Looking back at my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions post, I was pleased to see that I had accomplished some of my ‘resolutions’ for last year, although lack of time and job hunting made sure that I never had the time to get round to doing all of them.

This year, I’m going to take more of a relaxed approach to things, and if they happen, they happen. More ‘plans’ than ‘resolutions!’

One of my goals for this year is to do more writing. I’m about to see one of my articles in print for the first time in Great Food Magazine, which will hopefully become a regular column. I’m also still writing my cookbook, but have still to find that elusive publisher!

I’m also going to be doing some guest blogging, and I have some plans to expand and revamp my own blog. More details about that soon!

Also, now that we have a larger allotment, it will give me more space to expand my chilli empire, although the freezer and larder are groaning under the weight of last year’s harvest, both frozen and pickled. Even though our growing space has been tripled, I’m still going to have to scale back my current seed order for 2012, as otherwise I’ll run out of space in April, never mind by the summer!

I know that I’m a little late to the party with this, but after seeing this on other people’s blogs, I thought it would be good for me to share my allotment based resolutions for the year, and also for me to look back in a year’s time to see how many have been achieved.

So far, I have decided that my resolutions are:-

1. I will bake bread at home more often. and also build a bread oven. I have always tried to bake bread at home, but last year, people were kind enough to send me some sourdough starters, so that has spurred me on to be more creative with my bread. Also, the ‘BBQ Man’ in me wants a bread oven in the garden!

2. Make my own sausages, salami and chorizo. I have already taken a step forward in this by taking delivery of my mincer and sausage maker! However, the local butcher looked at me like I was from planet Zog when I asked whether he could get the sausage casings for me, so I’ll have to order those online before getting creative.

3. Although I am writing a cookbook of my own, I now have enough cookbooks. I tell myself this every year, but I am now running out of shelf space, so this is one resolution I will have to keep to this year, otherwise I will be tripping over them.

4. Hatch my own chickens. After reading about other people’s exploits on Twitter, and also converting my wife so that she has now fallen in love with our ex-battery chickens, we have decided that we want to hatch our own. However, I think a little bit of reading and getting advice from other people is needed before we start on our chicken empire.

5. Plant lots of wildlife friendly flowers. This was a plan for this year, but time and other things meant that it was put on hold. However, we need to attract more bees and wildlife to the garden. Which nicely leads us onto ….

6. Keep bees. We have a hive on our allotment site, but my ultimate aim is for us to have a hive on our plot.

7. Forage for wild food. My allotment site has a plot where sloes are in abundance, and for some reason, the plotholder has no interest in using them. I’ve always made sloe gin and vodka, but after seeing what is out and about, I want to use more food from our wild larder in my cooking this year.

8. Get better at composting, feeding and sustaining my crops this year. I made a start on composting this year, but could definitely try harder this year.

…. and finally ….

9. I will not get seduced by the exotic sounding seeds in seed catalogues. So many times this year I have found myself saying ‘oooh that sounds nice,” just as I hit the send button to order the seeds. Then, later in the year, I found that I had run out of space to plant the stuff I originally wanted to!

So, that’s my resolutions for the year, and I wonder how many I will stick to?! Have any of you come up with food related resolutions for the year?

After I announced on Twitter that we had adopted another four ex-battery chickens, people have been asking for pictures of the new ones, and also updated pictures of the older girls, so the can see how they are getting on.

So, since it is Christmas, here they are! First is a group shot of all of them in their temporary home in the polytunnel where they are living until the snow clears.

Then from left to right on each of the rows is the older girls, Edith, Gladys, Hattie and Mabel, and then the newer girls, Beattie, Chuck, Fran and Mavis.

If you’re looking for a last minute Christmas gift, then you can’t do any better than agreeing to give some ex-battery chickens a new home in the New Year.

Finally, whatever you are doing this Christmas, I hope you and your family have a fantastic Christmas and a peaceful New Year.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that recently we added four new chickens to Chickenopolis, namely Fran, Beattie, Mavis and Chuck.

Since I’d had chickens before with my ex-wife, I knew that there would be a bit of fighting while they sorted out the new pecking order, but I think it still distressed my wife a little bit, who started talking to the chicken that was bullying the new arrivals like they were an errant teenager who had arrived back from the pub a couple of hours later than they said they were going to!

After a week or so of getting to know each other, things seems to have settled down in Chickenopolis, and the old girls seem to have accepted the new arrivals.

Also, we have got them a Christmas present, which is a bigger house and an extended run!

We have also decided in the new year that we are going to start breeding chickens and hatching our own, so watch this space!

Time for a little bit of a catch up I think, since I have been a bit stingy with blog updates recently!

I was a little worried about Gladys, one of our ex-battery chickens for a while, as she seemed to be very much out of sorts, and would not stand up for more than a few seconds at a time. We had to lift her in and out of the nest box and place her near the food, and we were dreading the day when she stopped eating.

Then one day we went down to open them up, and after the other three had come down the ramp at Mach 3 to head towards the food, Gladys then announced herself in a flurry of squawks and feathers as if to announce “I’m back!”

She’s now barging the other three out of the way at the feed, and instead of being very scrawny, is growing all of her feathers, and giving the others a run for their money!

All of the chillies are benefiting from having more room in my new polytunnel and have put on a massive growth spurt and are producing bucketloads of chilies. It’s good that I discovered the trick of how to freeze them last year, as I’m going to need to do the same this year.

All of the spuds have been lifted, so we have enough to feed an army. We want to have fresh spuds for Christmas Day, so we are going to plant some more in a patch of our allotment that could do with some help in being cleared, and the soil being broken up.

The sweetcorn is also teasing me as it looks like it is ready, but everytime I pull back its covering to have a peek, it is not quite there, so I have to wait another day at least before I can fire up the BBQ.

I’ve also harvested four bags full of purple top turnips which will come in useful in stews in the Autumn and Winter. Planted up some more as well, as I love them!

We’re also having the usual game of hide and seek with the courgettes, but still miss the odd one which then turns into a marrow in the blink of an eye. However searching for those means we can spot all of the pumpkins that have kicked into life that will be used in due course to make pumpkin and chorizo soup. spiced pumpkin risotto …..

This week, since my greenhouse was becoming increasingly overcrowded, I decided to treat myself to a polytunnel, so that I would have more room to grow what I wanted.


I’ve started moving some of the chillies, papalo, tomatoes, cucumbers and tomatilloes from my greenhouse to my polytunnel, and to be honest, it doesn’t seem as if I have made any difference at all. The good thing is that there is still loads of room left in the polytunnel, so eventually I will be able to reach the watering can in my greenhouse without having to hack my way through all of the undergrowth in there!

I’ve now got more room to grow some of the more unusual Mexican herbs such as Epazote or Hoja Santa.

The chickens are coming on in leaps and bounds, and they have blessed us with two eggs between them a day. What has surprised my wife is that, although they have only been out of the battery farm for a week, they have already learnt how to take themselves to bed.

I’ve also been busy this weekend sorting out my first ‘Chiili Guru’ video for Wahaca, and that will be appearing on both their and my blog very soon.

We adopted four ex-battery chickens – Edith, Gladys, Hattie and Mabel – yesterday from those wonderful people at The British Hen Welfare Trust.

We arrived at the collection point early, but by opening time there was a massive queue of cars behind us. It was heartening to see that there are so many people wanting to give ex-batts a second life.

When we got them home they all congregated in one corner, obviously frightened and disorientated, but after a short while their curiosity got the better of them.

They left their grit and food alone, and decided to peck away at the grass in their run. I don’t mind admitting to a tear in my eye when I saw how happy they were having grass under their feet.

I was then severely told off by them when I put them to bed at about 8.30pm, and there was lots of squawking as they jostled for position in the coop!

After a back breaking weekend, and sunburn on top of sunburn, we finally finished ‘Chickenopolis’


It may not win any design awards, but we hope that the four ex battery chickens that we are adopting next weekend will like it. If they decide to give us some eggs in return, that will be fantastic, but it will be enough to see how they react to having grass under their feet.

The chickens will soon get their own page on the blog, so watch this space ….

This weekend, along with the usual weeding, potting on, etc, was stage 2 of 4 of building ‘Chickenopolis.’

Those nice people at HenHouseWorld donated a chicken coop a while ago, but we never got round to clearing a space for it on the lottie until now.

So now we have their bedroom sorted out, next week we will start on the slightly longer job of building a large enclosure around their coop. Apparently, there are quite a lot of foxes around our allotment site, as there is a nature reserve nearby, so lots of high fencing, and we’ll also be burying the fencing at least a foot and a half into the ground to try and stop Mr Fox burrowing his way into their run.

If anyone else has any suggestions or tips about how to make their enclosure safer, they are gratefully received!

We also picked the first harvest from our lottie this weekend. Some of the peas were ready, and they were gorgeously sweet eaten straight from the plant. We also picked some carrots, which although they were ugly buggers, were also delicious.

Hopefully there will be more to come, as everything seems to have had a growth spurt with the sunshine and showers, and even the sweetcorn which we thought had bit the dust in the late frosts is now showing signs of life too.

Since we want to have chickens as soon as possible, (allotment site rules say we can’t have them until we have been on the site for a year) we thought it was time to start clearing the space where they are going to live.

We moved the greenhouse to a more logical place last weekend, and this weekend started the job of clearing the large pile of assorted rubbish that the previous plotholders had shoved behind it.

We foolishly thought this would take us no more than a couple of hours, but combined with sweltering sunshine, we found that the mound of earth and rubbish contained glass, rotting carpet, stones, rocks, roots, and lots of other nasties.

We eventually cleared it by the end of the day, and levelled the ground out, so stage two of Chickenopolis, (building their coop) will have to wait until next weekend.

Once that is up, we will then build a bigger run around it, so that the ex-batts that we want to adopt will have some room to roam around if we are not up there to let them roam around our lottie!

So, as you can see from the pictures, the lottie is changing shape. We were also excited to find pods appearing behind the gorgeous purple flowers on the broad beans, and also our first pods appearing on the peas!

I can’t wait to taste the first harvest from our plot … and also to welcome the chickens when they arrive too!