Seed Update

I realise, that you are probably all in suspense, wondering what happened to my seeds, planted three weeks ago.
Well, my first crop has come and gone in the shape of egg and cress sandwiches for three. I have planted some more this week and they are sprouting nicely.

 So far, only 5 of the carrot seeds have come up and they are so very, very small and the planter is so large that taking their photo didn't work. It looks like the sky at night on a particularly dark and moonlit night or possibly the inside of a coal cellar at night. Here it is anyway:

 
The carrot seeds have had a lot to put up with anyway as Oliver decided it was a good surface to race his cars on and Jess was leaping on the planter and then I probably shook them up when I tried to move them to safety. Funny that I thought growing them indoors would keep them safe from pests.

The winter lettuce has been disappointingly slow, probably due to the cold but if it is going to carry on at this rate I shall end up eating it as a microsalad (very fashionable at the moment I understand).

I have planted some more salad leaves out of a packet labelled mesclun which seems to be a mix of rocket and lambs lettuce and other random leaves.
The radishes seem to be doing nicely although I have doubts as to whether the margarine tub will be big enough. Still nothing venture, nothing gain.

I shall also sow some more onion seeds as the others have now germinated. It is not possible to have too many onions and if I don't have space to grow them on I shall eat them as spring onions.

The tomatoes and peppers I have a bit of a confession to make about, I failed to label the pots in the airing cupboard. I also failed to notice they had sprouted. Oops. Hence the legginess of the stalks as they tried desperately to grow towards the light. Most of them have sprouted but I don't know which. I shall know as soon as they get their proper leaves though although telling the upright tomatoes from the trailing variety my be more difficult.

 I should have known better at my age.

A Swarm in May

Exciting news this morning, for me at any rate, I received an e-mail inviting me to add my name to the Leeds Beekeepers Association swarm list. This is a list of volunteers who are prepared to drop what they are doing and go and rescue swarms from gardens, shops, buildings wherever.
The requirement for going on the swarm list is that you have had at least 12 months beekeeping experience so I couldn't apply last year. Nevertheless I did get to deal with a swarm, when my own hive decided to swarm. I had already lost a swarm in May when half the hive took off and settled at the top of my neighbour's 60ft tree, all I could do was watch it in frustration whilst devising wildly impractical plans for trying to reach it. After a few days the scout bees had found a good site for a permanent home and the swarm took off never to be seen again.
As my initial nucleus of bees had cost me £100, I didn't like this, so took action to prevent them swarming again by splitting the remaining hive into two. Neither of the two new hives had active queens and the theory goes that the first of the queen cells to hatch in each hive will kill any other prospective queens and then on a fine day fly off, get mated and then return to the hive to spend the rest of her life laying eggs whilst the colony builds up around her.
So I was quite annoyed when my by now very small original colony decided to swarm again. Fortunately they landed in a hawthorn tree in my garden:

However I was not totally unaided, Oliver wanted to help:

Here again the theory says that bees are at their most docile when they are swarming as they have no hive to defend and they are in fact unable to sting as they have gorged themselves so much on honey in preparation for the journey that they cannot get their stingers in to the right position. Be that as it may, when I went up the ladder with a clothes brush to sweep them into a box, I was wearing the bee suit and I did still get stung on the hand. It was such a terrible summer last year that I don't think my bees had any honey stores to gorge on.
Once I had the queen and most of the swarm in a cardboard box, I tipped it up on a sheet below the tree and left it propped up for the bees I had missed, to come to find the queen.

 Then at night when they were all quiet and had stopped flying, I took the box down the garden to the spare hive and emptied them into it.
After that it was a waiting and wondering time, hoping that the virgin queen managed to get mated and start laying. It is recommended that they are disturbed as little as possible during this time, so I used to go and sit on a stone near the entrance to the hive and watch the foraging bees coming into the hive. If I could see pollen on the back legs, I felt reassured as pollen is used to feed newly hatched bees although it is stored as well. Oliver would come and join me watching bees, hence the photograph at the top of the blog.
Well, I was lucky in that by the end of the season all three hives were queen right, that is mated and laying. They were all small in size and amount of stores as would be expected given the poor summer so I fed them with a sugar candy I'd cooked up, rather like making crystallized toffee. All I can do now is cross my fingers that they make it through to spring.

Sowing seeds for summer sustenance

I expect with a title like the Wood Be Good Life you were expecting this blog to be all about growing things and gardening and you were probably wondering when I was going to get on with it.
Well, today is the answer to that.Today I went through my box of seeds, removed the Thomas the Tank Engine toddler sock (don't know how that got in there) and sorted out what I could use, what needed to be thrown out and what I needed to buy.
Then I got down to it and planted two types of tomato (normal and hanging basket), peppers, onions, basil, lettuce and cress.

The tomatoes and peppers are planted in carefully accumulated empty cream cartons not only as it makes it easy to throw them away after use but because the little clear plastic lids that come with cream cartons do a really good job at keeping the warmth and moisture in the soil whilst the seeds are germinating.
Now with the exception of the onions, lettuce and cress, these seeds are all going in the airing cupboard where they will sit on the bottom shelf of the electric clothes airer until they germinate, after which they will go on the south facing windowsill of Rosie's bedroom.
I need to buy sweet pea and nasturtium seeds as I want to mix flowers and peas and beans climbing up all the fences. Also I am wondering of the practicality of starting parsnips off in bigger cream tubs and then cutting the base out when I come to plant them out. Or cut the base out now maybe?

Stocking up - Part two

So after making a stash of carrot cake, malt loaf and oat cakes to see us through the week, I thought I would have a go at making cheese.

 Making a soft cheese is really very simple, you just take milk (I used 4 pints), heat it to 32 degrees and then add rennet according to the instructions on the packet and leave it to set. After several hours it will look like this :

Chop it into cubes and heat again to 32 degrees. This will encourage the whey to drain from the curds. It can then be turned into a muslin lined sieve to drain.

Once it has drained to the desired consistency turn it into a bowl and add salt and any herbs to taste. A little milk or cream may be added now as well.
So I had my cottage cheese, but what to do with it? One answer was to use it as a filling for ravioli so naturally I had to make pasta then. I made it by mixing 6 eggs into 600g of white bread flour and attempting to form it into a dough. My mixture however was incredibly dry and didn't want to stick together so I instead of adding more egg, I cheated by adding a little water. This seemed to do the trick although compared with bread making the dough still seemed very hard to knead. Eventually I had a lump which looked like this:

  Taking approximately a quarter of this dough I rolled it out until it was thin enough to force it through the rollers of the pasta maker, like so:

Then I kept on passing it through the rollers, moving them closer together each time until the above lump of dough had been rolled so thin, I had been forced to cut it in half and turn it into two pieces like so:

I then did the same with the remainder of the dough. Although I was going to make ravioli, I had far more dough than I needed so I used one third to make spaghetti and another to make tagliatelle:

These have both gone in the freezer for another day. Cost for all the pasta about 54p.
The ravioli I wanted to make was this recipe by the Hairy Bikers http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/ricotta_ravioli_with_a_25270 for Ricotta Ravioli with Soft Egg Yolk, Brown Butter and Pan Grattata. Obviously I was using my own home made cheese instead of ricotta. Translated the recipe called for large ravioli parcels to be filled with a ricotta and parmesan mixture and then have an egg yolk placed gently on top of the cheese like so

 and covered with the top sheet of pasta. This is then poached in simmering water for two minutes to give you a lightly poached egg inside ravioli.It is finished off by being  topped with garlic breadcrumbs and melted butter poured over. Here is the finished article after I cut into the egg to show off the glorious golden yolk of our eggs.

A Black Dog in a White World

We didn't get as much snow as I was expecting, but still as I walked out on the valley beyond the bottom of my garden, the combination of the snow and all encompassing cloud made everything eerily white

Jess disturbed a pair of foxes who bounded off into the undergrowth. Lovely to watch but disturbingly close to my chickens. On my return I checked on the beehives but there was very little snow on them.

A cold winter is actually better for bees, than a mild one. Mild weather at the wrong time can entice them out of the hive when there is no pollen to collect.The chickens are now benefiting from the roofing panels I put up over the chicken run, which has given them a dry snow free corner to get at their food. I may put up another panel though, as the entrance board to the house was covered with snow, which they wouldn't like.That can wait for better weather. This afternoon I will be indoors, on the sofa, wrapped in my knitted blanket. I would like to say that I will be on the laptop, working on the cash-flow forecast for the soap business, but it is more likely that I will be gazing mesmerised out of the window, watching the hundreds of tiny white flakes dancing dizzily down to earth.

Bread and Butter

No, I don't mean that figuratively, I really do want to write about bread and butter.

After Christmas and the New Year, I was left with a pint of double cream that we had not got round to opening for various reasons, much as I adore cream and indeed most fats, I was not going to eat a pint of double cream by myself so I decided to make butter with it.
It isn't difficult, simply put the cram into the food processor and beat as if you were whipping cream and then got interrupted at the point when it is whipped and left it to go very stiff. At this point add a cup of cold water and beat again until the butterfat separates from the buttermilk and it looks like this:

Pour off the buttermilk into a bowl and beat a little more, before turning the remaining lump of butter out on to a chopping board. It is then necessary to work the butter with a pair of wooden spatulas or spoons to get the remaining water out. You can buy specialist 'butter hands' which probably do the job much better but if you only make butter occasionally it isn't worth it.

After a few minutes squeezing and rolling, it looks like this:

Now is the time to add salt if you want, and work that evenly into the butter. 

So there you have a nice piece of butter ( I checked out of interest and it weighed 9 oz), and a bowl of buttermilk, which is obviously calling out to be made into soda bread or possibly buttermilk scones.

On this occasion it was soda bread:

It didn't stay like this for long, a few minutes later it looked more like this:

Eggs!

I went out to do a much needed clean out of the hen house and found two eggs! This is exciting as it is the first time they have laid since the beginning of September when they started to moult. I rushed back inside to get my camera and record the moment.

Not only is it wonderful to be having fresh eggs again, it means I can use my Christmas present for the first time.

Admittedly it will look better when it has more eggs on it.

To honour the egg producers I tried to take their photographs but they were more interested in what was going on in the compost heap after I had emptied the contents of the hen house on it.

I should say that the chickens are a rare breed, Marsh Daisies. When I was choosing chickens I wanted to do my bit in a small way to preserve rare breeds. Eighteen months on I am beginning to appreciate why they are a rare breed as egg laying isn't their forte. Bertie, on the left has never laid at all, I suspect that some early infection led to a hormone inbalance which stops her functioning as a normal chicken, indeed in the summer time she frequently attempts to crow. A harder hearted person would have eaten her by now, but at the moment, the hen house would be an even bigger and draughtier place if there were only two chickens.
The other drawback of Marsh Daisies is what the books call 'flightiness' which makes me think of an unsatisfactory housemaid in Victorian times but means they are good fliers and keen to escape at all times. Having just repaired the fence between myself and the neighbours, I watched this morning as Amelia cleared a five foot fence from an almost vertical takeoff. Time to clip the newly regrown wings I think.

A New Life

Welcome.
Join me as I craft out a new life for myself.

 I want to  find a way of living that is fulfilling. It is about self sufficiency but also about how that ideal can be adapted for those of us who have to live in the city. I can’t wait for that elusive lottery win to buy my dream home in the country, I need to start living life as I want it now. It is about being frugal as frugality means  freedom from money grubbing but not to the point when I will be eating nasty food just because it is cheap.

A year ago I was in a well paid job. I had financial security but nothing to look forward to until I retired. Everything I liked doing had to be squeezed in evenings and weekends and the list of things I would like to do if only I had the time was growing longer and longer. I don’t want to go back to living like that; I need to forge a new life where time is more important than money.

So there will be a lot of decluttering, a fair bit of baking, some knitting, some desperate diy ,much gardening, a lot about chickens and bees, a good deal about soap and setting up a craft business and who knows what else.

It will be about growing it and making it and doing it yourself and not just because I have no money but because I find it satisfying to look at a completed item and say ‘I made that’.