Thistles - A Tale of Love and Hate

Why is it that some of the very best plants are also some of the very worst plants?
I'm talking nettles and thistles. The good side:  not actually bad looking plants, wonderful for wildlife, useful as a barrier. The bad side: rampant and uncontrollable.

I'll deal with the thistles for the moment, creeping thistle in the main. It produces fluffy seedheads by the million. If they find a footing, they shoot their roots deep into the ground and in no time fleshy roots are spreading deep underground, sending up battalions of prickly shoots. Pulling them is tedious and disheartening, not to mention the inevitability of discovering some time later that microscopic pieces of thorn are lodged just under your skin.

But on the good side, there's this:

Thistle flowers are an absolute magnet for insects. These photos took me less than 10 minutes to take and it wasn't even a sunny day.

If only there was a way to control the thistles, to grow them where I want and only where I want.
The old saying goes -

Cut them in June

You've cut too soon,

Cut them in July,

They're sure to die.

 

Unfortunately it's not that straightforward. But it is definitely the best time to cut the plants when they have just put all their energy into producing flowers. More than that though, they need constant removal and this is just not realistic. (It's taken for granted that I will only use a weedkiller when I have completely run out of other options - even that would require repeat applications).

Now, I may not be able to constantly keep the thistles cut, but I am hoping that I have put together a team who can. They need a little help at first, for which I use a hand sickle to swipe down the plants, but after that they come along and devour the wilting leaves. They gradually nibble the fresh young leaves too and I'm hoping this will be enough to do the trick over time.
Here is my team.

If my Shetland sheep attack the thistles with the same gusto that they nibble at my trees, in no time the thistles should only be growing where I choose.
They like nettles too.

Finally Tying The Great Knot

It's not great...but it is a Great Knot!

The lucky bride-to-be

I have an announcement to make. Sue and I, after 27 years of blissfully living together, are finally getting married!
It's not going to be a huge wedding and we started planning it at the back end of last year. The first question was, what date?
We didn't want it in the winter. Nor, of course, could we have it during the spring or autumn migration periods. This left midsummer as the safest time.

Eventually we plumped for 1st August. I reckoned this would be easy to remember and hopefully the weather will be good too. There are also only a tiny handful of birds likely to turn up in Britain which would cause me significant levels of inner stress on the day and distract my mind from my beautiful new wife!
At this time of year the chances of a lifer turning up on any given day are extremely slim. In fact I have only had 10 July lifers since the turn of the century and I have never had a new bird on my birthday. The only realistic chance of a lifer for me lies in a lost wader, of which I only need five species to complete the set. Of these, two are outrageous rarities which have not turned up since I've been birding and two have only put in one brief appearance each.
The fifth is Great Knot, with four previous visits, but two of them in the last days of July.

Several years ago I enjoyed a mad dash to Breydon Water, on the Norfolk/Suffolk border to see a distant blur which eventually was judged to not be a Great Knot but just to be a Knot (aka Red Knot) - I hope you're knot confused.

And so to yesterday morning. After a late start, I logged onto my computer at 8:15am and the first thing I clapped eyes on was "Great Scott, Great Knot". In my initial sleepy panic I put two and two together and started considering the drive to Scotland. I'd really like to see a Great Knot, but I really didn't fancy driving to Scotland right now. Besides, I didn't even know where in Scotland.
A couple more keyboard strokes and I found my answer. Breydon Water! The Norfolk part of Scotland! Holy mackerel (or something like that!) Why had my pager not wailed into action and woken me earlier? Why had my phone not alerted me? I'd foolishly left them both in the 99% portion of the house which enjoys absolutely no signal whatsoever.

It took me five minutes to let the turkeys out, let the geese out, let the chickens out, let the ducks out, feed all the aforesaid, grab my bins and scope, crisps and chocolate and I was off!  Like a rocket.

For the next hour and a half I enjoyed the delights of the A17 and the A47 - what a pair of roads to negotiate when you're in a hurry. All this time the bird was still present in the high tide roost though mostly not visible.

Breydon Water is a huge inlet from the sea with vast mudflats enjoyed by swarms of waders. However, they are often mobile and distant, with views not ideal due to heat haze and the direction of the sun. At high tide, birds get forced onto a small patch of salt marsh at the east end, near the bridge and Asda car park, which is where I hastily abandoned the car at some time just after 10.
As the tide recedes, bird fly out to feed on the mud, mainly on the south side.

There were maybe 30 or 40 people already assembled along the footpath which runs under the road bridge. Some had already seen the bird earlier when the tide had allowed it a little exposed mud. Another similar size group were assembled along the sea wall on the south side.
I perched my bottom precariously on a grassy slope and started to scan the salt marsh. Avocets, Curlews, Whimbrel, Godwits, Redshanks, a Spotted Redshank. Yes, all the taller birds were just visible, their heads and shoulders poking out above the beautiful purple flowers of swathes of sea lavender (I may be wrong on that one?) For ten minutes a grasshopper used my knee as a perch.
But the Great Knot hadn't been since since 9:55 when a brief aerial foray had at least confirmed its rough location. As the tide rose higher and higher, all the waders were clearly getting wet feet. Occasionally a group would briefly take to the air before settling back down again. I'd been there about half an hour when a large group of avocets did this. Then the call. In amongst all those black and white feathers and recurved bills was, somewhere, a Great Knot in flight. Briefly, very briefly, what was probably the bird shot through my scope, but I was then completely unable to get on the bird again despite several people calling directions to it. I came off the telescope and went for the wider view of the binoculars, but still I couldn't get on it. By now it had joined up with a group of golden plovers and was heading away at height! "In the blue patch of sky", someone said. I aimed my sight at a random blue patch and there, third from the left in the line of golden plovers, was a not-golden-plover! I followed it for a couple of minutes, almost always heading away, until that thin line of waders became undiscernible dots and disappeared.
That had not been in the plan. The Great Knot was supposed to sit it out on the high tide and duly start waddling around on the mud as the tide receded, even if it failed to poke its head above the salt marsh before then.
So, I had definitely seen the bird that was a Great Knot, but no way had I seen enough to be happy.

Why had it gone off with Golden Plovers? Surely it would land in a field with them and then feel out of place. It may even realise its mistake and return on its own. Anyway, for now the tide was still rising - typically it was unusually high - and all I could do was wait. At least it was sunny and there were lots of old friends to catch up with, as well as friends on the way and texting for updates. I was pretty hungry though, having dashed out of the house without breakfast. Asda was only 5 minutes away, but I daren't go just in case the bird put in another brief appearance.

Eventually the tide started to turn and the first patches of mud appeared. Squadrons of Avocets marched down from the saltmarsh to begin feeding and gradually all the waders were becoming visible. But the tide receded quickly and in no time distance and heat haze were rendering our views far from perfect. And still no Great Knot.
The mud on the south side of the channel was now becoming exposed. Most of the waders were heading over there and the light was better from that direction too. Gradually we too left our high tide roost and filed over the bridge, scrambling down the other side. As we did this, the line of birders who had chosen to wait on the south side began moving noticeably quicker. There was even running. Had the bird been refound or was this just a panic? Should I play it cool or break into a trot?

RUN!

When I caught up with the crowd, there were confused messages passing this way and that. At the extreme left end... near the tyre.... by the avocet (not helpful). But the tyre was nowhere near the extreme left hand end. All the birds were still distant, but not too distant to pick out a Great Knot, surely.


A long line of birders finally enjoying views of the Great Knot

Then, four hours after I had arrived, the dumpy figure of a Great Knot was walking across the mud in my scope view. By now people were starting to arrive from as far afield as Bristol and Sussex.

I had waited a long time for a crack at one of these. I had even had one snatched away from me, bizarrely in exactly the same spot as I found myself now. Views weren't ideal but, as well as the distinctive shape, you could clearly see the dark amber-spangled upperside and the distinctive black chest.


It's out there somewhere!
But we couldn't put the birders on the opposite bank onto it.

We watched the bird for almost an hour, which included a rather comical phone call trying to give directions to the bird to someone on the other side of the basin. Perspective can be so deceptive.
Then it flew west and out of view.

However, it's not often I'm going to see a Great Knot, so I joined the line of birders who decided to yomp the couple of miles along the seawall in the hope of better views. We weren't disappointed. All the waders were feeding on the South Flats and the Great Knot was dabbing into the mud at a distance of less than 100 metres. Now that may sound like it's still a bit distant, but when the light's good the 60x power of the telescope zoom allowed every detail of the bird to be admired. For the first time I could make out the intricacy and beauty of the feathering on the back and I could finally clearly see the spotted flanks. Now I could relax and enjoy the bird.



My attempts at bird photography go no further
than sticking the phone up to the telescope,
so I was quite happy with my record shots.

It was great to bump into some old friends too, some who I'd not seen for a long while. That's how this twitching game works. You never quite know where you'll be, what you'll be seeing or who you'll bump into when you're there.

Let's just hope a Royal Tern doesn't rock up on 1st August! The 2nd August would be okay though!

Radish pods - at the forefront of trendy veg

I'm not a great fan of radishes.
It's not that I don't like the taste, but a couple of slices is enough.
So what I need to grow is about one radish plant every week. What I actually grow is about 20 plants a week, but only for about 3 weeks, when I run out of steam.

The main reason I grow them is that every gardening book advises to intersperse radish seed with slower growing seeds of other crops such as lettuce and parsnip. The rapidly growing radish seedlings mark the line of the other crop so it is not lost in amongst the multitude of other weeds competing for resources.
The trouble is that those other weeds invariably overtake the radish too!
The result is that, a couple of months after sowing, I suddenly discover three rows of radishes gone over.

Peppery, woody balls in the ground topped by gangly shoots culminating in delicate little flowers.

One year I'll get this element of my gardening sorted, but until then it doesn't really matter. In fact, better than that, I have discovered a new way to use radishes. For those radish flowers develop into small pods shaped like magical toadstools and with a flavour more subtle than the roots but still distinctly radish.

I reckon you end up with a much more sophisticated vegetable and you get a good number of pods per plant too. Plenty enough to add a delicious flavour to my omelette.

I appear to have become a sheep farmer

These beautiful Shetlands (sheep, not ponies)
are a very welcome addition to the smallholding,

Somehow over the last two weeks I have gone from having 9 sheep to having 23!

The nine I got from the Rare Breeds Farm are doing very well and are finally managing to make an impact on their patch of grass. However, this is just one section of the meadow...there are another 8 sections and the grass is still getting taller!

The nine lambs are what is known as cade lambs. When a ewe has triplets the third lamb has to be taken off her. If it can't be adopted onto another ewe then it needs to be bottle fed. It will probably end up slightly smaller than its brothers and sisters, but not appreciably so.
The advantage of buying in cade lambs is that they are incredibly tame, all the more so if they have been raised on a rare breeds farm where they are the main visitor attraction.

Hand-reared livestock. Fairly tame!

Basically we aim to purchase the lambs when the grass starts growing and they go on their final journey when the grass stops growing. That way we have no worries about lambing, feeding and housing over winter or long-term health issues to worry about. We don't have to worry about getting in a ram to cover the ewes either.

The other advantage of this system is that we can buy in as many lambs as have been pre-ordered by customers, plus a couple for ourselves. In fact, we have decided to operate an adopt-a-lamb scheme in the future. This is effectively pre-ordering of a lamb but with a more personal touch. People will be able to choose their lamb and visit it if they wish, although some will probably prefer not to see the lamb grow up in the knowledge that they will eventually be eating it! But, as a friend of mine said, "All livestock is deadstock".
If the scheme takes off, I plan to e-mail people photos of their lambs too.

The disadvantage of buying in lambs each year is the fact that availability varies from year to year. This year it proved extremely difficult to get hold of cade lambs and by the time we found a source May was almost over. It had been a warm and wet May and the grass was approaching elephantine proportions. Sheep are supposed to prefer to graze shorter grass, but with a little help from a hand sickle they have gradually got at least one patch under control.
The other disadvantage, of course, is the expense of buying in the lambs, but this is partially offset by other savings such as not having to buy in hay for the winter.

However, I have for a while had a yearning to keep a small flock of sheep throughout the year too, to complement the bought in lambs. I was keen to go for a 'native' breed, partly because being smaller they tend to lamb independently and they are well adapted to our winters. Also they are much happier to eat weeds and scrub and won't need anywhere near as much hay through the winter. They'll certainly help out with the mammoth task of eating all the grass and hopefully the grass won't romp away each spring before I can get the cade lambs in.
Being smaller, the native breeds are shunned by commercial farmers. After all, costs are pretty much the same whatever the size of the sheep, so it does not make sense for them to keep smaller sheep. But the smallholder does not have the same considerations as the large commercial farmers producing meat for a wide public. That small  native breed sheep will contain more flavour in that compact body than any commercial sheep. In fact, breeds such as North Ronaldsays and Shetlands are highly prized for their hogget or mutton. Keeping them into at least a second year means that they reach a more acceptable size.
The clues to their hardiness, if you know your British geography, are in their names, their origins being in the rugged, far northern isles of Orkney and Shetland.

And so it was that I had my eyes out for some Shetland sheep and when some year old rams were advertised locally and the price dropped significantly, I decided to take the plunge. Picking them up went without a hitch. They were more stubborn than I am used to, but the horns came in handy for 'leading' them into the trailer.

Three of them have quite magnificent horns. In fact, I have been asked to make sure I get them back when the rams eventually meet their maker. Apparently they are highly prized as handles for walking sticks or shepherds crooks. I digress. Those horns were the vital clue to the fact that these rams had not exactly been effectively castrated as young lambs! Clearly the rings had missed their mark.

This handsome boy may well end up as our breeding ram.

This boy is safe.
As a 'wether' he'll make a good companion for a more virile ram.

I wasn't sure about taking them, but I decided that even if they got too boisterous, I was buying a lot more meat than the sheep actually cost me. Besides, I would be able to choose the best one as a potential future breeder. The one who was no longer intact would make a good companion for him too.

 



These four ewes (one out of picture) are fine specimens.
I'm very happy with my purchase.

Now, anyone with any competence in arithmetic will be puzzled. For this still only makes 13 sheep. Well, I was on the lookout for maybe four more Shetlands, preferably ewes. So when I saw an advert for ewes, some with lambs, at a very reasonable price, I was quick to enquire. I was told that there were four ewes without lambs and two with. There were four lambs, all rams. I could have the lot for £250. I never quite planned to buy another ten, but somehow that's what I came home with! If it proves too many, I can always thin the flock down a little. But for now I can choose the best to  keep and they will certainly begin to make a bigger impact on my jungle of meadow.

Shetland lambs certainly have the cute factor.

The rams soon got over their initial excitement.

When I brought them back, I decided to let them in with the four rams, hoping that at this time of year the rams wouldn't be too interested in the ladies. As it was, they went into 'lad mode' for about half an hour, strutting around, sniffing the air and preforming some pretty impressive headbutts on each other! But it wasn't long before the calmed down. Better still, the new sheep came out of the trailer and headed straight for the nettles, which are now almost all gone. In fact, anything not in the paddock seemed infinitely more tempting for them than the grass. A short stretch of temporary electric fence has made sure they don't jump the rickety old fence in their eagerness to eat the hedge.

This ewe and her two lambs think the grass (or hedge)
is always greener on the other side.

John the brave beekeeper collects a swarm

Not many photos for this one I'm afraid. I am not a kamikaze blogger. Read on and all will make sense.
I spent last weekend in the Extremadura region of Spain. It was sort of my stag weekend, though there were considerably more birds involved than beer. If you know me by now, you'll realise that last sentence was not as damning as it may sound, for I enjoyed spectacular view of vultures, eagles, storks and my first ever European bustards.... yes, bustards.

That's nothing to do with this post though. I returned to the smallholding late on Monday and come Wednesday Sue was off on her headteachers conference. It is rapidly becoming an annual tradition that Sue goes off on conference and John has to become an emergency bee-keeper! And this year was no disappointment.

Our hives have been doing well this year and we have had our first significant honey harvest, 130lb so far.

But while I was away in Spain, Sue found 20 queen cells in the middle hive. This is a sure sign that something is amiss. Either the bees are not happy with their queen or they are doing so well that they are preparing to swarm and are laying the foundations of a new colony before they go.

So, left on my own, I was fully expecting to witness a mass departure of bees. They usually choose a warm, muggy afternoon to go and we've had our fair share of those these year. But as it happens, my emergency beekeeping duties stemmed from elsewhere when, on Thursday evening, there was a knock at the door from a local farmer informing me of a swarm of bees on the verge outside his house. For all I knew, they could even have come out of one of our hives earlier in the day.
I rushed around grabbing what I needed, squeezed into Sue's beekeeping suit and jumped in the car.

I arrived to find a dinner plate circle of bees huddled together on the tarmac. A small group had unfortunately been run over by a passing vehicle. They did not look like any of our bees, these ones being almost black. I scooped them up in my hands and into a box, making sure to get as many as possible. When bees swarm their soul aim is to huddle around the queen, so they do not go into attack mode. Allegedly, they've stuffed themselves so full of honey in preparation for their adventure that they are actually incapable of stinging. I kept my thick leather gloves firmly on, not wanting to test out this theory!
I got them home sealed tightly in their box in the back of the car, then set about hastily assembling a hive. All this while I was attempting to make my first ever pizza from scratch as a practise for the blokes baking group on Friday.

So, come about midnight, I finally got to sit down and tuck into my pizza, which was absolutely delicious.

Pizza. From scratch. Lish!

I set the alarm for 5.30am as I had a very busy day ahead of me. It would start with pouring the bees into their new hive and I wanted them to still be in sleepy mode when I did this. It's amazing how bees in a cluster behave just like a gloopy liquid. You do just literally pour them in then leave them to settle.
Then I had some sheep to collect, a horse manure collection to make and in the evening I was hosting the blokes baking group again.

Fast forward to today and there I am in the paddock with my new sheep (more on these in my next post) when a bee starts persistently buzzing me. I stayed perfectly still for a couple of minutes but the bee just seemed to be getting increasingly aggressive until it dived straight into my hair. Time to pull it out and leg it back into the house.
I guessed that Sue must have upset them and if they were this cross I would be spending a couple of hours safely inside (hence the break in my work to compose a couple of blog posts).

Sue waits patiently, but these bees
aren't giving up that easily.

It wasn't long before Sue appeared with two dozen bees angrily circling her head. She sat and waited, but these bees weren't giving up that easily. In the end she had to walk away and then make a run for the door and get in before the bees caught up.
She then explained why the bees today were quite so angry.

Sue had gone out to give some syrup feed to the colony of bees I had collected. However, unable to see a queen (that doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't one in there), She decided to take a tray of eggs from the middle hive. This would give the bees something to work on to start a new colony if indeed they were queenless. At the same time, it would keep the middle hive busy and maybe distract them from swarming.






Monster hive

But bees are full of surprises, for when Sue opened the middle hive she found it eggless, a sure sign that somehow they had lost their queen. This is where the tactic of destroying the queen cells to prevent swarming comes unstuck, for the bees had known better than Sue. Those queen cells were not being made as the foundations of a new colony, they were made to make a new queen.

So Sue decided to take two trays of eggs from the monster hive, one tray to put in each of the other hives. It was shortly after this that the monster bees took exception. They streamed out in a cloud of smoke and aimed straight for Sue's face!! Fortunately the veil did its job and protected her. SHe quickly put the lid on and beat a hasty retreat.

We both survived without getting stung.

Sue has now headed off to Holbeach for her dummy run on the hair and make-up for her wedding makeover. I am about to venture back outside to spend some time with my new sheep. I could be back inside sooner than I planned.

Lardy dardy - making leaf lard from flare fat

It's a bit of a cliché, but they do say that the only part of a pig you can't eat is the oink.

Working with the butcher when Daisy was being turned into sausages gave me the chance to try a new product, for he presented me with what is known as the flare fat. This is the fat from inside the pig, around the kidneys and inside the loin.

The flare fat can be rendered down into leaf lard, the highest grade of lard. I never before realised that there were grades of lard, but then why should I? I'd only ever seen the one grade of supermarket lard.

So I decided to have a go at making my own lard. It's a bit out of fashion these days, but it is still the product to use for classic short crust pastry and flaky pie tops. It will certainly come in useful at the Blokes Baking Group.

Making lard from flare fat really couldn't be more simple. All you need do is cut the fat into cubes and heat. As it cooks down, pour off the fat into containers and then just wait for it to set solid. It does need to be kept in the fridge or frozen if you want to store it for long.
I decided to use the microwave method. I filled a plastic bowl with chunks of flare fat and set the mike for 4 minutes, at the end of which the chunks of fat had softened and reduced considerably. I poured off the liquid lard and then returned the bowl to the microwave for a further 4 minutes, repeated the same procedure and then went for a third go in the microwave. Here's what happened!

One very hot plastic bowl!

So my advice would be to always use a Pyrex dish, or switch to the stove top method in a saucepan, which is the option I took.

While I did this, I had all Daisy's bones roasting off in the oven. These went into a giant pot along with a few old vegetables, a couple of handfuls of herbs and a couple of pieces of skin to help jellify the stock.

Several hours later the whole lot had reduced down nicely. We (Sue) separated out the stock juice then boiled it down further. The end result was a rich, concentrated stock which turned nicely to a jelly and is now sliced up and stored in the freezer. There's plenty of it too.
Those winter casseroles will be even more tasty now!


Back to that leaf lard. The saucepan method worked well. I gradually poured off the rendered fat until all I was left with was a small pile of crispy fat pieces - tasty but very unhealthy!

I left the lard to cool and it gradually set to a pure, white colour, then into the freezer. I can't wait for an excuse to make some short crust pastry. I sense a steak and kidney pie coming along.

The end product
Premium grade leaf lard, plus a few unhealthy nibbles.