Our 100th post, Celebrations all round!

I can’t believe that I’ve written 100 blog posts, thanks so much to our regular readers who keep coming back for more.

Congratulations to the three winners of tickets to the Country Living Spring Fair, we hope that Sam Fut, Bridget Mellor and Julie Fraser had a great time and look forward to hearing their highlights.

Celebrate a prize…

We were really pleased to hear this week that we’ve won a prize with the project Capital Growth. This initiative, that supports Londoners to grow their own food, has been a great source of encouragement to us throughout 2013 as we logged all our produce that we collected from the garden on their Harvestometer. It was through their campaign for Londoners to grow a Million Meals that we worked out that between the fruit, vegetables, honey and eggs we gathered 200kg of food worth approximately £1,160.00 contributing to 2496 meals! It was also a privilege to partner with Capital Growth for one of our Pick and Pickle courses last year, helping those that grow their own food preserve the gluts and ensure nothing goes to waste. Thank you for our prize, we looking forward to spending it on fantastic goodies to help us grow more food this year…

Celebrate a birthday…

Our good friends at Omlet are celebrating their 10th Birthday very soon… We have been using their fabulous Eglus to house our chickens for seven years now and they are still designing great new products for both the kitchen and the garden such as this contemporary Egg Ramp that allows us to eat our eggs in order of freshness.

We love the story of how Omlet began, and as a reminder, here is our interview with one of the founders, Johannes Paul.

Coming up at the Corner…

This year we have planned courses right throughout 2014 giving everyone the opportunity for ‘A little bit of country life in London’, in May we will have three types of courses available. Introduction to Bee Keeping, a practical hands on opportunity for small groups to inspect our honey making pollinators and two types of chicken keeping courses. Family Feathers and Fun includes all the information of our Urban Hens course but also provides treats and craft activities for our younger guests.

A Year of Recipes from an Urban Hen Keeper

Book of the Blog Post:

A Good Egg: a year of recipes from an urban hen-keeper

I’ve had this book for a year now and it was a delight to pick up again this week to flick through the seasonal recipes, all using our freshly laid eggs. We are collecting up to nine a day at the moment and fortunately my daughter is becoming quite the little baker! This Sunday we were more than happy to sample her warm batch of Pasteis de Belem, Portuguese custard tarts… yum!

This book is available with many of our other favourites books from the Hen Corner Shop!

Other News:

• Fortunately, Ascot is much better, she seemed to have something stuck in her throat
• We did our first full bee inspection and all three colonies have survived the winter well
• Hurrah, we’ve spotted our first couple of asparagus spears peeking through

Jobs for next week:

• Arrange to transport one of the colonies of bees to a friend who lost one over winter
• Give the compost bins a good stir, aerating them will speed up the process
• Buy some eggs boxes as the eggs just keep on coming, if you are in the area, why not come and buy some?

Have a good week yourself…

Join us on the Journey!