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.

A Springtime Catch-Up

No blog posts for a while. I won't apologise. It's not through laziness but through business.
It really is all go on the smallholding at this time of year. Dawn till dusk working the soil, sowing seeds, mowing lawns. Then there are baby animals imminent and chicks galore waiting to hatch. Plus all the routine work.
So instead of my usual day by day post, here's a catch up across the smallholding.

Firstly, the weather. April has been warm and sunny, a perfect start to the growing season. We could do with one night of rain now though!

The 'Family'

Gerry has caught his first rabbit of the year and is now catching at least one daily. He sometimes brings one back for the dogs, particularly Arthur our young jackadackadoodle. It was just such a gift that caused the first ever brief fight between him and Boris who has finally realised that fresh rabbit is actually quite a tasty treat. They quickly made up.

I'm sorry if anybody reading this is feeling sorry for the cute little bunny-wunnies, but I find it hard to feel sympathy for an animal which takes great delight in digging up my freshly planted garden shrubs and flowers. Besides, it saves on the animal feed bills.

Boris and Arthur have been enjoying the life of Riley lately. I discovered a supplier of knuckle bones who sell a whole sack full for under a tenner. These should keep the dogs busy for quite some time.

Most delightfully, a year and a half into his life, Arthur has finally realised how much fun it is playing with a ball. He bounces around with sheer joy at his new discovery.

Poultry
The farm fowl are all back outside now, albeit with a few restrictions in place. The geese make regular trips back into the stables to lay. They are sharing two nests this year.
We collected the first 60 eggs or so as they are Sue's favourite egg for eating and we managed to sell quite a few of them, which will have gone a long way to offsetting the costs of feeding the geese while they were imprisoned inside.

Caught in the act by The Silver Stag

The turkeys are laying too. Again we collected the first couple of dozen eggs, but the hens quickly started sitting for long periods. Currently two nests are set up next to each other and two birds seem to have settled on them. I will be very happy if they hatch any young. We would like to keep about six for meat, but any more than that should be fairly easy to sell as chicks to fellow smallholders wanting to rear them.
In the same pen, the Muscovy Ducks are creating a sizeable clutch of eggs too. Last year, letting the duck hatch out her own eggs proved unsuccessful whereas Elvis, our broody hen, managed to rear all of her ten successfully. So that is the plan again this year. I would like to get two batches hatched out over the year as the Muscovy Ducks are the tastiest of birds, as well as being rather charming inhabitants of the poultry pen.
Last but not least we have started the cycle of hatching out chicks. These are collected from our trio of Ixworths and will be raised for the table. The first hatching only delivered eight healthy chicks, which was a bit disappointing. We have started collecting the eggs for the second batch in the incubator. Hopefully this lot will do better.

The chickens were absolutely delighted to go back outside. I herded them down the land to their pen and they instantly set about dust bathing and scratching around. Their egg production has gone right up again too and it is lovely to have them attending to my every move as I dig in the veg garden.

Last years ram lambs tucking into a nice piece of willow

Just going by their tummies,

it's looking like a 3-2-1-0 again this year.

Sheep
We have brought the four Shetland ewes down to the stables in readiness for lambing, which was due anytime from Friday onwards. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long.
Rambo has settled in with the three wethers (last year's male lambs, no longer 'intact') but he likes to show them who is boss occasionally. There are enough of them to share the hassle and they have enough space to escape it.


Yesterday we went to a sheep day run by Mick at CSSG. We had a fantastic day and it was great to finally be properly shown some of the techniques which we have so far just been using common sense to achieve. We haven't been doing anything dreadfully wrong, but I know I will be more confident from now onwards.

Bees
Sue's department. She is very happy with how the two colonies are faring at the moment. They have come through the winter strongly and the queens are laying well. One hive already has a super over the brood box where the bees can make honey for us. The second hive should have enough brood in to extend upwards this week.
All around us the rape is in flower. There seems to be more this year than ever. Probably something to do with subsidies and not a lot to do with need. This means that the bees will be well fed but their honey will need taking off and processing quickly before it sets like concrete.
At least we now have the tools to cream the honey which stops it setting solid.

Fruit and Veg
Fruit
Pruning is finished, moved, new bushes and canes are planted and mulched, blackberries are tied in to new supports and the raspberry beds have had an overhaul. Mr Rotavator has done a brilliant job tidying up the strawberry beds. Leaves are unfurling and buds are bursting. We should get bumper crops of everything this year.
The fruit trees are coming into blossom and the weather has been good for pollination.
We have already harvested mountains of rhubarb and we managed to sell a fair amount which made a small contribution to the coffers. We don't charge much, but I would rather people enjoyed it than it went to waste every year. Rhubarb plants are dead easy to grow, even easier to propagate and they shade out all weeds. The perfect crop!

We have had both mowers out and they are both still working. The veg patch starts to reveal its plan once the top is taken off the winter grass growth and the beds are cleared and worked.













Veg plot
The soil is warming up and drying rapidly. Working it is a delight at the moment and I have been working hard to get all the weeds out and prepare the beds for planting. Broad beans, early potatoes, parsnip seeds, garlic and onion sets are in the ground already. In the next week there'll be a lot more crops being sown.

The garlic is doing well.

I have now sown parsnips down the rows.

These two crops always do very well together and

the garlic is out before the parsnips take over the space

If we don't get any rain very soon I'll have to consider watering just so that the young seedlings don't wither and die before they can get their roots deep enough.

Polytunnel
The early potatoes in the polytunnel will be ready soon and the mangetout are rapidly growing. I am anticipating the first flowers and pods very soon. My second sowing of carrots has germinated well, unlike the first and my turnip rows are already shading out the weeds.
The polytunnel is full of seed trays at this time of year, young plants being raised either to go in the tunnel beds or to go outside later.
Today I start making my rosemary oil which I am hoping will be my chief weapon of destruction when it comes to spider mites this year.

Birdlife on the farm
Our winter visitors have all but moved on now and we are still awaiting the arrival of most of our summer visitors. Every evening I anticipate the chattering of swallows in the skies above the veg patch but as yet they are still not back.
Our resident birds are taking full advantage of the early start that braving the English winter gives them. The Little Owls are back in the hollow Ash tree again and the Pied Wagtails are back under the pallets. Crows, Woodpigeons, Blue and Great Tits are all nesting in the Ash trees while Blackbirds, Stock Doves, Song Thrushes and Robins hide away in the ivy which clambers up the trees.
A pair of Linnets has appeared and I am very pleased to see Greenfinches occasionally visiting the feeders, though the Tree Sparrows are not around so far this year.
It's been a good spring for Reed Buntings and Yellowhammers which continue to frequent the feeders, both near the house and the feeding station I have set up down in the young woodland.

Frozen Frog Spawn

12th July
Elvis did not come out with her ducklings this morning. As I suspected, she is stepping back and letting them get on with growing up... which they are dong very fast indeed. They are a pretty bunch and it will be a shame to eat them later in the year.

Today's main job was a dangerous one, summer pruning and harvesting gooseberries. We've not got a bumper harvest this year, but I'm not complaining. Every year is different. The red gooseberries all needed picking. They are small but very sweet. The standard green Invicta gooseberries were well swollen. Some were ripe enough to eat raw, the rest I left on the bushes.

The whitecurrants were easier to deal with. Their summer prune just involves cutting back the sideshoots. In previous years the ducks had enjoyed more of the currants than us, but this year they showed no interest. To look at the bushes from outside you would think there was hardly any fruit to be had, but the currants hang on short stems hidden by the leaves.Delve a little deeper and there they are.

In fact I managed to harvest about 3kg of whitecurrants. I just need to decide what to do with them now.
Picking the whitecurrants took an age as I patiently worked along each branch. But there was still time to prune the redcurrants. These are just starting to colour up and there are absolutely mountains of them hanging on the bushes. It won't be long before a redcurrant bonanza. I might try using the steam juicer to make a cordial this year.
The birds find redcurrants easier to spot than their white cousins and last year we lost them all just about the night before I was intending to pick them. So today they were netted, using the net which has just come off one of the cherry trees which Sue picked.

23 eggs have been in the incubator for 18 days now at a temperature of precisely 37.5 degrees Celsius. We tried to keep the humidity at 45% but with the ambient air at over 60% most of the time this proved impossible. (Hence 23 eggs. We started with 24 but one was replaced with a sock full of rice in an attempt to reduce the humidity. It worked a little, for a while!) Humidity is important since it dictates how much liquid evaporates through the shell of the egg and therefore how big the air sac is for the chick to breath when it comes to hatching time.
So today was Day 19. Time for the eggs to come off the roller and to increase the humidity further.
If all goes well they will start hatching in a couple of days.

13th July
I open froze the currants and berries in trays. Today I scraped them off the trays to go into freezer bags. The whitecurrants, to my evil eye at least, look like frozen frog spawn. There could be a marketing idea here for a healthy Halloween treat. I also discovered by accident that it may be an awful lot easier to remove the stems when the currants are frozen. I'll bear this in mind next time.


A surprising proportion of the rest of the day was spent picking blackcurrants and raspberries, especially given that I was supposed to be at work for the afternoon.
But for the second week in a row my car refused to start. After replacing the starter motor last week, it looks as if it was the battery after all. I won't ever be going back to Whizzywheels in Wisbech again. It's the second time they've taken the proverbial in the last few weeks.
On the bright side, it did spur me into finding a more local mechanic.

So engrossing myself in the fiddly task of picking and de-stemming blackcurrants was a welcome distraction from my thoughts. The raspberries have enjoyed the wet weather too and are starting to produce a bumper crop. I've finally worked out that I've pretty much got all summer-fruiting canes and that all the healthy canes which came up and didn't fruit last year were in fact what would bear this year's fruit. I hadn't expected them to come up so early and so made the mistake of thinking they were autumn-fruiting canes which failed to crop. Doh!  I know now.

14th July
Car fixed. New battery installed.
While the mechanic was here, this arrived. Care to guess what it is?

It's a chicken plucker. You scold the chicken, attach this contraption to a drill and the spinning rubber fingers take (most of) the feathers off the bird. I imagine these end up literally everywhere. Anyway, if it works even half as well as I hope then it will save a lot of time when it comes to processing a dozen chickens at a time.

I did actually make it to work today, though I owe them quite a bit of time now and will try to make most of it up next week before the summer holidays start.
After work I hitched up the trailer and drove to a field in the middle of nowhere where a smallholder acquaintance (who just happens to be one and the same mechanic as fixed my car this morning) was baling his hay field. What a lovely activity on a fine day under the endless fenland skies.




I slalomed between the bales on the field before pulling up and loading fifteen bales into my trailer. Back to the farm to unload, then back again for another fifteen.

This winter was so mild that the Shetland sheep got by without any hay whatsoever. Buying thirty bales now is probably a good way to guarantee another mild winter.

As I was stacking the hay in the turkey stable I discovered yet another secret hoard of eggs furtively tucked away. I'm reorganising the stables in a couple of days, but I'll try to move the nest so that hopefully the hen keeps laying in it. That way I know where they are when I want to steal the eggs. I'll mark a couple which I'll leave so she keeps coming back.

One final job for the day.
I abandoned the coriander crop in the polytunnel - it just hasn't grown leafy enough this year - and sowed another few rows of carrots which so far have been doing very well under cover. Hopefully the carrot flies won't discover that the polytunnel has doors.

One hell of a hail storm

21st June
Six chicks have now hatched and are fluffed up nicely in the incubator. There's no sign of anything happening to the other twelve eggs though, which is disappointing. We are only collecting them from two Ixworth hens though, so it took a couple of weeks to collect a clutch to go in the incubator.

I set up a broody box for them which included our new (second hand) electric hen. I am much happier using this than the anglepoise lamp we used to use. I was never quite sure I wouldn't come home to a molten plastic box or worse still.

The weather was good today so mowing was very much on the agenda. This is a job which feels very much like repainting the Forth Bridge, never ending! I don't mind doing it but it takes time away from other jobs.
In between mowing I took full advantage of the new neighbours' invitation to harvest their strawberries, which always appear to be ready before ours. Sue has dried a fair few and the rest are in the freezer waiting to be turned into jam, ice cream and yogurt.

22nd June
I am a bit surprised to report that we are up to 11 chicks. They are all safely in the broody box. The next batch of eggs will be in the incubator as soon as I have time to clean it out.

23rd June
The electric fence in the top paddock has been set on full bluff for a while now as the battery has no power in it. But the Shetland lambs have figured this out and hop through it with impunity. Within the confines of the paddock this is not really a problem since there is enough flimsy fence to still keep them where I want them. The problem is though that the lambs now have horns and I came home from work today to find one pathetically entangled. It was no great effort to set it free, but I decided that now would be a good time to move the lambs up with the adult Shetlands. The ewes' udders would have completely dried up by now and the adults need a little help keeping the grass down this year.

Before the move I did a little maintenance work on the electric fence which runs all round the bottom field. This one is mains powered and it's not a good idea to touch it! A couple of wooden posts needed replacing and I wanted to set up the strip grazing system again.

This was a couple of hours work, so at about 8pm I led the lambs down to be reunited with their mums and dad, Rambo. The two new lambs we bought from Church Farm went too. Introducing seven at once would share out the stress if there was to be any argie-bargie. As it was, the sheep mixed together very well...

... until the Shetland lambs started going straight through the electric fence and into the orchard.

This was more serious, as from there they could go absolutely anywhere if they so chose. They could also do a lot of damage to the trees, as Shetlands' favourite food is tree bark. I tested the fence and it was very weak.
A few older parts of wire had started to rust a little and in places the fence was running through very long grass indeed. It was possible that too much electricity was being lost along the fence. However, my poor understanding of the subject led me to believe that at least at the beginning of the fence the charge should still be strong. I tested it and it wasn't.
By now, the sheep were back out into the orchard again and it was raining heavily. I turned the fence off and decided to reconnect it where the lead-in wire comes in. It was while I was doing this that I received a rather sharp shock! My finger was tingling for several minutes afterwards. There was obviously power somewhere.
Still the power was low. I went right back to the energiser in the stable and reconnected the lead-in wire at that end. Still no difference.
There was no choice but to go all round the perimeter of the fence moving the posts inwards to shorter grass and pushing the long and very wet grass away from the base. By the time I got all the way round time was getting on and I was absolutely drenched. Not only was the rain coming down heavily but the water was travelling up my trousers from the sodden long grass. From there gravity took it back down into my boots which were squelching nicely.

I got back to the beginning and tested the power again. Still no difference. :-(

This was clearly going to need further investigation, but darkness was approaching so I took the decision to move the lambs back to the top paddock.
The whole evening had gone, I was drenched, the sheep were back in the same place and I now had two electric fences not working.
On the plus side... any suggestions?

24th June
The morning after the night before.
I always stay up ridiculously late on election nights. I'm addicted to the coverage. I'll keep away from the politics. Suffice to say that I'm glad I grow all my own food - it just might shield me from some of the worst effects of what's to come.

Good news today. At the fifth attempt I've finally managed to germinate some Pea Beans. I literally chucked loads of them into a seed tray and covered them in compost as a final last ditch attempt.

More good news. Sue has been away for a couple of days and now she is back. She came back to another swarm of bees. At a guess from the same hive as the last one. Sometimes they just keep swarming.
The swarm I caught a couple of days ago didn't stay in the end. By the morning the spare hive was completely empty. Hopefully we'll have more luck with this lot.

Final job for the day was to nip out the tomato side shoots. As well as those in the polytunnel I'm growing lots outside this year. This is always a risk and often comes to nothing, but if everything comes together we will have mountains of tomatoes at the end of the year. The first ones should be ready in the polytunnel in the not too distant future.

25th June

The videos, if they've worked, say it all.
I was working on the bean patch today, weeding, edging and planting out module grown plants where there were gaps. Only a couple of the kidney beans had come through so replacing these was the main job.
After that I set about erecting supports for the broad bean plants which are on the verge of collapsing under their own weight. Half way through this the heavens opened and I had to make a run for it into the polytunnel. This was to be no normal storm though. Hailstones absolutely pelted down for half an hour. Fortunately for you, in the name of the blog, I made a run back to the house to get my phone and record the event. I was literally running through about an inch of water and hailstones. My second drenching in three days.

When it finally eased off there was water everywhere and piles of hailstones.

I hadn't twigged that the brassica netting might be in trouble too. When I went back out to check all the birds and animals were okay I noticed that the aluminium poles were dangerously bent and the netting was weighed down with hailstones, which I had to scoop out by hand. It is late June and my hands are stinging from scooping up hailstones. Something is wrong here.



Fortunately the netting was strong enough not to tear and the poles sprung back into shape. Otherwise a fairly harmless but spectacular weather event could have been a bit of a disaster.