22nd of January - Finishing the Pond!

Putting the last roll of logs onto the side of the pond.

Measurements were very accurate - we needed that 6th roll.

Some of the aquatic plants have stated to look a bit more at home in the pond.

We will be looking closely for signs of life and growth in the next few weeks.

Proudly sitting on the edge of the new pond - just the landscaping and the bog garden to go once the portacabin has been demolished in the background.

17th January - Making bread, mushroom ketchup and kale juice!!

Today was pretty busy, we made quite a few different things using herbs and other garden produce.

 We made some fougasse bread today and flavoured the bread using rosemary and thyme from our new herb garden,  We also used chili peppers which we have been drying  for the past few weeks.  We also have one jar of our sun-dried tomatoes left from our summer tomato glut.

Here we stretched the bread dough and added the different flavours before kneading the dough again to evenly distribute the herbs, chilies and tomatoes into the bread.

We also made some chili and cheese soda bread using our dried chilies.

Here are our fougasse (not sure what the plural is?) on the left they are awaiting proving, with a bit of olive oil and some rock salt.  On the right they a baked and are cooling.

Chili and Cheese soda bread and all our baking packaged up ready to be sold.  

We decided that making and selling bread was a good way to make a bit of money for our Garden Project.  We are trying to have a bit of  money which can be used to pay for vets bills if any of our hens need to go to the vets.

Today we also had a go at making mushroom ketchup - which is a condiment which can be used in cooking, a bit like Worcestershire sauce?   Mushrooms are diced, salted and left for 24 hrs, then mixed with shallots (some from our garden), cinnamon, peppercorns and a few other spices and cooked for an hour.

We also had a go with a juicer today.  This is some of our kale which has been growing in our garden, we have both green and purple kale.

 We put it through the juicer, the juice was kind of an interesting green colour, the purple kale made dark brown juice.  We also juiced apples and root ginger too,

 The finished juice was a light green colour, and much to everyone's surprise was actually really nice!

We also cleaned and prepared some of our turnips and swedes to sell.

Picking the turnips

Time to pick the turnips which were planted out a few months ago.

Some of the tops were a bit nibbled and eaten by something, but we managed to harvest quite a few.

 The question is what to do with a box full of turnips?

A bed of garlic, which looks good.  We have plans to use this to make a batch of garlic infused olive oil later in the year.

Giving the hens a really good clean out.

And our first visitor to the new pond!  There was great excitement at the news that there was a duck on the pond - its a shame that it was a yellow plastic one!

Edging and planting the pond.

Today we continued with the RHS pond project.  The pond survived all the bad weather over the Christmas holiday.  Today we started edging the pond with some rounded logs.  The logs came in a roll and had to be cut to fit around our pond.  Our students got to do some practical maths, measuring the right length for the side of the pond.

Some webbing was stapled onto the back of the log roll to keep them together while they were cut with a saw.

More cutting.  We will use the off-cuts in our outdoor oven - which is our next RHS project for the Spring term.

The logs were then attached to the outside of the pond.  We had to be very careful not to puncture the pond liner.

We also started to put the aquatic plants back into the pond - hopefully they will have survived and will show some new growth in the spring.

Putting some irises back into the pond.

It was pretty cold putting the plants back into the pond.

Almost finished, just a bit more edging to put around the back, then a bit of landscaping which we will start after the mobile classrooms have been demolished.