Good old eBay!

Thanks to eBay and Rob from Tiptree in Essex, and to his wife for the coffee, drinks and chocolate biscuits (says Michael), I am now the proud owner of a fabulous new greenhouse and five cold frames.

Michael and Rob spent the afternoon dismantling the approx 6m x 2.4m aluminium greenhouse.  I've now got to decide what to grow for sale next year.

The deconstruction process -

Glass out from the sides

Roof off

Loaded and ready to come home

Michael would like to extend a huge thank you to Rob for helping him take it down, he was extremely helpful.

Can't wait for next year now, it's going to be a huge task to get it up, the base laid, staging in and the cold frames erected too, but it'll be well worth it.

Stats today -

Eggs produced = 10

Sales -
1/2 dozen eggs £0.90
1 x 500g Carrots £0.75
1 x Cucumber £0.60

Expenses -
Greenhouse and cold frames £383.00 (that's an awful lot of eggs and veg to sell!)

Mysterious theft

We seem to have suffered a small spate of thefts here on the smallholding.

Now I love sweetcorn, it's one of my favourite crops in the veg patch.  Get the water boiling on the stove then go and pick a cob or two, drop it straight into boiling water, then eat with lashings of salted butter, until it drips down your chin, ~Yummy!

So I was rather annoyed to say the least to find this had happened.  It's a patch of land next to the fence, behind the raspberries and next to the muck heap, that I thought would be perfect for the sweetcorn, a patch out of the way where they could grow and not bother anyone.  It seems that something has bothered it though.  My husband didn't know anything about it; it wasn't rabbit damage, so it was quite puzzling for a while.

Until ..... Somebody came to say hello over the fence when I was in the veg patch

What is she like!  That'll teach me I suppose.

Stats today -

Eggs produced = 10

Sales - (excellent day today!)
1/2 dozen eggs £0.90
1 x Cucumber £0.60
3 x 250g Tomatoes £3.00
2 x Geranium plants £3.00

Expenses -
Nil

Poo tea food

Food for tomatoes that is!

How to use your Poo tea.  What?  You mean to say you haven't made any?  Shame on you, when it's free (or pretty cheap, compared to chemically prepared stuff), and organic, what could be better for your plants?

Ok, so you made your witches brew a week or so ago, it should be pretty well stewed by now, stewed enough to use anyway.  Collect your utensils together -

I use an old baked bean tin to collect the tea in, a large plastic watering can, I think it's about 10 litres, then a stick to stir it with.

Give your brew a good stirring.

Then collect a tin full of it, straining off as much as the liquid as you can, leaving the raw material behind.

Empty the strained liquid into your watering can and then top up with water.  Direct the watering can flow at the bottom of your tomato plants; I use one watering can's worth to six plants.

I'm tending to use this concoction every day to water my plants, rather than just plain water, especially as the fruits are beginning to ripen.  Don't forget to top up your dustbin, as the water level recedes.

Stats today -

Eggs produced = 13

Sales -
9 x Geranium plants £13.50
1 x 500g New potatoes £0.75
1 x Cucumber £0.60

Expenses -
Nil

98% Home grown dinner

Tonight's dinner was a huge success.  Not only was it the first dinner I've cooked in my new oven, (thanks must go to hubby for installing it over the weekend), but it was about 95% home produced.

First course - Toad in the hole

Sausages, home grown by a fellow smallholder, produced not far away
Eggs from my own hens
Milk and flour - Tesco's
Gravy granules - Tesco's
New potatoes, curly kale, french beans, and calabrese all came straight out of the garden.  Just look at the colours.  Yippee!

Then for afters, picked five minutes before serving -

Unfortunately the ice cream we had to go with them was Tesco's.

So all in all, not a bad dinner I'd say.  The veg all tasted wonderful.  I just love curly kale, it's the one vegetable that if I only had room for one winter veg it's the one I would grow.  It tasted OF something this evening, not of a plastic bag that it had been wrapped in for a fortnight.  It tasted like it was doing you good.  The french beans were melt in the mouth sweet and tender and the calabrese, took minutes to cook just lightly steamed.  And then I always use the veg water for making the gravy, so keeping the goodness.  Just delicious, one of the best meals my husband reckoned he'd had in ages.  Compliments indeed.

Stats today -

Eggs produced = 11

Sales -
1 dozen eggs £2.00
Can't believe nobody bought the first cucumber picked out of my polytunnel this morning, and it was only 60p!  These people aren't right in the head!!

Expenses -
Nil

Chickens and eggs

Got some figures for you today - hope your brain's working!

We've been working out some costs, I hope I can explain this right.

One bag of feed lasted us 10 days for 15 hens
During that 10 days we got 83 eggs, and a bag of feed costs £7/bag
Which means that for every egg produced it's cost us £0.08 in feed to produce it.
So, half a dozen eggs costs £0.48 to produce.

The hens cost us £5.00 each and we bought 12 at the time = £60.00; assuming after a year that they are worth nothing at all, the cost per day for 12 hens = £0.164.
Over a ten day period (i.e. the amount of days a bag of food lasts), the cost of these hens = £1.64
Divide this amount by the 83 eggs we'd had produced = £0.019, then multiply that figure by 6, to get the cost per half dozen eggs = £0.11.

So, per half a dozen eggs -
Feed = £0.48
Hen = £0.11
Total = £0.59 to produce half a dozen eggs

So by charging them out at £0.90 per half a dozen we are making £0.31.

That's all very well but that excludes fixed costs, eg, labour, housing, water etc.

It's quite an eye opener don't you think?  Michael made me put the cost of our eggs up from 1st July, from £0.75 per half a dozen and now I'm glad we did.

Have you ever done figures like this, and if so what were your costings like.  Did you include anything we didn't?  I'd be interested to know.

Stats today -

Eggs produced = 8

Sales -
One and a half dozen eggs - £2.70

Expenses -
Nil