Departures and Arrivals

Life In The Tropics
We had some rain! About two hours of it on my birthday.
If it did that two or three times a  week we would be on the way to recovery, but since then it's been even hotter and bone dry. School holidays may have started but we are getting little achieved on the smallholding. Anything more than extremely light work is impossible apart from the first and last hour or so of the day. In between it is just too hot to do anything.

Departures and Arrivals
It has been all change on the farm.
Sheep
Three sheep went off on Sunday morning, two of last year's rams which have one ball each(!) and one of last year's ewes. We had a choice between two ewes, a difficult choice which we eventually made based on their fleece for we have plans to get the autumn sheep's fleeces properly tanned.
We are desperately trying to conserve our grass so three sheep less eases the burden somewhat.

Sorry lads!

Turkeys
It's been all change in the turkey pen too. I forgot to mention it, but the second turkey hen had some chicks too. The first three joined the other hen and her two chicks, but the younger hen kept sitting on the remaining eggs. But there was trouble ahead, for as soon as they were born the other hen would kill them before we could save them. In the end I moved her and the older poults into a different pen and the younger hen was left with all six chicks. We decided to sell all six turkey chicks and two of the ten week old turkey poults. They went to local smallholders. We have kept plenty for meat for ourselves and sometimes it is better to cash in by selling them early rather than going to the effort of rearing and fattening them. Again having fewer birds puts less pressure on the land and the money from their sale funds the feed for those we keep.

 

Muscovy Ducklings
We have an extra two Muscovy ducklings too, hatched in the stables under one of our Cream Legbar hens. All I can say is that they are very cute but they don't stay like that for too long.

Laying Hens
There is another addition to the smallholding too. Our flock of old hens are hardly laying at all at the moment. The hot weather is not helping.
So we have brought in 8 ex-laying hens. They come from a free-range flock and should be much more productive than our old chooks. Within an hour they had already produced as many eggs as all the other hens.


We won't be so sentimental about them though. We will keep them until next year when we will replace them with a new group.
More on my opinions about buying in ex-layers in my next post.

There Once (briefly) was an Ugly Duckling

Following on from the previous post about rearing chickens for meat, today I move onto ducks.

We breed our own Muscovy Ducks for meat (which are actually closer to geese than ducks), hatching the eggs under broody hens. It keeps the hens happy. The ducklings grow up with their adoptive mum and live their life in with the chickens, free-ranging over the smallholding. We make no effort to grow them especially fast, but by about four months old they are big enough to eat. A male Muscovy has a deceptively good amount of meat on it, quite easily doing six meals.

One of the Muscovy girls

We occasionally use a couple of 

Muscovy eggs to keep a broody hen happy.

These two were born on 21st July. 

Six Muscovy ducklings under the care of the three Silkie hens

This year we are trying something quite different. We came upon the chance to purchase some meat strain Pekin ducks. This was when we extended the opportunity to the rest of our smallholders club and ended up with 174 ducklings in a stable for a brief time.

We kept twenty of the ducklings for ourselves. Six will be kept as egg layers, the rest are for meat. Their growth rate has been quite astonishing. They came to us at 10-12 days old and we kept them safely in a stable until they were four weeks old. Their first day out saw them diving head first into a rather green pond, but the subsequent preening brought their soft white breast feathers through. Suddenly they started to look like ducks rather than ducklings.

That was only a week ago but the ducks are growing daily. They should taste nice as they have found the raspberries! Luckily there are plenty growing beyond their reach.

Anyhow, the best way to illustrate their rapid growth is to leave you with a series of dated pictures.

23rd June 10-12 days old

23rd June 10-12 days old

5th July 22-24 days old

9th July 4 weeks old

13th July 4 weeks 4 days

16th July 5 weeks old

20th July 5 weeks 4 days

22nd July 6 weeks old

It's a short life for a meat chicken

This seems a long time ago now

Six months does not seem a long time for a table bird to live before it makes the journey into the freezer. Before I became a smallholder I definitely would have questioned why a bird couldn't enjoy a longer life before that life was taken for our culinary pleasure.
That was until I finally plucked up the courage to dispatch some of our older cockerels. They were tough as boot leather!
Add to that the fact that cockerels if let grow too long will become aggressive to each other and ungentlemanly to the hens.

Suddenly a touch of reality strikes home. These birds are not pets. They will live for six months and that's it. So the best I can do is give them a good life.

Three Ixworths and a Muscovy duck

Until this year our meat birds have been Ixworth chickens, a traditional breed, and Muscovy ducks. We didn't feed them any different to the other birds, for they all lived together. The Muscovies grew to a good size but the Ixworths were mostly leg with slithers for breasts.

The Ixworth trio when we had them.

Smart birds, but not a lot of breast.

But it gets more complicated. Six month old birds would be considered slow-grown. Commercial hens will be ready in 6 weeks. Over the years this age has come down dramatically. At the same time slaughter weight has risen equally dramatically. Since the 1940s, slaughter weight has doubled while slaughter age has halved.

Graph taken from Compassion in World Farming document

Now there is so much that I find abhorrent about intensive poultry farming. But the age of the birds is, as I have discovered, not quite so straightforward. The birds probably have no expectations of how long they will live, but would certainly prefer to have space and freedom while they are alive.

We recently reared some chicks taken out of a highly intensive system. Their rate of growth was astonishing, as was their ability to eat and drink vast quantities. But at least these birds were able to live the life of a truly free range chicken until they reached slaughter weight. I would genuinely say that it wasn't overly cruel, though they were abnormally big-breasted and by ten weeks old some were quite waddly. None went off their legs, though they would have if left to grow even heavier. A couple spent some time apparently gasping as they got older. Maybe this was indicative of heart problems or being just too big and misshapen.

Anyway, my conclusion was that provided they were slaughtered before they got too heavy, although their life would be short we could offer them a reasonable life. But I did feel that genetic 'improvement' had gone a little too far.

Our next meat birds, the ones we have just slaughtered, came to us as one day old commercial broiler chicks. They come through a friend and don't even have a breed name. In fact they are a bit of a mish-mash. Most pure white with thick yellow legs and bright red combs, but some clearly mixed with traditional brown hens and a couple specked with rogue black feathers.
They grew much quicker than I had anticipated and took me unawares as they suddenly reached a good weight. I had to hurriedly take them off growers pellets and put them onto finishers (for growers pellets contain medication so require a withdrawal period). They were ready for slaughter at 12 weeks or 84 days. I was very happy with these birds. They did not seem out of proportion. They were healthy birds, it's just that they grew much more quickly than the traditional breeds we had previously tried to rear for meat.

And so I feel we have found our meat chickens. Their short life is nevertheless a good one, far removed from most of their cousins in intensive systems (and I include minimum standard so-called free-range in that).
There are some big benefits to them having a short life too. Feed costs are lower, there is less demand on housing and the ground can be rested more. But there are limits.
The European organic standard gives a minimum slaughter age of 81 days, which I would say is about right for today's fast growing birds. Anything which reaches table weight considerably before that is probably too genetically manipulated to have a comfortable life, not to mention the conditions it is kept in to maximise profit and the expense of welfare and taste.

Turkey Surprise

Another catch-up post which should bring us to mid July.
The drought continues... enough said about that. It is becoming a real problem.

Linseed field casts a blue shimmer as if reflecting the constant blue skies

The field next to us is almost always wheat. When it's not it's rape. The field behind us is almost always sugar beet. But this year we have something different, presumably because of the poor sowing conditions early in the year. Instead we have maize in the back field, as opposed to sweetcorn. This is a biofuel crop - astonishing that some of Britain's most fertile land is used to feed our energy consumption rather than our bellies. This change of land use did mean that we had two pairs of lapwings which I presume attempted to nest. I think the crows got them though.
And in the field next to us we have a delightful blue see of linseed. It is certainly attracting the cabbage whites at the moment.

In the veg plot, I have harvested the garlic and should really do the same with the shallots and onions. All these crops tried to bolt this year, unsurprisingly.

The broad beans are processed, mostly blanched and frozen and their place will be taken by Purple Sprouting Broccoli plants just as soon as it rains and I can dig even the tiniest holes in the soil. I almost missed the calabrese but caught it just before the buds opened. This freezes really well so I grow the crop to mature in two groups rather than over a long period.

Blanching Calabrese

Raspberries and Blackcurrants went mad this year. We are picking bags and bags of them. Every available space has now gone in the freezers.
When this happens Sue hunts through for last year's produce and digs it from the bottom of the freezers for wine and jam making.
She has just set a blackcurrant wine going and we were excited to be informed that raspberries make just about the best country wine going.



I always reserve one or two veg beds for bee crops as well as letting some parsnips go over to flower in their second year. These are a wonderful magnet for hoverflies.
This year I planted a cornfield mix with added barley and wheat. It hasn't quite turned out as I expected, for the whole patch filled with phacelia and borage. I am not sure whether this was residual seed in the soil or whether it was in the cornfield mix.
Anyhow the proper cornfield flowers are coming through underneath now and the whole is a blaze of colour and buzzing with bees.


The Pekin ducks we bought as 10 day olds are growing at stratospheric rates. Now big enough to be safe from crows, we let them out a couple of days back and herded them into the veg plot. The pond in there has dropped right down and is rather green, so I put the hose on to top it up. I didn't expect them all to just go diving right on in, but by the time I returned from the tap they were having a whale of a time. They were looking a bit green though!
We put some tyres and old planks in, for ducks are quite capable of getting waterlogged and drowning if there is no easy way out.
Amazingly having a proper bath and a thorough preen instantly changed the ducklings into ducks. There yellow down was superseded by creamy white and they suddenly look all grown up.

The meat chickens we had are now gone - don't ask if you don't want to know! They reached their weight in a much shorter time than we had anticipated. They only got a stay of execution as we did not have finishers ration in. This is the non-medicated pellets they are fed for the last week or two as the growers pellets need to be withdrawn.

Chickens just hanging around waiting to be plucked.
(they are not alive).

'Processing' the chickens was a big job, spread over two mornings. Let's just say that Friday 13th was an ominous date for the last seven. It is made much quicker by wet-plucking. We dip the carcass into a giant pot of water at 160F for 45 seconds. This loosens the feathers just enough without meaning that the skin rips easily. It reduces plucking time from over 20 minutes to under 5. You don't get a perfectly neat finish, but nearly all of our chicken is joined anyway so that it more easily fits in the small spaces in the freezer.
This time I boiled up the chicken feet and made a jelly stock which I divided up to go in the freezer. A good stock makes all the difference to so many recipes and I begrudge paying for those little foil packs.

The other chickens, the ragtag bunch of old ladies which we sentimentally let live on to old age, they are laying no more than two eggs a day between them. It is always a lean time and the drought isn't helping. Here are two of them and a Muscovy duck sat tight in the nest boxes. Between these three they were sitting on a grand total of one egg!


Last weekend we went along to our Country Winemaking group, again part of the Smallholders Club. Tonight we were doing blind wine tasiting. Sue's contribution was some elderflower champagne.
Fortunately we still had some left, for earlier in the week one of the bottles had exploded with such ferocity that it smashed a hole in the side of the plastic bin we were keeping it in.


We returned from Wine group to a big surprise. Four baby turkeys wandering around with the others. I didn't think they were due for another week yet. We had planned on removing the older poults before this happened, but all seemed to be getting along ok so we left them.
The next morning, quite by chance, I got a message from somebody in need of two newborn turkeys as her hen had accidentally destroyed all the eggs she had been sitting on. This was fine by me, for we are going to have excess turkeys this year and some need to be sold anyway.
Getting them out from under mum was a bit of a challenge but the mission was successfully achieved late evening so that the chicks could be put under their new mum in the dark. I have just received news that mum has accepted them and both are doing well.

So that brings us up to mid July. Just a week to go until schools break up for the summer. I'd like to think that will be the cue for endless downpours, but I somehow doubt it. This drought feels like it's in for the long haul.

The d word

Drought. This is beginning to feel like a drought.
When they said June would be dry, I didn't think it would be because the country had run out of carbon dioxide just before the World Cup!
But in all seriousness the lack of rain is starting to be a real problem. This is not just the usual moan when it's hot, moan when it's wet, moan when it's cold, moan when it's dry. This is a summer to rival 1976, which I am old enough to just about remember.

This blog post is a quick catch up on the end of June as I've fallen behind a bit. I blame the World Cup and Wimbledon.

Parched Earth
Aside from a very brief downpour early in the month, not another drop of rain fell on the farm during the whole of June. In fact the turkey poults (born 12th May) have only ever seen that one brief spell of rain. The cracks are really opening up now. Most of the crops are just holding up, but the potato harvest is at serious risk. At the moment I can barely even get the fork in the earth. We are doing all we can to preserve growth in the sheep paddocks too. The younger fruit trees have suffered but we will still get harvests from the more established trees. It might even be a good one if the fruits get enough moisture to plump up. The strawberries came and went in a flash but the gooseberry harvest was phenomenal and raspberry canes and blackcurrant bushes are straining under the weight of fruit. I might mention this a few times in the next couple of months, but we are already playing freezer juggling.

Honey But No Nectar
Sue collected the first honey of the year. Most of the colonies have worked through their problems and are building nicely. There is just one which looks like it will have to be amalgamated with another.
Since then Sue has collected another two supers of honey, giving 69 jars, all from one hive. The dry conditions mean there is a lack of nectar though, but if the weather favours us it could turn into a bumper year.

It was while Sue was collecting the second batch of honey that I incurred another bee sting on my temple. My theory that I have stopped reacting to stings went out of the window as over the course of the next twenty four hours the swelling increased and slowly travelled down the left side of my face. It wasn't too itchy though and was nowhere near as painful as it looked.

Collect Hay While The Sun Shines

One benefit of the drought (yes, I am using the d word) is that I have not had to mow the lawns. Of course, the converse of this is that much of the grass on the farm feeds the animals, especially the sheep but the poultry too.

So I was more keen than usual to get in stores of hay for later in the year. I like to collect hay off the field, usually the same day as it is baled. It's a job which always happens when it is baking hot and the smell of the freshly cut hay is the essence the countryside. My first source of hay fell through due to low yields but another opportunity quickly presented itself. I filled the animal trailer and the back of the car, twice.

Astronomy for Dummies

The end of June presented us with a stunning Strawberry Moon, but even more strikingly, through the power of the Twitterverse, I found out that Jupiter and Saturn were putting on a good display too. The birdwatching scope, at 60 times power, was enough to be able to see Jupiter complete with 4 of its moons but better was to come, for Saturn looked like a gyroscope, its rings clearly visible as a bring hoop around the planet. Unfortunately my phonecam was not up to the job to capture more than a fuzzy blur of light.

Cherries, Cucumbers and Courgettes

I already mentioned some of our harvests, but one which we look forward to every year is the cherries. We only net one tree, a Morello, and still the birds manage to get a small proportion of the fruits. But eventually after we have watched the fruits darken and endlessly repositioned the net the day for picking arrives. It takes a good couple of hours to strip the tree, a job which will only get bigger every year. Luckily Sue is in charge of cherry-stoning.

In the polytunnel, cucumbers have started coming thick and fast. It's not easy getting through a couple of cucumbers a day, but the spares are gratefully received at work.

Courgettes have started too! These are the archetypal glut vegetable. But we have an answer to that, for the chickens love them.

A Strategy For Pain-free Dental Treatment

In between all this activity on the smallholding I fitted in a successful trip to the dentist. I have a new dentist and am working on the theory that if I tell her enough times how scared I am and how much I fear injections, that she will take the utmost care not to cause me pain or psychological suffering!

Lambrusco for the Vegetables

The very last days of June saw me reduced to using the hosepipe in the veg plot late in the evenings. My water is metered, not that I would waste it anyway. I reserve it for the youngest of plants or those which absolutely require water to survive and produce a harvest. Many crops such as the broad beans, sweetcorn, pumpkins and amaranths, seem to have thrown their roots deep enough to still be thriving. But I can't keep delaying transplanting plug plants. It is impossible to look after these in the heat we have been having so the best thing is to get them outside and in the ground, but their very limited root system means they need a little encouragement. I don't give them too much water as they can become reliant on it and besides tap water is to rainwater as Lambrusco is to Champagne, except my Champagne is free and I have to pay for my Lambrusco, if you see what I mean.

I have been trying to give the early potatoes some water, but to not much avail.

Four Hours of Solitude
June ended with me undertaking a new venture. Nothing to do with the smallholding. I was up with the larks or even before them to venture out onto the RSPB reserve at The Nene Washes, where I had undertaken to perform a survey of one of Britain's rarer breeding birds to see whether or not there was evidence of young being fed. I spent four hours in one spot just looking out over the reserve and not encountering another human being. Just me, the early morning sunshine and the birds. Perfect.

In At The Deep End
I returned to the farm full of vigour and decided to tackle the wildlife pond which the ducks had totally trashed. All the soil edges had been washed into the pond and all the plants had vanished. Fortunately many of the pond plants I had purchased were being nurtured in smaller ponds. Considering how prolific they are once they get going, pond plants are hideously expensive.

My wellies are no longer totally waterproof but I put them on anyway and stepped onto the shelf of the pond. It quickly became apparent that the whole deeper centre was full of slimy mud. There was no alternative. I took off my wellies and socks and stripped down to my underpants. I then spent an enjoyable but hard couple of hours scooping mud with my bare hands. Fortunately nobody was about with a camera!

What Happened To Community?
I had to scrub up quickly though, for in the evening we had a social meeting of our local group of smallholders. This turned out to be a huge disappointment - one of those events (and there are many) which dents my faith in fellow human beings. Sue and I had a lovely time with the host couple, but nobody else from the group turned up or even let us know they weren't coming. Everybody professes that the group is a great idea but it just seems that these days people expect something called "community" without having to contribute at all. People put a lot of effort into organising everything yet others can't even be courteous enough to send their apologies. 



Anyway I won't give up on humanity quite yet. But I did choose over the next couple of days to throw myself into the tiring and physical task of restoring and finishing off ponds. Temperatures in the 80s (that's the high 20s for younger readers) made for thirsty work. The boggy areas which I always incorporate as overflows from the pond were not retaining enough water so I had to dig out all the soil and start again. Then there was the big pond by the house to finish. It already has plenty of newts in it, but it needed work to blend in with the landscape and offer easier access for wildlife.

Before I knew it we were into July.

Dozens of Ducklings.

Saturday 23rd June 2018
A big day today. 170 Ducklings arriving!

Before that, the lambs needed worming and moving down to the main paddocks, where they disappeared in the long grass.

One benefit of the constant dry weather is that mowing the lawns becomes a much less onerous task. It only took a couple of hours today to do the whole lot. Job done.

Still the day passed quickly and at 3pm the ducklings arrived in three poultry crates in the back of a car. Making the arrangements to get them here had been a bit tricky, especially when we had to delay everything because of the winter bird flu restrictions.

The plan was that we would be keeping 16 for ourselves, mostly for meat but maybe keeping a couple of females to join us more permanently and bolster our duck egg production. The rest were to be picked up by other smallholders from Fenland Smallholders Club. I was making no profit from these, just organising it for the benefit of the club.

It was novel having 170 ducklings in the stable for a while. They were completely comical.  They were hungry and thirsty!

It was lovely to welcome a string of other smallholders to the smallholding too.

Once all the ducklings had been picked up, we actually had 20  left. I expect you had already counted that there were 174 and not 170!

With all the excitement over, we headed over into Northamptonshire for a bat and moth night. We got to use bat detectors for the first time, which brought glimpses of bats to life. Then we headed along the dark tracks of the woodland to meet up with some mothers (pronounced with an "o" and not an "u"). Unbelievably it was the first time I had seen a moth trap in action. The moths were intriguing and I could have spent much longer here but I did not know my way out of the woods! I can definitely see myself doing more of this in the future.
A big bonus was finding lots of glow-worms. I had completely forgotten they had been mentioned as a possibility when I spotted a faint glow from deep within the vegetation by the path. Everybody else had walked past it. About 30 yards further on I found another, then other people started finding them. The best was one which just sat on the path affording the opportunity to see the creature itself and not just the glow from its bum (technical entomological term). They look like a giant ladybird larva.

We were back on the farm at about 1am. I poked my head in on the ducks which were all huddled together in a pile.