Fishing Pond

As I wrote already today on my other blog, I am fascinated by the idea of having a pond for fish and for fishing. My son and I are keen and not very good fishermen, and far more interested in sea fishing than coarse, but the idea is an appealing one.

Reading Parson Woodforde's diary (highly recommended, a fantastic insight into real life in the 18th century, and in a strange way a compelling soap opera avant la lettre) I was taken with his own obsession for a time with stocking, filling, and generally taking care of his own fishing pool or pools. Tench featured regularly on his menus, as did eels (best not to promote the eating of them at present given they are in decline), and if memory serves carp. I cooked carp once, bought on Bury Market as a Christmas Eve treat for my late Polish father-in-law. It tasted muddy and very unexciting, but I think in his grumpy way he appreciated the effort.

We do have an ornamental pond in our garden, and have managed to keep goldfish alive for several years in there, plus a few tiny perch (I think). Recent visits by a heron (can't help thinking about the instructions in Hannah Glasse about how to dress one of these birds) have almost certainly emptied the pond of fish, so perhaps in the warmer months we'll restock with something edible.

Given the weather the last few years has been wet, wet wet, thus parts of the garden are sodden after the merest drizzle now, it could be a good idea to expand the pond, or dig a much larger one designed for the purpose. I guess my wife will have her say on that. As we have lots of trees which drop leaves aplenty it may not be truly practical here. The fun of raising tench, perch and whatever other species are compatible and obtainable, is another aspect to this, and so of course is dropping a hook and line in to catch one for tea.

And yes, tench, perch etc are fine to eat. Perch is a treat in Switzerland, where I have eaten it. My memory is that the flesh was quite sweet, a bit like dab. They need a good sauce, but then so do quite a few more frequently eaten fishes.

Big Freeze and Chickens

As ever with any threat of cold weather the media are predicting death and terror. Here on the west side of the country we tend to avoid major snowfalls, but when we do get them it makes life a bit tougher for the chickens, and along with the duty to look after them there is what happens to the egg yield to consider.

Ours are bright enough (a relative term as regards hens) to spend more time in their house when it gets really cold, but if there is a frost it still affects them - they can't for instance figure out what to do with frozen grass, the non-frozen variety being a big source of food for them when they roam the garden. That grass is supposed to help with the yellowness of the yolk, so I'll supplement the diet with scraps of our greens to balance it out. And if they are using loads of energy to fight the cold they lay fewer eggs (ours are intelligent enough not to lay less eggs), so I up their feed (not that they are ever without anyway) and include some cheap (cheep? I hate myself) porridge oats, said to be the best thing for them in the cold.

Anyone reading this and thinking about keeping chickens? A few pointers:

1: It's easy. Get a very basic book and read up before buying.
2: Make sure you fox-proof their home as far as that's possible.
3: Go for the bog-standard brown hens, not the fancier breeds. They are healthy and lay more frequently.
4: It's kind, and economic, to give them plenty of time ranging free. If you have a garden they can make a bit of a mess, but they fertilize it and make inroads into snails and slugs and other nasties, especially near fruit trees.
5: We had a rat problem briefly, as the hen-house was then far too near a hedge - good cover for the vermin - and probably because we were sloppy with the odds-and-sods we fed our hens. Make sure the hen-house is in the open.

Austerity Banking

On a blog followed by a blogger I follow came across the idea of Sealed Pot Sunday. Why Sunday I have yet to figure out, perhaps the alliteration was too tempting. The basic idea is just that of a kid's piggy bank, saving money for about a year (for some reason December 3rd the date to open the pots) and then splurging what is found in the pot on Christmas or perhaps travel. The money is meant to be loose change, any coins found on the street etc, and for some the money saved with special deals or selling stuff. We decided to give it a go.

It struck me that this campaign or trend says something about our continuing distrust of banks, and certainly of Christmas savings schemes (I have never been tempted by those, partly because every year you hear of someone absconding with the dosh, or of a firm going bust - yet to understand how that can happen).

I put my loose change in a pot previously, banking the money when a certain coin reached the £1 or whatever mark specified on bank coin bags, so today transferred the contents of that to the new bigger pot. It will take some work to sort all the coins collected over a year, bag them and bank them, but maybe it will be worth it - the plan is to use the dosh for a break, whether that be a night in a hotel, a few days in a cottage, or something more exotic.

What we will not be doing is using the coin counting machines you see in supermarkets. I'm not sure if they are all the same, but I had a look at one some time back and noticed it took 25% for doing the sorting and giving you a voucher. When I saw that I alerted a guy about to tip in a massive bag of coppers, but he either thought I was a loony, or didn't understand the idea of 25% being lost, or was so flush he didn't care as he went ahead anyway.  

Waste Not

I just spent a happy half hour digging three barrowfuls of compost out of our kitchen-waste compost bin. The main driver for this was there being so little room at the top that something had to come out of the bottom.

Some of the goodness has doubtless leached out in the several months the stuff had to rot down, but it looks good and smells ok - I love the way gardeners talk about how good compost smells 'sweet'. It was dumped on one of the raised beds in which we grow (in the main) salad stuff, heavier duty crops being reserved for the allotment.

There is something immensely pleasing about how the bits of veg peelings, fruit skins, and the odd dose of chicken poo (great accelerator) can turn into such useful and free material for future crops. It was full of worms too, some of them now being turned into eggs in the innards of our hens who were out when I was doing this.