I can't believe it, we are so fastidious about keeping the chicken coop tidy, I found some red mite in there last night!  I thought poor little Lottie had been looking pale, as if she hasn't got enough to cope with at the moment, poor baby!  Ian only cleaned the coop out recently with poultry shield and he always scatters some diatomaceous earth in amongst the bedding but somehow the evil little blood suckers have got in there!  If left untreated, they will slowly kill the chickens by sucking their blood so something had to be done and quick!

Ian dismantled the coop today, blowtorched all the nooks and crannies, scrubbed it with poultry shield and made a paste with the DE and painted all over the inside of the coop and stuck it in all the nooks and crannies.  Then he scattered some dry DE around the cracks before he put new bedding in.  Then the girls got a good dusting of powder, so did Ian while he was dusting the girls!

Anyway, despite the wooden coop looking absolutely gorgeous, we have decided to replace it with an 'Omlet Cube' which should be much easier to maintain as it's made of plastic and should last for years, I hope so at that price!!!  (I daren't even tell you how much they cost, it makes me shudder).  To think, we got chickens to save money! :0)

Before my beautiful wooden Hensington Palace bites the dust, here are a few pics taken at the weekend.  We're keeping the large run and the cube will butt up against it.

Went foraging today and am absolutely shattered with a capital K!!!!!  The slightest exertion just does me in these days but still...  We went to Pickerings Pasture first and somebody had got to the apple tree before us and stripped it bare!  We got some elderberries and a few blackberries and then went on to Spike Island.  Got a few more elderberries.  Not fantastic pickings as the heads had a mixture of ripe berries, unripe and shrivelled up ones.  Better to have a full head of plump, ripe berries, makes it easier to use, otherwise you end up having to pick the good ones off by hand and that is such a time consuming and tedious job, as I found out!  

We then headed for Pex Hill and got a few more blackberries but I think, again, they'd been picked over good and proper!  We did find another wild apple tree though.  We tried one and it tasted slightly of pear and judging from its flesh and skin (and having done a google) I think the variety was 'Hudson's Golden Gem' but I don't know for certain.  They probably aren't fully ripe but we weren't taking the chance this time so picked some of the larger ones!  Knowing our luck, if we'd waited and gone back, the tree would have been stripped!  I'm sure they'll be okay cooked up with some sugar.


I was on the lookout for some crabapples but didn't spot a single one!  Plenty of rosehips, must google rosehip recipes and see if there's anything worth making from them.  We found a sloe bush with one single solitary sloe on it at Spike Island, again, we'd been fruit gazumped!

Another mini harvest from the garden.  Three apples from one of our trees (it's only a small tree and not properly established yet, so that's not bad!) and the last of the Spring onions.  I'm going to make blackberry and apple jam with our apples and some hedgerow bbs we picked last weekend which I froze.  

I'm making homemade savoury rice for tea to have with some sausages so I'll use the Spring onions in that and maybe save some of the onions for a cheese and onion omlet tomorrow :0)

Mum's birthday but she didn't feel like celebrating, with dad still being in hospital, so we dropped round in the morning with a card and a couple of tubs already planted up with a mixture of flowers, from the garden centre.  We asked if she wanted to come out and have breakfast with us but she wasn't in the mood, understandable really.

We spent most of the day at Applejacks farm in Warrington with some friends.  I would have liked to go in the 'amazing maize maze' but I get bit uncomfortable in situations I can't get out of quickly, so I gave it a miss.  Ian and I had a stroll while we waited for the others to appear out of the corn! :0)

I did have a go at the archery but didn't have the strength to pull the bow back far enough, even the child's bow!  I think I got 1 arrow in the target though :0)

The pig racing was cute.  Normally I wouldn't advocate using animals for entertainment and was quite dubious about the whole thing, but the pigs were lining up at their gate at the allotted time as they obviously knew what was going to happen and they were raring to go!  They did 3 laps round a grassy track and got apples and slices of bread at the finish.  You could tell they enjoyed it and it was good stimulation for them.  They only do it 3 times a day too so they're not overworked and they weren't stressed and had a lovely big paddock to chill out in between races :0)

Then we all went off to have lunch at The Thorn pub and after a delish meal and a cple of drinks, the afternoon seemed to have flown by!  We went our seperate ways and Ian and I set off for Knowsley to pick up some 'Country Smallholding' magazines we'd seen advertised on freecycle.  The people giving them away had their own chickens so we chatted chicken for a bit and went away with approx 42 magazines!!!!  When we've read them, we'll freecycle them on again most likely, in about, ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,  3 years? :0)

Eo made the most goegeous potato wedges using our spuds and we had them with some frozen veg, our girls' eggs and some lovely outdoor reared sausages.  Simple but tasty, very, very tasty! :0)

Popped round to see Al, Dave and Lucy.  Lucy is really starting to talk quite a lot now, mainly one syllable words so; money is "mun",  monkey is "monk", apple is "app", Thomas (the tank engine) is "Tom" but she can say "Bob" (the builder ) :0)   She can do all the noises for a dog, cat, monkey and a fish and a lot more too, I think she's amazing :0)

Just when I thought I'd got her to recognise colours by pointing to the pink flowers on her dress and her pink shoes, she pointed to a yellow flower and said "pink" :0)

She was able to do this puzzle all by herself which I think is good going for a 21 month old!

Tuesday was horrible...The weather was horrible; dark, wet and windy.  It's been lousy for days now!

Mariana was looking a bit peaky  but it turned out to be a soft egg and she seems fine now. Shalott was fine in the morning but then later on looked all depressed, standing about with eyes shut.  She hadn't been looking well for a couple of days.  

Then yesterday my poor little Harry (budgie) fell off his perch and was squeaking and wobbling all over the place. I had him on my knee for about 10 minutes and he seemed to be fading. He is 11 years old so I was dreading this day. He stopped squeaking and started to lie down, eyes closed, I was in floods of tears!  Then he started to pick up, little by little. He was very unbalanced at first so I kept him on my knee but now he seems back to his old self, hopping about on his perches and scoffing his millet! I think he may have had a stroke, budgies are prone to them unfortunately. But, fingers x'd, he'll be okay.  I was okay in the morning but by the afternoon I was a gibbering wreck!!!!  I can just about cope with 1 sick bird at a time, but 3 at the same time!!!!

Shalott still didn't look any better yesterday; hunched up, eyes closed, hardly eating or drinking and doing eggy coloured poos. After 2-3 days we knew it was time to take action so Ian took her to the vets! I didn't go, I couldn't, in case of the worst!  The vet said she had a soft egg that was stuck so they 'unstuck' it and got most of it out, she's had a baytril injection and this time we've been given baytril tablets to give her. We were charged £21 this time which is odd because they spent longer working on her than when we took Mariana and Mariana's visit, plus her (liquid) baytril was £31!?  The vet said the tablets would probably be easier to administer, we've been told to just put half a pill in her beak and she'll swallow it!

She seemed a little bit better this morning but still not her usual bouncy self.  We've given her her medication and she's still had periods of looking unwell but she's also been more active than yesterday, fingers STILL firmly x'd!  I'd hate to lose her now that she's started to look like a 'proper' chicken, poor baby :0(

This is her when she came to us back in october last year.  Virtually bald but the feistiest, pluckiest little thing you ever saw :0)

Don't know anything about the poet whatsoever but it's one of those "I wish I'd written that!" poems.  

Right, as I don't have any children to sit on, I'm off to chase butterflies! :0)

Was up until half past midnight last night, or should I say this morning, making more lemon curd! :0)  Totallly shattered now but I don't mind when it's getting tired from something enjoyable.

Dropped the curd off at Eddisbury Farmers' Market for Celia and looked after the stall while she went and did a deal with Bev (aka 'Mama Bongo' as was!) about some jars she had going cheap.  

I sold my first jar of curd within 10 minutes of being there (plus 2 of Celia's jams)!  Anyway, when celia came back, Ian and I wandered around the market and bought some bread, broccolli, carrots and some more pies from Neil at http://www.thegreatnorthpiecompany.co.uk/  

As we were in the area, we then popped over to see Lynda and the gang.  Lynda's new piglets have arrived so after a cuppa and the most delish flapjack I've ever had, we went to see the little piggies.  The little piggies had other ideas and refused to come out and play!  They were all snuggled up together in their house and wouldn't be persuaded, even with some apples!  They're about 12 weeks old I think she said.  

Typical babies, if they're not eating then they're sleeping! :0)






Then it was back home to enjoy the delicious pies from the market, I think they were called 'chicken piperade' or something like that but whatever they were, they were incredible!  We had them with the carrots, broccolli and our spuds.  Ian mashed the carrots into the potato and it was delish.  

Roasted pork shoulder tonight from Lynda's pig.  Ian cooked it with garlic and rosemary from our garden and we had it with carrots from the garden, the rest of the free broccolli from the market and potatoes from the garden :0)  Ian picked some more spuds today and there were a cple of whoppers so think we'll have them baked at the weekend !

The crackling was gorgeous, just had to be careful with the gnashers!  I broke my tooth on a pork scratching once, cost me a fortune!

I started making lemon curd a while ago after finding a recipe on the chicken forum I use and as a way to use up some of our girls' eggs.  It was delicious and everyone loved it.  I thought it would be fun and interesting to try selling it at a farmers' market.  I made friends with a lady that sells jam at our local farmers' market and, to cut a long story short, she suggested I make some for her and help her on her stall.  I couldn't do it by myself as it's complicated and costly to set up on your own and for various reasons, I'm not at a stage in my life where I'm able to do that anyway.  I did it for the craic, to get some fresh air, to get out of the house and to meet a few people and see what it's like on the other side of the stall.

Anyway, I made 6 x 1/2lb jars and 4 x 1/4lb  jars (and an almost full 1/4lb jar for tasters) to sell on her stall yesterday.  I couldn't use my own eggs as our girls aren't DEFRA registered so I bought some eggs from a free range egg farm just down the road from me.  

I was slightly disappointed with the colour because when I made it with our girls eggs (whose yolks are bright orange) the colour was incredible.  The taste however was just as delicious.

This is the one of the jars I made with our girls' eggs as Mothers' day presents for our mums and it was a lovely bright yellow...

The market was from 10am to 2pm and I was sooooooooooo tired afterwards, in fact I've slept most of today, but it was great fun, I got to meet some lovely people and made some good contacts and we'd sold out of my curd by 12.15pm!  I reckon I could have sold more but it was better to have sold out than to have had some leftover because of its shelf life.

There was virtually no profit in it, if at all, but that's not really why I did it.  The ingredients cost £7.71 (my partner paid for the jars), the curd sold in total for £21 (£2.50 for the 1/2lb jars and £1.50 for the 1/4lb jars) and my partner and I did a 60/40 split (60% to me) so I got £12.60. Therefore, less the cost of the ingredients, my share of the profit was only £4.89. However, I bought expensive lemons and used branded (English) butter so I'm buying cheaper lemons next time and I think I'll get Asda's own brand butter.

I'm also thinking of increasing the cost (perhaps later down the line) because we were charging the same for the jam as for the lemon curd but jam is less costly to make.

Had I been taking 100% of the profit it wouldn't have been too bad but even then if you factor in the time spent purchasing the ingredients, making the curd and then the 4 hours spent selling it on the stall, not to mention the gas/electricity used in making it, it's a pittance really.  In fact, taking all that into account, I probably haven't made a penny!  There's no way I could make a living from it at this stage but like I say, I didn't do it for that.  It's been a good experience and a good insight into the workings of a farmers' market.  I've made some valuable contacts too who have given me loads of advice.  The guy on the veg stall also gave me some free broccolli at the end of the market. What he couldn't sell, he shared with the fellow traders, which was kind of him.

I spent all my profits, and more, on other goodies at the market anyway but I got a trade discount on some of them :0)  We got a couple of pies from http://www.thegreatnorthpiecompany.co.uk/ and they were absolutely delicious!  I also bought some papaya chutney from a friend's stall.  It was her last market as she was packing it all in to go back to the 9-5 life as she couldn't make her business pay.  Such a shame!  Although people want home grown, home produced foodstuffs, it seems they're not prepared to pay for them!  Come on people, stop giving your money to 'the big man' and support small, local producers!  

That reminds me, I watched "You've Got Mail" tonight with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks and it just reinforced my opinion of supporting the "little guy" and not giving my money to big corporations if I can at all avoid it!  Made me feel guilty for shopping in places like Waterstones and Borders but if I do come across little book shops, I do usually go in and buy something!  In fact, if you're ever in Liverpool, there's a great independant book shop called "News From Nowhere" on Bold St.  Waterstones is at one end, keep walking right on by ;0) and NFN is up the other end, near the bombed out church.  That aside, it was a lovely film, proper 'chick flick' and I loved it! :0)

This is me in action, I did actually have a folding chair behind me as there's no way I could have stood up solidly for 4 hours!  Ian took the piccie and he failed to get my lemon curd in on the photo but never mind!  

Not sure the stripes do me any favours! :0)

Took mum to the hospital so left Ian with instructions to make a spag bol for dinner.  We had a glut of baby toms and needed to use them up, some of the tumbling toms from our garden and some cherry toms from his mum.  I told him to blanch them in hot water for about 10 seconds then into cold water and peel the skins off.  A fiddly job but I assumed not impossible.  

Anyway, before I dropped mum off home, we popped back to my house to pick up some scouse I'd put aside for her the night before (made with some of the potaoes from our garden-see blog for yesterday) but left at home by mistake.  When we got there, Ian brought the scouse out to us and I noticed that the front of his shirt was dotted with tomato seeds!  He said the blanching method didn't work so he'd tried squishing them through a sieve but that didn't work either so he had to mush them up with his hands and pick the skins out!  There was tomato juice and seeds everywhere!  I'm still finding them stuck to various kitchen gadgets; kettle, slow cooker, the splash back etc etc.  Oh and the plug hole in the kitchen sink had little bits of tomato skin blocking it..

In his defence though, the spag bol was incredible and I'm glad I didn't have to deal with that many tiny toms!  Not only was it made with home grown toms but he'd used bits of the various varieties of basil from the garden which gave it a lovely fresh flavour and there was enough to freeze for 2 more meals.  

He also did the dishes, I just had to wipe the walls down! :0)