Wrap up warm

Sunday 15th January 2012

This morning's frost was a sharp one, at last. The animals' water needed a series of concerted heavy stamps with my welly heel to break through. I had to jump up and down in the pigs' trough to crack through the ice. The chickens had let themselves out already and were busy exploring new areas of the farm. I will need to clip their wings soon, as it won't be long till they're banished from the veg plot again.

I am a man of many layers - at least when it comes to wrapping up for winter. At least two pairs of thick socks, longjohns or pyjama bottoms under trousers, t-shirts, sweatshirts, fleeces, thin jumpers, thick jumpers - at times I feel as if I'm wearing half my wardrobe. But it does the trick. It takes a good while for the cold to penetrate, always fingers and toes first. If I choose the right jobs, normally lugging things around, I'm warmed up before I ever feel the cold. Unfortunately, many of my jobs at the moment involve digging, which is not happening when the ground is frozen. So today was a good day for moving some more of the haystack and mixing up the compost heaps.

Right on top of the haystack was this little beauty, a shiny, fresh owl pellet. More evidence that at least one barn owl has moved back into the area.

There's only a certain amount of lugging you can do in a day, so I allocated the afternoon to bitty indoor jobs that always get relegated down the to do list. First, the bathroom fan which has started screaming manically to announce when it comes on. Only intermittent of course, so that you can never quite be sure it's fixed. Now, I'm not so good at this sort of thing, so I generally prodded and poked about, couldn't see anything obvious, and am now hoping the problem will sort itself out before I have to start taking things apart.

Flubenvet (other worming products are available)

On top of monthly treats of cider vinegar and the occasional garlic clove crushed into their food, periodically the chickens need to be wormed thoroughly and properly. The girls work hard for us (though they don't think of it this way) and deserve to be kept healthy. Besides, egg quality and production depend on the birds' continued good health. Probably beginner's luck, but the hen's have laid brilliantly this year. Not only that, but everyone who tries them seems to genuinely rave about their taste. We will certainly never again be able to pay good money for what they sell in the supermarkets, even the guilt-free organic freerange ones taste nothing like what our girls are capable of producing.

Now this rural idyll which we are creating has to exist in the real world, and we have to think about economics. Although we are lucky enough that we can support the venture with our other work, it is important that eventually everything at least pays for itself. I reckon the food cost of our eggs is about 10p per egg. Add to this 1p per egg for the boxes (nothing fancy, the quality is in the egg, not in the packaging). The Flubenvet adds almost 2p per egg so already we're up to nearly 80p for six. That's how much you can buy them for at the farm gate round here! OK, so we only sell the large ones and they taste fantastic, but convincing drive-by customers of this so we can actually make a marginal profit is a long-term project. Luckily we have a couple of regular customers (who also return their egg boxes). As we're not exactly in mass production this means we are not now overwhelmed with eggs, although hardly a day goes past without an egg in at least one meal.

Back to the point, exhaustive internet searching uncovered the possibility of buying Flubenvet in a bigger tub (4x larger) and at higher concentration (2.5x stronger). By my calculations this is 10x the active ingredient and all for double the cost. Overall, that's 20% of the price. Quite some saving! A long use-by date, so nothing to worry about there. Just need to take extra care with quantities when mixing. At our current scale of production, I reckon that's £32 per year we've saved. Not much, but count the pennies...

Anyway, must go now. That bathroom fan is screaming again!