Baby animals everywhere I turn

29th April


The first of our goslings was born this morning. We deliberately took most of the eggs off the geese this year so when they started sitting they weren't on many eggs. Of course it's more complicated than that, as there are currently 4+ nests on the go and the white geese seem happy to share eggs and nests. Anyway, for a while yet entering the stables will be a rather tricky manoeuvre.



30th April

Victory to me!!!I managed to get all the lawns mowed. This Herculean task is most satisfying when it goes well, but at this time of year it'll need doing again in a few days time. Fortunately the geese help with some of it, though they do make a bit of a mess sometimes.
The turkey chicks have started to hatch right on time. We'll give it a day to allow all the chicks to escape their little calcium caccoons before moving mum and chicks to the safety of a stable. This will protect them from the mishaps (getting lost, falling into ponds, encounters with angry geese... the possible list goes on and on), the elements and the unwelcome attentions of predators.

Meanwhile the first Ixworth chicks we hatched are now two weeks old and doing well.












In the evening I meandered through the young woodland I planted when we moved here. I was searching for self-seeded hawthorns. These little plants are amazing, avoiding the ravages of rabbits and hares and refusing to be outcompeted by the swards of grass. They are filling in the spaces nicely. This is natural succession happening right here. In all I managed to find and mark over 60 saplings!


1st May
And so into May. Today we returned to the Green Back Yard in Peterborough for the first of a three day basket-making course. The weather was gorgeous and I could have got plenty done back on the farm but occasionally it is important to have a bit of time out so the farm work never becomes a chore. I'd forgotten everything I ever knew about basket weaving but fortunately some of it came back to me. Progress was slow as Renee's attention was richly in demand, but by the end of a few hours I had completed the base, put in the side rods and started coming up the sides. I brought some willow home with me to do some homework ready for next weekend.

When we got home we decided it was time to move the turkey hen and her new family. While I gently picked her up, Sue scooped up all the babies - 11 in all! One egg had been dislodged from the nest halfway through incubation and one egg hadn't yet hatched. Apart from that we had 100% success. (The unhatched egg chick never did make it out of he shell, but when I opened it up there was a fully grown chick inside). Such a shame that Terry was not around to cherish his new family.
All settled well into the stable I'd reserved for them.


Unfortunately for Rameses our bottle-fed lamb this meant that there was no longer to be a stable for him at night.
The two ewes had been letting him into the shed with them during the day so I was confident he would be warm and protected at night.

Continuing with the baby animals theme, the gosling had its first excursion outside. This single yellow ball of fluff had a security entourage of three white geese. The other two have stayed on their nests.

First Hatch of the Year

It's that time of year. Our poultry seem to have nests all over the place.
Two of the geese are sitting on nests in the stable, effectively making it a no go zone for a few weeks. The others have therefore made new nests to lay in.

Our girl turkey started sitting on 1st April and is still there, in the flower planter at the front of the house. She may have timed it wrong for the tulips to still be open when her eggs hatch, which should be the end of this month.

Elvis doing what Elvis does best.

Elvis has gone broody again. She has been surrogate to many families over the years: chickens, ducks and even guinea fowl. So this time we have shut her up in the high rose coop with ten Muscovy Duck eggs. If they hatch she's in for a big surprise.

Then just yesterday Elvis's most broody daughter Priscilla, was found sitting on eggs on the hay bales in the stable where Rameses, our orphan lamb, goes at night. So we quickly swiped those eggs from under her and replaced them with a dozen eggs we had been collecting from the Ixworths, which will eventually give us some meat birds later in the year.

And so to the first hatch of the year, not a very successful one but it's a start. Remember that Crested Cream Legbar which started sitting in the most unlikely of spots under a pile of wood right by the garage door? Well her eggs were due to hatch last Wednesday. Somehow the 12 eggs we put under her to start had been whittled down to 7. I don't think it was rats and I almost wonder if, after sitting tight for so long, the laying hens don't occasionally snaffle one of the eggs, maybe the ones which have something wrong with them. But that's just conjecture.
Anyway, come Saturday I decided that something must have gone wrong. Maybe the cockerel which we got in was firing blanks. I put my hand under the hen, suffering several sharp pecks, and pulled out an egg. The intention was to crack it open to see whether it had ever been fertile. As I pulled it out though, I saw a small hole in it and heard it cheeping loudly! I quickly placed it back under her.
Later on there were two fluffly white chicks poking their heads out from beneath mum's feathers. We resolved to leave the new family until evening and then move them to the safety of a coop.
But that plan went awry when I found one of the chicks huddled under a lump of concrete several metres away from the nest. We resolved to move the family there and then. I picked up mum and left Sue to collect any chicks she could find and any unhatched eggs. It was a smooth operation and we were quickly shutting the lid on their new coop.
When we looked yesterday, there are only three chicks (one dead, probably the one which had wandered away). It's a start though and as long as some of the other hens go broody we will have a production line of birds going through the spring and summer. The two unhatched eggs (the seventh vanished) contained fully grown chicks when I opened them. What a shame.


Now I know this all sounds rather cute, but we have quite enough poultry birds at the moment, so all these new hatchlings are destined for the table. Poultry meat production is the one thing we've not been very successful at yet, hence the Muscovy Ducks, the Ixworth chickens and us keeping back a pair of turkeys.

The only poultry birds I've not mentioned are the Cayuga Ducks and the last remaining white duck. These live in the vegetable garden and spend most of the day snaffling slugs. They give us a couple of eggs a day at this time of year, but they are not productive enough to use as meat birds. We never got round to dispatching the drake who was born last year and it has caused trouble for us this last week as his hormones have been on overdrive. Drakes don't give the girls an easy ride at the best of times, but a couple of the ducks have really been suffering.
So this morning there was only one thing to do. Duck for dinner tonight!
This may seem a rather violent end to a cute post about chicks, but if you could see how he treated the girls you would have chosen exactly the same outcome. It is essential as a poultry keeper to be able to thin out the males as there are always more of them than are useful. No comments please!!!

More about Ixworths

The Ixworth chicken breed was unsurprisingly developed in the Suffolk village of Ixworth. Perhaps, more interestingly, it was developed by the same person, Reginald Appleyard, who developed the Silver Appleyard duck. He was clearly quite a talented poultry breeder, if a little unoriginal in thinking up names for his breeds.
The aim of developing the Ixworth was to produce a bird which not only laid a good amount of eggs but one where the cockerels grew quickly a made good meat birds. Today we call this an all-rounder.
The breed was finally developed in 1939 and became popular in war time and post-war Britain.

But then came the arrival from America of mass-produced food which unfortunately included chickens. Meat breeds were developed which reached kill weight in half the time. Eggs were produced by different breeds.
By the 1970s the Ixworth breed was almost gone. The public had got used to cheap, tasteless white meat from mass produced birds and insipid eggs from battery farms. Convenience and cheapness had taken over from quality and any concerns for animal welfare. This applied to pretty much all food. You can understand it after times of austerity and with lifestyles changing so quickly, but the trend has unfortunately carried on. There is slightly more awareness about the issues now, but overall people have become totally distanced from the origins of their food. I know somebody in their mid-twenties who didn't even know you had to dig to get potatoes out of the ground!

One good product of the 70's was The Good Life. Good old Tom and Barbara showed us another way. (Was that too may goods?) I don't know how much this influenced me in my youth, but there is now a significant minority of us who prefer to balance the conveniences of the present with some of the values and qualities of the past. Of course some of us are more stuck in the past than others.

And so re-enter the Ixworth. This once seemingly perfect all-round breed was thankfully not forgotten by everybody and is now making a comeback. It is still a rare breed, but is gaining popularity among smallholders.

I managed to get a cockerel from a different source to my two young hens to avoid weak, interbred stock. This trio of birds have now been introduced and are getting along very well. Once the hens reach point of lay, I will start collecting their eggs, as normal. But come next spring I will be placing their eggs under any willing hens in the main chicken pen, with the aim of hatching them out and raising them for meat.

Poultry merry-go-round

The two white hens have moved to the turkeys' pen, the turkeys have moved up to the white cockerel's stable, the white cockerel has moved to where the four cockerels used to live and the four cockerels have moved to... the freezer!
All this happened a week ago. For as a smallholder I seem to be constantly moving animals from place to place.

The two white hens are in fact Ixworth hens and when they are big enough they will be laying eggs to be hatched under our broodies to be raised as meat birds.

This cockerel will be a more permanent resident
than some of the others, so we'd better think of a name for him.

The white cockerel is slightly older and came from a different home. He is an Ixworth too and his job is to look afer the two girls and make sure their eggs are capable of hatching.
So there we have our breeding trio. They will be kept in a separate pen to the other chickens so their offspring are pure. Hatching them under broodies will not only keep the broodies happy but it saves Sue and I having to look after them inside. And when they hatch they can wander around with all the other hens until they are big enough to go in the freezer, for Ixworths make an excellent meat bird.


The turkeys came to us a few days old, which meant keeping them in a box with a lamp for heat until they had enough feathers to go outside, which coincides with the time that three of them are pretty much too big to fit in the box comfortably. It also unfortunatley comes several weeks after they begin to create quite an odour! They go out during the day for a while first, like hardening off plants, and then they went into their own pen down with the chickens.

The turkeys in their hardening off pen.
 (and Sue) (and Boris on the outside, when he was little)

But turkeys like to roam, so they quickly learned to hop the fence and wander around the farm. This home too was a temporary one for them, since again they quickly get too big to be put away every night in a chicken house. They barely even fit under the door. But it gives them a chance to get used to their surroundings before they move up into the stables, where they can roost safely every night and free-range during the day. In the evening I simply lead the gangly creatures back to their stable.

The turkeys explore their new accommodation

That brings us to the four cockerels. The law of Sod states that when you hatch eggs there will always be plenty of cockerels. But the law of Sod also states that you will have to keep them quite a while until you know for sure they are cockerels. (The Crested Cream Legbar male chicks were different to the girls, but they didn't make good meat birds and the young cockerels were very 'boisterous'.) So you end up with macho young cockerels upsetting the balance of the chicken pen, challenging the older cockerels and harassing the females. Therefore we separated four of them off a while back until they were big enough to ... well.... let's just say that their moving on was well timed for the great poultry merry-go-round. Their dispatch was swift as Sue and I have become pretty good at this now and Sue soon had them processed and in the freezer.
Five years ago we were city folk and wouldn't have had a clue how to do all this. We have moved on a long way since then.

As I write, the Ixworth trio are now together. For a couple of days they were in adjacent pens so they could get used to each other but when we opened the door, they settled together instantly. The hens follow the cockerel everywhere and he takes care of them.

Meanwhile one of the black ducks has disappeared. To be more precise, once in a blue moon she appears for food early in the morning before wandering off to disappear again. I think she has hidden herself on Weasel Ridge somewhere. If all goes well, she will appear one day soon with a line of ducklings waddling along behind her.
And on the same theme there are now only ten guinea fowl on the fence at nights. I found the other two yesterday, hunkered down in the comfrey bed. Let's hope they do better than last year, when between all of them they eventually only managed to rear two young. If only they would incubate earlier in the year so the chicks weren't so vulnerable to Lincolnshire's early autumn weather.