Chicken chicks that is One of our chicken didn’t leave her nest today, so we have been collecting eggs to put under her.

Main thing you need to know about collecting eggs are:

• are they from chicken that "are visited" by a rooster each and every day?
• you turn them 180 degrees every 12 hours so the egg yolk won’t stick to the scale

Once you gathered enough eggs, life becomes easy because the mother-hen is the expert!

We removed our mother-hen from her nest, added the eggs and well, mother-hen will do the rest. Farming has never been so easy!

Main thing to know is that the chicks will appear in 21 days from now, so I better write it down, like here

Health is an issue when you get older and well, machines just break down…

My water-pump in the basement finally broke down after more than 40 years of service. The plumber said it couldn’t be repaired anymore (but that’s what they always say…). Anyway, I am in no mood to try and fix it myself as my garden needs water and I am not going to break my back trying so! Pumps are heavy, or at least my old pump is

So up and buy a new one, £400 well spend if this pump agrees on working another 40 years Saves my back also a lot of work because carrying water in buckets outside is quite not a good idea.

Meanwhile our cat is having kittens again, so that will keep the mice out of the corn we feed our organic chickens with.

As you can see, blogging these days is going a bit slow. Something went wrong with uploading the pictures, and my young niece isn’t around to help.

And without smileys, this blog really looks a bit dull, so I hope having it all fixed soonest. yet when you are retired, things are not as urgent anymore as long as life goes on

Every August people ask me what strawberries to plant and every March, people ask me what tomatoes to grow…

Well: you grow the tomatoes you prefer of course!

The next best answer is: you grow the seeds you can find in the shops… Some shops have really limited choices, so … that’s why you have no choice…

Myself I just take a day to drive around all the seed and garden shops nearby to see what’s on offer. If there is a new tomato variety, I buy and try.

I also try to harvest seeds from the tomatoes I grow, but when it comes to seeds of Hybrid tomatoes: it mostly doesn’t give good results the next crop.

Because my garden is big, I love to have variety: the Italian tomatoes, yellow tomatoes and the dwarf tomatoes: those that give tomatoes when the plant doesn’t even reach your knee! Ideal for under glass:

Cherry Tomato "greenhouse"

Then there are people that love to pick tomatoes with the stalk… personally I cannot be bothered because I eat the tomato, not the little stalk attached to it!

In my greenhouse I use "indeterminate varieties" that keep on growing until it freezes, which due to very mild winters can go deep until December. The opposite are the determinate tomatoes: they grow more or less as high as a 10 year old child, so you don’t have to invent big constructions to support the plant.

And of course there are tomatoes in between the 2 mentioned above: they grow a bit higher than myself but do stop growing eventually. Read the tomato seed package before buying.

Anyway, back to work, oops… gardening fun

It’s getting warmer now at the last weeks of winter, so some of these chickens will start laying eggs again after there winter-rest. I guess this chicken had some extra savings…

Not good for her backside though…

Birch juice looks like water, almost tastes like water (be it a bit sweeter) and after you drank it, you get the impression it wasn’t exactly water…

Like water: it’s good for your kidney’s, just that you don’t have to drink as much water as you drink birch juice to have the same effect.

Each tree gives about 1 bottle a day, and that’s more or less your daily intake of fluids.

If you do happen to have a birch forest, you could sell the birch juice to those health shops, reform shops and organic shops… Ok, seems my mind is still in the corporate world

Yet it’s still February so no fruit available but ideal time to prune the roses before they start growing again due to a way too mild winter.

Meanwhile we are helping out the wife from our late friend: since he always drove her around shopping and she doesn’t have a driving licence, her children, friends and neighbours are her new "taxi-drivers".

Luckily my wife is close to her, so she can just drop by and see if anything is needed. Nothing can really replace a loving husband it seems. Which makes you wonder: whoever is left behind is in for a really hard time

It’s better than nothing but of course it hardly can make up for her loss.

But it just makes life a bit more easy especially for her children who have been helping her tremendously the months before her hubby died in hospital.

I intend not to give them names because maybe 1 day they need to end up in a pot… No need to say that’s cruel: if you ever watch how animals end up at the butchers… you most likely wont eat any meat anymore.

I have these 2 geese because well, I am a bit lazy in mowing the grass, and they do the work for me. In return they give my grass free fertilizer, so it’s a kind of win-win situation (apart from not having to step in their free fertilizers…).

Anyway, I do have a huge grassland especially for them, so the grandchildren
nor us need to be bothered by their fertilizing efforts.

It has just been around 1 month that I planted tulips, and already 1 is growing above soil. Way too early if you ask me, but I am sure this tulip knows better!

It is quite warm for the time of the year: no freezing, yet cloudy and a lot of times raining. So I am just worried that because of the "heat" the flower will shoot up way to fast, breaking the fragile stem and therefore not flowering at all.

Yet again, nature knows best, so I will just sit, wait and relax

Let me answer you ‘how do snails reproduce’ : kind of like normal people: when they drink too much beer, they think they can be superman in bed, but what really happens is that they snore like a bore…

Almost the same with snails: they love the smell of beer yeast and once they get drunk, they die…

Now that’s good because I don’t want snails to reproduce in my garden. Or not too much that they start eating all my October cover crop seedlings. I know, autumn is a hard time for everybody and I do sacrifice my beer in stead of drinking it and keep warm

Main thing is to put a plate at ground level. Fill it with beer and the next day you just get rid of the snails drowning in your beer.

In the picture they have sold me a "plate with a roof" on it, so my precious beer doesn’t get diluted after each and every autumn rainfall.

How do snails reproduce? Not in my beer-garden!