My Babies Are Growing

My Greenhouse is filling up and this is my Easter Potato

Broad Beans and my baby Sweet Peppers.

Now you might think that those look like funny plant pots for the peppers but they are, in fact, the best thing for your plants and possibly the cheapest! I have done tests and the plants germinate much quicker in these than in plastic and stay moist but not wet. Blinkin' marvellous! All it takes is a little time and you can have an unlimited number of pots, in whatever size you want, with no disposal problems afterwards. Isn't that cool, here's the instructions link

http://www.wizer.co.uk/?p=29 .

I spend the otherwise wasted time in the same room as a functioning TV making these by the dozen and marvelling at how clever someone was to design them. Fantastic!

Anyway, in the last couple of very busy days, we have added Runner Beans, Beetroot, Brussels Sprouts, Canary Seed (of that, more later), Cherry Tomatoes, Beefsteak Tomatoes and a few herbs. I now have the fingernails of a miner. Ah, well, it's the price we pay.

I have planted some canary seed to provide the canaries with green-food which is one of the things that gives them their zest for life. At the moment they are taking a very tiny share of the veggies we are given for the pigs - they eat more cabbage than seed, these days! Incidentally, don't give any creature too much lettuce, it has a purgative effect! Ask any rabbit.

Off to the Son's Wedding this weekend. 'Bout time, too! He has yet to realise how lucky he is to have such a really nice young lady prepared to put up with him! He should remember that there are some of us out here that know his real character! Ha!

The weather has been very kind over the past couple of days and so the other job that has been finally completed is the Aviary!

Four lutino canaries have moved in and this is the first time they have lived outside. After being told this morning that the night temperature would be 6 - 8 degrees Celsius - almost balmy - it transpires that we are going to have a frost here. Let us hope that the poor little blighters survive the night!

More later

Chaos Descends!

On Sunday the Daughter arrived from Cambridge, complete with dog, and did the Mother's Day visit. Son remembered to phone, too! This is a full-house hand!

Anyway, it transpires that the lease runs out on the Cambridge shared-abode this year and so they have to show prospective tenants around the place. This means it has to be comparatively tidy, with an absence of long, wiggly, omnipresent, shedding-his-winter-coat-right-now dog hair. Our house will now become the opposite of this.

Chaos has arrived and it would appear that he is here for the duration of The Daughter's Saving To Go Travelling Year and the subsequent Travelling Year after that.

Chaos is a big boy. He is 50/50 GSD and Malamut. He can put his front paws on my shoulders and look me straight in the eyes. He is also a crafty and inventive thief and bin-raider, with all of his 5-year life having been spent in perfection of these skills. Rosie is terrified of him - which is only fair, since he is terrified of her. The difference is size is something in the range of 40 - 45 KILOS! They both usually calm down after the first week or so - well, they did last time The Daughter took to the High Seas in Search Of Adventure.

Chaos has also decided that it would be quite interesting to meet some piglets and some sheep and some chickens and any other moving thing on the field - at speed! So he has spent several hours standing, with his front paws on the top of the gate, barking despondently as we feed all those interesting creatures without his help. We are, apparently, rotters!

Despite the patchwork of nice, sunny weather and appalling wintery precipitation, the plants are beginning to grow and we still have no mushrooms. The heater has been put on in the greenhouse as the night temperature has dropped to January levels and I have babies in there that would not survive freezing. The greenhouse now smells like the M1 - I wonder if we are doing this right?

The aviary is almost completed and soon I will be able to reach my waste-paper bin when the canaries and budgerigars move out there! JOY be unbounded! Have you ever seen the mess that can be made by about half-a-pound of birds? Knee deep, I tell you! Knee deep!

More soon!

'Ere We Go!

Hello!

Well, I've finally done it and set up a blog. I am a complete newby to this stuff and also losing my marbles a bit due to old age and decrepitness, so you will have to bear with me as I learn how all this stuff works.

Anyway, we moved to Suffolk from Hampshire in 2002 to run a pub. That was too much like hard work so we packed it in and moved into a little bungalow nearby which came with an additional acre of land. Very nice it is, too. This will be our third Spring here, and this time we are almost ready for it!



Virtually every windowsill has seed trays, little newspaper pots and seedlings on. We have germinated Squash (Crown Prince, Butternut, Sunburst and Big Max) in the airing cupboard, Broad Beans are about 6" high in the greenhouse, with a second load on the way. We have Lemon Basil, Galia Melon, Capsicum, two rows of early peas now about 9" high, two rows of late peas, chives and loads of baby tomato plants! And now the weather forecast is for blinkin' SNOW!



The more interesting feature, as far as I am concerned, is the Livestock. We have three Soay ewes; Big Mum, Shaggy and Twothree (who was unfortunate enough to get two ear-tags in the cerfuffle of tagging SEVEN Soays when we bought them, which meant that one of them had no ear-tags at all), only seven chickens (of these, more later), four saddleback pigs; Winston, Lilly, Violet and little Daisy, two polecats; Sharon and Tracey and a 7lb dog called Rosie.



Most days my entire life is concerned with feeding something! For a start, there's me; diabetic, a-bit-dodgy-all-round and, ahem, a touch on the rounded side. I have to eat regularly in order to feed my insulin habit. Good heavens! I'm the world's most boring junkie! Then there's the Hubby who has become obsessed with the amount of salt in his food of late and regularly reads food labels to me. Then it really gets heavy! We collect waste food from some of the kind shopkeepers in the town and I stand, for what seems like hours, and chop up various vegetation which is fed to the piggies, this they enjoy greatly. Then there are the chickens and, although the flock was reduced considerably (from 25 to 7) when there was a Avian Influenza panic at the local Turkey Processing Factory, these remain another few hungry mouths. Their food is in sacks of 25Kg which I can't lift so has to be kept in a shed on the field so I can transport it a little at a time or talk The Hubby into doing for me. They also eat cooked kitchen scraps - apart from meat, which the dog has.

Polecats like little meaty biscuits, thank goodness, and apart from a propensity to make me root around in the neighbour's shed on a recapture mission, are hardly any work at all. They use a litter tray and are nice, friendly, clean, fascinating little girls who, actually, smell quite nice (in an animally kind of way).

So, you see, I've become fairly obsessive over food.