Silver Lining

Snowy Sunday

We woke up to three or four inches of snow, this morning.  Not that you'd know it, now...

So I made a snuggly for the nibling's pram.

I also built a hutch, into which the guinea pigs (Harry and Ron) are now safely installed.  Let's hope they're warmly installed, too...

 

Harry	Ron

I have a headful of chickens.  It's turning into an obsession.

I've wanted chickens for a while, but the cost of providing housing for them has been a prohibiting factor.  Up till now.  It's not that I've won the lottery, nor that the price of chicken housing has fallen.  I'm not sure the chicken Chancellor is fully on top of inflation in the chicken housing market, to be honest.   I think prices are running riot, and I blame Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (and probably placenta pate, too.)

Anyway.  Chickens.  Last week, a friend in Lincolnshire offered me six of hers, and a chicken house she no longer needs.  The only downside is the house didn't have an integral run and I don't particularly want to free range my chickens when I'm at work.  They all *tell* me the fox won't visit in daylight hours.  They all *tell* me my chooks will be safe in the garden whether I'm home or not.  Its just that, when I look out of my bedroom window and see the fox waving jauntily at me from the field on the other side of my garden hedge, I'm disinclined to believe them.

Well, by the time I'd looked into the cost of hiring a van, filling it with petrol, driving it to Lincolnshire, giving my friend £50 for her chickens, and buying a run, it came to roughly the same amount of money as buying a new house and run all for my very self.  Back to the inflated chicken housing market. 

But an interesting thing happened on the way to the forum, Flavia...

While I was researching the price of chicken runs, I came across lots of blogs about people building their own chicken sheds.   Building their own.  Chicken sheds.  People.  Just like me.  Building their own chicken sheds.  The seed of an idea has begun to germinate in my mind.  And we all know how dangerous that can be!

I have emailed another friend.  Her husband, confusingly, is called Mr Fox.  He's an expert on chickens.  He says I need an area 6' x 4' with a concrete base.  I have an area 15' x 8' available, so that would seem to be just the ticket.  He says if I have kicking boards and a roof on my run, it will keep the litter dry and so will make cleaning out easier.  He suggests I use 2" x 1" slate laths.  I'm not sure what slate laths are..... they sound like stone, to me.  (There's no reason *why* I shouldn't build my own chicken shed, right?)  I think I should probably use wood.  I email him to check.  (No reason.  Right?)  It's so much better to expose my ignorance, than simply to Google.

Anyway, I have pictures of other people's constructions.  I'm sure I can make a plan.  Sure I can.

I think I may be spending this weekend pouring concrete.  Now, in the unlikely event that it turns out I *can't* build a chicken shed after all, what alternative uses can I find for a 15' x 8' stretch of conrete???

As the little chicken says, I only hope I don't cluck up...

I came home last night, to find a neighbour lady looking over my front garden.  Uh-oh, I thought: the front garden competition is obviously hotting up.  The neighbours are planning sabotage most foul. 

But it turns out she simply fancied a bit of my cistus! 

We've agreed that when it's big enough, she can have a cutting; and in return she has given me a tray of nemesia and a couple of little verbennas (for the back, obviously).

I am reassured that, even in this cut-throat world we live in, a girl can still get ahead by sharing her cistus!

Everything's coming up lovely

In the aftermath of carnage, there is nothing like a spot of quiet gardening.  I must be getting old.

We had a surprise 18th birthday party for Moo last night.  30 teenagers and assorted adults.  It didn't result in the kind of carnage that comes from advertising on MySpace, but even so this morning there were bodies everywhere, more or less attached to youthfully sore heads, and several trips to the recycling centre.

So after a large pub lunch, I tied up the peas.  I also planted the remaining bedding plants, relying  on the much predicted rain to water them in for me.  The sweet peas are doing well, despite the best attempts of the mice, who DBO noticed have dug even more holes in the window boxes in the last few days.  The cat protection people tell me they have had a run of feral cats being delivered recently, so as soon as the adults have finished nursing their kittens, I will have a chief  gamekeeper on the premises!

Sissy came to the party, too.  She looks very well and we made some elastic loops to keep her jeans fitting for a bit longer.  We've selected lots of baby patterns, so I have much sewing goodness to keep me occupied for the next few weeks.

The clouds are scudding over the back garden.  I bet it doesn't rain at all, and I have to get the hosepipe out...

Admire my butt!

Hmm.  I suppose there's little point in having a journal if you never update it!

We started the compact on 1st April.  So far, so good.  I can absolutely confirm that it is entirely possible to survive for 17 days on only the stuff you already own.  Totally possible.  No let or hindrance.  Absolutely nothing to report.

Except, except...  the ongoing battle with the mice?  My water paranoia?  The fact that the hammock in the garden is so much more appealing than the PC and the journal, nor even the working from home...

I dug a vegetable patch over easter.  There's a fenced off corner of the garden which was just ideal for putting something you need to keep the dogs off.   It was never a place of great beauty; there is a built-in thingummyjig for storing garden stuff, and it's the only bit of garden which is in shade for half of the day, so the lawn was substantially mossy, and anyway too small to to comfortably turn a lawnmower in.  So  I dug up the turf, used an old pallet to build a compost bin,  edged a path with some spare decking planks I found in the garage, lined it with opened out  potting compost bags topped with slate chips taken from the raised beds on the top tier of garden.  Then I dug over the rest, and planted.  So now we are waiting for french beans, carrots, peas, mangetout, beetroot, maize, and purple sprouting broccoli.  It is all pushing up nicely.  Except, except...

Every once in a while, in the first few days post planting, I'd come out and find a dint in the earth.  Mostly over the maize.  A dint like someone had poked a finger into the soil, up to the middle knuckle.  I'm not experienced in this vegetable growing malarkey, so it took me a while to figure it out, but eventually it dawned.  The cunning, burrowing, bastard little mice were digging up my maize!  And it's not on!  So I took to leaving the cat more outside than in.  And when that had no effect, I contacted the Warwick District Cat Protection League, and now I am on the waiting list to give a feral cat the position of head gamekeeper on my estate.  So the vegetables are safe. Except, except...

It has been glorious out.  Not a drop of rain for a fortnight.  Barely a drop of rain since I installed the little rain butt in the back garden.  No rain is not good for vegetable patches, leading as it almost inevitably will to a hosepipe ban, I fear.  And in the event of a hosepipe ban, my little rain butt in the back garden will not be adequate to the task of watering both the veggies and the new front garden, and the hedge which must not perish.  So what I need is a bigger rain butt.  I could put one at the front and one at the back of the house, and keep all my precious plantings safe.  Only, I don't have another rain butt.  And I can't buy one; no shopping.  No new stuff.  So that's a dilemma.  I begged and pleaded and debased myself on freecycle, but it appears that all that anybody wants this year is everybody else's spare rain butts.  And then I discovered a nice man on ebay selling recycled wine barrels (like these, but wine not whisky). Recycled, see?  Not new.  And with a tap fitted.  Ideal for water storage, and less ugly than a lump of green plastic, to boot.

So that's that problem solved, then.

Which leaves nothing to report, except the hammock.  Mmmmm...... hammock.......

 

In which I am mostly a Rachmanite bastard

When I was planting up the window boxes last weekend, I discovered a cunning mouse larder in the potting compost.  They had gnawed a little hole, half way up the 80L bag, but didn't seem to have done anything else.  Except these Warwickshire mice are canny, burrowing little bastards.  They had stolen peanuts meant for the birds, and ferried them diligently into the potting compost, where they were mouldering merrily, wrapped in a ball of lovingly shredded pinky orangey paper.  It looked familiar, this pinky orangey paper.  And there was quite a lot of it.  But beyond a passing wonder, I paid it little heed and concentrated on extracting it from the potting compost so that it could be replaced by my sweet pea seeds.

The weekend before last, DBO was getting wood down from the rack in the garage roof, so that I can (eventually) build myself a compost bin.  He found a little mouse nest, sandwiched between two remnanted planks of decking.  A nest of Muttley hair, inside a small coccoon of pinky orangey paper.  He showed it to me.  It looked familiar, as I chucked it in the pile of cuttings, branches and mulch packets, collecting for the tip.

Today, Daisy has been poorly, and I have had a slow time, working from home and trying to contain my frustration as my imminent deadline looks to slip from my grasp.  I decided to amuse myself by clearing out the garage.  I picked up an upended stack of cotton-lined baskets, to find them filled with a little mouse nest. It turns out I have not, after all, got the only self-sweeping autumn lawn in the whole of Warwickshire.  It's just the mice had collected the fallen leaves and built themselves a cosy corner, lining the leaves with the chewed cotton linings of the basket, and some gnawed-to-size pinky orangey paper.

I picked up a large, rolled rug.  Pinky orangey paper fell desolately from one end.

I looked in an empty planter.  There, at the bottom, was a now very familiar ball of shredded pinky orangey paper.

The mouse had found enough pinky orangey paper to print their own daily editions of the Mouse Financial Times for a year, should they have wished.  But where?  Why was it irritatingly familiar?

I opened the old kitchen cabinet, stored in the garage until my sewing room comes to fruition.  There was a box, filed with dyes: procion dyes, cold water dyes, machine dyes, soda crystals, dyes for wool, dyes for silk.  All in little plastic pots.  All lovingly wrapped in pinky orangey paper.  All covered in a not so fine layer of mouse excrement, and smelling like a mouse urinal.

I'm attached to my dyes, so I lovingly unwrapped them and put them somewhere else.  And threw the box full of shredded pinky orangey paper into the back of the car, along with everything else.

That's lots of little mouse houses on their way to the tip tonight.  Please be generous next time you're in this neck of the woods, and buy a Mouse Big Issue.  They're homeless and hungry;  they need help.  And pinky orangey paper.

I have bought seeds for the vegetable bed.  Peas, mange tout, dwarf french beans, tomatos, purple broccoli.  Also beetroot, borage, corn and carrots. 

I know where the vegetable bed will be.  I just need to build the frame for the raised bed.  Until I do that I can't get earth to fill it, so I will put one bag of earth in my compact as I doubt I'll be able to beg enough topsoil on freeserve to even nearly suffice.

This weekend I have taken out the 'water feature' which just eats electricity (or it would, if the mice hadn't eaten the cable) and doesn't tinkle nicely as water features ought.  I have left the reservoir in place, with its covering over it, and built a shallow alpine bed on top of it all.  It looks lovely, with a cyclamen, some saxifrage and a couple of sempervirens.

So next weekend we're away; I wonder whether now the clocks have changed there will be enough light in the evenings to build a vegetable bed after work.  I expect there might be.  I'm going to use wood that was left in the garage when i bought the place - left over decking and some bits of what might be an old child's bed.  I also need to build a compost heap.  Two pallets on the drive will give me enough wood for that.

But first, more turf must be removed.  It's never ending, this turf digging malarkey!  I have acquired a hippo bag for the waste.  And the side fence at the back of the vegetable garden needs fixing (or removing) as at the moment it's simply balanced on top of the retaining wall.  Oh, and I need to build a gate for the vegetable garden, to stop the dogs fertilising the carrots!

Daisy wants to build a scarecrow.  I can think of some old clothes which might do, but have no idea what we'd stuff it with.  A neighbour two doors along is clearing some scrub from his garden, and I'd beg some of the dead brambles to stick in my scarecrow shirt, but I'm afraid it'd be full of seed heads and completely bugger the whole project.

I've mulched everywhere, and planted sweet peas along the middle fence.  I've put a ribes speciosum into the raised bed where I cut out a flame tree.  It's been waiting patiently on the patio to be planted for weeks, and I swear it smiled when I dug the hole.  That bed has been dressed with slate chips, though, and the soil is incredibly stony so I'm not convinced anything will do well there.... Fingers crossed for the peony (Duchesse de Nemours) I put in in January...

I'm not at all convinced the water butt I've bought will be big enough (100L only) to give me watering water, if we get a hosepipe ban.  But it's too bad, I've bought it now, and short of anyone giving me a bigger one, it's the only one we've got!