Cheer up chicken

This is Gwen.  She hasn't been herself for a couple of weeks now.  The last decent egg she laid was about two weeks ago.  Since then she has spent a lot of time slowly mouching about rather than darting around in her usual busy manner.  I was worried that she might be egg-bound again but I now know this is not the case as she has started to lay eggs with a soft shell or indeed, no shell at all.

 

She has settled into a pattern of being quite under-the-weather in the morning but perking up by the end of the day.  She is still eating and I've been adding 'Chicken Spice' to her food.  This is like a vitamin supplement especially designed for poultry.

A bit of research on the web - there are more chicken forums than you can imagine - and I believe her to be going through a moult.  This is usual, with some chickens losing just a few feathers and some shedding practically the whole lot (should this happen, I have also found a site that gives knitting patterns for chicken jumpers - no really).  Apparently some birds can feel quite poorly when they are in moult and only want to sit quietly, all hunched up.

I do worry about my lovely ladies but the increase in dropped feathers makes me think there is nothing more seriously wrong with Gwen. 

Did you know that it takes a lot of extra protein to grow new feathers?

With this in mind, and the lack of hard shelled eggs, we have been mixing their Layers Mash with milk, and giving them both a little bit of cheese.

Here they both are enjoying a bit of sun, at last.

Flapjack recipe

 I have never had any luck with flapjacks until I was given this fool-proof recipe from a work colleague.

Melt 225g butter with 225g sugar

Add about a tablespoon of Golden Syrup

Stir in 275g rolled oats.

Press into a 9" x 13 tin, lined with baking parchment.  Don't be tempted to bake without the parchment, as I have before, unless you are handy with a chisel.

Bake for about 20 mins at about 180o*.

Leave to cool in the tin for a while, then remove and cut into squares.  Works every time.

*my times and temperatures are a little vague as I tend to cook by sight rather than precise instructions and more to the point, the temperature gauge has rubbed off our cooker! Still, at least I have one, the cooker we had before had no temperature control at all and I'd have to guess the temperature by the height of the flame.

Breaking Up

Thank goodness we've made it to the end of the academic year.  The children broke up on Thursday and I broke up on Friday.  Broke down would be a better description - I have never known such a tiring year!  The last three weeks at work have been so jam-packed that I haven't had either the time nor the energy to blog.  Still, we made it to the end of term without too many traumas. 

We can  now look forward to six weeks of holidays. 

I hope the bloody sun starts shining!

This photo has nothing to do with the start of the holidays but I think it's more pretty than the empty MacDonalds wrappers and wine glasses that usually mark the end of term!

An amazing find

My father was born and brought up in India and he moved to England during the 1940's. He led a very different life in India to the one he had here and it must have been such a culture shock to pitch up in Southampton after a 6 week boat trip.

The other day my mother unearthed this:

I have had such fun perusing the range of products on offer ....

I have been reading the advertisements aloud and find myself speaking in a clipped English accent much like Joyce Grenfell - I say, what a hoot.  How sensible to tin one's valuable wearing apparel during the monsoon season !!

 

They really are wearing Pith helmets and I'm afraid to say standing over a tiger.*

It is so un-pc but an absolutely fascinating window into a by-gone era. 

I will be posting many more gems from the catalogue for your delectation.


*shikar, shi-kaar, n.  Hunting sport (Urdu)

Carbonara and chickens

My husband often cooks at the weekend, and ALWAYS on a Sunday.
Last weekend he made Bacon Pasta Bake, but I didn't fancy that. 
I yearned for carbonara.



He saved me a couple of pieces of bacon which I fried till crispy

 

Luckily I had a little bit of cream leftover from a previous desert, Parmesan cheese and of course, there are always eggs available

I also add a little of the pasta water to get the right consistency to the sauce. 
It was delicious.

 

And the chickens loved the leftovers for breakfast the next morning

 

Allotment in June

A quick update on the allotment

Loganberries ripening nicely

Picked about 1 lb which were added to several pounds already frozen by Mum earlier in the season.  They will be turned in jam later on.

 

Cabbages doing OK despite marauding slugs.

 

The onions are really taking off now. This shot taken before I weeded!

Beetroot - coming along slowly.  Hoping to have enough to pickle this year.

Rhubarb - all round star of the allotment (see previous recipes)

 

Cherry tomatoes. Again hoping for a good crop as I like to make passata and also green tomato chutney

Beans to the left - weeds to the right

And finally, my majestic field of waving corn - all four of them!

Dave

Lambing season starts around the end of February, so from this time onwards, my husband is very busy looking after thousands of ewes and newborn lambs.  It is an accepted fact in the farming industry, that from the moment a sheep enters this world, it is looking for the quickest way to leave as it possibly can and it's my husband's job to stop them doing so.

There are many abandoned and orphaned lambs which end up being reared by hand, usually living all together in a barn until they are old enough to be turned out to a field.

From about the end of February, the children and I start bleating (!) to my husband that we would like to look after a lamb but he always say no, as he is worried that we will get too attached and tears will ensue when it is time for the lamb to leave. 

I think my husband felt the only way to put a stop to our constant requests, was to give in and at the start of the Easter holidays, Dave came to stay. He was born on the Thursday, one of a pair of twins, but his mother took against him and left him to fend for himself. This is him sitting on my lap the first evening he spent with us.

He was really quite robust compared to some of the sorry states that my husband has rescued, although you can see that he hadn't grown into his skin yet. 

Dave was too small to sleep outside without his mum to keep him warm, so we tucked him up in a corner of the kitchen.  The first night we had him, he was very vocal and we thought he must be missing his mum and brother.  I'd heard that if you put a cuddly toy in with them, it stops them being lonely.  We found the largest one we could, which happened to be a cow, and it worked.  Dave curled up to the cow and went straight to sleep.  Ahh.  I was a bit concerned that Dave might develop an identity crisis being with a cow, but he seemed to cope OK.
 

We settled into the rhythm of bottle feeding, with the first feed at 6.00am, followed by four-hourly feeds, with his last feed at 10.00pm. I slipped right back into preparing bottles and early morning feeds, it was just like having a baby again!

Dave was such a joy to look after.  He'd go straight into the garden after his first feed and spend the whole day gamboling around until it was time to go to bed.  Lambs really do jump about with all four feet off the ground!

As the holidays came to an end, we knew that Dave would have to move on. We were all very brave and planned that he would go on the Saturday morning of last weekend of the holidays.  Saturday came and went, and we couldn't bear to let him go. 

We decided to hang onto him until the last minute and he went off to his new home early on the Tuesday morning, before we went back to school.

Dave had proved to be such a special lamb, that we couldn't let him join the other lambs.  My husband knows a lovely couple who have a smallholding.  They have a tiny flock of sheep, made up of many other 'Daves', so off he went to spend the rest of his days with them and with the promise that we could visit him whenever we wanted.

Woolly Bear

This is our dog.  I have hundreds of pictures of him, mostly disappearing out of shot, blurry or just an indistinct mass of black fur.  There is something about black dogs that makes them difficult to capture in a photo.

We have a friend who thinks he looks more like a Woolly Bear than a Labradoodle.

Because he is half standard poodle and half labrador he has two main hobbies - swimming and eating. 

I had to bribe him with a biscuit to get this shot

 

He usually saves this look of adoration for my husband.   They head off to work together every morning and dog has become an honorary sheepdog.  In an ideal world, dog would spend every minute of every day with my husband, but he'll make do with the rest of us at a push.

 

"Can I have the biscuit now please?"

"Thank you"

See what I mean about disappearing out of shot? They do say never work with children and animals ....

Allotment in April & May

It's about time that I posted some pictures of my allotment.  Actually, it's not really an allotment, it's a corner of my mum's garden, which she has kindly turned over to me for the past couple of years.   I did have an allotment before I had the children but it was nearly the size of a football pitch (honestly) and was just far too much for me to manage with working and little children.

The arrangement we have now is fab - I can grow vegetables and visit my mum at the same time.  Two lovely ways to spend an afternoon!

The photo below shows it at the start of the season before we weeded.  It's actually in very good condition with only a few weeds that gave up quite easily and a little bit of bind weed which is a pain, but is no match for my mother.

We were a bit late starting everything off this year, but hopefully we'll still get a decent harvest.

Lovely rows of onions - I planted about 50 red and 50 white.

These seedlings were donated by her neighbour

If the slugs leave them alone, we'll end up with cabbages, broccoli and brussel sprouts too - my children will be delighted!

These pictures were taken back in April & May.  I have some more up-to-date ones to show you too, but you'll have to wait until the next instalment...