The end of Summer

Summer is well and truly over now and the leaves are starting to show their Autumn colours, so I thought I would share some of our summertime activities with you. We have been on all our usual adventures in nature as you may have seen in the 30 days wild project we joined in June, also trips to the Dinosaur adventure park and a theme park.

We have explored new places and had adventures on a prehistoric walk through ancient areas of woodland. We have also spent time exploring the countryside and the thrill of playing in fields of long grass.

The children gave themselves Summer challenges, my son's was a reading challenge to read the entire series of Harry potter books including the extra short books. This is a big challenge for him as he prefers to read fact books and encyclopedias so me and my husband joined him on this challenge to give him extra support... everyone finished this challenge in less than the three months given. He has now gone back to reading about Japanese mythology and his dinosaur research.

My youngest daughter had different challenges, she wanted to teach herself to weave bracelets, make wind chimes, hula hoop and juggle... all of which she accomplished with ease and has now moved on to learning musical instruments.

We have also spent a lot of time at our local swimming pool, the children had so much fun and can all swim a number of different strokes and have hugely increased their water confidence skills.

Both children attended two activity club courses looking at different animals and their care which they found quite interesting. We also took advantage of the Heritage free open days and went to three museums.

The children love exploring museums, my grandmother used to take me around the strangers hall museum when I was a little girl and it is lovely that it is still there for my children to experience. This year we even played old games in the museum gardens.

We managed to find a newt, something the children had been looking to see in the wild which was quite exciting for them.

We have had a few new additions to our family too, after spending time with the reptiles on the animal care courses that the children completed we decided to add a snake to our family, my son already has a leopard gecko, which is fascinating, so learning about snakes would be just as interesting and something my husband has been wanting to do for quite a while.

This is a photo of our beautiful new Royal python when he first arrived, only a few months old. The other new arrivals are chickens, as you know we lost two of our older girls earlier in the year and were only left with one chicken. The remaining elderly chicken, Dotty, was very lonely so we decided to increase the flock.

It took Dot a little while to accept the new chickens, but after a week or so it all settled down. Dot is on the far right of the above photo, the black and white chicken is called Sylvie and the two reds are called Evie and Ginny.

That covers a few of our summer highlights, adventures and challenges... Preparing for winter has taken hold here and the last of the allotment harvests have been collected and preserving food is in full swing.

Bean Projects

Every year since we started home educating, one of the spring science and nature projects has been bean growing in a jar to see the root growth. We have studied them, grown them, dissected them and eaten them... We have tested growing variations like light, dark, with water and without, and grown many different kinds of bean to compare. We have kept records and logged our data in every different way we can.

This year we tried something different....

This year we placed one side of the jars so that they touched the window, it has been so very cold and frosty here that we thought we would see how much temperature affected the beans. We put two beans in each jar on opposite sides, one side was touching the window pane at all times, the other bean was facing into the house.

As you can see in the two photographs above the bean on the inside of the jar (the warmer side) grew but the bean touching the window (frosty side) did not... the results were the same in each and every jar so the children's temperature experiment is quite conclusive even though there is only a short distance between the two beans on either side of the jar, this makes a big difference!

There is also added incentive to grow beans this year....

My husband built this tepee in the garden from some tree prunings, we wanted to create a living tepee, a quiet place to play or read in a bare part of the garden. The beans will be grown up all around the sides to provide the cover for little ones to hide in, my husband has added a little fence at the bottom to protect the young beans from the chickens. Although it looks like Dotty is having a quick dig to see what is in there, which doesn't look good for the beans!

On the celery front, we are continuing to grow new plants from the stubs which you can read here if you missed it. I have noticed some new shoots coming up from last years plants too, which is very unusual as the weather in the UK is too cold in winter for celery to survive!

We also still have and love the three chickens that live in our garden, they have been no trouble at all (so far) and have provided us with loads of eggs. In fact so many that we haven't had to buy any at all for over a year and I think there are about forty in the kitchen waiting to be used.

That concludes our quick update for now, we will be back very soon to breathe some life back into the blog.

Chicken Update

Lots of exciting news since the last chicken post, we had our first egg on march 16th from Ginger much earlier than we expected. So that was a big surprise not only to us but also to the chicken who was caught short and laid it in the middle of her run with a very confused look on her face.

The egg on the bottom is our first egg from Ginger, the egg on the top is for size comparison, it is a medium free range egg and only slightly larger. It was about a week later we started getting eggs from Dotty, then another week after that that Zelda joined in, rather dramatically as her first two eggs came just an hour apart with no shells.

This was a few days worth of eggs at the beginning of April, as you can see a different size and colour from each chicken, very handy for recipes requiring different sizes and the children love to pick out the egg they want for lunch. The chickens have changed quite a lot too, their combs and wattles have grown as has their tameness.

This is dotty now, she lays the caramel brown speckled eggs and loves to sit next to you on the garden bench especially if you have food.

This is an updated photograph of Ginger, layer of the first egg, she lays quite large medium brown eggs and is quite vocal.

This is what Zelda looks like now, she lays the light creamy coloured eggs. She is 'the boss' chicken and a regular escapologist, my husband has had to raise the height of the run several times. When she escapes she usually just digs for worms and grubs in the veg beds, although once she was caught eating the cabbages.

This is a very common view of the chickens, always digging about. They are currently watching my husband making some changes to keep Zelda in.

The chickens are very curious creatures, what ever you do in the garden, they are right there with you especially if you are digging or weeding. As soon as they hear the back door open they come running up to greet you, or should I say frisk you for food.

The children have been having the time of their lives spending time with the chickens and can often be found in fits of giggles, worm in hand being chased round the garden by three chickens. This has also been very educational for them and they have learnt many new things, one of their favourite jobs is collecting the eggs while they are still warm.

We now get three eggs every single morning and got a very large surprise the other day as you can see above. The egg was huge and weighed almost double that of some of the other eggs, it was laid by Dotty and turned out to have a double yolk.

Here is another picture of the large egg next to two of the other eggs I had in the egg box. We are all enjoying being chicken keepers and especially loving our three little feathered friends at the bottom of the garden.

New Arrivals

We have wanted some chickens for a few years now and finally this week saw this dream come true when we welcomed three young chickens into our family and I thought I would introduce you to them here. My husband managed to build the coop from some new pallets he was given you can read about it here if you want to, he is currently making some minor adjustments to make the run area larger, although they will be spending some time free range in the garden.

This is a photograph my eldest daughter's boyfriend took of our girls just after they arrived, I think they are wondering what is going on and are just as curious about us as we are about them. Firstly I'll introduce you to my youngest daughter's favourite one, she has named her 'Ginger', she is an amber ranger and the smallest of the three.

Ginger

My eldest daughter and my son both like our largest chicken best, she is a bluebelle and my son has chosen to call her 'Zelda', she is quite bossy with the other chickens but a little shy with us.

Zelda

The last one is our speckledy hen, according to the children this one is mine to name so say hello to 'Dotty', she is the bravest one and was taking corn from our hands the very next day.

Dotty

We have only had them a couple of days and already they just seem to fit right in, the children appear to be new 'chicken experts' and my youngest daughter calls them 'her girls'. I will never forget the squeals of delight when she found that they would take corn from her hand and it was soon declared 'the best day ever'.

Dotty

They are point of lay chickens, which means they are young and haven't started laying eggs yet, we have a few weeks to wait until that happens, so there is enough time for us all to get to know each other better. Really cannot wait to see how excited the children are when the first egg arrives, much squealing I expect!

Here is our self appointed chicken guardian, although I suspect he is only here to sun himself as he did not look too impressed with the very large birds that are now at the bottom of the garden and has been keeping his distance. Well, that was our exciting news this week, will keep you posted when the first egg arrives.

We have an allotment!

Having been on the list for an allotment for nearly three years now, you would think I would have been expecting it, but it has still come as a big surprise to finally be allocated a plot. Apparently, this plot is a half plot and has been turned down by quite a few people because it is very overgrown and it definitely  looks a bit challenging.

We have visited the allotment a few times to make sure we knew what we were letting ourselves in for, my husband is much keener than me, I have to say! After the initial shock it was decided that we would try to negotiate a little with the council... the end result was that we have a free year next year and the rest of this year greatly reduced... so we have accepted it. Let the digging begin!

As you can see from the photographs a lot of work is needed, but we have been planning the best way to go about this and still manage to plant things as we go along too. There are a few things already there hidden amongst the weeds, the vines you can see at the back and down the side are hops and we have spotted a few raspberry bushes, so that's a good place to start.

On the way to the allotment we walk past a small holding which has quite a few chickens and as we are hoping to get some chickens of our own soon, we have been stopping for a chat. They are very friendly and come up to the fence to greet the children which is nice, sometimes running from the other side of the farm. The children are becoming quite fond of them, so we have been talking about all the things that they can do for the chickens when we get our own. So now you know what we will be doing this year, it will be quite an adventure, I'm sure!

Fishy Farewell

I have had a pond in the garden for more than ten years, it started as a very small wildlife pond so that the children could see the frogs and rapidly progressed into a very large fish pond, containing many different types of fish including koi carp. I'm not sure how this happened it just did! When we moved I intended to donate the fish to someone else's pond but couldn't find anyone to take them on in time for the move, So we moved with them, that was a very stressful day and I lost my two biggest koi.

We lost another couple of our largest koi in the cold weather over winter so the pond population was much smaller and this prompted us to finally make the decision that it was time to re-home them once and for all, they should now be in their new home swimming merrily around. The photograph below is of one of the fish during transportation.

We now have a large pond to fill, in the area of the garden which has become known as the grotto mainly because it is segmented off from the rest of the garden by willows, fruit trees and overgrown ivy. It is a very Zen like peaceful area, where it is nice to relax with a cup of tea and a book. As every piece of space is well used here we are hoping to transform this area into a new home for chickens, once we have done some more research. Kind of a sad day but with a hint of looking forward to a new life stage as chicken keepers.