Monday 6 a.m.

"It was the moment between six and seven when every flower… glows."  Virginia Woolf

Diary of a Fluffy Bantam aged seven-and-three-quarters

It’s early summer and although I’m a menopausal bantam, or maybe because my hormones are all over the place, I’ve been feeling rather broody lately. Wouldn’t it be lovely to hatch out just one more clutch of chicks before I smooth down my feathers for retirement?

I haven’t got any eggs left to lay so I’ve been fluffing myself up and hopping onto any available egg in the coop. The trouble is, Mary barges in every day, slides her hand under me and snatches the egg away then tells me not to be so silly and anyway she doesn’t feel ready to be a grandma. She’s explained something complicated about not having a cockerel so the eggs won’t be fertile, but I don’t know, an egg’s an egg as far as I can see. 

24 May 

Mary came skipping along today saying “SURPRISE!” 
I don’t think it’s my birthday. 
She stuffed me into the cat box.
That was certainly unexpected and no way to celebrate... if it even is my birthday. 
I decided to go and sulk in the corner. 
SURPRISE!! 
There was a lovely pile of eggs all for me.

Evidently Mary had been talking behind my back with her friends who do have a cockerel and she borrowed some eggs for me. How thoughtful. Five beautiful pale blue ones from a Crested Cream Legbar and two small bantam eggs from “The Punk”... a quite ridiculous black and white bird with a brash tuft on her head. I do doubt Mary's judgement sometimes!

But anyway, I’ve got twenty-one blissful days for the news to sink in. 

Days 1-19

sit, shuffle, sit, sit, shuffle, sit, wiggle, sit.

Day 20

Mary will keep popping her head around the door and saying “peep, peep, peep”. 
I wish she’d give me some privacy. I’m absolutely fine, the last thing I need is a birth partner. She’d be much more use going to buy some chick crumbs.

Day 21

7am. For the past few hours I’ve heard faint peeps from inside the eggs.

10am. At first tiny holes and then big cracks and I can even see a beak.

Sometime later. Phew triplets before lunch and twins after lunch, all fluffed up to perfection and ready to meet Grandma. 
Sorry too busy now to write any more entries. 

P.S. Grandma is over the moon and is finally putting her nervous energy to good use. I can see her flailing around with hammer and nails making us a lovely new run.

P.P.S The bantam eggs didn’t hatch. I can only imagine the cockerel wasn’t going to be seen dating a mohican!

Up with the Lark

Wet weather stopped play on Saturday morning but at least I was up early to keep one step ahead of the approaching rainclouds. 
Just me, my trowel, the melodic quiver of skylarks overhead and the discordant bray of Sarah the donkey from across the neighbouring orchards.
I thinned my swede seedlings, planted a row of leeks, sowed some more carrots and then let the rain water them in.

A chance to pause and plan.

The lupins and foxgloves are about to hand the baton over to poppies and peonies. Beyond, there’s a war raging with nettles and ground elder. Blackbirds, exhausted by parenthood are squabbling over the mahonia berries but soon the wild cherries will be ripe and plentiful for all.

I have a rainbow of irises in a nursery bed. Last week I labelled the stems of the withering blooms with masking tape, so as I divide them up around the garden I'll have more of a chance of knowing what colour I have put where!

There’s still plenty of clipping to do but that job needs a dry day. So I’ve time to mull over the tuft I’ve left in the far right corner… I think it needs to be sculpted into a bird.

I already have one batch of elderflower cordial underway, the hedgerows are teeming billowing with blossoms, but what I’m really looking forward to is picking the pinkish blooms from my recently planted black elder in the white courtyard. I’m jealously guarding the thirteen flower-heads…  and yes I do keep a daily tally! 

There should be just enough for a very small bottle of very pretty pink cordial.

June in bloom

"I paint flowers so they will not die" Frida Kahlo

"Their beauty is beyond dispute. No velvet can rival the richness of their falls; or, let us say, it is to velvet only that we may compare them. That is surely enough to claim for any flower?" Vita Sackville-West, writing about the iris

An antidote to Chelsea

It’s Chelsea Flower Show week and one small corner of London is one big explosion of colour. Talk to any exhibitor at the show however and they will tell you that underlying the brouhaha over medals and perfectly timed blooms there lurks the exhaustion of months of poly-tunnels, artificial heat, micro managed watering and grey hairs.    

While I am undoubtedly enjoying all the media coverage of Chelsea, best in show for me at the moment is our native woodland draped with the most sublime mantle of blue.

A year ago I spotted a handwritten sign advertising a bluebell walk through some local private woods. 
Irresistible. 

And not merely a walk, as it turned out. We met at a farm, climbed onto a tractor and trailer along with an interesting collection of craggy faced enthusiasts and were bumped, to my childlike delight, a couple of miles down-lane and up-field.

Then we were guided on foot into a magical world. Not only of bluebells, swathes of wild garlic were an unexpected bonus.

We had stepped, legitimately, into the territory of the local gamekeeper. He was hovering protectively beside his pheasant enclosure. Hazel stick in hand and with the air of a disgruntled hedgehog he was keeping a watchful eye.

Now I can’t imagine anyone wanting to disturb his birds’ eggs, can you?

Baby-sitting an egg

My husband was busy doing ‘man’ things in the garden at the weekend. Power tools, billhooks, rotting fence posts, brute force and bonfires. Those sorts of things.

In his orbit, nervously eyeing his flamboyant recreation, was a hen pheasant. 

She was sitting on a clutch of eggs, in a not very camouflaged nest. 

Eventually her tolerance waned. Amidst great whirring and flapping, reminiscent of an early incarnation of the Wright brothers’ flying machine, she lurched skyward and so revealed 17 beautiful eggs... much smaller than a chicken’s, with a seductive natural sheen, and in enough neutral shades to compete with any Farrow and Ball paint chart, 

cardamom, beech bark, pebble, rain cloud, sapling, tail-feather taupe... now doesn’t that make you want to redecorate?

The sharp eyed among you will have noticed that there is one egg missing from the bottom photo. Yes, I did steal an egg (we're overrun with pheasants) and it’s sitting on my desk where I can admire it close up. And if mum abandons the nest I’ll be the first to borrow the whole lot! 

Long time, no see….

Bank holiday weekend... time for catching up with old friends.

 Just happened to bump into these saucy guys in the Co-Op.

Last time I saw them they were on on my drawing board!

mmnnn.… as good as homemade!

waste not… want not

Don't forget, when you've eaten the last pork pie, the final mushroom and three sad grapes, those little plastic trays could be very useful in the greenhouse at this time of year.

Ugly… but useful.

When life gives you violets...

April is the leanest time of year in my veg garden. It’s full of promise by way of seedlings in the greenhouse but I can’t find much to pick for dinner! 
There’s sprouting broccoli-a-plenty and some faithful chard but I dug up the last of the leeks this week and the salad leaves have to be carefully rationed. 
Of course rhubarb has flounced its way centre stage with characteristic effusion but there's a limit to how much rhubarb one can reasonably consume. 

Quietly prolific however is my favourite spring flower, the violet. Best appreciated from a hands and knees position, the garden is twinkling with hundreds of these dainty flowers, from deepest velvety purple to pure white. 

So, when life gives you violets.... take a fist full into the kitchen have fun with crystallised flowers.

Hitting the right note

“Play it like something you hear down by the river” Edward Elgar

Beautiful spring day. It’s warm already.  

I pulled a bucket full of weeds before breakfast as the rising sun leached through the willow and across the pond. 

Now I’m in the studio and have just tuned into Radio 3 which is playing a spirited recording of Elgar’s La Capricieuse for violin and piano. 

A perfect way to start the day. 

Happy Tuesday!

Spring has sprung

Wheeling barrow loads of compost the length and breadth of the garden could quickly become tedious and back breaking but with the right attitude and consistently deep knee bends, the monotony is soon eclipsed by the reviving breath of spring...

Past the pond fringed with downy willow buds, duck under the bean tree avoiding trampling the primroses, good time to transplant snowdrops, hug the perimeter of the chicken pen... pause for a quick chat and egg count. The fluffy bantam has surprised us all by coming in to lay again. At eight years old I really didn’t think she had much life left in her. Cross the flagstones, carefully, patches are slippery, hmm, the tulips have been nibbled by deer or rabbits but the irises are looking good, mental note to move the chrysanthemums and to sow stubby rather than elegantly pointed parsnips which never emerge intact from our clay soil… 

And so the narrative grows with each gladly shovelled load.