This is part two 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. After a lot of research, we settled on four main breeds that we wanted to keep to form the base of our flock….
Pickled Wild Garlic Flower Buds
The wild garlic is as abundant this year as ever. It carpets the woodland floors and lines many of the shaded roadside verges. Open the car window on a sunny afternoon or stumble over a patch on a walk, and its scent is almost instantly noticeable. Here on the smallholding, we are lucky enough to have a supply of our very own by the edges of the stream….
Pine Needle Vinegar
There has been a lot of rain here over the last couple of weeks. The ground is saturated with water. The stream is swollen and lapping at the edges of the daffodils. And the geese have found themselves inundated with muddy, pond-sized puddles to dabble in. But, in the moments of sunshine between heavy showers, we’ve noticed spring creeping up on us. The flowerbeds are full to the brim with pastel-coloured hyacinths, blue muscari, deep purple hellebores and primroses of the palest yellow. Woolly newborn lambs have appeared in the field next door. And the garden birds are singing their little hearts out. The longer days mean that we have just enough time to go for a walk after work in the evening light. Earlier in the week, on a stroll through one of our favourite woodlands, we foraged a few fir tree sprigs to make a pine needle vinegar….
Chickens: Creating a Dual-Purpose UK Easter Egger Flock – Part 1
We came up with a chicken-keeping plan several years ago, which we have been working on here on the smallholding ever since. Our ultimate aim was to create a happy, free-ranging and organic flock that lays a multicoloured array of eggs and produces some of the finest meat we have ever tasted. This is the…
Blackcurrant and Bay Leaf Jam
Jam making is very much an activity we reserve for the colder months of the year. Rainy days especially. There is something very cheering about having a huge pan of brightly coloured fruit and sugar bubbling away on the stove, while rain patters against the window panes. This weekend though, it was not only rain…
Keeping Geese Part 3: Fencing
Prior to moving the goslings from their brooder (see Keeping Geese Part 1 and Keeping Geese Part 2) out into the orchard, we gave some careful thought to fencing arrangements. Our initial plan was to allow the geese to free-range and not to worry about fencing but, after further consideration, we decided this wasn’t an…