The Ice Sets In



Tuesday 12th December 2012
12.12.12

Today started cold and got colder! Freezing fog lasted all day as temperatures stayed on the wrong side of zero. But as the day progressed, so the moisture in the air settled, crystallising on every surface.




The back road is always delightfully isolated
on days like this.

 

One of the local roe deer.
The group seems to have dropped from five to four.




A group of teal
mooching around in the misty dyke.

South Holland Main Drain
Perfect stillness

On a cauld and frosty morning



Tuesday 11th December 2012
 

The chickens still keep in very obvious groups. Pictured here are most of the birds we hatched in the incubator last year - unfortunately nearly all cockerels. This group has taken to wandering widely and now regularly make it all the way from the chicken enclosure up the land to the farmhouse. I must say, I do like to look out of the kitchen window and see this.





On a different note, this week's main building job has been topping up the insulation in the lofts and boarding them out. The extra insulation is very timely and is the first thing anyone should do to make their home greener and more carbon-friendly. I was pleased to see that most bulk standard loft insulation these days is made from recycled glass bottles too.
There are some wonderful old roof trusses up there, complete with old-fashioned pegs and plenty of woodworm holes (all old damage). Around this have been constructed, at some stage in the past, the new supporting timbers. All this makes for some severely restricted access! Getting from one end of the loft to the other involves sliding along on your back or scrambling, SAS style, on your belly. But it's vital storage space, especially at the moment as the house fills up with furniture and boxes, all with no place to go as most rooms are affected by building work.

A new loft ladder makes for
easy access up to the loft.
This ladder is remarkably easy to
operate and very sturdy too.

Once up there,
access is not quite so straightforward though!



Grow-Your-Own Meat

Monday 10th December 2012
Drama in the Air

I first started growing food, on a very small scale, when we lived in London. Just a tiny vegetable rotation which yielded a few potatoes, carrots, parsnips, beetroot and the like. Also the occasional cucumber and tomato from the small greenhouse.
At the right time of year we could provide all our own veg or salad items, at least for some of our meals.
 
I always knew that, with a bit more land, we should be able to provide almost entirely for ourselves when it came to vegetables and salad, as long as we were prepared to eat seasonal and store carefully.
I was even quite confident that we would be able to produce our own eggs (not literally, you understand).

But what I was altogether less certain about was whether we would be able to raise any animals for meat. After all, the only animals I'd ever kept were cats, tropical fish and a few goldfish in the pond. Not once did I consider eating any of these!
 
Inheriting a whole gang of cockerels when we took over the house made sure that we eventually had to 'deal with' some of them, and along with this act came our first meat 'n' 2 veg all of our own.

Inheriting our own sow at the same time took us a giant step along the way to growing our own meat. I'd imagined that we just might raise a couple of young pigs a few years down the line. But sometimes you just have to jump in and grab an opportunity when it comes along.
And then, with the help of a farmer very keen to loan out his boar, we find ourselves with not one but eleven pigs.


The last two pigs from the second litter.
We plan to have a go at bacon, ham and gammon.

Well, we're now onto our third litter with Daisy (our sow) and we can produce more than enough pork and sausages for our own needs and to sell. Not that we'll ever take it for granted.











Next we chanced upon some geese, though none of these has yet made it to the table and we have lost our female. But one day, hopefully next year, we will raise some of our own goslings, eventually to go on the plate.
The ducks are at about the same stage, though we are pretty confident we have a male and three ladies, so it won't be long before they start multiplying!

The guinea fowl are one step down the line and the first clutch are rapidly growing. It won't be long before we surreptitiously start picking them off.
 




And this year, along came the Zwartbles, Number Ten and Number Eighteen, that pair of friendly lambs who kept the grass short for a while before nibbling at all the vegetables too!

So here we are, two years down the line and beyond what I ever imagined. We have a freezer full of pork and lamb, a choice of poultry and a steady flow of eggs.
In fact it's now a rare occasion that anything on our supper plate originates from anywhere else but our very own farm. (Maybe the salt and pepper and a bit of butter)
 
But I'm always looking for new ways to provide for ourselves. By next year the fruit should start to produce in more significant quantities.
I'm toying with the idea of growing a little wheat too, what with bread prices the way they are. But when I get round to this project it will only make a token contribution. Unless I'm pleasantly surprised, I reckon the processing and the storage (keeping it away from rats and their rodent cousins) will not make it viable on a scale large enough even to provide for just our own needs.

Of course, there's always the possibility of new animals. Goats maybe? Could be good for dairy products.
 
But for the moment I think we'll consolidate what we're already doing for a year and continue to feast upon what our livestock and our land provide us with.

All in a Jam

 

 

We've not had too many fruit and veg gluts this year, but courgettes certainly provided us with a challenging mountain, as did rhubarb and pumpkins. There's only a certain amount of any foodstuff you can eat within the space of a few weeks and competition for freezer space is always tight.

So we've found that we need to diversify, and one of the best ways for keeping fruit and vegetables is making preserves. Just about anything can be made into a jam, chutney or relish and there's plenty of scope for experimentation. The end product is usually delicious and totally incomparable to what's available in the shops.
I now have a range of luxury preserves to feast on during the year and there's plenty left over to sell.

We left London to avoid the jams!

And this is exactly what Sue was preparing for in the photo, for this weekend marked her school's Christmas Fayre, a great chance to sell some of the excess preserves we've made through the year.
Best seller last year was Sue's Red Onion Marmalade, but the onion harvest was disappointing this year so our eager punters will have to wait another year for more. But the Beetroot Relish and the Rhubarb Chutney sold very well and the children went for the Toffee Apple Spread.
Surprisingly the Pear Jam sold none. This means that I get to eat all of it, so good news in a way.

Having said that, we're only just getting to grips with the unpredictable nature of selling produce. Another time, quite the opposite could be true. We'd run out of the pear jam and have loads of beetroot relish left.

At the end of the day, it's just a way of funding a hobby. But hopefully it brings a little joy into the mouths of others. It is always delightful when somebody raves about the taste of one of our very own products.

Winter Wildfowl return

Since I saw the Waxwings earlier in the week, I've not had a chance to check the neighbourhood birds as it's pretty much still dark when I leave for work and dusk when I return. So today I went for a little drive along the back road to see if any of winter's birds have returned during this last icy week.


Saturday 8th December 2012

 

Partridges everywhere.
Excuse the picture quality
- camera pointed through binoculars

A young peregrine has certainly been scattering the pigeons of late and I can see a sizeable flock, maybe forty, of Mute Swans loafing in the distant fields.

But the first thing to strike me on today's little excursion was a newly ploughed field jam packed full with Red-legged Partridges.
I counted at least 48, but then heads kept appearing from behind the furrows so there could well have been quite a few more.




Not much further along the road, another procession of the same species appeared from a dyke and scurried along the edge of a field.

There seemed to be fewer Fieldfares around today and much smaller numbers of Redwings, though this changes daily, depending on overnight conditions. And it was no surprise that I failed to find any more Waxwings. Although the chances of stumbling upon a gang of these is significantly increased at the moment, they are still a rare find.

On the South Holland Main Drain it was good to see a party of five Goosanders back. They happily preen and feed on the still water right next to the car, but as soon as I open the window to attempt a piccie, off they go along the river. A couple of Little Grebes under the bridge were new in too. If only these would somehow show themselves when I was stood on my farm. This species is so near yet so far from making it onto the farm list. Further along, small numbers of teal have joined the mallards in the wider dykes.

The flock of Mute Swans was nowhere to be seen this morning, dashing my hopes of finding any 'wild' swans in amongst them. But I did get to follow a sparrowhawk as it repeatedly flew along in front of the car, occasionally jinking into the hedge to upset the hordes of wood pigeons. A few magpies put up more of a protest and their cousins, two jays, just continued hopping around inconspicuously in the bare branches.

And that was about it. Nothing amazing, but a welcome distraction from an afternoon of moving boxes into the newly boarded loft and clearing all the furniture from our bedroom in readiness for new floorboards.

Friday 7th December 2012
Yesterday's 'sunrise'
Worthy of demotion to the bottom of the page!

A Gruesome Find

Thursday 6th December 2012

Clear nights have their bonuses, as this morning's fiery sunrise testifies. The bright, starry sky last night was amazing too.
But a clear night is a virtual guarantee of a frosty morning and an icy start to the day. This has its pros and cons. On the plus side, the ground is nice and firm, the soil is being broken up by invisible forces and all the nasties are being killed off. But on the downside, we need the mattock to break the animals' water in the mornings, there won't be much digging going on in the veg patch and I come back from feeding the chickens with purple hands!

But the ice has its surprises too, like this!

I occasionally find rodents drowned in the bathtubs which are scattered around the plot to collect water. But this poor creature (it's a young rat, so not too much sympathy), got hit by a double whammy. Sue found it yesterday, completely encased in ice, like some sort of sick novelty ice cube. Unfortunately the camera wasn't working, but by today this hapless rodent had a pair of icy wings.
Could this finally be the niche in the market I've been looking for? Ice lollies for cats!

Hardy Guinea Fowl

Tuesday 4th December 2012

Guinea fowl - perfectly evolved in Africa
to blend in with icy hummocks!!!?

 

The guinea fowl are probably not used to mornings like this and their native cousins throughout Africa have probably not needed to evolve to survive this. Yet they are coping pretty well with the English winter so far. They look terribly exposed perched in a row on top of the fence every night. I don't know what time they get up in the morning to begin their foraging, but they have got into the habit of all flying toward me, chacking and chuckling, as soon as they see me heading down toward the chicken enclosure. I feel slightly guilty that they have chosen to trust me, as one day I will betray that trust. The guinea fowl are, after all, primarily kept for their meat.

For the moment though, they form a formidable troupe. They always boss the food trays, seemingly fearless of even the biggest cockerels as they form a feeding huddle.

The young ones are beginning to get their distinctive bluish facial skin now and some have learned to do the guinea fowl cry, that incessant repetition of two screechy notes which carries far and wide over the flat fenland landscape on a still morning.

Waxwings come to Swallow Farm

Waxwings!!!

Monday 3rd December 2012

Since the cold weather arrived there have been even more thrushes on and around the farm. Flocks of Redwings and Fieldfares come and go with such regularity that on such days it would be unusual not to be able to find any to observe. I must admit, I particularly like these winter thrushes as I can 'do' their flight calls - there's nothing at all clever about that, they're really very distinctive, even for someone with a useless audio memory like myself. This morning there had been a notable arrival of Blackbirds too, with a dozen along one small stretch of hedge.
But there is another winter visitor invading our part of the country at the moment, one with an even more distinctive trilling call, and one even more handsome than the Redwings which find the roadside hedge such a handy winter larder. 

For I have been hoping to encounter Waxwings, pink, masked, bibbed and crested berry raiders with their wing and tail feathers dipped in bright yellow paint, topped up with a dab or two of white and a final seal of red wax.
Often quite tame, any image search will quickly reveal stunning photos of parties of these birds sitting atop berry bushes or feeding agilely on bright red berries.

I actually had a flock of about 30 Waxwings zoom over my head last year, but the light was poor and the sighting all too brief, mostly of their rear ends. In the end I doubted myself and did not add them to the farm list - probably way too cautious.

So imagine my frustration when, at 1:30 this afternoon while I was checking on the chickens, I heard the clear trilling of a Waxwing overhead, but searched the sky in vain. Just a Redwing and another, now distant, bird which frustratingly continued over Don's garden and away. Was this enough to finally add Waxwing to the farm list? For sure I wanted to. But something would always nag. A bird like a Waxwing you really want to see perched in all its glory.
There was the slimmest of chances that the guinea fowl had been hearing Waxwings and learned to mimic them - it would not be the first time that one of them has thrown its voice in near perfect imitation.


So, I paid more visits than usual to the chickens for the rest of the afternoon, each time being sure to take my binoculars. And at just after 3 o'clock I happened to notice a large gathering of thrushes in a distant bush over by Shell Bridge, about 300 metres away. I raised my binoculars but didn't have enough power to be sure of anything. Most of them were clearly Fieldfares, revealed by their distinctive underwing pattern as they flew in and out. But what about that one at the top left of the bush. Maybe a Redwing, but perhaps a bit too slim, a little too upright. Should I run back to the house to fetch the telescope? I knew what would happen if I did that. It always does.

The picture I took through my binoculars.
A pretty good representation of the view I was getting.
The birds on the top left of the bush (not the taller tree on the left) got my attention.

No. Instead I decided to ambitiously point my camera through one lens of the binoculars and snap away. If I was really lucky, the image would just be sharp enough to enlarge on the computer, should everything fly off over the fields.

Then I headed over Don's wet field towards my quarry. As I did so, a Sparrowhawk headed the same way over my head, but fortunately it veered left and did not spook the thrushes.
I stopped short of the reedy dyke and again raised my bins. And this time, for sure, I could make out the crests on several birds and maybe a hint of a dark mask on some too. Cars, vans and lorries were thundering past but they stayed put, so I decided to take a closer approach.

I could now hear the Waxwings quietly trilling and could just make out the bright splashes of colour in their plumage. But the light was poor still.

I approached closer, until I was almost at the base of the bush where at least 15 Waxwings sat upright. I crossed the fence into the Ancient Settlement field, to put the setting sun behind me, and I could now see these wonderful birds in all their colourful detail. I even managed to take a few snaps, just with the point and shoot. Not great, but you can tell what they are.

At this point, the aforementioned Sparrowhawk put in another appearance and Waxwings, Blackbirds, Redwings and Fieldfares scattered, the Waxwings trilling away as they headed over the river and into the neighbours garden.

A final in-flight count gave me sixteen.

And farm tick 104. For definite this time.

Chocolate eggs

The egg skelter is looking a little more colourful today.

Sunday 2nd December 2012

 

Life and death go hand in hand here on the farm, as indeed do fortune and misfortune. The events of yesterday serve to illustrate this better than I can explain.

For it started with the startling discovery of piles of feathers leading to a bloodied, beheaded goose. But it was not long before a positive counterbalance came along. For while I was spending some icy minutes observing the chickens, I chanced upon a chocolate brown egg lying on the floor. Of late, only one hen has been laying. I'm not even sure which one it is, but she has been laying a large, pale egg almost every day. But this latest was most definitely not from her. In fact, it was clearly from the French Copper Marans hen, a breed which we deliberately sought out for their dark eggs. Along with the other young hens, they've been a bit late coming into lay. But I guess they reached laying age just as the nights started to draw in and the short, dull days of early winter took hold.

I must admit that I've not been carefully checking every nest box daily, as our one laying hen has consistently laid in the same house. But this new egg, carelessly deposited on the icy ground outside, led me to check the other houses and there, in the high rise, lay three eggs, a pale one and two medium browns.

So it would seem that at least two of our young hens have started laying. With a bit of luck, the early winter dearth of eggs is about to come to an end.

I started this post by saying that life and eath go hand in hand here on the farm. And today was not to be without a final twist. This morning, while I was checking that all the chickens were present and correct after the fox's visit, I had been unable to find Elvis or any of her brood of ten rapidly growing chicks. After twenty minutes of searching I finally headed up beyond the orchard and found her pecking about, with her whole family. They obviously had fancied a bit of a wander today.

But as I now observed all the poultry, I realised that I had not seen Claw, that poor, friendless Cream Legbar with the deformed foot, the one which would trot over and stand next to me whenever I appeared, the one which Sue had adopted.
Unfortunately, Sue has a habit of taking under her wing the weakest, despite my warnings that nature will not be so kind to them. And true to form, the sharp frosts of the last two nights had found the weakest, for I found Claw lying dead in one of the chicken houses.

RIP Claw

Fox Attack

Saturday 1st December 2012

One of our ornamental chickens has been beheaded, a victim of the building chaos. But a little superglue will soon fix it and we can laugh about it.

But what met Sue's eyes this morning cannot be fixed.


For one pile of bloodied white feathers led to another and then, there in the corner of the goose paddock were the beheaded remains of one of the geese.

When we moved in, before we had any experience of keeping livestock, we asked the previous owners what time they locked the chickens away, only to be informed that they put themselves away and doors were not locked.


So we continued like this for about a year, with no losses, until very early one morning I saw a fox running across the back field. From then on the chickens and ducks have been locked away every night and let out every morning. This is a complete pain and it was much nicer when the chickens could let themselves out, usually well before sunrise.

The geese, though, have been a different story. They just kind of happened upon us and we started with four males and a limping female which failed to lay eggs in its first year. Not sure of their age, they have had little purpose beyond making the place look olde worldy farmy, cutting the grass (though nowhere near as good at this as the sheep) and letting me know when anyone pulls in. But they have grown on us and become part of the farm.
For a while, when they were fighting, the pair got herded into a stable every night, but the others have always been left outside. We gave them a small house, but they have steadfastly refused to use it.
I always knew that there was a risk of fox attack, but everything had been OK ... till now.

I guess we were fortunate to only lose one. Just a shame it was the female, as we were hoping she might lay next year and form the start of a productive goose flock. But nature has a way of selecting out the weakest and she did always have that limp. Maybe she just chose the short straw last night, or maybe that limp, that slowness to get moving, cost her life.

So it's back to herding the geese into the stable at night, for the fox is sure to come looking again. I guess its the cold weather which has forced it to become more daring.


Three very subdued geese,
safely in the stable for the night.

Long term, we may now give away another of the males, or try to swap it for some eggs in the new year.













 

Pulled Pork

Friday 30th November 2012
Woodpigeons flight at dawn

When it's cold, snuggle in close.

Daisy and the piglets are doing very well indeed. Despite the cold, all eleven are growing fast and have become real little chubsters.
But before you get too googly eyed over them, we must remember that they are not pets. So meanwhile, pork sales trundle along at a steady pace. This is important as Daisy's life depends on it! We have run out of sausages again, but there are still plenty of chops and leg joints left in the freezer.

We continue to try out new ideas for cooking pork, and today's little project was pulled pork. I started by taking the skin off a small shoulder joint, seasoning it and browning it. Then a long, slow cook at 160 in milk with added herbs and lemon slices.

I was not convinced by this recipe, as the lemon would surely curdle the milk. And it did, a little. But all those fresh, zingy, herby flavours actually percolated nicely into the pork. After cooling a little I took two forks to it and shredded it. The succulent meat fell apart.

Along with a few knobs of crackling I had made from the skin and a good, hearty chunk of seedy wholemeal bread, we had a very simple, very tasty meal.