Hatchings and musings

One of the hens has gone broody. About ten days ago I went to let them out and found Edith the Welsummer sitting determinedly in the nesting box. I thought she was laying and left her alone. The next day there she was again and sitting in a curious way, her feathers held out so that she looked like a great feathery flatfish. I rang my friend Penny who hatched the hens for us last year.

"Lift her out and see if she goes back in. If you lift her two or three times today and she always goes back then she probably is broody. If she's not serious about it she will get distracted when you lift her and wander off."

So I lifted her and every time she had a quick drink, a couple of peckfuls of corn and beetled determinedly back into the hen house again and settled down. While she was feeding I checked to find she was sitting on four eggs, one of her own and three bantams.

So out came the books and I was on the phone to Penny again. Apparently she needed a broody coop, a quiet place to sit undisturbed and where she and the chicks when they arrived could be separate from the main run. The coop (which is basically a wooden box with ventilation and a lid) doesn't have a floor but sits on the ground as the damp is good for the eggs. Ian made one, tweaking his back in the process, and on day three we moved her in, adding another nine eggs for her to sit on. I know it sounds a ludicrously large amount but that's what the books say a big hen like a Welsummer can sit on.

Now hens are creatures of habit. For the first couple of days she sat happily enough in her box all day but when she was taken out to eat, drink and defecate she clearly had no sense that her eggs were in the box and clamoured to get back into the run and the nesting box. We don't want her to be off the eggs for too long. I have read that up to half an hour is fine but as the time lengthened and she cloc-cloc-clocked nervously, clearly feeling it was time she was back, we decided to let her go where she wanted to be. Then after a few minutes of settling down we lifted her and carried her back, protesting, to the new box where she settled back again.

Then a breakthrough, on about day three in the broody coop she got it and went back in herself and settled down. If you hatch chicks in an incubator you have to turn them five times a day but if the hen does it herself she carefully moves and rearranges them, making sure that the ones on the edge are moved inside and the ones cosily in the middle of the nest have their turn on the outer ring. She has damaged one egg while doing this but she still has twelve.

I find this utterly fascinating, our first very amateurish attempt at raising stock. It will be about another week to ten days before they hatch. Yesterday I was up at the farm next door where my friend has been hatching chicks in the incubator. There were nine which had emerged that day, tiny buddles of fluff cheeping and falling over themselves. The eggs cheep noisily before the chicks break through. I can hardly wait for the sound from our own eggs. I wonder how many we will get?

The weekend has been full of people: younger son and his fiancee, ready to exchange on their new house so they will have it a couple of weeks before the wedding, and elder son and our two year old grandson for the night on Saturday. Ian has been laying the slate floor in the new greenhouse, despite his bad back.

And yesterday another blogger came visiting, exmoorjane a long way from home. I walked out along the track to meet her. A car turned in but didn't slow. That can't be her, I thought, doesn't look right at all and indeed it was someone going to the farm for an interview as a nanny. And then another car and it must be her. She looks just like I thought she would and she stops and I get in and we drive down to our house.

It is hard to find words to describe this sensation again although I have had it now a few times: you are clearly a stranger, we have never met before, we haven't even talked on the phone, yet I know you, I know what has been happening in your life and you know mine. Words fall out. We don't stop talking for four hours until she drives away.

And again there is that strange overlapping of worlds and connection, things that seem like more than co-incidence. I have been concerned since last week about a friend who may have cancer and who wants to turn away from conventional medicine and treat it with diet alone. She is consulting a nutritionist. Jane may be about to work with the same person. It was the same when I met Mountainear and found that she used to live round the corner from me many miles away from where we both now live. When I walked into her house I saw the great Chinese horse I used to see in the window of her other house years ago. I cannot now remember where the quote comes from but for a long time it sat above Ian's desk:"Deep assignments run through our lives. There are no co-incidences."

And today is a quiet day. The wind has dropped and it is still and soft, not quite rain, the green of the valley muted but still rich. There is bread in the oven. Everywhere is very silent. I water in the greenhouse and muse about co-incidences, or the lack of them.

May in the kitchen garden

I love May. I love its greenness, vivid and enchanting, and I love the way things are growing practically as you watch them. The force of new life is fountaining up in fronds of fennel and lovage climbing to the sky in the herb garden. In two or three days both are putting on inches, the fennel all feather and frond, the lovage deeply cut and sculptural. All the trees but the walnut are in leaf. The framework of the big oaks in the field below the kitchen garden is disappearing now into the blur of new green and the finely cut foliage of the ashes bursts out of the dark and stumpy buds, unexpectedly delicate.

In the garden it is impossible to keep up. In winter the city lures with its lighted streets and coffee shops. Then the view from the window is of relentless rain and going for wood for the fire requires a fleece, a waterproof and a pair of rigger boots. In spring and summer I can hardly bear to go. I got up early this morning to have an hour or so in the greenhouse, potting up dianthus and butternut squash, inspecting the French beans now easily big enough to go out with a cloche close by in case of late frost.

Then I wander around the kitchen garden. The early potatoes, Winston, are bulking up fast and at the other end of the bed the delicate frill of carrots stands in the stillness. A line of parsnips sown about a month ago is obstinately failing to germinate. Perhaps it has been too dry. I have beetroot and turnips growing in lengths of guttering in the greenhouse ready to go out too and lots of tiny celeriac plants given to me by a friend which I need to separate and grow on a bit before they go into the ground. The combination of poor soil, even though hugely fed with well rotted manure, cold winds and foraging chickens means that things do better if started off under glass and moved outside when they are big enough to fend for themselves, even things that traditionally are sown straight into the soil.

The next raised bed is ready for courgettes and squash. They too are in the greenhouse, muscling up by the day. The bed is deeply manured and lies waiting, like a newly made hotel bed with the covers turned down, chocolate on the pillow, ready for its occupants.

Up another level and the garlic and shallots are sprouting in their neat lines. The red onions too are just starting to show and here and there shoots of bindweed are sneakily twining and twirling. The whole bed needs hand weeding before it takes hold. It is this garden’s most pernicious weed, leaving me tolerating nettles, trying to ignore dandelions and drawing the line at thistles. There is a whole day’s weeding to be done just here in the kitchen garden, never mind out in the field or on the bank by the quince tree. Both of these have had hours of my time but will have to wait their turn when I come back. The kitchen garden needs it most.

Just outside the greenhouse is the bed for peas and beans with broad beans, mangetout and Hurst Greenshaft peas, each with one row transplanted from the greenhouse and a second sown into the soil as an attempt at the Holy Grail of vegetable growing, succession sowing. There are lines of rocket romping away too and a trough with a stir fry mix which is supposed to be harvestable within twenty one days of sowing already showing a fine fuzz of green.

An empty bed, not yet ready for planting in, is waiting for broccoli and curly kale and some leaf spinach which is only just now showing shyly in the guttering bed. And everywhere the fruit is getting ready to perform. The strawberry bed is full of flowers and the apple trees are so thickly covered in blossom it is easy to forget that their crop is hard and sour, good for jellies but not for eating from the tree. There are early signs of a huge gooseberry crop and of redcurrants by the bucket load. The blackcurrants are too young to crop this year and the raspberries are not yet in flower but the rhubarb bed which we supplemented with additional crowns last year is full to overflowing with pale pink stalks under the arching umbrella leaves.

I turn my back on everything reluctantly. I need to pack my bag and shower and put on my city clothes. The cats are sunning themselves on the cobbles and the swallows are swooping in and out of the big pigsty. As I drive away down the hill I try to persuade myself that the needing to leave is part of what keeps my love for the place so keen, like a love affair rather than the steady beat of a marriage, but I am not sure I really believe it.

Tulips and a greenhouse

It is such a glorious day here that I thought I would share a few pictures with you.

This is a tulip called Angelique. I tried several new ones in small quantities and this one is certain to be reordered in the autumn.

This one is Flamingo. It may be an utter show off but I like this one too in small quantities.

These are in pots overlooking the valley, somewhat windblown and battered throughout April but shining in the sun today. They are Pimpernel.And this is the view from my greenhouse (liberally sprinkled with dandelions). Thank you Ian for spending all day yesterday assembling it, one of the best presents I have ever had.

Friendships real and virtual

The 1st of May was a very suitable day for the third meeting up of the Shropshire/Wales bloggers. I rushed around filling bird feeders and seeing to chickens before bodran arrived. I'm driving today and we are going down to Welshpool to meet up at the Dingle nursery. I have spent weeks with my plant books (mainly Beth Chatto) trying to establish what else will grow up here at about 700 feet in our stony soil which drains like a colander so I now have a list of things to look for. When bodran arrives she brings me a couple of pieces of Inula, a good start to what promises to be a good day.

We bowl down through the borders in the sunshine and catch up madly. Bodran is opening a clothes shop and I marvel as I often do when I talk to her at the different ways there are of knowing things. By education and training I am a theoretical person but bodran knows from experience and trial and error. She is very patient with all my raw prawn questions: "How do you decide how much to stock and what?" "How do you decide on your mark up?" We agree that when the shop opens I will bring her tea and chocolate brownies on my day off.

We are the first to arrive at the Dingle, a proper nursery with a little room in which you can help yourself to tea and coffee. The others arrive within a few minutes: first woozle, then CCA, then mountainear and sbs (apologies for the strange names to any reader who is not a purplecooer, they are an attempt to preserve some vestiges of anonymity and purplecoo is a blogging circle which has been going for about a year). Again there is the strange rush of intimacy. Perhaps in previous times the neareat equivalent would have been meeting a penfriend. I feel I know these people very well, although only bodran is near enough to me for us to have met quite frequently, but reading and commenting on what these people have been saying for a year or so means that I know more about their lives, or what they have chosen to share about their lives, than the lives of some of my old friends who live in other parts of the country. And I know what the dynamics of the group will be. Bodran and sbs will make each other laugh, mountainear and I will talk plants, woozle and cca will amaze me as they always do with their utter refusal to let illhealth define their lives, full of energy, determination and good humour, outward facing and interested in others. We walk about the garden, catching up, changing partners, making sure we have some time with everyone. Sbs and cca are writing fiction, woozle fills us in on the progress of their extension. It is like a school reunion except that we would never have been at school together, there is probably a twenty year age range or thereabouts, but we are interested in the same sort of things and conversation fizzes and bounces around, utterly easy and satisfying.

The nursery is just magic. I find things that simply aren't stocked in garden centres at fantastic prices. Truly this is not an ad but it is really worth a visit. CCA is on a mission to stock a fairly new and empty garden in front of their beautiful barn conversion and has also come waving a list but a whole heap longer than mine. This has the fabulous effect of making me feel quite restrained. Sbs comes past, pulling a trolley as I am walking slowly amongst the shrubs, bending down the read labels and laughs at the look of contentment on my face. She is right, I am in my element, I could stay here all day. But lunch is beckoning and my breakfast boiled eggs seem a long time ago. Where to go? Mountainear suggests another garden centre not too far away. She is my kind of woman.

Plants are paid for and loaded up and we set off in convoy. Not a good carbon footprint for this trip with all these cars but today is a day off from normal life, no lists of jobs to do, no responsibilities, and a day off from environmental worry too. We are all pretty green I suspect most days of the year.

The day has warmed and the sun is out as we sit eating lunch and talking. Birds are hopping in and out of the hedge by our table and the talk goes on so long that it is clear that we are not going to get to Powys Castle with time to do it justice so it is another wander around this garden centre, also a beauty, and tea and cake to be had. The conversation moves to books and again I marvel at how much in sympathy our tastes are. Not that we all agree, not that we like the same things, but there is somehow a similar cast of mind and a readiness to talk and share.

Driving home through the sunfilled landscape at the end of a magical day out, bodran and I agree that it is astonishing to think that we would never had met had it not been for blogging, a strange and satisfying result in real life of dipping our toes into the virtual world.