Cheese

There was some consternation in our house at the weekend when we were given quinces from a friend’s allotment. What to do with them? How to cook them? How even to cut them without slicing your fingers off (they’re really hard!).
It turns out they’re very nice poached in apple juice with a baked ham. For Sara Ward at Hen Corner, quinces are the final harvest of the year. She reckons they need cooking with sugar. They do have a considerably sharper in flavour than their orchard cousins apples and pears.
Read my guest post on The Chiswick Calendar website.

That’s a wrap on our bee keeping courses, the honey is finally gathered in and this has definitely been my biggest honey harvest so far. A good job too as we’ve just won another Great Taste Award for our Brentford Honey – Hurrah!

When I first heard that phrase, in Sunday School as a child, my mind conjured up a very sticky scene akin to ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ with waterfalls of honey and rivers of milk, it sounded rather sickly – not somewhere I wanted to live. Over the years, I’ve realised that milk and honey are simply the evidence, the fruit, of a very fertile, lush land. Bees can only make honey with bountiful flowers around and milk flows strongest when the animals are happy in pasture. This month I’ve milked a sheep and harvested honey, with minimum sticky mess…

As Summer days shrink at both ends and a new term starts at school we celebrate the harvest and look forward to all the lovely Autumn activities ahead and, as usual, say ‘All Aboard and Join us on the Journey’…

The perfect start to the year… One of the advantages of running your own business is that you can choose when to take a longer than usual break from work…

What a week we had! 300 children met our chickens on Monday, 22 pre-school children and their grown ups helped with the bee keeping on Tuesday and 60 children baked…

Yesterday was a good day, OK it was sopping wet with so much rain that we had to postpone our Full Day Bee Keeping Course, but we had some super…

We had been planning it since last August and finally the day came around for our first greenwood craft day at Hen Corner. It was great to work with guest…

Regular readers may remember reading about our renovations in the Kitchen Garden earlier this year, the hoops and nets are really successful at keeping the chickens/cats/pigeons/foxes/etc. off our raised beds…

We have enjoyed numerous egg hunts this week, searching for the tiniest eggs laid by our queen bees, through the colourful eggs of our hens to the largest chocolate eggs…