Month: October 2012

Well that time of the year is here again when the dark nights get darker earlier and in the mornings you feel like you have been up for ages. It’s only 8.45 at the moment and I have done the morning routine already but it seems much later it also felt like it took me ages but Clearly it didn’t. I quite like the darker evenings because it means I can do other things instead of being outside, catch up on some reading and tracing ancestry etc, cosy nights in the warm with a hot chocolate, mmm make the most of it I say.

We have all been a bit poorly this week and so have been on light duties only, the only extra jobs we have done is put the lazy Sheila back up in the kitchen over the Rayburn. We took it down last year when we rearranged the kitchen and never got round to putting it back up but with the Rayburn permanently lit it makes sense to utilise the heat coming from it to dry the washing. We also replaced some of the bulbs in the outside lights that had blown, we need all the help we can get in the dark at this time of year.

The paddock tractor sold on eBay and I am just waiting for them to pick it up and then we can think about buying that compact tractor. The local farmer that I buy grain from came to unload this week bringing his enormous machine with him, the driveway was turned into a quagmire by the time he had finished, the tyres were higher than me, I am glad we don’t need one of them. We bought a ton of wheat and the price has gone up from £120 a ton last year to £190 this year, that will give you some idea of how much your weekly shopping bill will increase because of the weather this year. Sadly it won’t end there because at the moment the farmers can’t get on the land to seed ready for next years crop because the ground is too wet. They have until the 1st December but my farmer says if they can’t get on they will leave the land fallow meaning there will be even less wheat around next year, you have been warned 🙂

We have managed to sort out the Christmas tree situation and will be taking delivery of 80 Nordman Fir, 6ft trees on the 30th November. They will be £36 each and we will deliver to surrounding areas for £40, I have started a list of names of definite orders so if you want to go on the list let me know. As this is the first year of selling them we were unsure of what kind of numbers to order in, we may find we could have sold twice as many on the other hand we may struggle to sell all 80 it’s an unknown quantity this year but it will be exciting to be part of people’s Christmas preparations.

I do love Christmas, my whole family does, that stems from my Mum’s determination to keep the spirit of Christmas alive after all if you cant be charitable to people at that time of year there is no hope! I remember when we were children we had an ‘adopted Granny’ come for the day, I have no idea where she came from but she would have spent Christmas Day by herself otherwise, she bought an enormous box of chocolates with her, probably why I remember her so vividly! For us it is not about the religious or commercial side of the holiday, it’s about getting as many people round the feast table as possible, people of all ages and backgrounds enjoying each others company. Obviously we cant all get in the same house anymore, this year there are 36 of us and the family is growing year on year, but we do all go to a local pub for a Christmas get together and carvery during December we can pratically fill the place by ourselves! Personally for me, Christmas Eve is my favourite day of the year, people dropping in throughout the day munching on freshly cooked mince pies and the excitement and anticipation of the old and young for the following morning after Santa has been. Yep we love the magic of Christmas in this house we are all big kids at heart, so selling the trees will be an added bonus, although ask me if I feel the same after being out in the cold for a couple of hours at a time!

Today is a lot milder than it has been over the past week and that coupled with the fact I have not done much due to illness means that it will be a busy few days catching up, the chickens all need cleaning out there is still plenty of tidying up to do in the garden. I am still waiting for the delivery of the fruit trees and they will need planting as soon as they arrive providing the ground is not frozen. The house needs a good clean as the dust created by the Rayburn is constant, and my eldest daughter has moved out and in with her boyfriend so her room needs a bit of a makeover. Mind you half of her stuff is still in it, either she has too much or she is hedging her bets, I think it is the former! For the time being all my fledglings have flown the nest until the wandering youngest finally returns, do I have empty nest syndrome, not a chance, when I clean, it stays clean and tidy, its a marvellous thing. The wash basket is no longer overflowing like some clothes munching monster and my cooking duties are much simpler and condensed into a shorter time zone rather than spread over a couple of hours to fit in with work ending times. I don’t really have an empty nest of course because I filled it with animals instead, pretty much the same except their mess is all outside!

It’s a bit of a dank start to the day today but at least we don’t have full on rain just yet, and if the forecast is to be believed we better make the most of the mild temperatures before the end of the week brings in a cold sweep from the North 😦

I always get to this bit of the blog and think what have I done this week, I can never remember from day to day let alone one week to the next! It was probably not helped by the very sociable weekend I have had resulting in what felt like cotton wool stuffed ears all day yesterday, still the company was excellent, the wine was flowing and the music was great so it was all worth it.

I made my Christmas cake in the week, this year I have tried a new recipe called ‘as you like it’ which basically means put in whatever is to your taste providing it is of similar structure and quantity. I chose to use dried apricots and cherries, replacing some of the dried fruit, I also used Amaretto instead of brandy this year, the smell was delicious although the mixture was a bit sweet! One of the best things to do in the run up to the big day is getting the cake out on a weekly basis and lacing it with alcohol, I never tire of the job 🙂

We have been moving chickens into the stable again this week, this time some of the pure breeds from the small runs. The end run has become a bog and is unhealthy to leave them in there over winter, they will be dusted, fed up a little and introduced at night to the chickens that live in the small paddock in the old shepherds hut. Introducing them at night minimises the risk of fighting although the hen pecking will still go ahead to establish a pecking order. I am worried about putting a little Blue Orpington in with them though as she is very timid, so timid that when I opened the gate to let them free range on Friday, she went and hid in the coop all day. I don’t know what to do with her, she can’t live on her own because thats unfair but she is scared of all the others, she needs a home that can give her the time and patience to bring her out of her shell. I have never known a chicken like it, so if anyone feels they can take her on let me know.

The pumpkins that I have grown have gone to the front gate for sale, there were 9 big ones and 4 smaller ones in the end so not bad, there were a few others but they had begun to go soft in the top and so were fed to the chickens who devoured them in minutes. Apart from what is left in the ground that is pretty much it for the veg season, the poly tunnel is still nurturing dwarf beans and some winter lettuce, there are also cauliflowers and broccoli growing although not showing any signs of much at the moment. The cucumbers are all but finished and so I will probably be clearing them some time this week. The potatoes that I put in for Christmas did not do week during growth and I am not sure why, it is possible I put them in too early and they have all bolted, I will leave the greenery there and see what happens over the next few weeks, I may be lucky enough to get a Christmas Day boiling.
I have established that I have far too many birds and need to reduce the numbers, as the geese are both male, and it is difficult to introduce new geese to each other, they will also be on the menu for the festive dinner this year, along with a couple of surplus to requirement cockerels, sorry guys that’s just the way it is.

The weekend is always much busier than the week days here and this weekend was no exception. The trees that overhang the ménage needed trimming, the ménage surface needed dragging, we dismantled the two coops from the pens ready to clean and creocoat and the horse trailer was ready to be painted. That’s what the before and after title is about this week, the pictures at the bottom are of the trailer before and after its great paint job that my eldest daughter and her boyfriend spent all weekend doing so thank you very much to them.
The other before and after photo I just had to include is of Mia, she had great fun this weekend the power washer being her new found toy! She usually plays with water from the hoses when we are filling up water buckets but this was a whole new level as far as she was concerned, the spray that was coming up when I was washing the chicken coops was so much fun for her but she was filthy at the end of it, there was no point trying to stop her and beside it was very entertaining watching her. She had to have a bath after that and it took two lots of shampooing to get her looking any where near to white. We kept her in after that but needless to say she is back out this morning getting just as dirty again.

Karma is a bitch as they say, but also a great leveller I find and I just had to share this little musing with you as it made me laugh out loud. I mentioned before that the ménage needed dragging and this is done with heavy metal chains on the back of the quad bike. My daughters boyfriend had bought his over and so we were going to use the opportunity to use it for the job, I was going to get to drive it and get the job done, Hubby joked that I shouldn’t be in charge of machinery, I was not in the mood for his jokes and stomped off leaving the job for someone else. The next day he took the hedge trimmer and went to cut back the trees in the school while I got on with power washing the chicken coops (my mood had improved by this point and everything was amicable) a short while later he came limping round the corner, in an only ever so slightly concerned tone, I asked him what he had done, and the blood leaking through his jeans confirmed his story that he had caught his leg with the hedge trimmer. Of course being a good wife we went indoors and I cleaned it up and put a big plaster on it. We went back out and I carried on cleaning the coops, thinking to myself, thats Karma and that will teach you to mock me about being in charge of machinery, this is where Karma took her chance to level me, I took a step too close to the coop I was cleaning and ended up with my face covered in chicken shit that was sprayed up from the washer! Karma, you gotta love it, it will get you in the end.

It definitely feels like the middle of Autumn in the mornings and evenings at the minute. The upside to cold cloudless evenings though is the beautiful sunshine the next day, Sunday was the coldest of starts but the day fully blossomed into a glorious warm happy day, I hope we have a few more days like that over the next few weeks.

I spoke too soon about the squirrel, I spotted him in the week picking up cob nuts from the drive in the front, he obviously had better pickings to get round first! Luckily I have gathered most of the Walnuts already and there are plenty of cob nuts for us to share 🙂

This week has been more of the routine maintenance to get things ready for the big Winter sleep, more muck on the beds, more cutting back and tidying up, making sure that the animal bedding is kept clean and dry, little jobs that will make the winter more manageable. We have a patch of ground just inside the stable side entrance where the rain runs in and together with the foot traffic makes a mess, Hubby laid four slabs down there so this does not happen this year, it is surprising how little changes like that can make a difference.
One of the big differences we have already noticed is that the insulation we put in when replacing the cladding along the front, is doing a great job. Normally we would know how cold it is outside by the temperature inside but it is nice and toasty now and a bit of a shock when you open the door to find a very hard frost!

I have been washing all the hats, gloves and scarves ready for the enviable cold times ahead, all the winter jackets have also had a good wash, ready to get dirty again. Hubby’s wax coat is beyond any kind of salvage, I decided to buy him a new one for Christmas but when it arrived it seemed pointless waiting most of the Winter to give it him so he has an early present. It was intended to replace the old one which I was hoping to throw out but he seems reluctant to part with the old one and was still wearing it this weekend to cut up logs, mind you parting with it will be like moving house, every pocket is full of useless bits and pieces that ‘might come in handy one day’.

The power washer has come out to play again so I seized the opportunity to indulge Hubby’s playtime and lined up a plethora of items that need cleaning, the garden tractor being one item that benefitted from a blast of water and a touch of soap, hopefully we will put it up for sale and get that quad bike instead.

I have been eyeing up the leeks over the last week and with the change in temperature I think it is an ideal time to make a batch of leek and potato soup for the freezer. The parsnips have been growing nicely all summer and should be good to go now that we have had a frost, they are supposed to taste better once the the cold has got to them, I am not sure if that is true as I have never done a taste test to find out but old wives tales usually have some truth in them and so I don’t doubt it for a minute. The last of the fresh summer produce is slowly being used up, I have a bowl of green tomatoes sat on the windowsill in the hopes that they will ripen and a couple of peppers, in fact my middle daughter is here for the day and loves cooking so I have let her loose on the Rayburn to come up with a pasta lunch using all home grown ingredients including the dried herbs, I will let you know the verdict next time!

On Sunday my eldest daughter, her boyfriend and myself began the task of rubbing down the old paintwork on the horse trailer, preparing it for its new paint job next week. It will need a blast with the pressure washer too but I know someone who will be more than willing to do that job 😉 it should look very smart when its finished and it giving it some TLC now will mean that it should last for a few years to come.

I did say that I would write about Mia and her antics this week but she has been impeccably well behaved and not got up to any mischief at all really. She does like to torment the cats though and I am not sure if she wants to befriend them or eat them, either way they are having none of it and sooner or later she is going to get a nasty swipe from one of them. She has been a bit under the weather again this week and I thought at first she was going to have another visit to the vets but I think that she has had a hangover, the small cider apples are just the right size to throw for her to chase and once caught she sits and eats them. Most of the are on the turn and I think they have been fermenting in her belly, she has been much better since we started using a ball instead! Her training is going quite well and she cottons on very quickly, she is very food orientated which makes it a whole lot easier to teach her new things. At the moment she is learning a hand signal and the command to ‘go round’ not as difficult as it sounds because I go through one gate into the front drive she waits behind the gate naturally and then on my way back I tell her to go round and point to the other gate on the far side of the house, she usually gets there long before me. This should be a useful command in the future if I need her to help round anything up, providing she does not just keep going round in circles that is, the next comment to learn ought to be stop I think.

Well we have just eaten the pasta lunch so I can give you the verdict now, it was delicious and there is plenty leftover to have for lunch again tomorrow, I think she can come again 🙂

Mia has been a busy puppy this week, she is developing her character a bit more and we find she is not afraid of much! She is wary of the geese but she will still climb through the gate to follow me across the paddock, she is not at all afraid of the horses feet although she has not been kicked yet, that will be a lesson when it comes. She spends her morning following me around on the feed round, then we play a bit of ball and she is usually tired by lunchtime and crashes in her bed, she has enough to keep her both physically and mentally exercised and so up to now has not been too naughty.

We have had a busy weekend and consequently I can’t think of what I did in the last week at all, I just know that by Sunday evening I was tired out! We cleared the hay barn on the Saturday morning so that we could get the trailer in the dry, we need to rub it down a bit and give it a coat of paint, also if it is not out in all weathers it will hopefully last a good few years. In the afternoon we went to a charity fun day which had been organised by one of our neighbours, luckily the weather was good and as it was within walking distance we were able to have a few more beers than usual 🙂 We went back for a BBQ in the evening and the chap got his home made cider out, he made it from the apples on his trees, he said he just chucked in the apples added a bit of sugar and voila! I wish I was that free and easy with my methods, I am the type who will get the book out and follow the instructions carefully step by step! To this day I still follow a recipe to make things, the only exception is a basic sponge cake and pastry, those I know half by heart.

I just remembered the major occurrence this week and that was the decision to put up the price of the chicken eggs to £1.20 per half dozen. With the cost of feed rising all the time and the threat of an increase of 15 percent on most foodstuffs in the coming months, we decided it was not viable to leave them at a pound. I then decided to weigh out exactly what each chicken should be eating per day and total it up to find how much it is costing us, probably not the best idea and it just confirmed what we already knew, that the chickens don’t make us any money. They would if they all laid everyday, because we easily have the demand for eggs, the problem is that we bought in too many at once to sell on and they are still waiting to be sold. If they laid any eggs to sell in the mean time they would be cost effective but it seems that the weather and the daylight hours are against us and so they are not laying as many as they should be. One of the problems was possibly that I was not feeding them enough, so they have now all had their feed increased to the optimum amount per day and no doubt we will have an egg mountain by the end of the week 😉 I have not even costed in my time and labour, with that included they would probably retail at around £5 a box!! So I still think the eggs are value for money, where else can you buy a protein and vitamin packed ready meal for 20p per portion!

On Sunday we were busy clearing rubbish and taking it to the dump, we also had a feed run to do and I needed some new wellies (again). You surely don’t need some more asked Hubby, yes I replied, when you spend the best part of six hours a day, seven days a week wearing them, they don’t last long I can assure you! Good job I don’t wear Jimmy Choo ones otherwise it would cost a fortune each year. Our eldest daughters BF came over with his quad bike to help sort out a couple of the paddocks, they needed dragging and a broken down elder tree needed cutting up with the chainsaw and bringing back to the woodpile. Whilst he was here he noticed the school mirrors moving around a bit too much in the wind, when they went to look closer they found that the top wooden rail had rotted away completely and basically all that was holding them in was one bolt, so they took them down to make it safe, it’s a good job he noticed, that would have been nasty, not to mention costly, if they had fallen out and smashed while someone was riding in there.

Our middle daughter and BF joined us for a family roast at the end of a busy but satisfying weekend, at this time of year there is nothing better than the noisy chatter of a family sat round the table feasting on homegrown produce and I might complain about the amount of washing up it produces but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Looking forward to the week ahead there are the small chicken houses to clean out as well as the rabbit cages and the Quail, Walnuts and cobnuts to be picked up, I need to try and weed the front area by the main gate in order to plant some of the bulbs that have arrived and a visit to see our cow is on the cards for the weekend. There are a hundred and one other little jobs to do as well so thank goodness for the nights drawing in and the chance to have a rest at the end of the day!