Chickens - The Serial

Scraping around in the courtyard

Well, I have to say they are fun! They're not much work, we're getting two eggs a day from our two new point-of-lay hens and they're all getting on swimmingly. Or is that ducks....?

There's something very homely and comforting about the gentle noises these birds make as they scrape around their run. It's very much a sound redolent of comfortable living, lazy days and cups of tea in a sunlit garden. Perhaps a cuckoo calls in the background as the postman waves cheerily as he passes your gate - no bills today thank you!

As I write this I'm sitting in my back yard with the hens scraping around my feet. The traffic on the A21 is slow as hoards of families head towards Hastings and the beaches, the sun is blazing down, the breeze is lazily susserating through the beech trees and I have fresh bread in the kitchen and a coffee in my hand. The Olympics are drawing to a close and Great Britain have done more than enough to still the voices of the curmudgeons like myself who initially showed concern about the cost of the games and a lack of interest in the results. The sound of screeching U turns is very loud around here! Even my son Ben, an avid tweeter of all things that feel foul, has been to the Olympic Park and enjoyed his day.

The hens love the back yard; compared to their run which is now devoid of life and where a snail can be spotted by a beady eye from 50 yards, it's a veritable jungle and I had an odd flashback to fishing as I watched them rooting around. I used to love seeing reeds flicker as the sub-surface activity of fish caused their trembling movement and in the back yard, it's the swaying of raspberry canes, rosemary bushes and sage plants. Occasionally a head pops up or a long neck is stretched to reach a ripe raspberry, but the result is the same.

So the two new girls, Peggoty and Polly, had a few problems being accepted by Molly and Hilda initially, so for one day I kept the two new girls in the inner coop cage. Then I thought "Hang on, why am I punishing the victims?" so I put Hilda and Molly in the cage instead and that did the trick, in less than 24 hours, the twins had taught the youngsters to go to bed at night and were snuggling up together in the hemp bedding. Result, and peace in the hen house.

Wild Horseradish (Amoracia rusticana)

Love it or loathe it, horseradish is a great plant to find for two reasons; it's easy to transplant and grow yourself and it's very useful in all sorts of chutney making and cooking. Look for the tall, donkey ear leaves along roadsides and on broken ground - it's the roots we want, the leaves are bitter. Remember you need the landowner's permission to dig it up if you want to stay legal...It can be mistaken for dock, but the Horseradish leaf is shiny and much bigger.

Naturally, it is the ubiquitous Horseradish sauce that is usually made with the grated root of the plant and the recipe is simplicity itself, though it only keeps for a day or so.

Add 100g of grated Horseradish to 2 tsp white wine or cider vinegar, 1 tsp of wholegrain mustard, 125 mils or so of double cream and a pinch of salt and black pepper. Mix together well, cover and store in the fridge.

Personally, I would grate the Horseradish outside - if you think that some onions are bad for the eyes - Horseradish is like teargas!

As I said earlier, I use it mainly in Chutneys; Beetroot and Horseradish being my favourite, but I tend to chop the beetroot very finely (3 or 4 mil dices) as I don't like lumpy beetroot.  

750g (1lb 10oz) raw beetroot, trimmed, peeled and finely diced
1 onion, finely chopped
1 bramley apple, cored and finely chopped
2 tablespoons (about 100g) freshly grated horseradish
200g (7oz) golden caster sugar
300ml (½ pint) white wine or cider vinegar
2 teaspoons salt.

Add all the ingredients into a large pan and cook until a spoon dragged across the bottom of the pan leaves a gap behind it and the pour into sterilised jars. There are plenty of books and internet sites entirely devoted to this wonderful subject if you're really interested in making your own preserves and chutneys and I'm sure I'll be putting more recipes on here in the future as I'm often asked to...

Wild Strawberry

The wild strawberry is a plant which many people know about but few bother with. To my mind that view encapsulates the entire ethos of foraging in two short words - why bother? The rewards are limited, sometimes downright difficult to collect,  fiddly to prepare, often lack any nutritional value (mushrooms for example) and occasionally, seemingly impossible to find (alas, I have yet to stumble upon a morel!)

Yet I often become over excited, agitated even, when I discover some relatively unknown food item in the undergrowth, grassy bank or tree. Perhaps that makes me sad, old or easily pleased - I don't know- what I do know is that I am not alone. 

Many of us enjoy finding food items in the wild, shooting and preparing our own game, and making Jellies, jams, chutneys and alcoholic beverages for our own consumption or to give to friends and family. It can be awfully fiddly and time consuming, yet somehow it's worth it, particularly when spooning a good dollop of greengage jelly onto breakfast toast, heaping a year old chutney onto a ripe cheese or sampling a nip of bramble vodka from the hip flask on a cold December morning. 

The humble wild strawberry is one such foraging item that takes a long time to gather in sufficient quantities to achieve any lasting preserve, but add afew to your breakfast cereal or  to your raspberries and ice cream and those few moments of  activity become very worthwhile.

A perfect evening for fishing, but not catching....

Sometimes it just doesn't matter; how can you complain when the company is good, the weather benign, the conditions perfect, but the fish absent?

It's Bewl; it's the way it is; the reservoir is a favourite venue, but, for Harry and I, it gives up its fish reluctantly.

Bewl has introduced an "Any Methods" policy. Why, I don't know, perhaps the season's dampness has caused a drought of hardy, all-weather anglers; perhaps the Bewl water powers that be have changed a decades long ethos in favour of an elite clientelle, to an all encompassing, catch-all product brought about by the contemporary fad to dumb down as much as possible as often as possible. Maybe.

Anyway, be that as it may, Harry and I couldn't shift a fish. They were rising later in the evening but neither he nor I had a single take on the fly. Now, we're not by any means experts here, but not to have even a touch is very, very strange. We tried up until 8.45 and we tried just about everything. But it was such a wonderful afternoon and evening that we couldn't complain too much.....could we....?

The Boletus Mushroom.....Bay Bolete

There are many Boletus type mushrooms and from this time of year through to late Autumn most of the species can be found at some stage or another. It's late July and already we've had a few mushrooms in our omlettes and risottos in the Kelly Kitchen, but I just wanted to mention the Bay Bolete as many people are put off by its unusual characteristic of turning a strange shade of blue when cut or bruised. Don't let this put you off, it's just a form of oxidisation and they are a tasty and abundant foraging item.

Generally, the Boletus type mushroom is easily identified by its spongy bottom! It does not have gills, but instead it has a sponge like underneath. There are a couple of nasty tasting boletes, but only a couple and they are red and easily identified. I will blog them as I locate them this year. So look out for the boletus family, especially as one of them - the Porcini, Penny Bun or Cep is one of the tastiest mushrooms the UK has to offer. I may show you some pictures and describe the mushroom to you, but you'll have to fight me for the location .....

These all cook well and can also be dried but keep them from getting damp and pick them in fine weather as they easily become water logged.

Chickens - The Serial: The Homecoming....

Well, they're in!

Having done all the necessary work for as little cost as possible - we now have hens! Everybody I talk to, every blog or article I read; all agree that keeping chickens is not economically sound - unless you are keeping dozens of hens, selling the eggs commercially or for breeding! Whilst I agree, at least I can say, hand on heart, that I have attempted to keep the cost as low as possible.

Asher stalked the hens until she realised how big they were, then she gave up in a huff.

 But of course, these hens are not being kept solely for the economic viability of the enterprise; we are learning and we have the added advantage of adding to the family here in the woods. And so we have the arrival of Charlie, (a boy) Mollie and Hilda, none of which are going to be adding to the household budget for the foreseeable future. But that's ok, they are certainly fun to watch and definitely settling in well.

Making themselves at home...

We are now considering adding to the family by obtaining a couple of rescue hens, ex-battery babes in need of a good home to at least have a handful of eggs each week to mitigate the outlay of keeping hens who can't lay eggs for a while....

A Little Bit of Everything.....

There's just so much going on at the moment that I thought I would publish a "catch-all" article to try and tie everything together.

Firstly, I managed to capture one of our glow -worms mating. It was a little difficult as I had a crap camera and it was necessarily dark! However, as you can see the male bug is a "click-beetle" and therefore flies. The female does not, hence her need to attract the flying males down to the ground with her glowing abdomen. The other evening we located eleven such females in our garden and anyone who saw us myopically peering into our lawn and chipping heap at 10.30 at night would have thought us mad. I'm not at all sure they would be wrong!

A Mating Glow Worm Couple...

Frankie has been sitting in the garden with her camcorder at hand in an attempt to capture some of the bird life we have here. She has fallen in love with the woodpeckers that visit our feeders especially as they have been feeding a youngster with the nuts we (expensively) provide for them. Also, the other day we had a rare visitor (for us) as we don't very often see the exotically coloured Goldfinch here in the woods. This bird is such a beauty and would be equally at home with any of the strikingly plumaged birds of jungle, bush or outback.

Finally, our chickens are home....but more of that in the next blog......