Well we are back home finally and back into the garden. We had great tenants but unfortunately they were not gardeners! No one is perfect on all fronts. The good news is that Kristie had the foresight to plant several pumpkins. Between them and various self seeded wonders we have still been able to eek out some good eating from the garden. If you follow my instagram feed there are lovely shots of cabbage trees and even gorse that popped up too. Spectacular.
I got super inspired and dug over one end of the garden adding rotted tree mulch and compost. The compost and mulch were both looking wonderful and both became this way with little intervention on my part. The tree mulch was some I didn’t get around to spreading out and was left in a 10 cm thick bed, the compost was a heap that we constructed 8 months earlier and left. Both great techniques for those of us who don’t have a lot of time or energy for turning heaps over with any regularity.
After all that digging I decided that the rest could wait for the return of our chickens. They had been on holiday in the country and arrived back last week. We gave away a small flock of two older birds (pets) and 4 young ones that the old girls hatched for us, with the idea that we might get a few back on our return.
Though it was “lovely” to see the old girls back I had hoped they would retire to the country and send back some fresh laying chickens in their place. Unfortunately the message didn’t get through to the chickens and home they came with one younger rooster as their date! Oh well, I strongly suspect that Kristie might have send a slightly different message to our friends than the one I had hoped for…
All is not lost though there is some good scratching and pooping going on in the weedy end of the garden. The block they are working should nicely prepared for garlic planting in a month. The other added bonus is that our rooster might mean we get a few fertilized eggs for our ever clucky bantam to sit on.. I wonder what Barred Rock/Orpington chickens look like!