Eggs and seeds

A welcome surprise yesterday morning - Gina is back into egg production! Yippee! A perfect brown egg was waiting for us nestled among the hay in her sleeping compartment. Now we just need Georgie to get back on track and we can forget buying local eggs until next winter.

Spring is obviously just around the corner. It's not just the eggs that give away the (slightly) warmer weather, but the onions and garlic are showing their first green shoots through the sodden earth (more garlic than onions though, but never mind) and there's buds on lots of shrubs and trees in the more sheltered areas around our home.

We got seed catalogues falling through our letterbox too at the weekend which make for lovely browsing with a cuppa and piece of choccie cake. Katie is keen to stock up on some unusual varieties of veggie - purple broc. and carrots etc., etc., but we have so many seeds left over from last year it seems daft stocking up on more. My friend has very offered me some runner bean and pea seeds she harvested last year. I'm going to plant her runners with my dwarf beans to get a really good crop (hopefully). Peas will be new to us - the birds love them apparently so I'll need to tackle that one.

Enjoying the winter sun

The weather today was lovely bearing in mind it's the middle of January. We all got outside for a bit of a kick around with the football to blow the cobwebs well and truly away. Kanda, the visiting cat, enjoyed chasing the footie too and chickens seem to hunt out the sunniest spots in the garden to catch a few rays. Ben helped cut up a few more sticks from our October tree pruning pile. We still have a long way to go, but we'll get there in the end.

Checked on the onions, which I've now covered in chicken wire as the hens keep pecking away in there and also the cats were beginning to consider the fresh earth as their next toilet! No sign of any onion life as yet. Also checked the garlic which was planted in December. Quite a few bulbs needed pushing back into the ground, again, probably the chickens scratching away in there. They love to have a good old nose in the compost heap, especially after I've thrown a fresh tub of veggie peelings and tea bags on there, so a good old scratch around in the veggie patch enroute is probably entertaining for them.




Spotted this lovely sign of Spring growing on our driveway.