Quack!

I'd like to share these lovely photos that Katie and I took yesterday of the ducks that live across the road from home.

There's been four sets of ducklings born so far this year although sadly one set didn't really make it past a few days. The second lot are more-or-less adult sized now and very, very cute. You can tell them from the adults by their yellow legs (adults have orange).


2 days old

This new lot of ducklings arrived two days ago and belong to a calling duck we named "Mental". We named her this when we first moved into the house as she makes an awful lot of noise (as calling ducks do) and has serious "mental" moments chasing other ducks around quacking at them furiously and often crash landing when she flies around the place! She's not a particularly good mum either and often abandons her little ones when there's a potential bread snack around or when she decides to have one of her "moments". Hopefully these ones will do better than the last lot.

"Mental"

There are plenty of "Mental" style ducks in with the pack, but somehow we can always distinguish the real "Mental"!

Veggie update - lots of progress

Tomatoes (indoor) and Chilli plants are beginning to flower. I'm amazed at how much taller the tomato plants are indoors compared to the two planted outside, even though the weather has been glorious lately.

We also have the distinctive mauve flowers on our self-seeded potatoes which have taken over the onion plot so much now that I have to part the leaves in order to find the onions. The potatoes grown in the black bags from The Potato Council are still flourishing although I've had to water them up to three times a day during the hot weather and there aren't any flowers on them yet.


The onions are looking fine, but small. I didn't have much hope for them from the start as they'd taken so long to get going, but they should be OK. Small is beautiful (and flavoursome).


My pride and joy is the peas. I'm so glad I decided to plant them and have actually sown more (having watched the River Cottage program recently where he liberally sowed peas rather than carefully spacing the seeds out like I'd done). I read somewhere that eating the peas once the pod has been popped is one of the biggest pleasures of home grown foods - so right. I think doing this is higher up the enjoyment stakes than digging up potatoes. I wasn't sure when to actually harvest the peas and didn't want to pick them too soon or too late. Having Googled Kelvedon Peas I read that it's best to harvest them sooner rather than later as the peas are much sweeter. This seems to be true in my opinion. I discoverd some very fat pea pods and found the goods rather bitter compared to pods that are plump but not bursting.



I've also plucked up the courage to try growing sweetcorn again - hopefully I'll do better than last year. The reason I've found some spare space in the veggie plot is because the little cabbages I grew went to seed and then promptly got eaten by the chickens! Nevermind, I'd rather have sweetcorn than cabbages.