ilultham

 For a long time I've been keen to take the girls camping, but something always comes up or gets in the way. That's why I was pleased when a mate mentioned that for his daughters birthday he'd like the girls and me to go "wild" camping with them.  So no tents. My eldest has been camping before (admittedly in different circumstances as was a huge scout camp!)  but not like this, and my younger daughter is yet to sleep outside (bad dad I know). They were both super excited about it though.  We were camping in a "wild campsite" where the is a long thin woodland along a river the other side of Brecon. When we arrived the others had already picked a camp so we strung up our tarp and set our bivi bags out with sleeping bags inside.  Luckily the girls fit in one bivi bag so it would help to keep them warmer (it got down to about 2 degrees C), also saved me from having to buy a third bivi bag just yet!  We ate like kings the whole weekend - in fact probably too ...

This year we've been plagued by bad hatch rates, I've kept changing my methods but I think having posted eggs really doesn't help things.  These chicks are from our own eggs, with a Indian Game cockerel over some Colombian Plymouth Rock hens.  What a difference in hatch rate!  I put in 16 eggs and it looks like we'll get 15 chicks (one is still hatching at the moment - as I write this we have 14 chicks). Two are Indian Game bantams which are still a useful bird to hatch out. The one egg I knew hadn't developed at 10 days so I had already discounted that. This was with a completely dry hatch, no water added at any point during incubation.  I love how this is our 6th or 7th hatch this year and the kids (and me) are still super excited about it. I'm hoping these birds grow quickly and have a good size to them. The plan is to kill them at 18 weeks(ish) although I might keep a few hens and cross them back to a different Indian Game cockerel to see what happens to the...

Really simple dinner of pasta and tomato sauce. We picked from the garden about 35 fresh tomatoes of different sizes, shapes and colours, a clove of garlic, medium onion and a huge handful of basil along with some bought in chorizo used more as seasoning than anything else.  Tasted amazing and shows with a few good ingredients it's sometimes all you need. And of course I had my two chefs with me. My eldest help chop the tomatoes and stir the dish, while my younger daughter made biscuits for pudding. Lovely to spend time in the kitchen like that, laughing and joking. 

 So it's the time of year where my mind really turns to making sure I have enough seed of everything. This year should have hot home to so many people that buying seeds from a shop isn't always guaranteed or possible, I was pleased that my seed saving obsession meant I had jars of tried and tested seed ready to go.    The video above shows how I save the seeds from my cucumbers. I got sent these seed from America via a twitter friend , so it would be really great to keep this strain going. We have grown lots of different cucumbers over the years, and this one seems to hit the sweet spot for us. It's prolific, perfect for eating fresh, perfect for pickling and crops over a long time. So who else ferments their cucumber (and tomato) seeds for storage?  What's your favourite type of cucumber to grow?

 So that's it - all three of my babies are at school now!  6 years of being a stay at home dad have come to an end! Blink and you miss it! I've been incredibly lucky to spend so much time with my children when they've been young. Yes, every experience might not be what is usual (I remember having my youngest in a pram for over an hour while I clipped maggots out of a sheep) but it's been time together and that's what counts.  My youngest is certainly not shy but starting school his outgoing personality has made me proud of him. He is the first to start playing a game and include the others and the other day when one friend was being shy he went up and talked him into playing! Follows after me socially I think!  He is very active though so I've been worried how he'll do in a classroom all the time - I even promised the teacher I'd walk to school while it was dry just to "take the edge off him"!  It's great that my work is so flexible that I ...

 After tea we tend to watch a program on TV to calm the kids down before bed. It's normally nature related and lately we've been watching the original series of River Cottage.  The kids have loved it and I've heard some full belly laughs from them as they take it all in (the bit where he sunbaths in the polytunnel, chases the rabbits off his land or ties the string to his toe to protect his pigs)  I've loved watching them again but it's been great to share them with my children. And when I walked down stairs the other day my daughter was reading my old copy of the River Cottage Cookbook, she stayed there for at least half an hour flicking through the pages.  What was your favourite episode? 

 So I have a friend who is interested in this small scale grain raising like I am - I know I was as surprised as anyone!  so he sent me a few grains to get going in my plot here, ones I could over winter.  Just a teaspoon of each really but it means I can sow a little patch or a planter with them next year and then have enough to produce a whole bed next time, a slow but rewarding process.  Some interesting seeds and some from Salt Spring Seeds In the US - they seem to have quite a few interesting ones! I'm looking forward to watching these grow - especially the blue tinged wheat and the kamut two I've read about - I think they all look beautiful growing.  I admit grain is one of my more mad cap endevours and I know it doesn't interest everyone but I will keep posting here as I like to keep a record of it! 

 I know I've posted before about the kids packed lunch, but now they're getting older they pack their own and it's interesting seeing their choices.  Normally they have school dinners but due to the school figuring out how to handle social distancing and stuff the eldest is having to take a packed lunch for a few week - I swear she was more excited about this than going back to school.  It should be noted that the beaker is used like Tupperware as we can never find any lids for anything else.  She packed herself a huge chunk of focaccia and then a little tiny jam jar that contained oil and balsamic to dip in it (what have we done here! Lol!), then to go with that she went and picked herself some cherry tomatoes, cucamelons, achocha and cucumber. For her desert she got some homemade blueberry cake from the freezer, four damzines (a damson plum cross) and a discovery apple.  Apparently her one friend said to her "Your lunch is very healthy" to which she replied ...

I know I've often posted about the little ones using tools safely but I just had to share my 4 year old boy cutting up this cucumber for lunch.  He hah such concentration on his face as he did it.  "Wow, you're pretty good with that knife, did Jamie Oliver teach you to use it?" He looked up and shrugged his shoulders  "Nah, my sister taught me"  

 I foolishly said on a previous post that threshing the grain wasn't the issue - Well it turns out I was wrong there as well.  My hulless oats have been causing me trouble as well.  In fairness I think I'm trying to deal with the difficult grains that are left as I thought I had pretty much lost the lot due to birds attacking it while it was still standing, but the grains haven't come out easily even in this (don't get me started again about my emmer wheat). Hitting it with sticks, although fun, did nothing much.  When I upped it and made a semi lethal thresher for my drill things improved slightly.  Then I ran it through a sieve to get rid of the big bits.  And then tried winnowing it with a big fan - this proved to be too strong and I was getting grain blown about.  So I went back to my seed cleaner and run it through a couple of times - I really need to make a better hopper for this!  In all I spent an hour and got this whole jam jar full of hu...

 In the last post I talk about processing a few of our Indian game hens for meat. One was a bantam and a respectable 1.3kg. But as they say the proof is in the eating - so on Sunday we had a little roast chicken for tea.  We spatchcocked the bird to reduce cooking time. This isn't the first bantam we've eaten this year, earlier in the summer we had six young bantam cockerels that were spending their days fighting and worse so we ended up having them for a BBQ. the lightest weighed in at 330g but we all had one each for our tea and it seemed far better than wasting them.  This bantam was on a different level - the others were more like eating a quail whereas this had some good meat on it. It fed all five of us, but the bones were picked clean by the end!  One thing I really love is the difference in leg meat and breast meat - the light and the dark. Unlike supermarket birds (or even home raised Ross Cobbs to a certain extent) you can really see the difference in two m...

The children and I processed three of our chickens the other day. These were the purebreed Indian game cockerels - two full sized birds and one bantam.  I decided it made sense to do it after some canning so the hot water from the water bath could be used to scald the chicken for plucking.  As usual the kids get stuck in straight away. We had a bit of a rain show half way through but the kids are getting pretty good at this job now. In the time it took me to pluck two birds they had done one - I'd call that some good help!  They seem to really understand the process now and know just what to do. They have no fear of any stage of it.  We finished off inside, gutted them and kept them as whole birds to rest in the fridge for a few days.  I was pleased with the size of the birds - the large fowl came out at about 2.69kg each and the bantam was an impressive 1.3kg.  Looking forward to eating these! Hopefully we'll be able to do a few more of these now we have s...