The third in a series of posts about creating a dual-purpose, free-ranging, organic flock of chickens that lay multicoloured eggs and produces some of the finest meat we have ever tasted.
Smallholding
Shetland Sheep
An overview of Shetland sheep characteristics, benefits for small-scale sheep keeping, and the story of how they arrived on the smallholding.
Chickens: Creating a Dual Purpose UK Easter Egger Flock – Part 2
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.
Chickens: Creating a Dual-Purpose UK Easter Egger Flock – Part 1
[su_spacer size=”20″]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…
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…
Planning the Vegetable Garden
With the February days slowly starting to lengthen and the garden beginning to show signs of creeping out of its winter slumber, we decide what to grow in the vegetable patch during the year ahead. We start by trawling through the huge metal cake tin we use to store seed packets and envelopes of hand-collected…
Apple Pressing Weekend
Last weekend was dedicated to the annual apple pressing. Every year we harvest a hotchpotch of eating and cooking apples from the orchard to transform into a year’s supply of apple juice. By late October, most of our trees (with the exception of the two Spartans and a little tree of unknown variety by the…
Apple Crisps
Apple season has arrived here in Somerset, and the fruits on each of our trees are busy ripening in quick succession. The orchard equivalent of a musical canon. There is a wonderful mix of eaters and cookers. Some are great for roasting, bubbling down into a compote, or turning into chutney. Others are best crunched…
Rainy Days and Lost Swarms
The beekeeping year started out so well. Our two hives had overwintered successfully and powered through spring with neat frames of brood, plentiful pollen stores, and lots of straw-coloured honey. We artificially swarmed one of the hives in June and proudly increased our apiary size by half. To our absolute joy, several swarms landed in…
A Swarm in the Plum Tree
When we lived in London, we did everything we could to entice a swarm of bees into our little garden. Purchasing a colony of bees is quite pricey and the idea of being able to expand our hive numbers for free was very appealing. In the beekeeping world, lost swarms are fair game and it’s…