My Eggs are Free

So I have had my Hens for about 6 months now and after a slow start egg wise they all began laying an egg a day. This as it turns out is more eggs than I and the Mrs are willing to eat. Four eggs a day, 7 days a week is a lot of eggs to eat, but we do try. Amanda has had to do much more baking this year. Yum!

Beaky, Duchess, Matron and Speckle enjoying their warm treat on a frosty morning

No matter how much baking and eating of eggs we do there is to much for us, so we have been selling the eggs to friends and colleagues for a very cheap £1 a half dozen. That £1 then gets put in to the chicken tin which is used to buy their feed. Yesterday I looked in the tin and found I had about £10 and decided to stock up on some feed. I bought some pellets, corn and some rice and spaghetti which are treats. They absolutely go crazy for some warm boiled rice or spaghetti, I'm sure they think they are maggots or worms, but what ever they think I feel happy that they have had a warm meal to keep them going as the weather gets colder. So it turns out I am getting my eggs for free, by selling them cheap to friends who appreciate a bargain, from looked after hens, that will not end up as cat food when they stop laying.

Best of the Blossoms 2013

The Potato Harvest 2013

A few days ago I harvested my potato's and was very happy with the amount I had grown. From a 12x5 foot bed I got 2 large sacks of King Edward potato's. The two bags are essential to this post and for all the wrong reasons. The reason being one of the bags is full of spuds with some sort of disease! Here is a particularly bad example of one....

Half of my crop has these 'scabs' all over them, which is really annoying! Though they look abit black in the picture, fresh out of the ground they were brown in colour. At first I thought I might have had blight though having never had any diseased potatoes of any kind I was not sure! So On to the RHS website I went to confirm my fears that it was blight. 

As it turns out the most likely candidate was not blight but Potato Scab!And whats worse it was probably my fault. The RHS says....

Common scab is caused by Streptomyces scabies and powdery scab by Spongospora subterranea f. sp. subterranea. Both are pathogenic micro-organisms and cause rough, scabby patches. Scabs appear during summer and persist on harvested tubers throughout storage.

It turns out the above diseases are at there worst through dry periods in the summer and I have to say I was not watering them enough. We had the hottest and dryest summers I can remember for a long time and certainly since I have been gardening and I was watering at the same levels as last year where we had a far wetter summer. So I have lived and learnt from this experience.

The spuds though won't go to waste, the most scabby ones have been boiled up as mash and fed the the chickens, they love it, Others with minor scabbing will be eaten first and hopefully the good bag will store well for winter. As a small back up I have some Nadine potato's growing in a tub for some Christmas new potatoes.

I've Gone Poppy Crazy

Like the title says, I have gone poppy crazy this year, out of shear easiness (or laziness) I sowed a few different types in to my flower beds. One bed in particular I was hoping for a spectacular display, however its not quite turned out the way I had envisioned it in my head.Nonetheless I am happy with the flowers I have had and the amount of variation has been great. Here is a selection of what has flowered...

I am not a lover of pink flowers but I really have loved the pink pom pom blooms, The seed for these came I think in some wild flowers mix so I have no idea what its called the others I have bought. Come autumn I will be saving all the seed I can and creating my own poppy mix. I wont be sowing any poppy seed next year at all and will let nature take its course with what ever seeds falls to the ground.

Garden Walk 29th May

It has been raining for two days straight here and I have not really been up the garden at all, we had a glorious bank holiday weekend but I was working most of it. So in between the showers today I finally went out and took a look. The mix of some good sunshine and now some rain has really done some good.

The Potatoes are going well, both the lates in the raised bed and the earlies in the tubs.

My Tomatoes have been out of the greenhouse about a month or so now and I am quite happy with them. The are Tumbling Tom bush cherry variety, which did really well for me last year.

Mean while in the flowery part of the garden........ Lupins, Digitalis and Forsythia are coming on strong.

 One of my two apple trees on blossom, the other looks like it is on deaths door, hardly any leaves and its blossom, what little of it there was has gone brown. I think its dead. 

Last year I bought some creeping Thyme which I have moved around a little some of them are doing better that others. I want a carpeted area of it so I can rub my hands amongst it.

In the shed bed, the Dog Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) surrounding my tiny Kiwi Vine has taken well, to its left some Lily's of some kind and to its right the old rose bush that was in the bed when we moved in. All the earthy gaps I have filled with wild flowers and poppy's for this year.  

Lavander is slowly growing around my now dead looking Discovery apple tree.

My Shady plants are happy too, one of my astilbe's below.

And finally the ferns and Hosta's, which I am growing on in pots and buying more of until I get round to building my Shade Garden Planter some time this summer.