The Seasonal Table - A journal of slow food and slow living from a smallholding in rural England

Chickens: Creating a Dual-Purpose UK Easter Egger Flock – Part 3

03/04/2020 By The Seasonal Table Leave a Comment

This is part three of the story of how we created our dual-purpose meat and coloured-egg laying flock here on the smallholding. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

After deciding on the chicken breeds to keep, we came up with a plan. We wanted to keep a closed flock*, which meant buying hatching eggs to incubate. As we are doing things on a very small scale (initially we had room in the chicken house for a maximum of 8 large birds), we had to build up the flock slowly with one hatch per year. We decided to start with the Marans and Welsummers in year one; Araucanas and Ixworths in year two; and breeding hybrid chickens in year three.

…

Shetland Sheep

30/06/2019 By The Seasonal Table Leave a Comment

This time last year, after months of research and planning, we decided to get a small flock of sheep to live here on the smallholding. We were keen to get heritage, multi-purpose sheep, who could offer us the ability to produce excellent dairy, meat and wool. We also wanted a flock that would be well suited to life on a smallholding and easy to look after. After careful consideration (and a close contest with Icelandic sheep), we settled on Shetland sheep, who seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

…

Rainbow Chard with Fennel, Chilli, Wild Garlic and Rosemary

03/03/2019 By The Seasonal Table Leave a Comment

It has been a rather unusual weather week. Most mornings started with frost, icy water buckets, and gloved windscreen scraping. Then fierce daytime sunshine took over and our winter coats were swiftly replaced with t-shirts and sunglasses. As night descended, so did the temperature, which meant lighting the log burners remained essential in our stone cottage with its broken boiler and draughty windows. We warmed ourselves in front of the flames while rubbing aftersun on our noses. Bizarre, stunningly beautiful weather, with the deeply worrying undertone that it could be attributed to climate change.

…

Apple Pie

Apple season is in full swing here on the smallholding. It is a favourite time of year for the geese, whose morning routine now begins with an extremely loud and flappy visit to the base of their favourite apple tree to see what windfalls have come down overnight. They appear to have a strict finders…

Wild Blackberry and Rosewater Cake

Wild blackberries are very much at home on the smallholding. They wind their way through hawthorn, ash and nettle hedgerows, providing a welcome barrier from the country lane and home for a multitude of wildlife. Unfortunately the brambles also pop up in less welcome places. This year they have made an appearance in the middle…

Wild Cherry Sour

It has not been a particularly good year for our cherry trees. One of the two sweet cherries, which gave us an absolute bumper crop last July, has been struck by what appears to be a nasty combination of fruit drop and cherry blackfly. The tree stands curly leafed and forlorn, surrounded by shrivelled fruits…