There was a time when I was only about twice the height of a chicken. Look, here a picture to prove it:

Them there hens, which come up to the top of my 1970s flares are Gingernut Rangers, a prolific egg layer that were the bread and butter of the free-range family farm. (They were the lucky ones, as elsewhere there were fatter, more meaty birds destined for the dinner table.)

They had an idyllic life sleeping in bright, airy barns and being let out to roam free among the apple trees in the orchard every day. We spent summers there, Sal and I, helping to feed them in the morning and shut them up safe from the foxes at night.

Well, they say things go full circle, and while I may no longer be a flares-wearing shortie I’m about to launch myself back into the world of poultry and eggs, as I’ve put in an order for a coop. It won’t be here for another month, which gives me plenty of time to source my laying ladies, which have been named Margot, Gerry (Geraldine, not Gerald, natch) and Barbara even before they arrive.

Why three? Because you should always start with more than two. If you don’t, they’ll bond as a pair rather than a flock which leaves you somewhat stuck when one of them dies. The one that’s left will be simultaneously bereaved and unable to relate to any new chickens you buy to replace the dead one.

In the meantime, I have some learning to do, like what you feed them, how much you give them, and what you do when an egg gets stuck half-in, half-out.

Actually, I already know the answer to that last one - I just don’t want to think about it.

We’re trying cucumbers for the first time this year, and so far it’s going pretty well. Cucumbers are one of those crops - like potatoes - that are so cheap to buy in the shops that you have to wonder wether it’s worth the space to grow your own. We said we would, though, as everything we have read indicates that their taste is a world away from the watery batons you can buy in the local supermarket.

Plus, of course, if you’re serious about self-sufficiency, you should look to extend that to as many areas as you can; not only those that are more expensive to satisfy in the shops.

The seeds are cheap and readily available, and we bagged around 250 for 99p in the local DIY store. We planted them up in 8cm pots to get them started, and then chose the four strongest shoots to transfer to 5in pots filled with good compost. This should, hopefully, be where they spend the rest of their productive lives, and the pots from which they produce a healthy crop.

However, they can just as easily be grown out of doors when sown direct into the plot or your borders. Like tomatoes or beans they need some support in the form of canes and strings as they get larger, and they also benefit from a regular drop of tomato food when they start fruiting in earnest.

Assuming all goes well, they’ll join the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and beetroot we’re growing in the plot and greenhouse for a summer of totally home-grown salads.

We’ve had two weeks of back-to-back bad weather now. It’s doing wonders for the garden, filling up the water butt and keeping the plot almost too well watered (certainly for the carrots, which like a bit of a drought), but it’s not doing much to chivvy on the outdoor fruit.

The fruit trees are steadily loosening their grip on the last few petals of blossom, and while the strawberries in the patch are plumping up nicely, they’re still a pasty green-white.

Fortunately it’s a slightly different story in the greenhouse where we’ve had our first three red strawberries of the year. We ate two of them on Sunday, perhaps a little prematurely, and left this one on the plants to fatten up.

Let’s hope it’s the first of many; last year’s crop was just two dozen berries. Quite lame.

The Independent was yesterday asking ‘Is it time to dig for victory again‘. This is a bit of a trend: the media is getting quite interested in the whole idea of self-sufficiency of late, probably spurred by the looming credit crisis (although the Indie is taking a green tack instead). PM, the other day, ran a story on the booming industry for fruit trees, which are being bought up like never before. The vendor they spoke to said it was a sure sign of impending recession. Not good.

Anyhow, the Independent report threw up some interesting stats, like the fact that the whole dig for victory campaign was spurred by the fact that blockades meant Britain could no longer rely on the 55 million tons of food it had previously been importing. My impression was that this pretty much fed the population - albeit frugally - but in actual fact it only provided around 10% of the country’s food needs.

So perhaps this 10% is the magic number for which we should all be aiming - to produce a tenth of our annual consumption of vegetables in our own homes, gardens or allotment plots.

It doesn’t sound like much until you realise that the campaign focused on growing only the speediest crops with the highest nutritional value, not the wide variety a home farmer might use today. And even then it required a certain amount of going beyond the minimum and eating the parts of plants that these days we would rarely touch.

“Little things once commonplace like pinching off the tops of broad beans – a fabulous spinach substitute – or trimming the tops from radishes and serving them as a vegetable are worth reconsidering,” says garden historian Caroline Holmes. (Source: Independent)

I’ve often wondered how much of what we cut off our food and throw away we could actually eat. Like the stem on a head of broccoli, for example, which makes up a great part of the weight for which you pay in the supermarket. It probably wouldn’t be very nice if you boiled it, but could you blend it into a soup?

I almost trimmed down the leaves from the tops of the sprouts at Christmas as they’re supposed to be like a slightly stronger cabbage, and I read the other day about drying the leaves from your raspberry canes to make fruit tea, which is very tempting.

As for the broad beans suggested above, though… well that’s a ‘hmmm’. Looking at them in the plot last night they looked far too much like sage to make them tempting as a stand alone vegetable.

But maybe I’ll give it a go. For old times’ sake.

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self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, vegetables

So this weekend we finally opened the home-brew beer and it was… quite nice actually. In fact, very nice. Between four of us we got through the best part of seven pints and the empty bottles now stand lined up, waiting for sterilisation so they can be used again.

We’d been very doubtful about opening the first one in company and had planned on having a private tasting session in advance of the weekend’s festivities. We also bought three emergency bottles from the supermarket just in case it was a complete disaster. When we’d been bottling it up, we had both got some in our mouths from the syphon tube and it was the bitterest, most foul tasting liquid ever to come from anything other than a medicine bottle. We were sure we must have done something wrong.

In the end, though, another month of conditioning in the bottles did them the world of good. Each one had been topped up with a teaspoon of sugar to feed the yeast and we were left with a light golden-brown liquid, smooth and barely fizzy, and perfectly refreshing.

So we’ve proclaimed the beer-making a success, and although we have plenty left to uncap and drink we’re already planning for fruit-blended varieties for the next batch.

Looking back on the calculations we did when we bottled it, the seven pints we drunk cost us 17p each, or a grand total of £1.19. That’s about a third of a pint in a London pub.

In metric, it’s about 36p per litre, which makes for simpler comparisons. Taking Sainsbury’s prices as generally representative, Adnams Explorer works out at £3.18 per litre, Badget Fursty Ferret at £3.06 per litre, London Pride Ale at £3.38 per litre and Newcastle Brown Ale at £3.05 per litre. That’s an average of £3.17 a litre, or a little under nine times the cost of our own home brew.

So on a self-sufficiency front, home brewing is very much worth the effort. It’s easy, fun, and massively cheaper than buying from the shops. And as a bonus, we all woke up clear-headed the next morning.

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beer, home+brewing, self sufficiency, self+sufficiency