Month: March 2011

I thought I would write this week about our larger 4 legged friends on the farm, we have 4 large dogs, two of them are Siberian Husky and live outside and 2 Collies live inside. This week the collies Max & Milly had their annual haircut, well more of a shave really. Max has a thick long coat and it matts easily and Milly’s is also thick, so once a year near springtime they get a shave, for a couple of weeks they look like the ‘would you give £2 a week’ dogs and could easily front a campaign! They do love it though, Max who is nearly 13 acts like a puppy charging around the yard, sporting his new look!

We also have 2 farm cats called Felix and Diesel, they are very good at catching mice and rabbits, they have even caught a mole, baby stoat and a hen pheasant! My Mum who is a keen writer is busy writing children’s stories about the adventures of these two, they have a great life together but both had an interesting start to life before they became the best of friends and I am hoping to start publishing the stories on this blog in the not too distant future so watch out for those.

Apart from cats and dogs we also have the horses, Scrumpy Jack, Atherton, and Jazz, all of them with their own individual characters, the vet came last week for annual vaccinations and the horses have to have their teeth filed down and any plaque removed. They have this metal gadget that is inserted into the mouth then winched open so the vet can reach inside, not a very dignified process (for the horse or the vet, who ends up with horse dribble all down her arm) but a necessary one. Many people ask me why horses have masks on in the summer, they assume that the horse can’t see out of them, but for any of you that have wondered they are fly masks, they have a fine mesh so that the flies do not keep landing on their eyes which they find very annoying as you can imagine. In order of appearance Milly, Max (relaxing), Moloko, Kai, Diesel & Felix, Atherton, Jazz & Scrumpy Jack

Apart from the daily routine of looking after the ‘farm’ animals, the paddocks have to be maintained and this involves, dragging and rolling, reseeding and repairing fences and gates etc, all this is done in the spring before the ground gets too hard,  it is a job that has to be squeezed in before the veg patch gets underway.

Meanwhile there is still much to do on the veg garden. The asparagus arrived this week and so had to be planted straight away, this is a long term investment crop as it will not be fully harvested until the third year after planting, but it will give you an annual crop for 20 years after that so a worthwhile project hopefully. I have also indulged myself and planted a bed of dahlias, any gardener will tell you that you need flowers to bring in the bees for pollination, but I think it is nice to have something bright and cheery, so these will be for cutting and giving as birthday flowers etc.  Hubby has been busy digging his trenches for the potatoes, they will probably go in this week as well, the salad crops are coming along well as are the courgette seedlings, the sun has really boosted them and I will be potting them on later today.

We are off on our hoilday on Friday but I am leaving it all in the very capable hands of my Mum, nearly everything I know about gardening I learn’t from her so  it will be well looked after, the girls will be here also, Sam will take care of the farm and Charlie will take care of the house so we are all sorted. Meanwhile hubby and I will be eating, drinking and totally relaxing in the sun, have a great week, I know I will 🙂

Its been a manic weekend, the sunshine usually brings many more visitors to the farm for eggs and back garden chickens. We have had people arriving for manure as well, if anyone wants any let me know, its free if you bag it up yourself or 50p ready bagged. The seedlings are all beginning to break the surface and need watering a couple of times a day when it is so warm, it wont be long now before we have radishes, lettuce and spinach ready to eat. I had potted on some strawberry plants a while back and sold a fair few of those at the weekend, I also have herbs such as Sage, Oregano and Chives ready for sale as well as Lavender plants. I love this time of year, I especially enjoy seed sowing and potting on, it definitely beats weeding!

It’s all been happening in the poultry dept this weekend too, during the week we collected 24 hatching eggs from various breeds and set them in the incubator, they will take precisely 21 days to hatch providing all goes well, as soon as they begin to pip I will take some pics to post. It seemed like a good time to move the chickens huts across the paddock to new grass, so we get up early on Saturday morning armed with the tow chain and van only to discover that himself had not shut one set of chickens away the night before! The dilemma was do we go ahead and move the hut running the risk of squashing roaming chickens or wait until the next morning when hopefully he would have remembered to shut them in, we chose to run the risk of squashing them! Actually they were all pretty nimble and moved out of the way sharply once the ancient hut started rumbling across the ground, after reconnecting the electric fencing we stood and watched them for a while, they are very funny when moved to new ground, running around in all directions looking for early morning worms.

The geese began to lay this week, I am not sure of the best way to hatch the eggs yet, geese tend to be  bit clumsy both with the eggs and the goslings, hatching them under a broody chicken seems like a good idea but you have to spray the eggs with water each day as the geese would normally wash then sit back on the eggs, hens don’t like to get anywhere near water except to drink. Incubating them is not always successful, so we might have a go at all three and hopefully get some goslings.

And on Saturday a little boy visited the farm, his Dad is buying him 8 chickens for his birthday, I was very impressed with his knowledge and handling of the birds, he is only 8 years old and they have chickens at his school where he obviously learnt everything he knows, his Mum was very surprised to hear him ask me lots of very relevant questions about keeping and feeding them, his interest didn’t stop at the birds either he was delighted by all the other animals we have, a mini smallholder in the making I feel.

We had the hunt charging past which was very exciting, especially for my daughters horse who used to hunt in a former life, as soon as he hears the horn, his ears prick up and he starts charging around the field, I am sure he is thinking, if only I could break free, what fun I would have! As the riders and hounds came racing down the field behind us a huge deer, which must have been standing just behind our wall, bounded across the field into the distance no doubt terrified, but the hounds were not interested in him only the scent they were on. I am neither for nor against hunting but they do make a magnificent sight thundering past and certainly liven up a saturday afternoon!

The huge full moon was quite a spectacle out here, we have almost no light pollution and it lit up the sky! I am not sure if it was the hunt or the moon that got everything in a tizzy that day but all the animals were in a heightened state, we certainly notice that the dogs behave differently during the full moon stage though they do stop short at howling!!

I almost forgot to do my blog this week! I am so excited as Hubby has booked a holiday for us in a couple of weeks time, we have not had a proper holiday since we took over this place so I am looking forward to a week without wellies!

The weather is beginning to look promising, the daffodils are ready to burst open and the animals are all ‘twitterpating’. I have been busy sowing seeds in the greenhouse, Tomato, Pepper, Sweetcorn, a squash called Sweet Dumpling, I have also sown some Spring Onion, Raddish, Lettuce and Spinach in the greenhouse that the Tomato’s will eventually move into, as they wont be planted untill May, it made sense to use the space for a quick crop of salad. Hubby has been very busy weeding and rotovating the large outside beds ready for the potato’s, at the end of the month the Carrots & Parsnip can be sown straight into the ground as will the Peas and Runner Beans, these can be started off indoors but I find that when planted outside they are stronger and catch up very quickly. No sign of the broad beans breaking through the surface yet but I have checked beneath and they are shooting so they wont be long.

The chickens are speeding up with the egg laying, so much so that I thought of pickling some of them now, ready for Christmas, I also tried my hand at making pasta with the duck eggs, it was unbelievably easy, the only thing was that I was unable to roll it thin enough and so might need to invest in a pasta machine. A friend once told me that once you have tasted home-made pasta you wont go back to eating the ready-made stuff, I think she is right!  While I was making pasta, I also made a lemon drizzle cake, excellent for spring I think, the sharp lemon is a lovely contrast to the cake and an ideal accompaniment to a well-earned cuppa on a spring day.

We sold 6 of the baby rabbits over the last week! They have gone onto solids in a big way, carrots, apples, cauliflower and I even gave them a fennel bulb which they devoured with gusto! Only 2 left to home now, great considering I thought we might not be able to sell them all, this would mean having to eat them, each of us looking at the other wondering who is going to be brave enough to dispatch these cute little things! We also sold 2 more point of lay hens, these are Lohmann Browns and great egg layers, up to 300 a year, they are friendly little birds and if anyone would like some for the back garden just get in touch.

The lambs are coming along nicely, they are sturdy little things with great personalities, they have just begun to do that characteristic little hop, skip and a jump when they see you, I am told that this is how lambs display happiness! I am not sure if is true but I would like to think so 🙂 The horses are also displaying spring like behaviour, they no longer stand in the field looking depressed, they are ‘frolicking’, tearing up and down the paddocks and having a good roll or basking in the sunshine, my daughter rode out with a friend yesterday and gave one of the horses a good canter to blow the cobwebs off, they enjoy the sunshine as much as we do. I keep looking into the goose pen for signs of an egg or two but as yet nothing, geese have a short laying period from March to June, not like hens who will lay all year. We have a problem with the geese, we have 6 altogether but they have decided to split ranks, up until yesterday they were living in two sets of three, now one set has decided that they no longer want the third goose with them! They will pick on it until it is driven away, we had to pick it up last night and put it in a pen overnight until we can decide what to do with it, I will give it a few weeks to see if it lays and if not it will either have to be rehomed or dispatched to the freezer.

I moved the Tortoises outside at the weekend, they have been overwintering in the greenhouse, but woke up quite early back in January so I decided now was as good a time as any to put them back out, they live in the herb garden, which is fully fenced so they don’t escape. Tortoises spend their whole time trying to wander off, we lost our female Sarah when we first came here, I put her out on the grass for a while and when I went back I couldn’t find her and she has not been seen since! They can get up to quite a speed once they have warmed up, coincidently we discovered that there was a tortoise rescue place about 2 miles down the road from us, they had a tortoise handed in the week she went missing but it was not her, females tend to go walkabout in July looking for a mate, although she had 2 to choose from here, they obviously were not good enough! She only ever laid eggs once and that was in the summer of 2006 when it was incredibly hot, unfortunately I was in Australia at the time where it was raining! and by the time I got home the eggs were not viable and so we were unable to hatch them.

As the sun is shining today, I need to stop sorting clothes for the holiday and go outside and prepare the beds for seedlings, a fine tilth is needed, otherwise the small seeds will struggle to reach the surface. We are quite exposed here and always 2 degrees lower than the neighbouring town so I have to wait a couple of weeks longer for the ground to warm up, it should be just about ready when I come back from my holiday!

On a day to day basis, we encounter the expected and the unexpected, the expected events make the day busy, the unexpected turn a busy day to chaos!

I received a phone call on Tuesday night from a friend who had a ewe that had given birth to triplets, the ewe was unwell and not expected to make it, would I be interested in taking on the orphans she asked, yes I replied without hesitation. This throws us from busy into chaos, as part of the stable needs to be sectioned off and secured and bottles need to be made up, early morning and late night feeding would become the order of the day from now on, as it happened by Thursday the ewe was not doing too badly so we just took in two of the three lambs, we named them Winnie and Nelson! They are adorable as you can see from the photo. Lambs are wonderful in the sense that they do not mind a bit that you have taken them from the mother as long as they get fed and fussed, a human will do just as well. They are bottle fed 3 times a day, so it is just like having a baby, except you don’t have to mop up the other end!

Friday was the most glorious day so far this year, we had blue skies and sunshine all day long. I spent the afternoon on the veg plot, weeding and fixing any holes in the fruit cage, while I was out there I heard the unmistakable cry of the Buzzard, I looked up and in the distance were 3 of them soaring high up on the thermals and coming closer all the time. Suddenly a couple of crows started to dive bomb one of the Buzzards, they must have had a nest nearby and were protecting it as fiercely as a Spitfire during the war. We get quite a few birds visiting the farm, my favorite is the long-tailed tit, very cute, not so cute are the crows that arrive each morning for a free feed, approximately 30 turn up at the precise moment I feed the chickens and I have to find ways to stop them devouring it. I have tried feeding at different times, hanging all sorts of paraphernalia to frighten them off, running around the farm clapping my hands like a madwoman, all of the above together, but they still arrive expectantly!

This weekend was great weather too so we have weeded and rotovated the area that the potatoes will grow in, they are chitting nicely now and if the weather stays fine will be ready to go in at the end of the month, we plant first earlies and main crop, you can’t beat the taste of new potatoes picked and cooked within 15 minutes! The main crop are the ones we will store over Winter, we have bought scab resistant varieties this year as we had a problem with scab last year, although they still taste and cook fine they don’t look very attractive! I have also planted up some seed trays with herb seeds that I had left over from last year, I lost two rosemary bushes in the harsh winter so need to replace those. The broad beans have not broken through the surface yet but with all this sunshine I am sure they wont be long. The pace is begining to pick up now, the preparation work is nearly done, then it will be a case of waiting until the time is right to begin putting in seeds of all descriptions, a few months of watering and weeding then harvesting and cooking or freezing! During the busy time of Spring and Summer I always take time to stand at the back door, with a coffee in my hand and look across the fields, these are precious coffee breaks, as I stand there I always think, how lucky am I, I have inlcuded a photo of exactly what I see, and once I have published this, that’s where I am going!

If  you are interested I found this live lambcam http://www.meadopenfarm.co.uk/lambcam.htm