Just a quick update - you may remember that I posted a short while ago about Little Hen Rescue and their bid to rehome 10,000 battery hens. Well, the good news is that they SUCCEEDED!!! An amazing feat - all the girls are OUT, free, and in loving, new homes with a good retirement ahead of them.
I just wanted to say a massive well done to all those involved in coordinating and rescuing the girls, and of course to those that have given them new homes. It’s a fantastic bit of news.
Of course, there are still many, many battery hens that are awaiting homes (in an ideal world, there would be no battery hens at all though). There are a number of organisations working with the farmers to have the girls rehomed, and if you’re still looking to adopt hens, why not take a look at:
Battery Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT)
All have coordinators dotted throughout the country, so the chances are that wherever you live, you won’t have to travel too far to collect your girls.
Once again, big well done and congratulations to Little Hen Rescue.
Well work has been as relentless as ever in the last week. It’s been a bit of a ruddy nightmare, if I’m honest, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes. My back - for the moment - is just about holding out. There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m hoping that in little over a week things will have calmed down somewhat. And I’ll have some energy and inclination to tackle the (roughly) six thousand, four hundred and ninety-three jobs that need doing at home.
First on my list is my greenhouse. It’s looking very sorry for itself, parked in the corner and slowly being overrun by a tangle of bindweed and other annoyingly persistent perennial weeds. It’s currently hosting a mountain of used plastic plant pots, seed trays and various garden tools, including a small broken electric lawn mower and a strimmer. It’s missing two panes in the roof - something that I’ve been meaning to address for months now - and just looks ugly.
At the beginning of the summer I was intending to plonk a couple of straw bales inside the greenhouse, and use them as a planting medium for my butternut squashes. Rich’s parents also gave us some courgette plants, so I need to get those in there too. Needless to say, it hasn’t happened yet, but I’m going to be damned if I don’t at least achieve that this year.
I mean, I do have the time now. Being the summer solstice, I can easily work outside up until 10 o’clock in the evenings. It just feels like madness. To think that, at 10pm, in six months’ time, if I stood in the same place it’ll be pitch black, cold, most likely wet and windy, and pretty uninviting. So strange.
But I digress. There are jobs to be done. Mowing is a gargantuan effort at the moment, especially around my veg plots. I want to lay down a weed supressant mat and some bark or gravel, but once again, this is where funds are an issue. If I do it, I want to do it properly. I can’t stand half-finished or half-hearted jobs, and unfortunately, there are a lot of them about around here.
I’m pleased though that what little I did manage to do this year seems to be coming along well. My (german) prizewinner runner beans were a gift from a German friend. At first, I thought that they weren’t going to come to much, but in the last two weeks they’ve put on a growth spurt, spiralling and twisting themselves around the bamboo canes, and suddenly bursting into flower. I’m not a massive fan of runner beans, but I’m hoping that picking them fresh will make a difference to my indifference. Rich, on the other hand, loves raw runner beans, so I think he’s looking forward to a PYO session, when the time comes.
I’m feeling quite smug about my Charlotte potatoes. They’re huge. It’s like digging for big hunks of gold. It’s tantamount to looking for freshly laid eggs in the nest box each day - there’s something about that feeling of making the discovery, the anticipation of what you might find, that never goes away. I’ve only dug up about 5 potato plants so far, but the results have been good. The only downside is that (I suspect) because we have sandy soil, our potatoes can be prone to a bit of scab. It’s no biggie, just an aesthetic thing realy - a quick scrub with a brush under some water gets rid of it.
My onions and garlic are swelling nicely, and my carrots are putting on a lot of growth. They always do well in our soil. I’ve got Autumn King in, so it’s going to be a while until I can savour their sweetness. The rabbits, on the other hand, are enjoying nibbling their way through the thinned-out carrot tops. I think I’m right in saying that the carrot is part of the parsley family, and the carrot tops certainly resemble some sort of herb. I’m sure they can be used in cooking, although I’ve never come across any recipes that use them.
My parsnips - all five or six that germinated - are actually doing well. OK, so I’ll only get a couple of meals’ worth, but I think I could maybe sow a couple of rows of salads inbetween to make use of the space. I also rehomed some surplus cabbages that Mum had knocking about, so they’ve gone in, with one lone brussel sprout plant for Rich. I just don’t like them. I live in a county famed for it’s brussel sprout growth (I think there was even some sort of campaign to rename it a Bedfordshire sprout), but they’ve just never hit the spot with me.
There’s still lots to do though. Greenhouse, weeding, cutting back, planting up… it just never stops, but I think, in some ways, that’s the beauty of it. Just don’t get me started on the house. The burrow. The tip. When I have some time off, I’m going to have to blitz it. It’s just unbelievably… cluttered. But for the last two or three weeks I’ve only had one and a half day’s off work, and I am NOT spending all of that time cleaning. No, I’ll wait until I have a few days off after Edinburgh. Then I’ll tackle it.
The other thing that’s been whipping around my head is writing. I want to write a book. I really do. When I was a kid, I used to write loads of stories, some of them actually quite good. As I got older, I would try and start a ‘novel’, get in two or three chapters, and then give up. I haven’t attempted anything like that for years, but I’ve had something bouncing around in my head for over a year now, and I’m wondering… actually, I’m wondering a lot of things. Trying to work out plot lines, characters that fit, themes, the politics of the whole thing. I have what I think are awesome ideas, and then realise that they’ve featured in other stories, films or TV shows. I look at what JK Rowling has done and think… pah. I could never build a world as impressive as HP. This is my downfall. I want to be the best at what I do, but inevitably, as you might guess, it never happens, so I don’t bother. Because that would be like losing.
Silly girl.
I might just do it. Writing creatively is something I’ve done since I was able to write my first sentence. OK, so my story about the bulldozer that got angry and pushed the crab in the water won’t be on the Telegraph’s best seller’s list in five years’ time, but I would at least love to have one of my stories published. I’d love to get people reading, to inspire children, to fire up their imaginations and get them thinking. To love (and probably, at times, hate in equal measure) what I do.
That would be a Good Life.
The sun’s had his hat on this weekend. And my flowers, veggies and weeds are growing at a rate of knots. So I’m glad to see after the past week or so of cool, wet weather, that the bees are back in town.
Among the plants that are starting to resemble towering spires amongst the borders are the Borage. I’m in two minds about Borage; on the one hand, it has beautiful, dainty blue flowers, the bees can’t seem to get enough of it, and in theory, it has a lot of medicinal and culinary uses. It also fills a few spaces in my seemingly endless long borders. I’m guessing it can be used for fertiliser, in the same way as comfrey.
However, on the other hand, it spreads with the verocity of a thuggish weedy giant, is an absolute pain to rip out if you haven’t a pair of thick gloves to hand, and not matter how thoroughly you weed it out, it’ll still come back next year. It might as well blow raspberries and give you two fingers. It’s that obnoxious.
So what do you do with yours?
Well it certainly rained a lot last week. Less watering!
I was actually awoken last weekend by the sound of rain smashing onto the roof tiles. As I rolled over and looked out of the window, Mindu (one of our cats) was sat neatly on the chair, peeping through the curtains. I think she was pleased to be in the dry and warm. Bit like me really. So I pulled the duvet up over my shoulders and snoozed for another hour or so.
Last Sunday morning I booked a trip to Edinburgh. I made reservations at the (five star, first time ever in my life) Balmoral Hotel for Rich’s birthday, and we’re flying up to spend just a short break away from it all. It’ll be the first time we’ve properly been away together in over seven years. Seeing as I got a little promotion and pay rise at work, I thought it would be nice to do something. I surprised him that morning by making him a (free range) fried egg (in olive oil, of course) sandwich and a cup of tea. Just ‘cos I’m nice…
I’m excited about going because I just need to be away for a while. Work is just… mental at the moment. There’s no other word for it. Today is Saturday, and this morning at 9 o’clock I was to be found sitting at my desk. On a Saturday morning. Like I said, mental.
But of course, I’m home now. I’m still feeling prettywound up about work. ‘Work mode’, I call it. I was so tired last night that I fell asleep fully clothed on the bed, having only gone to lie down with the fan on to cool down (had been running round the Smallest Smallholding, trying to get the bunbuns in from their ‘free ranging’). Rich came up at around half past nine and put me to bed because I was so out of it. I was so tired so that I slept through until around sevenish.
Needless to say, I’m still struggling with everything, especially finding time for the allotment. Mum has just been a superstar and has been doing most of the legwork down there. I’ve been quite useless, actually. I’m just mentally so tired in the evenings, all I can do is fall down with a book (re-reading the Potter series in preparation for forthcoming Half-Blood Prince film, of course), or sit down and steadily make my way through my boxsets of Alias. In fact, Rich and I now have a thing where we dedicate around an hour or two in the evening to Alias. I love that show. Rich never really watched it, but I think I have him a bit hooked.
The other thing is that I’m eating far too much at the moment. I’m just too big and I don’t like it. I caught a fleeting glimpse in passing of my old best friend from school the other day. She looks great. I look like a fatter, older version of myself. I’m not happy about it. I’m doing my yoga stretches for my back problems each evening, but it’s not exactly exercise. I’m getting really worried that I’ll never shift this excess weight that I’ve put on since leaving school. I always thought I was big back then, but of course I wasn’t. I might have been taller and broader than the other stick-like glamour-puss friends I had, but I wasn’t the heifer I thought I was.
Of course, now, I think I am. Typical woman thing? But somewhere inbetween everything else I have GOT to make room for exercise. Proper, getting-out-of-breath, pain-barrier, hard work kind of exercise. Because I NEED it. Whilst I’ve been picking up my yoga stretches and making it into a daily routine, I’ve become horrified at how much flexibility and strength I’ve lost. Even in the past six months or a year, I’m just rubbish compared to what I used to be. It’s scary! So yes, that’s something else on the agenda.
Oh good grief. I just need a big break really. At school I had half terms and summer holidays, at university I had even longer breaks, and when I was freelancing, whilst I wasn’t going on holiday, my time was flexible. OK, my work schedule isn’t terrible, I have a full weekend, but it just somehow feels relentless. I can’t mix work in an office with projects on the computer, projects outside… I’m having to do stretches every night so that I’m able to work at the computer every day, to keep the really bad pains away. OK, yes, there are people out there that think I’m a moaner, that think I’m just making up excuses, but when my back and neck pain gets bad, it takes over. I have constant grumbles of discomfort from working on a computer all the time, and it’s really wearing. I would try and change my lifestyle but I can’t see any other way than what I’m doing right now. I’m kind of working my way out of a very deep, large, hole and laying down roots. I’m hoping I’m working towards a life where I actually have something put away and some security. Where I have building blocks, I suppose. If that makes sense.
I just feel like my attempt at the Good Life is slipping away. My dream was to have a comfortable home, to grow my own food, to maybe write a few books (got one outlined in my head), have a mix of projects on the go. At the moment, it’s only a fraction of a part-time attempt at the Good Life, but at the moment seems to be eclipsed by work, being tired because of work, trying to fit in things around work, trying to juggle everything, be a success at everything I turn my hand to, and my Smallest Smallholding always seems to come way down on my list of priorities. And THAT doesn’t sit well with me at all. When I look at the bigger picture, I wonder why I’m struggling. I have my evenings, I have weekends, yet somehow the free time slips away and nothing really gets done. Am I just too lazy? Am I unorganised? Am I just lacking inspiration and dedication?
After all, there are plenty of people that find a way to manage. I just feel like I’m in a big tangle and things just aren’t going the way I want them to. Is that what people call ‘ just life’?
P.S. I miss seeing my hens pottering around.
Tags: animals, Good Life, smallholding, vegetables, work
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