We are back from our camping holiday just outside of Wells, Gloucestershire and have been and got some chickens. We have been advised that our house should be able to accommodate 4 chickens so we have chosen 4 different breeds. Ranger the ginger one, Bluebell the grey one, Sussex the white one and Rocky Road the black one. We have called them Ginger, Annie, Star and Roxsy.
The place we had them from has a return policy whereby if you have any problems with any or all of the chickens you can take them back within a given period of time. We had issues with Rocksy, the black Rocky Road chicken where she was squawking loud all of the time and physically attacking the other hens to the point of there being blood everywhere. We took her back and she was put in a special "ASBO" enclosure that they have for problem chickens, where they can keep an eye on their behaviour. Our hen house became peaceful with the other hens getting along together really well with Ginger, the smallest of them, being in charge.
As you can see, our raised vegetable bed is green, with the runner beans being good producers. The variety are "Gigantica" I think they were called, my father-in-law got them for us and they are big runner beans. Quite a lot of them have grown in funny shapes due to lack of growing room and with me being only small I have to keep getting step ladders out to reach the tops of the bean plants and find all these beans that have been "trapped" and grown weird.
Whilst their plants have produced beans for them ours have gone mad and I've been harvesting them twice a week, cooking half of them and blanching/freezing the other half. We have over 11lb of sliced green beans in our freezer so you imagine what kind of crop we have had this year, so many in fact that when I close my eyes at night that is all I see, they've even been calling to me and they must know my name as they have grown in shapes of the letters, J U L I. They obviously come unstuck when it came to the last letter though but I suppose growing in the shape of an "a" is a tall order. Amazing!
Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the cabbage and cauliflower. We have not had anything from them as we have been blighted with millions, and I mean millions, of caterpillars. I got excited and took a photo of a purple cauliflower as it started to grow but it didn't get much bigger than that before it was covered in caterpillars.
We did plant some potatoes in bags and we did get a few from those but not very many. Tomatoes, we had a few but mostly the insects got to them before we did. We did get a few beetroot and carrots though. Its the first time either of us have grown vegetables and its a big learning curve but at least the chickens are laying eggs so we have a ready supply of fresh eggs to enjoy.
