The First Seedling of 2017

3rd February 2017
The First Seedling
Storm Doris was so offended by the name she was given that she veered off toward France. I was expecting a howler but instead we got a whimper.
Meanwhile, the first seedlings are up! A momentous day each year. Glory went to the third aubergine in row two, narrowly beating the lemon drop chillis which were sown on the same day last week.
I start these seeds off so early as they require a long growing season to grow and ripen. The downside is that they will need gentle tending until the polytunnel warms up properly.

The start of the 2017 growing season

4th February 2017
While the cat's away...
Well, more precisely, while Sue's away we all sleep on the bed and have a lay in.

Slightly 'soft focus' but it's not easy taking a selfie with four animals on the bed.

My battle with the rat(s) in the polytunnel is still ongoing. It took ten bags of Eradibait - the 'friendly bait' that doesn't harm other wildlife, they just forget to tell you that the rats don't bother to eat it either!
I thought it must be taking the bait until I found more rat holes with Eradibait pellets strewn everywhere. They have simply been dispersed. So I have set the proper poison up and they have started taking it.
I am itching to clear out and clean the polytunnel so I can get growing in there.

This afternoon I moved the sheep around a bit, along with hay feeders, the Xmas tree for them to keep munching on, water...

The Shetland lambs in their new home.

The lambs were moving back up to the main paddocks to give the paddock near the house time to rest for when this year's lambs move into it. But before they moved, the adults had to be moved further down the land.
This operation was all going very smoothly until a very unfortunate incident when three dogs briefly ran amok through them. Unfortunately it happened in the short period when I had the electric fence off to move the sheep. But it shouldn't have happened and I just hope no harm has come to the ewes or their unborn lambs. The dogs were not vicious but I was powerless to stop them chasing the sheep.
As it had happened while I was moving the sheep, we had all been taken by surprise. Otherwise I don't think the sheep would have turned tail and ran. The trouble is that it only takes one sheep to lose its nerve. If Rambo head butted a dog I have no doubt he would do some very serious damage. I don't think the sheep realised this would happen, as Boris and Arthur are the only dogs they know and these have always kept a respectful distance.
It took me a long time to persuade the sheep to follow me back up to their new paddock again.

The adult sheep finally where I wanted them, lured with Christmas tree, hay and mangels.

After this incident I left the sheep to recover in peace while I took cuttings from my buddleias, willows and elders. These three species are the keenest to take root and it is very hard to fail with them. And if you take enough cuttings it doesn't matter if a few don't take.

While I was cutting the buddleia, I came across the first snowdrops of the year. It's beginning to feel like Spring is just around the corner (cue gales, rain and snow!)

5th Feb 2017
Plants for free
I spent the morning poking yesterday's cuttings into the ground, over two hundred of them. I have put them into a special cuttings area and will move them to  their final growing sites early next winter, once they have had a season to grow some roots and gone dormant again.
The unexpected early arrival of Sue back from London cheered me up and I quickly had her helping me erect a temporary stretch of fence alongside the bottom sheep paddock. We had to improvise with what few materials we had on hand but it was more important to get something up quickly than to make it look good.

6th & 7th Feb 2017

A Hullaballoo in the Polytunnel
Main job for the two days was to create as much hullaballoo as possible in the polytunnel. For I had finally lost patience. Rat activity seemed to have died down so I guessed the poison was finally taking effect.

The polytunnel is a lovely place. Warm, dry, full of food at the right time of year. It was brilliant for the first few years, but it has been harder going the last couple of years. It is an ideal place for rearing seedlings, but later in the year the red spider mites undertake a silent invasion, sucking the life out of many of the crops. Voles and field mice enjoy the warm and dry, along with the supply of carrots, though many end up in the traps. Then this winter the rats have found it to their liking too.

I felt I needed a fresh start, so Monday morning I started clearing all old plants and dead material out. I followed this up by taking Mr Rotavator in and churning up and down the beds, taking extra care near the thin plastic walls. The idea was to turn the soil but also to cause maximum underground disruption, collapsing all the tunnels and generally scaring anything taking shelter. Rats do not like disturbance.
Next up came chemical warfare. I am pragmatic organic, which means that I am totally organic unless there is absolutely no other way to save a crop or to eradicate a weed. It is rare that I have to resort to other methods, but today I blasted the polytunnel with a spray of Jeyes Fluid, paying special attention  to all the nooks and crannies between the metal framework and the polythene.

Then came a thorough power blast with the hose pipe. It is very difficult to stay dry during this operation!
All this took the best part of a whole day, but there was still more to come.
Tuesday brought out the soft broom and the washing up liquid, for the polytunnel imperceptibly turns green during the year. It doesn't really notice, but a thin film of algae builds up, along with grime on the outside. All of this blocks out the light, not so important in midsummer but crucial when the sun is low and the days are only just starting to draw out.
The outside is relatively easy to clean, although there is a strip about a foot wide on top which I can never reach. Inside is a different story as most of the water ends up coming back down on me!
Anyway, after two hard days of cleaning the polytunnel is looking like brand new. This weekend I shall plant my super early potatoes in there and sow my first carrots, turnips and lettuces.

If any pests return I am going to hit them very hard indeed.

8th February 2017

A Bird Flu update from The Ministry.
Full details in the next couple of days. This merits its own post.

Where's Dave?

28th January 2017
A little twitching, a committee meeting and a bit more of the sharp end of smallholding

Even living in The Fens, it's not every day I open the curtains and find myself face to face with a barn owl. In one way or another, birds were certainly the theme of the day.

It started with a trip further up into Lincolnshire where a White-billed Diver had taken up temporary residence on the River Witham near Woodhall Spa. By rights it should be plying its trade in the Arctic seas, so how it had quite got itself here is a mystery. But it was a huge and uncanny coincidence, for the most famous previous inland record was on the very same stretch of river 21 years ago.
The diver had been commuting up and down a 5 mile stretch of river with just a few access points, so it was just a case of picking a starting point and walking. I thought that if I waited till the weekend I would get more up to date news and save my legs a little. I also had a plan to drag Sue and the dogs along for a nice long walk in a new place. And so we parked up at the old Stixwould Station, where the bird had drifted past earlier in the morning, and started walking south... and south... and south until eventually we caught up with the bird and the crowd of birders just a couple of hundred yards north of Kirkstead bridge, where we could have parked! If only one of the fifty or so birders there had bothered to broadcast its whereabouts.
Never mind. We enjoyed great views of a rarely seen bird and I bumped into some old birding friends along the way. I was slightly disappointed that Boris and Arthur seemed to take little interest in the bird, though better that than they jump in the water after it!
But they had a most exciting walk, with new smells everywhere and quite a few doggy encounters. They were slightly confused by the metal sheep they met along the way though.

This was the longest walk Arthur's little legs had ever been on and he slept all the way home.

Sue and I on the other hand headed off to Upwell for the Fenland Smallholders Club AGM. I have to admit, this is hardly the highlight of my year. Unfortunately, although club membership is doing pretty well, getting people involved is becoming increasingly difficult. Anyway, there were just enough people to coerce into filling the spare spaces on the committee. I myself have come off the committee as I find committees exceedingly frustrating and the FSC is certainly no exception. Democracy seems to favour talkers and not doers. I do however continue to do plenty to help out as the club is well worth supporting.

When we got home the barn owl was still in the tree though slightly more alert. It soon headed off to hunt along the dyke and over the veg patch.

It may be getting dark now, but a long and eventful day was certainly not finished. There were two sheep to be loaded into the trailer... don't ask where they were going!
Loading up went very smoothly. These were the two commercial sheep which we had brought in to fatten up. Their departure would be quite welcome as they had stayed a little longer than expected and sheep food does not grow free in the winter months.

With that operation successfully completed, it was into the kitchen to gut and prep the birds which we had dispatched the other day - a turkey, a goose and a cockerel which had been hanging (colloquially and then literally!) in the stables.
No pictures, you'll be glad to hear.

And that was that. An end to a very eventful and varied day.

29th January 2017
Where's Dave?
A very early start to drop the sheep off at the abattoir. We like to get there early - it saves waiting in a queue and means we can be back on the farm by 8.
We usually have to wait for Dave and his son to arrive in the Land Rover, but today the gates were already open. We were greeted by two new faces, though I recognised one of them as the butcher who had helped me load Daisy into the back of the car a couple of years back (for those new to the blog, Daisy used to be our breeding sow.)
I presumed that Dave was on holiday, but then received the shocking news that he had moved on - not in a bad way, but to new ventures. I liked Dave. He was straightforward. He would stand back and let you struggle to get your animals out of the trailer (particularly pigs) but would step in if really needed and proceed to make it look ridiculously easy. He had a way of just tickling the pigs or sheep off the trailer, down the ramp and into their new temporary pen.
It'll probably be another forty or so years before I can call myself an established fen-dweller, but I don't like change as much as I used to, so I am on my way!!!
I just hope al the abattoir arrangements stay the same, as we have become rather efficient at it now.

Now I don't like to moan (no, really, I don't), but I coughed and spluttered my way through most of last night and really am not on top form at the moment so I decided to spend the rest of the day indoors. A day in a warm kitchen would surely help matters, so I set about baking and cooking.
Even kneading the bread felt like hard work, but I knocked up a good dough for my multigrain bread.

While I left it to rise, I started on a Lardy Cake. This is one of my favourite recipes, full of fruit and the lard is a permissible sin.
More kneading and rolling, more waiting to rise, so a quick Leek and Potato soup was on the cards. Leeks are a brilliant crop, for they come good when not much else is around and they stand outside whatever the weather. And while that was boiling up, I put the old cockerel in to a large stock pot to boil up for a few hours.

Come the evening I had to try to keep myself lively as we had been invited over to the new neighbours for dinner. It was fascinating to find out more about them and their plans for their cottage and land. The food went down well too. Beef. One of the few meats we don't produce on the smallholding.
I managed not to fall to sleep (not the company, the man flu).







30th January 2017
I needed to take care of myself today so I didn't get up till nearly 11! After that I took it easy.
I picked the meat off the bones of the old cockerel and turned him into a most nutritious chicken broth with potato and pearl barley.
And then something more adventurous. Jerusalem artichokes are a bit of a novelty crop and I grow them as much for a windbreak and for an attractive patch of dense greenery as for the harvest of their roots. But during the winter the roots are always there in the ground should I fancy something slightly more unusual in my diet.
I had found a recipe for Zesty Roasted Jerusalem Artichoke Salad which used blood oranges which just happen to be available at the moment. It wasn't my usual sort of recipe but would make a change from Artichoke Soup. As it turned out, artichokes roasted and glazed with blood oranges, then mixed with watercress and topped with crunchy breadcrumbs and goats cheese, well it turned out to be rather tasty. Sue loved it. I made just one change to the recipe, incorporating thin slices of raw artichoke root, for this adds a fresh crunchy texture similar to water chestnuts.

31st January 2017
13 magpies!
Yes. That's right. I stared bleary-eyed out of the kitchen window to see THIRTEEN magpies in a bush. Now that can't be lucky.
Still struggling against man flu, I decided that a blast of South Lincolnshire's icy wind might do the trick today, so I took Boris and Arthur to see a Great Grey Shrike and a Great White Egret nearby but they didn't even look. They did introduce themselves to a few local twitchers though.

This was along the banks of the River Welland which flows through Spalding and out to The Wash. I discovered today that I can follow the country lanes from my house and they lead me to what is known as Deeping High Bank, the East side of the river.

Back at home and the postie brought me a delivery of seeds for this year's crops. The growing season really is almost upon us. Exciting times.

Ready. Steady. Grow!

20th January 2017
Christmas is over
Christmas is well and truly over for another year when the tree gets thrown to the sheep. As we had an artificial tree this year, I recovered the one which was about to go in the school skip. The Shetland sheep love a bit of Christmas tree and will spend the next week gradually stripping it of needles and bark.




21st January 2017
A pottering day. I finished pruning the apples and pears and moved on to the blackberries, which didn't get pruned in late autumn when they should have been. For now I've just cut back all the shoots which fruited last year and cleared some of the weeds from around the base. I am erecting new posts and wires when I get round to it, at which point I shall train the stems in hope of a better harvest. The blackberries and associated hybrids (tayberries, loganberries etc) have never really taken off, so this year I am going to put extra effort into them.

In the evening I met up with the Grow Your Own group for our annual meal. It was supposed to happen before Christmas, but I'm rather glad we left it till after.
A very nice time was had by all.

22nd January 2017
A late start today, but there was still a hard frost well towards the middle of the day. I took advantage and rotavated the bed where the garlic and shallots are due to grow.

Boris and Arthur keen to help with the plucking

Poultry executions
Then I'm afraid it was time for a few of the birds to go. The spare turkey stag was first and I got straight on with the plucking while he was still warm. This sounds a bit callous, but the warmer the body the easier the plucking. Hopefully the four remaining turkeys will settle down nicely now that there is just the one silver male.
Then it was a goose. I had only ever once dispatched a goose and that was a mercy mission, so I was a bit hesitant about this. However, it was actually fairly easy, nowhere near as difficult as some of the ducks are. Plucking, on the other hand, was an endless task. It seemed that the feathers had the ability to regenerate eternally. I left Sue to do the more delicate quills and down feathers while I got on with the next catch and dispatch, this time the spare old cockerel. I kept well away from his sizeable spurs, as these have been known to inflict deep wounds in the past! Again, cutting the number of testosterone-filled males down should help with the overall welfare of the flock, particularly with them all cooped up inside for at least another five weeks.

Finally, another four of the Ixworth meat chickens had grown plump enough for the pot.

23rd January 2017
Everlasting Garlic
I spent the first part of the morning jointing the chickens we dispatched yesterday.
The day started clear, but as the sun tried to break through it drove all the moisture out of the ground and into the air. A thick fog enveloped the farm for the whole afternoon.
I got on with planting the garlic and shallots. All the literature advises buying in special bulbs for growing garlic, warning of poor results and disease if you try to use shop-bought bulbs or dare to save a few from year to year. Well, maybe I just struck lucky when I purchased a few green bulbs from Pretty Fruiterers several years ago when I was down in The Big Smoke for a hospital appointment.
But those cloves have served me very well. I get juicy white bulbs every year which last right through into late winter. Come late January the strings of garlic cloves come back to life and cry out to be planted. I pick the best hundred or so cloves out and just poke them into the ground. The rest get given away or processed into garlic paste or powder.
Come midsummer, I'll be drying over 100 garlic bulbs.
Cost = about £1. Harvest so far = about 400 bulbs and rising.

24th January 2017
Dentist.
Crown fitting.
Tooth extraction.
Enough said.

I planned to travel North after the dentist to see a White-billed Diver, a high Arctic sea-dwelling bird which had somehow managed to end up feeding along a 5 mile stretch of inland Lincolnshire river for the last few days.
However, I had underestimated the impact of my dental work, so instead I headed home to sleep it off before spending the evening sorting my seeds.
Chitting begins
I did summon up the energy to set my New Potatoes chitting properly. They had already started of their own accord as I purchased them super early. These ones will be going into the polytunnel very soon to give me a fantastic early harvest.

25th January 2017
On a Cold and Frosty Morning...
We have had an excellent run of frosty mornings and today was no exception.
Still on the road to recovery, I decided to take the dogs for a long walk along the river. It was foggy again and we walked along in our own bubble of clear air.

I couldn't see the wild swan flock in the fields by the river today. I think they were there in the fog somewhere. However, one lone Whooper Swan was on the river bank and slid into the water as we approached. This is unusual for the whoopers, but I think it had lost its mate. It was calling quite dolefully.

Later in the evening the dogs, tired from their walk, took a well-deserved rest on the sofa, alongside Sue and Gerry.

26th January 2017
Today I compiled my seed orders for the year. The plans are done, the sowing season is upon us and it's all systems go!

27th January 2017
First seeds planted - chilli, aubergine and celeriac.
These three need a long, long growing season so I have taken to starting them off very early over a heated propagator. The seedlings will need some tender care during their early lives, but hopefully I will be reaping the rewards later in the year, when the fog and the frost are long forgotten.

My whopper celeriac

Tuesday 17th January 2017
I took the dogs for a long walk along the Main Drain today. It took longer than usual as I just kept stopping to take photos. They are just snaps taken on the phone, but there are days when the unique qualities of our Fenland landscape really come to the fore.

So that was the morning taken care off. In the afternoon I started the task of pruning the apple and pear trees. Anything I've pruned gets thrown to the Shetland sheep who delight in stripping off the bark and with it hopefully any pests and nasty fungi.

I harvested one of my celeriac roots today too. I expected to find a crown of leaves with a missing root underneath, gnawed by the voles, or to have to pick most of the crop to get enough celeriac to be worth the picking. This is what has happened in the past and this year was celeriac's last chance.

But no! I harvested a real whopper. Even after I had trimmed off all the leaves, the side-shoots and the roots, there was still a sizeable root left. Success at last!


The plan was for a roasted medley of roots all from the garden. In the picture are parsnips and carrots  (already frozen), potato, celeriac, Spanish Black Radish, beetroot and a small winter squash.

These vegetables were to be an accompaniment for Seared Duck Breast with Blood Orange and Star Anise. This is all part of my new Tuesday cookery resolution.

The skies continued to delight all day

And after dark it was back into the kitchen for a spot of baking.

Operation Turkey Swap

Sunday 15th January
I swooped this afternoon and managed to catch onto the leg of one of the turkey stags. It didn't put up too much of a fight until I put it into the dog crate, when it did its very best to squeeze through the bars in the roof and to shake the cage apart!
The reason for all this?

A turkey swap was on the cards today. For five of our turkeys have survived Christmas, including our breeding hen who is now into her third calendar year, quite an achievement for a turkey.
It won't be long before they come into breeding behaviour, clucking and egg-laying for the girls, strutting about and booming for the boys.
As the fox got Terry the Turkey, our fine and friendly stag, last year we needed to bring in some new blood. Fortunately friends of ours also had some survivors of the Christmas period, so a swap had been arranged.

Off went a black turkey... and back came a silver turkey.

I put our new stag into a separate stable to the others, fearing that our one remaining boy might not appreciate a newcomer. It was almost dark by the time we got home and I left the lights off in the stables. I would check what was happening in the morning.

Monday 16th January
The two turkey stags have found each other. They have both crossed one stable wall to meet in the middle, but so far there has only been ostentatious displaying toward each other.

I left the two alone for a while as I went to finish pruning the gooseberries, a prickly task. With this job done I returned to the stables and spent a long time just watching the poultry. They seem to have come to terms with their ensconcement but it is good husbandry to spend time observing their behaviour.
One of the old hens was spending her time huddled in the corner and appeared poorly. Obviously, with bird flu in the country, I wanted to keep an eye on her and observe all her symptons. I went in to have a look and her crop felt enormous. I suspected an impacted crop, something from which our hens have never suffered. But then they are not getting outside, not scratching around, not pecking at the soil.
I mixed a couple of scoops of oyster shell into their food and resolved to just keep an eye on things.

I left the main job for the day until the evening, as it was a job for the kitchen. We were kindly given a dozen pheasants, a couple of pigeons and a few wild duck recently. Sue had skinned the pheasants, but I needed to joint them up before plucking and taking the breasts off the other birds.

Tuesday 17th January 2017
Firstly, the hen seemed a lot better today. She still doesn't look quite right but I am certain it's not bird flu, which is the main thing.
The silver turkey (need to think of a name for him once I get to know him a little more) has hopped another stable and the females have found him and started flirting. There was a little rutting between the stags but nothing too serious. The black stag will have to go soon though. It's just a matter of when we can find the time.

A winter week on the smallholding

A fairly typical winter week on the smallholding.

Sunday 8th January 2017 - Poultry, Pruning and Pickling

The chickens have settled into the stable now

With the poultry inside and the sheep short of grass at this time of year, everyday feeding and watering takes quite a while. The geese and ducks empty their water buckets as soon as they are filled up, spilling it all over the stable floor, and I can't believe how much the geese eat. They don't usually get fed, having to survive on grass and a few roots thrown to them in the winter.
It is however, a good chance to worm them properly as I know exactly what they are eating. So today all the poultry (apart from those which will shortly go for the table) went onto medicated pellets. I used to buy the worming powder and mix it in with their usual food, but I have discovered you can pay someone else to do this for you! It works out about the same price and is so much more convenient.
The sheep are getting supplementary hay at the moment but their food of choice is sugar beet, which I buy in dried pellet form and leave to soak before feeding to them. They are getting a mangel wurzel a day too, which goes down very well indeed.

It was a lovely day today and blackcurrants were on the menu. Not the harvesting menu, but the jobs menu. They needed pruning and I planned on taking some cuttings too.
Sue and the dogs worked alongside me outside today, which was lovely. I got Sue sowing my mangetout seeds to go in the polytunnel before showing her how to prepare the blackcurrant cuttings.

Blackcurrants

- Freshly pruned and mulched

With those jobs done, it was back to the chickens, for some of the meat birds would be meeting their maker today. I get the hangman's job, not a nice one but a necessary part of self-sufficiency. I have said so many times before that nothing annoys me more than people who will only touch unidentifiable meat in frozen cubes.

The dispatch is quick and humane. As these chickens were to be jointed, we dunked them in hot water before plucking. 40 seconds at 160 Fahrenheit. This makes plucking ten times easier than doing them dry, but you don't get quite such a neat finished product.

Darkness comes all too early at this time of year so I retired for the evening. A nice cold beer and a warming bowl of Curried Pumpkin Soup did just the job.

With eggs back on the menu after a two month strike by the chickens, Sue tried her hand at pickled eggs. They will be ready for tasting in three weeks time.

Monday 9th January 2017 - Transplanting cuttings

By necessity I stayed on the farm all day, waiting for the parcel redelivery I had booked. It never came. Nice one Post Office!
It was another beautiful start to the day, though it wasn't long before the showers started and by the end of the day I was battling against sticky mud.

I started by taking flowering currant cuttings, though there wasn't much young growth to use. So I cut one bush right back. It should produce plenty of new material from which to take cuttings next winter.
Next on the jobs list was to move some willow cuttings which I set down last winter. They had done well, very well. In fact, they had done so well that I couldn't get the roots out! I had to remove all the cuttings around them so I could get at them with a spade. And so it was that I ended up transplanting all my buddleia, dogwood and privet cuttings from last year before I could tackle the willow.

As the sun set, I quickly cut a few handfuls of oregano, which I steeped in oil to make, surprise, surprise, Oil of Oregano. I shall be using this in a spray this year to try to avert the dreaded leaf curl which afflicts my nectarines and my mirabelles every year.
Unlike copper based mixes, it will not poison the soil and can be used even when the plants are in leaf. Whether or not it works we shall see.

Tuesday 10th January 2017 - Survived the dentist!
Another beautiful start to the day, only spoiled by the root canal treatment I was due for at midday. My dentist looks after me but it still doesn't make for a fun day.

I decided to drop in at my bulk potato stockist on the way home - I buy a few sacks for members of the Fenland Smallholders Club - but the gates were closed and there were no cars. On further investigation online when I got home, it seems their parent company may have closed the cash and carry side of the business. It is a shame when small local companies get incorporated into larger companies and then, several years later, quietly disappear.

My new year's resolution is to do a lot more baking and cooking using our produce. The visit to the dentist left me feeling a bit beaten up, but I didn't want a bad start to my resolution.
Anyway, I managed to bake a loaf and cook up a huge dish of Parsnip and Chickpea Curry. Later in the week I will knock up a cream of chicken soup, using the old hen we dispatched at the weekend, and a potato, leek and hock soup from the offcuts of a Serrano ham I purchased for Christmas.

Wednesday 11th January - Snow in the forecast
With snow forecast for later in the week, I took the chance to take down the brassica netting. The chickens and geese are in so, hopefully, there's not much to threaten the greens. Pigeons tend to avoid our garden.

Thursday 12th January - An Uneggspected find
Look what Sue found inside the old chicken when she was cleaning it out. These are eggs slowly forming in a queue.
The rest of the country got snow today. Somehow we escaped it.

Friday 13th January - A Recipe Refound
The day passed without incident, not that I am superstitious.
I did, however, find a recipe sheet which I thought lost. It was from my days as a vegan, over 20 years ago, and included my favourite recipe for home-made mincemeat, as well as a couple of other favourites of mine. I was well chuffed.

Saturday 14th January - A rat, more pruning and a new stretch of hedge
A rat has moved into the polytunnel. It is, I'm afraid, not welcome and now that I have moved the ducks out I have put poison in. Today the poison had gone down, so hopefully it won't be long before the rat is no more.



There was more pruning to be done today, redcurrants, whitecurrants and gooseberries. I do these on a different day to the blackcurrants as they are pruned to different principles, fruiting best on two year old wood and older. If I did them on the same day I would get confused!
Gooseberries are treated in exactly the same way as the currants, except they are considerably more prickly and time-consuming. I got ten of them done, but that's not even half of them since I took cuttings and drastically increased the number of bushes I have.

I took delivery of 25 bare-root Bird Cheery whips today and planted them in a double row. They should take well and will hopefully be providing shelter and food for birds in a couple of years time.

And lastly... I finally got round to boiling up the old chicken for soup. I boiled it a good long time, in case it was tough. The meat just fell off the bone and the juice I turned into stock.

So that was that. A typical busy winter week.

Poultry imprisoned for another 8 weeks.

Monday 2nd January

Difficult to capture with just the phone, but the thin crescent moon and Venus put on a great show in the early night sky over the house.

Wednesday 4th January 2017
 

Not unexpected, but today the Prevention Order was extended until the end of February. This is an attempt to prevent Bird Flu crossing from wild migrant birds into the domestic poultry flock.

Unfortunately it means that the poor ducks, chickens, turkeys and geese have to stay locked up for another two months.

They have actually settled down into their temporary accommodation now. The chickens are quite happen in the warmth and shelter. In grotty weather they don't do much when they are outside anyway, though I would like them to be scratching about in the veg plot unearthing all the bugs.
The turkeys have finally started coming down to ground level and the Muscovy ducks have started laying again. We are finding the odd chicken egg too, usually up on the hay bales.

Eggs again!

Now that the lock down is extended, I needed to move the three ducks out of the polytunnel and in with the chickens. They enjoyed their walk outside for all of about two minutes!
I had a big swap around in the stables too, moving straw to where hay was and hay to where straw was. In the process I found one dead rat, two young voles and a whole pack of mice.
Rodents are a bit of a problem when the birds are kept inside and I will have to spend a little time laying traps and bait in the stables to make sure it doesn't get out of control.

One of the older hens has something wrong with her foot, so it is probably time for her to be made into a broth! The meat birds have finally began to fatten up - moving them indoors set them back for  a couple of weeks - so we'll 'process' a few of those this weekend. The more we can thin down the numbers, the more straightforward it will be keeping them indoors.


Thursday 5th January 2017
Back at work today after Christmas. A bit of a shock to the system but I quite enjoy my job when the government is not telling us all that we're useless as a way of covering for its own ineptitude! The only trouble with working at this time of year is that there's so little time to get anything done on the smallholding.
This evening we were heading for the Cambridgeshire Self-Sufficiency Group's January meeting which turned out to be a very informative and entertaining talk on growing wood for fuel and coppice products. It was a chance to pick up some more Dexter beef from Paul (who played Santa in a previous post) too.

Saturday 7th January 2017
Hopefully the two lambs have come through. They are being nurtured in the stables, which is a bit of a squeeze what with all the chickens, ducks and turkeys in there too. Not only that, but today the geese were moving in, for with the lock-in extended their temporary accommodation thus far just won't do the job, especially once they start laying eggs and becoming more territorial. The mucky straw from the old shed went under the blackcurrants as a nitrogen-rich mulch.

And so today the stables underwent their third reorganisation. The lambs now have their own 'room' with one wall made of hay - an edible wall!

Seven of the chickens met their maker today. This should ease the overcrowding slightly. The old hen will hang for a few days before being turned into chicken soup. As for the others, we will take off the breasts, wings and legs. As they are not for roasting whole, they don't need to look perfect, so we dunked them in hot water for 40 seconds before plucking. This makes the job so much quicker, but you don't get quite such a clean finished product.