welsh hills again

Hens are great heralds of spring.  Although it is still cold enough for the woodburner and the electric blanket every night, the hens are more responsive to the lengthening daylight than the temperature.  We have eight hens and one cockerel.  Throughout the short dark days of November, December and January we get just one or two eggs every couple of days.  It is hard to tell whether they are laid by our rehomed hybrids from the British Hen Welfare Trust or by our own Welsumer crosses as both lay a medium sized pale brown egg, though perhaps the Welsummer eggs are a little darker and more inclined to be speckled.  The Cream Legbars don't lay at all in the winter.  Their eggs are a beautiful pale blue and as the days get longer we check the nesting boxes hoping for the first sight of that pale blue gleam. This one is so pale you can hardly tell it is blue in the picture but I promise you it is.  Now we have all the Cream Legbars laying and eggs com...

This year I absolutely promise that I am not going to turn my back on the garden and just sneak off inside.  I am going to clean the greenhouse and cut back and mulch and all those good things.  Honestly.  But there is nothing like a rainy day to set me thinking about winter projects.  I am not one of those people who carefully finishes one thing before starting another but even I was surprised at how many things I seem to have on the go or waiting.  Confession time. It is a bit of a giveaway that the basket which holds all the wool waiting to be worked is my  parents' old log basket, i.e quite a big one.  The bag on the top contains the project which at the moment is at the top of the queue.  Younger son and his wife are expecting their first baby in November and I am making a blanket. Not a delicate white blanket for a newborn but a cheery, cosy blanket for the car and the pushchair. The wool is a soft merino aran and the pattern is fr...

There was an awful lot of snow.  When the great fall came we spent two and a half hours digging ourselves out.  And now, nearly two weeks on, there is still quite a bit lying. The wind piled great drifts, as high as the stone pigsties.  The kitchen garden was one great surging sea of snow.  Usually it looks like this, in fact this picture was taken a couple of days before the snow hit. Today it still looks like this. Ian spent hours and hours digging and shovelling and hiking in and out of here over and through the snow to the hens.  They spent the worst of the days confined to their house and then nearly a week with access only to the enclosed run.  On Tuesday Ian and a friend's son dug out the deep drifts which had buried the fencing for the larger run and reinstated it. It's a good job that only the large house at the end is in use at the moment as the two smaller houses which we use for younger birds had filled right up with snow. ...

Outside my window   the moon is riding high and clear in the night sky.  I stood at the door  half an hour ago and heard an owl hooting from further up the valley and a fox barking.  I hope the hens are tucked safely away for the night. I am thinking    of all the things to do in the garden and of the need to get my own laptop fixed.  I am writing this on Ian's laptop while mine displays the black screen of death.  Have I everything backed up on memory stick?  What do you think? From the kitchen    comes the smell of white thyme bread.  Ian has been experimenting with sour dough bread again and today I had a go with the natural leaven.  If you haven't come across this before, it is a way of creating leaven using the natural yeasts in the atmosphere.  The process of making the leaven takes a few days but when you have it you can take from it every day and keep the leaven alive for as long as you wish.  I...

Slightly late (and confessing that somehow I managed to miss last month entirely) here is the end of month view for October, hosted by Helen at patientgardener I have lost it a bit with the garden as the winds blow.  The winds here in our bit of North Wales have been from the South and East for more than a week.  The good thing about that is that the temperatures are higher than usual for the beginning of November.  The bad thing is that our house is perfectly protected from the westerly and north westerly winds which prevail around here. We are tucked down and barely feel a ripple as the winds go by.   A south easterly though comes roaring across the valley and shakes the yew trees and drives me inside.  Today the wind had gone and it was a still, blue and gold day.  I planted some of the ludicrous numbers of tulip bulbs bought from Peter Nyssen out into the cutting garden - two of the big squares, both in triangles of Abu Hassan and Ballerina. ...

Sometimes it is the simplest things that make you feel good if only you can slow down enough to really notice them. A still clear morning, trembling with dew.  That stillness and sun has all blown away now in a gusting cold wind, but it was there, for a day. A visit on Monday from some blogging friends, mountainear , snailbeachshepherdess , bodran and bluestocking mum - tea, cake, more tea, even more cake and vast amounts of talk and laughter.  Things have not been easy for everyone over the last year or so and yet there seemed to be nothing we couldn't talk about or laugh at.  It doesn't happen more than twice a year but it's amazing how easy it is to catch up and how our lives intertwine. The sight and size and gentle furriness of the quinces which Felicity brought for me.  Aren't they beautiful? A full log basket and a fire in the woodburner. A full glass. Three perfect eggs from the Light Sussex hens. A video of my two year grandson sitting ...

I love keeping hens.  I love the eggs, brown and speckled with vivid orange yolks and a taste which beats even the best shop bought free range eggs.  I love the way they are a presence in the garden, rushing and clucking and shouting to each other and bustling about.  Watching them always makes me smile and the garden would feel empty and dead without them, although it might be quite a lot tidier. But it's time to lift the veil on the less pleasant side of chicken keeping.  Those of a squeamish disposition should look away now. One of our older hens is a Welsummer, a dark brown hen who lays dark brown eggs.  She was given to me by a friend because she was being mercilessly bullied in her flock and my friend wondered if a new flock would let her have a new start, a bit like sending a bullied child to a new primary school! It took her ages to settle in when she came.  She didn't seem to be bullied here, partly I think because she clearly knew her place...

Five of the good things about today: Eleven month old grandson on the swing, giggling with delight. Roast beef and yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings for lunch, cooked by lovely daughter. Being told by exceptionally nice Swiss family that the holiday cottage is the best they have ever stayed in. Roast beef sandwiches for tea. Eleven month old grandson concentrating hard on eating carrots, picking them up with the utmost care, moving them carefully around his mouth, carefully expressing them onto the high chair tray, and then carefully picking up another. I was going to combine this with some not so good things in the interests  of balance but I am having trouble coming up with five.  This is the best I can do: The hens have just about stopped laying and even good, free range shop bought eggs are not the same. Claudia Winkleman's dress and makeup on Strictly.  Seriously? Perhaps it is meant to be ironic and I am just missing the joke. No, sorry.  It was ...

Yesterday I had one of those days when I suddenly felt overwhelmed.  Inside and out, there was so much to do that it seemed it could never be accomplished and we would always live in dust weeds and chaos.  I went looking for Ian to have a consoling hug and was surprised to find myself teary.  I am so not a teary person.  I am a cheerful, easy going, competent person with a tendency to look on the bright side in a possibly irritating, Polyannaish manner.  But not yesterday.  I fought back with a chicken tagine, some homegrown raspberries and cream and half a bottle of a good red wine, eaten properly at the specially cleared table instead of on trays on our knees. And this morning everything seemed manageable again.  I decided to have a day in the garden and started by taking my camera out to record the largest sunflower we have ever grown. I am five foot four, so the sunflower is probably about eight foot high and such a perfect flower, a flower to ...

Today we had four eggs from our five hens.  I am busily eating poached eggs for breakfast every day but we have now got to the stage where I can't keep up.  Tomorrow I shall bake lemon drizzle cake, one for us and one for the weekend's visitors to the cottage, and that will use up a few more. Here is today's collection: the dark brown one on the right is from our Welsummer hen.  The little white one is from our little white Wyandotte bantam. The paler brown egg at the back is from one of the Frisian bantams. She is a little larger than the Wyandotte but the eggs are way bigger.  With Wyandotte eggs you need a couple to even notice they are there. And the brown egg on the left is from our new hen, the Buff Orpington/Welsummer cross who is intended to be our broody this spring so that we can hatch some more chickens.   She is lovely, a real old farmyard hen, and I am looking forward to seeing her clucking and fussing with chicks in tow. I always use the dark ...