Rosie to Rockie

Anyone who has followed the blog over the last year will know the attempts I’ve made to become more self sufficient – starting with constructing a potagère and leading to buying some chickens as well as other fowl. The final purchase were two Rouen ducks which grew to an enormous size and had to be seperated from the chickens into the wider potagère, which they subsequently wrecked by trampling down the blooming veggies and breaking the stone walls.

There were losses if our feathered friends during that time, with the final one being only recent. My husband had forgotten to lock the gate of the chicken area and my daughter had let the dog in there. Our beautiful Lady Jane is with us no more.

As de-confinement started and the markets opened up the girls and I went to get a new chicken. There weren’t very many full grown ones, so we had to buy a bigger chic. They were covered in fluff but bigger than a yellow chic that you see on an Easter card.

We bought two, one each for the girls, but it became apparent very quickly that the grey one was ill. It died shortly after we’d taken them home.

I was gradually rebuilding the beds and trying to get the area in some kind of order. However it soon became apparent that I hadn’t the time to divide between the potagère and the kitchen work, so I’ve accepted that I’ll leave this project until Autumn when I’ll start to prepare for the next growing year.

In the meantime I’ve used the rubble from the fireplace to make paths around the reformed beds to keep weeds down.

Unfortunately our desire to be more self sufficient has led to a new dilemma. My buying the chics had me unprepared to ask questions that I don’t need to think of for my normal, poultry purchase. Boy or girl.

As time has gone on our little Rosie seemed to have big feet. Her wattle seems to be bigger then her fellow birds. She seems to be head and shoulders above the rest, with a bud barrel chest. And even though she’s not yet fully grown the feathers at the bad of neck seem to be taking on a different hue and she seems more aggressive than the others. Finally, just during the past week, her tail feathers seem to be getting suspiciously like that of a coq.

In short, we think Rosie is a Rockie.

So we have to come to a decision; should we rehome Rosie/Rockie or should we keep her/him?

Our daughters are all for keeping him. We’ve explained how roosters fertilise the eggs and they’re excited by the prospect of chics. This has inevitably opened up the discussion to what do we do with those chics when they’re grown. We only have so much space – we can’t support an indefinite amount of hens.

The obvious thing to do would be to rear the hens not just for their eggs, but for their meat too. Yet, as I’ve said before, we’re city folk and the idea of eating meat not prepackaged in plastic is (hypocritically) horrific to us. But there’s something wrong with that isn’t there? Isn’t this why there is so much food wasted in the West? We no longer see the value of food, just the price on the packet. And when the price is low we value it accordingly.

So I’ve been talking to the children openly about farming practices, about where their food comes from and what it would mean to rear our own chickens to eat.

My oldest has decided that killing and eating our own chickens, instead of buying them from the supermarket, is worth it if we can keep Rosie/Rockie and get to have little chics. Obviously thinking and experiencing are different. Nevertheless I’m left wondering should we do this, even for a season, just so the girls have this deeper understanding of the value of food? They live in a world where they have so much. They break something and they think it will be replaced. They want something and they never doubt it will be provided.

There’s a lot to mull over. I’ve made my case about keeping our bird and the subsequent chickens to my husband (he’s not convinced) and tried to be honest to the girls. However it would be a financial, emotional and time commitment and as such we need to think about it some more. I’ll keep you posted.

Le Potager

My body aches. I started the project yesterday and continued today; the family potagère, our kitchen garden. We have a walled section of garden just to the side and I thought it would be perfect for one, especially as I intend to focus on healthy eating this year. So, with the kiddos off school and little point in my starting internal projects, I thought this would be the perfect way to keep them occupied.

The day was crisp, but not overly cold, as I set to work lobbing branches from an evergreen that dominated the space. I’m afraid I can only show you pictures of the site once I’d started, as I was so eager to get going, but believe me just cutting of as much as I had made an enormous difference to the space and light. It now awaits my husband to get going with the chain saw on the weekend.

When he’s does there will be a tree stump as well as another previous one. As I won’t really be able to plant on this patch I’m hoping to put a chicken coop there one day – though that’s a dream at the moment.

Along the side wall had been a row of Hydrangea – I’ve managed to remove four, replanting one at the side fence (though I don’t know if it will stay there). All the back fence and side wall already have Hydrangea so I don’t feel it’s a loss to remove the others completely.

The area is surrounded in the main by walls as well as some open flower beds. The wall diving it from the rest of the garden is ancient and used to go to the main house. As sections of it have been removed the stones have been used to edge flower beds and created little walls throughout. There’s also a large pile of them next to our neighbours back wall.

When I started to research potegères there was some lovely examples of raised beds with stone edging. As I wanted raised beds this seemed like a good idea for ours.

I’ve made a preliminary plan for the layout based on the little research I’ve done; what to plant and how, bed rotation and sunlight availability and I’ve used this to start to mark put where the beds and paths are going to be. However I’m going to do some more research on other things like companion plants. I’ll write more on this later.

In the meantime it’s turning out to be a challenging, but hopefully rewarding, project for us as a family. The girls certainly like helping, for short periods of time anyway 😉.