welsh hills again

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 ...

I have had a few days away with my parents, catching up on family things.  It was lovely to see them but very good to come back home at the end of the visit.  Funny how being away makes you very aware of the patterns of life that are so woven into your day you hardly think about them when you are in your own place doing your own things: the time you get up, the time you go to bed, when and how much you eat.  Coming back home yesterday and settling into my own bed was ridiculously blissful.  I had been sleeping in a perfectly comfortable bed but my own bed folded itself around me like a lover.  I must be getting seriously fixated. The wind has blown cold up here today but in the morning the sun shone bright and I wandered around catching up with the garden.  Snowdrops are filling out now along the bottom of the stone walls.  I found three eggs nestling in the nest box, the first of the year.  I had them scrambled for lunch with buttery toa...

Oh no it is raining again. A couple of days ago we had such a lot of rain the path in front of the house turned to a stream. The land drains worked a treat and all the water from behind the house came spurting out and rushing down the hill. Let's try to take a positive approach here: the hills are a glorious green. The vegetable garden does not need watering, including the new beds in the field which require the humping of heavy watering cans. The onion crop for some reason is the best ever. The hens are all laying, the Welsumer and the Frisian bantam having at long last given up their joint attempt at going broody, much of which involved sitting in the nesting box together, taking turns to sit on each other's head. I am about to go and see my daughter and son in law and my parents, which, as Ian and I are both going, will mean a lot of my favourite people all together. The roof is not leaking (fingers and toes crossed here). But I do long for meals outside under the yew tree a...

A blue and gold autumn day, balanced between the warmth still in the sun and the wind's slight chill. This morning I took my basket out to pick quince. I am stretching up into the branches of the little tree when Ian shouts for me. Amazement and excitement - the hens have laid! I was entirely resigned to having no eggs until the Spring but Ian looked in the nestbox this morning (instincts of a countryman he claims) and there were two perfect, but tiny eggs. Here they are in the dish with our walnut crop. We had bacon and tiny egg for lunch and they were orange yolked and delicious. I suppose the trouble with bantams is that they will produce small eggs, the upside of not tearing your garden to pieces. The bantam hens had been looking much more henlike for the last couple of weeks, their combs properly grown, their tails high and full. I would love their presence without the eggs, but with eggs as well, what's not to love? When our friends came recently S and I decided that the ...