Letters from Wetville

The good bits: 1. shovelled the newly arrived mushroom compost onto the punga raised bed and then sowed lots of seeds in it. 2. made three loaves of bread and a double batch of hummous and made up nine packets of four hummous sandwiches, seven of which are now in the freezer. The useless bits: 1-a big number. the many things I did not protect from Brighid. Leaving my best sewing scissors in the lounge where she found them and cut up Fionn's precious league team photo for which we paid $15 only two days ago. The dried apricots. The liquid soap. The toothpaste. The state of the bathroom generally. The state of the house generally. Shall I go back to the good bits then? At coffee group this morning, I was given some pea and sunflower seedlings. The sunflowers need a bit more mollycoddling I think, but I have planted the peas in the newly filled punga raised bed and covered each one with a 3 litre juice bottle with the bottom cut out of it. This is to protect the peas from th...

Sitting here typing my gardening day up, drinking kefir, for all the world like a hippy who did not have KFC for lunch, or spend the evening at a rugby league prizegiving... Turns out that our lovely new chooks adore bok choy. I weeded out all the lovely yellow flowered plants which ran almost straight from small seedling to seed in the recent warmth and the children fed it to the chooks. Behind the bok choy I had sown some beneficial insect blend and the hardier of this mix have been flopping round green and frothily. I also have some rocket in this wee patch. Hidden amongst it are three coriander plants, all looking quite healthy and completly invisible to me until today. I sowed the coriander seed last year and thought it a flop attempt. So I have weeded all the plants out except I have left the rocket (seeding, but I am getting into this self-seeding thing lately), the coriander and the alyssum. I sowed some miner's lettuce, some radishes and some mesclun lettuce mix in...

The blessed relief of Friday. August and September are crazy months here and Fridays at least involve me staying at home getting to do home things. The chooks are settling in well. They are not so tame on arrival as our first chooks were but each day they get a little more confident when I come along with food. I boiled up swede and barley and vegetable peelings for them yesterday. A huge pot full. No eggs yet. The last two nights have been calmer on the wind front which hopefully is a little more pleasant for my five chooks. I am very very happy to have chooks again. I am growing things inside again. I am starting off with kefir again after a break of several months. I made bread this morning using a wheat leaven. I've got a little bit of rye left (I liked my rye starter earlier this year) but have moved to wheat loaves as my flour supplier is out of rye until next season. A few weeks ago I made carrot and ginger pickle from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions boo...

Huge storm last night, a tough introduction for our new chooks. But they seem well today. They don't yet associate me with food and when I go to see them I can observe their potterings as if I wasn't there. One of the roosts blew down in the storm last night but the stronger one remains and tonight I went out with the torch and found all five sharing the surviving roost. This afternoon I had a poultry adventure of a different kind. I met the very lovely Mr Munn who taught Raelene and I how to skin a young chook. He killed two of Raelene's roosters and we followed his guidance and had a go at one each. You miss out on the skin this way, but it is a lot faster than plucking. I have one rooster in the fridge as I type. Tomorrow will be stirfry or chicken pie and stock making and Friday (assuming I don't go on kitchen strike) will be chicken risotto. Mr Munn, who I'm guessing is in his seventies, learnt these skills from his mother. His family raised lots of c...

I collected five beautiful Brown Shaver point of lay chooks this afternoon and met the young boy who has raised them. They are in excellent condition and I was impressed all round. It is totally wonderful to have chooks again. I put them in the run and, despite appalling weather here, went out to see them about six times between 4 and 6.30pm. Favourite Handyman and Fionn made roosts for them earlier in August and they are sleeping on them. Wonderful to see and if this keeps up, then our nesting box won't be so quickly full of poo like it was with our first chooks who preferred to sleep where they laid. But then I did shut them in the nesting box for the first 24 hours of them living with us....

Hurray for Corrine ! It was Corrine who commented recently on using leftover porridge in bread. So today I used the leftover porridge to make oat bread, using a mix of this long rise oat bread recipe and this faster one . It has turned out beautifully, and the biggest problem will be that I will eat lots of it which isn't good for me. I have a vegetarian loaf recipe much used in my student days which I resurrected last week. That has rolled oats in it and with a bit of tinkering could accomodate leftovers from the breakfast saucepan quite easily. I will post that later in the week. This morning I snuck outside while the children weren't watching and sowed purple sprouting broccoli, broccoli de cicco, leeks carentan giant, celery for cutting and corn salad vert de cambrai. The first four are in seedling punnets and the last straight into the ground. Later I realised I had planted the leeks too early. Last year was too late. ah well. I got back inside to discover Brighi...

Another pretend home school day while the boy healed his chest cough. All those vitamins and cod liver oil and probiotics I threw down his throat seem to have helped immensely. Looks like he will be able to play in the league semi-finals tomorrow after all. But children smildren, the point really is that we got to bake and garden almost all day without bells shaping our lives. Banana and choc chip muffins, mini quiches and chocolate chippie biscuits. The freezer now contains plenty of good food for school lunches next week. Later on I made apple crumble for pudding and turned leftovers from earlier in the week into nachos. But more about leftovers later. In the garden I pulled out a blackcurrant bush which looks the weaker of the three and is in a good place for more vegetables. Fionn and I dug a large whole and buried the bokashi. I am so excited to announce that we collect five new chooks on Monday, less than 72 hours away! The scraps situation is ridiculous without chooks t...