It's a short life for a meat chicken

This seems a long time ago now

Six months does not seem a long time for a table bird to live before it makes the journey into the freezer. Before I became a smallholder I definitely would have questioned why a bird couldn't enjoy a longer life before that life was taken for our culinary pleasure.
That was until I finally plucked up the courage to dispatch some of our older cockerels. They were tough as boot leather!
Add to that the fact that cockerels if let grow too long will become aggressive to each other and ungentlemanly to the hens.

Suddenly a touch of reality strikes home. These birds are not pets. They will live for six months and that's it. So the best I can do is give them a good life.

Three Ixworths and a Muscovy duck

Until this year our meat birds have been Ixworth chickens, a traditional breed, and Muscovy ducks. We didn't feed them any different to the other birds, for they all lived together. The Muscovies grew to a good size but the Ixworths were mostly leg with slithers for breasts.

The Ixworth trio when we had them.

Smart birds, but not a lot of breast.

But it gets more complicated. Six month old birds would be considered slow-grown. Commercial hens will be ready in 6 weeks. Over the years this age has come down dramatically. At the same time slaughter weight has risen equally dramatically. Since the 1940s, slaughter weight has doubled while slaughter age has halved.

Graph taken from Compassion in World Farming document

Now there is so much that I find abhorrent about intensive poultry farming. But the age of the birds is, as I have discovered, not quite so straightforward. The birds probably have no expectations of how long they will live, but would certainly prefer to have space and freedom while they are alive.

We recently reared some chicks taken out of a highly intensive system. Their rate of growth was astonishing, as was their ability to eat and drink vast quantities. But at least these birds were able to live the life of a truly free range chicken until they reached slaughter weight. I would genuinely say that it wasn't overly cruel, though they were abnormally big-breasted and by ten weeks old some were quite waddly. None went off their legs, though they would have if left to grow even heavier. A couple spent some time apparently gasping as they got older. Maybe this was indicative of heart problems or being just too big and misshapen.

Anyway, my conclusion was that provided they were slaughtered before they got too heavy, although their life would be short we could offer them a reasonable life. But I did feel that genetic 'improvement' had gone a little too far.

Our next meat birds, the ones we have just slaughtered, came to us as one day old commercial broiler chicks. They come through a friend and don't even have a breed name. In fact they are a bit of a mish-mash. Most pure white with thick yellow legs and bright red combs, but some clearly mixed with traditional brown hens and a couple specked with rogue black feathers.
They grew much quicker than I had anticipated and took me unawares as they suddenly reached a good weight. I had to hurriedly take them off growers pellets and put them onto finishers (for growers pellets contain medication so require a withdrawal period). They were ready for slaughter at 12 weeks or 84 days. I was very happy with these birds. They did not seem out of proportion. They were healthy birds, it's just that they grew much more quickly than the traditional breeds we had previously tried to rear for meat.

And so I feel we have found our meat chickens. Their short life is nevertheless a good one, far removed from most of their cousins in intensive systems (and I include minimum standard so-called free-range in that).
There are some big benefits to them having a short life too. Feed costs are lower, there is less demand on housing and the ground can be rested more. But there are limits.
The European organic standard gives a minimum slaughter age of 81 days, which I would say is about right for today's fast growing birds. Anything which reaches table weight considerably before that is probably too genetically manipulated to have a comfortable life, not to mention the conditions it is kept in to maximise profit and the expense of welfare and taste.

Keeping Chickens for Meat

29th March 2018
I am keeping a diary of the progress of Ewe 0004 and her lamb, but I am going to publish it all at once when I know what the outcome will be. As you can tell, we still have her but her future is unclear.

For now, meat chickens.

Ixworths
We have a trio of Ixworth chickens from which we have been hatching eggs for the last couple of years. We have a conveyor belt going, 18 eggs into the incubator, from which typically 12 have been hatching. We rear them for the first four weeks indoors in an old hamster cage under an electric hen, a heat pad under which the chicks can take shelter.
After four weeks, the next batch of eggs are hatching and need the electric hen. So they go into the garage in a brooder ring, a giant Correx circle. Heat comes from an overhead heat lamp.
When they are ready, they go down to the main chicken pen, but in their own small compound until the other chickens have got used to them and they are big enough to go free range.

This has been pretty successful for the last couple of years, but to be honest we have been getting a lot more leg meat than breast. Now I like legs, but I like a bit of breast too!

This left us in a quandary. Perhaps the only way to get a bird with a decent breast is to be cruel and raise something that is so inbred that it has heart problems and can't stand on its own two legs.
If this were the case, then maybe we should accept the Ixworths as the best option or stick to Muscovy ducks for meat instead.

Industrial Chickens
I refuse to call these anything else. Chicken production is not farming, it is an industrial process and it is not pretty.
Four months ago we took on a dozen chicks which had come from a unit. These birds are bought in as day olds and reared 50000 at a time until about four weeks old, then they go off somewhere else to be further fattened up. But they are not destined for roast chickens, they are for processing. They are given as much food and water as possible and as little exercise as possible. High mortality is an accepted part of this.

The birds we got did not profit the unit they came from. They were taken into a school to show the children and then could not go back into the unit because of biosecurity.
I was curious as to how they would fare if reared alongside our other free range chickens.
They are now 18 weeks old and getting big. So far there has been nothing cruel about keeping them. Yes, they eat a lot and drink a lot, but as long as they are encouraged to roam and look for their food then they don't just sit there. They have legs like tree trunks and are clearly very big-breasted. Their growth has been much quicker than the Ixworths too.
In fact, they look ready to go now. If they get much heavier they do look like they might struggle, so we will probably cull a couple of them quite soon and see just how much meat is hiding under those feathers.

'Commercial' chickens
With our industrial chickens almost ready to go in the freezer and with spring upon us (though you wouldn't know it), we needed to think about 2018's plan for meat chickens.
Friends of ours have been going through a similar process of trying to find the right meat birds and each year buy in day old chicks. These are of no specific breed, but instead have a number assigned to their strain.
Our friends have been happy with these 'commercial' chickens so far, so we asked them to get some in for us this year.
And so today they arrived. Here they are.

For the next four weeks we will have a noisy and occasionally smelly front hallway.

Chicken Fried Lice

Sunday 22nd October 2017

Rounding up the meat birds

***Warning*** This post concerns itself with the slaughter and processing of chickens for meat. It's up to you if you choose to read on.

While we were in animal moving mood, some of the Ixworth chickens have now passed 24 weeks old. Time to move up to the stables ready for...

24 weeks may not sound like a long life, but commercial chickens are kept for as little as 7 weeks.

In fact Sue was talking to a chicken farmer recently who rears meat birds for Aldi and Morrisons. They are reared inside and they are used for 'processing'. They go off at 4 weeks old!

That's why we choose to rear our own birds.

Whilst the economics of this are clear, the ethics are much less so. It's not how long the chicken lives that gets me, for I am not sentimental about it. But it is the quality of their life. As little exercise as possible, as much food as possible and bred to produce so much breast meat that they can hardly waddle around, many succumbing to lameness.

In order for our birds at Swallow Farm to have a longer life we have to sacrifice the large breast. Ixworths produce much more leg meat instead. We could keep them longer, but the danger is that the meat turns tough and the skin goes rubbery. Besides, we do have to take feed costs into account and as the birds grow larger they take up more and more housing space too.

Anyway, back to moving the birds. Catching them during the day would be a nightmare. Ixworths are naturally quite a wary bird, especially once they have seen one or two of their mates being caught and carried away. So instead I pick them out of the chicken house once they have gone to bed. They are much more docile then although they still manage to shuffle to the impossible to reach corners. I managed to catch ten this way. The other two I caught by surprise the next morning.

While I was doing this, Sue was cooking up and straining crab apples ready to make crab apple jelly and toffee apple jelly.
There's always something to do here on the smallholding.

Monday 23rd October 2017
A day of disgustingness
We rear our chickens thinking ahead to killing day, for killing and plucking, gutting and butchering takes quite a while.
So the eggs go in an incubator about 7 months before a school holiday.

We have become very efficient at this process now. We don't relish it but it has to be done if we want to eat chicken.
I do the killing. dislocating their neck using the broomstick method. This is quick and humane and pretty much fool-proof.

One of the meat birds ready to be plucked

The bigger birds which we will have as a whole roast chicken we dry pluck, but this is fiddly and not practical for all of the birds.
The rest we dunk into a huge pan of water. Temperature and dunking time are important. We dunk for 40 seconds at 61 degrees Celsius. After this, the feathers virtually fall off. The reason we don't do this for the best birds is that it does slightly spoil the appearance of the skin.
Any birds not being kept for roasting are jointed (Sue's job), vacuum packed and frozen.

To do ten birds took us a long morning. (Two got lucky and went back to the chicken pen to grow on a bit more)

As I often say, smallholding is not always glamorous.
As if killing and processing chickens is not unglamorous enough, we had two extra irritations to cope with today. Sometimes the chickens have a few lice on them. They don't seem to show any distress, but obviously it's better if they don't have them. The dunk and pluck method kills them all quickly, but when we dry pluck some of the lice choose to crawl off the chicken and onto the plucker! Sitting down in the living room when the job is done and feeling lice crawling over your skin is not nice, not nice at all.

Obviously the welfare of our birds is important to us, so I have now built a covered dust bathing area for the chickens, with a plastic paddling pool filled with sand and diatomaceous earth, which is the best product for killing all manner of creepy-crawlies.

There's more disgustingness though.
For the Muscovy ducks which are inhabiting one of the stables (because they are persistent wing peckers) had a guest to dinner today. When I opened up the stable door, there was a rat brazenly feeding on their grain. We expect the odd rodent or two after harvest time but I don't like to see then in with the poultry during the day. This is one of the reasons why I don't like to keep the poultry indoors.

So the Muscovies have been moved out. How we cope with the wing-pecking I haven't worked out, but separation is not really an option any more.

I Need To Plan A New Hatch

We like to rear a few birds for the table, aiming for a couple of geese, half a dozen turkeys, a dozen Muscovy ducks and about 30 chickens a year.
Rather than buying in chicks or young birds, we prefer to hatch our own eggs and rear the birds slowly to table weight.

But this year we have been experiencing problems! Things have not gone as straightforward as we would have liked.



Geese
So we have ended up with one gosling from four nests. Goslings take forever to feather up, but ours is now starting to look like a small goose rather than a bundle of down, so fingers crossed it will make it safely through to Christmas 😀😋😋😋

The turkey hen on her new nest

Turkeys
Having sold quite a few young poults, we then experienced a couple of unexpected losses which has left us with three young birds. I don't know if it is just coincidence, but the survivors are all the silver strain birds.
However the turkeys had a Plan B, and seemingly a Plan C, for quite unexpectedly one or more of them carried on laying and a month ago the old hen started sitting. The eggs were due to hatch a few days ago - I say 'were' because, as you've probably guessed, something has gone wrong.

The old eggs - why did she abandon so close to hatching?

With just two days to go the hen moved off the eggs, but she has moved onto a clutch which mysteriously appeared in the other house. Inconveniently this means that if they hatch it will be when we are away and someone else is looking after the smallholding. It also means the turkeys won't be ready for Christmas, but that doesn't bother us since we have plenty of non-festive recipes for turkey!


Ixworth Hens
We keep a trio of Ixworth chickens (that's a male with two females) for the sole purpose of producing eggs for us to hatch and rear as table birds. We aim for three consecutive hatches in the incubator which gives us three batches of chickens following on from each other at monthly intervals.
We have been experiencing problems here too. For our hatch rate this year over four hatches has only been about 40%. One hatch was disastrous, producing just three young birds. Our most recent hatch produced ten birds out of 24 eggs.

We need to isolate the two hens so we can work out whether the problem lies with the cockerel or with one of the hens. My suspicion is that one of the hens is producing virtually no fertile eggs.

Elvis with her flock of growing ducklings last year.

Muscovies
Last year we hatched ten Muscovy eggs under Elvis, our broody hen. She did a brilliant job and we soon had ten fast-growing ducks. They have proved to be a very tasty addition to our diet and they produce plenty of meat too. After this success we obviously decided to follow the same plan this year. But Elvis had different ideas! She is getting on a bit now, being the only one left of the chickens which came to us with the smallholding when we purchased it, and just didn't go broody early in the year.
Instead though, one of the Muscovy ducks sat on her eggs (they reputedly produce lots of young without any intervention). Muscovy incubation is a long drawn out affair, 35 days as compared to 21 for a chicken. That's a long time to wait  to discover that none of the eggs are going to hatch, but that's what happened. Eventually I had to kick her off the nest. The eggs proved to be mostly fertile but had clearly perished at various stages of development.

No sooner did I kick this girl off the nest than another started sitting. Another chance. But I am sad to report that exactly the same has happened again.
Yesterday I took the eggs from under her and all nine eggs had fully grown young dead inside.
I need to look into why this is happening.

One very pi55ed off Muscovy duck

But I have hatched another plan. For Elvis eventually went broody. With my ducks sitting I collected a dozen Muscovy eggs from a friend and placed then underneath her. She has now been sat tight for ten days.
We will see what happens. Priscilla, daughter of Elvis, has also gone broody up in the stables and is now sitting on five of our own Muscovy eggs too.

Priscilla has to budge over as

one of the Cream Legbar hens

lays an egg in her nest

And finally the new brown Muscovy duck which we purchased earlier this year has not come out of her house for a couple of weeks, so maybe it will be third, fourth and fifth time lucky.

We will either have a lot of duck to eat or none at all. Let's hope for at least one successful hatch.

Tales of the turkey clan and more

After a straight drive of almost 12 hours I arrived home from North Ronaldsay very late at night, so there was no time to pop in and look at the four new turkey chicks (known as poults).

In the end three female turkeys ended up sitting together on three loosely organised clutches of eggs. We weren't sure how this would turn out. The geese engage in this same sort of communal nesting and they are pretty useless at it! Last year we just had the one turkey hen who sat tight on her clutch and successfully hatched all 18 of her eggs.

So nothing could have pleased me more than to find one of the turkey mums roaming around with ten fluffy little chicks in the morning. More than that, there were five more under one of the other hens.
However, the mums were struggling to keep control of their inquisitive chicks, who were getting trodden on by an overly attentive stag. It wasn't really his fault, as they were buzzing about everywhere.
A couple of hours later and all the new poults were up and about, with two hens trying desperately to keep an eye on them all. Sadly a couple had not quite made it cleanly out of their eggs, but still there were thirteen chicks, each and every one a bonus for us.



My intention was always to bring them down to the warmth and security of a stable, but I didn't want to intervene before all viable eggs had hatched out. In the end though my mind was made up for me when the Muscovy ducks started picking the poor chicks up by the leg and shaking them around, perhaps confusing them for frogs.
I hastily collected them all into a bucket, captured one of the hens and carted them all off into the stables. I transferred the Muscovies to the chicken pen too, all except the duck who is sitting tight on  her own clutch of eggs.


The rest of the smallholding is flourishing too, with the lambs going from strength to strength and the mangetout in the polytunnel yielding a sizeable harvest.



I put some of the turkey poults up for sale and had sold eight of them within a couple of hours. This would leave us five for meat later in the year and the sale would make a contribution toward the upkeep of the turkeys.

Two days later three more fluffy little bees were trying to follow mother turkey around down in the turkey pen. But the last hen had come off her nest which still contained another dozen or so eggs. I think these were quite possibly laid after the turkeys started sitting, so whether or not any more will hatch is doubtful.
Anyway, I scooped up the three chicks and introduced them to the rest in the stable. The hens were quick to take them under their wing. The other hen went straight back onto the nest, but as I write several days after this event there have been no further hatchings.


Back in the house, the first clutch of meat chickens have been growing rapidly. They really do get very messy and smelly and soon stop being cute. It was time for them to go into an outdoor building under a heat lamp. During the day, in dry weather, they go into a giant cage on the lawn.
The geese are sitting tight on their nests too. They should hatch any time soon - it's difficult to know exactly when they started sitting. The two Embden ganders stand guard and make entry to the stables a little precarious, but they know I am the boss! Very occasionally one of the geese comes off the nest to stretch her legs and take a dip.

The laying hens seem happy now they are outside. I have been letting them into the orchard (still a fenced area and part of their controlled range, as restrictions are still in place for a little while longer) and it is lovely to watch them able to behave so naturally.

Further down the land the ram lambs have been causing me headaches. One of them learned to put its head down and sweep aside the electric fence with its horns. It didn't take long for it to teach another the same trick. So I would find them on the wrong side of the fence, happily munching away at my trees. A short chase and straightening up the electric fence would sort it out, but then one morning they were back on the wrong side of the fence within minutes. Time for them to go in the old pig pen, now well on its way to becoming a fully grown nettle bed. The Shetland sheep don't eat the nettles while they are growing, but I ventured in with the weed thwacker and they were more than happy to munch at the wilting stems.

Self-shearing can make you look

a bit silly for a while!

Their Houdini instincts mean that they will be going on their final journey a little earlier than originally planned, along with the third ram lamb who seems to have escaped the attentions of his castration ring. This of course makes things complicated when it comes to grouping the sheep.

They will probably go off in midsummer, once they have fattened up on early summer's fresh grass (assuming we ever get some rain and it starts to grow a bit faster). I have decided not to buy in extra sheep for fattening this year. The grass is slow to grow and I want to give the pasture paddocks a  chance to grow a bit lusher this year and to give longer breaks from grazing.

Wool Day inspired Sue to get back to the peg loom.

Bird Flu - The Latest

It's that sign again. Another proclamation from The Ministry.

The poor chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys have now been confined in the stables for longer than I can remember. Supposedly this is to protect them from catching bird flu which is occurring at a higher rate than usual in wild birds.
The Prevention Order was originally issued in early December, then extended until the end of February. Communication from The Ministry was poor and haphazard at best and the wording ambiguous.

Cases of bird flu have continued in the wild and on poultry farms, despite the precautions, so there was never much hope of the order being lifted at the end of February. After all, the wild ducks and gulls which visit us in cold weather would not have returned to the continent yet.

There are several big problems if the incarceration continues after 28th February. Firstly, free range producers lose their free range status.
For us here at Swallow Farm, the geese and turkeys will be laying soon but without sufficient space it is very unlikely they will manage to rear any young. That will be two of our big meat sources gone. On top of this, the geese will be getting much more territorial soon and we just don't have enough space for two protective ganders and five broody geese.



And so we got another announcement a couple of days ago. At least they are giving us time to plan this time. The country has been split into High Risk Areas and the rest. In the High Risk Areas, the housing order will, unless there are significant changes, remain in place until at least the end of April.
These HRAs seem to generally be within 10km of the coast or to follow the main rivers and Washes. Unfortunately for many of our friends, the marshes around The Wash and the flood areas around the Nene Washes and Ouse Washes remain High Risk.
Fortunately for us we do not fall into one of these areas, which means that in theory our birds can go out in 18 days time.  But it is not that straightforward. Some of the looser wording of earlier orders has been tightened up and there are hoops to jump through, which is why we have been given some time to prepare the ground, quite literally. We will have to take biosecurity even more seriously.

Good news for some of our poultry.

Being outside the High Risk Areas does at least give us some options.

Overall the chickens have settled in to 'barn life', though I'm sure they will eventually be happy to get outside and enjoy their natural surroundings and behaviour. The ducks are faring quite well, though they would definitely be much happier outside.

The turkeys and the geese have learned to co-exist, but I get the distinct impression there has been quite some strutting to establish a pecking order. But these are messy. They crap everywhere and spill their water as soon as it is topped up. I have to move in slow motion in the stable to avoid panicking them too.
The geese will be laying very soon and will need enough space to make dry nests. The old turkey hen laid outside last year and won't be able to find anywhere to sit on eggs within the cramped stables.

On top of all this, the ewes will need the middle stable from mid-March.










The Plan
The size of protective netting for outside has changed from small enough to keep out all birds and their droppings (totally unrealistic) to 50mm mesh so that snow does not bring everything down. This means that we should be able to give the turkeys their own small outdoor range, along with the Ixworth trio who are currently living in a very small coop. We have to risk assess the land, remove standing water and take every measure we can to keep wild birds out of the area.

The geese will move into the smaller stable but will be given access to the wide central path down the land. This will give them fresh grass, fresh air and room to spread their wings. We should be able to arrange it so their water is not in the same stable as the nests they will build, so hopefully we can still get a few goslings.

As for the chickens, the meat birds will be going very, very soon. This will release one small stable. Our plans to start incubating more Ixworth hens are up the swanney as, for the moment at least, the last thing we need is more poultry to house.
Priscilla (daughter of Elvis) has been living with her two chicks in another small coop, but the male chick is now 24 weeks old so we will be 'waving goodbye' to him too. Priscilla and her young hen will come up to the stables, where all the laying hens will move in to the larger stable vacated by the geese.

We will try to come up with a plan to let them outside, if only for short periods in a very limited area.


So that is the immediate future for our poultry. Let's hope things improve soon.

A winter week on the smallholding

A fairly typical winter week on the smallholding.

Sunday 8th January 2017 - Poultry, Pruning and Pickling

The chickens have settled into the stable now

With the poultry inside and the sheep short of grass at this time of year, everyday feeding and watering takes quite a while. The geese and ducks empty their water buckets as soon as they are filled up, spilling it all over the stable floor, and I can't believe how much the geese eat. They don't usually get fed, having to survive on grass and a few roots thrown to them in the winter.
It is however, a good chance to worm them properly as I know exactly what they are eating. So today all the poultry (apart from those which will shortly go for the table) went onto medicated pellets. I used to buy the worming powder and mix it in with their usual food, but I have discovered you can pay someone else to do this for you! It works out about the same price and is so much more convenient.
The sheep are getting supplementary hay at the moment but their food of choice is sugar beet, which I buy in dried pellet form and leave to soak before feeding to them. They are getting a mangel wurzel a day too, which goes down very well indeed.

It was a lovely day today and blackcurrants were on the menu. Not the harvesting menu, but the jobs menu. They needed pruning and I planned on taking some cuttings too.
Sue and the dogs worked alongside me outside today, which was lovely. I got Sue sowing my mangetout seeds to go in the polytunnel before showing her how to prepare the blackcurrant cuttings.

Blackcurrants

- Freshly pruned and mulched

With those jobs done, it was back to the chickens, for some of the meat birds would be meeting their maker today. I get the hangman's job, not a nice one but a necessary part of self-sufficiency. I have said so many times before that nothing annoys me more than people who will only touch unidentifiable meat in frozen cubes.

The dispatch is quick and humane. As these chickens were to be jointed, we dunked them in hot water before plucking. 40 seconds at 160 Fahrenheit. This makes plucking ten times easier than doing them dry, but you don't get quite such a neat finished product.

Darkness comes all too early at this time of year so I retired for the evening. A nice cold beer and a warming bowl of Curried Pumpkin Soup did just the job.

With eggs back on the menu after a two month strike by the chickens, Sue tried her hand at pickled eggs. They will be ready for tasting in three weeks time.

Monday 9th January 2017 - Transplanting cuttings

By necessity I stayed on the farm all day, waiting for the parcel redelivery I had booked. It never came. Nice one Post Office!
It was another beautiful start to the day, though it wasn't long before the showers started and by the end of the day I was battling against sticky mud.

I started by taking flowering currant cuttings, though there wasn't much young growth to use. So I cut one bush right back. It should produce plenty of new material from which to take cuttings next winter.
Next on the jobs list was to move some willow cuttings which I set down last winter. They had done well, very well. In fact, they had done so well that I couldn't get the roots out! I had to remove all the cuttings around them so I could get at them with a spade. And so it was that I ended up transplanting all my buddleia, dogwood and privet cuttings from last year before I could tackle the willow.

As the sun set, I quickly cut a few handfuls of oregano, which I steeped in oil to make, surprise, surprise, Oil of Oregano. I shall be using this in a spray this year to try to avert the dreaded leaf curl which afflicts my nectarines and my mirabelles every year.
Unlike copper based mixes, it will not poison the soil and can be used even when the plants are in leaf. Whether or not it works we shall see.

Tuesday 10th January 2017 - Survived the dentist!
Another beautiful start to the day, only spoiled by the root canal treatment I was due for at midday. My dentist looks after me but it still doesn't make for a fun day.

I decided to drop in at my bulk potato stockist on the way home - I buy a few sacks for members of the Fenland Smallholders Club - but the gates were closed and there were no cars. On further investigation online when I got home, it seems their parent company may have closed the cash and carry side of the business. It is a shame when small local companies get incorporated into larger companies and then, several years later, quietly disappear.

My new year's resolution is to do a lot more baking and cooking using our produce. The visit to the dentist left me feeling a bit beaten up, but I didn't want a bad start to my resolution.
Anyway, I managed to bake a loaf and cook up a huge dish of Parsnip and Chickpea Curry. Later in the week I will knock up a cream of chicken soup, using the old hen we dispatched at the weekend, and a potato, leek and hock soup from the offcuts of a Serrano ham I purchased for Christmas.

Wednesday 11th January - Snow in the forecast
With snow forecast for later in the week, I took the chance to take down the brassica netting. The chickens and geese are in so, hopefully, there's not much to threaten the greens. Pigeons tend to avoid our garden.

Thursday 12th January - An Uneggspected find
Look what Sue found inside the old chicken when she was cleaning it out. These are eggs slowly forming in a queue.
The rest of the country got snow today. Somehow we escaped it.

Friday 13th January - A Recipe Refound
The day passed without incident, not that I am superstitious.
I did, however, find a recipe sheet which I thought lost. It was from my days as a vegan, over 20 years ago, and included my favourite recipe for home-made mincemeat, as well as a couple of other favourites of mine. I was well chuffed.

Saturday 14th January - A rat, more pruning and a new stretch of hedge
A rat has moved into the polytunnel. It is, I'm afraid, not welcome and now that I have moved the ducks out I have put poison in. Today the poison had gone down, so hopefully it won't be long before the rat is no more.



There was more pruning to be done today, redcurrants, whitecurrants and gooseberries. I do these on a different day to the blackcurrants as they are pruned to different principles, fruiting best on two year old wood and older. If I did them on the same day I would get confused!
Gooseberries are treated in exactly the same way as the currants, except they are considerably more prickly and time-consuming. I got ten of them done, but that's not even half of them since I took cuttings and drastically increased the number of bushes I have.

I took delivery of 25 bare-root Bird Cheery whips today and planted them in a double row. They should take well and will hopefully be providing shelter and food for birds in a couple of years time.

And lastly... I finally got round to boiling up the old chicken for soup. I boiled it a good long time, in case it was tough. The meat just fell off the bone and the juice I turned into stock.

So that was that. A typical busy winter week.