RAIN!

Chicken damaged tomato

   Vegetable gardening on the scale I attempt it has ups and downs. Keeping animals like chickens adds to the downs and ups. Like in the picture.  Chickens like tomatoes. Seems it does not matter if they are ripe or not they will go for them. There is a preference for the red bits but if the weather is dry then they will eat the green bits too. They also like anything  young and green, like lettuce, beetroot, kale and cabbage! Having said that the amount of slug and snail damage I get to anything I grow is minimal. I am happy to say that one of our hens we call Mrs Chick (do not ask why)  has managed to hatch out three out of six eggs she was sitting on. We have also managed to incubate four Ixworth chicks and have obtained another five chicks from a friend. Our current Ixworth cockerel will now be heading for the freezer. He is just too aggressive.

Three latest arrivals...

   All in all not a lot done in the garden or the poly tunnel this last week. It has been too hot and as I have nothing to plant at this time. Picking cucumber, tomatoes, lettuce, digging up some potatoes and harvesting tree onions is about as much as I could manage! Of course, watering has been done in the poly tunnel also the melons and squash still had to be done. There has been a little rain this week accompanied by a stonking thunder and lightning storm so sitting back and sipping an ice cold beer has very much been the order of the day. All the first earlie's, variety Nicola, (new potatoes) are now dug up. Thirty three kilos harvested from three kilos of seed potato. Reasonable crop I think. In the supermarkets here new potatoes cost around 1 euro 60 cents a kilo! A very small number of borlotti beans have been picked, de-podded  and put aside to use in stews etc. They had dried on the plant. It has been that hot. Failure of another lot of own sown lettuce has meant the purchase of another lot of Batavia Blonde lettuce from the Aigurand market. I lost eight out of twenty four of these to the hot weather and the rest are now established in the poly tunnel. Now I will not have any till the end of August for lettuce. Annoying as my succession planning was working well.
    So, what is on the horizon? Next Friday I will purchase winter leeks from the market and plant those out. No swede this year, seedlings killed by the heat. I may strike lucky and find some in the market but it is not a usual plant to find there. Hopefully it will get cooler and maybe a bit of rain? Who knows. Fingers crossed.