Changes Afoot

The last ten days have just been a whirlwind, hence the lack of posts on here. So for now I'll give a quick resume, then I'll come back to some of this in future posts.

Most importantly, Daisy has gone.

She went on Sunday morning. She almost cost me a bird too! For those who don't know me, I'm an obsessive twitcher. Seeing new birds in Britain takes precedence over almost everything else in my life. This completely obsessive, irrational behaviour helps me put the rest of my life into perspective.


Twitch on!

Last seen out there somewhere

Fortunately I took "Eagle-Eyed" Mick with me.

Anyway, I eventually saw the Short-toed Eagle.
Sue went off on her cheese-making course which I too was supposed to be attending, and we left Daisy at the abattoir.
It seems strange going down to feed the chickens and not hearing a welcome grunt or snort from the pig pen.


Yesterday I picked Daisy up - more on this later - and spent the day with Paul, the butcher from the Cambridgeshire Self-Sufficiency Group, turning her into gammon joints, eight varieties of sausage, diced and minced pork, kebabs... In the evening the rest of the group turned up for a sausage making demonstration and a barbecue. Daisy went down very well! As did the bunny burgers provided by Mick.

I'm spending today getting everything into the freezers, rendering down some of the fat and making stock from the skin and bones.

Changes for the other animals too.
The nine lambs have moved into the long grass and started the gargantuan task of grazing it short. I'm hoping to get four more soon to help them out.
Both sets of geese have failed to hatch a single egg. Yesterday I finally turfed them off their nests and destroyed the eggs. If you want to know what a foul smell is like, crack open a rotten goose egg. It was enough to actually make me sick!

Goliath, the lone goose who we hatched in the incubator,  follows us around everywhere but he's grown even bigger. Still doubling in size every week. The other geese are back together, grey and white united, but they continue to take an unhealthy interest in Golly and he sticks close by when they're near.


Exciting news on the bee front. Sue has taken our first ever significant honey harvest. One super from each of the healthy hives, so about 40lb of honey, but there's more waiting to be collected.
The third hive, which is a newly created colony as the old one failed to come through the winter, have made themselves a queen. Sue saw her emerging from her queen cell the other day, so hopefully she will get mated and start laying soon.

And finally, we have three new inhabitants on the farm, a new species for us. For on Monday evening we picked up three turkey chicks. We intend to grow them on slowly so they'll probably make it past Christmas, but they'll end up on the plate at some time. Meanwhile they are very welcome to stay on our farm.

Daisy. One Stubborn Pig!

We spent Bank Holiday Monday in the pleasant company of a larger than life figure and his wife down in the southern fens. The reason for our excursion off the farm was to discuss sausages and bacon products.

If you follow this blog you'll know that we only have one pig at the moment, Daisy, our breeding sow who has become too close to being a pet since we decided to stop breeding her.
The Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group are holding a sausage making and barbecue evening in the near future and the subject of our art is to be Daisy! This seems like a fitting end for the old girl.

We have ordered half a dozen different packs of sausage flavouring and are researching the chemistry of bacon curing.

But Daisy has other ideas!!

We started trailer training her over a week ago. For Daisy cannot be manhandled. Daisy goes where Daisy wants to go.

I had two major concerns. Getting her in the trailer and getting her out the other end. I figured that I needed to get her used to eating and sleeping in the trailer and coming back out in the morning. If we could get to this stage then I would move the trailer onto drier ground and repeat the process there, leading her up from her pen every evening. The next stage would be to take her for a little drive so that she got used to coming out of the trailer after a journey.


Now all this sounds like a good plan and Trailer Training Stage 1 went reasonably smoothly, although it took 3 days to get her into the trailer the first time. I had to move it so the ramp didn't slope quite so much. But we eventually got to the point where she went straight in every evening for three nights.

Then I had to use the trailer to fetch the lambs. I decided this would be a good time to park it on higher ground. Well, that was four days ago. It took FOUR hours of coaxing to get Daisy up into the trailer on the first evening - it was gone midnight before I got back into the farmhouse. Part of the problem is that Daisy is so long that I need her to go right into the trailer before I can shut the gate on her. I lost count of how many times she backed out just as the last couple of inches of bum were still sticking out!

For some reason, Daisy wasn't happy when I closed the gate that time and she has steadfastly refused to go in the trailer for the last three nights. She takes the titbits I throw to try to tempt her, but most unusually for a pig her stubbornness is overcoming her hunger.


To be quite honest, I have been getting very frustrated by the whole situation. However, something always happens to lighten a situation and this time it has been a family of wrens which provided the entertainment. For they have nested in the top corner of the garage porch, in an old swallow nest. While I have been waiting for Daisy to go into the trailer, there have been constant high-pitched begging calls coming from the nest. Then, on the third day, four young wrens appeared on the scene.









One of them found a very novel perch!

















Despite this, there was no budging by Daisy on the trailer issue. So yesterday I took the decision to move the trailer back down to her pig pen. This is now a major worry as we have had constant rain for two days and I really am not confident that I will be able to pull it back out again... if Daisy goes in that is. I have decided that she will only be fed right inside the trailer. She could do with losing a little bit of fat before she goes off anyway.

A Stinking Comfrey Bath Full of Rat-tailed Maggots

Two of my previous posts have become unexpectedly linked. For it wasn't long ago that I encountered this creature in my polytunnel

 

This is a drone fly, so called because of its superficial resemblance to a honey bee. It appeared in my post about polytunnel intruders.

Now just outside the polytunnel sits this old bath, full of stinking comfrey juice.

It is just rainwater with a bag of comfrey leaves immersed, but this makes the water go really quite disgusting. It has a rather unappealing aroma too, though you get used to it. But it's worth it for the black gold it produces, free plant food which my tomatoes love. For more on growing and using comfrey, you can visit this post.

So you're probably wondering what these two subjects have to do with one another. Well my tomatoes are just forming their first fruits now so I decided yesterday to start feeding them but, as I approached the bath of black liquid, I could see what appeared to be hundred of slugs swimming around in it, slugs with tails! The last thing I would want to do is pour slugs, or anything similar, all over my crops.

So a quick internet search for "water larva spiky tail" brought me instantly to the answer at uksafari.com.

The aquatic larvae of droneflies are known as Rat-tailed maggots.  They develop in stagnant water, animal faeces and rotting carcasses.  The more putrid and foul-smelling it is, the more the larvae seem to like it.
Each larva is equipped with an extendible tail called a 'siphon'.  This tail, which can extend to about 5cm (2 inches), is used as a snorkel to breath air from the surface of the liquid while the larva feeds below.

Special features:  Drone flies look similar to honeybees (hence the 'drone' name), but they lack the narrow waist between the thorax and abdomen.  They also have just two wings, where the honey bee has four.

The body is brown to black in color, quite hairy, with varying amounts of orange/yellow markings on the side of the second and third abdominal segments.

The males have large eyes which meet in the centre, while the females have smaller eyes with a gap in between.


When they are fully grown, the larvae leave the water to pupate.  The pupae are a reddish-brown colour.  At the front are some horn-like projections, and the tail often curves up and over the back of the body.

Mystery solved.

Lamb Plan Part 2

If you want to skip the build up, just scroll down to the cute lamb pictures. Here's one to keep you going.

Excitement has been building all week. For Friday was the appointed date for collecting the lambs from the Rare Breeds Centre.
All I had to do was to bring the livestock trailer up from the pig enclosure, where Daisy has been using it to sleep. (Don't ask why!) But then a prediction of rain on Wednesday night made me a little worried that the ground would become too slippery to tow the trailer out. And it certainly did rain overnight, which would have been a good thing had it not been for the trailer.
Still I thought that everything would be alright. The ground had been very dry and the grass would dry out during the day. After all, temperatures had been up into the 70s (I still think in Fahrenheit) all week.
But on Thursday, while I was stuck at work, the heavens opened as we were hit with several late afternoon downpours accompanied by clashes of thunder and some quite spectacular lightning. I rushed home from work and went straight down to the trailer. It was still raining so the quicker I could move it the better. I decided that the best way would be if I could pull it by hand, for I reckoned to have more grip than my car, which is not really designed for such tasks. I managed to heave the trailer some of the way until I was beaten by a slight incline, plus a rather muddy dip in the ground where the moles cross.

I reversed the car to the trailer, hitched it up and tentatively touched the accelerator. Slowly and gently we started moving. I kept a featherlight touch on the accelerator and crossed my fingers. A minute later we were on safe ground and all I needed to do was to clean out and disinfect the trailer ready to head out early in the morning.

The journey to the Rare Breeds Farm went according to plan and they were ready on my arrival. I chose the biggest stockiest lambs. They don't have the cute factor, but they will be better equipped to move outside and start chomping on my long grass. They should end up bigger too.
In no time I had six boys and three girls loaded up and ready to go. Six of them are commercial cross-breeds which the farm buy in so there are enough hand-reared lambs for the public to ogle over. One is a pure Norfolk Horn and one a pure White-faced Woodland.

And here they are.

It was a cautious arrival at their new home.

This green stuff was new to them too.

I backed up the trailer and, opening the back door, I stood back out of the way before they came bounding out. But they were more cautious than that. After all, they'd just been picked up from their home and put in a strange trailer which moved.

When it finally stopped and the gates were flung open, there was a whole new world outside. And it was covered in green stuff. They had seen this distantly before, but most of their lives had been spent in a straw-filled barn.

 

It took a while for the bravest to venture out, eventually followed by the others. And when they did get there they weren't sure what they were supposed to eat. First they tried the trailer, but that didn't taste too good. Then they tried my trousers... which didn't please Goliath who was hiding between my feet.

Is this what we're supposed to eat?

Eventually one of them discovered that dying dock leaves, the old ones at the base of the plant, are quite tasty. Another discovered that sticks were good to chew on.

 

 

 

New experiences just kept coming. They tried a bit of Goliath chasing, until they happened upon his dad.

 

They tried a bit of tree climbing too.

 

 

They did a bit of running around madly, but John was too slow with the camera. But eventually they discovered that the green stuff made pretty good eating.

 

White-faced Woodland

Norfolk Horn.
His wool will turn white with age, apart from the legs

So that was that. Our lawn mowers have arrived and we will have meat in the autumn.
And while I work outside the occasional bleating of lambs is a most welcome sound on the farm.

Lamb Plan Part 1

Two years ago we had these.



Number 10 and Number 18

Last year we had these.

And this year we have...




Five and a half lambs presold ... but no lambs!

Our sheep plan goes something like this:
Buy sheep in spring. Preferably bottle fed so they are tame (saves on rugby tackles). Sheep eat grass, so saving me a major headache. Sheep get nice and big and juicy. Sheep go on a journey. Sheep go in our freezer, or people come and pick them up in boxes and give us money.
This plan avoids all the tricky bits of keeping sheep. No lambing. No overwintering. No shearing.

Almost everybody who bought half a lamb from us last year has asked for a whole one this year. Everything had fallen into place perfectly. Sheep sold before we even bought them.

But then our plan skidded to a grinding halt. For some reason, there just aren't any sheep available this year. We have looked everywhere, but everybody is asking for lambs and nobody wants to sell any. Several leads fell through and we were left with  a couple of acres of rapidly growing grass and six expectant lamb customers. One small problem... no lambs!

I was even forced to consider changing the sheep plan. If it was to be this tricky to find lambs every year, maybe we should set up our own flock. But this is not the right time of year to think about that and we would not be producing lambs until next year.

Just as things were getting desperate and I was contemplating having to let down our customers virtually before our customer base was even established, not to mention what to do with the ever-growing grass, Sue made a phone call which solved everything.

Those lovely folks at the Rare Breeds Centre still had some bottle fed lambs left to sell. For most farmers, bottle feeding lambs is an expensive and time-consuming inconvenience. But it is the Rare Breeds Centre's meat and drink. This means that we don't even have to take them while they are still on the bottle. The idea of bottle feeding lambs may sound cute, but I've got enough to do without that.

And so it was that a couple of weeks ago we went to view our nine lambs.....

 Of course, we took the chance to have a look round the rest of the farm too.

 

Meet Goliath The Giant Gosling

 



You can almost see Goliath growing!


 

For a few hours he (or she) was called Gary, but it reminded me too much of someone I know with the same name, so instead I have decided to call him Goliath. Quite fitting this name really. For he is, after all, a Giant Dewlap Toulouse and will hopefully attain the same statuesque figure as his father, George. And it certainly seems that Golly is heading that way as he doubles in size every week. I have calculated that this cannot continue or else he will be 150 metres tall in ten weeks time!


Goliath is fast becoming a pet. Since the loss of his sibling he has become even more reliant on us and spends all day calling for us, only going silent when he knows we are there. Given the chance, he follows us around everywhere. He has been to the vegetable garden, the chicken pen, the back garden, the front garden, the kitchen... I had not realised how flat-footed a gosling could be, but when he crosses the kitchen floor his feet flop, flop, flop on the slate surface. This is quite useful really, as it means you don't forget he's there and accidentally step back onto him.


Selfie

 

Funniest of all though is the fact that Goliath has also imprinted on Angel, our adopted black and white moggy. She was, after all, present with Sue when he hatched out of his egg. He runs up to her and tries to peck her on the nose. She runs off and he goes flip-flopping in pursuit across the kitchen floor. Hilarious!

Angel looks on with a weary eye

My usual view of Goliath

Barny's Back!

I have spent most of the last two days grappling with electric fence wire, made from a substance of which the sole function is to tie itself in unfathomable knots. It has been absolutely glorious weather, which is not really what was needed when spending two days working right out in the open. Having said that, the bottom of my land is a very peaceful place to relax... until that blasted fence wire twists itself into yet another impossible knot. At least I've got an instant tan, though that's not really the done thing these days.

The bottom of my land is a place of long, undisturbed grassland surrounded by the young trees I have planted, which are finally starting to look like they may one day actually become big, grown-up trees. At least one pair of skylarks seem to be nesting down there, constantly serenading me from somewhere up in the blue sky. A Meadow Pipit, too, made frequent visits, its mouth full of grubs for its young, and a female Reed Bunting broke cover a couple of times.

But best bird news of all is that I have had daily Barn Owl sightings for five consecutive days having virtually not seen one for well over a year. Hunting during the day is a sure sign that it has young to feed. After a population crash over the last couple of years, it will be brilliant for the barn owl to again be part of our fenland landscape.
The Little Owls, I presume, have young too. They are very active during the day flying between the old Ash trees and even perching out sometimes. They too seem to be faring well. I have seen four in this area within the last week. The pair of Yellow Wagtails continue to add a splash of colour to the pig enclosure and finally I have heard a cuckoo this year. In fact I saw two fly acoss the neighbouring field being chased by a blackbird.

Yellow Wagtail

Today my job is to plant 66m of bird-friendly, intruder unfriendly hedge. I wouldn't normally be planting bare root trees at this time of year since they would have long come out of their winter dormancy. However, those folks at Ashridge Nurseries have had them in cold storage and are selling them off half price.
The bird-friendly hedge consists of the following native species: Hawthorn, Wild Cherry Plum, Wild Privet, Hazel, Wild Damson, Guelder Rose, Blackthorn, Dog Rose and Field Maple. I've ordered extra hawthorn slips just to make sure it becomes impenetrable and I shall be using it to fill any gaps in our boundary with the road. Any left will be planted as a windbreak.
Who knows, one day Barny may well be spotted hunting along my new hedgerow.