Chocolate Duck Makes Bid For Freedom

A while back one of our Muscovy ducks mysteriously disappeared. It was about the same time as we lost our drake Cayuga duck. Whether it was a natural predator or they fell victim to wandering too far and didn't realise that not everybody's dogs are duck-friendly I do not know.
Anyway, there is no happy ending. There is no surprise reappearance a few weeks later.

A new chocolate Muscovy duck

This left us with our drake Muscovy and two females. As well as their eggs, the Muscovies give us birds for the table as each year we hatch some out under broody hens. Their meat is just about the tastiest of any animal, bird or mammal, that we keep.

So when a friend said they were thinning down their Muscovy flock I decided to replace the chocolate brown girl we had lost. Sue picked her up late one Saturday afternoon and when we got her home we put her straight into her own house in the chicken pen overnight. The hope was that in the morning she would emerge, meet the other Muscovies and hang about with them.
But no!
She flew straight over the fence, into the field and then across the road. The first I knew of this was Sue waking me up to come and retrieve her.

I seriously thought we had no chance. Muscovy ducks are very strong fliers and one more flight would take her too far away. If she got on the pond at the end of the track opposite we would have no chance of getting her.

Fortunately the ground was solid so we could skirt right around the field and approach her from the other side. She flew straight back over the road.
More careful approach and she started heading back toward the farm. I kept just far enough away to encourage her to keep moving without spooking her into flight. The smallholding she came from did not offer her the opportunity to fly freely so her wings were now tired from the novel experience of her long flights. But it was going to be a long waddle across the field, over the dyke and back onto the smallholding.

We eventually got there and I managed to persuade her to go into the cage with the Silkie hens.

Next stage of the plan was to move a couple of the other Muscovies in there with her so she could make friends with them and hopefully learn the ways of our smallholding.


After several nights refusing to go into a house, she has finally learned from the others and follows one of them in at night. She has also learned not to panic when we go into the cage. We'll leave it another couple of weeks before she gets another taste of unfenced freedom.

Know Your Onions - Get Ready, Get Sets, Go!

Every year I go to Limmings in Holbeach and I purchase one bag of Red Baron onion sets, one bag of Stuttgarter onion sets and one bag of Sturon onion sets. Put simply, sets are miniature onions which grow into big onions.
This gives me a whole bed full of onions. They are simple to grow - just plonk them in the ground about mid March and keep them weeded. That's it. The worst problem I have ever encountered is a few of the onions bolting if the weather is warm and dry.

This year however Limmings has shut down. I could still hunt around for onion sets in other shops but it seems like a good time to try something different.

So this year I have ordered onion seeds.
The advantage is that many more varieties are available. Also they apparently are capable of growing to a larger size than those started from sets as long as they are started early.

I have six packets - Red Onion Brunswick, Stuttgarter, Sturon, Globo, Sweet Spanish Yellow and Long Red Florence. I have a lot to learn. I do know that they need to be started quite early. I also know that they can be multisown in modules and planted out in groups.



So last night I sowed 6 trays of onions. We will see what happens throughout the year.

Just in case things go wrong, I have also purchased a small amount of onion sets which were on sale as part of the Potato Day last week.

I also sowed my first rows of carrots in the polytunnel today and half a row of turnips.

Things are starting to move.

Potato day 2019

While heavy snow hit almost all the rest of the country, here in our little piece of fenland we managed to all but avoid it. But with the ground frozen for a couple of weeks it has slowed my progress in the veg plot.



That is though what the seasons are all about. As a smallholder you work with the weather patterns. We don't get snow all winter, but a week or two of freezing temperatures and the odd covering of the white stuff is what we should expect.
Anyway, I am glad we didn't get a lot of snow for it somehow has the capacity to make the ground even sludgier than a downfall of rain.

Saturday 2nd February was Potato Day, an annual event held by Cambridgeshire Self-Sufficiency Group.
For the last few years I have helped set up, getting lots and lots of potato varieties out of a van and laid out in neat order on tables. The event is held in Huntingdon but the venue has changed several times. For now it has settled into a fantastic old church in the very centre of town.
It surely has to be one of the most glamorous venues for a potato day.

As is usual I like to arrive early, get set up, purchase my year's supply of seed potatoes and get out before the place is full of Joe (and Jane) public.

There are over 40 varieties of potato to choose from. We used to have even more, but some of the more unusual types don't sell well enough to be worth buying in. They are just £1/kilo for members of the group, £1.30 for non members.
It is a great opportunity to experiment with new varieties. One year somebody bought one of each just so they could compare yields, taste and uses.

With so many types of potato on sale it can be a bit bewildering. It pays to do a bit of research and find out the qualities of each one. There is of course information available at Potato Day, but over the years I have now settled on eight varieties.
Primarily they absolutely have to be slug resistant. For some reason slugs like to munch some types of potato but not others. The other big pest is a fungal one. Blight. That's the same potato blight which caused famine in Ireland all those years ago.
We didn't get it at all last year but that was because it was such a dry year. It thrives in warm, humid conditions, exactly the conditions we are getting more and more in summer as the climate breaks down.
There are some varieties which have been bred to be very resistant to this scourge. I have grown them and their leaves did stay wonderfully green compared to the collapsed foliage of the potatoes all around them. Unfortunately though they have very little taste.
So instead I look for varieties with 'some resistance'. This usually means that they do get killed off by blight, but that for some reason it seems slower to infect the tubers meaning that more can be saved.

It is this prevalence of blight nowadays which necessitates purchasing new seed potatoes every year. If we didn't get it I would probably just use last years potatoes to start off the crop each year. This is the reason why 'volunteer' potatoes, those which you missed harvesting the previous year and appear in last year's bed, need to be removed straight away.

So, my eight varieties:
Earlies - Arran Pilot and Red Duke of York.
Second Earlies - Kestrel and Charlotte (Kestrel is the variety chosen by the Grow Your Own group for everybody to grow this year so we can compare results. Fortunately it is one which I grow every year as it grows very well here. I did used to grow Blue Kestrel successfully too but it is no longer available at potato day)
Maincrops - Desiree, Valor (a new one I tried last year, very firm flesh which stores well and has a lovely taste), Cara (a good all round white potato. I would prefer the organic growers' favourite Orla but that one is not available).
Speciality - Pink Fir Apple - very late to form tubers so be prepared to get none if blight comes early. But in a good year I get sacks full. It is a distinctive potato which is great boiled or whole in winter stews. It lasts well through the winter and we are often still eating it when the first of the early potatoes is ready in spring.

I have planted some of the Arran Pilot potatoes in the polytunnel where I can protect the emerging leaves from frosts. They will give an early harvest of new potatoes.

Arran Pilot and Kestrel potatoes being chitted

The rest are in the conservatory (aka plant nursery come potting shed at this time of year) chitting. This is the process where you lay them out in egg boxes and encourage them to start sprouting. In theory this gives them a head start once they are outside in the ground.
They can' just go straight into the ground outside as any frosts will likely kill them.
I think the effect of chitting is marginal but it's just something you do, almost a custom which marks the beginning of the potato growing year.

No digging, plenty of lugging!

With Spring hurtling towards us, there is plenty to do to get ready for sowing and growing. The ground has been pretty much frozen for a while now, so I have used my time to do some of the more physical jobs on the smallholding, mainly moving piles of stuff from one place to another.

Firstly an offer of woodchip rapidly developed into collecting 6 trailer loads of the stuff over several days. It's not heavy, but that's still a lot of shovel fulls to load and then unload at this end.
Considering how much I shifted, it seems to have gone nowhere. I do at least now have some nice woodchip paths between my new no-dig veg beds.
Not all the beds are ready yet as there are leeks and brassicas still in the ground holding up my redesign of the bed system, so the last couple of trailer loads are piled up waiting to go to their new home.

While the trailer was on the car I used the opportunity to collect a couple of loads of straw bales. We are fortunate that a couple of very local farms still do conventional small bales which are far easier to handle than the massive agricultural scale ones which mostly go straight off to be burned for energy these days.
They are still only £1 per bale here, which is ridiculously cheap compared to other areas of the country.

I've continued moving compost onto some of the new beds too. The asparagus bed is looking particularly swanky. I hope the asparagus plants appreciate my efforts and throw up a forest of lovely spears this year.

Final job, and one which Sue excels at, was to clear a year's bedding from the goose stable. We run them on a deep litter system and have a good clean out once a year just before they begin laying, which traditionally happens on Valentine's day (give or take a couple of weeks).
This heady mix of straw and goose poo goes by wheelbarrow straight down to the soft fruit patch. I had to hurriedly prune all the currant bushes before it went down.
I pile it around the base of each bush and then the chickens come along and spread it everywhere!
This practice seems to reward me with ample currants. The blackcurrants especially thrive under this system.

While I was down in the soft fruit patch, I finally finished

cutting back the summer raspberries.

 

I laid cardboard on the grass (thanks Big Dug) and covered it with 

goose bedding. This will create a new bed into which I intend 

to plant more blackcurrant bushes which I raised from cuttings two years ago.