Started!

I can't believe that it's March already! It's been nearly a month since I last posted.

My sister has just started growing vegetables and I am helping her to set up her new veg beds. We are planning on spending a day a week in each others gardens working together. It's nice to have company and I can help her to learn about growing veg. She doesn't have space for a green house so we will sew seeds in modules here whenever possible. We are also sharing packets of seeds which will hopefully save us both some money.

Today she has been here and we have started sowing a few things (tomatoes, chillies, aubergines and cucumbers). These are now sitting on the kitchen window sill. The greenhouse has a broken pane of glass so I will need get that fixed before anything goes out there. My niece found a packet of sweet peas in my seed box and declared that she wanted to grow some pretty flowers, we helped her sew some in loo roll tubes. She a nice new pink watering can so she can help mummy and aunty Jayne.

I have been reading a lot about permaculture and forest gardening recently and have decided to try to create a mini forest garden border on the other side of the garden to the new veg patch. I have bought a couple of fruit trees and some gooseberries, which were very cheap in home base. I will add to it as and when I can afford to, hopefully it will be a productive but low maintenance area. I will probably blog about this in more detail later.

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Sunny days!

No photos today, just a quick update. We have had a couple of really beautiful sunny and warm (for the time of year) days this week. This has allowed me to get outside, yay!

Yesterday Tom and I spent the afternoon at the allotment, clearing the last of the crops that I didn't manage to harvest before the snow hit. We came home with 2 big plastic trug buckets full of veg. There were leeks, parsnips and some huge potatoes, which amazingly survived the snow and rain pretty well.

Tonight we had a vegetable bake for dinner which was yummy, the parsnips are really sweet after all that frosty weather, I will make some spicy parsnip soup tomorrow, which is one of my favourites and I will save some to roast with some belly pork at the weekend.

We brought all the tools home as well, I think I mentioned before that we are not going to continue with it next year, I am going to concentrate my efforts on making new areas to grow veg in the garden, I hate mowing the lawn so am happy to dig some of it up for veg.

I have been reading the seed catalogues, that I always get through the post at this time of year, and am writing a list of what I would like to grow this year. I will probably have to half the number of varieties before I order, I always get a bit carried away at first. I have loads of plans for the garden this year, giving up the allotment will give me the time to

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New soap 'flavours'

At Christmas I decided to give some of my homemade soaps. I had fun playing around with different 'flavours'. I ended up giving chocolate mint swirl and honey oatmeal scrub soap.





They seemed to go down rather well. My sisters children loved them, although my 3 year old niece had to be reminded that it wasn't to eat. I have now had some requests for some more, so today I have been in the kitchen playing with 'flavours' again.




I collected and dried some calendula petals from the garden in the summer so I decided to add these with some orange essential oil.




It has given the soap lovely orange speckly appearance.




It is now sitting on my worktop, wrapped in an old sleeping bag, setting. Tomorrow I will chop it up into bars and them it will need 6 weeks to cure. Luckily I have some of the Christmas bars to hand out until then.

Unfortunately I can't sell my soap, there are too many rules and regulations, but I enjoy making it and am happy to make it for my family. My mum had given me a bag full of lavender from her garden so I may use some of that in my next batch.

Hettie

Introducing Hettie, the latest addition to our flock. She is a volwerk which is a fairly rare breed I think.

I actually went with my sister to buy some new hens for her, but when she asked if I wanted Hettie how could I resist, she is beautiful. I nearly came away with a silkie as well, they have fantastic punky hairdos, perhaps next time.



She is still quite young but I think she is going to be quite feisty, she is totally unfazed by the move to her new home.

Experiments with Cheese

Having mastered the art of making soft cheese, I decided it was time to try some different cheeses. So I tried some mozzarella, which was so much fun and you get two cheeses for the price of one because you can make riccotta from the whey. So we can have pizza one night and spinach and riccotta ravioli the next (the riccotta freezes quite well so you can just put it away to use later). Making mozzarella involves heating the curds (I use the microwave), and kneading and stretching them until you get that lovely stretchy shiny ball of cheese which you then put into cold water until you want to use it. There are loads of recipes on the web for mozzarella I used this one http://chickensintheroad.com/cooking/making-fresh-mozzarella/ I can't remember where I got the recipe for the ricotta but again there are loads of them on the web.

With mozzarella under my belt I decided to try some hard cheese. My lovely kids bought me a cheese press for mothers day last year and I have made a few attempts at making a cheddar type cheese since. The first couple were very nice but had more of a drier crumbly texture than cheddar. They were polished off quickly so I suppose that they were a success but they were not what I had intended to make.

In november I bought myself a cheese making book by Paul Peacock, I have found this to be really helpful, it is written with the home cheesemaker in mind, whereas most of the recipes in the other books that I have seen use gallons and gallons of milk and turn out huge cheeses, most of the recipes in this book use 4.5 litres.

So in the run up to christmas I was trying to make one cheese a week and experimenting with recipes from the book and using different starters such as creme fraiche. We have only just started sampling these cheeses as they have been maturing, I have set up my old fridge as a cheese cave in the garage for storing them. So far we have had a few promising results. I m making notes and hopefully will come up with a good every day cheese soon.

Facebook shop

I have just opened a shop on facebook to sell some of my handmade goods, there are only cards on there at the moment but I will hopefully be adding more items soon and some cards that can be personalised.

I have added a link on the side of this page, please excuse my spelling I was so busy trying to work out how to set up the shop that I didn't notice the mistakes until after I had posted it and now I can't work out how to change it (I will have to ask my kids!).

Postage is free so have a look and see if there is anything you like, if you don't want to buy and you are on facebook you could 'like' the page, it would be much appreciated.

Getting crafty

With my whole garden having turned into a swamp, I'm seriously thinking of getting wellies for the chickens! I am staying indoors as much as possible. Having been a really good girl last year (mostly), santa brought me lots of lovely craft related gifts and I have been having loads of fun in the last few days playing with them.

I'm a big fan of the Tim Holtz products and was lucky enough to get some of his dies for my sizzix machine, as well as distress inks and stencils from my lovely hubby and kids and my sister gave me an embossing heat gun.

I spent yesterday in my nice dry craft room cutting and embossing bird cages and learning how to make paper flowers.

I also made this little paper mache shelf for my ink pads, it's a bit shabby, but it's just made out of an old cardboard box and some newspaper (which aged up a bit with some distress ink) and I like it. To round off my lovely day Tom cooked us a delicious chinese dinner so I didn't even have to cook, perfect!