I fell off my blog

(I pinched that from another blog I read today, which I thought was terrific.)

So we've just come back from a glorious few weeks in Europe (very hot summer coming up for them, I think! Sablet was like a little oven!) and winter has hit while we were gone and there's Things To Be Done in the garden, although the delicious Gardening Dave and our very kind neighbours looked after the place very well for us. This morning the garden was thick with frost which still hasn't quite burned off. The chickens appear to have gone significantly quiet egg-wise - two eggs a day since we arrived back, and Pauline said they were only laying three a day while we were gone, so one of them is shirking. I think it's the black one, because she's looking a bit headachy at the moment, so I'm going to treat them today to a rice-tuna-garlic thing with some cheese shredded in and see if that helps by infusing a little protein. I'll add some garlic, too, just for anti-everything properties.

The co-op is closed today, but tomorrow I'll hit them up for some tonic and new layer mush. For some reason these girls prefer their pellets as mush. I think they're spoiled, but what the heck.

The vegetable garden got eaten by something  while we were gone - the caulis looked like they had been doing well, but there's only bits of the new heads left. The brussels sprouts, ditto - but this will happen when you leave a place for six weeks, and anyway we were planning to put new earth in for Spring. So that won't be a problem.

That's it for the moment. Just trying to remember to use this again as a way of keeping tabs on what works and what doesn't, what needs to be done, and when.

Fires and hedging

As it turns out, the hedging should probably have been done in early October.

It's all fires and helicopters right now. And tradesmen, of course (how we do love our tradesmen!)  The potatoes I planted in grow-bags are flowering now, and I have baby tomatoes on the yellow pear and cherry  tomato plants. We're harvesting peas (novella) and kale and spinach, and the fennel looks great. It's all coming up. The olives are blossoming, plus the apples; the chickens are laying (3 out of four) and

Dave put the new bridge in today and all the sleepers.

Bless you, Dave.  :)

We're back -

We had to go away for a few days while the floors were sanded.

The weather this week has been most odd. Very cold, and three days of rain, then very high winds and rather hot (25+ degrees). The garden seems to cope better than I do. One of the Rockets has started to lay  :)

The apple trees are flowering, the plum is beginning to plum and the michaelis hedge is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen. I adore this place!

Today I put in another row of spinach, two rows of fennel, a row of carrots and radish (we're eating those other radishes now) and a few more beans. But I was watering most of the day because oh! those winds!

My regime at the moment in the vegie garden is weed one and feed two beds each day. Full watering happens every second day for ten minutes.

In seed news, the brandywine and jaune flamme tomatoes are up, but still a long way from transplant sized. The yellow and red grapes are flowering.