Easter Monday

A sad start to Easter Monday as it was time to dispatch the Muscovy duck that we reared last year. He had grown into a big boy but, to the displeasure of the boss male, he had also taken a liking to the females.
For quite a while now this had made putting the ducks away at night a bit of a nightmare. Every night the chickens and geese put themselves away, the turkeys and guinea fowl go up on the fence, but the ducks loiter outside until I appear to put them away. The female and the boss male then go into the house as a group, bobbing their heads at each other and hissing in a friendly fashion. It's not unusual for two to get wedged in the door as their efforts to go one at a time go awry.
Once in, the old male turns around and guards the door.

Boss male with his girls

The problem comes when the young male, who has been hanging around hiding, then needs to be put away.  For he is scared of the dominant male and every time he attempts to enter the house he comes running back out again. Leaving him outside is not an option as he doesn't go up on the fence and would otherwise end up as fox food. However much we have tried, he won't do the sensible thing and go into alternative overnight accommodation.
So the only answer is to chase him round and round the pen until it is the easier option for him to brave going into the house.

This has been an inconvenience, but in the last few days he has started being pecked in the house. He was always destined for the plate anyway, but this made the matter more pressing.

So this morning I caught him straight from his overnight accommodation (a risky operation as he was a big, strong boy and Muscovy ducks have sharp claws) and did the deed.

While I was doing this (and well before, while I was still in bed), Sue had been a busy bee in the kitchen.

I went down to the kitchen to find a Rhubarb and Orange Crumble made with our own hazelnuts in the topping. Yummy!
Sue had been at the bottle again too. She had bottle up her plum brandy and sloe vodka and put some rhubarb and ginger vodka to start as well as sloe port.

That should help us through lockdown!

It was a much chillier day today so I chose an indoor task, pricking out the celeriac seedlings and planting them individually into modules. This is a fiddly task and the seedlings need to be treated very delicately. I selected the strongest 40 seedlings from the small tray of maybe twice that number. They can now go to the polytunnel to grow on before they are planted outside. It will be a long while before they are ready to harvest.

40 celeriac seedlings in the polytunnel

next to sugar snap peas and red onions

I spent the early afternoon planting another couple of beds of potatoes before we turned our attention back to the Muscovy duck, now hanging out in the stable.

Muscovy ducks have three layers of feathers and plucking them dry is a Herculean task, so instead we dunk them in boiling water for 3 1/2 minutes which makes plucking far easier.
We do the plucking in the stable which makes for easily sweeping up the feathers to go on the compost heap. We did have to keep the geese away though so they wouldn't see what was happening.

One was sitting on the nest so we left her there, a much safer option for us. We have the same problem with the geese as we had with the Muscovys. Last year's sole offspring is a young male and is get harassed. Fortunately he has the sense to spend the nights in the separate stable we have allotted to him.









While we were clearing up I decided to sort out last year's onions. We didn't manage to use them all before their inbuilt senses kicked in and they sprouted fresh growth. So I sorted them out and moved those which were still ok to the fridge.
Unfortunately no animals or birds will eat onions so any excess grown cannot be used for them.

Final job of the day was to mend the roof of the chicken house. The overnight winds had whipped off the felt. To be fair, I had been looking at it for a while thinking that it needed replacing.