On the chicken front, there is sad news to report. After 5 days of making the new chickens' lives miserable, it all got too much for White and she had a stroke. She lost all control of one leg and one wing, but was still able to give a hefty peck if you were in the wrong place, so John did the needful. It was such as shame as she was a fine bird - large, stately and big enough to cope with the cats. I don't know if it was serendipitous or not that we bought two new chickens, and hopefully the new supplier that we got Salt and Pepper from has provided birds with a longer life span, but we are now back to three in the run. Here are Salt and Pepper - you can see the combs are still under-developed, but Salt has pale and stern eyes. While I thought Pepper was going to be a bit of a sop, she has just fought Black for a cherry, so that is a good sign for the future. It is a rough and tumble world in the chicken run and you have to fight for the best worms, slugs and chaffer grubs.
Did I mention a fight over cherries? Yes, the cherries are starting to ripen and the blackbirds are starting to be a nuisance. We need to get the scarers into the tree, as cats cannot be relied on to keep them off - they don't have the attention span for a concerted 3 week campaign. The big worry is rain next week, which could make the fruit split...
I did a bit of bird scaring myself, as I spent a happy half hour sowing sweet corn. We are sheltered enough here to not get cross pollination from the huge maize fields at the end of the village, so we can get away with sweet corn and not end up with too many smuts or hybridised cobs. I sow into loo roll centres, using our own compost, and the seedlings should be ready to replace the broad beans in their raised bed in about two to three weeks. My patent method for filling loo roll centres with compost is the cut off top of a bottle of Quezac mineral water and a used bamboo skewer.
If only I was as good as Frayed at the Edge on doing action shots of crafts...
A few posts ago I was complaining at the challenges of gardening here, and wondering whether or not to bother with peas. Well, I decided I could be bothered and now we have two lovely rich rows of peas with baby pods and should be stealing our first pods for eating raw by the middle of next week - can't wait!
And finally, a word on snails and slugs. Our neighbour (feckless Joel) can be relied on to take snails off our hands if we can summon the gall to offer them to him - he has been known to lean over the fence and rummage in the irises for them. He likes to eat snails, we regard them as a pest, and yet there is still something a bit difficult about offering them to him. I have read with amusement articles about how coffee grounds, broken egg shells and other pointy things can create a barrier around tender plants. We have a rather savage door mat at the front door for getting mud and grass clippings off John's boots when he gets home from work. It doesn't keep out the muck and it doesn't have any effect on snails either - see the evidence of the trails on the photo below. You are better off with a hungry neighbour I think!
Of course, such a long and varied post means that I have rather scuppered myself for something later in the week - and I used to be a Planning Officer too!
Thanks for the mention!! Both Malcolm and Stuart gave me tripods for Christmas, which makes it much easier to do the action shots - I set the timer on the camera, then I have ten seconds to get my hands in the right place! I envy you all the fruit and veggies - but unless we dig up all flower/shrub borders, we don't have room for veggies.
Posted by: Anne Donald | 27 May 2010 at 07:24 PM