Power out

We had a power cut today. We haven’t had one of those for ages and I was a little lost without my internet to pop backwards and forwards to. I spent a peaceful hour or so in the garden instead; without electricity I couldn’t hear the normal 3 different types of music blasting in competition across the back fences. I managed to actually clear one side of the greenhouse which I’ve been meaning to do for a few weeks now.

I’m pleased with how the moneymaker tomatoes are cropping and harvested a whopping 6 kgs. I’ve washed and dried these and then put 1kg of whole tomatoes into ziplock bags with the air sucked out ready to be dealt with in winter when the dark nights and cold days keep me in the house for longer. Then the smell of tomatoes can remind me of the summer and give a promise of whats to come as the heat from the cooker warms the house.  It sounds very poetic and simply means I’ll get into a mess peeling skins off toms as I complain about frozen fingers and water!

I still have about the same amount of tomatoes left on the plant so I’m shutting up the greenhouse and hoping that they turn red.

I also found this little chappy under the mess and very happy I was to see him too! He’s been very busy this summer as I only found one large slug in the greeehouse which the ducks were very grateful for!

After clearing the greehouse, I planted up my cheap onion sets. There were 25 in each net which were reduced to 20p in Bradley Nursery. As there’s still no where for them to go while we wait for the plot to be ploughed,  I put them into modules which I’ve left outside.  When I came in the house I looked at the moon calendar and today is a root day so hopefully, these should romp away!

As soon as the power was back on, the boom boom of rave music blasted over the fence and the fan kicked in from the “social house” that the neighbours at the bottom of our garden have built so I had pleasant wafts of au de lager and cigarettes drifting up the path. I pottered around for a while but gradually got more and more fed up and frustrated with my neighbours lack of consideration and came in to cook tea instead.

One chick died

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to keep one of the chicks that hatched a few days ago alive. It wasn’t attempting to eat or drink so I’ve been feeding it by hand. Really I shouldn’t have bothered because it would probably never feed itself. I should have researched how to dispatch it and done that as soon as I knew it wouldn’t survive but DFS thought that it wasn’t trying to feed itself because it was week. I didn’t think so as it was managing to get itself back to the heat lamp if I left it out of the way.
It means that there are only two of the pekins now and I suspect them to be one cockerel and a hen – at least I hope one is a hen. We’ve got enough cockerels and I’ll have to dispatch those soon along with the cock quails. I’m not looking forward to it but I said when I started that we would be raising them for meat and eggs.