I know that there’s still a lot of rain about, but the temperatures aren’t quite as low as they have been, and the days are getting longer. At the weekend, the chickens had a good long run outside, which gave us the opportunity to change the straw bales in the run. They certainly enjoyed investigating the nice clean windbreak, although as we left they were already busily pulling it to pieces.
Here on the north-west edge of London we haven’t suffered too badly with snow compared with other parts of the country, but a good covering on Friday has been compounded by another one today. We went down after church to replace the chickens’ drinking water, and also to add a layer of Aubiose to the coop so that they had somewhere warm and dry to snuggle down.
The urban foxes had been busy! Not only were there tracks everywhere, but one hopeful had burrowed into a pile of woodchips that I’d temporarily stacked against the smaller henhouse.
Posted in Allotments, Poultry
Tagged chickens in the snow, fox attacks, hen house, hen run, Ixworth chickens, urban fox
The next experiment is making some home-cured bacon. I’ve sent away for some dry cure and wet cure salts. I bought a nice piece of belly pork, removed the few little ribs from it, and trimmed the skin, then rubbed it with a dry cure formulation. Here it is, newly salted.
In about a week, we should have a nice piece of streaky bacon, ready for Sunday brunch with our own fresh eggs. Or not. Watch this space!
Over the Christmas hols, we watched The Great British Bake-Off on iPlayer and were very charmed by it. Having no television, we rarely watch anything retrospectively, and certainly not a whole series. But something about this appealed. So (of course) I bought the book – Mary Berry’s Baking Bible.
I make good bread, but, as I’ve remarked before, my cake and pastry making is normally dismal. Maybe things will now take a turn for the better. Jean is very fond of seed cake, so I made one, although not before checking that it was a really simple recipe:
We don’t give our chickens names as a rule. The cockerel is called Billy (after a vulgar expression implying that he’s more noise than action), and the senior hen is called Cromwell because she has a growth on her beak that looks like a wart. But now, albeit temporarily, we have a new name – Purple Hen.
Posted in Allotments, Poultry
Many years ago, we used to make our own sausages. Then a series of house moves and a very busy time in both our lives forced a pause in such hobbies. But I remember the product with some fondness, and thought it was worth having another go. Our small mincer and sausage stuffer had long ago disappeared, so with my fondness for gadgets, I bought replacements albeit secondhand on eBay. This time I’ve got a mincing attachment for the Kenwood mixer, and a rather larger stuffing machine.
I just went to buy some chicken feed, both for us and for our allotment colleague Salvador, whose birds we’re temporarily looking after. Well, that’s the first slap round the face from 2013. The new year price rises are serious.
Five bags of feed? That’ll be 66 quid to you, sir.
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Posted in Poultry
Tagged Allen & Page, Farmgate, Garvo quail feed, poultry feed, Quail
We’ve been maintaining two small flocks of birds for a while, corresponding to our two hatches of eggs early in the season. The first batch turned out to be 3 boys and 5 girls. We chose the best looking (in terms of Ixworth standards) of the cockerels, and culled the other two. The flock became known as “the allotment chickens”, because they were transferred to the allotment first, leaving “the garden chickens” behind for the time being. The garden chickens consisted of 2 cockerels and 4 hens.
We’ve now got just one big happy family.
Posted in Allotments, Poultry, Uncategorized
From both of us, and of course from the chickens. I’ve rather neglected the blog over the Christmas period, partly because in these dark days not much is very photogenic. So I have a New Year Resolution:
Posted in Uncategorized
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