The flock, using graywater, protecting the harvest

 

Eating some grass at the allotment, May 2025

I sent the son to the allotment on Sunday for the morning chicken check (I've been going up myself both before school and after work), with instructions to take a photo of the chickens for me.  They went up a week ago to a very grassy yard and have done a lot of mowing.  At this point I'm not sure how long they'll stay.  A few weeks?  All summer?  No definite plans at this point.  I wanted them up there to clear away the grass at the very least.  However if we get a heat wave they'll have to come back home to their house and yard in the shade.  Bonus from all that grass I presume:  egg numbers have gone up.

The ducks are still at home, locked in their large yard for the present.  I've been planting out the kitchen garden including the non-fenced portion;  when my new plants are bigger they can have some free range again.  

Once again, it's not rained at all in the previous week.  The husband and son wrangled the washing machine so it pumps out the dryer vent;  I've found some of my collection of pipes and hoses (I can't seem to find all of them), to direct the water onto some of the beds surrounding the patio.  I use homemade soap in this laundry (it's made with tallow, lye and water only, and well aged to make sure all the lye saponifies with the fat).  The pipes empty onto the soil itself at the top of the beds to seep downhill, not splashing directly onto my vegetables.  I'm generally doing one wash every morning.  

The water butts still have a very small amount of water, but I'm also saving some water from the house to take outside:  some bathwater (hard to transport), the water used in cooking and washing vegetables, that sort of thing.  Mainly I water my pots and planters with this saved water, the beds with the washing machine water.

This weekend I netted both my Morello cherry tree and my small strawberry patch at home.  Hopefully both are bird proof, as there's definitely not enough to share!  I also remembered to put my purple sprouting broccoli seedlings under insect mesh--I found one small patch of eggs on one of the leaves.  I really need to plant those out as they're getting too big, but where?  I'm thinking maybe I can plant them in gaps in the beetroot bed at the allotment--it still has insect mesh on it (mainly as a pigeon deterrent).