No brick unturned

Building work continues unabated, at times providing us with some fairly challenging living conditions!
Old doorways (most of which were designed for persons considerably shorter than myself, as the top of my head can attest) have been blocked up and new openings have appeared.

                   Today came the biggest change. Dust and debris flew as the kitchen and dining room became one.
The end product certainly is becoming easier to imagine now, though I think it's fair to say it's still some way off yet!


Before...


and after!!

Meanwhile farm life continues as if nothing were happening. But there are housing upheavals on the horizon for the poultry too. The ducks need to move into the veg garden along with the geese, and I really want to find a way of moving the guinea fowl closer to the Ash trees. Hopefully they will eventually make them their night-time roost.

Saturday 17th November 2012

Sunday 18th November 2012
A sharp frost

Welcome back Number Ten and Number Eighteen

Today I picked up my two friendly Zwarbles lambs       ...from the butcher.

The butcher was quite surprised at how "long" they were, but then I guess he doesn't get many Zwartbles in and they are certainly a tall and elegant breed of sheep. I was quite pleased with their weights though, as a friend had recently taken hers (from the same batch) and they were just over 20kg.
So what do you get from one lamb?

Four legs! (no surprises there)
Four shoulders.
I had the bone left in all of these celebration joints, for flavour and drama.
About a dozen pairs of chops (I was too busy to count exactly)
Five packs of mince.
A couple of loin chumps.
Lungs, liver, kidneys.

I for one am very much looking forward to tucking into them. We would never dream of buying chops normally, or even  leg these days.
In fact, if I can manage their grazing more effectively I may even keep a couple more next year, maybe to raise on to make mutton.
It could well make more economic sense to be raising these for meat than raising pigs, certainly in terms of selling the meat.

The key difference is that pigs need constant feeding with brought in feed which is ever-increasing in price. It's also possibly the least environmentally sustainable part of everything we are doing here.
In contrast, the main cost of the lambs was the initial purchase, a little bit on medication and the butchery costs. In all they have worked out about £92 per lamb. So that's in the region of £5 per kilo of meat.

That is, of course, if you don't factor in the £85 it cost me today to replace the tyre which got pot-holed while driving back with the meat last night! Wouldn't have been so bad if I could have removed the wheel nuts!



For ourselves, I reckon a couple of weaners and a couple of sheep a year, along with a few chickens, guinea fowl and a couple of geese, would keep us quite splendidly supplied with meat...

Maybe a cow too...

Or a goat...!!

Friday 16th November 2012
A sunrise to forget.

Ashes to ashes? Worrying times.

Thursday 15th November 2012

I missed posting yesterday, for not only is the house in a totally disorganised, dusty mess at the moment, but Sue got the dreaded Ofsted call on Tuesday. Please don't get me started on this subject, or anything to do with the way successive governments have bullied teachers and mismanaged the education of our nation's children. Suffice to say it's been all-consuming, disgracefully stressful and I'm not even allowed to tell anybody if it went well or not for two weeks.
Anyway, now it's over.  As is my rant.

Last night, in the murk, I got a wonderful sight of a flyby barn owl which eventually settled in the branches of the oldest Ash tree. It's been spending more time in the proximity of the farm buildings of late and I've even found a few pellets in the stables. If I ever get time I may investigate these further and post my gory findings.
More surprising though was a very unseasonal bat, a pipistrelle I think. I guess it was lured out of hibernation by the balmy temperatures we've had for a couple of days, 12 degrees late in the afternoon yesterday.
The Little Owl too has been calling more persistently of late and I actually saw it briefly in the gloom as it broke the skyline and alighted on top of the telegraph pole by Don's gateway.

At this time of year though, there's a price to pay for this warm weather and this morning was a real pea-souper. All I could see of the garden for the whole day were the four Ash trees standing majestically. They give the garden structure and are a valuable home and food source to all sorts of wildlife. As with all trees, the older they get the more valuable they become in so many ways.

So you'll understand my affection for them and my worry about the effects of the dreaded Chalara fraxinia, or Ash Die-Back as it's quickly become known.
It would be so awful to lose them, and there's no way I could replace these wonderful specimens, even with a different species, in my lifetime. I've just got my fingers crossed. I've heard it said that mature trees could resist for years, so I can get going with my underplanting now so that we at least have some height in the garden if the Ashes eventually have to come down. As for the saplings at the end of the land, well I'll be surprised if they are still there in a couple of years.
Ash is by far the best wood for me to grow and coppice for fuel. I'd never rely on just one species, or plant up a monoculture, but I still need to have a bit of a rethink.

I just hope that, in ten years time, my ash wood is by some miracle coming from the trees at the end of the land and not the dead old trees near the farmhouse.

Wednesday 14th November 2012
Not the best start to a very stressful day.

Dust Storm



Tuesday 13th November 2012

This looks like a good place for a doorway.



Well, the building work is well and truly under way now and there's dust everywhere! Hardly a wall, door, ceiling or window will be unnafected in the next few months.
If the computer doesn't choke, I'll keep posting whenever I can.

The first lorry delivery.
Jacksons Spalding have been brilliant so far.
I can't speak highly enough of their service.
(And no, I'm not being sonsored to say that!
Just credit where credit's due.)





Piglets growing fast

The piglets have got through that vulnerable stage where they are either suckling or huddled together in a shivering ball.

Now they are inquisitive, mobile and playful.




Monday 12th November 2012

 

I often spend time just watching them and being with them. They do that thing that pigs do when they all play statues for a few seconds and then continue as if nothing had happened. Then there's the little bursts of energy, a sudden skip of the heels and twizzling round in circles. Games of piggyback too, and chasing.
Potatoes are fun to nuzzle around, but too big to nibble yet. And look! I can snout around in the straw just like mum.

I'll shut up and just let you oooooh and aaaaah at the pictures!

Now that the Zwartbles are gone

Boy, the abattoir was busy this morning. We joined a long queue to drop off the Zwartbles and it wasn't too long before we were towing an empty trailer back to its owner.

Lovely as the sheep were, they could sometimes be a right pair of thugs. I had to leave the gates to the veg garden open, otherwise they just blundered right through the fence. And I couldn't leave the doors to the chicken enclosure ajar, otherwise they trotted straight in and pillaged all the feed, knocking everything flying in the process and terrifying the poultry.

Next year I'll be better prepared for containing them.

Sunday 11th November 2012
We bade an icy farewell to Number Ten and Number Eighteen.

But today spelt freedom for the ducks, chickens and geese. (The guinea fowl already freely hopped the fence).
The ducks quickly waddled into the veg garden and began devouring all the juiciest morsels. I am hoping to move them into here, even in the spring when the chickens will again be banished on account of their determined scratching and scraping the ground.
The geese have grazed their paddock to a fine green baize so will welcome the lusher grass of the veg garden now. And the chickens get the winter to wander around the whole farm.



All the poultry have a new found freedom to roam.
They are already making the most of it.

When I'm not so busy managing the house renovations, I'll grab a few minutes to dig the veg beds and apply manure so that winter can break down the soil. This will be when the birds come into their own, greedily scoffing every pesky grub which is brought to the surface. Shame I can't tell them exactly which ones to eat and which ones to leave be.

 

Zwartbles get ready for a journey



Do they know what's coming?
 

I really should know by now.

 

When a plan goes even better than expected...

There's a surprise in store!

 


Saturday 10th November 2012
The words dull and dreary
do not do it justice!

When the livestock trailer appears on the farm, all the animals should be wary. There's a fair chance it's not good news for at least one of them.

And todays victims were...














... Number Ten and Number Eighteen.


Without doubt the most endearing animals on the farm, these two characters have ensured there will definitely be a space for sheep here in the future.

But for the moment I am really looking forward to being able to tuck into a nice piece of lamb, a luxury which I can ill often afford. We look after them as best we can, we feel affection toward them, but at the end of the day they never were pets.






It must have taken all of about fifteen seconds to lead these two inquisitive animals up into the trailer. They simply followed the remains of the Euonomus plant, now a few twigs in a pot. This was always the first thing they headed for when they managed to sneak through the gate into the stable yard.

But there is a twist.
For sheep are resourceful, headstrong and remarkably agile creatures. They soon discovered that by climbing on the rails of the hurdles inside the trailer, they could almost blunder their way back over the tailgate. A lofty drop onto concrete would have welcomed them, as well as the task of reloading them without the benefit of taking them by surprise this time.

With no way of blocking the opening at the back, I removed the hurdles and decided to park the whole shebang in the paddock.

That way, if they persisted with the escape plan they would land on grass and be in the right place for recapture in the morning.
I just hoped the car would get enough grip to pull the trailer out!

As darkness fell, Number Ten and Number Eighteen settled down, though they still managed the occasional peek over the top.
I really think its 50:50 whether they'll still be contained come the morning.

Whatever happens, they'll be fondly remembered.

Mini Guinea and Little Legbar - In Memory

 

Friday 9th November 2012
The calm sunset gave no hint of a shocking start to the day.

A shocking sight met my eyes this morning as I picked my way over the soggy ground to let the chickens out. For there, dead on the ground, was one of the Cream Legbar chicks which we raised in the house. These two chicks never became very streetwise in the big world with the rest of the chickens, but I didn't expect this to happen. In fact, last night I took a picture of the Elvis coop at roost to show how the young chicks had finally been accepted by the others. You can see one of the young Legbars front right - it's the barred plumage tucked under the wing of the older female Legbar.

I had assumed that the other was somewhere in the melee with Elvis, but how wrong could I be?

Little did I know when I took this piccie
that one of the chicks was missing.

 

It must have got itself stuck outside somewhere.

These two had become very friendly to me, as have previous cock Cream Legbars, but I always knew that one day they would have to go so they never acquired names and I always kept a distance.

 

 

But lightning struck twice last night. For I could only count ten guineafowl keets. I had suspected this last night, but wasn't sure in the gloom. It didn't take me long to find MiniGuinea lying dead too. For some days it had been struggling with the damp and the cold nights, often needing help up onto the roosting fence to spend the night protected by the warmth of its siblings.

 

Since we have lived here things have often seemed to balance out in sometimes cruel ways. These two sad losses closely followed the joyous birth of our third piglet litter.

I have become more hardened to it now. MiniGuinea was always facing an uphill battle and just never grew quickly enough. Always the weakest, the wet winter weather found it out.

 

The hardest part was telling Sue.

 

Upheaval



Thursday 8th November 2012

Today, rather unexpectedly, the building work started! In the next three or four months there won't be many walls, doors, floors or windows which will escape.

 

 

In the meantime, there'll be lots of noise, dust and shifting 'stuff' from room to room.

At least this new doorway should be tall enough for me. I've lost count of how many times I've whacked the top of my head on the old one (just visible in the picture - the doorway, not the top of my head!).

I'll continue to post whenever I can, but it may be somewhat intermittent.

There is a strong possibility we will be moving into the stables with Daisy!