vampy – Page 2

Haha chickens, I win!

Mum and Dad came over on Monday and helped put up a fence to keep the chickens in one area away from my patio, and they don’t seem overly unhappy about it, so now the patio is clean (well, kinda, still needs pressure washing), and I planted some herbs in a place i can easily get to them from the back door while i am cooking. yay!

They have trees for shade and digging around under, grass for scratching in and sunbathing in, and the old fire pit for having dustbaths in, what more could chickens need! Oh, and since I took the pics I’ve put a few paving slabs in so I don’t have to walk over wet grass to get the eggs in the winter, and so they have something to grind down their beaks and claws on if they so desire.

Now I just need to work on the main area of the garden, cos it’s raaaather untidy.

The area where the chicken run was will be partly taken up by a wooden swing seat, but I’ll need to either plant some grass on the rest of the bare soil there, or put in some plants, and i have to do lots of weeding and trimming of plants around the pond. Still, it’s getting there slowly!

And the veg patch is looking awesome, even if it is mostly filled with tomatoes, I guess I’ll just be freezing a lot of them! I did pick my first real crop last night though (well, aside from radish and herbs, which don’t really count), 2 green and one yellow courgette. I fried them with butter and black pepper then mixed them with pasta and sundried tomato pesto, and they were reaalllly yummy.

Peeeektures

This is what my patio looks like most of the time. All the gravel round the edges pushed all over the place, and shit everywhere. I do like having free ranging chickens, but I really wish they’d just leave the damn patio alone. And no amount of sweeping helps, cos as soon as it’s clean, they go digging craters in the gravel again.

So I decided they need to be fenced off. The side of the garden by the hedgerow has some of their favourite areas in…it has the trees they can sit under when it’s too hot, a patch of ground they like to sunbathe on, and the old fire pit that is filled with ash that they love to have dustbaths in. So today I put up some canes and string to mark off the area they’ll have, and mum and dad are going to come round next week to dig holes for the posts and help me put the fence up.

You can just about see the string line in these pics…the scaffold hammock frame is going to be dismantled and their house will go there, and they’ll have the whole end of the garden from under the trees to the veggie patch fence. The place where their house is now will then be empty, and it is the perfect place for the wooden swing seat mum and dad are getting rid of when they move…woooo…I love swing seats!

And speaking of veggies…they are going well! Dad found some spare wood in his garden so built me another bed, which I’ve put a few tomato plants in. Eventually i’ll plant half of it with asparagus, but my asparagus plants are only about 2″ high at the moment, so I’ll keep them indoors in pots for a while longer.

Everything else is going well…the wind made a gap in the fence a couple of weeks ago, and the chickens got in and destroyed all my beans, but i bought some more and fixed the fence, so it shouldn’t happen again. And I almost have foooood! This one should be ready in a couple of days, and the yellow ones on the other plant are starting to fatten up too.

Aaaand, here’s some more awesomeness from my garden. In this case, by ‘garden’ i mean ‘zoo’, and by ‘my’ i mean ‘Banham’. I don’t wanna fill this blog with tooo many pics, but there are a handful more on my flickr.

Failbread, and other tales of domesticity.

I found some french flour at the local farm shop, which made me decide to make french bread. And I did (several months later). It turned out really nommy, but I was slightly afraid of breaking my mixer, and I couldn’t knead the dough by hand unless I wanted to suffer for it for days. So I decided to try a no knead recipe for my next attempt.

I used this recipe, pretty much, after reading a few things online and deciding to change it up a bit. My dough was too wet after the, hmmm, 16 hours it spent rising, so I used a wet spatula to try and fold it over in its bowl, then gave up and dumped it straight into the bowl with the floured towel. Then the plans went a bit wrong, i put it in the airing cupboard just before my parents came over to take me to the garden centre, thinking I’d be back in time to get the oven hot for it to go in after 2 hours. Well, i forgot that ‘do you want to go to the X’ from my dad, means ‘do you want to go to the X and then the pub’,Â so we were out considerably longer than expected. When i got home the dough had fallen inexctricably in love with my teatowel, despite the copious amounts of flour used. So i just dumped it in the cold cast iron pot, pulled as much as i could off the towel and chucked it on top, then stuck it in the cold oven. I turned the oven to 230 degrees and set the timer for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes i removed the lid and stuck a thermometer into the dough. I have no idea how long the next stage took, maybe 15 mins, but when the internal temp of the bread reached 99 degrees, I took it out.

Looking good!

Then. I looked over to my left and saw the untouched roll of greaseproof paper. I had PLANNED to put some in the base of the pan to stop it sticking. or at least some flour, but in my teatowel unsticking frenzy, i forgot.

Still looks pretty good, right?

Untiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil

YES MY BREAD HAS NO BOTTOM SHUT UP. There was no way in hell i was getting the thing out of the pot, so I waited until it was cool and then realised i had to sacrifice the bottom crust.

Ignoring that huge fail though, it looks pretty good, really light and airy, tastes like a cross between ciabatta and french bread, but with the BEST CRUST EVER. Seriously, it’s incredibly delicious. Next time I will use a liiiiiittle less water, remember the damn greaseproof paper, and probably borrow a smaller casserole dish from my mum so it makes a taller loaf. Oh, and try not to ruin any teatowels. Still, failbread is yummy, so I’m happy.

Another fail i experienced lately was that my beans didn’t grow. Considering the seeds were 10 years old, I pretty much expected it. So today i bought some dwarf french bean seedlings, which are now happily sharing a bed with my peas.

The tomatoes I am growing from seed did rather too well, i have 20+ plants, but i am expecting at least a few cat-related losses. The watercress in the front large pot has suffered at the paws of mummycat, and the carrots in the back pot have been sat on a couple of times too. Still, stuff is growing. There’s 4 chili plants in there too, which are doing very well.

The courgettes are getting biiiig, and i got a couple of tomato plants from someone down the road (one Alicante, one Gardener’s Delight) for some variety, as the ones I’m growing are all Moneymaker.

And fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinally. The most unflattering photo of me EVER EVER EVER.

I finished this dress the other day. The top is based on this pattern but at a tighter gauge because I wanted to use a 100% silk yarn and knew it would stretch, and then i added the skirty part. I don’t like orange, but i had 4 skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk in orange that I bought aaages ago cos it was cheap. I thought i actually had 5, but maybe one has gone on a stash adventure. I also had a skein each of the pink and purple, so made that hideous creation. AND TODAY I DYED IT. I was going to dye it red then overdye it with black, but i decided i liked the red as-is, so it can stay this way for at least a little while until i am bored with it. Red is notoriously hard to photograph, but here it is, it’s a really bright yummy cherry red colour.

Once it’s dry I’ll beg Gren to take a pic and hope I don’t look as chubby as in the above webcam pic. I may also have to sew an underdress thingy for it, cos it is raaather nippletastic, and while i have no qualms normally about my nipples showing through my clothing, this is a little much even for me.

Another veg patch update.

It’s coming along well. Since the last pic I’ve cut back the hedgerow and pulled a few weeds, and weedkillered the brambles, which are starting to die off. I got Gren to dig out the grass under the cold frame, which he did with minimal protesting, and got a few sacks of spare gravel from my parents’ place, which Gren moved with considerable protesting. I put down more anti-weed plastic on the path areas, and weedkillered the remaining grass/weed areas, so soon I’ll be able to put some plastic on there and get a bit more gravel, and it’ll start looking like a cared-for patch!

The radishes are now ready, and many have been eaten, nom nom! Once I’ve taken out a whole row, I’ll plant some more. The tomatoes and chillis are all potted on and are in the cold frame waiting to get a bit bigger before I plant them out. I have 20 tomato plants, so I’m going to need to rehome most of them! The strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries are all in flower, so if I can keep the birds away, I should have some nice fruit this summer. I think Snargle is doing a pretty good job of keeping the bird population down though, yesterday Gren came and told me she’d got a bird but he wasn’t going to take it off her because of some spurious reason which boiled down to being lazy and hoping she’d eat it. She did a good job, only left the wings. This morning there was a dead starling in her offering spot, so I can only assume starlings don’t taste as good as whatever she had yesterday.

Something I never thought I’d say…

…I’m on a diet!

Since Gren moved in almost 18 months ago, I’ve put on 7 lbs. Not a huge big deal cos my weight fluctuates with my health and med side effects and other crap anyway, but I’ve been generally feeling ‘well’ this year, and noticed my diet has got worse, more due to laziness/routine changes than being too sick too cook. I am 5’3 and now weigh 126lbs. So totally not overweight or anything, but I LIKE to be around 115-120. I am fairly curvy, so any less than this my bones stick out too much and people start telling me I look sick (personally I don’t notice that I look sick until I get below 100, but I guess I trust people around me). And I miss my flat tummy.

So I decided to try and reduce the crap I eat. My new diet consists of:

not letting gren cook for me when iâ€™m too lazy to cook myself, cos every meal he cooks involves chips
only drinking fruit juice diluted half and half with fizzy water or cold tea
making large amounts of various salads and putting them in the fridge so I always have food available when i want it and am not tempted to eat junk cos itâ€™s easy
only having one beer when i go out instead of two
not buying anything that says â€˜low fatâ€™ or â€˜dietâ€™ on it unless itâ€™s naturally low fat
not having any food that Iâ€™m â€˜not allowedâ€™, cos that would just piss me off and make me fail
if i buy any chocolate or cake or other â€˜junkâ€™ leaving it in the fridge and only bringing one portion to my room at any time. Iâ€™ve not actually bought any junk, but the day i decided to start this, we had a bbq and my mum brought over a strawberry pavolva. nom!
using half the amount of mayo that i normally do when i make coleslaw
going back to eating when iâ€™m hungry and not because itâ€™s â€˜dinner timeâ€™

At some point, if I’m feeling brave, I might add ‘forcing myself to eat breakfast’ to the list, but I’m not so sure, as even though I’ve not been feeling terrible since spring started, I still generally feel pretty sick for the first couple of hours after waking, so I don’t know if food is a good idea then.

Mebbe I wonâ€™t actually lose any weight, but at least Iâ€™m eating a lot more veggies now, and in my fridge there are piles of green salad with yoghurt and mint dressing, coleslaw, waldorf salad, brown rice salad, and hummous. and a whole roast chicken. AND i have homemade french bread, which is surprisingly good given there was no way I’d be able to knead it by hand, so did most of it with my poor old mixer. It didn’t seem too happy with the task, but it coped reasonably well. I really hope I don’t kill it by using it for dough, cos I so can’t afford the KitchenAid I’ve been lusting over. I have been keeping my eyes open for bread machines with a dough option on freecycle though, so maybe I’ll manage to snag one of those instead.

And I am actually enjoying the cooking. I’ve always liked cooking, but never really liked doing it just for me due to the level of mess, and Gren doesn’t each much that I eat, so we only eat together once every week or so (when i cook a roast, or when I’m too lazy to cook and eat burger and chips with him), but having the new kitchen helps, cos it’s a lot easier to keep clean. I suppose not feeling like I’m going to pass out every time i stand up also helps, but fingers crossed I’m getting better and won’t have as many days like that in future.

Everything is growing!

We seem to have pretty much missed spring and gone straight into summer, it’s been sooo hot the last few days. My plans to plant stuff got put on hold due to being ill and lazy. I managed to get in 2 rows of radish and 2 of lettuce, and that was it. But today I finally got round to doing some stuff and bought a couple of plants, and planted a few seeds too.

See! much less empty space!

The raspberries are going crazy. My mum put in a few more, and a few strawberry plants that were taking over her garden, they have been sat on a few times by Snargle, and the strawberries don’t like the lack of rain, but I just gave it all a lot of water, so hopefully they’ll be happy soon.

The blueberries are all happily flowering, and this time are out of the way of the chickens, so hopefully I’ll actually get to eat some this year without polly stealing them all through the net.

Woo radish! There were a couple of rows of lettuce, but I think the other stuff growing is just weeds, so I’ve started some more romaine lettuce indoors, and some mixed salad leaves in that pot.

Peas! I bought these today from the shop in long stratton, and also planted some more indoors, so hopefully that means I’ll get a couple of crops

Courgettes, one yellow, one green. I’ve not had yellow courgettes before, but someone on rav suggested I grow some.

I also planted some carrots in a pot, cos they always fail in my heavy soil when i try and plant them in the ground, and a pot with spinach and watercress in, which are in the cold frame. Then there’s the mixed salad leaves pot outside, and indoors I am trying peas, romaine lettuce, climbing french beans, and moneymaker tomatoes. The seeds for the beans were reaaaaaaally old, so I’m not holding out much hope, but the others are only from last year, so they should work. Hopefully. Provided the cats don’t knock the whole lot off the windowsill.

Not that these lazy creatures would even THINK of doing something so naughty

Oh, and in non garden related news, I’m making a strip quilt. I cut a bunch of squares of paper from an old yellow pages, and these strips of fabric from an assortment i bought on ebay. It’s going okay so far, aside from the cats loving to sit on the piled up paper and fabric bits.

ETA: Wow, after posting this i flicked down to look at the pics from my last garden entry. It’s amazing how much the hedgerow has grown in a single month…and the raspberry plants…and the grass…and the weeds.

I did it!

Quilt top is finished, with considerably more cat interference. but it’s ok, cos it’s doooone. There are a few mistakes, the piecing errors are due to me changing my mind on the design half way through making it, and the sewing errors are because, well, i can’t sew. But it mostly all lines up, and i’m really happy with it, to the extent that i look at it and can’t actually believe that I made it.

Now to learn how to quilt and bind and all that other fun stuff.

Crazy hour. It’s like happy hour with no booze required.

I really really should have remembered. Every evening at around 9 is crazy hour in my house. British summer time only started yesterday, so i guess their internal clocks were still a little off. It mostly involves the cats tearing round the living room trying to break the sound barrier and destroying everything in their way. Often it involves one of them ‘hiding’ under the throw over the sofa and being attacked by another. It is generally amusing.

Tonight, it was less so. I finally got round to working on my quilt again, and after sewing a few bits together today, I had a nap, then decided to press them ready for the next joining stage, and lay them out so I could see how big it was going to be and work out whether i was going to sew them together as planned, or change it up a little.

It was going pretty well, all the pieces were laid out, so I decided to get the camera. At some point between walking upstairs to fetch the camera, crazy hour began. I came downstairs to find this:

I must say it was only babycat and mummycat involved this time, Snargle has been asleep on top of my wardrobe for at least 4 hours. I think she is saving up her energy for a 4am mountaineering expedition across my desk. After the crazy cat train made its way noisily upstairs, I thought I was safe to start again. I was wrong. I got half way through before they reappeared and trashed everything again.

BUT I WON. Because, as yet, cats are unable to get inside my photoshop.

Now I just have to decide which of these layouts, if any, I want to use. The pros of the last two are that it’ll probably make it large enough to cover my bed without me needing to cut more strips to make into yet more squares, and it makes it less eye-searing to look at. The cons are that I will need to buy more fabric (not a huge issue as i need to go to the shop for more thread tomorrow anyway), and i’ll have to figure out whatever magic method is used to sew long strips between panels.

I win…for now

So, I bought and erected a fence around the veg area, so the chickens can’t get in and trash everything. They are pretty unimpressed, they saw me heading that way with a fork earlier, and came running after me hoping for wormy treats, but they were foiled by the gate. It all looks chicken-proof, but i am taking bets as to how long it’ll take them to break in.

The compost bin I had was full, and over winter I’d just been putting the straw from cleaning out the chickens in a big bucket. So the other day I built a new compost area out of chicken wire, and emptied the bucket and old compost bin into it. The straw from last year had hardly broken down at all, the whole thing was too dry…I need to use more kitchen scraps on it. And possibly pee on it. Hopefully the wire will allow for more water and airflow than the bin, so it’ll start working its composty magic all by itself now.

Now I just need to figure out what to plant. I have the remaining strawberries and raspberries, and I’m going to fill that bed with more of the same, and I have 3 blueberry plants in pots which have also been relocated to the veg area…they did ok on the patio last year until Polly started eating them. The newest bed will be for peas to help make the soil nicer, and because I love peas, but I’m still not sure what to put in the other two beds. I’ll definitely do some radish and lettuce, but I’m undecided as to what else. I may ask my LSG hoars for suggestions.

Oh, and i made this crappy panoramic pic of the garden just for reference so i can see how it changes over the year/s. Though now i want to try and do a proper one with a lens that doesn’t have crazy distortion at the edges.

It’s that time of year

Well, it’s been that time of year for a while, but I’ve mostly been in bed for the last 2 weeks cos I had a horrible cold. Now I’m just slightly coughy, I thought it was time I got on with stuff I’ve been putting off. So I cleaned out the chickens, sorted out the big bin I store the feed/corn/straw/medicine in, and started on the veggie patches. The furthest one in the pic had awful soil in last year, so I grew potatoes to break it up, which seems to have worked. The other 2 weren’t so bad, but were very weedy when i got to them today, so i dug them as best as i could, and spent most of my time just sitting on the edge of the bed pulling weeds and squishing lumps of soil with my hands. Most of the raspberry plants have survived, but only 3 strawberries made it. Before I plant this year I’m going to build a fence so the chickens can’t sit on or dig up everything. And when I say ‘I’, I mean, hope gren and or my dad will help me.

Every time I turned round today, I had a row of chickens following me. I kept telling them not to eat ALL the worms, but I don’t think they listened.

Before I got ill, I discovered the eye-searing Oranje on Knitty. Orange is SO not my colour, but I decided I had to knit it. I am trying not to buy yarn, so I had to knit from stash. I chose Faithful Beauty Bugga! for the main colour, and a green and a blue for the CC’s. It knitted up SO fast, and although it was my first project involving steeks, it was all very easy and uneventful. I put plenty of notes on my rav project page if anyone else is thinking of making it and is unsure of anything. I mostly followed the pattern, but made the collar a little shorter and did the bands differently as I’m going to be using a zip rather than buttons. Currently the zip is tacked in place, awaiting a battle with the sewing machine. Here’s a zipless pic.

The pattern looks a little daunting because it’s so long, but that’s a good thing, because it means it’s really clear and easy to follow. HUGE props to the designer for writing such a good pattern, and for generally being an awesome person. This is the first colourwork I’ve done on a garment (other than little things like socks, gloves, and hats), and the charts were easy to follow, easy to remember, and even the few rows that involved 3 colours in one row weren’t too traumatic. I love it so much I’m considering making another in worsted/aran weight so I can wear it as a jacket.