Garlic and Shallots - Divide and Conquer

Tuesday 9th January 2018
The final order for ducklings from fellow smallholders was 226. I look forward to the day they all come.
Garlic and shallots in the ground
I got the garlic planted today as planned. The cloves are planted just below the surface. The more space you give each one, the larger the final bulbs (within limits). The main choice is whether to plant on a square grid pattern or in rows. Either way, you get roughly the same number in the same space. I prefer rows as it's easier to cultivate in between the plants later on when the weeds are running riot.
They should still catch a few heavy frosts which they need so the cloves divide later in the year.
Garlic gives a fantastic return, with approximately a ten-fold increase on your original investment in just half a year. If I had replanted all of the offspring from the original three bulbs every year I would be growing 300000 bulbs this year! I think I'll stick to the usual 100.

I got 30 shallots planted too, ones I saved from last year. These grow in a similar way to garlic, one set dividing into maybe 5 or 6 during the year. It's like free food every year.

The geese have been keeping the grass short in the orchard and have been wandering further up the land. It is nice to see them feeding in the young woodland.
There was a treat for them today as I discovered a few missed carrots in the ground as I was clearing one of the polytunnel beds.

The chickens 'helping out' in the tunnel.

The polytunnel is usually a strict no go zone

for the chooks as they can wreak havoc,

but I like them to scratch around when I'm having my annual clear out.

That's all for this post. Thanks shallot! (sorry, but it makes me chuckle every year)

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

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 your companions begin to smother you

The title of this post is NOT a subtle hint to Sue. It's actually referring to pot marigolds, nasturtiums and borage. For these plants are wonderful companions to other plants in the vegetable plot and they randomly appear all over the place every year. But it's important not to get too attached to them, for they are still a plant and still compete for valuable resources. They all grow exceptionally well on my soil and, if left, will swamp the intended crop. So it is important to be firm with your companions, keep them in their place and kick them out when they start to get too much of a foothold.

Friday 1st July
The first cucumbers of the year. They'll be on tap now for a few months.

Look carefully at this picture of the geese and you'll spot a very young gosling, for Golly the grey goose stayed sitting on two eggs while the rest ventured outside. I held no hope, but one day a little bundle of yellow feathers poked its head out from under her.
Sadly this gosling has already succumbed. At three days old she took it out and I was relieved that the others accepted it. It successfully joined the flock and was very adept at keeping up with mum, who protected it well. So imagine my sadness when one morning, having watched it follow mum into the stable the evening before, mum came out of the stable without it. I found it dead down a small gap between the tyre nest and the wall. So frustrating.

Main job for the day was to weed the sweetcorn and the pumpkins for they were in danger of being swamped by self-seeded nasturtiums. Most have got their roots down and are growing fast enough to avoid significant slug damage, but a few of the sweetcorn needed replacing as they had been starved of light and withered. This is a reason to grow more than you need and hang on to the spares until you're absolutely sure they are no longer needed.

Saturday 2nd July
An extremely busy start to the weekend. The most important job was to catch all the sheep to worm them and apply treatment against fly strike (hence the blue crosses on their backs). We have become very efficient at this now so it didn't take long. A few years back this would have been a whole morning's task. As a reward for their cooperation, I moved the sheep onto new grass. In the picture below you can see the contrast between the grazed area they moved from and the new area of long grass. They always head straight for the clover.

Next up were the Ixworth chickens who needed their wings clipped. One of the hens had taken to hopping onto her house and over the fence and I didn't want her 'befriending' the other cockerel.
This is a simple and painless operation.

Once the animals were tended to, we turned our attention to the crops. The garlic has succumbed to rust, not helped by the fact that it has become overtaken by weeds so there is no air circulation. This is not too much of a problem and I had delayed harvesting until we got some rain in the hope that the bulbs would swell more, but under all those weeds it was getting too hot and sticky, a perfect environment for things to start rotting.

After a couple of hours in the sun, the garlic bulbs were looking much better. I'll let them dry out for quite a while before processing them to be stored through the autumn and winter. The best ones will be saved for replanting in late winter.
Part of the reason for the mass of weeds was that I had sown parsnips between the garlic rows. These two grow very well together, but this year the weeds came through too quickly and I couldn't hoe or pull them for fear of losing the tiny parsnip seedlings.
Clearing unwanted plants is very easy unless you have to pick your way around others.

Finally, a few images I snapped as I was taking a well deserved break.

FREEDOM!!!!! The trials and tribulations of poultry keeping.

Avian Flu Restrictions Lifted
The poultry are free! Restrictions are lifted. They can stretch their wings, explore, scratch around wherever they want (but NOT in my veg plot!)

The chickens helping me clean up the land, fertilising as they go.

Goslings
The geese hatched their eggs with impeccable timing to tie in with the end of the avian flu restrictions. So yesterday they took their four goslings out on their first ever excursion from the stables. Four goslings from four nests is not the greatest of returns, but is completely typical of geese. They sit tight for weeks on end, only to abandon their nests as soon as the first goslings emerge, whichever nest that might be from.

Focus not sharp, but I was risking my life approaching this close!

Unfortunately two goslings were lost before they left the nest - just sad little bundles of yellow feathers left in the nest. Sadder still, one of the four which was waddling around yesterday was presumable squashed in the nest last night, so we are down to three.

And then there were three

Life expectancy for goslings is not good. In past years we have lost them to crows, in water buckets, behind piles of wood. Even with seven adults looking after three youngsters, their chances are still not good. If they can, they will find a way to expire! The strongest and luckiest survive.

The alternative would be to keep them in the stables. This would be safer for them but the practicalities of food and water would be very messy, even if it were possible for us to get into the stable without being set upon!
The only other option would be to remove them from the parents and set up an enclosure with a heat lamp in the same way that we rear the meat chickens which we hatch in the incubator.

Anyway, any geese that do make it through will be considered a bonus. In previous years we didn't really mind, but now that we have tasted one of them we are keen that some survive! I know that sounds a little harsh, but that is an inherent part of smallholding for self-sufficiency.
The geese have to earn their keep. They achieve this partly by mowing the lawns, though they do get a little messy at times, and in part with their bounty of eggs which feed us handsomely for a couple of months with quite a few left over to sell.
If we fail to rear any goslings to adulthood, I think we will buy in some geese later in the year specifically for meat.

A Disappointing Hatch
Since I've already mentioned the meat chickens, I should mention that our last incubator hatching was disastrous. Three out of sixteen eggs hatched successfully, which is a woeful percentage. Next time we'll go back to the recommended humidity level. We had upped it on the advice of others and it didn't work.
Humidity levels in the incubator are very important as it affects evaporation through the shell and the size of the air sac which develops at one end of the egg. From memory, if the air sac is too small then there won't be enough air for the chick to breathe before it can break free. Too little humidity and the shell and inner membrane can be too tough to break out of.

We are now collecting Ixworth eggs as quickly as they can lay them to get another batch going in the incubator.
The first batch of eight birds are doing well now. One developed a bad leg and couldn't stand for a while. I thought we would lose it but it seems to have made a good recovery.

Perky Turkeys
In one of the other stables, the two turkey hens still have poults to look after. Unfortunately we have lost two - all part of natural selection - but the remaining five look very strong and healthy. (But so did the other two until they went rapidly downhill).
I am just urging them to grow, for every day they survive their chances get better.

Muscovies
Finally there are the Muscovy duck eggs. One duck has now been sitting for 34 days. Muscovy eggs have an unusually long incubation period - 35 days. So tomorrow is D-day.
We have tried to put Elvis onto another dozen duck eggs but she does not seem so broody this year and I'm not sure she is ready to sit. Maybe she is just getting too old for all the hassle. I would far rather hatch ducklings under a bird than in an incubator as the rearing is taken care of for me and ducklings seem more hardy outside than any of the other young birds.

Egg Thief!
Finally on the subject of poultry, at this time of year our egg production always seems to plummet. I have been in the habit of finding excuses in the weather, but I have slowly come to suspect the crows which, for the last two years, have nested in the ash trees. The drop in eggs seems to be closely correlated to their nesting.
So yesterday I loosely covered the entrances to the chicken houses with grates and hey presto! Seven eggs. Crows are super intelligent and will eventually work out that the new arrangement is not a threat to them, so I will hang some old CDs over the doorways. Apparently this is an effective deterrent and doesn't bother the less intelligent chickens who just blunder straight through the obstruction.

So that's it. Successes and failures. Life and death. Smallholding in a nutshell.

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.