Everything is reproducing, expanding and growing. We’ve gone from 3 colonies of honey bees to 10 within 3 months and doubled our headcount of chickens overnight. With all this warm weather and regular watering, the kitchen garden is covered with sprawling vines of grapes, cucumbers and melons. The red oak lettuces are magnificent as a living border to the tomatoes, and the peppers and aubergines are ready to fruit.

Back last June, we hosted a special event for American homesteaders who were visiting the UK checking out how we keep chickens this side of the pond. A couple of the visitors, Rory & Rebecca Feek, invited us to visit their 100 acre farm in Columbia, Tennessee to join in The Homestead Festival that they’ve been hosting over recent years.

Today is World Bee Day, a time to celebrate our fabulous pollinators that have kept nature ticking over for millions of years. Without bees, we would lose a huge percentage of the foods we enjoy; fruit and vegetables, coffee and chocolate, not forgetting all that delicious honey. We rely on them to pollinate cotton crops so that we can wear t-shirts, jeans and linen blouses. Even our canvas trainers need bees to bring them about!

We’ve had the best time this month hosting The Edible Garden at the Ideal Home Show. Our friends from Omlet brought a shiny new Eglu, the team at Cultivate London brought a whole host of edible plants and we brought our chickens!

If there’s anything to remind us that Easter is on its way, surely the sound of a clucking hen announcing her freshly laid egg ranks a little higher than endless aisles of chocolate in the supermarket.

We’ve been munching our way through Real Bread Week, enjoying the delights made on our Introduction to Scandinavian Baking course, planning Pizza for supper and looking ahead to the classes that we are running up until Easter.
We were delighted to discover that our Seville Orange Marmalade won another award at the World Marmalade Awards, so good job we’ve got Real Bread to toast for breakfast each morning!