Author: frieslandfarm

I thought I would do a pictorial blog this week, I managed to photograph all but the cats who are nowhere to be seen, and the baby quail who hide every time you go near them.

We are still being woken in the early hours everyday by the dog barking at the fox, I hope it gives up soon as it’s very tiring!

The quail are laying a couple of eggs a day again and the little shed is beginning to have a bigger range of products for sale.

The hen that was attacked by the fox last week is doing ok, still not weight bearing on her leg but laying eggs so hopefully she will recover given time.

As you can see from the pics everyone loves a bit of sunshine including me, fingers crossed it stays all week as our middle daughter gets married on Friday 🙂

Luckily there was no one around at 4am on Sunday morning otherwise they would have seen me in the front paddock in my pyjamas trying to round up chickens. The dog began barking and so I opened to the window to see what was occurring, plenty of squeal from my chickens……fox, I grabbed the torch, put my shoes on and ran out there. The fox had got in the pen, the battery was not only low but the earth wire had come off rendering it useless, he had tried to drag out one of the chickens from underneath the coop. We gathered up any hens that had got out and put them in the more secure big coop, put a new battery on and went back inside. I didn’t bother going back to bed however just in case he came back again, in the morning I could see which hen he had tried to get as she had a bald bleeding patch and was standing on one leg, I assume he had pulled it and it was hurting. I took her out of the run and fixed her up, put her in the back run where she promptly laid an egg. She is still looking a bit sorry for herself and I am unsure if she is going to recover, the shock can often kill them very easily.

The rest of the week has passed by without any drama I am glad to say. The weather has been great and we have been able to get on with plenty of outdoor jobs, the weeding of the large veg beds is almost complete with just one more to do, I have adopted a little and often approach and we are much further ahead this year than last so I do not feel under any pressure. We dug up all the remaining leeks to make way for this years veg and there are plenty of them and in good condition, not rotting in the ground kick last year. I will use a few of them to make batches of leek and potato soup for the freezer, but if anyone wants some just give me a shout. The broad beans, peas, garlic and carrots in the poly tunnel are coming along nicely they will be a welcome early harvest and the rhubarb is growing quickly so it won’t be long before we are eating home grown produce again.

Sunday was a most glorious day and the tractor actually started for a change so we got it out and dragged the paddocks that needed doing. We drag them to break up any lumps of mud, pull out any thatch and spread and muck that is still on the ground so that the grass grows a bit more evenly. We tried rolling but it is still a little soft and the tractor got stuck more than once and so we will wait until next weekend and try again. It is a fine balance because while most of the paddock is drying out fast, the poached areas near the gateways are still boggy and difficult to roll, but if you leave it too long it bakes hard and is too lumpy to roll, timing is key.

The eggs from the incubator hatched out on Friday, I currently have seven Norfolk Greys and three Light Sussex bantams, I have more eggs on the way, all bantams, Rhode Island Reds and Lemon Pekins, they will go in this week. This year is all about the birds, I have just ordered sixty point of lay hens on top of the sixty arriving in April, I have also ordered six day old geese and 12 day old meat birds, as well as the twelve day old ducks arriving soon, plenty of new birds to keep me busy on the farm in the next couple of months.

These are the newest arrivals in the brooder, I have just bought an extra large indoor rabbit cage for them to move into when they get big enough 🙂

Finally we have had a run of decent weather which makes life a lot easier and certainly a lot happier 🙂

I feel much more inclined to get on when the ground is dry and I am not trudging through mud, will still have some fairly wet areas especially where the horses have churned up the ground but it is drying up daily.

The vegetable garden has got some much needed attention this week, I have spent at least three days out there, weeding and tidying, I even cut the grass, it was a bit wet and sticky but now it has dried out it looks ok. I have planted the onion sets and the garlic, then covered it over with environmesh so that the birds don’t tug at the ends of the onions and pull them back out of the ground. Mum has been over this week and put weed barrier down on the birds, bees and beer bed, it got very weedy last year and was quite impossible to keep it tidy so this year we have decided to cover the ground and hopefully it will be less work. I have also been weeding and cutting back in the herb garden, that got a bit neglected last year and needed an overhaul, any herbs that could be divided have been potted up ready for selling. There are four sage bushes in there but they have never done very well, they obviously don’t like it there and so I have dug them up and potted them for the time being until they recover, I then need to find somewhere else for them to be planted, somewhere they will thrive.

One of the paddocks also had a bit of a makeover when I had a spare hour last week, they can get overlooked with so much else to do, but cutting back the hedge so that it does not interfere with the electric fence is just as important as well as fixing any broken fencing and picking up stray bits of rubbish, generally making sure it is fit for purpose which is to keep the horses in.

We have had a couple of nights of disturbed sleep this week for various reasons, the first was the dog yapping continuously, we went out but could not see anything untoward, in the morning I discovered that one of the ducks had got herself shut in the fruit cage and was there all night which is why the dog was creating a fuss. The second time was a bit louder, with excited barking and a new noise that I had not heard before, at 1.30 in the morning I went out to see what was going on. One of the dogs had a cockerel in his kennel, the other who is locked in was trying to dig through the wooden floor to get to the cockerel. There was no way I was going to be able to get the bird off of the dog so I went to the freezer and got the other one a bone to chew on hoping that would quieten them down, it did, eventually. It seems that the fox had opened the door to the run where the cockerel was as there were feathers everywhere in there, I can only make an educated guess at what happened next, the cockerel must have got out through the door ran round to the front on the farm, a trail of feathers shows which route he took, then hopped over the gate and into the waiting dogs jaws! Out of the frying pan into the fire 😦

The Norfolk Grey eggs that I set in the incubator are due to hatch at the end of this week, I candled them and all of them are fertile so I am hoping for a high hatch rate, it was not the same for the bantam eggs only four out of six were fertile so less success there. They won’t be going outside for quite a while yet but I have been getting the pen that they will eventually go to ready, best to get it done sooner rather than later when it would be a last minute rush, I have been there before lol.

On a personal front we have exciting times coming up very quickly, at the end of this week my brother and his family will be flying in from Australia, and a week after that our middle daughter will be getting married, I have my fingers crossed for some weather like the weekend just gone. Trying to keep my nails clean and unchipped is proving to be a bit of a challenge particularly as I like to hand weed and I have tried different gloves but they all let the dirt through in the end. I shall have to have a manicure and take before and after photos as it is unlikely that my hands will look like that again for a very long time!

I have had a fairly packed week this week and certainly an eventful one. They say everything comes in threes and I think that is true to an extent.

The beginning of the week was a very productive one, I fixed the greenhouse back up so that it was useable again, no wind and rain blowing in any more, tidied up all the plastic pots so they are no longer flying all round the garden every time the wind blows. I also took the opportunity on a dry day to give the greenhouse a coat of wood preservative and put a few more slabs down around the outside, it’s looking good any ready for anything now. I potted up Lupin seedlings that I found while I was weeding and a couple of small Bay trees that were growing from the roots of my big Bay tree. Some Mushroom spawn that I ordered I have now put in a dark box full of rotted muck and finger crossed they will grow, I also potted up around 12 raspberry canes that Mum bought over and a loganberry. A visitor who came to get some muck for his garden is kindly going to bring me a Clematis later on in the year that he has potted up which will be some welcome colour and much appreciated. Those jobs were all in between the rainy days of course, when it’s nice like this morning it’s easy to get on, I love a frosty sunny morning, it lifts the soul, but the minute the rain comes I scuttle off back indoors, mainly because it’s cold with it and I don’t want to end up with the flu.

That was all at the beginning of the week, by Thursday our first of three struck, that was the phone call so say that the Landrover hand broken down. It was at the end of the day as our eldest daughter was driving home, luckily Hubby was not too far away and went to find her, it had to go into the garage to be fixed thankfully it does not look like it will be too expensive! The second and by far the worst was on the Friday evening, we knew the Rayburn and the flues needed cleaning and they were scheduled for the weekend. For some reason as we were getting ready to go and see our middle daughter for her birthday, Hubby decided to open her up to get her going a bit and then went for a shave, the next thing I saw was smoke billowing across the front yard. The chimney had caught fire and there was a lot of clinker in the flue box, normally when you shut it all down it dies down and goes out, but not this time. It took us a couple of hours to get the situation fully under control, Hubby was up on the roof with a wet towel over the flue but the enamel flue got so hot that it was glowing red in places and the twin wall flue got so hot that anything remotely flammable near it started to catch. Luckily we have a small kitchen extinguisher which I hate because it is quite ugly, but on this occasion I was glad it was there, it is the first time I have ever used one, I hope it’s the last. This one had powder in it and when I set it off the powder worked immediately but there was a layer of it all over the kitchen, then Hubby decided to be on the safe side he was smash a whole in the kitchen ceiling to make sure that nothing was in the ceiling cavity, the place looked like the aftermath of a disaster movie at the end of it. Eventually when we were sure it was all cold we went off to have a bit of birthday cake and a well earned cuppa. We were up early on the Saturday morning to start cleaning out all the flues and the fire box and of course the kitchen, typically it had been a cold night and so the sooner we did it the warmer we would be. The calendar is now marked once a month to clean out the flues even if they don’t need it doing!

As I am writing this it occurs to me that we have had more than three things actually as five of the Quail have died this week, probably my fault as I put them outside a bit too early I think. The most likely explanation is that they were too cold and huddled up together squashing the ones at the bottom, I have put an extra thick hay bed in for the remainder and so far they seem fine.

The last of the three that I originally thought about was the horse. Three of them went down to the field in the village on Saturday afternoon, this helps to keep our paddocks from getting too poached and gives them a change of scenery. Last night one of the horses appeared unwell, she had not eaten breakfast or dinner and was not interested in her hay, to make matters worse it was hammering down and she was laying down in the mud. Things always seem to happen at night when it is more difficult to asses a situation. She had to be bought back up to the yard which normally would not be a problem, but it was pitch black and raining heavily, walking back through the village is not too bad as it is lit but once outside the village and on the lane back home there are no lights. Torches in hand to warn traffic they walked her back without incident thankfully. Her temperature was up slightly and she has a bit of a snotty nose, so she is now in the warm and had some medication and seems to be a bit better this morning, certainly gobbling her food down anyway which is a good sign.

The weather forecasters say we can expect warmer weather at the end of the week, I do hope they are right, I have onion sets that need planting and it would be nice to be able to spend a couple of days in a row out on the garden to get everything up together. I have some little tete a tete daffodils that have now flowered and they make me smile whenever I walk past them, it’s great to see a splash of bright colour in amongst the rain and the mud, for me they hold the promise of what is to come.

It is quite cathartic writing a weekly blog, not that I ever go back and read what I have written previously, I suppose one day I will, when I am retired if that ever happens! Even though not much than the usual routine happens during the Winter month and the blog is sometime like a retrospective weekly weather report, to me it is important to write it down, if anyone reads it or not is another matter entirely 🙂

As I have said in previous blogs, I sit down to write this and think, what have I done this week, it’s hard to remember unless it’s written down as I go, the weekend stuff is easy because it’s fresh in my memory but the rest is very often a blur. Routine is important and becomes the norm and the norm is not very exciting to write about, but without the routine the animals would probably rise up and revolt. Somehow, without a clock of any kind, they know exactly what time feeding is, the chickens are usually gathered all along the fence, the dogs start whining, the horses become agitated and the ducks waddle back from the paddocks before I even step outside the door, of course they can’t feed themselves and they rely on me to be punctual.

We have spent a couple of the better days this week, tidying up more of the front areas, I say we as Mum has been down to help on one of the days and Hubby has helped to cut the front hedge on another day, we now have a big pile of cuttings heaped up ready to burn as they deteriorate, it is surprising how much debris is created. The front is now ready for Spring and it won’t be long before the buds begin to burst open and the whole area will be green and full of life again, the daffodils and primroses are also budding almost ready to give us bursts of colour which will be much appreciated.

One of the jobs we achieved this weekend was to move the chickens from their very muddy, smelly paddock to a fresh paddock next door with grass. There is a bit of logistics to this job as it’s best to do it first thing before letting them all out that way they can be contained inside the electric fencing, well that’s the theory. It didn’t quite go according to plan this time however, the ground is still quite soft and towing the big coop was a little difficult, the smaller ones can just be lifted into place but somehow some of the Hens got free and so I decided to let them all have a bit of freedom to roam. This was fine until they decided that the lane was a great place to roam which led to a phone all from our neighbour to tell us that they were all over the road, trying to round them up was like a scene from a comedy sketch. They clearly enjoyed this new life of exploration and were not in any hurry to go back behind the fence, one of them was like a road runner, every time we thought we had got her cornered she would shoot out and run off down the paddock, after about half an hour of chasing and trying to entice them in with various tit bits we finally managed to get the last one in. They are obviously happy in the new paddock as the egg numbers increased almost immediately and it is lovely to see them in a much better grassy environment than the mud pool they were in before.

This week I also received the eggs for the incubator that I have been waiting for, Norfolk Greys and some Light Sussex bantams, although we sell point of lay hens people often ask if I have any bantams so this year I will be able to say yes providing the hatch goes well. The Quail I hatched out are now four weeks old and it will only be another two weeks before they become fully mature and ready to lay eggs, they are quick to develop and I have been busy getting an outside cage ready for them to move into probably sometime in the next week. The objective this week will be to wean them off of the lamp they are under, they are still having it turned on at night but during the day it is turned off, and I just have to keep my fingers crossed that once they go out the weather is kind and does not suddenly drop in temperature.

American Button Quail of various colours

I sometimes wonder at what point I should just give up, after being on top of everything, or so I thought, it seems that I am to be tested or challenged to see if I am indeed worthy of calling myself a gardener.

After getting ahead with the greenhouse preparations and snugly bubble wrapping it, the winds came along and took out the back glass panels, some of those I had only just refitted, which in turn lifted the polycarbonate roof panels, and it goes on because that let the rain in and now I have discovered that ALL of the seeds I had ordered have got soaked, some beginning to sprout on their own and some just rotting away.

Then there is the weed barrier I put down on the bean bed to make life easier, well the dogs decided to get in there and play chase, result, holes in the weed barrier, not the best thing that could happen to it.

All of that with the chicken massacre makes me think f**k it! Shall I go back to suburbia and retire?

Three steps forward, two steps back, always, arrggghhh

The only topic of conversation across the whole country this week has been the weather, you could not avoid it or the coverage of it. We have had just about everything except snow thrown at us this Winter. Wild and wet is the description I have used this week, at one point I did wonder if we would still have a building standing and I know many people were kept awake one night just because of the noise of the wind. Having said that we are still a lot better off than large parts of the world, there are fires and droughts, mudslides, hurricanes and flooding for hundreds of miles, yes people have been flooded and lively hoods are affected and there have been a few fatalities but all in all, although major to us, it minor in comparison. On Sunday, after all that, we were rewarded with the most glorious sunny day, I don’t think I have ever seen such a perfect Winters day, or maybe I was just delighted that it was not raining or windy! Wherever you went people’s demeanour was upbeat, whistling, humming, smiling and walking with heads up, it was a real tonic.

During the worst of the windy weather, the night we could not sleep, the gate on my pure breed pen blew off, I image the latch blew off first leaving it swinging in the wind then the hinges gave up and off came the gate. At first, the morning after the storm I was walking around feeding thinking, well that’s good, there are no trees down and no apparent damage, then I got the chicken pen, the sight before me could only be described as a massacre 😦 every single chicken dead and scattered all over the place. Presumably foxy didn’t mind the windy weather and decided that this was a great opportunity for a bit of fun. I was, of course, gutted, but it is one of the things you learn to get over quickly, you can’t let it bring you down, we have lost so many birds to the fox and even the dogs that I would be locked away by now if I had dwelt on it too much.

We had shot a fox on the Sunday night and as I always say another takes its place very quickly. During the week I was chucking up muck onto the pile when I caught a whiff of fox, picture this, I am stood on the top with a pitchfork in my hand saying out loud, ‘I can smell you’ lol I think I must have looked and sounded like the kiddy catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

The Quail are growing well and unusually as yet I have not lost any, normally you get a couple that die for no apparent reason but these are doing very well, I am having to clean them out everyday now though as the brooder unit is small and they mess it up quickly. If they are not cleaned they gather the muck on the end of their toes and that in turn goes hard forming little balls which can cause infection or toenails to come off, so a clean environment is very important, not to mention that if you don’t do it they stink to high heaven.

As yesterday was so lovely and I had to be outside to burn a few chicken bodies, I took the rake out the front with me and started to give the front yard a tidy up, raking up soggy leaves and snapped off twigs, it was lovely to be able to get going and I was probably lulled into a false sense of security thinking that the rest of the week will be the same. As it turns out we have a drizzle again this morning but it’s very mild with it, and yesterday’s boost is still with me this morning so I am only hampered by the weather not my mood.

Oops forgot to publish yesterday, went out to re-felt the shed roof and totally forgot! I have been carrying on outside and cut but the willow whips in the driveway and any other overhanging branches from various shrubs and trees. My new hedge trimmer arrived today so I will be trimming everything in sight over the next few weeks lol, we have a petrol one but I find it’s too heavy for me and so I ordered an electric one, at least when Hubby is busy with other things I can get on with preparing for the arrival of Spring 🙂

Quick one today as I have been away this weekend and got lots to catch up on plus it’s a lovely day so get busy while I can!

I think we had one day of sunshine last week, I used that day to get out on the veg patch and do some work, I put the wood ash from the fire around the strawberries to encourage flowering then used the weed barrier to cover the soil around them so that the weeds don’t get out of hand and also to stop the fruit spoiling on the dirt. I also put a whole section of barrier right down the bed that will be for runner beans, they don’t go in until quite late and usually the weeds are rampant by then. I am hoping to save myself a lot of time from weeding by doing this with most beds this year and planting into cuts I make for the plants to go in.

On the same sunny morning I looked out of the side window to see a herd of fallow deer which is unusual, they were grazing the hedgeline and it was a lovely sight to see, things like that can really perk up the day.

The rest of the week was wet, very wet and so not much got done outside, to be honest I was just killing time until the Friday when the girls all went away for our middle daughters Hen Weekend. I left Hubby in charge and on my return all animals were still alive and doing well so he did a good job 🙂

This morning is a rare and lovely sunny day and so I am eager to get on and do plenty of jobs that have had to wait clean out the dog kennels, the duck pen and the chickens. I need to get this done before the next band of rain comes along which will be shortly I am sure. I gave the horses a bit of a treat as well today, the paddock they have been wintering in is in a bit of a state now, the mud is wet and calf deep, this morning I decided to put them in one of the untouched paddocks. It is the chicken paddock really but we have not been able to get on the field with the tractor to move them, the reason being the the tractor would make such a mess in the soft earth it’s not really worth doing it. The horses were clearly delighted as this paddock actually has grass, they did a few high kicks before they set about munching it off. It is one of the best feelings to be able to put your animals somewhere that is not muddy at this time of year, and they are just having it as a one day treat otherwise it will look like the other paddocks if I leave them on there too long.

Make the most of the lovely weather today whatever you are doing, I certainly will be 🙂

Well it’s February folks, thank goodness time is not standing still and we are moving towards better weather. The discussions on the farm revolve around the weather forecast and how much more rain we can take, the fields are waterlogged and it is soft under foot, the paddock that the horses are in looks like a ploughed field this morning. They always come back good in the Spring but I often wonder at what point they will just stay a churned up mess.

There is very little happening on the farm at the minute in the way of animals, the chickens are just paddling around in mud, still laying quite well though. I have started keeping an egg count everyday to see how the numbers fluctuate, they are fairly consistent with the ducks laying five or six a day and the hens laying around twenty six. I was cleaning the birds out every week but it has got to the point where my walking around the huts is making it a whole lot worse so I have just been topping up the bedding and will wait until the ground dries up a little. This time of year is when everything gets the better of you, you can’t get on to do things but the more you leave it, the worse it gets and there will be a great deal to do once I am able to. The same can be said for the veg garden, you can’t get on it to do much as it’s wet and sticky but the weeds are beginning to grow, at least this means the ground is warming up! I did manage to sow some carrots in the poly tunnel and some more broad beans and peas in the greenhouse but that’s it so far. After watching country file last night, I know we are a lot better off than most especially around Gloucester way, this prolonged bout of wet weather is probably going to ruin a lot of farmers, one lost £160,000 last year and is still under water, I don’t know what the answer is but something needs to be done otherwise farming as this country knows it will be gone.

I have spotted a range of wild birds this week, the usual little brown ones such as sparrow etc and also chaffinch, bullfinch, pied wagtails, wren, and the Little Owl which I have seen twice sitting on our fence out the back, the smaller birds have begun checking out suitable nesting sites, I hope they don’t start nesting too soon because if we then have a cold snap any offspring are likely to perish.

The Quail that began to hatch out last week are now fifteen in number, not a brilliant hatch but to be honest better than I thought it would be. We had to put a hot water underneath the brooder box for the first five days as they were so tiny and unable to generate much heat between them. They are now doing really well and running around the box keeping themselves warm. I can’t get a decent picture of them as the bulb in the brooder is red and it does not make for very clear pictures which is shame as they are very cute. These are American Button Quail and should be various different colours, at the moment there are grey, black and striped chicks, one of the black ones has two yellow wings so it will be interesting to see how that one feathers up.

As I have been unable to do much outside I did a bit of baking this week, welsh cakes on the Rayburn hot plate, a fruit cake and a lime and coconut cake, which have nearly all gone already! We also had our first roast pork joint from the pigs that went to slaughter a couple of weeks ago. It is so tasty, these were fed a great diet of windfall apples, acorns, nuts, and veg from the garden no wonder they taste so good 🙂 we have enough left over form the roast yesterday for bubble and squeak today, one of Hubby’s favourite mid week meals, it always smells good but I am not so keen on eating it myself. One of the other stories on country file last night was about the ‘pig idea’ this is about processing the huge piles of food waste and feeding it back to the pig industry. To be honest my first thought is that we should not have that kind of waste in the first place, I was quite shocked at the huge pile of chocolate not to mention the bread and cracker pile. We don’t have a lot of food waste here, I try to buy only what we will use up and if there is any left it goes to the animals. The dogs will eat left over dinner if there is any, the ducks eat bread crusts, the chickens eat any veg or salad or fruit that is going soft, the only thing that does not go to them would be left over pudding and that does not happen very often! Any veg peelings go onto the compost heap now that the pigs have gone, I also put the toilet roll middles in there and egg shells, I have been known to put socks and any old cotton clothing in there too.

I have cleaning and washing to do today after the family have been home all weekend, I am going to spend my day dreaming of drier, sunnier times and hope they are not too far away!

It’s been a quiet week really, that’s not to say we have not been busy just that nothing urgent or important to be done by a deadline.

Most of the days start with the usual routine, firstly feed the cats as they get under your feet if you don’t, then feed the horses before they start kicking at the doors, feed the chickens and let them out from their nights roosting, feed the ducks and collect their eggs as they will have laid overnight. Make sure everything has water for the day, feed the dogs and tidy up after them, check the egg shed to make sure there are some in there, collect the money and any empty boxes, then back over to the stable block to rug up and turn out the horses and muck them out so that they return to clean beds this evening. Then comes my favourite part of the day, Coffee, I don’t know why but that coffee always tastes better than any other I have during the day.

While drinking my coffee I tend to make a list of jobs I want to achieve during the day, I find that if I do a list they are more likely to get done, if I don’t, I wander round thinking, what is it I need to do today. I have been trying to concentrate on getting the greenhouse ready, after smoking it, I have cleared everything out and brushed down all the cobwebs etc, then I used a staple gun to put bubble wrap all around the bottom and sides to try and insulate it a bit more. I have decided to run a paraffin heater in there for a few weeks to get an early start so, I monitored the temps and got up to a good 20 degrees, the overnight temps only have to be frost free and the paraffin ran out before I could get an evening reading, so I will have to wait for some more to arrive. I cleared out all the pots and seeds trays and went through them in the garden, one pile of broken ones to bin and one pile that will need washing and disinfecting, the mini hurricane we had on Saturday afternoon, more about that in a minute, blew the whole lot all over the place where they still remain waiting for me to go and pick them all up.

In the afternoons the feeding routine begins again, usually an hour before Sunset as the chickens need an hour to digest their food before settling down for the night, if they still have food in their crop and the temperatures plummet it will not digest and they will get ill. On Saturday afternoon we had made the decision to go out and get the feeding done, we put on our boots and coats and went out, the wind had blown a pane of glass out of the roof of the coop so Hubby picked up a piece of board and his drill to make a temporary repair, we got half way over the paddock when it began to rain, no big deal this often happens, but all of a sudden from nowhere came, what I can only describe as a mini hurricane, we were suddenly pelleted by very cold hailstones and very strong winds. The wind was so strong you could hardly stand up and the cold wind literally took your breath away, it was over within about five minutes but by that time we were completely soaked through to the skin and freezing cold. I have never seen anything like it or perhaps just never been caught in anything like it, I did stand a laugh, a bit like a madman at one point, it was all very surreal, that’s when everything that was not tied down went flying all around the farm, the plastic pots included. The girls were all here and on seeing us struggling out in the weather rushed outside to help with any other jobs that needed finishing, getting logs in, collecting the eggs etc. when we came in we had to get out of our wet clothes, and have a cuppa before going back out to finish the day off.

The Quail eggs that I put in the incubator on the 10th of January, began to hatch out bang on cue yesterday, I set up the brooder box and moved a couple of hatchlings over in the evening but it soon became apparent that it was too cold for them, so we moved the box into the kitchen and put a hot water bottle underneath the box as well. This morning we have had eight more hatch and have a total of eleven as I write this. The hot water bottle was redone this morning and and I found a higher wattage bulb to put in, they are now moving around quite well and will hopefully continue to gather strength. These are American Button Quail, I have not had these before and they come in lots of different colours so it will be interesting to see what we end up with.

I have had a couple of plants delivered this week, a cranberry and a fig, they can be potted up and left until I decide where they are going to be planted in Spring, the seed potatoes have also arrived, I usually put them into egg trays and leave them somewhere frost free and dry to chit ready for planting into the ground once the soil warms up, if I put them in too early they would probably rot away so no point being too keen. We are now on the homeward run towards Spring and warmer ground temperatures and like me, most gardeners I speak to are chomping at the bit to get the new growing season underway, I have noticed the snowdrops in flower and the daffodils leaves are pushing up nicely through the cold ground so it won’t be long now.

On today’s list is, retrieve all the stuff that has been blown around the place, bag up the rubbish ready for going in the skip, so that’s what I am off to do now before we get any rain!

This is the greenhouse with the smoke bomb doing its job inside, it stinks and was leaking out of various crevices that I had not sealed up!

The Quail hatchlings all nice and cosy in a box on the kitchen table.