Month: September 2011

Good morning all, another Monday morning and another blog 🙂 I have just had a look at my stats, and since I began the blog, I have had nearly 1000 views, not bad. I started the blog as a way to record and look back at the things that happen or the things that we do on the farm, and the fact that people read along with our weekly exploits is a real bonus so thank you.

The subtle changes of Autumn are in the air, the leaves are beginning to turn brown, the vegetables have definitely slowed to snail pace, and the morning and evening air temperatures have dropped. Despite that it is still a lovely time of the year that can sometimes surprise you with a lovely sunny day, we are forecast a good week this week coming so we had better make the most if it.

The Greater Spotted Woodpecker made a welcome return this weekend, we have not seen it all summer long, but I heard It’s unmistakable call on Saturday, looked out and there it was sat on top of the telegraph pole. We also have an Owl that appears to be living very close by, I have an Owl box that my daughters boyfriend made for my birthday so need to get that erected in the roof of the hay barn and see if it will become a des res for a family of owls which would be very exciting. As I was making my way to feed the dogs this morning I noticed what looked like a pile of pigeons! There were five of them all piled on top of each other trying to have a bath in the smallest of puddles, the silly thing is that there were plenty more puddles around, that one obviously was deemed to be the best by the local pigeon population.

We have had a visit from a large dog fox this week, thankfully it took the bait in the trap, I have to admit it was a beautiful looking thing but not something I can have prowling around my poultry ready to pick them off. I also had a visit from the lady at the farm along the lane, her lodger has shot four on their land alone in the last month, they seem to be on the increase, sadly it is suggested that urban foxes, when caught, are transported out to the countryside and released, while this may seem like a kind thing to do, it is just the opposite, urban foxes do not know how to survive in the countryside, they are used being fed by humans or scavenging on readily available rubbish, not hunting for their own food with natural instinct.

The same lady keeps bees and produces her own Honey, she kindly dropped off a couple of jars in return for a couple of buckets of cooking apples to make chutney with. The honey is delicious, I had it on toast this morning 🙂 the farm is less than half a mile from us and so it is possible that the bees have popped over this way to collect the nectar, you can’t get more local than that! While we were chatting she told me about an old recipe for Apple chutney that her Nan used to make, when she came back with the honey she also bought me a jar of the chutney as well as the recipe for it and another for Pear chutney. I had a go at making the Pear one on Sunday and early signs are that it is delicious, nice and sweet, I will leave it to mature for a couple of months to bring out the true flavour, and look forward to eating it at Christmas with some cold ham :p

September is a great month for produce, we went along to the local ploughing match this weekend and while we were there we had a wander round the produce tent. What an amazing amount of talent, everything from cupcakes and scones to vegetable animals and sacks of grain harvest. The whole atmosphere was once of relaxed contentment, heavy horses beautifully adorned, huge steam engines and ancient tractors of all kinds, all aiming to get lovely straight furrows and win the, no doubt, coveted prize of a shiny cup. Also on display were the ancient crafts of wattling, woodcarving and weaving all lovingly carried out by those few determined to keep the traditions going, those stalls together with displays from the sheep dogs, the local hounds and many other countryside pursuits, made  a welcome escape from the jobs on the farm and a relaxing afternoon out 🙂

Here on the farm this week we have been using copious amounts of purple spray, for those of you who don’t have a clue what that is, it is a spray that among other things contains Genetian Violet. It is used widely on wounds of all kinds and on many animals, we have had to spray the chickens, the ones that have been pulling each others feathers out. Despite giving them plenty more oyster shell and grit for Calcium and digestion they continued to de-feather each other, eventually they begin to peck at the skin and they don’t stop there, this can result in cannibalism! Purple spray not only heals the wounds but is a good visual deterrent for chickens and it appears to have halted them in their tracks for the time being. We have also had to use it on one of the rams, he has small horn buds, but keeps knocking one of them off when he is rubbing his head on the fence posts, on Sunday morning it looked like a massacre had taken place, not only was he bleeding all down the side of his head but he had managed to rub it all over the other sheep too! We scrubbed him clean and purple sprayed the wound, which should keep the flies off until it heals. 

Talking of sheep, I finally got round to sorting out their final few weeks, it started off well, after much discussion on a forum, I found out which tags I needed to buy to replace the ones that had been lost. All sheep have to be tagged and many of them now have to have electronic tags, because ours are under one year and destined for slaughter they can have just a visual tag, but because some of them have come off and are lost they have to be replaced with a red tag. It’s a complicated system until you get your head round it, but what else do you expect from the EU!!!! Two of the female sheep will be held back as they will not make weight in time, we have until next April for them to go, after that they will have to have two tags, one electronic and one visual. They say it is to make the origin and train of produce simpler for the consumer, but personally I think it is to clog up my life with more paperwork than is necessary 😉

Well that was definitely a windy week and although the house roof stayed on, the greenhouse roof came crashing down onto the tomatoes 😦 Very annoying as it was a new roof  last year and cost a pretty penny! The runner bean canes are all but on the floor, although I am still managing to pick a few beans. This morning I have been digging up the carrots ready for them to go into dry storage, that is basically a large metal box filled with sand, the carrots go into the sand and should still be ok by next Spring. Some of them I will chop and freeze, so that I have some handy bags available for those days when everything is a rush. Last week I had a little bit of a glut on a few things, so I made up a veg box and put it for sale on Facebook, I was really surprised at the interest and sold six in total! Until then I was contemplating scaling down the veg patch as it was producing far more than we could eat, but this seems like an opportunity too good to pass up on, so instead I will be planning my crops for next year with a view to doing a few boxes a week and see how it goes.

The chicken problems just keep coming this week, I have one with an impacted crop, I have fed her cod liver oil but it has not shifted and failing that only surgery would help, another just dropped dead, no apparent reason, just one of those things. On the up side the mother bought her babies outside on Saturday and they are a pleasure to watch. She is such a good mother, clucking around showing them what to eat and calling them back sharply if they stray too far from her.

 While I was out with the camera, I caught Diesel in his favorite position, sleeping in the hay barn, both of the cats have been very busy this week, the hay fields around us have been cut which drives all the mice to look for new homes and a lot of them come our way! The cats have been on a constant hunting and stalking exercise, what makes me laugh though is they always bring their prey all the way back home before they eat it and go off to catch more 🙂

 The last photo I decided to take, shows you have the new girls have settled in, remember the ones that would not come out for two days. well they have quickly got over their shyness and have learnt that if I am around they just might be getting some titbits!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That will have to be it for this week, as WordPress is playing havoc with my patience!! Also I have got lots to do, including sorting out the sheep (note to self, pull your finger out!!)

Well we have found both of the tortoises, one was found in the stable block heading for one of the stalls, no doubt to hunker down for hibernation and the other was about to break free into the paddocks, both are now safely back where they belong in the Herb garden.

Chickens seem to have been the main focus of this week with various problems cropping up, one of the four that my Mum was having had developed a limp that got steadily worse, we got her out and had a look at her and she appears to have arthritis, she has a joint that is solid and hot to touch, we have applied a generous covering of Arnica gel to see if that makes any difference, if not we will then need to decide what to do with her. Because she is quite well in all other respects the dilemma will be to A) put her to sleep or B) leave her to limp around and see how she gets on.  She shows no other signs of distress so I am inclined to see how it goes for a while. If Mum decides to take her on she will get plenty of personal TLC and lots of Aloe Vera!

One of the Buff Orpingtons has managed to hatch out 3 little chicks, its little bit late in the year and all kinds of mishaps are waiting for them but hopefully she will rear them successfully. I have two other hens that keep trying to go broody, unfortunately they are laying hens and do  not run with a Cockerel so they have no hope of hatching their eggs! In this instance it is kinder to break to brooding pattern, that can be as simple as keep taking her off and taking away the eggs or as mean as shutting her out of the hen house, it all depends on how she wants to play it, so far just removing the eggs seems to be working although they did keep going back for three days in a row.

We have a feather eating problem in the other batch of hens, after studying them for a while we caught the culprit ‘red beaked’ so to speak with feathers in its mouth! We have had to separate that hen from all the others to break her of the habit, we have also given all the hens a replenishment of oystershell and grit in case it is a deficiency. At this time of year the chickens will go into a moult, egg production decreases and they need a little added extra calcium to grow new feathers, egg eating can also be a problem this time of year for the same reason.

Our home reared bacon arrived in the week, you will remember that we had a pig living with our friends a couple of miles away, well the bacon is delicious, not like the watery thin rashers you buy in the shop, you only need one of these rashers they are about 1/4 inch thick and when you cook them you get very little liquid out of them. We also put a gammon joint in the Rayburn to cook very slowly overnight, in was in for 10 hours and was ready for breakfast the next morning, my worry was that it would be burnt so it was a bit of an experiment but it was fine, very succulent and a great way to start the day 🙂

The freezer is very nearly full to bursting with fruit, veg and meat and so anything that is in the garden from now on will have to be eaten fresh, there are still lots and lots of runner beans to be picked as well as cooking apples. The pumpkins are ripening a little too early but once they are picked should store well in a cool ventilated area. Most of them will be used for Halloween, I personally don’t like eating pumpkin, apart from in a cheesecake I once tasted which was delicious, but I will probably save the seeds from any that we use to carve lanterns from. I need to pick the sweetcorn, it has been a good crop this year and although sweetcorn tastes better if picked and cooked immediately, I will have to freeze some or we will be eating it every day for a couple of weeks!

I still have not decided what to do about the sheep yet but I need to sort it out soon, mainly because we are now spending money on feed that we don’t necessarily need to be doing and so it is not cost-effective. The cow that we have gone halves with also needs to have the same decision made, does it go for slaughter this side of  Winter or do we feed it though the winter which will be costly but all the while it is still growing and we get more output in terms of meat in the new year. Decisions, decisions, a consultation will be made with the butcher to see what he thinks before the final choice is made.

The strong winds that we are experiencing at the moment are bringing down all the nuts and we have been gathering Walnuts and Hazelnuts, I have not seen any more signs of the squirrel and am beginning to think he may have become a casualty of the road, great for me, not so great for him!

Talking of the wind, as I can hear it picking up outside, I am hoping that the new roof  Hubby has been busy trying to finish, stays put! It will be a compete calamity if it doesn’t (note to self, have a little more faith in his abilities). Hopefully I will report back with good news on that score next week 😉

Ooops, I have managed to lose the Tortoises this weekend, yesterday I let them out into the Veg garden for a stroll and forgot to put them away!! This morning there is no sign of them anywhere, the garden is quite large and so I am hoping I will spot them at some point over the next few days, Hubby saw one of them in the afternoon ambling past him as he was weeding and that is the last known sighting!

The dreaded fox attacks have returned and I have lost 3 of my breeding chickens and a goose! This fox is a little more cunning as the fox trap was set but he has avoided it, we are having to shut the birds in tight and hope that it eventually goes for the bait.

My new chickens arrived on Friday at lunchtime, I left them shut inside to settle in, the next day I went up to feed them and open the doors, but they didn’t come out all day! No surprise really as they would have been shed reared from hatching and have no idea that they are now allowed to go outside to play. Yesterday a few of them ventured out but the rest stayed inside, I am hoping that today they will all get to enjoy the great outdoors, they are safely behind an electric fence so hopefully safe from Mr Fox. My Mum has finally decided to have some chickens and I have 4 lined up for her, she named them Molly, Dolly, Sally and Primrose, they are from a batch I hatched earlier in the spring and they will soon be off to thier new des res.

I need to organise a date for the sheep to go to their final destination, the dilemma is that only six of them are at weight, two are not ready yet, they are the one that had fly strike and the one that had the breathing problems in the beginning. Do I send six off and keep the two back until later or keep them all until the other two catch up, meanwhile the others are getting fatter and fatter!! Hmmm the jury is still out on that one.

Hubby has still been very busy this weekend and we now have half a new roof, at least one end of the building is leakproof at last, Mum and Stepdad were here helping again this weekend and we have picked lots of cooking apples and processed them for the freezer, I picked at least 7lb of Runner Beans on Sunday and just looked at the pile in despair, its great to have so many but it takes ages to sort that amount out for the freezer 😦 I will be glad that I did in the middle of Winter though 🙂 We also picked sloes and I might have a go at making that good old country tipple Sloe Gin, I have never tasted it before but used to have the odd Gin and Tonic many years ago and if I don’t like it I can always use it for presents 😉

We went to the Wychwood Forest Fayre yesterday, it was a lovely sunny afternoon, the place was full of local crafts and businesses, we bought some locally produced Cider and Cheese, at the end of the afternoon we sat down and listened to a folk tale from the storyteller, very therapeutic. I am always in awe of people who produce wonderful looking objects, there were Bow makers, wood turners, weavers of every kind, bushcraft, potters, the list goes on. I picked up some good tips about weaving with Willow and will definitely be having a go with all the whips I cut back this year, it may not be pretty or even functional but at least I will have tried 🙂

Lastly, have a look at this photo, I took it on Saturday when the men moved some cupboards away from the door in an outbuilding, We marvelled at the amount of work that went into building a mountain of cushioning before building the little nest in the top! It must have taken the Robin days and days to build it 🙂