I keep looking at my seed packets, waiting for the first day of planting, but spring seems to be so long in coming. The daffodils and crocuses are up, and the Christmas rose is in flower, but the seed packets still insist it’s far too early to get planting.

Still, there’s preparation to do, so I invested in a better spongey mop and set out to clean the greenhouse. I can’t believe how grubby it’s got in the last two years. The roof had a healthy coat of green growing on it, and in places it was starting to run down the sides.

That would seriously impact the amount of sun that made it through to the plants when we started them going, so I spent a happy hour before the rain washing it all off. I’m pretty pleased with the results. Hopefully the plants will be, too.

Clean greenhouse windows

Related posts:

1. Spring cleaning the greenhouse
2. How to use a paraffin greenhouse heater
3. Clearing out the greenhouse

How long have I been making yoghurt? Long enough, I think. So why the stupid, rookie mistake? It’s ages since I’ve last made any at home, so decided this week that it was time to start again.

Making yoghurt isn’t hard, but when you’re starting all over you do need a pot of shop-bought natural yoghurt as your starter. I use either Yeo Valley or Sainsbury’s organic varieties, but so long as it’s a live variety it doesn’t really matter.

You gently heat your milk and stir in a couple of tablespoonfuls of powdered milk to thicken it up nicely, and than take it off the heat and wait for it to cool down enough for you to be able to keep your finger in it comfortably for at least 10 seconds. When you can, you add a couple of spoonfuls of your starter yoghurt, pour the whole lot into a flask, loosely fit the lid and leave it somewhere warm overnight. By morning, hey presto – yoghurt.

I know it’s a cheat to start that way, but once you have done you just repeat the process every time you’re getting close to the end of your yoghurt supply, this time using the last few spoonfuls of your last batch as the starter for your next.

Well, that’s the theory.

What actually happened was that I forgot the powdered milk and then I stirred in the starter yoghurt without first allowing the liquid milk to cool. The culture would have been killed almost right away, and that would explain why when I opened up the flask this morning and poured it into the glass jar we use for our yoghurt it was more like a sturdy milkshake than a thick, creamy dessert.

Back to square one…

Related posts:

1. Yoghurt win!
2. We try our hand at homemade yoghurt
3. We try cheese

Disaster. I picked our redcurrants yesterday, determined to turn them into a redcurrant and apple jelly. It’s been our first summer with the little redcurrant bush so the crop wasn’t exactly big – just 260 grams, for a recipe that required 900 grams.

So I picked them all, carefully sliced an equal weight of apples and put them all in a pan with some water to simmer while I checked my emails. That was my downfall. Soon the house filled with the lovely sweet smell of stewing fruit, which we both enjoyed greatly.

An hour later, though, after doing some other jobs, helping change a bulb on the car and what have you, I remembered the pan… and the fruit.

Too late. Far too late. All the water had gone and the fruit had boiled itself onto the bottom of the pan.

We won’t be having any redcurrant jelly this autumn. Instead I had half an hour with the wire wool, scrubbing the base of the pan. The moral of this story, obviously, is to keep an eye on your pan whenever you’re making jam.

Burned fruit in a pan

Related posts:

1. We’ve planted a redcurrant bush
2. How to make crabapple jelly
3. Eating this year’s crab apple jelly

One of the downsides of living right next to a nature reserve manifested itself this morning. Well, actually, it probably manifested itself a few days ago but this morning it came to a head.

We spent yesterday in France and by the time we got home it was dark. We crept out into the garden to shut up the chickens and the whole place reeked of bad fish. Really bad fish, like it had been rotting for days. We couldn’t see anything, of course, so we shut up the house and went to bed, thinking nothing more of it.

Coming in from his run this morning, Rich went out to let them out again and that’s when he saw it: a dead fox on next door’s lawn. It was in a terrible state, the poor thing. There was no obvious sign of how it had died, but most of the fur had come off its back and it was decaying quickly, which isn’t surprising when you consider it’s been pushing 30 degrees for more than a week now.

This wouldn’t usually be such a problem, but our neighbours are away at the moment so it was up to us to deal with it. It was too big to put in a bin bag, and anyway the bins aren’t going to be emptied until Friday. By then the whole thing would be moving around on its own courtesy of the seething mass of flies that would have hatched. Being a Sunday there was no point calling Environmental Health, either, as there would be no one there.

So we did the only thing we could: we put one of the plastic recycling crates over it to contain the thousands of maggots that were devouring the poor creature and anchored it down with two logs from the stack they’re seasoning for their wood-burning stove.

We’ve left them a note. What a nasty thing to find on your return from holiday. If you want to see what it looks like, click here, but be aware that it’s pretty gruesome.

I hope we’ve done the right thing. At least this way they can arrange for Environmental Health to come around when they know they’ll be home.

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1. The chicken bomb in our garden
2. How to make your own cloche
3. Keeping bees in the garden

Mum has got back into baking bread in a big way. We couldn’t be happier as it means that every week we’re swapping half a dozen eggs for dinner and a freshly-baked loaf. Perfect for popping into the Dualit and enjoying with a good spread of butter.

I grew up on home-baked bread, and so the lovely flakey crusts of these loaves are highly evocative – a reminder of bowls of dough proving by the fire or in the back of the airing cupboard – and they’re a real treat when toasted and slipped under our weekend eggs, fresh from the garden.

They’re also proving highly inspirational. As the little rosemary bush outside the kitchen window is growing faster than we can use it right now I’m formulating ideas for a little rosemary loaf, which I have a sneaking suspicion will be the perfect accompaniment to sausages in thick, dark onion gravy.

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1. How to make rosemary and olive bread
2. We’ve made beer bread
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I‘ve just finished (rather belatedly) watching How to Live a Simple Life. It’s been stacked up in my iPlayer for more than a month, waiting for the book to be written, the holiday to be taken and life to get a little less hectic.

What an inspiring series.

The idea, like its title, is simple. Vicar Peter Owen-Jones vowed to give up money for almost a year – from one spring until the next new year. Instead of relying on cash he’d swap his time and skills for food, he raised chickens for their eggs and grew his own veg, and it very, very nearly worked.

Whether it meant to or not, the series – just three one-hour programmes that are still available to UK readers on the iPlayer if you’re quick – proved two things.

First, that it really isn’t money that makes you happy. It may make you feel secure and give you the opportunity to buy shiny things, but that’s not really happiness.

And second, in today’s world it really isn’t possible to live without at least some money. It was perhaps naive to ever think that you could outside of the confines of a TV programme construct, but that doesn’t make the series’ ultimate conclusion any less dispiriting.

Well worth a watch if you’re living in the UK.

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1. Your chance to live on the Victorian Farm
2. End of The Good Life
3. What The Good Life can tell us about self-sufficiency

Our rhubarb is doing well. We planted two roots back at the end of winter in the hope of starting a little rhubarb patch behind the chicken run where we don’t get so much sun, and it seems to be paying off. One of the plants looks big and healthy and the other, after a bit of hesitation, is starting to catch it up.

But we’re cheating a bit here. We won’t get any real fruit from either of them this year – they’re just getting themselves settled down – so when I saw six huge stalks of rhubarb on the market for £1 I couldn’t resist. They tipped the scales at almost a kilo, so when you compare that price with what you’d have to pay in the supermarket they were a veritable bargain.

I decided to stew them for a crumble by adding three tablespoonfuls of water, a teaspoonful of ginger and 70g of brown sugar, as most of the online sources seem to recommend, then put them over a low heat until most of the rhubarb lost its structure, leaving just a few good chunks among them for texture.

Sadly it boils down quite efficiently and by the end we had enough for a crumble for three, which I’ve frozen, plus a small container over which I’ve been spooning into our homemade yoghurt. It is fantastic. Easily the best yoghurt flavour we’ve yet tried, and enough to make me a bit annoyed that I have frozen so much of the fruit. I could defrost it and use it all this way, I suppose, but I am really looking forward to a crumble before too long.

Rhubarb dilemma.

Either way, if I see any more on the market next week I’ll be buying some.

Stewed rhubarb

Related posts:

1. We’ve planted some rhubarb
2. We bag some bargain rhubarb for the garden
3. The rhubarb is shooting

May was a month of getting produce back in the plot in time for this year’s growing season. It was also the month we said goodbye to one of the longest serving members of our little home flock.

Growing food: This year’s beans are in the ground and it feels good. We had started them out in the greenhouse, but with the last of the frosts hopefully passed it was time to move them on.

Keeping chickens: Barbara chicken falls off her perch and so becomes the first of our chickens to die. We think she had been a little under the weather for a week or so and in the end she went very peacefully, simply closing her eyes and keeling over.

Growing food: A surprise showing from the ‘dead’ rhubarb proved that the hunk of root we planted a couple of months back and had since proved thoroughly uncooperative was simply lying dormant.

General: Our unproductive flowers prove strangely rewarding and convince us that you can mix productive and pretty things in a self-sufficient garden. They’re still putting on a good show, and we’ll certainly grow some more next year.

Related posts:

1. Popular Blagger posts of March 2010
2. Popular Blagger posts of February 2010
3. Popular Blagger posts of January 2010

Yeah, so I don’t do flowers. Until this year I’d never really seen the point, but then we all painted the outhouse walls and the patio became a far nicer place to spend more time. Hence the flowers.

So I invested in some colourful blooms for a hanging basket by the front door and troughs on the patio. And, you know what, they’re really rather nice. They’re flourishing, too.

Previously the only flowers I would have considered growing would have been sunflowers, so that we could give the seeds to the chickens, or marigolds, so that we could put them down around the tomatoes to scare off the aphids. We’re doing the marigolds again this year, but resting the sunflowers for a season.

The patio looks great, though, and although they have no real use I’ll certainly do flowers again next year.

Flowers

Related posts:

1. Flowers in the garden
2. Sunflowers
3. Flowers. Yes, really – flowers

As April draws to a close we can look back on a month of successes. If you missed any of Blagger’s posts this month, here are four highlights.

Brewing and winemaking: We’ve opened our first plum wine. We weren’t sure what to expect as it was the first time we’d made wine without the help of a kit, relying instead on plums we’d picked wild last summer. It was lovely, though, and we both agreed that it was one of the best wines we had ever drunk.

Cheese: Our first homemade cheese is a success, too. It has spent the last 10 weeks slowly maturing in the outhouse, and reeked by the time we cut into it. Inside the thick skin, though, we found a lovely creamy hard cheese.

Growing food: Planting this year’s herbs had us slightly on edge as we weren’t entirely sure that the last of this year’s frosts had passed. We also noticed that our garlic was shooting very quickly, which worried us as we didn’t want it bolting. It’s still growing, but fortunately slowed down a little.

Related posts:

1. Popular Blagger posts of March 2010
2. Popular Blagger posts of February 2010
3. Popular Blagger posts of January 2010