2010 – A Really Good Year

Posted by louisa on Friday 31 December 2010 in meta | 2 comments

Everyone else is doing end-of-year round-ups and it’s inspired me to do one too. Feel free to skip if you don’t like introspection ;)

While my life as a whole has been up and down (mostly up but some deep downs), 2010 has been a fantastic year from a simple/DIY living point of view.

Growing

Our first growing season in our new house, this year was one of experimentation. We had fresh produce from the garden from March through to October – and have a cupboard full of preserved goodies as well as potatoes in store. I’ve written about our growing successes and failures before – our overall output was disappointing but my, my, I learned so much. I’m pretty jazzed by the potential of what we can achieve now we know more about the conditions etc.

Chickens

Our first four chickens arrived in June and we got another four (which soon depleted to three) in November. They’ve been ace!

They’re a lot of fun – such personalities! – and the egg output has been awesome. From the day they arrived in June until the middle of December, the first four provided about 3.6 eggs a day (ie, most days one each but sometimes just three between the four of them) – they’re still laying now just less than that (especially as one has entered an early moult). The new girls have yet to start laying but hopefully they’ll start soon – and that’ll provide cover for when the rest of the originals going into moult.

Aside from the extra winter workload, I’ve been stunned by how little work they are – food & water are topped up once a day (they always have more than enough), quick visual inspection of the coop every day-ish (remove any giant piles of poo/top up straw & shavings as appropriate) and a full clean out once a week. It’s an hour a week in total, max. I do typically spend more time with them though – because as I said, they’re so much fun. Their arrival has been one of the highlights of 2010 for me.

Cooking