Dispatch Day - Down To Earth Smallholding

Sunday 17th December 2017

Bad news for the Muscovy boys

Back in early August Elvis hatched out these little beauties.

They grew quickly and for a while were a bit of a pain as they kept nibbling each others' wing feathers. But that has mostly sorted itself out as they have arranged themselves into friendship groups and go into various houses of their own choice every night.

They are now almost 20 weeks old, which is pretty bad news for them. Firstly, they are getting big and putting pressure on housing space. Secondly, the drakes will be harassing the females soon. Most importantly, their pin feathers will have grown out so plucking will be slightly less impossible now.

And so today we bade farewell to the four largest males. I pulled them straight out of their roosting house to save chasing them around the smallholding. Dispatch was quick. I always say sorry to each one before the deed.

We like to take the time to prepare the big males properly. A whole roast Muscovy duck is a very special meal. But plucking takes ages. They have three layers of feathers.  When we do the females we will just take off the breast, legs and wings which is a much quicker process.

While we were at it, one of the turkeys had an unlucky day too. I chose one of the young stags as they have started strutting their stuff recently, challenging the old breeding stag. Again I took the time to dry pluck it carefully and it will now hang for a few days. On 23rd we will be taking it over to Paul (the butcher from CSSG) who is kindly showing us again how to bone it out ready for stuffing.

Monday 18th December 2017

A glorious sunset today. These clear days leading up to Solstice provide us with some stunning skies.

It's beginning to feel a bit like Chr...

Wednesday 6th December 2017
Poultry Explorers
The monster chicks are faring well. They seem to have massive crops, which allows them to stuff in even more food at once than I am capable of! A tragic and unforeseeable accident meant that sadly we lost two but it could have been worse as I found them in time to save two others.

At this time of year I let the chickens into the veg plot and the soft fruit patch. I like to see them scratching around or huddling together under blackcurrant bushes or asparagus fronds. They can't do too much damage as there are few crops showing above the ground. If I can I like to turn the soil so they can clear it of larvae and eggs.
The geese don't get to go into the veg plot yet, as they are adept at finding root vegetables and have a liking for parsnips in particular. Instead though they get the run of the orchard while there is no fruit to stretch up and pull off. They can be surprisingly intelligent in this regard. I have seen them yanking on branches to dislodge apples clinging on for their lives.

Nice to see the three new Silkies exploring

The older hens stick closely together with Cocky

The young Muscovies are getting big now.

They give the run around every night and often just won't go into their houses.

The bigger males will be 'going' in the near future.

Thursday 7th December 2017

A Christmas gathering with good people

I wish the Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group were based a little closer to us, for they are a lovely group of friendly people. Sue and I get along to as many events as we can.

I don't do many Christmassy things, but we were keen to get along to their Christmas Get-Together. It is always worth making time to spend it with good people. There are not enough of them in the world.

Friday 8th December 2017
By the time I get back from work it's pretty much getting dark at this time of year. So I took the time to admire the sunrise this morning.

Saturday 9th December 2017

More Christmassy stuff
I don't know what's wrong with me, but Saturday saw Sue and I at another Christmas event, the Green Back Yard Christmas Fayre. I must be going soft in my old age

Maybe it's the early morning frosts and the icy, clear air going to my brain.

Before we went out, Sue put some lamb neck in the slow cooker along with a selection of our own dried beans and some of our vegetables. This type of food is just perfect for warming the soul on a cold, dark winter's evening.

I don't often do 'what we had for dinner' piccies, but here you go.

We got to The Green Back Yard in Peterborough just past midday. The air in town was somewhat warmer than on the smallholding out in the rural fens.

I certainly don't do Christmas consumerism but I did enjoy seeing some of the crafts. I got a few ideas to steal too.

A simple basketwork angel and a willow Yuletide tree decorated with greenery

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.

Flying Young Cannibals part 2

Three days in the stables and the Muscovy ducklings' wings were all healed.
Remarkably the three perpetrators of the crime for some reason do not peck each other.

I decided to get the nine ducklings out of the stable and drive them back down to the chicken enclosure. The operation went pretty smoothly and the ducklings were overjoyed to find Elvis waiting for them. If only I could convey the contentedness of their quacks.



I left them be and took the dogs around the perimeter walk.

But on my return, maybe 20 minutes later, four of the ducklings had bloody wings again. How frustrating!

I needed to separate them out again, but this time I decided it should be the perpetrators of the crime who should be the ones to be incarcerated in the stable away from their surrogate mum.
It didn't take long to catch one in the act. Capturing it was a bit more of a struggle, but fortunately ducklings are not wonderfully designed for running. I knew that if I chased it around a bit it would eventually topple forwards and I could catch it. Muscovy ducks are actually tree ducks and have quite sharp claws plus the ability to squirt unmentionables from their back end. I carried the little blighter up to the stables. There was no dignity for it along the way.



Returning to the chicken pen and peckers number 2 and 3 soon became obvious. They too were transported to the stables.

And that is where things stand at the moment. A day later and the nine ducklings' wings have already healed and none of them are harassing the others.

It is much better having just the three ducklings in the stables, a lot less messy, though I suspect they will need to stay there until the others are a lot bigger.

I rather suspect that the three culprits are the drakes of the pack, in which case I very much look forward to eating them! A drake Muscovy will easily serve 6.

Meanwhile Priscilla's little flock of four are growing fast and presenting no such problems thank goodness.

Accidental Cannibals

Remember those cute little ducklings that Elvis hatched five weeks ago?

Well they've grown! Compared to turkeys and chickens, Muscovy ducklings grow ridiculously quickly. You can understand how when you watch them, for they peck at anything and everything to see if it is edible.

A few days back I let Elvis and her gang out of their protective compound. I judged they were big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves. Elvis is a good mother and would protect them and teach them well. But what I hadn't accounted for was the danger within.

After a couple of days I noticed that three had blood around their developing wing feathers. I separated them off into the stables and put the rest away for the night. In the morning another four had similar injuries. It didn't take too much observation to work out what was happening.

When you spend all day waddling around pecking at everything in sight to see if it is edible then your siblings' newly developing wing feathers just look like another potential meal.

The trouble is that open wounds are not particularly conducive to good health.

The situation developed rapidly and I now have nine ducklings in a stable, with one of the peckers also a peckee and separated off on its own.

My hope is that their feathers grow in properly within a week and that all wounds heal up quickly. I will then try reintroducing the ducklings to the chicken pen and see how things go.

I don't like having them shut up inside when they could be wandering around the orchard pecking at grass stems, snatching insects and seeds.
However, they have failed to make appropriate choices and need protecting from themselves.

Elvis to the rescue

For one reason or another much of our egg hatching this year has not gone entirely according to plan.
We tried to time it so that nothing complicated would happen while we were away on the Outer Hebrides last week, but the poultry had other ideas!
First there was the turkey hen who abandoned her eggs at the last moment only to sit on a clutch in the other house. Result: hatching due last Thursday, while we were away.
However, the turkey hen is still sitting. I coaxed her off the eggs yesterday. She is only sitting on five eggs and I would be very surprised if they hatch now. It was very late for her to sit, so the eggs may not have been fertile anyway. I'll give her a few more days sitting and then investigate the eggs if and when they don't hatch.

Then there was Elvis and her daughter Priscilla both going broody very late on in the season. With three successive clutches of Muscovy duck eggs failing under three different ducks, I grabbed the opportunity to put some eggs under the two hens. Their due date was this Sunday just gone, our first day back from holiday.

And guess what I found on Sunday morning.

Ducklings!
By Sunday evening all twelve eggs had successfully hatched. Goodness knows how they can hatch under a chicken but not under a duck?
Anyway this is good news, as the only other option for hatching Muscovy ducks would have been the incubator and this is reportedly tricky. Not only that, but there is the hassle of raising the ducklings. With a good broody hen, all this is taken care of.

Then on Monday morning Priscilla was off her eggs in search of food and water. I noticed that one of the eggs was cracked and there was movement inside. Fortunately she went back on the eggs and as I write this I have just moved hen and four healthy ducklings down to a new home in the chicken pen. No pictures yet as they are still getting used to their new home.

Now, as cute as they undeniably are, you must remember that this is a smallholding blog. In about six months time these ducklings will hopefully be big juicy Muscovy ducks, known in the restaurant trade as Barbary duck. 😋

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.

When she started sitting we had frosts and drought

Tuesday 23rd May
I decided to kick the black and white Muscovy duck off her eggs today. She had been devotedly sat for six weeks. Muscovy incubation is a drawn out job at 35 days, but I figured that nothing was going to happen now. When I cracked open the eggs, they were in various stages of development, so at least our male is not firing blanks. I think the problem was that some of the eggs were pretty dirty and duck eggs are porous.

Stretching her legs for the first time in seven weeks

Meanwhile, the white Muscovy duck is sat tight in a different house. Hopefully she will be more successful. Ducklings are cute to have around and grow quickly into very tasty meals!
In previous years we have hatched ducklings under our trusty broody hen, Elvis, but this year she is showing no signs of wanting to sit, even when we shut her in a house with a clutch of eggs. Maybe she is too old to be dealing with a clutch of young birds now.

I gave the sheep some new grass today. This is just a simple operation of moving the electric fence posts back a little to allow access to the lush grass on the other side. In fact, there were treats all round for the sheep today as I cleared out some of last year's overwintered Swiss Chard plants to make room for this year's tomatoes.
















Wednesday 24th May
Temperatures are soaring. After a worryingly dry beginning to the year, recent weather has been just about perfect for growing with temperatures high but with significant showers every few days to keep the seedlings happy and the grass growing (and the weeds). Temperature in the polytunnel are regularly breaking 100 degrees, so watering and any significant tasks in there have to be done early morning or evening.
Most of the plants are in the polytunnel beds now and the melons, cucumbers, tomato and okra are thriving. In the next few days I'll dig the last of the new potatoes and turnips and
evict the mangetout, which is just on its way out. Waiting to jump in their graves are the peppers, chillis and aubergines.
There should be sweetcorn too, but I'm having to start a new batch after a very disappointing germination - I'll be changing supplier next year.

With the risk of frost over now and the soil warm. the next week will see me busily planting all of the tender plants into outdoor beds. They have been out in the cold frame to harden off. I have bean poles to erect and arches to build to grow my tall peas up as well as more mangetout. The few sweetcorn seedlings which did germinate will be going outside too and the outdoor tomatoes will appreciate some room to spread their roots.
There's Minipop sweetcorn too, which can be grown near the supersweet varieties since it is harvested before pollination. Fortunately 100% of these germinated, so it's nothing I'm doing wrong.

Saturday 27th May
The first day of half term. Hurray!
I took one last mangetout harvest from the poly before evicting it and planting the bed with young butternut squash plants. It won't be long before these are doing their best to take over the whole polytunnel but I will show no mercy in keeping them cut back.



A few weeks back I planted mustard green manure into the bean and pea beds. One moment the beds were spattered with small seedlings but before I knew it they were full of lush green growth. This is my first proper attempt at growing green manure. I chose carefully a crop which I would be easy to work into the soil. I also needed something which could grow quickly and be ready to rotavated before the main crop needed to be planted.
So today I let Mr Rotavator loose. He made light work of cutting swathes through the crop and turning it into the soil.


My work was cut short today though as Sue took the year's first honey off the giant colony of bees. They weren't happy about it and vented their anger on me. At the fourth time of being aggressively buzzed by a bee, I gave up and headed inside.
Sue has been waiting for the honey to be capped sufficiently to collect. She got about 30lb from the one hive which is great. Unfortunately the second hive continues to struggle. Sue has tried twice to add frames from the successful hive. If the weak one has gone queenless then the bees should have used the new brood to make a new queen, but they have failed to do so. The other explanation is that there is a queen in there somewhere but she has gone off lay. To be on the safe side, Sue has decided to split the strong hive into two. Swarm season is upon us and we could easily end up with two weakened hives.

With the warm weather we have been leaving the windows open at night which tonight resulted in numerous moths coming into the house. I am starting to get interested in moths and it is only a matter of time before I take the plunge and purchase a moth trap. But for now I am happy to photograph whatever comes into the house and then struggle to identify it. It is strange to be a total beginner.

Anyway, here's what I captured, along with tentative identifications - I love moth names, they are so eccentric.

Pale Prominent

Silver-ground Carpet

Bright-line Brown-eye

Yellow-nosed Bell

White Ermine