A grumpy look back at the festive period

There was an almost total lack of Christmas in our house this year.
Anyone who knows me will know quite how grumpy I get at this festive time of year!

It wasn't helped by the boiler breaking down three days before Christmas day, the same day that one of my tooth crowns came out embedded in a wine gum. Unfortunately my life doesn't stop for Christmas, though everybody else's seems to.
Fortunately we managed to get somebody out to fix the boiler (the tooth has to wait till 2020 but at least it's not hurting). On the negative side, the boiler went wrong again on Christmas Eve.
So we spent Christmas huddled in one room, thankfully with woodburner keeping us toasty warm.

Lots of snuggles and the woodburner kept us warm and cosy for Christmas

Christmas Day itself gave us gorgeous weather. We spent a good couple of hours clearing out some of the veg beds as I put my slowly recovering back to the test. Then it was a short drive to take the dogs for a walk along the River Welland in Crowland while the rest of Britain tucked into a gluttony of turkey and listened to the Queen's Speech.

This meant that we didn't encounter a single other human being while we were out, which was just perfect.

My faith in the human race (well, at least one of them) has since been slightly restored as the boiler man came out the day after boxing day and spent a good couple of hours getting the boiler up and running again and didn't even charge us.


I have been starting to sort my seeds for next year and planning the next rotation of the veg beds. We have a week of dry weather ahead of us which will hopefully sort the ground out a bit too, as Arthur doesn't like walking on the mud or getting his belly wet wading through puddles.

Two days after boxing day I braved the shops - alien territory for me. I have a trip coming up in February and the only clothes I have are old clothes for outdoor work, certainly not suitable for where I am going.
It was all too much for me and we managed to do a whole retail outlet in under an hour. Nothing purchased though.

The penultimate day of the year saw me down in London to have a camera down my throat, part of ongoing surveillance for a genetic condition.
Fortunately they gave me lots of sedation so I don't remember a thing, though the results weren't great and I have to go back again soon. A final kick in the teeth from 2019, which has not been one of my better years. Let's look forward to 2020 and hope that things go a little better.

The final day of 2019 was spent shopping again, this time in Peterborough which has a lot more to offer than Spalding.
Everything went well and I bought everything that I needed, which is fantastic as it means I probably won't need to go back to the shops until late 2020 at the earliest!

High levels of Ractivity

I do my very, very best to work hand  in hand with nature, but just sometimes our human activities tip the scales and create an imbalance.

There is an all too common belief amongst a vast majority of Britain's landowners - by which I mean primarily farmers, but also gamekeepers and, to be fair, smallholders and gardeners - that anything which comes onto our land without being invited is to be killed.

Be it rare birds on grouse moorland, foxes, hares, moles or deer, birds or beetles, there seems to be an uncontrollable urge to get rid.

I am no idealist. I realise that the countryside is managed for our needs. But there is a balance to be struck, for Britain's wonderful wildlife was in most cases here before we were and deserves a place to live and thrive.

But some creatures are, in certain circumstances, without a doubt intolerable and have to be treated as pests.
Slugs for one! They are an important part of our British fauna, but in the context of a vegetable plot, a manufactured environment, their population can cascade out of control. I don't use slug pellets but rely on night time forays and the day time duck squad to control numbers.

The pest I want to focus on today is RATS.

I did once sit and watch a colony of rats in a woodland setting and they were quite charming, but in the context of a smallholding they are not quite so desirable.
They are not helped by their long, bare skin tails and their protruding incisors which make them look, well, ratty.

When we moved onto the farm there was a huge rodent problem. The previous incumbents had done just about everything they could to make the place as welcoming to rats as possible.
It didn't take us long to get the situation under control. For most of the problem can be sorted by limiting food sources, clearing debris so rats have to cross open spaces and casuing lots of disturbance as rats are neophobic (they hate anything new).

But living amongst arable fields which are usually wheat and keeping poultry, we are always going to have to be on our guard against rats moving in. Why don't we want them?
For starters, they carry some very nasty diseases. They are destructive too, gnawing their way through anything if there is food on the other side. Worse than this, they will take young poultry and will actually eat young birds alive as they roost at night. We lost several ducklings this year which were in an enclosed stable as a rat managed to squeeze under the gap in the door.
The rats can be a pest in the veg garden too. If they get to the sweetcorn before it ripens they can take out the whole crop in a couple of nights. This happened this year.

For quite a few years we relied on the targeted use of poisons. Whenever we saw evidence of rat activity (I call it ractivity) we would fill up bait boxes and within a week the problem would usually disappear.

This year we had an excellent talk on pest control at the Fenland Smallholders Club. What struck me most was the move away from a reliance on poisons to a more traditional approach of trapping alongside good practice as discussed above.
So I invested in five Fenn traps and made boxes to house them to protect against catching non-target species such as hedgehogs.

The fen traps do their job very well. 

I don't like killing any animals, but this is necessary.

Unfortunately our switch in approach has coincided with an unusually bad year for rats. It's not because of the change in approach though, for this increase in the rat population is being reported by all the other smallhodlers I know. It is far more likely down to an exceptionally mild winter last year.

The traps are working, but the rats are clever.
They were avoiding passing through the wooden tunnels (with trap hidden inside) when I placed them in their runs, so now I am placing bait on the traps too. I am just using the same food I feed the chickens, a mix of grains and pulses. I make sure there is no chicken food left at night, which forces the rats to risk that which is in the traps.

As you can see the rats often manage to get the food without treading on the traps!

But we are catching enough.

I am catching on average one rat every day or so, but they have learnt to get at the food without treading on the trap. Instead they burrow underneath so that the food drops through. Clever little rascals.

A couple of dead rats placed out for 

the crows and owls

When I do catch a rat, I leave it on a gate post and it mysteriously vanishes.  I think the crows and the barn owls take them.
This is the good thing about not using poisons, I don't have to worry about harming other wildlife.

I think the current very, very wet ground will cut the population down and a nice cold winter would not go amiss. In the meantime, we are keeping abreast of the problem and I am sure we will see a return to lower levels of ractivity soon enough.

Puddles provide birding bonanza

We have plenty of surface water this year, or as I like to call it, our seasonal lake.

Sunshine has been a rare commodity during 2019. Things were looking great up till June, but then everything went rapidly downhill. Rain, on the other hand, has not been an issue.
This resulted in a poor growing season. Not only did crops not ripen, but beans and squashes didn't get enough sunshine to dry and store properly. Blight did its worst on the spuds and tomatoes too.

Autumn and early winter have been wetter than ever and without warm winds the water takes an age to drain away. We are not too muddy quite yet, but underfoot is slippy and entrances to gateways are getting a little sludgy. Grass growth for the sheep has been poor too and we are already giving them hay and moving them frequently to protect the ground.

Sue moves the sheep on a particularly dreary day

At this time of year and in these conditions, cold and crisp weather from the East is much more welcome than wet and windy from the West.

There has, however been one big benefit of bepuddled farmland. The fields around the farm have been heaving with wild birds. Gulls and corvids (the crow family) have been around in far greater numbers than usual, as have waders such as lapwings and golden plovers. Wild swans have been finding it to their liking too.

Whooper Swans on the flooded stubble by South Holland Main Drain

All this has resulted in some excellent birdwatching to keep me busy while my back has stopped me doing anything on the smallholding.
In just a few weeks I have enjoyed three new species for the farm list and a run of excellent records.

A Green Sandpiper, just the second record in 9 years, 

stayed a few days in the dyke.

Following on from a brief dusk fly-through, a Tawny Owl was heard hunting in the new copse I have planted. A few nights later I heard the familiar hooting from across the fields. Then early in November came a Rough-legged Buzzard hovering by South Holland Drain. Unfortunately it disappeared as quickly as it appeared but it was a very welcome first record for the farm.

Then a strange owl call one evening from the old ash trees just outside the farmhouse. I eventually matched it to a call described as the xylophone trill of courting Tawny Owls. Excellent stuff, the first time I had ever heard this call.

Next late one afternoon  at the back end of November I could hear wild swans calling to each other while I tried to round up a sheep that had barged through the electric fence. Light was fading before I could make my way over to the flooded fields by the South Holland Drain, but there were an unprecedented 190 wild swans. The biggest flock here previously was about 50. A distant egret looked quite tall for a Little Egret, which are now regular in the winter, but light was fading way too fast to make out anything more.

This Great White Egret hung around for 4 days.

First thing in the morning the swans and the egret were predictably all gone. Several groups of wild swans flew through during the morning, but better was to come. Late morning the egret re-appeared along one of the dykes. My initial suspicions proved correct as there stood a magnificent Great White Egret.
This bird is following in the footsteps of Little Egret, establishing a breeding toehold in the country and becoming much less rare over winter. But I was still very, very happy that one should choose to spend a few day in the neighbourhood of the farm.

Within a week there was another new bird, but frustratingly the Mediterranean Gull which called loud and clear as it flew over the smallholding could not be seen in the thick fog which enveloped us all day!

Rough-legged Buzzard, Great White Egret and Mediterranean Gull are all scarce birds which I half expected to eventually see here.
But the next new bird for the farm was altogether less expected.
All through November the pools and wet fields have been frequented by wild swans. These have the potential to attract wild geese too. The previous two records of White-fronted Goose have both been in with the swans. There was once an exotic Black Swan too.
On 2nd December there were good numbers of swans over by South Holland Drain so I took the dogs for a late afternoon stroll. I took my binoculars with me so I could scan through the swans and work out how many of the more diminutive Bewick's Swans were in amongst the Whooper Swans. I noticed two small grey geese lurking at the back of the flock. I could just see their heads and necks poking above the stubble.
But with the light fading and no telescope, I couldn't quite work out what they were. It did cross my mind that two Tundra Bean Geese had been with wild swans in Crowland the day before. South Holland Drain continues all the way to Crowland.
I ran back to the farm and opted to drive round to where the geese were. It took an age to relocate them as they had dipped down into a dyke, but I managed to get them in the telescope and they seemed to indeed be Bean Geese. But just at that moment they were disturbed by hare coursers (sadly not that unusual in the fields round here).
I was left frustratingly lacking definitive views, but I was pretty sure what the geese were.

The next morning there was much disturbance in the area from shooters. I left it till mid morning to search for the geese again and was relieved to find them in almost the same spot as yesterday. I was now sure they were Bean Geese, but needed better views. Over the course of the next hour I skirted round the fields and gently approached along a dyke. The geese were hidden from me by reeds, but this gave me the opportunity to sneak up on them. Every few yards I raised my binoculars hoping to see them before they saw me.

Tundra Bean Geese

In the end I managed to get them. There, just 50 yards away, were two Tundra Bean Geese. It had been hard work securing good enough views to really clinch the identity. This was one goose species which I thought I would never see in the area. At any one time in winter there are usually only a handful of birds in England.



Frustratingly the geese were not viewable from the farm though. The heads of the taller Whooper Swans could just be seen over the banks of South Holland Drain, but no chance of the geese for the farm list.

Mid afternoon I decided to give it an hour or so viewing from the end of our land. This was more in desperate hope than anything else. If the geese flew I would surely see them, but this was very unlikely.
Then a miracle happened. After a few minutes I noticed a couple of blokes in high vis jackets walking along a nearby footpath. This footpath is regularly used by dog walkers and it seemed unlikely the geese would be disturbed enough to fly. Then I noticed these two were carrying shovels. Remarkably they headed along the dyke which led straight to where the geese were. Apart from hare coursers, I had never seen anybody walk along here before.
The tension rose. Would the geese fly? Would I be able to see them? The swans all took flight and then, above them, two grey geese! Unbelievably the two Tundra Bean Geese led the swan flock right towards me, giving an amazing view. I could make out all of the plumage details to identify them in flight. They even called their distinctive call as they flew right over the farm
I watched them head eastwards with the swans until they were dots. What a result!

There have been no more new birds for the farm since, but just to be able to watch large flocks of lapwings and golden plovers is a joy. This is what the fens might have been like before they became intensive farmland.

Lapwings and Golden Plovers

There is a chance of other waders taking advantage of the standing water too. I have already seen a flock of 6 Snipe and an unprecedented flock of 20 Redshanks (previously only two records of single birds).

Back On Course

At the end of August I developed a bad back. As a gardener, I am no stranger to the occasional back twinge, but this was different. It was disabling and just would not get better.

Eventually I made a rare trip to the doctor which resulted in me being sent a series of physiotherapy exercises to perform daily. Progress has been slow and it has led to me becoming quite depressed. Working outdoors is my joy in life, so not being able to get anything done outside has been a bit of a nightmare.
After the worst growing season we've experienced here on the smallholding, it has not been a good latter part of the year. The only consolation is that the timing of my bad back could have been far worse. I missed some harvesting and didn't get any winter crops in, I wasn't able to clear old beds and sow oats as ground cover, but overall it won't take too much to get back on track.

Finally in the last couple of days I have been able to think forward. I have been clearing canes, cutting back old growth, covering beds with cardboard and even moving a little compost onto some of the beds. And with this comes renewed hope. 2019 is almost behind us and in some ways is best forgotten, but 2020 is a clean slate.

Clearance begins and beds are being covered and protected ready for the 2020 growing season. 

As you can see, it's all a bit wet at the moment.

But 2019 wasn't a total loss. I have learned a lot from my experiments with no-dig growing and from using volunteers on the farm. The enforced break was hard and I was beginning to lose heart, but a couple of days of gentle work outside have left me feeling enthused again and my back seems to be holding up as long as I am careful with what I do.

It's that time of year when plans and preparations are made for the coming growing season. On this day last year I planted garlic cloves.
As you can see from the puddles, that task will have to wait a while this year.

It's been very wet lately. So when we get prolonged rain there is quite simply nowhere for it to go.

It doesn't stay like this for long though. It will gradually seep down through the ground.