Small holding – Big responsibility

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 you’ve been following Hen Corner on Instagram you’ll have seen that we had loads of visitors and special guests. On the first day, Alice Beer and the filming crew from ITV’s This Morning came to present a feature on the show and our chickens, as always, were the stars. You can watch the clip below:

Throughout each day, I was giving talks about Hen Corner, our urban smallholding and, after explaining that we can harvest £5,000 worth of food from our garden and nearby allotment, I was often asked how much space we have.

Well, living in London, there’s a big emphasis on the ‘small’ but I’m jolly proud of all that we produce and constantly try new crops to increase the varieties in the harvest we yield.

When talking about choosing which plants to grow, I alway emphasise the value of perennial plants – those that just keep giving and giving even if we forget to sow seeds, or the cats trample on the young plants. This year, some new plants have included an apricot tree at home and a walnut tree at the allotment. Our kiwi vine is looking very healthy and there’s some good sized almonds growing on the tree near the beehive.

 

Big responsibilties

My daily talks went on to explain the joys keeping bees for honey and chickens for eggs. Guests would often ask me if it was easy keeping bees and, with 15 years experience, I want to say ‘Oh, it’s about an hour a week from April to July’, but alway I emphasise the need to take it slowly, do the training, join your local bee keeping association, etc. Bee keeping is not something to rush into.

When looking after anything that’s alive, be that plants, bees or chickens, there are alway big responsibilities and I was scurrying around before the Ideal Home Show ensuring that we had a watering schedule in place for the plants that we weren’t taking to the show with us, that I’d inspected each colony of bees (I’ve currently got FIVE colonies over THREE sites) and split in half the colonies that were getting a bit big. I had a rota of which chickens I was taking to the show with me each day and planned out food and water for those left at home. Good job my kids are old enough to cook for the household on yet another rota!

Another highlight of the show was meeting wine guru Oz Clarke, we had a good chat about our respective work and he shared a few pearls of wisdom which I’ll hold onto.

 

 

After unpacking from the Ideal Home Show, I was back in the kitchen teaching bread skills to this fabulous bunch of bakers.

Our Introduction to Making Bread has always been a popular course and, particularly with the yummy pizza lunch and bags of bakes for the family and the freezer, it’s one of my favourites as well.

Watch out for the next sessions on Wednesday 3rd June and Tuesday 22nd September – don’t forget your 20% discount if you’ve been on a course before!

Coming up at Hen Corner:

May

Full Day Bee Keeping Wednesday 6th

Making New Cheeses Wednesday 13th

Full Day Bee Keeping Saturday 23rd

Bees for Children Tuesday 26th

Family Feathers & Fun Friday 29th

June

Introduction to Making Bread Wednesday 3rd

Bees for Children Saturday 6th

Introduction to Making Cheese Wednesday 10th

Full Day Bee Keeping Tuesday 16th

Urban Hens – Keeping Chickens in London Wednesday 17th

Growing the Good Life Thursday 18th

Introduction to Scandinavian Baking Thursday 25th

July

Urban Hens – Keeping Chickens in London Wednesday 1st

Bees for Children Saturday 4th, Tuesday 28th

Pasta Together (Families) Thursday 30th

Other news:

• One of our bee hives has now got THREE super boxes on top – they can hold 36lb of honey in each!
• I’ve planted another 18 crowns of asparagus, these should feed us for another 15 years
• We are trying out the super new chicken feeders and drinkers from Omlet

Jobs for the week:

• Put up some wire to train our plum & apricot trees into fans
• Deep clean the chicken coops (Omlet are sending some staff over for training sessions)
• Cut the grass at the allotment, plant some squash and keep up the battle with the brambles

I’m loving this sunshine!

Are you growing any food this year?

I hope to see you soon,

Sara