Our first onion was a lot smaller when we’d dug it up than it looked in the ground. It had been flowering quite impressively, with a fat stem snaking up from the bulb, sprouting from a three-inch wide white island in the sea of earth that makes up the plot. Pulling it out of the ground and taking it into the kitchen, though, it soon became clear that it was all show and no trousers.

The bottom, you see, was flat, which was great for cutting as it sat easily on the worktop, but meant it was only half the size we were expecting. That’s not necessarily a problem as we’d have been trimming it in half anyway, but it does mean that our onion crop - if they’re all like this - might yield only half of what we were expecting.

Either way, it was a lovely mild onion that you could happily slice without your eyes watering and, as the base of a Quorn lasagne, a good start to a great evening meal.

Saturday morning, we drove up to Stebbing for our lesson on chicken keeping, and to pick up the first three members of our little home flock: Margot, Gerry and Barbara.

The lesson itself was both interesting and useful, and made us feel better about not picking up rescue hens from a battery farm. As Kirsty, the breeder selling us our chickens, explained, every regular hen you keep in your back garden means neither you nor your neighbours, to whom you’ll inevitably end up giving eggs, will be supporting the battery industry.

We never buy battery eggs anyway, but it was interesting what she also said about so-called ‘free range’ hens. Most of these never see the outside world at all and spend their whole lives in a crowded barn. This is because that’s where all of their food and water is kept, while the outside area to which they have access - on an industrial scale at least - is planted out with dull rye grass, which does nothing to inspire them.

The best eggs, if they’re not your own, are the woodland eggs you can buy in some supermarkets (Sainsbury’s in particular) where the chickens actually have an incentive to head out and enjoy the fresh air because they have access to woods, which more closely match the jungle forests in which they evolved.

So anyway, at the end of the session we loaded three chickens into a box, drove them home and then literally poured them out into their new home in the garden. They were reluctant to leave the box, and clearly a little bit scared as they refused to venture out into their run until we had cleared off on our bikes for the afternoon.

Gerry (above) has quickly established herself as our favourite. She’s a Bovans Amber, and slightly smaller than the other two in our flock. She was the first one to let us pick her up, and she sat quite happily on our laps enjoying a tickle as we drank our gin and tonic on Saturday evening.

Barbara (above) is a Sussex Ranger, and captured the heart of our neighbour who came around with his granddaughter to view the new arrivals. She has the silkiest feathers of the flock.

Margot (above) is a Maran Cuivre, and is the biggest of the flock. We had thought, as a result, that she would have been the dominant hen, but she is actually the most timid. She is quick to run away from the door whenever we open the run, and spent most of Sunday morning digging herself a hen-sized bowl at the back of the run where she could hunker down and bathe in the dust.

They are quickly establishing individual characters that will mark them apart just as clearly as the colour of their feathers, and we’re sure Gerry will become more of a pet than a pure egg-making machine.

Despite this, we’re going to try and remember that they are working animals with a short lifespan, so we shouldn’t be lavishing hundreds of pounds of medical care on them at the vet if they fall ill.

We’ve also been warned about spending too much time worrying about the consistency of their stools, which apparently becomes something of a chicken keepers’ obsession.

In the meantime we have to just sit back and relax and wait for our first eggs which, all being well, should arrive in six or seven weeks. Our pullets are just 17 weeks old right now, and won’t be productive until week 24.

Technorati Tags:
chicken, keeping chickens, poultry

When we picked all those beans a week or so back and said we had a lot of cooking coming up, what we didn’t mention was that we were taking them away to a Yorkshire cottage where we’d be spending a week self-catering with the rest of the family.

Well, that’s what we did, and of course it raised a bit of a self-sufficiency dilemma: what do you do with your plot and your crops when you’re away?

Even absent weekends can be testing on some of the fruit. Particularly the tomatoes, which are very picky about having regular waterings. Andrew’s tomato harvest was ruined last year when his plants developed blossom end rot, which can result from irregular dousing in the hot weather. Tomatoes are creatures of habit, you see.

Fortunately we’d already earned ourselves a favour by watering next door’s beans, raspberries, tomatoes and aubergines while we were feeding their cat a few weeks ago, so we could ask them to do the same for us.

And what a job they did. We came back to find ripened tomatoes, a profusion of tiny white chillies waiting for the sun to give them some colour, and cucumbers that had swelled so much they were starting to look like vibrant green potatoes. As a bonus, they also got very excited about the chicken coop in the garden, so we already know we have a couple of hen sitters eager to step in the next time we go away. We’ve already promised them free eggs in return, and gave them the pick of the ripening beans on our vines when we were gone last week on the condition that they weighed whatever they took.

The moral of the story? That the ’self’ in self-sufficiency is true only to a degree. Unless you’re willing to devote each and every day to your goal, it helps to help out your neighbours in the hope they might return the favour the next time you need a break.

Not two months after I switched energy provider, my new supplier announced a price hike. A pretty big one, as it happens. What’s most galling about that is that one of the reasons I chose them in the first place was that they’d just gone through one increase already, which I assumed would mean any further change in their rates would be a good year off at least.

I’m on a green tariff where all of my bills go towards providing hydroelectric power, and the plan came bundled with an energy monitor that tracks every watt as it’s used. Having it beside the TV blinking away every time you boil the kettle or wash your clothes certainly helps you focus on your usage, which is where Bye Bye Standby comes in. It’s three plug adaptors and a remote control that lets you switch your appliances on and off from the comfort of an armchair.

It sounds like the height of laziness, but actually it makes good sense. If you want to actually switch off my TV you have to either unclip all of its back panels to get to its master power switch, or clamber around behind some furniture, the upshot being that you’re more likely to use standby and waste power every time you head out or up to bed.

Now I can switch it off at the plug - along with the digibox, DVD and everything else plugged into the same extension - with the press of a single button, because that extension lead is plugged into the Bye Bye Standby adaptor. At the same time I can switch off the lights by pressing red button two (or switch them on with green button two, which impresses visitors) and switch the broadband router on and off from downstairs (it’s upstairs in the study) with buttons red three and green three.

Each unit has the capacity to control up to eight plugs without changing the channel by switching between groups one and two on the front of the control, and new plugs can be bought individually or in packs to expand your set-up. Each has a simple 1-2 toggle on the side that assigns it to one group or the other.

Now, as I head to bed at night or leave the house in the morning I just press each red button in turn and know for definite that everything is switched off. The packaging promised annual savings of more than double the asking price, which may be a little optimistic in my case as I’ve always been quite good about switching things off properly, but now that it’s become a part of my life, and control of all of my sockets has been centralised in a slimline control small enough to lose down to the back of a cushion, I wouldn’t want to go back to the old way of working.

Price £20 - £25 for three-plug kit including remote.
Pros Centralises the controls of every gadget in your home. Quicker than turning off everything in turn.
Cons None.
Verdict The smartest, easiest way to save energy - and money - in the home.

Technorati Tags:
energy+efficiency, energy+saving

In a rather exciting turn of events, we’re off to a chicken-keeping lesson on Saturday morning. It’s a 60-minute talk, followed by a 30-minute handling session where you’re taught how to pick them up, carry them around and clip their wings, and then some Q&A.

And, at the end of it, we’ll be picking up our first flock. We’ve ordered three feathered ladies, which even before they arrive have been christened Gerry, Margot and Barbara. We’ve gone for three different breeds to vary our egg production and hopefully ensure that we should have a nice daily supply of eggs throughout the darker winter months when chickens tend to lay a little less.

What are they? A Bovans Silver, a Bovans Goldline and a Rhode Ranger.

We’ve not yet broken the news to the cat that he’ll have to start sharing his garden with three birds bigger than any he’s seen before in his life.