It’s January, which means we’re already thinking ahead to the next gardening season. Despite the recent wet weather, Nikki managed to get garlic in the ground, plant some spring bulbs, and upgrade the chickens with a new feeder designed to stop vermin from stealing their noms. Here’s a quick chicken and garden update as we look toward the months ahead.
These informal, unscripted vlog-style videos are a chance for the team to share some of the fun things happening in their respective gardens – and are filmed without a teleprompter in a single take.
Presenter: Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield
Camera, Edit & Color: Vi Horton
Art & Animation: Erin Carlie
Producer: Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield
Read the full transcript here
Hey everybody, happy Sunday! I hope that whatever you are and whatever you are doing, you are safe, you are well, and you are with someone you care about who also cares for you.
Things in the garden have been slowly progressing. We are now officially in 2026, if you missed my chicken and garden update last week. Happy New Year, I hope you are well. This is my first official chicken and garden of the year, and you’ll be pleased to know that progress has been made.
First up, the greenhouse. I think it was a couple of episodes ago I noticed that we had some holes developing in the greenhouse. I’ve actually reached out to the manufacturer of this greenhouse, because my wife made this bit, and I said, “Hey, can you sell me a new cover?” I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m hoping that I hear back reasonably soon because I would like to put a new cover on for the start of the growing season.
And officially, the growing season has already started, but for the most part the garden is still dormant. So coming through the garden right now, and trying not to hurt my ankle, we’ve had so much rain still. We had this very short dry spell just before the Christmas holidays, and my wife was expecting my Christmas present to arrive. She gave me strict instructions not to look outside if it arrived, and if it did arrive, not to look at it.
She went out to see a friend, and it arrived. It was on the doorstep, and I had to sort of go around it and pretend that I didn’t even acknowledge its existence, tried really hard not to look at it. I managed to keep it a bit of a surprise. For those who are interested, it was a Saunders Machining Plate for my Carvera Air. This is very nice.
But I came out, and I came out because I wanted to plant things. First up though, sprouts, yeah whatever, broccoli, yeah whatever. I’m going to plant this year’s broccoli very soon, I think. I think that’s the way around it.
It’s been very warm for the most part. It’s kind of a bit nippy today, but I mean you can see I’ve got no sleeves on and I’m not super cold. We’ve not really had many frosts. I think we’ve had maybe three or four frosts this winter. By now we should be getting sub-zero temperatures every day, sub-zero centigrade, not Fahrenheit obviously.
But I have put my garlic in. So you can see here some of the garlic keeps being dug out because critters. But you can see the garlic is supposedly in the ground, and I’m just going to replace that bit there. But for the most part the garlic is in the ground, and people keep pushing it up because people are underneath apparently. Look at this.
I have put extra garlic in. This has been a continual problem for me in the past. I’ve had issues with critters kind of helping themselves to my garlic. So I’m just going to pop them down. I come out every day and just make sure that everything is covered up. As soon as the actual garlic starts to properly grow, this won’t be so much of an issue. But right now my elephant garlic is being assuaged by critters in the ground.
The other thing is that over here, my onions that I thought had all dug up last year have started to grow again. So if you look over here, some of these onions, quite a few of them in fact, have started to come up again. So I’m just going to leave them for a bit. I might harvest some of them, but I need to come in here and clear all of this out.
And I need to decide if I’m going to let those go to seed and collect the seeds, or if I do something else. I would love to know your opinions. But if you look over here, we’ve got all kinds of things growing, and I think that might be a garlic. I think this might be garlic. Let’s have a look. Yep, that’s garlic. So I have a volunteer garlic from last year that’s decided to grow up. Yep, definitely garlic.
So I need to tidy up a bit and get on with that. But there’s been some other good stuff happening, and for that we’re going to go over to the chicken coop.
Now, as you might know, we’ve had some issues with the chicken coop. Namely that people have been helping themselves in the chicken coop. I just noticed a bit of woodworking stuff that snuck out. This is the thing I 3D printed for my wife. Must have gotten her vacuum cleaner, because he just put the sawdust down.
But we got the old grandpa’s chicken feeder. And this is the first time we’ve used it with the hens, and they seem to be doing really well. So how it works is they stand on it, and then this bit goes up. Now you can see I’ve got socks on with my sandals. I don’t care. You probably already knew that.
But they stand on it and it goes up. And the benefit of that is that it stops every other bird and critter from figuring out a way of getting into the coop. Predators can’t get in, but mice and little sparrows and things can get in, and they’ve been helping themselves. So they’ve been getting through these little gaps at the bottom.
Now I do need to put some fresh soil in here, probably some pebbles as well, and to clean that up. But that’s going to be hopefully a really good way of lowering the amount of money I spend on chicken feed. Old Grandpa’s, I think, is a Kiwi company.
And I spoke to several people, asking people if they had any ideas on how to help minimize food wastage, and everybody said Old Grandpa’s, including Kate Wollan-Elliott, who has one for her hens. And so that’s what we ended up doing.
And also, I’m aware that last week we were talking about the chicken coop and potential changes to it. I would love to make videos about that. So if you want to watch them, I’m going to make them.
But we still don’t have any eggs yet. We’re still egg-free. We had one egg, I think in November, that made me go, “Oh, we’re going to start having eggs again,” but no, they haven’t come back yet. Which is fine. They’re old birds. They’re like six, seven years old now, so I’m not going to complain. Five or six years old, I think, is probably their age, thinking about it.
But yeah, so I’m not going to give them a hard time for that.
But anyway, I would love to know what’s going on in your garden. Have your bulbs come up yet? I would show you some of the daffodils that have come up at the side of the road and also at the front of the house, but that area is a complete mess and I’m not going to show you them.
But suffice to say that my daffodils are now coming up, and some of my other bulbs are coming up because of the weather. It’s been so warm compared to normal. That worries me slightly, but it also means we should get a head start on the growing.
The problem is it’s been so damp that the ground is just sodding wet, and that could cause us problems further down the line.
So anyway, let me know what’s going on in your garden. And before I go, we’re going to change our introductions and our closes a bit this year because the old credits weren’t really working.
So I have a task for you in the comments down below. Tell me about your garden. What’s going on right now? And also tell me how long you think it’s going to take my chickens to get used to Old Grandpa’s feeder.
It’s a three-stage thing. So the first stage is the lid is fully up, so the hens go in and figure it out. The second stage is where it currently is, where it’s partly up and they have to put their foot on it to get it fully up. And then the final stage is fully down, and then they have to put their foot on it to open it up and gain access to the food.
How long do you think it’s going to take them before they’re ready for that? So I switched it over to stage two a few days ago, and it’s recommended a couple of weeks. But I think my hens are above-average learning curve. Let’s just leave it at that.
So tell me in the down below how long you think it’s going to be before they’re properly using the hen feeder.
And I will see you this time next week.
Also, thanks to the amazing list of people scrolling by. They are the reason why this video exists, even though I know that the chicken and garden updates don’t get a huge amount of viewers. That’s the reason. They are the amazing people who help support us and keep paying the bills, because YouTube definitely isn’t anymore.
Let me just leave it at that. If you want to join them, you’ll find links down below to join us on Patreon. You can send us Ko-fi, you can send us an old-fashioned check. You can also join the channel on YouTube, although that doesn’t really help us because YouTube takes a massive cut.
Anyway, thanks for watching. Thanks to the amazing Patreon list. I’ll see you this time next week.
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