Heathfield show

Spent yesterday at the heathfield agricultural show.







There were lots of lovely animals that I would have loved to have brought home with me.







Especially these piglets! But they were all going to grow too big, not enough room in my garden for sheep or pigs or goats.

But....






Someone did come home with us!






Introducing Pippa our new speckled hen. She's moved in with Hettie and the ducks. So far they all seem to be getting along really well.

Jayne x

Duck update

Emma's ducks have settled well into their new home. They are now fully feathered but are still too young to lay any eggs yet.



They love their paddling pool and become quite excited when we fill it up. These pictures were take a few minutes after I had filled it. They had swam round and round, jumping in and out (totally drenching me in the process) and flapping their wings like crazy.



They also like to sit under the hose and snap at the water as it comes out. They are really funny to watch and all have their own personalities.




As you can see Hettie has now moved in with them permanently. She seems much more comfortable living with ducks than chickens.

Rose Petal Jelly

I love roses, especially ones that have a really good scent. My favorite roses are the David Austin ones that we have bought over the years at RHS shows. I love going to these shows, my favorite is always Hampton court. It's chelsea week this week but I will only be watching it on the TV, we have been before but it is expensive and always very crowded, but I always feel sad that I'm not there when I watch it.

Anyway back to the roses, as I said I love heavily scented roses and I thought it would be lovely if I could make some rose petal jelly. I had read that the more fragrant the rose the better, so my David Austin roses were perfect for the job.

I picked some flowers that were fully open, stripped all the petals off and gave them a good wash, I don't use any sprays which makes them safe to eat but may mean there is the occasional bug.

There was quite alot of petals so I put them in two jars and filled them with boiling water.

The effect was quite amazing, all the colour from the petals immediately drained out into the water, turning it bright pink. I left this to steep for about an hour and the I sieved it to get rid of the, now off white, petals.

This left me with quite alot of rose water, I measured out a litre, added the juice of one lemon, a kilo of sugar and a packet of pectin. I heated this mixture, stiring till the sugar had dissolved and then brought it to a rapid boil until it reached setting point.

I then put it into sterilised jars. You can't really see from the photos but it is the most amazing jewel like pink colour and is absolutely yummy. As you can see from the picture I had quite a bit of the flavoured water left so I made another batch and also tried it it a batch of soap, I had hoped it would retain some of the colour and maybe a litte of the scent. The colour turned to a beige as soon as I added the lye and I'm not sure about the scent I think I can detect a hint of rose, but will have to see what it's like once it's cured.

I now have a new favorite thing to have on my toast for breakfast. I have been looking for other things that I may be able to do with flowers from the garden. I've read that jelly made with dandelion flowers taste like honey, I'm always battling with dandelions in the garden, so I may try this next. Then I can say I'm growing them for culinary use, any excuse for doing less weeding!

Photos

 OK so I haven't posted any pictures for a while so I'm going to make up for it now. It has been all go in the garden for a couple of months now, we've had some unseasonably warm weather of late and living in England you never know how long it's going to last, so I've been working outside as much as is possible.

Most of the lawn has been replaced with raised beds on one side and my mini forest garden on the other. I hate mowing the lawn! Although we do have a decent sized area of grass left at the end of the garden.

The raised beds have been filled up with a mixture of straw, home made compost and top soil. I think that I may have to add some bought compost as the level has dropped quite a lot since I made them. The only problem is some wheat that is growing in them, this has come from the straw, but it's quite easy to pull out.

So far I have planted one bed with potatoes, which have just started to come up and another with some onion sets. I have lots of things growing in modules in the green house to go out later.

I'm quite pleased with how the forest border looks it still needs more plants but so far I have put in a pear, nectarine. crab apple, a couple of hazel nuts, gooseberries, blackcurrants, loads of different herbs and some strawberry runners. Some of the plants are new others have been moved from elsewhere in the garden. There are also some apple trees and a plum that were already there, oh and I have also put in a couple of silver birch trees, just because I like them, either side of a bench which will give a nice shady place to sit. Lastly I have sewn some flower seeds some of which are edible and some of which are good companion plants.

The rocks around the edge were already in the garden and the path is edged with the trucks of some leylandi which we took down recently. I have had to buy some bark for the path and some compost when the home made stuff ran out.

I particularly love my new crab apple tree, which was my mothers day present from my lovely children. It is quite large, I have no idea how they managed to get it into Toms little renault clio, but they managed to get it home without knocking all of the flower buds off and it is looking really beautiful with all the blossom out.

About a month ago Emma and I went collect these 3 little beauties, we got them from the same place that we got my lovely Hettie, I had spoken to the lady about ducklings when we were there to collect Hettie and she phoned me to say that she had some available.

They have grown a lot in a month and are now in the chicken run, although they are seperate from the chickens. Alice is the biggest she was yellow when we got her but she is slowly turning white, Dolly is the khaki campbell and nugget is black and yellow, but the yellow is also turning to white. Hettie seems to prefer to be with the ducks than the other chickens, if you look at the photo you can see her sitting next to the duck pen.

Constuction is underway on the new duck run, we are building on the side of the existing chicken run and you will have to go through one to get to the other, this will mean that if we want to let them live together all we have to do is to leave the inner gate open. We have a shed in there that will be the ducks house and we need to get paddling pool for them to swim in.

Anyway I have probably waffled on for long enough! I will try not to leave it as long before I blog next time.

Bad blogger!

I am a bad blogger. I get busy in the garden and I completely forget to blog. The reason I started this blog was as a record of what I was doing and when, mainly for me to look at back at.

I have now set up all my new raised beds, although some of them might need some more topping up as they have dropped down a little, I have also finished the forest garden border.

We collected some new Ducklings a couple of weeks ago and they are growing rapidly and are now outside in the chicken run although we are keeping them separate for now. John has started construction on a duck run next to the chicken run and we have bought a new shed for them to live in.

With all this activity in the garden I haven't had much time for crafting and have just made a couple of cards to order.

I keep forgetting to take photos to post, I will try to take some today to post later and to be a better blogger!

New veg beds

We've been very busy in the garden. I made a start on my mini forest border and it is looking quite nice, I'll try and take some pictures to post later.

John took a couple of days off either side of the weekend, so we managed to get quite a lot done. My raspberries now have some support so they aren't flopping every where any more, I have a new washing line (boring but essential as I don't have a tumble dryer) and all my new veg beds have nice wooden edges.

The ground here is absolutely full of stones which makes digging a very hard and sometimes pain full experience. I started digging the new veg beds last year and managed to make two new beds. I completed another one last week but it was such hard work and my arms and hands were sore from the jarring when the fork was hitting the stones.

Raised beds seemed to be the answer but they can cost a fortune to fill up. I have read on various websites about lasagne beds (they go by various different names but I like lasagne beds), basically you layer different materials in your raised bed which will break down to make soil. I started with a layer of cardboard to cover the grass, followed by some straw and some of my garden compost, I emptied some of last years used grow bags onto them and some top soil, that had previously been some turfs that I had removed and stacked the year before last when I made a flower bed. I will probably add some lawn clippings as well next time I mow that lawn.

So now I have three traditional double dug beds and four lasagne beds, it will be interesting to see how they compare, watch this space!

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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