Going Cheep

April's Showers Arrive Late

I wouldn't be English if I didn't open with the weather.

We've finally has some of this...

Rather a lot. In fact I've had a butt full of it. Water butts of course! I've managed to fill two IBC containers, that's 2000l of water collected. 

Frost-free?
Not only that, but following an overnight frost on the morning of 7th May, we now have a frost-free forecast through until 20th.

I've finally started moving some of the plants out of the conservatory. Chances of anything apart form a light frost are now very low.

Chicks, Ducklings and Poults

The week has been all about baby birds though, We suddenly have 53 extra little mouths to look after!

We bought in a score of ay old chicks. These are hubbards which grow at a medium pace and are well suited to free range life. They are meat birds but we don't place a huge priority on bringing them to weight as fast as possible. The fastest growing birds, as used in the poultry industry (and by unthinking smallholders), just grow too fast for my liking. They are genetic monsters which can easily become too heavy for their legs or hearts to carry them. On the other hand, some of the more traditional breeds really aren't economically viable, producing scrawny birds which take ages to get to weight. This is fine if you are in the privileged position to pay considerably more for your meat, but it is not a viable route.

So we strive for a happy medium, birds bred to grow faster than normal and to put on more breast meat, but which can still lead a happy and healthy (if short) life. The shortness of a meat bird's life always comes as a shock to those not in the know. A commercial meat chicken will have no more than  couple of months of life. 

Gut instinct is that we want our chickens to have a much longer life than that, but this is where reality kicks in. For no chicken bred for meat would go much past 6 months. For starters, it would be very expensive, but more than that any chicken older than that turns to rubber. Imagine eating one of those chicken dog toys!

There is obviously the option to go vegan, and I wouldn't criticise that choice at all. In fact I was a vegan for part of my life. For me the important factor is the quality of life an animal has while it is still alive and keeping our own livestock gives me complete control over that. 

Hot on the heels of the chicks came the ducklings. Indeed it was a lot hotter on the heels than I had anticipated and it had me scrabbling around for somewhere to keep them. Again the ducklings are destined for the plate and will grow quickly. I searched around the smallholding for a suitable container in which to keep them. Finally I found the perfect solution, a large and strong plastic post office sorting box which we had been gifted and were using to store logs.

I fashioned a lid from strong metal mesh and suspended a heat lamp from the rafters in the garage. The poor little things were very sleepy and would just collapse asleep. A week on and they are almost unrecognisable. I am really pleased with how strong they are. If they feather up and the weather warms it won't be too long before they can enjoy free-ranging around the smallholding. For the moment they wouldn't survive the cold and wet, not to mention crows and rats!

Back to the chicks. Just a day old, they went straight into an old gerbil cage we scrounged off a friend. Here they had warmth, food and drink and safety. But their rate of growth is phenomenal and it doesn't take long before the smell  becomes somewhat noxious.

So already, after just a week, their accommodation has been considerably upgraded. We managed to scrounge another post office sorting box so they have moved into the garage alongside the ducklings.

As if that weren't enough to keep us busy, the turkey hen who was siting on eggs under a pile of sticks by the roadside paddock has hatched out al her eggs. I returned home from work to see her leading nine poults (baby turkeys) through he long grass.

I quickly sprang into action scooping the fluffy little balls into my coat pockets while mum did her best to fend me off, flying up at my face with claws outstretched. This is a dangerous lifestyle! 

We had prepared a stable in anticipation so I led mum towards it as she followed the calls of her babies. Again it is much safer for them to be reared indoors until they can fly up onto a perch.

There's more! A week later the other hen who was sitting on the straw bales hatched out her own clutch. Interestingly these chicks look completely different. One mum is a Norfolk Black, one a Bronze, but dad is a mix. However, the poults seem to have taken on the genes of their mums. We had no idea how many eggs she was on so I was pleasantly pleased to fin myself scooping up a dozen baby birds. Just one didn't make it out of its egg. Mum will be a very good parent. I can tell by the tenacity with which she sat for four weeks and by the tenacity she showed in jumping onto my back several times to defend her young.

Pegleg's Veg

Meanwhile in the veg plot some plants have finally started to be transplanted outside. Broad beans, onions, turnips and radishes are the first out. None of thee mind the cold too much, but I've been waiting ages for rain to wet the soil.

In the polytunnel, Florence fennel I sowed last July is just now coming good. Its the first time I've had success with this crop.

I've also been busy creating a new area to attract and feed wild finches and buntings. In general they won't come too near the house but we have really good numbers of Yellowhammers on the holding this year. To attract them I've sown some of the mixed seed we feed the birds into an area bordering the sheep paddocks and orchard. It's already working as there are regularly several birds feeding there, though they are showing a remarkable ignorance of farming. Each seed they eat could potentially have produced many hundreds later in the year!

One For Sorrow

Now for some sad news on the nature front. Having watched the pair of long-tailed tits busily constructing their delightful nest, I went outside to see a pile of feathers on the floor. Something, I suspect  magpie, had found the nest and pecked a hole in the top. The long-tailed tits have abandoned, leaving their tiny eggs in the nest. Nature can be so harsh.

Nature's Undertakers

One of my favourite jobs is turning the compost. It is a thriving city of minibeasts beavering away. Last week I unearthed a large beetle, maybe an inch long, with notable orange blobs o its antennae. A minute later there was another. They scuttled a bit too quickly to get any decent pics.

I looked them up and they are black sexton beetles, nature's undertakers. They sniff out small dead animals then dig underneath them until the corpse is buried. These two had sniffed out a dead rat! Smallholding's not always as glamorous as it seems.

2021 Week 8 - Final preparations for outdoor growing

Spring is most definitely in the air! We've had warm, dry winds all week which have done wonders drying out the land. It's left the soil in the veg plot nicely pliable too, not that I dig it much now that I have converted to no-dig. It does make for good weeding though. Oh the satisfaction of pulling out a couple of foot of couch grass root in one go!

The veg plot is gradually taking shape as winter debris is cleared and beds are covered.

There was a lull in the seed sowing schedule this week so instead I've been concentrating on getting all the beds ready. With no dig, this mainly involves just shifting all the compost I managed to make last year. There's not enough to apply a thick covering all over, so I focus on using it in the polytunnel and on this year's potato beds. I've also been harvesting and chopping back the willow growth. Some is used for structures to support climbing plants and the like in the veg plot. The rest will be shredded and can go on my new perennial beds.

The mangetout has been planted in the polytunnel beds

We were back at school this week. Actually it was our bubble's turn to be teaching from home, but our broadband has been behaving like a temperamental small child which meant that I had to go into school every day just to connect to broadband so I could Zoom into pupils' homes and classrooms. I mostly had to work in a classroom on my own so I didn't do too much bubble crossing. 

The nights are really drawing out now though and it's easily possible to get a couple of hours done in the garden when I get home from work. This makes a really big difference.

Home from work and still plenty of light left

One of the principles of sustainable smallholding is never to throw anything away and to accumulate anything that might come in useful one day. This policy was vindicated this week as some incomplete polytunnel frames which I had collected quite some years ago (and had been moved around the smallholding several times) finally found a use.

With my new found interest in growing perennial plants, I have lots of pots over-wintering. They are fine in the polytunnel over winter, protected from the worst of the wind and frost, but temperatures in the polytunnel have been soaring whenever the sun shines, These plants are much better outside now, but a modicum of protection from the wind and the birds is still useful. So I have build an extension onto the back of the polytunnel and converted a previously wasted space into a nursery area. I just need the bird netting to be delivered and it will be complete. There was an old scaffold platform making the place look messy too. This I have repurposed into staging for plant trays.

I am really pleased with the new space I have created.

Boris and Arthur help out
with plucking as usual.

Bird flu restrictions are still in place so the poultry remain locked up. But the turkeys have started to fight as two young males have been strutting their stuff. There always comes a point when rearing birds when the boys have to move on. With this more aggressive springtime behaviour came a bit of wanderlust too. One morning we discovered they had got out and ventured into the field next door! This was the cue to round them up and for one of the boys to be freezer-bound. As usual I got a couple of wing-whacks in the face in the process of catching him. I've learned to take my glasses off.

I've been a busy boy this week. I've also built a low shelter for the chickens, again using old bits of polytunnel frame. I've got some old polytunnel cover sitting around that I scrounged too which should make this into a perfect shelter from the wind and the rain. It will also give the poultry some dry, dusty ground to bathe in once they are all free to explore.

The Silkies have had a major home improvement too. I purchased several large sheets of welded mesh. This was mainly to stop the rats digging under and into their pen, but it has also served to keep the chickens up abuve the mud. They seem very happy with the new arrangement.

More happy animals.

We have let the sheep back out of the stables. They were ecstatic, the old ewes running and bouncing and leaping around the paddock when they were let out. Rambutan got very over excited too. He is not in with the girls this year, but decided that ramming me would be quite a good game. I can tell you it hurt! It did remind me why they are called rams.

The geese responded to having all their stable straw changed by almost immediately beginning to lay. The first goose egg is one of those markers of the seasons for us. Next up will be the return of the swallows onto the farm.

Of course, I can't go without giving a Covid update. There is seemingly light at the end of the tunnel as Boris revealed his road ma. As expected we get all the children back at school in  a couple of weeks time. But I won't be around for the first week when they come back. For I have finally got the hospital appointment I've been waiting over a year for. This is one of my regular cancer checks and it has been a worrying time not having these checks. Hopefully nothing nasty has developed inside me while the hospitals have effectively been closed for normal service.

As well as the twice weekly lateral flow tests I am now taking for school, I will be required to take a proper test before I go into hospital and to self isolate for a few days beforehand. This time exactly a year ago I was one of the first to self-isolate in this country following my return from Thailand with a persistent cough. How things have developed since then.

Finally, my forest garden has arrived in a couple of boxes this week. Well, it's just part of what will hopefully become a food forest in the future (more of an edible copse really). For now this unusual mix of trees and shrubs has a little growing to do.

I'll tell you what the plants are in detail next week. I'll leave you with a mystery. What are these?

May Daze

Come back Rain, all is forgiven

Hot sunny days and lockdown have meant that I don't particularly have to work around the weather or other commitments. I can relax a little more and still keep on top of things on the smallholding.

Having said that, our boom and bust weather patterns do make things more difficult. 7% of our usual May rainfall has necessitated watering in new plantings and watering where I sowed the carrots, one of only two crops which I now sow direct. The parsnips failed to come through this year, so did their replacements. Worse still, the water butts have run dry so I now have to use metered and treated water. At least hoeing has been easy.

The body and soul of the soil

I have steadily been moving last year's compost onto beds. The huge pile is now all gone, but the encouraging news is that I had enough to cover the majority of the 80 or so beds I have. 

It's amazing how much material we produce to feed the compost heaps. Hopefully I can persuade some to break down enough for a mid summer mulch. 

Bee-keeping Update

We have only had five swarms of bees this year so far. Three of them have been huge swarms. One we gave away, the other four we collected and created new hives. One of these disappeared again, so Sue is now left with NINE hives. Her ideal number is three!!!

It looks like a good honey year. Sue has already taken 60 jars of early honey. She is not one to rob the bees of too much and always leaves plenty for the girls. 

A welcome hair cut

The hot weather is hard on the sheep too, so it was a relief for them when the shearer came a few days back. Jason and his wife Chloe are really friendly and fantastic with the sheep. Not only do the sheep get rid of their uncomfortably hot fleeces, but they get their feet trimmed and a dose of Clik to protect against fly strike. It's also a chance for a health check by people who know much more than us and for us to ask any questions we have.

One of our ewes looks suspiciously fat. If she is pregnant, it will be a virgin birth as the three rams have been kept well away. I have my suspicions how it may have happened. We'll see if she really is pregnant and what the lamb looks like if there is one.

Rambo, our breeding ram, has lost a lot of weight and his stools are not solid. We have tried worm and fluke treatment but it has not made a lot of difference. Jason gave him a mineral drench (this is not as it sounds, but simply means given orally) and says that often cures unknown problems. Let's hope.

Respect your Elders

Another feature of this time of year is that the elders come into flower. This is the cue for Sue to make elderflower champagne. The process is very simple. Just dissolve sugar in water, est and juice lemons, add elderflowers.

Stir daily until it starts to bubble from the natural fermentation. Then bottle and burp.

Sue has also frozen about 50 heads. Don't worry, there are absolutely loads left for the birds and insects.

Birdlife on the Farm

These two swallows ended up inside the house.

One found the exit and I caught 

and released the other.

Swallows are now swooping in and out of the stables, robins, blackbirds and starlings are already feeding young. Blue tits and great tits are busy collecting food for young families. A pair of pied wagtails loiter around the stables and often fly out of there as I approach. A couple of years back they nested under some pallets by the polytunnel. Woodpigeons, chaffinches and goldfinches breed in good numbers here and we have a thriving colony of house sparrows. Further down the land there are meadow pipits nesting in the rough grass and skylarks rise high to blast out their song. Wrens sing loudly and are dotted all about the smallholding. We have thrushes breeding on the smallholding too, both mistle thrushes and song thrush. But they are outcompeted in the song stakes by our blackcap which hasn't shut up for weeks now. I saw the male carrying food into a bush in the front garden yesterday.

Above: The rewilded front garden

Below: Native hedgerows as they should look, planted by me 7 years ago.

The Little Owls are incredibly secretive at this time of year. I rarely even hear them. Excitingly though, tawny owls have moved in and I hear them almost nightly. They may have driven the barn owls out though.

Finally we have summer migrant warblers back. Our first singing sedge warbler and whitethroat appeared earlier this week. We had a reed warbler singing from the hedge for a couple of weeks, but it needs to move on and find the right habitat. 

I've probably forgotten a few of our breeding species, but every year we seem to get more and more which is a fantastic result of all the work I've put into creating a nature friendly smallholding.

It's a Rat Trap

One species not so welcome on the farm is rats. The traps are working well and at the moment I am catching young ones. The traps are not live traps but are very secure in terms of not catching non-target species. I leave the dead rats on a post and something takes them.

A few weeks back I was just checking and resetting the traps when one of our geese got trapped inside the brassica netting. In my rush to free it, I misplaced the rat trap (not set to spring) and have been searching for it ever since. Well yesterday I found it as it go mangled by the mower blades. It fought hard though, so I now need to get the blade mechanism fixed.

Poultry News

On the subject of the geese, they are still laying and we are still trying to steal their eggs. However, one is now permanently settled on the nest so we'll leave it to fate whether or not we get goslings this year. 

The glut of goose eggs means Sue keeps busy making cakes. We freeze these and they are an extremely good way of storing a surplus of eggs. Goose eggs make the best sponge.

In other poultry news, one of our turkey hens managed to hatch out three healthy poults. We put them in the poultry cage as protection against crows and they are all doing well. The other hen is desperate to sit on eggs but the crows keep finding her eggs. Hopefully she'll find a good spot somewhere in the veg plot or soft fruit patch before it's too late. We are happy to leave this up to fate again.

We have two Silkie hens sitting on Muscovy duck eggs and now one of the Muscovy ducks herself has made a nest in the corner of the chicken house and is sitting. Hopefully we'll end up with a few ducklings. Two of our Muscovy girls are now missing in action. We don;t know if they've been taken by something, moved away or are secretly rearing clutches in some forgotten part of the smallholding.

Clearing the seedling log jam.

Planting out beans. The climbing structures are made from coppiced willow rods

which the sheep strip for me.

With the last frost gone (a really late one would be a bit disastrous) I have been busy clearing the logjam of young plants in the polytunnel. I have moved most of them to benches outside as temperatures have stayed in double figures day and night for quite a while now. 

Corn, beans, tomatoes, courgettes and squashes have all gone into the ground outside. We had a couple of very windy days which was a challenge for the newly planted beans, but on the whole I've never had young plants settle in so well. They usually suffer a setback for a week or so but not this year.

The Rewards

At the other end of this process, we are already starting to get some decent harvests, particularly from the polytunnel which is yielding delicious new potatoes, carrots and mangetout. Once these are harvested their space will be required for tomatoes, peppers, melons and cucumbers. In fact, they are already underplanted. Outdoors we have now stopped harvesting the rhubarb but we have a couple more weeks of asparagus left. The gooseberry bushes are bursting to overflowing and we'll very soon be thinning out the early picking for the sharp gooseberries. The rest are left on to sweeten. 

We have salad leaves coming out of our ears. We have so many different types of salad leaf and can always spice them up even more with edible flowers or herbs such as fennel or oregano.

So, that's about all for now. As you can see, we're always busy on the smallholding. 

Stay safe.

Compost turning back on the agenda

8th January 2020 - Jobs for the day

Put bins bags out for collection
Feed and let out poultry
Check rat traps, move one into stable to catch the rat in there
Batch freeze soup made yesterday - by the way, concentrated orange and pineapple squash is not a suitable substitute for the juice of an orange in a butternut and parsnip soup recipe
Go to doctors for vaccinations for upcoming trip
Check out swan flock that has appeared in the fields on the way to the doctors. (49 Bewick's Swans and 140 Whooper Swans)
Clear perennial weeds from two veg beds, mulch with an inch of compost to protect the surface and provide goodness for next year. Cover with fleece until it settles down to stop the ducks and chickens moving it back off again.
Turn 2019 compost heap.


Yes. TURN 2019 COMPOST HEAP.
This is significant as it's the first time I've actually been able to turn the compost since the end of August. I don't want to build my hopes up too far, but months of gingerly pottering around in fear of aggravating my back pains may be coming to an end. Enforced rest (which has driven me stir crazy) and half an hour of exercises every night seems to have finally got me to the stage where actually using and exercising my back muscles, within reason, is helping my recovery.

The compost which I started back in November 2018, when I decided to trial no dig, has shrunk unimaginably. Despite my best efforts, there will only be enough to cover about a fifth of my veg beds. This has always been a concern of mine about the no-dig system as I see post upon post on Facebook where people are bringing in compost. To me a truly regenerative system needs to be self-supporting and this is what I am constantly searching for.
On a more positive note, I have a humungous pile of compostable material that I have amassed during 2019. I've just not been able to turn it of late.
From the outside it looks nothing like compost as the outermost surface is recently added material, but when I turned it today it didn't take long to reach usable compost. The best stuff was where I had added woodchip which comes directly from trees and shrubs grown specifically for harvesting for this purpose.
In fact I reckon I will be able to cover close to half of the veg beds with what I have produced.

This is encouraging and spurs me forwards to producing more and more compost. The willow bed will go from strength to strength, as will the elephant grass, both specifically cultivated for adding to the compost. Their roots will stay in the soil to add structure.

I was disappointed not to be able to try my oats experiment this year. The idea is to sow oats quite thickly after the earlier harvests. I can get whole oats as animal feed for less than £5 for a 15kg bag. The oats will grow enough to protect the soil surface, then get killed off by the frost. Come springtime they can be raked off and added to the compost.
I don't know anybody in this country who uses this method but I have seen it on YouTube and can't see why it won't work.

Planting garlic cloves - the first job of a new decade

It was at the beginning of the last decade that we took the plunge and bought our smallholding in The Fens. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.

And so we enter a new decade.

One of the things which we love about growing most of our own food is how our lives are now so entwined with the weather and the seasons.

The first bed of the year planted up with garlic cloves

New decade or not, the turn of the year has seen me planting garlic every year. This marks the start of a new growing season. The ancestors of the garlic cloves I planted today go right back to those three bulbs of garlic I bought from a greengrocer in London quite a few years back. Every year I select some nice plump cloves from last year's crop and each develops into a new bulb, multiplying itself by about 10.
And by my selection every year I get stronger stock adapted to growing here on the smallholding.

In keeping with the developing patterns of climate breakdown, this winter seems even warmer and wetter than previous ones. In fact, it would be good if somebody could tell the rhubarb to stay in hibernation for a couple more months. It really is quite confused at the moment.

Some very confused rhubarb

I had to wait for a protracted spell of dry weather before I could consider working in the veg plot. Even though I have gone no-dig, so no need for digging over sodden soil, even just walking around on the paths would create a mud bath.
Fortunately that dry spell has now come. The puddles are receding and yesterday I was able to prepare the first bed ready for planting up with garlic cloves. The whole family came out to help. Sue cleared the asparagus bed of its old stems, Gerry climbed a tree and the dogs went digging for voles.

My team of helpers.
Left to right: Boris, Arthur, Gerry and Sue

I have had to move the sheep more frequently to stop the ground from becoming poached - with water lying on or just below the surface, their hooves quickly turn the ground muddy and the grass is slow to grow. We have moved the rams well away from the ewes as we are not breeding this year. They were spending all their time frustratedly pacing up and down the fence-line turning it into a swamp.
We have had to feed more sugar beet and more hay this year. Hopefully the paddocks will recover with drier weather and we won't have to hunt for more hay towards the end of the winter.

The ewes are quick to move to a new paddock when I lower the electric fence. 

But the grass doesn't last long in these conditions.