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Children's activities Food Growing vegetables The Good Life

Growing Cress Egg Heads

We have started our veg growing for the year! Last week, Emilia decorated two Egg Heads, and then planted them with cress seeds. One week later, this is the result! This is a brilliant rainy day activity to do with children, even in mid-winter. Next up is carrot seed sowing in toilet rolls. Yep. (You can read about […]

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Growing vegetables

Winnie the Pooh is back to save the Honey Bees

I’m sure a lot of people have Winnie the Pooh mingled in with their childhood memories. So many lovely stories, quotes and programmes come from Winnie the Pooh. I have a little Pooh Bear, who has stayed with me since I was born (though my sister rudely tried to claim him as hers, more than once). I also used […]

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Chickens The Good Life

Introducing new chickens to your flock – Omlet’s Eglu

Due to some sad losses, we’ve been down to two chickens in our flock for a while now, and with spring arriving we wanted to expand the brood. So back to Hinchliffe’s Farm we went, and luckily for us, they still had a few point of lay hens for sale, despite an unprecedented demand for them recently. […]

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Chickens Food Leeds Local food

Pullet Eggs this Easter?

This Easter, The Local Pantry is giving away pullet eggs to customers that buy an Easter treat in their cafe and shop. I had never heard of pullet eggs before (and I keep chickens!). They are small eggs, that are produced by chickens when they first start laying. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with them, but due […]

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Food Local food The Good Life

Picking Plums and Making Pies

Our plum tree is now two years old. It’s a bit squat and fat, but it makes fruit! Darn tasty fruit it is too. We got about 20 plums growing on it this year, and they each remained stubbornly green for weeks and months, until all of a sudden they were purple and leaping from […]

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Food Leeds Local food Recipes The Good Life

Local Asparagus from Horsforth, Leeds

Each year I bang on about how amazing fresh, locally grown asparagus is (see posts from 2011 and 2012), and this year is no different. Due to the cold weather, the season has been delayed this year, but with the recent sunshine the asparagus is now leaping out of the ground. I always go to […]

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Blogging Growing vegetables Local food The Good Life

Springing Sluggishly into Seed Sowing

Last year was a total washout when it came to vegetable growing. The relentless rain and the violent onslaught of slugs destroyed just about everything. It was totally disheartening. So, it’s been a little bit of a battle to get my enthusiasm up for veg growing this year, but my empty beds were looking mournful, […]

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Food Growing vegetables The Good Life Uncategorized

It may be raining, but…

It is still spring! And the time to be planting seedlings. I am going a bit overboard this year and planning to fill our new raised beds with as much produce as they can take. My window sills have been crammed with little sprouts of plants and plants of sprouts, and I have been rapidly […]

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Food Growing vegetables The Good Life

Pumpkin Patch

I promised a pumpkin post ages ago… apologies! Pumpkins are one of those veg (that is technically a fruit?) that I presume must be difficult to grow because they look so amazing. However, they are surprisingly easy, which is a good job, as I just bunged the plant in the ground and then left it […]

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Blogging Chickens Review The Good Life

Is Omlet’s Eglu all it’s cracked up to be?

In a word: YES. I was woken at 3am by the latest addition to the Murricane family and stumbled my way into the bathroom, still half asleep and cursing the cold. I was then startled by an almighty clatter coming from outside, which was followed by lots of squawking, gobbling and flapping from our 4 […]