No dig gets off the ground

The Easter holiday comes as an annual life saver for me. It is a chance to catch up with everything (including writing my blog!!!).

For once I am actually pretty well on top of everything at the moment. There is a steady flow of seed propagation from the conservatory to the polytunnel. The basic rule is that once the conservatory is full, whichever tray of seeds is most advanced goes out into the polytunnel.

From there, hardier seedlings go into the coldframe before being planted out.

The no dig beds are taking shape - it really is bringing an exciting freshness to my growing. Already I have broad beans, onions, shallots, garlic and parsnips in the ground, as well as half of my potatoes. 

I am trying quite a few new crops this year, at the forefront of which are Spinach Rubino and Bull's Blood Beetroot, whose seedings are already in the gorund under fleece alongside mixed lettuces. With regular picking these should provide a steady flow of mixed salad leaves well into the summer months.

One major problem with no dig is that nobody sent the memo to the chicken escape committee. Cocky and the two Cream Legbar girls jump the fence every morning and spend the day looking for freshly laid compost mulch to shift. Even better if this involves dislodging a few onion sets or freshly planted seedlings.

A few rustic sticks and some old scaffold netting protect the young broad bean plants

This has necessitated a little more crop protection than usual. I'm sure after I've chased them off a few more times and lobbed a few more clods of soil in their general direction that they will give up with their vandalising behaviour and find somewhere else to hang out.

The new ducks on the other hand are much more considerate, spending most of the day hoovering for slugs. They even stick mostly to the paths.

More new ducks

There has been a bit of a duck changeover on the smallholding. The Pekin ducks had grown into brutes, just trampling right over the netting I erected to protect my vegetables.

They had to go!

But ducks are an integral part of my slug control. So I turned to the interweb, typing in "best ducks for a vegetable plot".

The overwhelming winning breed was Khaki Campbells.

I hadn't realised that most Khaki Campbells actually reside in the West of Britain, but it didn't take me too long to locate an advert from over this side of the country.

In fact they were on a smallholding down near Lakenheath, along a road which I used to visit to see Britain's last remnant population of Golden Orioles. Sadly they have gone now.

We took the chance to take the dogs on an adventure, walking them along the river at Santon Downham. This stretch of river has otters and Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers but alas we didn't see either.

Onto the smallholding and there were about 80 Khaki Campbells to choose from, all ducks. They were in muddy conditions and it was all a bit smelly! They weren't tame either so we just took the first three we could catch. Fortunately nobody ended up face down in the mud!



Khaki Campbells are a small breed of duck. They are not fancy, but hopefully will do their job well in the veg plot without causing too much destruction. Here they are on their first day, desperate to hide away in their new house.

ed     A couple of weeks have passed now. The Khakis didn't come out of their house for a day or two and I eventually had to eject them. Then I had to fish them out of the pond as their feathers weren't in a good enough state to repel the water.
But they have now settled in, made friends with the two old ducks we have, and are enjoying life in the veg plot. Their feathers have improved so they can now use the pond. They have started laying eggs for us too.

Meanwhile we managed to sell four of the five Pekin ducks. Unluckily for him, the buyers didn't want a drake so he is soon destined for the table. The four females had just started laying whopping great eggs, so they were a good buy. They have gone to a smallholding where the owners do B&B so lots of people will get to enjoy them.

Duck Apartheid is Lifted

Well, it's been a while.
With the summer hols finished, the return to work did not go quite to plan as Sue and I found ourselves in at the deep end.
All our enthusiasm and fresh ideas for the smallholding have had to be put to one side. Having said that, the wheels are slowly being put in motion for an ambitious new project.

Big ideas are all well and good but it is the small details that make the smallholding such a special place to be.
This week we are celebrating the end of duck apartheid.

A little duck history first. We originally had three white ducks which were passed to us by an ex-smallholder. One of these still survives. We also had a small flock of black Cayuga ducks which we thinned down to a trio. Unfortunately one of the females then died and the male just vanished - presumably taken by a predator or a dog.

So for a while we had the old white duck and the old Cayuga with her limp, a droopy wing and a bald patch.

When the Pekin meat ducks came along, black duck completely disappeared. We presumed she had come to some unfortunate end, but a brief sighting a week later was followed by another after a further week.

Eventually we discovered her sitting tight deep in the lovage patch. Meanwhile old white duck teamed up with the new white ones. In fact despite being half their size they respected her seniority and made her their leader.

Skip forward a few weeks and black duck finally realised that no amount of patience was going to make her eggs hatch - hardly surprising since there was no drake around when she started sitting.
But now her best friend was gone, leading the white duck gang, and they were having none of it. It was like a duck version of Westside Story.

Black duck tried her best. She hung around on the outskirts but old white duck had forgotten her, moved on. Every time black duck tried to join the gang she was pecked and pushed away. Fortunately a duck's beak is no lethal weapon.

Since I dispatched a dozen of them for the table 

the ducks have been much less approachable! 

Look carefully and you can see black duck 

with her white pate near the back of the flock

Don't let it be said that persistence doesn't pay. Last night a lone dark figure, barely visible in the gloom of dusk, followed the white duck gang into their night stable.
And this morning black duck and white duck led the gang out! They have all hung around together all day long.

Duck apartheid is over. This is one smallholding tale which has a happy ending.

As peace breaks out we had our first dramatic and chilly autumn sunset of the year. 

The seasons they are a-changing.

Halcyon Blues

More work on the pond
First job on our return was to crack on with the big pond. The overflow boggy area wasn't working as it obviously had a leak and the damp soil was perfect to be invaded by grass. Taking advantage of my renewed vigour and ignoring the heat I set about digging all the soil back out and relining it. It is now basically a second pond which I will plant up with marginal pond plants.

A Kingfisher Missed
All the while I was doing this I couldn't get out of my mind what Sue our farmsitter had told me that morning. Just the previous day a kingfisher had been sat on the log I placed at the back of the pond. We had a kingfisher in our London garden once and only once, but never have I seen one here. I have spotted them on the Main Drain, but only rarely and little did I think that one would visit my new pond.
Let's hope for a repeat performance.
Until then I am gutted that I wasn't here to see it.

Quack Quack! I'm a Duck, Not a Drake

One animal that won't be allowed anywhere near this pond is my ducks. Ducks have already ruined one wildlife pond. Anyway, most of these won't be around for much longer. They have continued to grow at a staggering rate. They are still only eight weeks old. The males are beginning to show their curly tail feathers - it might be in their interests to try to hide these!

But there is another easier way to differentiate males from females. Only the females quack! Again the males may do well to learn to quack PDQ!

A Whopper First Plum Harvest

Other news and the first plums are ready. I've lost the label and am wracking my brains to remember the variety. It may be Opal, which was originally a cross between a plum and a gage. This year they have remained green and not coloured up at all but they have ripened and sweetened nicely in this year's exaggerated sunshine.
Sue couldn't quite reach all the high up fruits, but she still gathered 17.5kg of fruit. That's a lot of plums! We have about half a dozen other plum trees which should come to fruition over the next month or so.

A duck lost, a duck found, a duck lost

A few days back the guinea fowl were shouting at the tops of their voices. They are great guards, a little over enthusiastic at times. But this seemed serious. Their attention seemed to be on the somewhat overgrown soft fruit bushes.
I did investigate but couldn't find anything.

But that night the two old ducks, the black one and the white one, did not go away at night. I couldn't see them or hear them anywhere.
In the morning the white one appeared by her house, but there was not a sign of the black one, who has been quite weak recently and walks with a limp and a droopy wing.
No sign the next day either and I gave up hope.

There was more tragedy too. When I put the twenty young meat ducks away I counted them through the gate as best as I could. 1, 2, 3....19. 1, 2, 3....19. Four times I reached 19.  So I headed back into the veg plot where the sad sight of a dead white duck soon confronted me. It was just squashed up against the fence. No signs of being attacked by anything. I could only guess that it had basically been trampled by the others. So sad but completely unavoidable.

However, this tale has a surprise happier ending.
For while we were showing our friend around, the one who is looking after the smallholding for us when we go away, the black duck just appeared out of nowhere!

ed We are back from our week away now. The black duck and the white duck are no longer using their house at night and we don't really know where they are spending all day. The white duck has been seen twice and the black duck not at all. She is possibly sitting on eggs, but if she is they will not be fertile.

There Once (briefly) was an Ugly Duckling

Following on from the previous post about rearing chickens for meat, today I move onto ducks.

We breed our own Muscovy Ducks for meat (which are actually closer to geese than ducks), hatching the eggs under broody hens. It keeps the hens happy. The ducklings grow up with their adoptive mum and live their life in with the chickens, free-ranging over the smallholding. We make no effort to grow them especially fast, but by about four months old they are big enough to eat. A male Muscovy has a deceptively good amount of meat on it, quite easily doing six meals.

One of the Muscovy girls

We occasionally use a couple of 

Muscovy eggs to keep a broody hen happy.

These two were born on 21st July. 

Six Muscovy ducklings under the care of the three Silkie hens

This year we are trying something quite different. We came upon the chance to purchase some meat strain Pekin ducks. This was when we extended the opportunity to the rest of our smallholders club and ended up with 174 ducklings in a stable for a brief time.

We kept twenty of the ducklings for ourselves. Six will be kept as egg layers, the rest are for meat. Their growth rate has been quite astonishing. They came to us at 10-12 days old and we kept them safely in a stable until they were four weeks old. Their first day out saw them diving head first into a rather green pond, but the subsequent preening brought their soft white breast feathers through. Suddenly they started to look like ducks rather than ducklings.

That was only a week ago but the ducks are growing daily. They should taste nice as they have found the raspberries! Luckily there are plenty growing beyond their reach.

Anyhow, the best way to illustrate their rapid growth is to leave you with a series of dated pictures.

23rd June 10-12 days old

23rd June 10-12 days old

5th July 22-24 days old

9th July 4 weeks old

13th July 4 weeks 4 days

16th July 5 weeks old

20th July 5 weeks 4 days

22nd July 6 weeks old

Turkey Surprise

Another catch-up post which should bring us to mid July.
The drought continues... enough said about that. It is becoming a real problem.

Linseed field casts a blue shimmer as if reflecting the constant blue skies

The field next to us is almost always wheat. When it's not it's rape. The field behind us is almost always sugar beet. But this year we have something different, presumably because of the poor sowing conditions early in the year. Instead we have maize in the back field, as opposed to sweetcorn. This is a biofuel crop - astonishing that some of Britain's most fertile land is used to feed our energy consumption rather than our bellies. This change of land use did mean that we had two pairs of lapwings which I presume attempted to nest. I think the crows got them though.
And in the field next to us we have a delightful blue see of linseed. It is certainly attracting the cabbage whites at the moment.

In the veg plot, I have harvested the garlic and should really do the same with the shallots and onions. All these crops tried to bolt this year, unsurprisingly.

The broad beans are processed, mostly blanched and frozen and their place will be taken by Purple Sprouting Broccoli plants just as soon as it rains and I can dig even the tiniest holes in the soil. I almost missed the calabrese but caught it just before the buds opened. This freezes really well so I grow the crop to mature in two groups rather than over a long period.

Blanching Calabrese

Raspberries and Blackcurrants went mad this year. We are picking bags and bags of them. Every available space has now gone in the freezers.
When this happens Sue hunts through for last year's produce and digs it from the bottom of the freezers for wine and jam making.
She has just set a blackcurrant wine going and we were excited to be informed that raspberries make just about the best country wine going.



I always reserve one or two veg beds for bee crops as well as letting some parsnips go over to flower in their second year. These are a wonderful magnet for hoverflies.
This year I planted a cornfield mix with added barley and wheat. It hasn't quite turned out as I expected, for the whole patch filled with phacelia and borage. I am not sure whether this was residual seed in the soil or whether it was in the cornfield mix.
Anyhow the proper cornfield flowers are coming through underneath now and the whole is a blaze of colour and buzzing with bees.


The Pekin ducks we bought as 10 day olds are growing at stratospheric rates. Now big enough to be safe from crows, we let them out a couple of days back and herded them into the veg plot. The pond in there has dropped right down and is rather green, so I put the hose on to top it up. I didn't expect them all to just go diving right on in, but by the time I returned from the tap they were having a whale of a time. They were looking a bit green though!
We put some tyres and old planks in, for ducks are quite capable of getting waterlogged and drowning if there is no easy way out.
Amazingly having a proper bath and a thorough preen instantly changed the ducklings into ducks. There yellow down was superseded by creamy white and they suddenly look all grown up.

The meat chickens we had are now gone - don't ask if you don't want to know! They reached their weight in a much shorter time than we had anticipated. They only got a stay of execution as we did not have finishers ration in. This is the non-medicated pellets they are fed for the last week or two as the growers pellets need to be withdrawn.

Chickens just hanging around waiting to be plucked.
(they are not alive).

'Processing' the chickens was a big job, spread over two mornings. Let's just say that Friday 13th was an ominous date for the last seven. It is made much quicker by wet-plucking. We dip the carcass into a giant pot of water at 160F for 45 seconds. This loosens the feathers just enough without meaning that the skin rips easily. It reduces plucking time from over 20 minutes to under 5. You don't get a perfectly neat finish, but nearly all of our chicken is joined anyway so that it more easily fits in the small spaces in the freezer.
This time I boiled up the chicken feet and made a jelly stock which I divided up to go in the freezer. A good stock makes all the difference to so many recipes and I begrudge paying for those little foil packs.

The other chickens, the ragtag bunch of old ladies which we sentimentally let live on to old age, they are laying no more than two eggs a day between them. It is always a lean time and the drought isn't helping. Here are two of them and a Muscovy duck sat tight in the nest boxes. Between these three they were sitting on a grand total of one egg!


Last weekend we went along to our Country Winemaking group, again part of the Smallholders Club. Tonight we were doing blind wine tasiting. Sue's contribution was some elderflower champagne.
Fortunately we still had some left, for earlier in the week one of the bottles had exploded with such ferocity that it smashed a hole in the side of the plastic bin we were keeping it in.


We returned from Wine group to a big surprise. Four baby turkeys wandering around with the others. I didn't think they were due for another week yet. We had planned on removing the older poults before this happened, but all seemed to be getting along ok so we left them.
The next morning, quite by chance, I got a message from somebody in need of two newborn turkeys as her hen had accidentally destroyed all the eggs she had been sitting on. This was fine by me, for we are going to have excess turkeys this year and some need to be sold anyway.
Getting them out from under mum was a bit of a challenge but the mission was successfully achieved late evening so that the chicks could be put under their new mum in the dark. I have just received news that mum has accepted them and both are doing well.

So that brings us up to mid July. Just a week to go until schools break up for the summer. I'd like to think that will be the cue for endless downpours, but I somehow doubt it. This drought feels like it's in for the long haul.

Dozens of Ducklings.

Saturday 23rd June 2018
A big day today. 170 Ducklings arriving!

Before that, the lambs needed worming and moving down to the main paddocks, where they disappeared in the long grass.

One benefit of the constant dry weather is that mowing the lawns becomes a much less onerous task. It only took a couple of hours today to do the whole lot. Job done.

Still the day passed quickly and at 3pm the ducklings arrived in three poultry crates in the back of a car. Making the arrangements to get them here had been a bit tricky, especially when we had to delay everything because of the winter bird flu restrictions.

The plan was that we would be keeping 16 for ourselves, mostly for meat but maybe keeping a couple of females to join us more permanently and bolster our duck egg production. The rest were to be picked up by other smallholders from Fenland Smallholders Club. I was making no profit from these, just organising it for the benefit of the club.

It was novel having 170 ducklings in the stable for a while. They were completely comical.  They were hungry and thirsty!

It was lovely to welcome a string of other smallholders to the smallholding too.

Once all the ducklings had been picked up, we actually had 20  left. I expect you had already counted that there were 174 and not 170!

With all the excitement over, we headed over into Northamptonshire for a bat and moth night. We got to use bat detectors for the first time, which brought glimpses of bats to life. Then we headed along the dark tracks of the woodland to meet up with some mothers (pronounced with an "o" and not an "u"). Unbelievably it was the first time I had seen a moth trap in action. The moths were intriguing and I could have spent much longer here but I did not know my way out of the woods! I can definitely see myself doing more of this in the future.
A big bonus was finding lots of glow-worms. I had completely forgotten they had been mentioned as a possibility when I spotted a faint glow from deep within the vegetation by the path. Everybody else had walked past it. About 30 yards further on I found another, then other people started finding them. The best was one which just sat on the path affording the opportunity to see the creature itself and not just the glow from its bum (technical entomological term). They look like a giant ladybird larva.

We were back on the farm at about 1am. I poked my head in on the ducks which were all huddled together in a pile.

The Hub - A Duck-Free Wildlife Pond

Saturday 14th April 2018
A dry day and blue skies!
Today's job was to build a hazel and willow barricade around the small wildlife pond which forms the hub of The Wheel, my veg plot design. This preformed plastic pond has followed Sue and I from our first house in London where it was the centrepiece of our 16 foot square garden. Our current plot is over 800 times that size!

I want to move the ducks into the veg plot to hoover up the slugs which live under the grass overhangs where the beds are edged. But they will trash the pond. Instead, I am building a new pond for them, more of a duck lido in fact.

So I set about cutting the stakes for my duck barrier, using hazel I had harvested. I then weaved in the willows, using basic weaving techniques.

I have to say I am very pleased with the end result.

And the ducks are so impressed with their new lido that they have not even noticed the other pond. That one can be kept a secret between me and the wild birds and the frogs and toads.

Pekins here we come!

Friday 5th January 2018
Duck! Duck! Duck! Duck! Duck!
I received a lovely message in my inbox today. A company who supply hatching kits for schools and care homes contacted me as they obviously end up with rather a lot of unwanted young birds. It seems someone who takes their meat strain Pekin ducks off them has let them down so I have arranged to take some off their hands at a very reasonable price. This presented a great opportunity to share this fortune with fellow members of Fenland Smallholders Club. I whacked a message on Facebook and, as I write, I have orders for over 100 ducklings. We will take a dozen or more with the aim of rearing some for the table and possibly some to keep, as long as they don't get so fat that they can't waddle! They will keep the slug population down and maybe give us meat strain birds to hatch out in the future.


Meanwhile, do you remember we were given some commercial chicks to rear? Well they have been lovely so far. They are very tame and run over to see us when we go in the chicken enclosure, though I think this is more greed than affection. So far we have seen no signs of problems caused by their breeding. They are now about 9 weeks old. I suspect that would be that if they had stayed on the farm. But living with the other chickens and allowed to roam their growth has been good but not ridiculous. They will be around for a while longer yet.

Not a hawfinch in sight

Saturday 28th October 2017
Not a hawfinch in sight

We've had some beautiful clear days recently and some amazing skies.
I've spent a lot of time outside trying to get hawfinch on my farm list. There's something of an unprecedented irruption of these giant-billed finches at the moment, but despite days working outside not a single one has flown over the farm while I've been looking.
There has however been a good arrival of winter thrushes with redwings and fieldfares streaming in across the fields in their hundreds. There have been impressive numbers of starlings and woodpigeons too. In amongst them I've had the odd good bird, a few redpolls, a couple of yellowhammers and quite a few skylarks. There have been more chaffinches than usual with arrivals from Scandinavia finding the old ash trees to their liking. But not a hint of a hawfinch. 
I have listened and listened and listened to recordings of hawfinch flight calls. Remembering bird calls is not a strength of mine, but as I work in the garden my ears are on constant alert for their weak call.

Job for the day was to build a shelter and dust bath for the chickens, though it took longer than  it should have due to a certain amount of sky staring!
The finished job is somewhat basic but it should do its job. I've used old polytunnel plastic which I scrounged so if the winds do their worst I can easily replace it.

Sunday 29th October 2017
An extra 3(!) hours in bed
The clocks went back overnight so I celebrated with an extra three hours in bed!
A little owl was clearly thrown by the change too as it spent most of the morning sat in full view sunning itself. I hear the little owls most days but very rarely see them outside of breeding season.

The weather this half term has been amazing so we made the most of it with a walk along the river late afternoon. I was thrilled to see not one but two kingfishers. There is hardly anywhere for them to perch as the drainage board have cleared the banks, so I was surprised that even the one has stayed.

Monday 30th October 2017
A new swimming pool... for the ducks
More mowing, for the grass is still growing thick and fast.

Then I hand dug a new pond for the three ducks who now live in the spare veg patch. They have found my wildlife pond and wrecked it, so I am giving them a purpose built luxury pool. I will bar access to the wildlife pond with a willow weave barrier.
I would move the ducks, but they have an important job of slug clearance. Slugs have been a real problem this year so I am keen to turn the soil and expose them to the birds as much as possible this winter. In fact I managed to rotavate the cuttings area today. I dug up the privet cuttings which I started last winter. About half had made it through which was good. I have replanted them into the freshly turned soil and there is now space for this year's cuttings.


Tuesday 31st October
Halloween!
I'll spare you the usual rant about the waste of pumpkins. Or the one about since when was Halloween such a big celebration on this side of the Atlantic.