Congratulations Brutus its a Chick!, and another and another and.......

'Daddy!'

Brutus became a father for the first six times on Monday and the little ones are doing well.

We hatched six of our eggs and have a brood of beautiful fluffy chicks.  Nanny Southwellski has named them all as Spot, Zorro, Amber, Easter, Patch and Copper.

It was a stressful time watching them 'pip' and then break out of their shells, Spot arrived first and the second chick arrived as we were at the official opening of Wideham Farm Equestrian Centre.

Bless their little fluffinesses!

Nanny Southwellski then had concerns that they might have different birthdays as the hours of Monday passed and the last chicks still had yet to arrive.

However all was well and the final chicks arrived while Nanny was talking to her sister Julie in New Zealand.

So technically Julie knew about them being born twelve hours before they arrived.  Oooh too confusing!

We have to do it all again this weekend with 5 Buff Orpington's due!

Spot

It's 4 days since they were born and their rate of growth is incredible, it is possible to just sit and watch them for hours on end, indeed one of us does!

Coco is very gentle with them and knows how to 'call' them by scratching her fingers on the floor.

There will be many many more photos of them on Nanny Southwellski's Flickr page just google 'Southwellski' and it will be there.

One of the many cucumbers!

On a more gardening centred note we are experiencing a glut of cucumbers, be nice to have a few ripe red tomatoes to go with them and perhaps a crisp bit of Pak Choi as well.

The tomatoes are still not ripening either indoors or out although I am sure one of them is starting to change colour.

 I have even hung a ripe banana in amongst the tomatoes, just to give them a little idea of what they should be doing.

Chilli? - put a coat on then!

Our peppers are looking very healthy and we also have the first of our little chilli's making an appearance (its in the middle of the photo).

The bell peppers are growing as you watch them, and we have yellow and green ones, not sure if any will turn red, if they're like the tomatoes probably not.





Outside is quite busy too with the pumpkin plants dying back we can see the pumpkins themselves and we have twelve football sized fruits just starting to turn (tomatoes take note).

We also had two cucumbers as well, not sure where they came from, although Coco was a nifty one for pulling the labels out of the seed trays.

Nanny Southwellski is not sure if she likes pumpkins or not so we will try one and if not the rest can go on sale at the front of the house.

Our weeds are doing exceptionally well especially the nettles, but there is a reason I am not pulling everything up wholesale, well two reasons really.

The reasons are Julie Bruton-Seal and Matthew Seal.  They are the joint authors of 'Hedgerow Medicine' a book about just that, remedies from the plants (and weeds) we find in and around our gardens.

However, unlike many other tomes relating to the topic, this book not only tells you the properties of each plant but how to harvest, prepare and use the remedies. I will expand on this in later posts.

Finally, I should say a big hello to Tony and Linda in Tasmania, and to Julie in New Zealand of course.  Who'd have thought Grandpa Southwellski's Garden would go global!