hen house, or stood on top of it, trying to see in through a gap by the roof hinge, and to White falling off the hen house quite frequently as she is not very acrobatic.  She also made a few spare nests around the chicken run, but these either got rained on, trashed by the other two when she wasn't looking or dug up by us to help in the search for worms. 

After about 5 days of this, White gave in gracefully and has resumed normal chicken life.  Indeed after about 6 days, she even started laying again, which was a surprise to us as we thought she would take longer to get back in the swing of things.  What may have helped was that she didn't lose condition at all while she was brooding, apart from the fact that her comb went pale.  Anyway, it is nice to have her up and about again.