Animal Helpers

One of my favourite childrens books is Farmer Duck, in which a very lazy farmer lays in bed all day scoffing chocolate while his animals do all the farm work. Every now and again he bellows "How goes the work?" I won't tell you how the story ends.

Life is busy for all of us on the farm at the moment. I dig, sow, make things, fix things, weed, mow and look after the animals. Sue juggles her work with looking after the house, helping me, making wines and preserves, and baking cakes to use up the excess eggs. Our roles aren't fixed, or stereotypical, but we both get on with what we do best. In fact, there's so much going on that I find it difficult to decide what to write about. Sometimes the more mundane jobs, but essential ones, get left out.

So I thought I'd do a little catch up blog to show how the animals have been helping out lately. For everything on the farm has to earn its keep.

The chickens have been turning the compost.

The guineafowl have been picking off all the creepy crawlies.

 

The ducks have been hoovering up the slugs in the veg patch

The geese have been cutting the grass

and the pigs were let loose in the spare veg patch

where they dug up all the old potatoes and snouted up the earth
ready for cultivation

 

 Last, but not least, these four arrived to help out with the grass.

As I wrote about a couple of days ago, Gerry has been keeping the rabbit population in check too. And then there's about twenty thousand bees who have hopefully been busy pollinating the fruit trees, though they seem to prefer the nearby rape fields.

Hopefully all my animals won't rebel, kick me off the farm and chase me in to the sunset.

Oops! I gave away the ending.

First Asparagus



Asparagus takes centre stage,
even over our own fresh duck eggs and
home-made ham.


Two years ago I planted some 30 asparagus crowns and watched them grow into wispy, fern-like plants. Last year I waited patiently for them to emerge and they duly did, poking their heads through the soil's crust as if by magic. Again, I watched them grow into wispy, fern-like plants. They attracted a few asparagus beetles, beautiful insects which more often than not managed to fly away before I could squash them between my thumb and forefinger. There were never more than a few, though, so no worries about an infestation. I duly mulched the asparagus with hay, supposedly this luxury crop's favourite treatment, but this was not a good move in the year of the great slug plague. It just gave the slimy vermin somewhere to hide and a damp shelter from the sun. The hay was removed, but still the slugs attacked.

But this year, their third year, I awaited the emergence of the asparagus spears with more anticipation. For this year I could eat them! No more patiently waiting while they accrued the sun's energy in their roots and built their strength.

 

Why do I choose to write about this today? After all, asparagus has been advertised at the roadside for several weeks now.

In fact that first, memorable harvest, was a few weeks back now. It happened during the great technological meltdown which brought this blog to a grinding halt for six weeks. And there's still so much for me to catch up with. 

But today, for the first time since we moved in, having feasted on his rhubarb, apples and strawberries, having burned his wood in our fireplace, having borrowed no end of things from him, today I was finally able to give something to our neighbour, Don, which he doesn't grow himself.

Yes. Our investment in a modest asparagus bed is finally paying off.

All being good, we will be harvesting spears from these very same crowns for the next fifteen years or so.

For the moment though, we have another two weeks to enjoy our almost daily harvest before we again leave our asparagus plants to grow into wispy, fern-like plants.



Catching up with the pigs

It's not often that I laugh out loud (and shoot me dead if I ever abbreviate it. lol!)

But the other day I stood by the polytunnel chuckling away to myself. For I could hear the piglets barking -  they more often make this sound than an oink - and I could see them haring around in circles, chasing the guineafowl! The guineas have clockwork legs which carry them with surprising speed, but they were still getting a good run for their money. It took them a while and a good amount of protestation and indignation before they thought to take flight and perch on the fence, continuing to complain in the loudest way possible.

Anyway, this reminded me that before my recent technological meltdown the pigs were still in their stables. But I did manage to take some nice piccies when they finally got to see the big outside.

Thankfully the pig enclosure has dried out significantly since then.

The boy has gone off too. Boy pigs face a tricky choice, either to have their bits chopped off or to head to the butchers before their six months birthday. Otherwise their developing hormones taint the taste of their meat. This boy did get one extra week in this world, thanks to a bank holiday. It doesn't seem to have affected the meat, which is selling very well.

Pesky Rabbits

Apologies for yesterday's post - it was a bit gruesome.

If it was too much for you, then I suggest you look away now! For I came in from the polytunnel yesterday afternoon to find Gerry, that sweet little cat of ours, devouring a rabbit on the lounge carpet.

Our Gerry has a killer streak, his Mr Hyde. Even as a kitten, when he had two brothers, the three of them were capable of catching (and eating, always from the head first) surprisingly large rabbits.
We always know when Gerry has had a rabbit as he disappears upstairs and sleeps it off for hours on end.

Young lovage plants, now protected behind a fortress.

Now those rabbits may be cute, but if you saw the state of my lovage plants, lovingly reared since last year and planted out into the finest soil, prepared with blood, sweat and tears... if you saw the carnage as they lay uprooted and left to wither on the ground, then you would understand why I did not feel too much pity for the rabbit.

Gerry has now all  but cleared the rabbits from the dyke, but there is still one which has found its way into the veg patch. It often scarpers from the rhubarb patch and scurries to safety under the compost bins.

If I find out this is the animal which chewed all the leaves off my blueberry plants, just as they were getting going for the first time, and then chewed the main stem too, then I will not be held responsible for my actions. Meanwhile, I have already carried Gerry down to the rhubarb patch where he had a good sniff around before a sharp shower had him scampering back inside.

Gruesome Goosome.

Today, as I passed the stables, an unfamiliar odour wafted through the air. Not manure. Not dead animal. Not the methane smell which wafts over from the Crowland compost factory on a Westerly wind. No, none of the usual unpleasant farm smells.

This was an odour I had never before encountered. I followed my nose which led me straight into the goose stable, where two of the girls still sit with total dedication on their clutch of eggs, which we think have gone way beyond their due date. The most dedicated of the girls is in quite a poor state now, her feathers dirty and abraded. She has left the nest only a couple of times in well over a month. I had even thought about evicting her and taking the eggs, but decided that it would be best to give it a little longer and hope she realised for herself that her eggs were not going to hatch.

Well, today things took an unexpected turn. For as I entered her domain I could see that she appeared to be devouring the contents of an egg. But something looked wrong. I braved the attentions of the guards on the door, hissing and baring their teeth, and edged closer to see.

And yes, as I suspected, it wasn't a yolk she was eating but an unborn gosling. A gruesome sight, which is why I have left the photo till the end of this post.


Groose-some.



But it does open the game up again.For it shows that at least some of those eggs were indeed fertile. And as she stood to defend her nest, I could see that a few of them were still intact underneath her. So maybe, just maybe we will end up with one or two goslings after all. Or maybe something has happened and today's incident has pointed at the fate of all the eggs.

A Mystery Break Out

The window was broken from the inside. The door was still bolted. Nothing had been taken. In fact, something had been left inside.

Yes. Quite inexplicably the shed window, made of thin perspex, has been broken from the inside! We did take a buffeting from the wind a few nights ago, but surely we would have noticed a broken window in the shed we visit at least twice a day, where the chicken food is stored.

Broken from the inside!

These dodgy-looking characters were loitering, but it couldn't possibly have been them.

But today we think we solved the mystery. For when Sue opened the shed there, already inside, was a chicken. She had clearly returned to the scene of the crime, presumably through the very window she had smashed. The only logical explanation is that she had hidden away inside the shed one day, got locked in, panicked and flown against the window, thus breaking it from the inside. Hard to believe, but the only possible explanation. But not enough evidence unless we could find a motive.

And there it was, on the floor, nestled in a carefully shaped cradle of straw. An egg.

You may be forgiven for being a bit puzzled right now, so a little history will help.

Elvis



Cocky



The last time we gave Elvis some eggs to sit on she got a right mixture, but a couple were her own. And I'm pretty sure that I know which of the young laying hens is hers. For starters, it looks like I'd imagine a cross between Elvis and Cocky to. Should we call it Elky or Cockvis? Neither too catchy.



Leave my egg alone, you!



But more than that, it has persistently showed strong traits of Elvis's broody behaviour. For this is the hen which took itself off and laid 8 eggs in the goose house. And I suspect this to be the hen which laid 15 eggs in the leaf litter heap. Then came half a dozen eggs in amongst the straw bales, followed by EIGHTEEN eggs tucked away in the corner of the old pigs' stable. She even sat on these for a few days before abandoning them, presumably after Gerry found her and started loitering around.

 



So, returning to the present, it seems like her latest plan went wrong when she stowed away in the shed only to get locked in. But she left behind one vital clue - that egg.

Motive, opportunity and means.

Dusky at Dawn

Plan A today was to sow all my Mangel Wurzels, rotavate a large area of ground and empty out the second pig stable. Oh, and to treat the four new lambs for flystrike.
For the year is flying by and, as usual, I have queues of young plants waiting to go outside into beds which are not yet ready. I am much more on top of things than in previous years, but a few more days hard toil is still needed.

So it was that, before first light, I found myself parked at the entrance to Margate Cemetery! Thankfully, without the rotavator.
For at just past 11 o'clock last night the pager had whirred into action announcing a Dusky Thrush in Kent, my old stomping ground, present for the last three days.
A quick internet search revealed a photo of the bird from 15th May, identified as a Redwing.
http://steve-tomlinson.blogspot.co.uk/

To put this bird in context, the last twitchable Dusky Thrush in Britain was FIFTY THREE years ago. That comes in the Birds Before I Was Born category.


So after just one hour's sleep, there I was at 4.15a.m. waiting for it to get properly light. There were fewer cars than I expected. I think petrol costs these days lead people to wait and see if the bird is still present before jumping in the car. A fair few people were either in bed or the worse for wear by 11 the previous evening, so will have woken up to some most exciting news.
Anyway, it was very good to see a few old friends again. By and by more truly gripping photos of the bird appeared on Smartphone screens, giving us some vital clues about where to start looking in this vast cemetery.
It wasn't long before the gravestone which featured in one of said photos had been located, and then began in earnest the tense wait. Could there really have been a Dusky Thrush in this corner of Kent for the last three days? And much more importantly, would it still be there on this fourth day?

It felt like an age, but at just before 6 o'clock a soft whistle led to a minor stampede of birders across the cemetery. The bird had flown in to the top of a tree, looking to return to its feeding area.
But before many people could get views, off it went. But it didn't take long to get found again, or to fly off again. At least this time I got brief flight views, but not enough to tick the bird.

The bird's third appearance (in a thankfully short time) was much more satisfactory as it perched at the very top of a tree on the edge of the cemetery.

The sense of excitement, mixed with relief and joy, at the moment I set eyes on the thrush is something that probably only fellow twitchers can begin to comprehend.

The next couple of hours were more leisurely, spent catching up with old friends and trying to get better views of the bird. It continued to keep its distance, clearly perturbed from returning to its favoured area by the sudden appearance of a couple of hundred people. (Though behaviour was actually very good. Thank goodness this was the older, historical part of the cemetery.)

I eventually got some much better views of the bird perched in a small tree in front of me and it was time to head back to Lincolnshire. Not before a quick stop at Reculver towers where I enjoyed some excellent views of a ringtail Montagu's Harrier. But these days I can no longer manage on an hour's sleep, so my journey home was punctuated by an hour's nap in a layby.

Eventually I pulled back into the farm in the early afternoon, only to find my friends visiting to help us out with the lambs. I had secretly hoped they might have been over in the morning and the job would be already done for me.

However, the lambs are becoming much tamer and keeping them in place for long enough to squirt the treatment fluid along their backs was no problem. I only had to catch one of them, the most timid, which we have realised appears to be a girl. More on the lambs in a post to come soon.

I still had time to get those Mangel Wurzels sown too.
For more information on these, just follow this link:

http://talesfromswallowfarm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/mangel-wurzels.html

There was time too to cut about 10kg of rhubarb from Don's rhubarb jungle, which Sue spent the evening turning into 1910 Rhubard Chutney and Rhubarb Ketchup.

At about 8 o'clock, just as I was composing this post, the pager began wailing again. With three lifers, this year has already outstripped 2012, but another one would be most welcome. I jumped up and grabbed the pager expectedly, but it carried news of a Collared Flycatcher in Yorkshire. This is a bird I'd like to see, but it's on my list so does not take priority over all the jobs I've got to do here at Swallow Farm.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring. The plan is to continue preparing veg beds and moving young plants outside.

Goose bumps

In the middle of March I left you with news that the geese had laid their first egg. After that, they kept coming, one or two a day. Every now and again we pilfered a couple for culinary purposes - they make a very impressive boiled egg.

So the geese took to hiding them under the straw and for a couple of days we were fooled.



Nothing here...just a pile of straw.



But look what's underneath.

 

Things carried on like this for a while as we continued to pilfer and to surprise our friends with novelty eggs. It kept us vaguely amused during what were to be some of the worst days of the building works.

Anyway, at some point (and how we wish we'd noted it down), Mrs Goose decided to sit tight and begin the incubation process. She was more and more frequently joined by Mrs Goose 2 and sometimes by Mrs Goose 3 too. It was fascinating to watch them tend this communal nest.

I have no idea whether anything like this happens in the wild. I know it does with ostriches, but we've not got those ... yet.



The last time that all six geese were outside together

 

After a few days we did find the nest unoccupied for a while and I managed to count a whopping SIXTEEN eggs! And that was the last time I managed to get to the eggs, for since then they have been vigorously defended. Even if you get past the guards at the door, the girls just don't budge.

Strangely Mrs Goose 4 has never joined in with the whole broody idea. She bears a very subtly different colour leg ring, which I assumed to mean that she was from a different clutch, or born at a different time. But when I found her climbing on one of the girls, everything fell into place! Now she may well be a he, or just a very masculine she. Who knows?

All this has been unfolding over these last 2 months. The problem is, the incubation period for goose eggs is supposed to be 35 days max. Which is why we wish we'd noted when Mrs Goose started to sit. Instincts tell me that these eggs are not going to hatch and it is just a question of waiting for the geese to realise this and vacate the nest. Already a couple of the eggs have been eaten and seemed to be full of yolk. Or did the geese just know that these were the infertile ones??

For the moment, all thoughts of sixteen (or more) cute little goslings to munch my lawns until they grow into tasty little packages for Christmas have been put on hold.

Two sisters on the nest. One estranged boy on the right of the fence.
The old male in the foreground.
And then there's the transgender goose who may or may not be related to the others.
But were any of the eggs ever fertile?
Who needs Jeremy Kyle?!
"Now it's over to those all-important DNA tests".

Good to be back

I know. I've been AWOL for quite some time now.

Those of you who follow this blog may have realised that I tend not to do things by halves. So, when I started blogging, I vowed to myself never to become one of those people who blogs enthusiastically for a while before things tail off ... with the usual excuses ... you know them.

What's my excuse then for my last post being way back in March?

Busy? Most definitely. Away? Only for a day, to see a Rock Thrush in Yorkshire.

No. I've had a complete technological meltdown and that's all I want to say about it. But now I'm back, though photos may take a while to make a reappearance.




So, what has been going on here at Swallow Farm? Not much really.

The building work is almost done, but we have definitely been through the worst of it. There have been times when we wondered why we ever started it. The house is painted. We have four new lambs, one less pig, four fewer hens (sold) and eight fewer cockerels (freezer) and we don't have sixteen new goslings (long story, still going on). There's mixed news on the bees which have had a testingly long winter. On the wild bird front, the swallows are back in the stables, the pair of Little Owls has moved into the Ash trees and Don discovered a Mallard nest yesterday while he was cutting the meadow for me. The first cuckoo of the year has been heard and Swifts are screaming through the air once more on their short summer sejourn in our land.
I've been digging, sowing, digging, planting, digging, muck spreading and digging. And the grass has been growing, along with the weeds.

The weather has been cool, but anything's better than last year's early drought followed by endless soakings. Things in the veg plots are looking up. The fruit trees and shrubs are looking healthy and the young woodland has come through the winter well.

Actually, thinking about it, we really have been very, very busy.

A birthday egg from the geese

I've not mentioned the geese for a while, but the other day they came up trumps with their first ever egg...on Sue's birthday.

Since then we've had a few, though it's a bit unpredictable where they turn up. Today's was just laying in the middle of the goose paddock.


All this is very good news. It means the geese are settling in. We were a bit worried that no eggs had been forthcoming, as the traditional date for them to start laying is Valentine's day, though friends of ours have geese which started laying way back in December.

A quick resume of our history of goose-keeping, for those new to this blog. We chanced upon five geese which turned up on a friends perfectly manicured lawn. But we had no idea of their age and only one seemed to be a female. Our best guess was that this was a pair and their three young sons. The three sons proved overly boisterous, to say the least. The goose paddock was not a peaceful place. We sold one to somebody who was after a gander, but then we lost the female (who had never laid anyway) to a fox.
Apart from their grass-cutting abilities, this left us with three rather useless males.
Not wanting to give up, though, we managed to get our hands on four rather delicate new girls, but this just made the young boys more aggressive.

Scene of the first egg find.

So one was given away (with an offer to take him back if he proved too aggressive). He was subsequently named Edward and settled in well to start with, but has since become too aggressive to the other geese and is now being lined up for the pot.

But Edward's departure did the trick as far as our clock was concerned. The old male has established dominance and is fairly gentle about it. The girls have learned to stand up to the young gander when he gets ideas above his station.

The goose flock are now living in harmony.



The dominant old male.
Should we name him?





We'll give them a while longer, but if they carry on like this we may have to give them names.



Anyway, back to that egg. It was huge. Somewhere on the way to an ostrich egg.

Goose, duck, hen

Tonight Sue had it scrambled and I had one fried, on toast with our own bacon.
There was certainly a lot of egg! And delicious it was too.


It's a pity, though, that the geese choose to lay when the ducks and chickens are popping out eggs left, right and centre. As soon as the building work's over it will be cake-making season again.

And, while we're on the subject of eggs, I found another secret clutch today, tucked in the corner of the leaf mulch heap. Fifteen in all! Daisy tried to eat the lot, though the piglets managed to snaffle a few of them.