Celebrating 5 years of Hen Corner!

And that, I guess, was the beginning of this exciting journey which is gathering pace year on year. My husband, Andy, helped me with the name, well, we just kept hens then and lived in the house on the corner of the street. My brother-in-law, Richard, chose the red chicken and another friend, Alex, encouraged me to blog. ‘You’d like Twitter‘ said Andy and little did he know how many followers we’d attract…

I bought the domain name for this website and wrote the About page in April ’10, by May ’10 the Observer Food Monthly had contacted me asking to include us in a feature about Urban Farmers in London!

It’s good to look back on anniversaries, every year there are new things to celebrate, so what have our highlights been over the past 12 months? A big one for me was contributing to the Country Living Spring Fair, I was asked to give talks on both bee keeping and chickens from the beautiful Spring Garden at the entrance to the Fair, I also did a food demonstration cooking griddled asparagus with poached egg and hollandaise sauce. The event programme also included a series of talks and interviews in the Country Living Theatre and it was a pleasure to be interviewed with the Telegraph’s Francine Raymond by Features Editor Ruth Chandler.

We have been delighted to work with several new schools this year, either taking our chickens into the classroom or welcoming groups to visit our home, we’ve even taken a small flock of hens on the road to the Horniman Museum and Gardens for their Chirpy Chickens event at Easter.

Back in September, our honey harvest was the biggest so far and we were thrilled to sell half of it to BAFTA, I hope the bees do us proud again this year.

So what are the things that we can look forward to in this next year?

Our wonderful new kitchen is so nearly finished and will be perfect for all our new food courses, we have more schools visits lined up and Bunty is broody and is sitting on 12 fertile eggs, hopefully, we shall see the chicks in a few weeks time… All of this alongside our usual harvesting from the garden; the peaches were pollinated well and are already starting to develop. As the quote says at the top of the page ‘Don’t just count your years, make your years count.‘ and that is exactly what we are trying to do!