More gardening

I let the new hens out this morning for the first time - they seem very settled:

Henry being uncharacteristically chivalrous

Luckily they don't seem too keen to wander off on their own and are quite happy to stay near the run.  They have bonded with Maud who is still a bit of a softy:

Maud gets carried around...a lot

So given it was Sunday and I had no butter with which to make cinnamon buns, I left the children cooking bacon (I didn't have bread either so it was the not very traditional Sunday breakfast of bacon in tortillas) whilst I went out in to the garden. I have a great new garden planner app on my iPad which tells you when to harvest things and apparently my potatoes should be out of the ground right now! - their exclamation mark, not mine. Unfortunately when I planted the potatoes I forgot that last year's borage would self seed and I couldn't actually see the potatoes:

Spot the spuds

After a cup of tea and a bit of digging I had my Red Duke of Burgundies out of the ground and a bucketful of borage too:

The borage did rather better than the potatoes but they are very tasty. So with a clear patch of ground and new things to plant I sent in the team of professional pest controllers:

...and then out with the hens and in with the brussels sprouts and carrots :-)

They're under their cloches for their own protection from both cabbage white butterflies (which are currently demolishing my verbascums) and the chickens, but they are there and will hopefully provide us with some ruby red sprouts later in the autumn.