This year has been a bumper damson crop for everybody according to the lady who rang my jam jars through the till at our local independant department store.  And yet it’s only a certain sort of cookbook that has any damson recipes in it, let alone a choice. I’ve gathered together a list of my favourite damson recipes to help out anybody else blessed with too many damsons.  No worries if you don’t have access to damsons – many of these recipes also work well with if you are afflicted with too many plums.

Recipes from Mostly Eating

• Damson, pear and walnut muffins
• Damson and port jam
• Boozy damson and venison casserole

Other people’s Recipes

• Delia’s spiced damson chutney
• Nigel Slater’s damson ice-cream
• Instructions for damson gin from the Cottage Smallholder
• All Things Everhot’s Damson curd, a take on Nigella’s cranberry curd recipe (amazing colour)
• Nigel Slater’s Damson spelt cake

I’ve tried and tested all of these recipes over the years with the exception of the damson curd and they’re all excellent, though of course if it’s quantity that you’re going for then damson jam and chutney are the best way to use up large quantities in one go.

Last time we talked about online grocery shopping, and how it’s convenience can help you to eat healthily when life is busy.  But there’s a down side too.  A picture is worth a thousand words. This is what you don’t get when you do your shopping online.

The freshest leaves…

The youngest, tenderest produce…

The foods that somebody carefully made or nurtured with their own hands

All handpicked at Woodstock Farmers Market, April 2nd 2011

Nope, this is nothing to do with saving on washing up.  The One Pot Pledge® is a campaign from the Garden Organic charity to entice 30,000 non growers into growing at least one edible plant at home.  It’s an excellent idea and not too outrageous either; everybody has room for one pot of soil even if it’s just on a kitchen windowsill.

Growing some of your own food is an excellent way to get back in touch with how food is actually made, slash your food miles and get some super fresh, flavoursome produce to cook with. It’s addictive too – this year I’ve grown twice as much as last year and tried at least three new crops.

As a relative newcomer to gardening, I’m not ready to volunteer as a Gardening Guru for the scheme but I thought I’d pass on my own suggestions for easy plants to get started with. These are the ones that worked for me first time, will grow happily in a pot and give edible results within 1 to 2 months.

Small shallow pots (ideal for windowsills)

• Herbs (coriander, dill, parsley, chervil and basil are all relatively easy to grow from seeds)
• Salad leaves
• Microleaves (some garden centres sell special microleaf mixes)
• Pea Shoots
• A chilli plant (in a slightly larger, deeper pot)

In a larger pot outside

• One courgette plant will provide more than two people need
• Salad leaves (again)
• Radish (radish are super quick to grow)
• A tumbling variety of cherry tomato (a project for next year now, either starting from seed or buying a young plant)
• Carrots (these are a little slower than radish to grow but delicious fresh)
• Spring onions
• Rocket
• Spinach

The one pot pledge site has it’s own guides to what to grow and I’ve also just found the Royal Horticultural Society Grow Your Own iPhone app which will give you growing recommendations based on how much space and time you have available.

(Thanks to the Cottage Smallholder, One Pot Pledge gardening guru, for the tip off about the campaign)

Even if you only dabble in growing your own vegetables, chances are that you grow a few radish here and there.  Few crops are as reliable or quick, speeding from sowing to serving in as little as three weeks. Our garden alternates between the mild, multi-coloured globe shaped radish that were my first ever crop and the hotter, torpedo shaped french breakfast radish.

This raita was inspired by a memorable keralan dinner cooked for us by friends, inspired in turn by their recent trip to India.  All of the food was vegetarian and included a dish that looked like a regular cucumber yogurt raita.  The first taste was cooling yogurt and cucumber, but swiftly followed by an unexpected and warming kick of ginger.  The same concept works equally well with the modest radish, which is also much easier to grow in the UK (though I am tempted to have a bash at propogating supermarket ginger indoors).

Like tzatziki and cucumber raita, this dish doesn’t keep terribly elegantly.  It’s not that it goes off overly quickly, just that the vegetables steadily seep water which separates from the yogurt.  You can easily drain off the excess liquid give it a good stir, but as the whole thing only takes five minutes to pull together I just tend to make a batch as I need it.  We use this as an accompaniment to veggie dishes (like the spicy chickpeas in the photo), simply cooked fish and barbecued or griddled meats.  If you fancy it you can add some finely chopped ginger for extra heat.

Other people’s radish

• Spicy Heirloom Radish Salad, with swoonworthy photos from Penny de los Santos
• Pickled radish from Lucy at Nourish Me
• Sarah Raven’s Radish top pasta, for the leafy part
• An Asian radish slaw, from Tea of Tea and Cookies

This is the second of two posts that make up a Beginners Guide to Keeping Chickens. If you missed it you might want to check out part 1 first.

How much contact time do chickens need?
Chelsea asked how much time we spend with our chickens every day.  Unlike cats and dogs, chickens don’t seem to crave human company and interaction overly so there’s no need to worry that you need to be able to give them lots of “quality time” (so long as they’re kept disease free and have all the food, water and shelter that they need). Chickens are friendly, inquisitive creatures and do like to know what you’re up to but in the grand scheme of things they’re much more bothered about whether they get to free range or not.  Ours are on their own for 8 to 10 hours a day while we’re at work. They happily keep themselves busy in their run for this time but are also very excited to be let out to free range for an hour or so when we get home.

Are they noisy?
If you only have hens then there’s no need to worry about that signature, neighourhood-rousing cock-a-doodle-do. But it’s only fair to warn you that hens can still be a bit noisy. We were getting up at sunrise in over the summer months to let our chickens out into their run so that they didn’t wake the neighbours with their chatter.  They’re only really loud enough for immediate neighbours to hear, but definitely loud enough to wake a light sleeper. There are all kinds of things that you can do to try and limit how early they wake up such as covering their hutch with dark tarpaulin to fake night-time. Touch-wood our neighbours haven’t complained and once the rest of the world is up and going about its business then the odd “I’ve laid an egg, aren’t I amazing” noisy announcement is drowned out the noise of
cars, people etc.

What about going on holiday?
The chickens are fine on their own for the weekend provided that you leave them ample water and food and that they’re safely shut away in a fox-proof run (knowing this was one of the tipping points that finally made us give chicken-keeping a go).  If we’re away for longer than overnight then we ask a friend to pop in and feed them and collect the eggs.

And that’s about all you need to to do!
The chickens aren’t hard work at all. Like most pets, little projects do crop up from time to time, especially if you’re a softy like me and want your girls to live in luxury.  We spent several weekends during the summer trying different ways of keeping them out off my precious vegetable patch before we came up with a solution that worked.  More recently we’ve realised that keeping the chickens on grass over winter
just isn’t going to work. The ground gets turned into a muddy quagmire and you have to hop in your PJs over damp, dewy grass to let them out every morning.  So this weekend has been spent building a more weather proof permanent corner for their run with the floor covered in plastic chippings.  And I’m sure come the colder months I’ll be out there at 7am taking them hot ‘chicken porridge’.  Then I’ll be wanting to rescue more chickens and build a “walk in run”. You get the picture…

So there you go – chickens are pretty low maintenance as far as pets go.  They’ll also have you completely trained and right where they want you within a matter of weeks.

Where to find out more
This Beginners Guide to Keeping Chickens has a part 1
The Omlet website has a good basic guide
The Omlet Forum is the place to go to for advice or for answers to more complicated questions
The Battery Hen Welfare Trust have a detailed guide to Caring for Ex-Battery Hens

This post is a summary of everything we’ve learnt in our first four months of chicken-keeping, especially for those of you thinking about getting your own chooks one day.  Our three ex-battery chickens are completely charming chatterboxes and super-easy to look after, but there are also a few things I wish we’d known before we got them and which I wanted to share with you.

This is very much a beginners perspective on keeping hens – experienced poultry keepers would no doubt have other wisdom to add and similarly I’m sure we’ll keep learning as we go.  If you are seriously thinking about getting your own hens have a read of this post first and then I urge you to go and hang out over at the Omlet forums for a while where just about any question you might have will already have been answered (probably several times over).
 
Our regular chicken care routine
We both work full time but we haven’t found looking after the chickens a big task to fit into our routine.  Here’s what we do:

Once a day
1. Top up the water
2. Top up their food
Chickens eat steadily throughout the day, storing the food in their crop to digest it at night. We feed our three special food from Allen and Page that is designed for ex-battery hens.
3. Collect any eggs (yay!). We’re averaging two eggs a day between three hens.
4. Hand over the treats
Chard is top of the list with grapes and sunflower seeds close behind. Sunflower seeds are the non-perishable bribe of choice for getting the girls back into their run.

Once a week
1. Clean the chicken house out.
Ours is a plastic Eglu which is super easy to keep clean. All we do is empty the removable poo tray, hose down the inside of the house and waft about PoultryShield and louse powder, both easily available and designed to keep the bugs at bay.
2. Catch each chicken in turn and dust them down with sweet-smelling louse powder

Are your chickens free range and how much space do they need?
Kathryn asked how much space chickens need.  Assuming that you can let them out to free range round the garden occasionally then the run that your chickens spend most of their time doesn’t need to be very big. We’ve got a nice routine going where the girls get let out of their run for an hour or so in the morning before we head off to work and again for an hour in the evening.  At the weekends they free range all day if we’re at home.

A run of about 2m by 1m is fine for up to four birds (we’re a soft touch so we bought a run extension to give them an extra metre in length so ours have a 3 x 1m run).  Most guidelines seem to suggest 3-4 square feet per bird.  With regard to having garden space to free range in, it seems to be quality rather than quantity that counts here. Our girls spend their outdoor time making dust baths in the soil, rootling about in leaves, trashing my vegetable bed and digging for worms rather than covering any great distance.

Urban foxes have been known to snatch chickens in broad daylight so we never let ours out of their run unless we’re at home to supervise. 

How do chickens and gardens mix?
Arwen asked how our chickens are treating our grass.  There’s no way round it – chickens are a destructive force in the garden. Their mission in life is to peck, scratch and eat everything that they can.  When chickens are out free-ranging the damage to your grass is suitably wide-spread not to be a problem. If your chooks are in a confined run for much of the day (as ours are) then they are much harder on your grass and you have to move them onto a new patch every week or so (and put down some seed to refresh any bald patches). Anything delicate new growth (spinach, chard and other edibles included) is also best protected from the hens.

Don’t let this put you off – after some initial arguments most people seem to find a happy compromise, maybe letting their chooks free range in half of the garden while keeping the other half poo and destruction free.  At the moment we let ours free range anywhere they want to but with a gigantic net over the vegetable bed which seems to be working well. 

How are the cats and chickens getting on?
The cats have made it their business to studiously ignore the chickens. The chickens on the other hand have both a sense of humour and no concept of fear. Therefore they love nothing more than to chase an unsuspecting cat to the bottom of the garden or flying onto the nearest windowsill.  But for the most part our chooks are too busy pecking and scratching to care much what the cats are up to and so all is harmonious (see photographic evidence below!).

I’ve split this into two posts as it was getting rather long. The second part of A Beginners Guide to Keeping Chickens covers how much time you need to spend with chickens, noise, holidays and where to find out more information about looking after hens.

A short post today about a couple of different things.

Seasonal eating for Autumn
Rather than re-posting it, I thought I’d just mention last year’s Seasonal Fruit and Vegetable Guide for Autumn.  If you’re after meal and snack ideas for seasonal eating, or fancy a pretty print-out of seasonal fruits and vegetables to stick on your fridge door then look no further.

Potential chicken-keepers – ask your questions here!
A couple of people have asked me what our day-to-day routine is with our backyard chickens so I’ve started to write a post about our daily and weekly routine. I’ve also included answers to the sorts of questions we had before we decided to get our girls, such as “can you leave them alone if you need to go away for the weekend”.

It occurred to me that some of you guys might be more actively thinking about getting your own chickens and might have questions that you’d like to ask somebody who already has chooks. We’re very much novices ourselves so don’t worry about asking anything too daft – just post them in the comments and I’ll answer if I can (you can even ask the one about whether you need a cockerel to get eggs).

Inspired by Elaine, Wendy, Kalyn and a whole host of other inspirational gardeners this has been my first summer of growing my own vegetables.  I always enjoy looking at other folks “grow your own” pics so thought I’d share a few of my own.

This summer has been a steep learning curve, with most lessons learnt the hard way. People say pictures speak a thousand words; these are just a few of the lessons I’ve learnt.

This is waaay to many radish for two people.  Nobody likes radish this much, even if it’s very exciting that they’re ready to eat before anything else.

Conversely, three sugar snaps looks like a lot of plant but is nowhere near enough to feed two people who really like them.

And everybody knows that two people don’t need more than one or two courgette (zucchini) plants. It’s not such a disaster then if you accidentally kill some of those extraneous seedlings by letting them get blown over and snap.

It’s your garden and place to sit out of an evening so grow a few pretty things too

But don’t sit and look at your beautiful handiwork for too long before eating. Somebody or something else will surely beat you to it.

For lovers of the green leafy stuff, learning how to grow your own salad leaves is (as Shauna pointed out) like green gold

As a novice gardener, however often you read the phrase successional sowing it will remain a mere a concept in your head until the day your precious lettuce and spinach bolts to over a foot high and you have no salad left to eat.

It’s amazing what you can grow from seed these days…
Last but not least, a timely link. If, like me, you reached the end of August before realising that all of those big sturdy Winter favourites (brussels, cabbages, parsnips etc) should have been planted way back in the Spring, don’t be too sad. You can still grow other tasty morsels like tuscan kale and brocoli raab. The Real Seed Catalogue has a great guide to produce you can grow in the Autumn and Winter months.

I’m looking forward to next year’s gardening already, especially now that we’ve found a way to keep the chooks out of the vegetable beds.  On the menu for next year will be forays into onions and garlic as well as mastering those finicky Mediterranean herbs.

I’d love to hear what you’ve learnt about gardening this year? Triumphs and disasters of course.

No time for a recipe this week, but for those of you interested in farm animal welfare issues  (and those of you who eat chicken),  I wanted to draw your attention to a thought-provoking blog.

The Chicken Out 39 day blog, The short, unnatural life of a broiler chicken follows the short life of a factory farmed chicken straight from the chick’s beak, one day at a time.  Our chick’s diary blog is on day 10 already and with the short journey from newly hatched chick to oven-ready bird happening in just 39 days, this is one blog that won’t take up space in your feed reader for long.

A sorry tale today, but one with a happy ending attached.  It’s no news that battery hens are kept in horrible conditions with barely the space to turn round and nothing to do but pull each others feathers out. But the story of what happens to these unlucky hens next is less well publicised. Battery hens are hybrids, bred to lay, and most battery hens can lay an egg a day for their first year (after reaching maturity).  In their second year that decreases to more like 270 eggs in the year.  In intensive farming terms this is just not efficient enough and most battery hens are sent to slaughter at around a year old. They’re not particularly tasty or well nourished so they end up in dog food or stock. 

In our current economic climate farmers are having to keep hens for longer than normal before they can afford to replace them with new. I can’t get my mind round which situation is worse for the hens: die early or have an extended stay in detestable, miserable conditions.  But hey, I said this was a tale with a happy ending.  Four weeks ago Eva, Henrietta and Gloria retired from the battery cage and came to live with us in veritable chicken luxury. 

Picking our three girls up on rescue day was rather more of an emotional rollercoaster than I had been expecting.  Five hundred stressed, neglected hens is a harrowing sight but the remarkable folk at the Battery Hen Welfare Trust had new owners queing out of the yard and down the lane to whisk all five hundred hens off to happy new homes.

Our three lovelies are in varying degrees of featheriness.  Henrietta appears to be a normal hen (until you pick her up and see her poor little bald tum). Gloria is clothed primarily in her white underfeathers.  Poor Eva has had her neck and shoulders so badly pecked that she looks positively oven-ready. 

While Nik and I have been learning all about henny behaviour over the past weeks so have Eva, Gloria and Henrietta . How do you explain to a hen that has never had an “outside” or a nesting box all about going to bed and laying your eggs in the right place? Happily they’re fast learners and all three already know how to take themselves off to bed at dusk and how to help themselves to the kale in my vegetable plot. Henrietta has even taught herself how to make a dustbath by relieving a hollow in our lawn of its grass.  Oh and there’s an added bonus too; we’re currently averaging two tasty garden-fresh eggs every day.

Find out more about chicken welfare and adopting your own
Battery hen welfare trust information for consumers
Battery hen welfare trust information potential hen adopters
Compassion in world farming poultry pages
Animals Australia Free Betty campaign