Hi! Sorry it's been a while. I'm an evening blogger, but my evenings haven't been very free, so I tend to want to go straight to bed after work.
What can I tell you about? Well, today I went to the wonderful Body Shop, and this nice lady called Kate helped me out, she really knows her stuff about skin. I think it's great when people can be so clued up on something, anyway she recommended Aloe Vera for me, as I've started breaking out, I'm soon to be 18 and it's only just started, i thought i was so lucky. I love that it's something natural recommended to me, that way you can be sure it's gonna be good for you as it isn't created in a laboratory with loads of icky chemicals. The other skin care ranges they do are jojoba, seaweed and tea tree oil, though I'm forgetting some, and they're all for certain skin types. www.thebodyshop.co.uk/page/skincareconsultation
She also told me I was lacking in Vitamin A, and that carrots are a great source of these. Yay a perfect excuse to start growing more carrots.
Growing.... ahh the good life, I can't wait till next year when i will be living with my beau. I did some more dreaming today about how our garden will be, we're gonna have at least 10 chickens, so our next project will be to build a run to house them, about 7 metres squared.
I also learnt about crop rotation today, so we're gonna have at least 6 raised beds.
There are 5 specific groups of vegetables, and the idea is that a group should not return to a patch of soil for at least 3 to 4 years. This is because certain crops require certain nutrients from the soil and if the same crop is planted back in the same location the next year, most of the nutrients will already of been used up. When the crops are rotated, the soil has a chance to replenish itself.The 5 groups and the general order they are rotated in are - Onions, which include your leeks, shallots, and garlic
- Potatoes & Tomatoes
- Umbellifers which are root vegetables, covering carrots, parsnips and celery
- Brassicas which are your cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, radish and swede,
- Legumes, which are peas & beans
It is then recommended you rest a bit of this land after by growing what is known as green manure on it. Rather than leave the soil bare, and for all the nutrients to be drained and swept away by weather, plants that improve or protect the soil are grown, so that when vegetables are grown again the next year, the soil will be replenished.
That all sounds wicked no? I can't wait to start, and then i found out about companion planting, which intrigued me even more. It's the idea that planting certain vegetables together can benefit them. The most common example is that of the Native American's "Three Sisters". This is a bed made up of sweetcorn, beans and squash plants. The sweetcorn offers a stem for the beans to climb. The beans set nitrogen into the soil which benefits the sweetcorn and squash and the large leaves of the squash act as a living mulch keeping moisture in the soil, preventing weeds from taking over, and keeping the sun from the roots of the sweetcorn.
It's definitely something I'll look into.
I have pretty much exhausted myself with all this information in one blog, so all I can really do now is show you how big the chickens got!. 
Benjalina is on my boyfies head, and Peggy has a brilliant pose on his shoulder! I love them to pieces!
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