A New Year Clear Out

Saturday 30th December 2017
Poultry thinning
The Muscovy ducks are so big now that, despite recently waving goodbye to four of them, there is barely room in the poultry houses at night. They are eating me out of house and home too. They are now 20 weeks old, they have had a good life, but it is time for them to go.
The final batch of Ixworth chickens which we breed and raise for meat are going too. Ideally they would have grown a little more, but we really need to thin down our stock levels for winter.

So today was operation catch. We tried to take them out of their houses in the morning, but several escaped past us. Most were successfully transferred up to the stables though and the last few we caught when they went to bed in the evening.

Tomorrow we are demonstrating how to dispatch and process the chickens and Muscovy ducks (and probably a turkey too). When we began smallholding we really didn't know how to do these things and there is only so much you can learn from YouTube. None of the smallholders in Fenland Smallholders Club (FSC) seemed confident enough to demonstrate, though they should all know how to humanely dispatch a chicken as you never know when you will need to do this.

In the end it was Mick from Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group (CSSG) who showed us 'the broomstick method'. (Don't worry, it does not involve chasing a bird around and clobbering it with a broom handle!)
Anyway, we were very grateful to Mick for sharing his experience. It turns out he used to be active in FSC before a rift and that it was he who had previously shown many of our club members how to do the deed. What a shame they weren't so willing to share their knowledge with the newest batch of novices.

So this is precisely why I offered the opportunity for people to come along and join in on our poultry dispatch day. We plan to teach them humane dispatch, wet and dry plucking, gutting, skinning and jointing. How much we have learned since those days when we knew nothing!

In preparation for the day we needed to have some 'here's one I prepared earlier' birds, so four chooks and four ducks got their marching orders today. It was good to run through how we will demonstrate and explain tomorrow.
Plucking the ducks was, as ever, the task which took the longest. They have endless feathers in endless layers.

We finished plucking the ducks just as darkness began to shroud the stables. Then it was inside to make a couple of loaves of bread for our guests to dip in their soup tomorrow.





Sunday 31st December 2017
What better way to end the year than a good communal activity. We had four people come along to our poultry processing day, which was a good number. Everybody got to have a go but nobody had to wait too long.
Hopefully they all learned loads and will be more confident chicken keepers because of it.

Sue explains dunking for wet plucking

A bit messy this one.

We are drying the chicken and duck feet. Apparently the dogs will love them. Waste not, want not.

And that, as far as 2017 is concerned, is that.

I have big plans for 2018.
We at Swallow Farm wish you a Happy and Fulfilling New Year.

The Luckiest Turkeys... for now

Wednesday 27th December 2017
The Deluge The final figures will probably show a slightly drier year than average. But in truth, most of our rain in 2017 has come in about twelve days. It has been a year of long dry spells, then periodically we get "a month's worth of rain" in a day, as the weather commentators say.
Just in case we were falling behind our allotted average, we had fifteen hours of constant rain last night, pretty much from dusk till dawn. Next door's horse paddock was looking more like a lake.

During the day the temperature plummeted and we now live next door to an outdoor ice rink.

Two traditional Christmas dinners in a row were very nice, but a third would be stretching it. So today I cooked up my first ever risotto, using up a small pumpkin and half of what remains of the turkey in the process. It was rather yummy and not a sprout in sight. There is a great website for turkey recipes at www.britishturkey.co.uk so the turkeys who think they got away with it when they spent Christmas day alive and well may still be in for a surprise!

Thursday 28th December 2017
The Luckiest of Turkeys
Not only have the turkeys survived Christmas, but they also have a new home. The old pig enclosure is too ramshackle now to ever hold pigs again and just fills up with nettles, presumably thriving on the enriched ground. The only animals on the farm who will enthusiastically eat the nettles are the turkeys, so this seemed like  logical place to move them to. The other advantage of this plan is that we get back a substantial lump of the orchard and the turkeys are further away from our boundary with next door. Hopefully I can let one or two out occasionally and they will still hang around the vicinity if the others remain in the cage.

The turkeys have moved in next to the trio of Ixworth chickens

The orchard is much more open now

The turkeys have settled in quickly

Friday 29th December 2017
I have been sleeping a lot lately. My guess is that I've been fighting off some sort of virus. But yesterday I had more energy. It was the first time this holiday that I have spent most of the day working outside. And today I awoke at 4am and just didn't feel like going back to sleep. I dressed up warm and headed out to the stables. The ground was sparkling and flurries of snow were falling from the sky. For we have entered another cold spell.
Main job for the day was taking Arthur to the vets for his vaccinations, but before that I wanted to clear the stable area. In a couple of days time we are showing several other people how to dispatch and process chickens and ducks and we need a tidy covered space in which to do it.