Gluts

Mushrooms everywhere - K's cooking pate as I write this.

Tomatoes like you would not believe - this is the third picking this week!

Melons!  Now you see it...

...now you don't!

Belch.

Chickens at last!

After months building one tiny coop and run, we've finally bought some chooks to live in it.
Cuckoo Marans - 3 hens and a cock, all looking a bit sulky out in the rain.

Looking a bit traumatised after sitting in the boot for an hour...

Marans are said to be very hardy, disease resistant, placid, and suited to wet conditions.  They lay about 200 dark brown eggs a year, and hopefully will go broody from time to time, or my efforts with chicken coop mk.2 will be wasted!  Meant to taste damn good as well.

The ladies settling in, which took literally 3 seconds!

Mr Lover Lover ...or you're in the pot, lad!

How not to make a chicken tractor.

After drawing lots of little designs and some larger ones on 1:20 scale with dusty scale rules, squares, and fancy pens from my old building design course which I bombed out of due to having not enough money for beer, I settled on a chicken tractor design that would cover half a veg bed and house four chickens in comfort. I could then rotate the tractor about the plot, keeping grass down, eating weed seeds and bugs, and harrowing the ground for me. I would have two tractors: one for eggs and one for meat. All would be simple, cheap, and easy...

...as long as I knew French and knew that cheap pine shrinks a bit when the weather's dry, which I didn't. I spent too much time explaining what I was after at the local builder's merchant and forgot to ask for untreated wood, and only remembered when I was taking the wood out of the car back on the Island. This meant planing the treated wood off every plank. The wood is pine from the Landes part of France - a vast sandy scrubland - and it grows very fast. This means the wood is sappy and expands with the weather. This means my nice smart coop, once tight as a ship's keel, is now sporting 5mm gaps between the planks! It's taken me weeks as well! I need a drink! I guess that the French aren't bothered about stable building materials - I used "volige", which are planks of wood used as roofing. Wish I'd just bought an "Eggloo" now and joined the trendy chicken set...

Bread

Want to keep fit but are sensible enough to realise that with gym memberships the only pounds you lose are the ones from your pocket? Better to do something that keeps you fit and has a nice tasty result. Buy a Country Living Grain mill from the States and a sack of wheat and mill your own flour. It's a bit like cycling for the arms, and you get something called fresh flour as a result, which makes good honest whole fresh bread, which is something I'm prepared to bet most people have never had before.

You need a beer after using this monster!

Our mill was bought after months of research, whereby I found out that most flour is milled by an industrial process which destroys all that is good about flour, and then made into loaves by an industrial process which destroys all that is good about bread. I've baked my own bread for years, from organic flour bought from shops with too many crystals and Hopi ear candles. However, I then found out that the oils contained in the grain go off as fast as milk does when exposed to air, so what I was buying was in fact stale food. As every time I'd eaten something commonplace which was fresh (i.e. hours old instead of weeks) and found out what it is meant to taste like - like turnips for example: picked when about the size of a golf ball and just boiled and eaten with salt and pepper, they're delicious; shop bought turnips are woody, bland balls - I decided to try using fresh flour.

Sooo, got the mill, and am now milling our own flour. It's like cycling uphill on a low gear using your arms. Takes about 15 mins to do enough flour for two loaves, which taste delicious. They have a nutty, rich, moist flavour and texture and it's definitely worth doing. Plus, you're getting all those amino acids, vitamins, and oils that you wouldn't be if you got shop bought stuff as an added bonus.