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We find a dead fox in the garden

Nik — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:27:01 +0000

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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A steady supply of home-baked bread

Nik — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:17:43 +0000

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.

How to Live a Simple Life

Nik — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:45:19 +0000

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.

Our first rhubarb of the year

Nik — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:19:04 +0000

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

Our unproductive flowers prove strangely rewarding

Nik — Sat, 22 May 2010 08:04:06 +0000

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

How to use rooting powder

Nik — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:57:37 +0000

You can’t just snip a plant and expect your cutting to grow. Sometimes it will, but most often it won’t. If you want to grow new plants from old without using seeds, you need to help foster strong new roots, and the way to do that is with rooting powder.

Our neighbourhood has a problem with a rough local cat that comes in everyone’s houses and bullies their own cats – ours included. Several times we’ve come home to find evidence of a fight having taken place in the lounge, and sometimes that had resulted in bits of our money tree being snapped off.

Money trees (also known as jade plant or crassula ovata) are very, very slow growers so we didn’t want to lose those snapped off branches. They are also easy to take cuttings from (with or without cats) and will happily form their own new roots. Nonetheless we wanted to give ours a helping hand, so out came the rooting powder.

The first step is to make a clean slice on your cutting with a very sharp knife. This should be done at an angle to expose more of the core of the branch. If you have other branches or shoots close to this you strip them off to give yourself a nice clean stem, and then dip it into the rooting powder.

Dipping a cutting in rooting powder

You should dip it to a depth of around 1cm and then put the cutting into a prepared pot of soil or compost. You will only need to make one application, so once it is in the soil give it a good watering and set it in a suitable location to start growing, being careful to follow any general growing guidelines for your particular plant. Our money plant, for example, doesn’t like too much direct sunlight, or extremes of heat and cold.

And here’s the finished product: two new money trees setting out in the world. They are a little wonky because their stems were so curled, but they’re cute nonetheless. When they find their feet they’ll be given new homes in the kitchen and bathroom.

Re-planted cutting

One word of caution: rooting powder is highly toxic. You should be careful not to breathe it in, and should wash your hands thoroughly after using it (you should also consider wearing gloves). Be careful how you dispose of unused powder and the container as it can cause harm if it finds its way into a watercourse.

Flowers. Yes, really – flowers

Nik — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 18:59:44 +0000

Long time readers will know that here in the Blagger plot we don’t generally do flowers. We give over as much of the garden and borders as we can to fruit and vegetables, and the flowering plants that we do have are hang-overs from our house’s previous owner.

But we do have a hanging basket at the front door (another previous-owner hang-over) that is looking decidedly tired. That’s not entirely surprising as we’ve done nothing to it in three years. It’s mainly ivy, so seems pretty happy being left alone, but today it looked a bit… well, worn out.

Yesterday’s planting session got me in the mood for a bit more grubby-handing, so I took it down and have hung it up in the greenhouse where I’ll see what can be done to perk it up over the summer. In its place, I’ve hung the spare basket that I found at the back of the garden when we moved in, and filled it with actual flowers.

I can’t quite believe it myself. Even Rich said he was going to take a picture to prove that it was happening.

The trouble is, hanging baskets aren’t all that large, and most of the small plants you buy in the garden centre come in trays of 6, 12 or 30. That left us with loads of spares, which I’ve used to fill the troughs we used for lettuce last year.

So, to commemorate this rather rare event, and so that I can look back at the other end of summer and see how they’ve grown, this post is here purely for the purpose of displaying that picture at the top. Little flowers in big pots, packed with potential.

Here begins and ends my involvement with flowers this year.