An Egg Thief

Friday 8th June 2012
The heavens opened.

I'm no fair weather gardener. I've taken my fair share of drenchings in the rain, buffetings by the wind and even peltings by hail stones. But I'm no fan of days when these elements combine.
For some reason I was up at 3 this morning, so I decided to scan the internet in search of a fencing and gate supplier. I was hoping to get everything I needed from one place, and the best I came up with was over the other side of Melton Mowbray. http://www.davidmussonfencing.co.uk/store/


So I set to work planning what I needed. I could get everything from here and their prices seemed very favourable compared to others.
After a break for the sunrise photo and another for feeding the animals, I had finally compiled my list of requirements. Two 9ft gates (10 foot if they could deliver), four 4ft gates, 40 posts, latches and hinges for six gates (the ironwork is a significant part of the cost), 100m of rabbit fencing and 25kg of straining wire.
My preference would be to view what I was buying, but it seemed silly to go all the way without the trailer. On the other hand, the trailer bounces all over the place when it's empty, especially on bumpy fenland roads, so I prefer to use it only for short journeys. Come opening time, I phoned to enquire about availability and everything was in stock...just. Delivery was possible, at a price, but by now I had decided to take the chance and hope that I could fit everything in the trailer.
By the mood of the sky at sunrise, there was obviously a lot of moisture in the air and it was only a matter of time before it came down in bucketloads, so a shopping trip seemed like the best way to spend the day. We headed inland through genteel country villages, all their houses hewn from the same, sandy stone. And just as we arrived at the impressive yard, the heavens opened. But I was in a sweetshop and nothing was going to spoil the fun.

Fortunately the shorter posts just about fitted in the back of the car,
as the trailer was full to the brim.

An Egg Thief

The hens' egg production has plummeted recently and I have been a little concerned. I could see possible reasons for a reduction, but we are now down to one or two eggs a day. Thoughts of disease were entering my head, but Sue has possibly discovered a more sinister explanation...cannibalism!

Chickens will eat eggs if they find one broken and that's just part of nature's recycling. However, every now and again a hen learns that inside those hard shells lies a tasty treat. And so it was that sue returned from the hen house with tales of Elvis and White Broody Number Two with egg on their beaks.

Now White Broody Number Two is sitting on eggs right next to here the others lay. Has she been secretly leaning over and helping herself? It would explain a lot.

Greeniversity

Monday 4th June 2012
The sun makes a valiant effort to break through.

Sunrise is getting earlier by less than a minute a day as it approaches the turn. From 14th to 19th June it's at 04:34, then it gradually starts getting later again. Egg production is still worryingly low. Three of the chickens are in heavy moult and another is sitting on eggs. Given how well they laid all winter, and that they were almost laying one a day on the shortest day, I think their bodies must have been tricked by the warm winter. Perhaps now, finally, they've run out of energy and need a rest. Let's hope so.


Not long ago we had so many eggs we felt guilty if we did not eat at least two a day and make a batch of cakes at the weekend. But now they're all sold before they come out of the chickens. In fact, when laying is poor, we have to ration our customers. With a week's holiday, we get to eat more of our own eggs and I'm looking forward to it.


Our efforts at rearing more egg-laying hens are proving frustrating too. Although our hatch rate has improved considerably, it is looking like we have far more cockerels than hens! In general with livestock, boys are pretty useless and girls are what you want. All to do with testosterone (or whatever the chicken and pig equivalent is if it's not testosterone).


Sue reckons it's something in the water round here as there are far more boys than girls in her school too.


Heritage Food at Greeniversity
After yesterday's mammoth job, my body needs a rest, so it is most convenient that we have booked ourselves to attend a heritage food event in Whittlesey, promising elderflower delights and goosegrass curry....



... well, the event wasn't quite what we expected. We hadn't realised it was part of a fairly small jubilee fete, unfortunately slightly dampened by the weather.

We decided to give it a miss, and instead went to a giant Tescos! Much as I criticise the big supermarkets, there are many things which we can't produce for ourselves. It's not often that we go to big shopping centres these days, and it felt slightly strange. In fact, we felt a bit like those tribespeople from PNG plucked from their surroundings and airlifted into the hullaballoo of the Western world!

We did have an ulterior motive for our Tesco pilgrimage today. Swing-top bottles. A special offer meant that it's almost as cheap to buy them filled with Grolsch as it is to buy them empty! I'll just have to do my duty.
I noticed too that it is possible to buy lemon curd and marmalade for 22p and 27p a jar. I hate to think how they do it for that price. We pay a lot more than that just for the jars for our honey, jam and chutneys (when we don't have enough to re-use that is). It would actually be cheaper to buy these products and tip them away! That can't be right and it would feel very wrong doing this. I'd end up trying to find recipes to use loads of lemon curd and marmalade...

To go off on a tangent, that prompted me to google the famous nursery rhyme. Fascinating the information you can find at the click of a finger.

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement's.

You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin's.

When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

This is actually a very lean time as the winter stores get low and we await the first crops with mouthwatering expectation. So we were a bit like kids in a sweetshop today! Not that I agree with flying food all over the world. Maybe as the occasional treat in our ever shrinking world, but it has become the norm and is taken for granted. 
Chicken talk
The Welsummers have grown at an astonishing rate and I was keen to get them outside today, while the weather held off, but the grass in the chicken area was truly like a jungle. So I attacked it for an hour with the strimmer. I was very pleased with the result. The chickens were not too impressed by the strimmer but I think they appreciated their new landscape!

With the disturbance over and the long, damp grass cut back, it was time to introduce the chicks to their new home and to the two French Copper Marans.



The 5 Welsummers (the large, darker birds)
and the four Indian Games
get used to their new surroundings and company.


Meanwhile, one of the teenagers has begun to cockle-doodle. Well, it's more of a croaky, muffled crockloooeeeuuuuuugh! If he had any sense he'd stay quiet and pretend to be a hen.
To end a very diverse day, I played chase with the pigs, trying to get photos of them charging towards me. This involves me running as fast as I can and turning to take a quick piccie before Daisy and her litter loom large. She moves with deceptive speed.

The pigs appreciated their rewards.

The day ended with an amazing moonrise, more than my camera can do justice too. A huge, orange globe in a velvety sky.

The Great Escape.

Thursday 24th May 2012
The sun tries to break through on a misty May morning.

No wonder some of the eggs are getting cracked - why do they all have to try to get in the same nest box?

Meanwhile, just look how big the teenagers have got!

The animals get through a lot more water in this weather and for the first time this year I had to use the hosepipe (it is allowed for this!) as most of the collected water has been used up. Trouble with a hosepipe is that piglets just can not resist playing with it!


As the temperature climbed into the 70's and the sun beat down, the piglets made their first ever wallow.

The return of Mr Mow-tivator
At 11:30 today this arrived back...Mr Mow-tivator.

By 8:30 this evening, I'd achieved this...

Perfect pathways in the potager

One hundred trees mulched with the accumulated clippings of the day - a convenient way to dispose of a mountain of grass cuttings, and a friendly way of protecting the saplings from weed competition without using nasty chemicals.

The Great Escape.

One more job before I could put my feet up and relax. The nightly round up of G'nea G'nea. Sue was at her community choir tonight, so the job was infinitely more tricky.

But not as big a problem as what was still to come, for I heard the familiar click-squeal sequence of a piglet encountering an electric fence. Problem was, all my piglets were kept in with wooden fence and stock fence. Only Daisy was hemmed in by an invisible force field ... until now.

Two of the piglets were in with her, and three more were outside all the fencing!! Thank goodness all that was on their minds was getting back in with their brothers and sisters or their mum. Two braved pushing under the electric fence to reach the safety of mum, but not before they got a bit of a shock! The last one, I showed through the secret gate at the back of the pig pen. I had been thinking about reuniting the piglets with Daisy, but not before I'd strimmed the grass and lowered the electric fence. Oh well. In the fading light I took down the partition and allowed the last two piglets through. Daisy was very excited to see them all, though I think she's forgotten that she had ten before. Let's hope they're all still there in the morning.

World's Smallest Chicken Egg.

Saturday 21st April 2012
A deceptive start to a very wet day.

I have to admit it, today I was feeling particularly grumpy and tetchy all day. Most of the time we are living a fairly idyllic life here, but it is not all plain sailing. Occasionally stresses and strains still bear down, and today they seemed to outweigh the good. Even this swallow, perched on my pea frame made from red dogwood, could not cheer me up for long.
Normally when I feel like this I just take on some impossibly hard and endless job and immerse myself in it totally, but today the rain just kept coming and everything I did seemed to need doing twice.

 

Rain stopped play many times today. Even the chickens took refuge in the pig shelter.

But who laid this tiny egg?

Left to right: Chestnut, Elvis, Speckledy Hen, Lady Guinea, ???

I did manage to get the hole in the pig ark fixed up ready for Daisy and her litter to move into it. It's only rudimentary, but the pigs won't mind. It will be lovely to finally be able to give the piglets a taste of outdoor life.

And Sue borrowed Don's blowtorch to dust off and clean up the old bee hives, which we have taken to Long Sutton to be filled with bees so we can have another go at beekeeping, something we began in London, without a lot of success.

Then, just as I was ranting and raving about giving it all up and living like normal people do, something happened to cheer me up. A car pulled up on the road, reversed and pulled in. I let Sue deal with this enquiry, fully expecting it to be somebody else with the lovely, but unrealistic, idea of keeping a pig as a pet (we get fewer of these now that the pork signs are up too!) I took myself down in the rain to hammer some wood and generally take things out on the pig ark and fence. Well, I returned to be told by Sue that she had sold three pigs to some local smallholders. They will collect them in three weeks time, when they will have been weaned (the piglets, not the smallholders). I am sure it will be the first of many piglets they will raise, as it is all a rather special experience really, even if I occasionally forget.

The day ended with a crow clearly unhappy about the presence of something or other in the horse chestnut tree at our entrance. I expected to see an owl being harangued, but the crow emerged from the tangled branches in hot pursuit of a cuckoo, my first of the year. I saw the other day that each cuckoo specialises in which species it parasitises and lays eggs which carefully match those of the host. This cuckoo had better not be looking for sedge or reed warblers upon which to foist its offspring, as it's beat them back!

Egg-spansion attempts disappoint.

Sunday 1st April 2012
April Fool's Day

With two chickens going broody, one sadly passing away and a couple of others going through a late moult, egg production has failed to keep pace with demand of late.

So it was that we hatched a plan (sorry, awful pun!)  More chickens.
So, through the post came some nice blue eggs, some nice pale brown eggs and some very nice dark brown eggs - Cream Legbars, Indian Game and French Copper Black Marans.

Well, we got three from the blue eggs. All six had at least been fertile. One has splay leg, a common condition which sees the chick almost doing the splits. We have applied first aid, but I give it a 50:50 chance at the moment.
As for the Indian Game eggs. Only two hatchlings from the incubator (only 3 were ever fertile) and Elvis seems to have failed again with the 3 we gave her. So a 22% hatch rate is pretty pathetic.

Chick of Elvis, if you remember, had also decided to build herself a nest outside the confines of the chicken compound, and was sitting on two of her own eggs. That was until the hay bales slowly collapsed, along with her nest, sending the eggs tumbling to the floor. At least she is coming back into lay now and will soon be giving us an egg a day.

And the six chocaliciously dark Marans eggs? Well, they're down to four already after two arrived cracked in the post. Fingers crossed for the other four, which have now been in the incubator for a week.

The reasons for our disappointing rate of failure are not known.
Suspects include:
Time of year - is fertility rate lower early in the year?
Suppliers - the Indian Game Eggs especially have disappointed. Was the cockerel a real man?
The Post Office - I'm sure they treated our packages, labelled FRAGILE, with extreme care. Not!
Some five year old children - was the incubator opened too often?
Us - did we look after the eggs properly between receiving them and putting them to incubate?

Once we discover what is the fate of the four eggs we currently have incuabting, we shall try again!
Next time, I will look for a local supplier, so I can collect the eggs in person. We will get 12 eggs and put them all in at the same time. We will leave the incubator in a quiet place in peace.

Meanwhile, at least we still have these.

and these

 

Wrap up warm

Sunday 15th January 2012

This morning's frost was a sharp one, at last. The animals' water needed a series of concerted heavy stamps with my welly heel to break through. I had to jump up and down in the pigs' trough to crack through the ice. The chickens had let themselves out already and were busy exploring new areas of the farm. I will need to clip their wings soon, as it won't be long till they're banished from the veg plot again.

I am a man of many layers - at least when it comes to wrapping up for winter. At least two pairs of thick socks, longjohns or pyjama bottoms under trousers, t-shirts, sweatshirts, fleeces, thin jumpers, thick jumpers - at times I feel as if I'm wearing half my wardrobe. But it does the trick. It takes a good while for the cold to penetrate, always fingers and toes first. If I choose the right jobs, normally lugging things around, I'm warmed up before I ever feel the cold. Unfortunately, many of my jobs at the moment involve digging, which is not happening when the ground is frozen. So today was a good day for moving some more of the haystack and mixing up the compost heaps.

Right on top of the haystack was this little beauty, a shiny, fresh owl pellet. More evidence that at least one barn owl has moved back into the area.

There's only a certain amount of lugging you can do in a day, so I allocated the afternoon to bitty indoor jobs that always get relegated down the to do list. First, the bathroom fan which has started screaming manically to announce when it comes on. Only intermittent of course, so that you can never quite be sure it's fixed. Now, I'm not so good at this sort of thing, so I generally prodded and poked about, couldn't see anything obvious, and am now hoping the problem will sort itself out before I have to start taking things apart.

Flubenvet (other worming products are available)

On top of monthly treats of cider vinegar and the occasional garlic clove crushed into their food, periodically the chickens need to be wormed thoroughly and properly. The girls work hard for us (though they don't think of it this way) and deserve to be kept healthy. Besides, egg quality and production depend on the birds' continued good health. Probably beginner's luck, but the hen's have laid brilliantly this year. Not only that, but everyone who tries them seems to genuinely rave about their taste. We will certainly never again be able to pay good money for what they sell in the supermarkets, even the guilt-free organic freerange ones taste nothing like what our girls are capable of producing.

Now this rural idyll which we are creating has to exist in the real world, and we have to think about economics. Although we are lucky enough that we can support the venture with our other work, it is important that eventually everything at least pays for itself. I reckon the food cost of our eggs is about 10p per egg. Add to this 1p per egg for the boxes (nothing fancy, the quality is in the egg, not in the packaging). The Flubenvet adds almost 2p per egg so already we're up to nearly 80p for six. That's how much you can buy them for at the farm gate round here! OK, so we only sell the large ones and they taste fantastic, but convincing drive-by customers of this so we can actually make a marginal profit is a long-term project. Luckily we have a couple of regular customers (who also return their egg boxes). As we're not exactly in mass production this means we are not now overwhelmed with eggs, although hardly a day goes past without an egg in at least one meal.

Back to the point, exhaustive internet searching uncovered the possibility of buying Flubenvet in a bigger tub (4x larger) and at higher concentration (2.5x stronger). By my calculations this is 10x the active ingredient and all for double the cost. Overall, that's 20% of the price. Quite some saving! A long use-by date, so nothing to worry about there. Just need to take extra care with quantities when mixing. At our current scale of production, I reckon that's £32 per year we've saved. Not much, but count the pennies...

Anyway, must go now. That bathroom fan is screaming again!

A Mucky Day

Thursday 12th January 2012

The balmy weather continues. It’s not fallen below about 8⁰C, day or night, for about a week now. Everything’s still growing. Whilst I’m keen to take advantage of it in the garden, overall I don’t think it’s a good thing. Nature needs its full cycle of seasons to function. This has evolved over many thousands of years.

Lavender

And that reminds me, I've got some lavender seeds which need to go in the fridge. Yes that's right, the fridge. I'm not going mad. It's a process known as stratification and tricks the seeds into thinking that winter has passed and it's now time to start growing.

I dampen a little compost and mix in the seeds. Then into a sandwich bag and into the fridge for 6 weeks, or until the seeds start to germinate. Doubtless the purists will say to use sand or vermiculite, but compost seems to do the trick for me and simulates nature more closely. Of course, I guess that might mean accepting a few more of nature's losses too.

Last year I raised many lavender plants from just a couple of packets of seed. After potting them up I moved them all round the garden. I like to plant lavender by gates and doorways where it releases it's fragrance every time it is brushed against. Their strong fragrance keeps the aphids away from the rose bushes, apple trees and fruit bushes, so I need to raise lots of lavender plants to sprinkle all over the garden. Add to this the fact that the butterflies and bees love the plant and it's a complete no brainer. A plant which knows which insects to attract and which to repel! Last year's plants have already made 6 - 8" bushy shrubs. By the end of this season patience will have rewarded me with more lavender bushes than I could ever dream of purchasing. I may even have enough spares to give to friends, sell or swap for favours. Some will go into lavender bags as its insect repelling qualities can be utilised in the home too to ward off moths and other insects.

The Sweet Smell of Muck
Every few weeks I visit a fellow smallholder to collect a trailer load of top quality, bagged up horse poo. My compost and manure heaps are a work of rustic art. They are crucial to the health and structure of the soil. As much goes back into the earth as possible, but it is still necessary to import goodness into the plot. Just think how much goodness is coming out of the soil each year in its bountiful harvest. The sun accounts for a fair degree of the "energy in" but the plants rely on the soil for a whole range of nutrients and there is a whole world of minibeast and microscopic activity going on down there too. During the peak of their growth, especially fruit production, many of my vegetables and fruit will receive top-up feeds made from comfrey leaves and nettles.I am still learning about this, and rely on a variety of books and websites which give helpful weekly or monthly reminders. Here's one that I find particularly inspirational.

This was a productive trip today, since I managed to offload 12 eggs and a cake. J and P's chickens are off lay at the moment and I am more than happy to have some space in my EggSkelter. Having your own eggs is brilliant, but we're not selling ours quite yet so the pressure to eat an egg at every meal is sometimes overwhelming!


After a pleasant cup of coffee and a chat, I returned home to unload. While I had the wheelbarrow out I decided to shift some more of the haystack too. A hard morning's work, surely more profitable and more natural exercise than a session in the gym. After a bacon and egg roll for lunch, which I ate as I observed the piglets snuffling and playing, I set out the pines and conifers for planting. I find it useful to insert a bamboo stick in the ground where I want each tree. It helps to see the overall picture before actually planting them. It's not a good idea to lay the bare-root trees out as the roots will quickly dry out, hardly a good start for a young tree which needs to send it's tentacle roots into the soil as quickly as possible.

No camera trickery! Why did I decide to do every sunrise when sunsets over the farm are so often like this. And I wouldn't have needed to get up early very day.