June round-up

Dunluce earlies, eagerly awaited

Strawberries 'Symphony'

June is when the new season harvest starts properly, with outdoor broad beans, mangetout, beetroot, shallots and the first of the new pototoes. The latter were especially eagerly awaited, since we ran out of main crop potatoes in March, due to a smaller than normal harvest last autumn because of blight. This year, we're growing extra potatoes to compensate for any outbreak of potato blight, and three types of blight-resistant maincrop spuds (Blue Danube, Sarpo Axona and Setanta).

Fruit wise, the strawberries got going very early this year, in mid June when we often don't have any until July. We've been having them daily in our morning porridge, made delicious strawberry ice cream and sorbet and possibly our favourite jam, strawberry conserve. 

To make conserve, layer the whole hulled strawberries in their weight in sugar in a non-reactive pan, cover with a towel and leave for 24 hours. Then boil for 5 minutes, cover and leave for another 24 hours. On the third day, add the juice of a lemon per kg of strawberries (or 1/2 tsp citric acid) and make jam as normal. Worth the wait - this jam is basically spreadable whole strawberries, an intense flavour.

The 2.5-year-old hedge

We've planted more hedge every winter so far, about 1000 plants to date. And this year the 3.5- and 2.5-year-old hedges were ready for their first trim! It's wonderful to start getting real shelter from them and birds and pollinators love them too. On our outer perimeter we've chosen spiky hedge plants such as hawthorn, blackthorn, sea buckthorn and rosa rugosa, to deter browsing by cattle and, eventually, deer. But for our internal hedges we've opted for variety, edibility and wildlife-friendliness, with hazel, crab apple, wild pear, elder, alder, poplar, willow, guelder rose, field maple, purple and green beech, forsythia, cotoneaster and dog rose, plus a few of the thorny types as well (after all, they all have edible fruit).

Wind protection for the squashes

The first Tigerellas of the season

Fuzz and the gang

Broad bean hummus on sourdough rye

Unlike our southern neighbours in England, we have not had a heat wave in June - unless four days above 22°C counts. Instead, we've been having a wet and windy old time, with the Rayburn back on for quite a few days. The wind has wreaked havoc with our squashes: 11 survivors out of 36 and only because Jim had the bright idea to shield the remaining plants with old car tyres. Next year, all squash seedlings will get a tyre - I'm sure our local garage will be only too happy to offload some for free.

At least, the cucumbers, chillies and tomatoes inside had no idea what nonsense went on outside and have been ripening away. As usual, Gusto Purple and Hungarian Yellow Wax were the earliest chillies. The Femspot cucumbers have been amazingly early, with the first one ready in the second week of June - definitely will be growing these again! The tomatoes too have been early and we had ripe tomatoes in June for the first time ever. The first three varieties were Matina, Tigerella and Harzfeuer, all now slotted to become regulars.

The chicks are two months old now and have free range of the chicken area. They don't mix with the older chickens but wander everywhere in their tight-knit group of five. They enjoy the foraging immensely and sometimes it's a chore to get them into their hut for the night. Unlike the senior chickens, they don't seem to realise that dusk is bed time! One of the two young cockerels looks as if he has fur instead of feathers - I just want to stroke him, but he's rather shy. With his unusual plumage, we might just have to keep young Fuzz for breeding (bad news for his dad, Feathers).

Apart from jam and ice cream, we've also tried making some new healthy snacks, including sourdough crisp breads and broad bean hummus, which is a great combination. The broad bean hummus is wonderful and so easy to make: Boil the broad beans for 5 minutes, drain, add some cold-pressed oil, garlic, lemon basil, salt and pepper and blend into a paste. Who needs avocados?

May round-up

Blossom, blossom, everywhere

It has been a very warm and dry month of May here. Three weeks without rain and lots of days with temperatures around 20°C! Our rainwater-collecting system (six barrels, each 200 L capacity, that are filled by run-off from our roof) which we use for watering the vegetable garden was nearly empty at the end of the dry spell. With all the new seedlings coming up (direct sowings of carrot, beetroot, kale, chard, New Zealand spinach, calabrese, red, winter and Savoy cabbage, purple-sprouting broccoli, kohlrabi, lettuce, turnips, radishes, scorzonera, edible flowers and herbs) and being planted out (dwarf and climbing French beans, summer and winter squashes, courgettes, celeriac, amaranth, sunflowers), there was a lot of watering to be done: my least favourite job in the garden.

Squash seedlings

Empty beds

Path from the top paddock to the middle paddock

Salad with beetroot and celeriac stalks

So hot we had to shade the greenhouse

The first job of the month was to get the squashes going. Sowing them on 1 May means that they are perfect for planting out four weeks later, after the last frost date and when it's reliably warm enough for them. Because I'm seed swapping with a squash aficionado, I ended up with 22 different varieties this time. Of course, I had to pop in two or three seeds of each, to be sure to get at least one plant each. The germination rate was excellent and suddenly we had 51 squash plants needing a home. Luckily, the Huegelkultur bed was nearing completion. It made a very handy depository for the mountain of used-up brassica plants left over from our winter crops.

Once all the purple-sprouting broccoli, kale and most of the chard had been removed from the veg garden, the beds were looking rather empty. The emptiest it's been all year. After a quick tilling and cultivating session with the new Mantis, the beds were ready for direct sowing and to receive the latest seedlings from the conservatory. The asparagus seeds germinated very well this time, after soaking them for two days, and it looks like we've got ourselves just over a full bed of asparagus plants. I already had a half dozen three-year-old Martha Washington plants and added the newcomers (Argenteuil and Jersey Knight) to the same bed. Now wait four years.

The grass has been growing like crazy and for the past week we've been playing catch-up to get things under control again. All the hedges need weeding and mulched around as do the fruit bushes, fruit trees and potatoes. So far we've completed the top and middle paddocks, with only the large bottom paddock left to do. However, since we've removed the fence between the middle paddock and the top paddock, maybe they classify as a single paddock now! The fence was very well made, but Jim managed to extract the six-foot posts (half underground) with the aid of a 2-tonne hydraulic jack. The space has now a much more open feel and view, and we've put down a more secure pathway instead of the old chicken ladder.

We've been eating very well, with the polytunnel virtually eliminating the 'hungry gap'. Already this month, we've had beetroot, broad beans, pak choi and courgettes from the polytunnel, colourful salads most days and heaps of globe artichokes. And wild rocket is a new weed in our garden - the kind of weed we like!

The chicks at one month

The chicks are growing fast. At the age of three weeks, they got a slight shock - it rained for the first time in their lives! Can't be many Scottish chickens that lucky. Out of the five, three are hens and two cockerels. Luckily three more hens was exactly what we wanted. We'll keep our flock black-and-white with two more black hens and one white one. The cockerels will be for the pot, unless one of them is needed to replace Feathers who's been spending a lot of time on the therapist's couch recently...

April round-up

Typical April harvest

April has been a super busy month. It started with another major sowing session indoors (cucumbers, tomatillos, asparagus, quinoa, amaranth, broccoli, basil, coriander, celeriac, cantaloupe melons), followed by sowing the maincrop potatoes (Setanta, Sarpo Axona and Blue Danube) outside in a new bed that required major stone removal - in fact, it now has a little stone wall running alongside it. We also planted out the peas sown in pieces of guttering, a method that worked extremely well.

One of the three black chicks

Unfortunately, we had an egg-eating incident - chicken caught in flagrante, pulling an egg from underneath another hen and chomping into it - so we had to soup our favourite hen. This prompted us to get the incubator on. Last round of incubating our own eggs. Next time we'll get some hatching eggs in from a local farm, probably Welsummers and Copper Marans, to mix up our gene pool again. Out of 10 eggs we got seven chicks, hatched on 25 and 26 April. Unfortunately, one chick died in the first night and another one had straddle legs, which we taped in place with a sticking plaster tether, but the little one did in the second night. At least the other five are doing very well.

Tomatoes in the polytunnel

Then it was warm enough to plant out the tomatoes into the polytunnel and greenhouse. Since our area is bad for potato blight (which also unfortunately affects their tomato cousins), we grow our tomatoes in containers and mainly inside: 16 in the polytunnel, 8 in the greenhouse and 6 in the conservatory. We'll try a couple of the Magic Mountain variety outside since it's been billed as very blight-resistant. We put a little bit of manure in the bottom of every tomato pot (and, later, we'll do the same for chillies, peppers, cucumbers and melons).

Brassica set-up

We also set up a brassica fortress outside. Each of our dozen kale, romanesco, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and red/Savoy cabbage seedlings has been planted inside a bottomless pot that has a ring of copper tape running around it. The pot to protect against the occasionally fierce winds here and the copper tape to keep slugs and snails at bay. Then the whole lot is netted over to protect the seedlings from birds and cabbage white butterflies. There will still be some losses, but at least this gives them a better chance.

The herbal tea plants are all up and we've even had some first flush green tea from our Camellia sinensis bushes. Though mainly we drink pots of lemon balm tea, various mint teas (apple, Swiss, Moroccan, Eau de Cologne and mixtures thereof) and sage.

The big new bed

The second large new bed in the bottom paddock has turned out to be too boggy to be used as a straight-up bed so we've decided to turn it into a Hügelkultur bed. This means that Jim will dig a trench which we'll fill with all kinds of organic materials and then make a little mound over it afterwards. Not too high though because of the wind! We're definitely horizontal gardeners here, anything that sticks out over the hedge will be scorched.

Overwintering pea in the greenhouse

The edible and medicinal flower bed has been dug at last and sown with edible poppies, two types of calendula, two types of cornflower, coriander, dill, cumin, chives, camomile and salad burnet. Just the amaranth and sunflowers to add next month. The old ash pit next to our front door has been sown with a profusion of wild flower seeds (plus some 5 for £1 Lidl flower seeds). And Jim has mowed the entire garden for the first time this season! All the fruit trees, some fruit bushes and some hedges have been mulched with the grass clippings.

Femspot cucumber in the conservatory

This year we're trying an all-female cucumber variety for the first time. Very impressed so far with the vigour of these Femspot cucumbers. They've already demanded potting up. We'll have to keep them separate from our other cucumber variety, Crystal Lemon, so the Femspots will be in the conservatory and greenhouse and the Crystal Lemons in the polytunnel. It'll be nice not to have to help along with pollination on the Femspot plants! On the Crystal Lemon cucumbers and the cantaloupe melons, I will be using cotton buds to hand-pollinate the female flowers from the male flowers.

First radish of the season

We've also started some direct sowing outside: carrots, scorzonera, lettuce, chard, New Zealand spinach, turnips, radishes, beetroot. Most of the direct sowing will be happening in May though. I've also continued experimenting with crops in the polytunnel. Already the first carrot seedlings are up and the beetroots are way ahead of the outdoor ones. I've also popped in one courgette, for extra early courgettes, and some pak choi. The tunnel's filling up fast!

Homemade pasta, on the homemade drying rack

On the food preparation and preservation side, we've made a batch of purple-sprouting broccoli & Daubenton's kale kimchi, some rhubarb ice cream and our first ever pasta - from home-milled flour with our own eggs. Definitely will be making our own pasta from now on!

Cooling off your cockerel

Feathers

Overly feisty cockerels are a common complaint among the poultry-keeping fraternity. Here's a quick post with tips & tricks we've learned for dealing with these bad boys, including a Chicken Hypnosis video.

This handsome chap is Feathers. Like his father and grandfather before him, he's going slightly nuts as he approaches his first birthday.

Seemingly this is due to a surge in testosterone levels as he reaches full maturity. He probably can't understand why he's so enraged all the time either.

Anyone who has spent much time around a cockerel will know the danger signs. We call it 'hard pecking'. When he's standing somewhere nearby, looking at you while he savagely pecks some blade of grass or something, as if to say, "That's you, that is!". The next stage is often full-on attack.

The underarm carry

Ideally before he gets to attack stage, grab him, tuck him under your arm and carry him about like that for five or ten minutes. This seems to foster the belief in them that you belong to a different class of being, not to be trifled with. The effect is temporary, to begin with at least, but it's easily repeated and (allegedly) the idea does eventually sink in on a longer term basis.

Besides being highly entertaining, chicken hypnosis also calms them down. The procedure is simple (see video):

• Get ahold of the chicken's legs and gently lay it down on its back.
• Using one or two fingers, repeatedly stroke down the midline from the base of the neck to the pelvis.
• As the beast relaxes, its legs will begin to stretch out and you'll be able to gradually release them.
• When the chook is completely relaxed and focused, with legs fully extended, you can quietly step back and observe.
• It can take several minutes for them to snap out of the trance, at which point they'll right themselves and carry on about their business, though now with a respectful eye on you!

They're all lovely at this stage.

In general, it seems the best chance of ending up with a 'friendly' cockerel is to hatch your own, or get them as day-old chicks, and then handle them frequently as they grow up, but there are no guarantees. 

Likewise, certain breeds are said to be more aggressive than others. Watch out for Rhode Island Reds! Again, however, no guarantees.

I've tried all sorts of responses to cock aggression:

• Ignoring them. Doesn't work - they soon adopt the notion that they're the boss.
• Fighting back. (With care, obviously, to avoid injuring them!) This is fun, but it doesn't work either - they never tire of fighting and any contest that ends with them still breathing is chalked up as a win.
• Putting them in the 'sin bin'. No discernible effect.

The underarm carry and chicken hypnosis are the way to go.

Happy chicken keeping!

December round-up

Scything under cat supervision

Surprisingly, the most time-consuming garden job this month has been mowing the lawn. With the mild temperatures, the grass just keeps on growing, and the scythesman had to come out one more time, ably assisted and supervised by Domino. Hopefully, this will make the first cut of spring a whole lot easier.

This time of year is meant to be the start of DIY season, but we've been a bit unwilling to get into that, so far. Luckily, our friend Dorothy has started for us by making the first batch of our new Roman blinds, complete with label: 'Handmade in Kirkmaiden', no less. No doubt we'll get on with more indoor things in the new year. Let's see how far we get...

The first of many venison casseroles

December's unexpected windfall was Jim's first roe deer. It took a couple of days to butcher (after hanging for 3-4 days), but now the freezer is full of delicious, tender venison. Domino and the chickens love the scraps, too. We've already had a few dishes from young 'Buckie' and the Christmas haunch stretched over three days. Jim got an interesting cookbook for Christmas: Delicious Vermin - all about preparing sustainable wild meat such as rabbit and pigeon (and a few suggestions for roe deer, partridge and grey squirrel).

The egg skelter is filling up again

Wonky mooli radishes - ideal for kimchi making

In other protein news, the three young hens hatched early last summer have now all started laying. The chucks gave us four eggs for Christmas! One of the new layers, the pretty black hen, produces a beautiful dark brown egg with a slight purplish sheen (as opposed to the light to very light brown eggs of the others). We might breed exclusively from her next year. So, again, it took almost exactly six months for the first young hen to start laying and almost seven for the late bloomer. A good indication is the state of the comb and wattles. When the pullets start to look like proper hens they won't be long in laying. Another sign seems to be that the cock begins mating with them...

Another thing that has kept us busy in December is kimchi production. All remaining mooli radish has now been converted into health-giving kimchi. In total, we made nine litres of the stuff, but a third of that is already consumed! Now that we know how easy it is to make we'll make it from all kinds of vegetables. Winter cabbage next.

Purple-sprouting broccoli

The first promising signs of next year's produce are beginning to show: rhubarb stalks emerging, garlic sprouts pushing up and broad bean seedlings unfurling leaves. The purple-sprouting broccolis are displaying the first small sprouts, new rocket is shooting up and the indoor peas are getting taller.

Fun-looking oca

We still have five squashes left, but some other fruit and veg ran out this month, notably garlic and frozen berries. Others, like frozen tomatoes and dried apple rings, are getting low. But there are still plenty of kale, chard, leeks, parsnips, swedes, Jerusalem artichokes, celeriacs and, in storage, potatoes. Plus our new crop: oca or New Zealand yam. Pretty in pink, they can be eaten raw or cooked. When they are cooked (just scrub, no need to peel) they lose the pink colouring and look and taste similar to mini potatoes but with a strong zing of lemon. They're definitely staying on the menu.

November round-up

Final squash harvest

The frogs and bees have gone into hibernation, almost all the leaves are down. There is more darkness, even if the supermoon provided some extra night light. A good time for a garden clean-up before a bit of winter rest. Just to be able to put all the squash plants on the compost bin, Jim had to dig over the whole row of bins twice! And he's even started digging some of the cleared vegetable beds.

Pile of squash plants

Frosted kale, should be sweeter now

The last of the squashes and beans have been harvested. This time I shelled the large runner beans, which were pretty in pink and purple. They weren't quite dry yet, but good enough to freeze. The naked beans turned out to be so delicious that I'm going to grow runner beans just for them next year. Eat the French beans fresh and shell the mature runner beans for winter stews.

We've now started into the kale, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks and Brussels sprouts. Some of the swedes are monstrous. I now throw a handful of neep cubes into every casserole I make. And we're still eating a large or medium-sized squash per week. The small ones are gone, but some of the remaining Marina di Chioggias are huge. The amaranth didn't quite make it to maturity. One plant was ripe and after threshing we got a medium-sized jar of amaranth. It might work in a hot summer.

First pears

More rewarding was our pear harvest: seven pears from our three-year-old tree and no threshing required. However, I learnt that pears don't really ripen on the tree and that it's best to pick them when they come off easily with a sideways bend and let them finish ripening off the tree.

Frosted purple-sprouting broccoli

The weather was very mild for the first half of the month, but now we've had several nights of frost, which is a little unusual around here, and it's been the coldest since we moved here ('feels like -6C'). Early in the month we covered the tea plants with garden fleece for the winter.

We've also completed hedging around the perimeter of our land. Hurray! It took another 115 hedge plants: 25 dog roses, 25 white rosa rugosa, 25 guelder roses, 15 forsythia, 15 purple beeches and 10 amelanchiers. We had hoped that planting them as early as possible in the dormant season would mean better weather for hedge planting, but alas it was not so. The first day it was blowing a gale and we had to retreat early. There followed a torrential downpour that night (one inch/25 mm of rainfall in one night) to water everything in nicely, followed by a decent day to finish the planting. We also moved some rogue raspberry plants and replaced them with rogue rugosas and stuck about 30 willow sticks in the ground to bulk up the hedges.

Greencurrant cuttings

The other exciting bit of planting came in a package from Finland: greencurrant cuttings. This is a Finnish specialty, a blackcurrant variety with translucent yellow-green berries. The flavour is said to be similar to blackcurrant but milder and sweeter. And the berries are hopefully less attractive to birds! Fingers crossed now that they will take (at least a few of the ten cuttings). I also took cuttings of our buddleia and stuck them in a seed bed.

Overwintering pea

So far the winter sowing programme has not been too successful. The aphids got one tray of lettuce seedlings and the slugs (unfortunately not in hibernation) got a second one. After that I set all four beer traps in the polytunnel and resowed. The pea seedlings are doing the best so far. I also sowed twenty broad beans outside and three inside the tunnel. The first of the Early Wonder beetroot seedlings are coming up and the rocket obligingly reseeds itself, both inside the polytunnel and outside in a raised bed.

As an experiment, I sowed some organic chickpeas - the fresh young pods are supposed to be the closest to edamame soybeans you can grow in the UK. I wanted to see how easy it was to get the shop-bought chickpeas to sprout. The answer is very easy. So that is another new vegetable on the growing menu next year.

Chickpea seedlings

Egg production is way down. We have six hens and only get an egg every other day at the moment! How can this be? One hen has just finished moulting, another one has just started and the three young point-of-lay hens have not quite reached the actual point of laying. So good old Mags is the only hard-working chicken at the moment - apart from Feathers who's taking his cock role very seriously. The young hens will be six months old on 1 December and hopefully our egg skelter will be filling up nicely thereafter.

Eating your chickens

One of our four too many

Of the many who keep hens for home egg production, it seems that relatively few are willing to consider the birds themselves as a food source. It's easy enough to understand the reasons behind this reluctance, but it is a sad waste of a useful resource.

The position becomes tenuous when you consider that not a few of those too squeamish to eat their own chickens will quite happily purchase a supermarket chicken or choose a chicken dish on a restaurant menu. Chances are, those birds will have had a far less pleasant existence than the ones you've reared and kept at home.

Examined honestly, it ends up looking less like a decision made in the interests of chicken-kind as a whole and more as a taking of the easy way out for oneself. The killing and butchering of an animal (particularly one that you may be fond of) is not a task relished by the sane. To my way of thinking though, it is a task that any eater of meat ought to be able to cope with on a conceptual level at least and on a practical level if you're in a position to do so.

Provided you can do the deed humanely and efficiently, eating your own chickens makes a lot of sense. This is particularly so if you hatch eggs to keep your flock going. There's always an excess of cockerels. Keeping more than one cock bird in a flock of less than around a dozen is no kindness to any of them. A cock of four or five month's age on the other hand makes delicious eating. Even a hen who has come to the end of her laying career will yield a succulent and nutritious batch of chicken soup.

The first time we hatched a batch of eggs, we hit it lucky. Out of eight eggs in the incubator, five hatched and only one was a boy. Second time around, the hatch rate was seven out of ten, but four of them were boys! Including their dad, therefore, we were ending up with at least four cockerels too many.

As the boys reached maturity, things in the flock started getting ugly and chicken was very much on the menu.

Our cone. Found on the beach and cut to size

The first point to deal with, and perhaps also the most daunting, is the dispatch. The three main methods all have their adherents. There's the 'off with his head', the pulling (or dislocation) of the neck and the 'go for the jugular'. All are pretty hands-on. Carried out correctly, all are humane. In any case, a cone is an accessory that lies somewhere between 'very useful' and 'essential'.

It's an inescapable fact that the killing of a chicken, by whichever humane method, is accompanied by quite a lot of tremendously powerful flapping. This is caused by muscle spasms that occur at the point of death and, though not indicative of suffering, can be distressing to witness as well as messy and bruising to the meat. Popping the bird into the cone, either immediately post- ('off with his head' or neck pull) or pre- ('go for the jugular') slaughter, eliminates this problem very effectively.

An old iron makes a good weight

Nearly ready for the pot

Next comes plucking. Plunge the carcass into a large bucket of very hot (too hot to touch, but not hot enough to start cooking the bird) water. A little washing up liquid added to the water will help it to penetrate the feathers. A weight of some sort is useful to keep everything under the water surface. This step loosens the feathers so you can pull them out more easily and without tearing the skin. Test for readiness by tugging on a few feathers. The large 'flight feathers' at the wing tips are the toughest, so if you can pull these out then the rest should be good to go. Five to ten minutes of soaking will suffice, if the water is hot enough. When the feathers are loose, pour away the hot water and replace with cold to cool the carcass and then go ahead and pluck. Keep a bucket handy for the feathers (there are loads of them). Feathers can go on the compost heap or be buried with the head and intestines. Either way, they'll contribute to your soil quality.

I don't propose to go into the nitty gritty of butchering here. I may do so in a later post, but for those needing the information, there are good YouTube videos out there and at least one really excellent book.

BBQ

Now it's nearly time to transform all that high-grade, ethically produced protein into your favourite chicken dish. First, a few points to bear in mind. 1) This is going to have a lot more flavour than supermarket chicken. 2) If your hens are of a type bred purely for laying, they won't have a vast amount of meat on them. 'Dual-purpose' birds are meatier and 'broilers' are the meatiest of all (this is what you get in the supermarket). 3) The meat is tougher than what you'd get from a broiler (hence the focus on slow-cooked casseroles or soups). This can be mitigated by brining the meat before cooking: Soak in cold water with a bit of salt and vinegar (2 tbsp salt + 1 tbsp white wine vinegar per litre of water) for at least a couple of hours before cooking.

Southern fried chicken

If you're an omnivore, gird your loins and get on with it. It's not an easy thing to do, but it does get easier with practice. It completes the circle of chicken keeping and reminds us of what it means to be an animal, part of a food chain and the web of life on earth.

October round-up

Squashes of all colours unite

October is the month of pumpkins and squashes. They've occupied just about every windowsill in the house. Squashes can last a long time if harvested ripe and undamaged and then cured (stored at room temperature) for at least a couple of weeks. The curing also makes them sweeter. But, of course, some squashes don't ripen in time and need to be eaten quickly, like courgettes, and others rot or get nibbled by the wildlife.

Hen pheasant in the front garden

The wildlife has been busy in the garden this month, judging by the pile of badger scat and the chomped-off raspberry bushes and roe deer scat. But most of all we've had pheasants. The shooting season has just started for them and both our farmer next door and the nearby estate breed pheasants for the hunt. Gangs of them can be seen roaming the farm track and our front garden, middle and bottom paddocks have been thoroughly checked out. We've already bartered pumpkins for pheasant thighs.

Shaggy Ink Cap fritters

We've also added wild mushrooms to our diet. Ever since going on an excellent mushroom foraging walk in late August and investing in a few good field guides, we've been on the lookout for mushrooms. Unfortunately, we haven't had as much time for mushroom hunts this autumn as we'd hoped, but we still managed several good meals. My favourite so far has been Shaggy Ink Cap fritters. Next autumn we'll know at least one good spot nearby already and we've got lots more woodland to explore.

The survivor

This month, the chicken flock has reached its target size: one cockerel (Feathers) and six hens. We figure six hens is a good flock size for two people. There is always at least one hen not laying (moulting, too old to lay every day, having a winter slowdown etc.) and excess eggs aren't difficult to get rid of. Feathers ended up as the new 'leader' since he seems a quiet chap with little interest in crowing or fighting (at least so far) and has been spotted breaking up fights and stepping up to defend the hens from the cats (though Domino just wants to play).

Blueberry bushes turning

We haven't got much by way of autumn colour in the garden. Most of the leaves are falling in the gales before they're changing colour, but the blueberry bushes are putting on a fine display. The other burst of colour in the garden are large glossy rosehips - it's a bumper year for them.

Big hips

Jerusalem artichokes in flower

The ocas have been earthed up and the first Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips and swedes have been harvested. Plenty of spent plants are bulking up the compost heap: sweetcorn, courgettes, squashes. Only ten tomato plants are left and the flow of tomatoes has slowed to a trickle. The baby sweetcorn actually gave us a decent crop so sweetcorn production is being continued. Next year we'll try a few in the polytunnel.

Baby corn 'Snowbaby'

Other than harvesting, it's mainly a case of clearing up at this time of year. A bit of cutting back here and there, the last mow of the season, composting annual plants that are finished. The main planting job is the big garlic sowing at the end of October. This year, we'll use our own seed garlic since we have enough to do so and the variety did really well.

This is the month when we've had the most visitors: every weekend booked and the half-term week. There are still plenty of fine sunny autumn days and on the foul days we can follow the cats' lead.

Poppy and Domino having a snooze day