Month: April 2011

What a glorious week we have had weather wise, I hope you have all enjoyed the Easter weekend out in the sunshine. Here on the farm we had a tea party on the lawn on Easter Sunday which was lovely and very English, all the best china came out, we had cucumber sandwiches and scones and cream, simmnel cake and much more besides! The oldies sat in the sun while the youngsters played ball games in the paddock, it was lovely to take time out from farm work and share the space we have with others.

The rest of the week has been full of highs and lows! We have had a visit from Mr Fox, he has taken seven of my best laying hens, he came in the middle of the day while we were busy doing some improvements on the house, Hubby said that he heard the rooks making a right rumpus about 1 o’clock, about 2.30 we went down the back to feed and there were feathers everywhere. These hens are supposed to be behind an electric fence and we even clipped their wings but they were determined to be fully free range and that was their downfall and mine! In future if the rooks make a din we will be investigating straight away, he may still get away with one or two but we can hopefully limit the damage. It means we are seven eggs a day down which is a lot over the week, I will have to tell customers that I don’t have any until the new batch of hens start laying, and if they know what is good for them they will start very soon 🙂

Talking of eggs you will remember that the Buff Orpington hen was sat on a huge clutch, well the time came and went for them to hatch so I decided to have a look at a couple of them. I broke them open and nothing but yolk inside so I went back and got a couple more, again nothing, she had been sitting far too long so I decided to break her brooding and put her in a new pen, I had a look at the rest of the eggs and nothing!! She has had a wasted 2o or more days. I had a visit from a friend this week who is a keen pigeon fancier and has contacts with lots of poultry people, there seems to be a general problem with fertility in birds this year, this set me thinking and so last night I candled the duck eggs in the incubator and only eight out of twenty-four were fertile 😦 I just hope that the goose eggs are going to produce some goslings otherwise it will be and all round disaster.

The improvements I talked about earlier are one of the highs, we are re-designing the interior of the place (which is a wooden structure) and fitting in a second bedroom, we have been living with one bedroom and a living room and so some of us had no place to sleep except on the sofa, now we have our own room and the girls have theirs which is bliss and makes so much difference! At the  moment we have no living room as we have to knock down a wall adjoining the office to make it bigger and so the sofa’s are stacked on top of each other and the TV is disconnected much to hubby’s disgust as the snooker championship is on at the moment. I have not relented and let him plug it in however as I cunningly figure we will get more work done this way!

The veg plot is coming along nicely, everything is growing although a burst of rain would certainly help to get it all romping away, tap water is never the same. The greenhouse is fit to burst with plants ready to either be sold or planted in situ, there are cucumbers, tomato, melon, pumpkin, courgettes, sweetcorn & peppers, the bean poles need putting in ready to plant up and the brassicas which have all been hardened off also need to go in, not to mention a second sowing of  salads and root veg! I think I will leave the TV unconnected a while longer, we don’t have time to watch it anyway!!

Enjoy your second long weekend, if you are celebrating the Royal Wedding have fun, and as I wouldn’t want the rain to spoil anyone’s fun could we please have some between now and Thursday night!

Its been a busy and eventful week, I had just sold the last three hens when a new batch of 30 arrived the very next day. It was a quick turnaround as I was not expecting them until next week, so after a phone call at 3.45 to say they were being delivered, I had to go and clean the whole pen and hen-house, dust it down for mites and get it ready. It is like a new intake at the beginning of a new school term, you never know just what to expect from the little darlings, these have turned out to be a bit of a handful! I left them in on the first day, the theory being they will know where to go back to at nighttime, now the first night of putting them away unfortunately coincided with my youngest’s 21st birthday celebrations, so while we were parting at my other daughters, John went home to put them all to bed! Half an hour later I had a phone call to say that the new chickens had roosted in a nearby tree and what should he do? Get the ladder and get them down I told him! An hour later he returned to the party with scratches galore but very pleased he had done the job! The hope was that the next day they would go to bed in their des res……..wrong, there they were up the tree again! So out came the ladder and up the tree went John, I don’t think that ladder will hold, I said to him, it did yesterday came the reply, so I let him get on with it, two minutes later he fell 10 feet out of the tree! I TOLD YOU SO! I did my wifely duty and showed concerned for his well-being, obviously holding back a huge guffaw until I got the answer I’m fine! He has a few scratches and ached a bit the next day but no real damage thank goodness. Last night we decided on a new tactic, so before dark we rounded them up one by one and clipped their wings, one wing is clipped so that they can’t fly with any balance and therefore should not be able to get any height, tonight they should go to bed, I will keep you posted!!

Chickens seem to have taken up a lot of this week, we had to despatch 8 cockerels, they were from a batch of eggs we hatched and only 4 were hens, as I have mentioned before, the down side is that you have excess cockerels that nobody wants!  We do eat these and now have a freezer full of chicken to keep us going through the summer. We also raised some table birds for the first time and did two of these in the week, the first weighed in at a stonking 11lb, this would make 3 good meals easily and a carcass for soup! Yesterday we had salad consisting of baby lettuce, spinach, cress, radish and sprouting, all picked from the garden and a home reared chicken, the best meals are the ones entirely grown by ourselves 🙂

The weeds are growing just as fast as the produce at the minute even with a lack of much-needed rain, the blossom is plentiful, the pear, apple and plums trees are loaded as are the blueberries and strawberries, unless the june drop is a heavy one we should have an excellent crop. The only problem with a bumper crop is the amount of time it takes to process all the fruit! A lot of it is frozen quickly and if time allows a few jam making sessions are in order. Towards the end of the season the chutney making kicks in, we always have plenty of chutney and pickles and still have plenty left from last year, some jars are given as present for Christmas but I think I will need to sell some this year. One of the chutney’s that was surprisingly good was the runner bean one, it is a little bit like piccalilli and excellent with a cheese sandwich!

As you can see from the pictures the lambs are growing fast and realy enjoying the outdoor life, it will be lovely when they are joined by the other six who are still indoors on milk. The newly hatched chicks are doing well and we are still waiting for the hen to hatch her brood, that should be next week sometime, the goose will be on her eggs a good deal longer as they will take nearly 40 days, I am just hoping that they are fertile or she will have wasted her time!

            Happy Easter 🙂

We are back from our holiday, which was such a treat, the weather was hot and we visited some lovely places including a cider museum in Brittany, so I have picked up so tips ready to make mine in the autumn.

So much has happened even in the short time we were gone, six new lambs arrived and the goose is finally sitting on about 8 eggs! I am very excited about the forthcoming goslings as we have spent two years raising the geese with various setbacks and now we will finally reap the rewards. One of the Buff hens is sat on a huge clutch of eggs, she has spread herself out as much as she can, I would think there are up to 25 eggs underneath her. While I was away a friend brought round 15 light sussex bantam eggs for the incubator, which was already full, so I told Mum to put them under one that I thought was going broody before we went away and she has taken them on! On the day we arrived back the eggs in the incubator started to hatch and we now have a selection of Maran, Wellsummer and Orpington chicks that are doing well.

The two larger lambs that we already had are now out in the paddock, they are a little bit forlorn as weaning them means stopping the bottle abruptly, they don’t quite understand why they have been put out to grass! It is lovely to see them leaping about in the sunshine though, lambs produce serotonin which makes them happy and that’s why you will see them skipping about and doing high kicks!

The veg garden is in full swing, this weekend we have planted the potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beetroot & fennel as well as some more rows of mangetout. My Mum planted out the broad beans while I was away and pricked out a lot of the seedlings including tomato, peppers, melons and some of the herbs, if all goes well this season we will have a bumper crop!

My Mum came to farm sit while we were away as the girls both still had to work, I was not sure if she had enjoyed her stay here until I read her post on Facebook, she wrote: I have watched the early morning sun bathe the fields in pale golden-yellow and stood in awe as the same sun turned the sky into a firebowl of reds and ambers, I have corralled geese and urged hens into a safe shelter, washed duck eggs and marvelled at the grace of a buzzard as it searched for its next meal, I have drifted off to sleep as the sounds of the night animals, badger and fox, scuffled around outside and woke to the bleating of new lambs as they called for their bottle. I have soaked up the peace and tranquility of being ‘away from it all’ Where? just three miles away from Carterton!

I will be taking bookings from next month!! Seriously though, It is lovely to read our life though a new set of eyes, we take so much for granted and moan about the routine, but we wouldn’t change it for a years worth of holidays 😀