Bringing Home The Bacon

I've been away for a while on my annual sojourn to Shetland to hunt rare birds.  It's a bit different to The Fens up there, though the islands are windswept, full of smallholdings and there are Shetland sheep everywhere... so maybe not so different after all!

But just before I flew north, I sent a pig off to piggy heaven. If you follow this blog, you may be confused as I've not actually had any pigs on the smallholding this year.

Sue and I have found that one pig is quite enough to feed us for a year. However, pigs are intelligent, social animals and are best kept with at least one other of their own kind. So this year we were part of a pig co-op. A fellow smallholder raised three pigs, one of which was destined for our freezer. We only ever met our saddleback twice, once when it was just a nipper and then, a couple of weeks ago, to load it into our trailer and take it off to the abattoir.

We are fortunate to live just a few miles from a small abattoir who always give us an excellent service. But finding a butcher to process the carcass for us has been proving tricky. Both this abattoir and another nearby have butchers attached, but they both put your sausage meat into a big batch along with that from all the other pigs they are processing. The result is that, as far as the sausages are concerned, you might as well just buy some good quality sausages from the supermarket.

We did have an excellent arrangement with a very small butchers just a very short walk from Sue's school. They would pick up the carcass direct from the abattoir and cut it according to our wishes. They made an excellent sausage using just our pork. It was sometimes a job to persuade them to produce any more sausages for us than the standard amount produced from all the offcuts, but overall it was a very good arrangement.
However, the butcher who used to do the cutting for us has been poorly for a while and has now left. So the job has fallen to the one who makes the sausages. Unfortunately he clearly does not want to take on this job - our lambs last year came back not even labelled! His default answer to any request seemed to be "no".
And so we came up with a different plan for this year's pig. A real character we know who lives down in the central fens is also a butcher. In fact, it's the same person who transformed Daisy into sausages last year.

The third time I met my pig!

The downside is that it's quite a journey and I have to transport the carcass to him in the back of the car. The upside is that I get to help out and I really enjoy his company.
So just before I left for Shetland I took our pig along to him. It took only a couple of hours to turn half of it into chops and joints, as well as a box full of tasty sausages and a long string of boiling sausages.
The sausages are so tasty that we will not be selling any this year!
The other half of the pig was prepared for bacon and placed in a brine bath. When we started keeping pigs, we dreamed of sausages, ham, bacon and gammon. But there is an art to making these products and so far we have never really been happy with our own attempts, especially at bacon. Paul still uses traditional methods to make bacon and gammon.
It's not really a complicated process, but a skilled curer's experience can make all the difference, judging things just right between under and over curing. Paul has come up with a great way to achieve this on a small scale. After cutting half the pig into about four great lumps, these went into a cooling box which was filled with a brine mix, containing salt, a very little saltpetre, herbs, spices and sugar. A few milk cartons of frozen water help to keep the temperature down and weigh down the meat to keep it submerged.

And so I headed off to Shetland, half a pig in the freezer and half left at Paul's to cure. There is no waste either. The bones go to Boris or will be boiled up for stock, along with the skin. The flare fat from inside the carcass will be used to produce more of that wonderful leaf lard which makes such excellent pastry and lardy cake.

Sue will hate me for publishing this photo,
but the main subject is the smoked bacon

Fast forward two weeks and today we went back to Paul's to pick up the bacon. It had come out of the brine and been smoked in Paul's home-made smoker, made from a hollowed out upside-down fridge.
He showed us how to use his slicer and we set to work slicing while Paul cut up the large leg ham into more manageable gammon joints for us.
Fast forward another few hours and we've just enjoyed our first taste of the bacon, along with a few of the sausages, a couple of our own eggs and some fried mushrooms. All I can say is that we most definitely won;t be selling any of the bacon either!

A Pear Treat

Last year we got our first ever pear harvest. I have several varieties, but star of the show was the Concorde, an established cross between Comice and Conference. One young tree kept us supplied with delicious pears for a couple of weeks.
So over the winter in our forays to the plant auctions I purchased a further four Concorde pear trees. Well, you can guess what's happened this year. Not a single pear, not even from the more established tree! Some fruits seem to work like this, plums especially, one year a bumper crop and the next year nothing.
But the Beth and the Williams in the chicken enclosure have come to the fore instead. These pears are different in that they need to be picked before they are fully ripe. If you leave then on the tree they go grainy.
I picked most of the Beths a couple of weeks ago and they have now been eaten. Delicious they were too.
The ones growing on the lower branches fell victim to jumping chickens, who very much appreciate a pear to play with.

The Williams weren't quite ready, but when I cleaned out the chickens last weekend I noticed that three of them had committed suicide by falling off the tree straight into the chickens' water. So I picked out the rest, enough to fill a basket. It's not much, but it makes a welcome contribution to our diet and I anticipate ever increasing yields from all of our orchard trees.

Now, a week later, the Williams are ripe and very juicy. There are 9 trays drying in the dehydrator and almost ready as I type. I tried a slice and the flavour just kept increasing in waves.

I expect next year we'll have no Williams or Beths but five trees full of Concorde pears. I won't be complaining.

One Lonely Sister - Disheartened by the Sweetcorn

I have written about the Three Sisters system of growing before.
For those who missed it, here's a quick resume.
Grow sweetcorn, squashes and climbing beans together. They all have different needs for light and nutrients and all help each other. It is a system used by Native American Indians.

Of course, it is very trendy, especially when you select Cherokee Trail of Tears beans to grow, for this makes it sound even more authentic. While Cherokees are, reportedly, a good bean to grow, so are many other French beans. I prefer Cobra, which sounds pretty authentic in a desert context, though it of course inhabits the other India!

But this system of companion growing is designed to use the same land year after year in a completely different climate and soil type to what we experience in Britain. I have tried it and it does not work for me. The beans never do well, or if you plant them too much earlier than the corn then the corn never makes it. So I have been sticking to Two Sisters growing. Small groups of corn with pumpkins and squashes rambling in between. It has worked well, except that in cooler years, or if the sweetcorn gets off to a slow start, the cobs are not ripe before the wheat field next door is harvested.

The result is disheartening to say the least. I'm not sure if it's the rats or the field mice (I suspect a bit of both, and maybe a bit of rabbit thrown in), but they devastate the crop before it is ripe enough to harvest. They even have the nerve to chew through the husk material to see if the corn is ripe. If not, they leave it till later, irrevocably damaged.

Looking on the bright side, at least we've enough sweetcorn in the freezer from last year that we won't run out. Even if we do, we've plenty more vegetables to choose from. That's the nature of growing your own. Every year some things go mad while others disappoint. Just look at my courgette failure this year for a good example.

On the other bright side, Rambo is enjoying the corn leaves and the stem and roots will go back into the soil and give it body.

And on the third bright side, the squashes seem to be coming good and nothing seems to eat them.

But next year the already depleted Two Sisters will be going down to One Lonely Sister. I am going to experiment with a new variety of sweetcorn, allegedly a supersweet, non-hybrid variety which ripens early. But to be on the safe side, I shall again be growing some in the polytunnel and the rest in my mixed vegetable beds outside, away from the field and in the more protected environs of the main veg plot.

News From Nowhere

I find the seasonal cycle reassuring. Like the sun coming up, there is a certain security knowing that winter will come again and spring will follow it. Each season holds its own wonders and challenges. Without them things would get monotonous. And as a smallholder, each time they come around I get another chance to try and improve on last year. Unfortunately I grow a year older too!

But this cycle doesn't make blogging easy! How do you write about your potato harvest for the fifth time in five years without getting repetitious? I find pulling potatoes from the ground just as amazing, every time I do it, but it's hard to get enthused about writing about it again. I guess I could always hope that no-one except me remembers the post from a year ago. For this reason, I don't always post about everything I do.

One thing which I do look forward to are the cider club days which Roger runs. The spring meeting fell through due to a last minute lack of apples, so it is now a full year since our last flow of apple juice. I don't see the group in between times, but I enjoy their company. They are a group of thinkers.

This last Saturday we gathered again under ominous skies.
The weather held for us, just, and as we chopped and scratted, pulverised, liquidised and pressed, it put me in mind of a book by William Morris, News From Nowhere, a utopian and nostalgic image of times gone by. (Alternative Title: An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From A Utopian Romance). It is one of the very, very few books to which I periodically return. In particular it reminded me of the community effort to gather in the hay. These days one man comes along with a massive combine harvester and creates a dust storm. Then, a couple of days later, someone else chugs up and down the field and the hay magically pops out the back in its shiny black plastic roll. It is called haylage these days. But in the past people came together. Undoubtedly it was hard work only made possible by a community effort, but it helped bond the community in a way which has now disappeared.

Anyway, back to the cider making. The beauty of the autumn cider day is that the apples are freshly picked. This year Roger had secured a new supply of mixed apples. Such a mix makes for the best juice and the best cider. He had also surprised us by procuring several boxes of mandarins.

These went straight into the shredder, peel and all and it wasn't long before the juice was flowing.

It tastes absolutely delicious as is, but we have put a good quantity away for when Sue gets time to turn it into wine. Now that's something we don't make every year.

The apple juice turned out equally delicious. We've now got three demijohns naturally fermenting. It won't be long before the bubbles start and the airlock valves start making mysterious noises in the kitchen. There's a demijohn unsealed too. This will turn itself into cider vinegar.

As for those changing seasons, we had the fire on last night. It was dark well before 8. And this morning I watched the swallows streaming across the fields. They are not 'our' swallows, for there are hundreds of them, occasionally accompanied by a handful of house martins. These have not yet chosen to adopt our farm as their summer home, so I see them only very rarely on such days when an exodus is in full swing.

I, on the other hand, will spend much of the winter snuggled up in front of my cosy fire with a glass of cider, or even mandarin wine.

And I'll be thinking of my friends. Thank you Roger.

Spuds

Charlottes and Kestrels laid out to dry.
Boris is helping.

Back in the spring I planted 24 each of 7 varieties of potato. As long as we don't have a disaster, I know that this is plenty enough to last Sue and I for a year and that the last maincrops will see us through until the first earlies come out of the polytunnel

They were:

Earlies
Red Duke of York - an early which is great for chips and roasting.
Arran Pilot - a bulk standard for nice new potatoes. Performs well and seems to stay in the ground well too.

Second Earlies
Charlotte - Another proven performer and so expensive in the shops!
Kestrel - A new variety for me.

Mains
Romano - a descendant of Desiree. I like a red potato and this gives great bakers.
King Edward - a good, honest basic maincrop spud.
Pink Fir Apple - Another 'luxury potato'. If only people knew how easy it is to grow and how nice it tastes. Allegedly prone to blight, as it is very late, but mine are more than ready now and last year, when blight struck early, I got a better crop from this than from many other varieties.

I have pretty much settled on these varieties now, after a few years of experimentation. There is a lot of talk of the blight-free varieties these days, especially with warmer, damper summers. However, the ones I tried tasted pretty insipid, so I won't be converting just yet. I have to admit, in a bad blight year they did come through better than the others. I've found though that if I'm ready for blight and take the tops off before it gets into the plants, that I get a good crop anyway, even when blight comes as early as it did last year.

We have been harvesting the earlies for a good while now, but there are still about half of them left in the ground. One of the Arran Pilots the other day was so big it did for a meal for two of us. It still tasted great though.

The tops have died down on the Second Earlies and I cut them off a couple of weeks ago, so with a dry day yesterday, even verging on sunny, I decided to dig them up. I like to cut off the haulms a couple of weeks before digging potatoes up if I aim to store them, as this gives the skins time to set in the ground. There is no point leaving them in for longer as this just makes them prone to slug damage and rotting in wet ground.

A reasonable crop of Charlottes.
Plenty for the two of us,
plus the geese enjoyed the smaller ones
 and any that didn't pass the quality test.

Digging potatoes is a magical job. You just sink the fork in and lift the soil to reveal clusters of swollen tubers. I dig thoroughly to make sure there are none left in the ground, as any 'volunteers' will grow next year and can harbour diseases through the winter. Some always slip through the net though!
I then leave the spuds on the surface of the soil for a good few hours if I can, before gathering them up and storing them in thick paper bags specially designed for potatoes. Any spudlets or damaged tubers get thrown to the geese who are very appreciative. The best spuds then go into a dark wardrobe in the garage. This keeps them in the dark so they don't turn green. It also keeps them not so warm that they try to sprout but above freezing, for if the frost gets to them in the winter they are ruined.

The potatoes I've dug so far this year are a good size, undoubtedly helped by summer's plentiful rain. The yield is not massive (a bit more sunshine and warmth might have helped) but there will be more than enough for our needs. The cost of a few extra tubers is minimal and once you're planting a few dozen, you might as well plant a few more. Better to have too many than not enough. Plus any extras don't go to waste. Potatoes are very popular with most of the animals.

A New Dawn

It's a new dawn. But that's enough about politics.

It's been a busy couple of weeks, but not busy enough to satisfactorily explain my lack of blog posts. This is better explained by my dropping my smartphone onto a concrete patio. No camera, no blog, for I am an impatient reader who needs some pictures to liven up the words.
I do have a proper camera too, but I've found these to be sensitive pieces of equipment which don't take to being carted around the smallholding in all weathers and all tasks.

But I have now conjured up a shiny new phone. Fortunately my contract was up for renewal anyway. All I can say on this matter is never accept the first deal they offer you... or the second... or the third. With a willingness to play hardball I managed to get them down by almost half. I'm not usually good at this sort of thing, but there really is a limit to how much I am prepared to pay on a phone which, in this part of the world, I can rarely use for its primary purpose anywhere outside. For phone signals, it turns out, do not work well on flat ground. You'd think it would be the opposite, that hills and mountains would get in their way, but no, they like to bounce around. It probably doesn't really work that way at all, but that's how I imagine it. But I digress, majorly.

Back to the smallholding. After a very, very long summer holiday, I'm now back at work teaching, though my hours are reduced which will hopefully mean I can keep on top of everything a little more easily. Of course, there are certain times of the year when ten days in a week would still not be enough!

Here's a quick overview of the last two weeks. Autumn is here! I was pleased to get the grass mowed over what may be the last two dry, sunny days of the year. I've harvested some sweetcorn, but not before the mice found it. The problem here is that they climb up and chew through the husk to check it for ripeness and start eating it just before it is ripe enough to pick. It's been a poor year for more exotic crops which need sun and heat. I really need to have sweetcorn ripe by early August, before all the surrounding fields have been harvested. Mid September is too late.
French beans, on the other hand, have gone berserk this year. Everything struggled to get going in the ridiculously dry spring we had, but once the rain came the beans found conditions very much to their liking. They are almost over now, but for a while I dreaded walking past them, for inevitably I would end up spending a considerable amount of time picking them, with the subsequent washing, slicing and blanching ready for the freezer.

The potatoes have done well too. Remarkably well. One benefit of a cool summer has been a freedom from blight. I've been able to leave the tops on until they died down (some are still on, just) and leave the spuds in the ground to take full advantage of the rains. The result is, so far, a giant harvest. More on this over the next few weeks. Ideally there will be a couple of hot, sunny days so I can dig them up and leave them on the soil to harden the skins ready for storage. I'm not holding my breath though.

My biggest success has been the failure of my courgettes! The plants have never got going since the cool, dry spring. We've barely had a decent courgette. I've discovered the cause. We have mosaic virus. I'll write more about this when I find out more. While the absence of courgette mountain has been a relief, the chickens have missed the giant marrows which I throw them when a rogue courgette has managed to hide for a few days. And I would actually have liked to have a few courgettes. Remind me I said that next year, if the harvest reverts to successful again.

As for the animals, we sadly lost one of our white ducks. These things happen and they have done well. It's just the way of the world and is balanced by the two Cayuga ducklings which are growing fast and continue to stick to their parents like glue. The guinea fowl have abandoned a huge pile of eggs in the middle of the comfrey bed. I've not counted them, but there must be over 60. They would do much better to sit on fewer and take better care of them. However, there are still only nine birds on the fence at nights, so three must be sitting somewhere.  I know where two of them are, but the third is a mystery.

The sheep are doing well this year. The grass is considerably greener and longer than last year. We have started to make plans for some of them to go on a little journey, though that won't be for a while until the grass stops growing. We are only aiming to take seven through the winter this year.

We also have a pig. I've only mentioned it once during its whole life as it has not lived with us but on another smallholding with a couple of other pigs. Anyway, our piggywig is due to trot off for one final time in a couple of weeks. It is being butchered by a wizard (yes, really!). More on this when the time comes.
I am just hoping that a rare bird doesn't coincide with when I've got the pig booked in, for it's that time of year when winds from the east and storms from the west bring lost stragglers to our shores and my irrational self takes over. I have already had an aborted trip to the Outer Hebrides, not to mention trying to chase a seabird up the east coast! I try not to make any fixed arrangements between mid-September and early November. When it's my turn to keep the pigs, I'll time it so they go off after this.

And finally, as alluded to under the headline photo, we have a new political dawn. Many of my younger friends will be experiencing some good old-fashioned honest politics for the first time in their lives. Let's hope it gets them thinking, for we are a country based on eccentricity and creativity, values which have been forgotten in our children's education.
Most importantly though, Jeremy Corbyn has an allotment, so he must be good! Mind you, a couple of Thatcher's cabinet were birdwatchers and that didn't work out too well as far as I'm concerned!

Two Little Ducks - Quack Quack

Just over a month ago one of our ducks went missing. Shortly after, I noticed that there were only ten guinea fowl roosting on the fence at night (there should be 12). Now there are only 9 guinea fowl every night.
So what's been going on? Do we have a case of poultry poaching? Or maybe a fox has been sneaking in? Are the birds getting ill?
There's no evidence to support any of these theories.

But there is this:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

To be honest, they didn't come as a total surprise. I rather suspected that Mrs Duck had taken herself off to sit on eggs and we did occasionally see her when she made brief forays to the food tray. She always disappeared off towards Weasel Ridge, which is somewhat overgrown at the moment, but it took me three weeks to locate her on her nest.

Once I knew where the nest was I waited for her to go for food and then was able to count nine eggs. Unfortunately only two have reached duckling stage, but that doesn't really matter. For when I let the birds incubate au naturel it is just really to keep the birds happy. Any offspring are a bonus and we always end up with significantly fewer young birds than if we took them away from nature and protected them in pens.

The chances of these two making it to duckhood are still slim, for there are many threats. But for the moment we will just enjoy their cuteness, watching their little clockwork legs whirring round at a million miles an hour to keep up with mums and dad.

And just so you don't get too attached, if they do become big enough they will be for the pot. We can't keep every cute animal we have as a pet. We are, after all, a smallholding and not a zoo.

As for those guinea fowl I mentioned, I've found two sitting on a loose pile of eggs (so many that they keep rolling out the sides) in the comfrey patch and one hidden under a rough patch of sage.

Let's hope we have more success than last year when only two made it through the autumn rains.

For now, I'll leave you with a couple more cute duckling piccies.

Today I brutted my laterals and pruned my plums

I read on Facebook the other day that someone was harvesting their cobnuts. Is it time already? I checked my spreadsheet of tasks to be performed through the year (yes, I know, it's sad) and there were the words "brut laterals on cobnuts". I remember typing this, but never actually got round to finding out what it meant. I had decided to leave it till I needed to find out... which brings me to today.
Basically the laterals are the sideshoots. Brutting means snapping them and letting them hang. I'm not sure this is a technique used on any other crops, but it has its own word. By snapping the 'twigs' half way along this year's growth, it stops the tree producing more growth and instead makes it produce more flowers, more nuts next year.
It also has other benefits such as opening up the tree and increasing airflow. It will be interesting to see the results next year.

One of my freshly brutted cobnuts

As I performed the brutting operation, I was surprised to see next year's catkins already beginning to form, even before this year's fruit is fully ready.

Tiny catkins already forming along the laterals

 My other job today was to attempt to prune my plum trees and cherry trees. These fruits must be pruned before the sap is withdrawing, otherwise they are very vulnerable to disease. Silverleaf disease is bad news for plums. The job had been delayed a week while I waited for an order of wound compound to arrive. I've not used this before, but it is essential when pruning stone fruits to seal up the cut ends of wood. I don't know why, but I was expecting a powder, so when I opened up the small tub I was surprised to find a gloopy substance which I swear is just a mix of mud and rubber. Anyway, it seemed to do a good job of sealing the wounds and now that I have it I can take more care when pruning other trees too.
The pruning is mostly just taking out damaged or crossing branches, opening up the middle of the tree and balancing the tree, I took the opportunity to remove and shorten some of the drooping branches which would struggle under the weight of a good harvest. The aforesaid good harvest seems totally unpredicatable when it comes to plums. Trees which did brilliantly last year had not a plum on them, whereas others such as my Imperial Gage were literally dripping with fruits.
At least I have a few varieties, so there will always be one or two trees which produce well.

These plums are still too firm to pick.
I'm keeping a close eye on them though so I can get them before the wasps move in.

One tree which produced fairly well last year was one of my Victoria plums. However, half of its branches seemed devoid of fruit and were adorned with treacherous thorns. I presumed that a few shoots had risen up from below the graft, but the source was hidden by the tree protector.
However this year the spiny impostor was rampant. It has formed a lovely looking tree, but the Victoria Plum part of it is right in the middle, amply protected by the spiny forest.
So today I removed the tree protector, intending to lop off all thorny interlopers. But what I found was worse than I thought.

The plum tree proper is the small stem on the left!

The main trunk of the tree led up to thick, spiky branches. The Victoria Plum was coming a poor second. I decided to leave it be. Maybe we'll get a surprise crop in the future, but what? Sloes? Bullaces? Mirabelles? Or just a nice looking tree.

More about Ixworths

The Ixworth chicken breed was unsurprisingly developed in the Suffolk village of Ixworth. Perhaps, more interestingly, it was developed by the same person, Reginald Appleyard, who developed the Silver Appleyard duck. He was clearly quite a talented poultry breeder, if a little unoriginal in thinking up names for his breeds.
The aim of developing the Ixworth was to produce a bird which not only laid a good amount of eggs but one where the cockerels grew quickly a made good meat birds. Today we call this an all-rounder.
The breed was finally developed in 1939 and became popular in war time and post-war Britain.

But then came the arrival from America of mass-produced food which unfortunately included chickens. Meat breeds were developed which reached kill weight in half the time. Eggs were produced by different breeds.
By the 1970s the Ixworth breed was almost gone. The public had got used to cheap, tasteless white meat from mass produced birds and insipid eggs from battery farms. Convenience and cheapness had taken over from quality and any concerns for animal welfare. This applied to pretty much all food. You can understand it after times of austerity and with lifestyles changing so quickly, but the trend has unfortunately carried on. There is slightly more awareness about the issues now, but overall people have become totally distanced from the origins of their food. I know somebody in their mid-twenties who didn't even know you had to dig to get potatoes out of the ground!

One good product of the 70's was The Good Life. Good old Tom and Barbara showed us another way. (Was that too may goods?) I don't know how much this influenced me in my youth, but there is now a significant minority of us who prefer to balance the conveniences of the present with some of the values and qualities of the past. Of course some of us are more stuck in the past than others.

And so re-enter the Ixworth. This once seemingly perfect all-round breed was thankfully not forgotten by everybody and is now making a comeback. It is still a rare breed, but is gaining popularity among smallholders.

I managed to get a cockerel from a different source to my two young hens to avoid weak, interbred stock. This trio of birds have now been introduced and are getting along very well. Once the hens reach point of lay, I will start collecting their eggs, as normal. But come next spring I will be placing their eggs under any willing hens in the main chicken pen, with the aim of hatching them out and raising them for meat.

Poultry merry-go-round

The two white hens have moved to the turkeys' pen, the turkeys have moved up to the white cockerel's stable, the white cockerel has moved to where the four cockerels used to live and the four cockerels have moved to... the freezer!
All this happened a week ago. For as a smallholder I seem to be constantly moving animals from place to place.

The two white hens are in fact Ixworth hens and when they are big enough they will be laying eggs to be hatched under our broodies to be raised as meat birds.

This cockerel will be a more permanent resident
than some of the others, so we'd better think of a name for him.

The white cockerel is slightly older and came from a different home. He is an Ixworth too and his job is to look afer the two girls and make sure their eggs are capable of hatching.
So there we have our breeding trio. They will be kept in a separate pen to the other chickens so their offspring are pure. Hatching them under broodies will not only keep the broodies happy but it saves Sue and I having to look after them inside. And when they hatch they can wander around with all the other hens until they are big enough to go in the freezer, for Ixworths make an excellent meat bird.


The turkeys came to us a few days old, which meant keeping them in a box with a lamp for heat until they had enough feathers to go outside, which coincides with the time that three of them are pretty much too big to fit in the box comfortably. It also unfortunatley comes several weeks after they begin to create quite an odour! They go out during the day for a while first, like hardening off plants, and then they went into their own pen down with the chickens.

The turkeys in their hardening off pen.
 (and Sue) (and Boris on the outside, when he was little)

But turkeys like to roam, so they quickly learned to hop the fence and wander around the farm. This home too was a temporary one for them, since again they quickly get too big to be put away every night in a chicken house. They barely even fit under the door. But it gives them a chance to get used to their surroundings before they move up into the stables, where they can roost safely every night and free-range during the day. In the evening I simply lead the gangly creatures back to their stable.

The turkeys explore their new accommodation

That brings us to the four cockerels. The law of Sod states that when you hatch eggs there will always be plenty of cockerels. But the law of Sod also states that you will have to keep them quite a while until you know for sure they are cockerels. (The Crested Cream Legbar male chicks were different to the girls, but they didn't make good meat birds and the young cockerels were very 'boisterous'.) So you end up with macho young cockerels upsetting the balance of the chicken pen, challenging the older cockerels and harassing the females. Therefore we separated four of them off a while back until they were big enough to ... well.... let's just say that their moving on was well timed for the great poultry merry-go-round. Their dispatch was swift as Sue and I have become pretty good at this now and Sue soon had them processed and in the freezer.
Five years ago we were city folk and wouldn't have had a clue how to do all this. We have moved on a long way since then.

As I write, the Ixworth trio are now together. For a couple of days they were in adjacent pens so they could get used to each other but when we opened the door, they settled together instantly. The hens follow the cockerel everywhere and he takes care of them.

Meanwhile one of the black ducks has disappeared. To be more precise, once in a blue moon she appears for food early in the morning before wandering off to disappear again. I think she has hidden herself on Weasel Ridge somewhere. If all goes well, she will appear one day soon with a line of ducklings waddling along behind her.
And on the same theme there are now only ten guinea fowl on the fence at nights. I found the other two yesterday, hunkered down in the comfrey bed. Let's hope they do better than last year, when between all of them they eventually only managed to rear two young. If only they would incubate earlier in the year so the chicks weren't so vulnerable to Lincolnshire's early autumn weather.

Don't worry, bee happy!

As I write, the sweetcorn is still intact. I have however caught my first field mouse of the autumn in the polytunnel traps, plus two voles (short-tailed field voles to be precise). There was a single rat dropping in the polytunnel too and there is the familiar smell of rodents in the stables.

But on the whole it does not seem that we have suffered the sort of invasion which previous harvests have catalysed.

This morning is a beautiful morning and I'm off to see a Red-footed Falcon just up the road at Willow Tree Fen. Boris is coming along for his first ever birdwatching trip. Let's hope he behaves.

When I get back, I'll be planting up some of the plants I've raised this year and I'll be rotavating, for two days of significant rainfall have been welcome and have left the soil in perfect condition for planting, weeding and turning.

The veg garden is looking just about at its best now. The flower mixes are floribundant (no it's not a real word) and the grass is verdant. I even managed to mow it all before the rain came.

It is important to me not only that the veg plot is productive, but that it looks beautiful too and that it is a haven for wildlife, especially beneficial insects. I have plenty of space to produce more than enough to satisfy Sue and I, so devoting a few beds to easily grown flower mixes doesn't compromise anything.

The one drawback of attracting so many pollinators into the veg plot is that, just occasionally, our paths cross. Sue's bees can be a little tetchy at times, a little on the defensive side. They normally go straight for the head and end up tangled in your hair. There is then a choice to be made. Try to extract them risking a sting to the crown or to the hand, or hope that they get bored, manage to extricate themselves and fly off. The latter is not quite so easy to do in reality when you can feel a bee crawling on your head and hear its angry buzzing in your ears.

But last week, taking the first course of action did not work either. I was actually planting some bee-friendly plants, anise hyssop and verbena bonariensis, when the attack happened. A single kamikazee bee which had clearly got out of the wrong side of the hive this morning took exception to me. Seconds later I felt a familiar sharp, painful sting in my finger.  have to say, the actual sting doesn't actually hurt too much. It's more just the initial shock. But my reaction to bee stings is more the worry. For within an hour or so the swelling begins. It starts at the location of the sting and then creeps very slowly. Last time a sting on the top of the head resulted in a swollen cheek bone. This time, a sting on the middle finger, by the next day, had become a swollen hand.

It wasn't helped by the fact that, two hours after the first suicide attack, the same happened again! Another sting on the same finger. 

I posted my picture on Facebook and all my non-beekeeping friends were horrified. There was even talk of anaphylactic shock and epipens, which I considered an over-reaction to a fairly normal occurrence. 

But I did start to think. I know that different people tend to react differently to bee stings. Last time Sue got stung it was just above the eye and I had to spend the next week persuading everybody that I had not hit her, such was the swelling! She spent most of the week sporting a rather oversize pair of sunglasses.

I seem to suffer a similar reaction to Sue. No real pain apart from the initial sting, but a delayed swelling which spreads and looks rather shocking. Oh, how could I forget the itching. Intense itchiness which comes and goes for no apparent reason. Indescribably itchy.

I decided to take to the interweb for advice. Not always a wise move when it comes to medical matters, but I just wanted to know if this swelling was indicative of an allergy to bee venom and if the next step could be anaphylactic shock. The interweb was unusually unhelpful, leading me round in circles and not really giving an answer. So I took to one of the beekeeping Facebook groups.

The comments I received from actual beekeepers were most helpful and put my mind at rest. It seems that many people have a similar reaction to bee stings. Although not the normal reaction, and probably indicative of some level of allergy, it is certainly not unusual either. It seems I am about as likely to suddenly stop breathing as anybody else. Unless symptoms change or get worse I have little to worry about. More than that, several people said that after a few more stings my body would probably get used to being stung and the reaction would die down.

So today I shall be doing some more planting and if I get stung I shall take consolation in the fact that it's probably part of my journey toward immunity... hopefully.

At least the swollen hand took my mind off the pain I was already suffering all down my arm after I foolishly tried to change the angle of descent of a branch which fell the wrong way when I was up a ladder dismantling a willow tree which had outgrown its allotted space... but that's another story. Let's just say that the heavy rain we've had has allowed me to find the chinks in the repairs I made to the gutters!

Sweetcorn at risk from a plague of rodents?

Every year I give you a photo of a huge combine harvester looming out of the dust and rumbling past the edge of our garden. Well not this year, for the air was still and the combine was for some reason much quieter.
Before I knew it, the wheat field next to us looked like this.

 The very next day it looked like this.

Nowhere to hide

Last year this spelled curtains for my sweetcorn crop. We quickly harvested what was ripe, but the rest got devoured overnight by field mice and/or rats, which flee the openness of the freshly cut field dodging the watchful eyes of kestrels and buzzards, and head straight onto our farm.

A kestrel and a rook captured in the skies above the
newly harvested field. Rooks are uncommon on the farm.

Last year five traps in the polytunnel caught five field mice the morning after the straw was baled up. It's not nice and they are beautiful creatures, but I have to do something to protect my crops. So two days ago had me rushing about setting mouse traps and laying rat poison (if you hit them hard straight away, it saves much bigger problems later on and minimises the amount of poison getting into the ecosystem).
This is not pretty stuff, but it is part of the reality of rural life.

So this morning I rushed out to check the traps and to check my sweetcorn, for it has been slow this year and none of it is yet ready for harvest. Just one vole in the polytunnel, which may explain the nibbled carrot tops I found yesterday and so far no damage to the sweetcorn. We'll see what happens over the next couple of days. Fingers crossed.