Month: January 2012

Well we managed to trap the elusive fox finally, but there is now another! After re-setting the trap and inspecting it the next morning we found that we had caught another but he had managed to rip the metal off the bottom of the trap and dig his way out! This will call for a bit of spot welding to be done to ensure that he does not get away a second time.

We had the use of a cherry picker at the end of last week and so the trees at the front of the drive had have a radical lopping! The Eucalyptus trees had reached about 80ft and all the growth is on one side due to lack of light from the conifer trees, we have reduced their height to about 40 ft and taken the tops out of the conifers for the time being although they will eventually come down altogether. They look a bit of a state at the moment but they will recover and look lovely come the spring, we will leave the conifers in place until that happens so that they are not an eyesore! We had just finished and were beginning to pack up the equipment when the most horrible hailstorm hit, I have not been out in a storm like that for a few years, it was cold and it stung! All that pruning means that Hubby has another big piles of branches and tree trunk to cut up ready for next Winters log pile, the Eucalyptus should smell amazing burning on the Rayburn and it will have all year to dry out first which is a good job as they are high in natural oils.

The other big job for Hubby this weekend was to make many trips with a trailer full of well-rotted manure down to the corner paddock, this will be spread and then weathered in before putting down grass seed in the spring, the paddock has been seriously overgrazed over the last couple of years and all it contains now is dandelions so is in need of some TLC to bring it back to good grazing. Although we have a huge pile of muck you would be surprised how much it takes to cover even a small area, it’s a good job we have a constant supply 🙂

I can’t write the blog this week without dedicating it to a man who greatly influenced my lifestyle choice and sadly passed away at the end of last year  ‘Some men achieve greatness, others are born with it’ as my Mum said to me when we were talking about him. Ernie was one of those born with it, he was a tutor on a Horticultural course I did about 10 years ago but his influence has stayed with me on a daily basis for all those years and will continue to do so. His passion and dedication to the natural world was something we never tired of listening to during our lectures, from teaching us all about the fascinating matriarchal society of a badger set to telling us stories of the magnificent stags on a misty Scottish morning during the rutting season. His horticultural knowledge was just as entertaining, one of the first practical things we did with him was to prune a very old grapevine, nervous newbies we stood there with our secateurs while he demonstrated which bits to cut out, ‘dont worry if you make a mistake’ he said ‘the sole aim of a plant is to grow and so it will recover’ a point worth remembering if you make a hash of your next bit of pruning! He spent the day, in his own time, teaching us the art of hedgelaying and we spent many a day wandering around outside as, in his opinion, this was the best way to learn. The things Ernie taught us could never have been learnt from a textbook alone, there were 5 of us on the course and 4 of us remain in close contact with each other even now. Each one of us has gone on to use and develop the skills he taught us, one has gone on to build a very succesful Green Roof business, one has among other things gone on to keep bees, knowing that this small insect is the most important insect in the whole eco system, the other is retired but has taken up Botanical painting, which is a wonderful way to look at all the intricacies that plants and flowers display, and then there is me with my madcap, muddy life, surrounded by all the amazing things nature has to offer. So thank you Ernie from myself and the hundreds, probably thousands of others that you were generous enough to share your life long knowledge and experience with.

We use rubber eggs here at the farm for two reasons, firstly to encourage the hens to lay in the correct place, otherwise they can randomly lay all over the place and every day would be an egg hunt! Secondly some hens take to egg eating, this is something you need to nip in the bud and a rubber egg is used, the hen can’t break it and so gives up trying (that’s the theory anyhow). When we came back from a weekend away at the beginning of the month I went to collect up the eggs and noticed that one of the rubber ones was missing, I hunted high and low in the coop but it had disappeared, I laughingly asked the girls ‘who has sold the rubber egg to a customer’, blank looks were what I received in return! At this point I feel I ought to explain that they are very realistic looking and even I have thought, wow they have laid well today, only to remember that the rubber eggs were there too :p Finally at the weekend a regular customer turned up and said ‘I have something funny to tell you’, ‘let me guess’ I said, ‘you were sold a rubber egg’. The story didn’t stop there, she was about to make cakes and tried to crack the egg which she was unable to do, so she called her husband and told him she thought there may be a chick in it and could he take it outside to break it open and look, it took him about 5 minutes to realise that it was not going to break because it was fake! I told you they were realistic!! They said that was the best laugh they’d  had in ages, I was thinking, good job they have a sense of humour!

This morning I have heard on the grapevine (which is pretty quick around here) that the yard along the lane from us was broken into last night and tools taken, so once again we need to be vigilant! I did have a bit of an inkling something was amiss when a police car pulled in the drive this morning, sat for a while and then left, always a telltale sign! I did have a thought that could work, as we get so much nighttime flying activity around here perhaps they could strap police cameras to the undercarriage, I am pretty sure the crime detection rate would shoot up! Seriously, it is a damn nuisance, rural crime is difficult to police I am sure as we don’t have the availability of CCTV, but no one ever seems to get caught and it just becomes a routine event, in fact you can guarantee that every six months you will get word of someone nearby being done over 😦

Two  more liveries arrived at the weekend so we are now a full yard, no doubt that the increase in horses has been noted by the aforementioned and the assumption that there will be an increase of tack on the premises, however we advise the liveries not to keep anything they value here, even locking things away does not stop them, the best you can do is slow them down a little and hope they get caught in the mean time, but if they want to get in they will so it is safer not to have it on site.

Hubby finished the last bit of fencing we will need to do for a while, he went hammer and tong to get it done by Saturday dinnertime, 22 posts to go in, 3 to every twelve foot, maths is not my strong point but that’s roughly 90 feet of fencing before 11.30 in the morning! It will help to get rid of the ‘Christmas belly’ 😉 I have a list of jobs to do this week, mostly thorough clean outs of hutch, runs and houses, there is always plenty of s**t to shovel round here so that will hopefully help me to get rid of some Christmas leftovers too 🙂

The fox is still being elusive, although he is still around, we have seen him with the torch and heard him fighting with another, we have moved one of the traps to the back of the paddock and disguised it with branches! I am not sure if he will be fooled by that or not, at the moment we have not lost any more hens but it wont be long if we don’t catch him soon. I have just realised that I feel like we are under attack from all angles at the minute 😦 No wonder my stress levels are up! Roll on the peaceful, heady days of Summer 😀

Well I have managed to write the blog without shedding any tears after saying goodbye to our youngest at departures last night, in fact she should be landing in Kuala Lumpar any minute on the first leg of the journey, I will heave a sigh of relief when she gets back on the correct plane (arghh) and lands in Sydney, then I will begin to worry again when I see the pictures on Facebook, she is 22 but you never stop worrying!

I hope you all had a lovely festive season, I thought I would give myself a couple of weeks off from the blog, I was, as I suspect were you, too busy in the run up to Christmas and too tired afterwards!

Well the New Year has certainly blown its way in here, the winds have been frightful, luckily the only damage so far has been a pane of glass in one of the stables. Besides the usual Christmas preparations, we still had the day to day running to keep up with and so it was very busy for a few days, the daily routine remains the same no matter what the calendar says, although we did have a couple of extra ‘half an hour’ lie ins 🙂

About two years ago we made the decision to take down some conifers that are at the front of the drive, they have reached about 50ft and are getting too big to be that near to the road, we finally got round to felling the first of them during the holiday break. That was an experience, cutting off as many branches as possible then tieing a rope to the top and hoping it would fall in the general direction required! When I heard the crack, just as it was about to fall, my heart was in my mouth, then the feeling and exclamation of jubilation, when it crash landed in the right place without any damage to persons or property, was amazing. We have another two to bring down and being closer to the road they will be a little more difficult to manage, but the amount of wood that we will get from them for next Winter will be well worth it.

Hubby and I went to visit My Dad in Wales for a couple of days after Christmas and left the girls in charge of the farm. The usual thing that happens is we get half way down there and they ring up to say the fox had been, so this time they decided to be one step ahead and bait the fox trap, a cunning plan, they got up the next morning to find they had caught…………….the cat! There he was sat in the trap with a belly full of pigeon! Oddly enough we did have a fox on the prowl, when I came home, I could smell that it had been marking its territory, so we baited the trap again and hoped that the cat stayed away, he did and this time we caught the fox. We can’t rest there though, only yesterday while out doing the afternoon feed, Hubby spotted a second fox in the far paddock, and there are tell tales signs of droppings around the Hen houses, so today we will set a second trap out in the paddock, I have lost one hen in the last week, and I can’t afford to lose any more.

I had some great presents for Christmas, all useful, which are the best kind and one of them was a micro brewery kit! I have not started it off yet but hopefully I will be brewing beer before the month is out, what it will taste like is another matter :p One of my aims this year is to use our produce in a wider range of products and brewing is right up at the top of the list 🙂 It may lead to some very entertaining blogs after a tasting session 😉

The New Year heralds new beginnings and that rule applies here just as much as anywhere, but before we begin planning for the future we need to clear up from the previous year, for us that means identifying birds that are no longer productive  and are costing more to keep than they make. From a batch of eggs hatched last year I have 5 very large Blue Splash Orpington cockerels, unless I can find buyers for them they will be fattened up for the freezer, we have around 10 hens that have either never laid or have stopped laying, they need to be culled and as there is hardly any meat on a hybrid they will be used to feed the dogs or bait the fox trap.  Yesterday we had to cull a drake who had suddenly developed a chest rattle and could no longer walk, poor thing was found flapping around in the mud, so we gave him a dry stable, water and food overnight to see if he would recover but it was evident that he was not going to 😦 Then there are the two remaining lambs that will need to go off to slaughter at the end of February, they have put on some good weight even though it is Winter, probably because they badger us for food every time we go near them! Once all that is done it will be time to decide what to plant, rear and grow for the coming seasons. We have talked about a permanent flock of sheep, just a small one of about 3 0r 4 ewes, it would uneconomical to keep a ram and so we would have to bring one in to serve them. It would mean that we would deliver our own lambs, which would be a whole new experience for us but a very exciting one as well, so watch this space 🙂 We also talked about having piglets again this year, after having a year without them, we need to build a permanent run for them first, and I was going to say, it will be a case of if we get round to it, but from experience what usually happens is an oportunity to buy some comes up and you dive in head first without much thought, ending up with piglets but no run, then a mad scrabble to get something ready for them to move into when they get too big for their pen! To be honest I prefer a ‘think on your feet’ situation rather than mull it over and planning it, with the latter we usually never get round to doing it!