Monthly Archives: June 2012

Just so you know …

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My broadband has been down.  Last time that happened it was because a snail had got into the box that matters (honestly, I’m not making this up) and got wedged.  No broadband.  This time it was because the cat Scarab, who has a prosperous figure and likes his sleep, climbed into the computer cupboard, spent several happy hours kipping among the cables and dreaming about anchovies and pulled a wire out.  Anyway, we’re up and running again but I haven’t done a blog.

London was surprisingly good fun, by the way.  It was raining when I left Wiltshire, but when I arrived in London the sun was hot and everybody was strolling around in T shirts, looking relaxed.  It was like being in another country entirely.  I had a great meeting with Country Living, and it was lovely to look through the proofs of the ‘Tales from a Stone Cottage book’ with them and have some ideas.  Then home again and guess what?  it was raining, and people were trudging about in waterproofs.  As always though, I went and stood on the bridge over our little stream and rejoiced about being back in the deep countryside.  And the animals were most welcoming, though they had a vested interest in that they all wanted to be fed.

The chicks seemed to have grown in just a day, they are getting the most outrageous hairstyles (nice one, Wenceslas!)  The chick I am calling Pippa (Middleton) because she always looks perfect in any situation, is golden with a pure white hat.  Very striking.  Dolly (Parton) is a mass of golden curls and Camilla (Duchess of Cornwall) – you may notice that we have a royal theme in the hen run at the moment – has a most sumptous feather headdress.  The sort you wouldn’t want to sit behind at an opera.

And this is very nearly a full-length blog now.  But I must race away because we have 8 for supper and they are arriving any moment now.  Have a wonderful weekend, and it’s great to be back online.

My proofs are in – huzzah!

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An UPS parcel delivery man arrived today, ran the gauntlet of dogs/cat/geese and delivered the proofs for my ‘Tales from a Stone Cottage’ book.  Mega excitement!  So far I’ve only been sent the pages that have colour illustrations on them, but as that covers just about every page I can get a really good idea of the shape and feel of the book.

And I really, really like it.

I’ve said it before, but Celia’s illustrations are so good.  I find them funny, and true to life, and spookily accurate.  She’s never visited my stone cottage on purpose, so she can use imagination rather than slavish copying, but you would never know it. She’s even got my sheep right.  And pictures like the time the washing line blew down and the geese got involved – honestly, she could have been leaning over the wall with her drawing pad and taking it down from life.

I’ve written some extra bits for the end of each chapter – villager’s handy hints for Food from the Wild etc, and I love the way those have been done.  And most of all it’s great to have the articles under one heading, collected together.

Anyway, I won’t go on about it (much) but it’s an exciting moment.  Tomorrow I venture up to London to have a chat with Country Living, which will be fun.  Apart from anything else, it’ll be great to wear something other than wellies and a harassed expression as I trudge around the quagmire that my previously beautiful section of England has become.  Funnily enough it’s a great year for roses here, I’ve never known them so good.  I was smelling them blissfully with my eyes closed yesterday and very nearly sniffed up a bumblebee, which would have been a shock for both of us.

Other news:  the sheep are feeling light and airy without their wool, and have taken to galloping about in packs.  I was worried at first, thought they were being chased, but then they started bouncing like pogo sticks and I realised it was girlish high spirits.  The horses are high maintenance regarding rugs, which need changing constantly as it rains, then doesn’t rain, then gets intensely hot, then rains again.  And Frillz wants everybody to know that she’s lovin’ it in the hen run now, and spends most of her time up the ladder in the ark having girlie chats with her new mates.

 

 

Wet Open Gardens (and sheep etc)

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One of the local villages had an Open Garden Day yesterday.  The format is now familiar:  the house owners garden frantically in the preceding weeks through the driving rain and extreme winds – despite everything they weed, mow and edge.  As the Day itself approaches the weather forecast gets worse:  expect tidal waves, water spouts, hurricanes, says the BBC calmly.  When the Day dawns it is chilly, overcast but the wind isn’t bad at all really.  Not really.  Not compared to yesterday.  Mid-morning the visitors start arriving, sensibly dressed for late June in waterproof coats, hats, umbrellas and wellies.  They splosh loyally around waterlogged green dens of wetness, admiring the petals on the lawn that were a stand of rather lovely peonies yesterday and then go into the village marquee and eat tea and cakes.  Until the marquee blows away, that is.

It’s important not to dwell on the weather too much (the wettest June in a century according to this morning’s papers).  It’s because we get so much rain that we have such a wonderfully green island.  And absolutely no scorpions etc because the poor things would instantly succumb to pneumonia the second they stepped off the boat they had stowed away on.  And occasionally the sun comes out to show a countryside so intensely beautiful that it’s nearly all worth while.

But in the short term, it’s a right pain, and that’s putting it politely.  Yesterday I sheltered under a wind-lashed tree and admired the remains of a beautiful herbaceous border, which obviously was the culmination of a lifetime’s dedicated work on the part of the lady I was standing next to.  “Lovely plants,” I said, as was true.  “Well yes,” she replied, “but I wish you could have seen the lupins before they blew down.”  And that said it all, really.

Home to comfort and feed the livestock.  The sheep have moved into the field shelter and say that until they’ve grown some wool back they are Not Coming Out.  Please send hay.  The horses say that they need waterproof rugs.  Unless the sun comes out even for a second, in which case they would sweat and need their rugs off.  Until it goes in again when they would like them on again (continues).

The geese continue to be smug.  They like rain, and the new puddles they can spaddle in.  And the happy fact that sometimes it’s raining so hard that I don’t get out of the car to shut the gate in time, and they waddle through in single file and go and chase cars on the road until I’ve fetched an umbrella and herded them back in again.

I don’t know what the hens think, because they never come out of their ark any more.  They say it’s an Ark, and they are Noah, and until somebody sends a dove plus olive branch to prove there’s dry land somewhere out there, they are staying put.

Shearing, it’s not all fun

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The sheep and I have had a bit of a testing time of it recently.  As you may have noticed if you live in the UK, there has been a lot of rain, wind and cold weather recently although it’s ‘the summer’.  In the same way that some people pack up bucket, spade and windbreaks and head for the coast even though it’s pouring with rain and howling a gale because it’s June, so my sheep grow an enormous thick layer of wool which then needs to come off because it’s June.  In the intervals when the sun comes out, it is very warm and the flies rise up in clouds.  And as many people will know, one thing you don’t want to land on a hot, woolly sheep is a blowfly.  So the sheep and me have been watching the weather, watching the flies, and trying to get the Gribbles interested in racing down to shear the sheep in the dry/warm bits of a very cold and wet summer.

The Gribbles, though, don’t do racing.  They do thinking about things slowly and doing them in their own good time.  This is very good for sheep they are shearing, they don’t get nicks and cuts from too hasty passes with the clippers, but it is awful when you are trying to attract them down here to do the sheep when they are (miracle!) dry, but there are mighty clouds building up on the horizon.

Anyway, yesterday it worked.  I rang Gribble Senior and after thought, consultation with the rest of his tribe, and several cups of tea he arrived here with his clippers and did the deed with my girls.  I was happier about this than they were.  He loves an audience, does Mr Gribble, but he absolutely can’t talk and shear at the same time.  So he was telling me a long and complicated anecdote about his owd bull, like, he’s such a character, while poor Lupin was slumped uncomfortably against his knees rolling an eye at me and wondering why she’d ever signed up to be a sheep in the first place.

The final trauma of what is an undeniably undignified and embarrassing business for a sheep is that when the ewes are shorn and returned to their adoring family, their lambs don’t recognise them.  There is a lot of “WHO ARE YOU?  I DON’T LIKE YOU!  GO AWAY AND WHERE’S MY MUM???” in shrill treble bleats before the lambs’ sense of smell tells them that despite all signs to the contrary the elegant lady in front of them really is the comfy old sofa that they used to love so much.

So that’s OK.  And I can hear buzzing of many flies and know that my girls are safe.  But thank heavens shearing comes just once a year!

Impulses

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Different people obey different impulses.  Some shop for shoes (“yes, I’ve got another 50 pairs, but those jade crystal embellished suede spike heeled Jimmy Choos are just so darling … “), some give up boring executive type jobs and decide to build a future career repairing dry-stone walls (this is true: I once did a dry-stone walling course with three of them.  Scary.).  My particular impulse is to fire up our little yellow incubator and put some more eggs in it.  Even if I have poultry coming out of my ears and the last thing I need is more of the little angels.

I don’t even take a straw poll of what comes running when I enter the orchard with a container of corn.  That would be almost sensible, along the lines of:  well, we have enough peacocks (one, more than enough), enough egg laying bantams (I’m running out of egg rich recipes in which to use their largesse and am giving most of their eggs away at the moment), enough non-productive but charming bantams (ie anything that seems to be covered in a mesh of frills instead of feathers) and absolutely no guinea-fowl.

The sad demise of Precious, the guinea fowl, comes in a blog a couple of months back.  I miss her loud African chanting from the top of her favourite apple tree, her hunch backed earnestness as she scampered around the orchard on little fat feet, and her blissfully spotted feathers.  So it would seem sensible, if I have a compulsion to start up the incubator again, to obtain a clutch of guinea-fowl eggs (triangular, spotted, hard as granite) and start to repopulate.

Or how about some quail?  Bonkers, to a man, but the eggs are beautiful and presented in a little plaited straw nest would make a lovely hostess present at supper parties, saving us a fortune in bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates.  Or ducks.  We have no ducks at the moment, and the slugs and snails are rejoicing and partying all night in the flower bed as a result.  Ducks would be great, either Indian Runner (they have a habit of forming into single file, leaning slightly into the wind and patrolling around the garden that I could watch for ever) or call ducks (small, cute and never shut up).

Nah.  I’ve got a friend coming to coffee any moment now bearing has some bantam eggs she found knocking around her hen run that she thought would be pretty.  Probably.  If they are fertile, which they may not be.  She only has 3, so I am padding out the incubator with 9 of our own.  Which means that in 19 days time we will have yet more mixed-race bantams to bring up and release into the hen run to find their place.  And quite honestly (this is the impulse bit) I cannot wait!!

London: there and back

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I went to London yesterday.  Not a great drama you would think, but for me it is.  For a start I have to get up extra specially early to feed and organise all the animals before I go.  Then I walk the dogs around the village, and something about my going-to-London day means that I will meet the most garrulous and needy villagers on my route.  Frank, for example:  “morning, my dear.  Looks like rain, don’t it?” (that’s how he always starts, it’s his opening shot before he really gets going).  Then he was telling me about his mother, who must be over 100 and has decided that she prefers life with no clothes on.  How can I sidle away from that one?

When I had listened to Frank, got home, checked the sheep (still not shorn, so highly attractive to blow-flies and need constant vigilance), made sure that shrieks from Frillz just meant that she’d discovered ladybirds, not that she was being torn apart by the others, and settled the dogs in their baskets I could finally set out for the station.

Another part of going to London is that I always arrive at the station about half an hour too early, just in time (in fact) to just miss the train before the one I am aiming for, a stress in itself.  Yesterday my half hour wait on the platform was made beautiful by an extended family of swifts, who hurled about the sky just above me, avian Spitfire pilots, yelling with happiness as they went.

Then the train to London, and sudden exposure to crowds.  Once I have established to my inner self that I don’t actually know anybody, so it is pointless to scan the faces of passers-by for a friend (as I do in Bath) it is exhilarating to be amongst hordes of strangers, all rushing to do something (what?  I’d love to know).  London was looking good yesterday, the sun was shining (as it was not in Wiltshire), the shops were awesome, and the exhibition of The Horse From Arabia to Royal Ascot at the British Museum was superb.  And although I got back to Paddington just in time to miss the train before mine again, so could hear the announcer urgently calling people to board the train for Chippenham as I arrived at the station, the return trip went smoothly.

I went and stood in the field when I got back.  It was raining steadily, in fact it was pouring, but the air smelt fresh and green and the dogs came and sat with me.  To quote Paul Simon, ‘Gee, but it’s great to be back home!’

 

Frillz moves into the hen run (eek!)

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Frillz has just started at Big School, and for an adolescent chick the move from safe little broody coop into the HEN RUN is just as traumatic as it is for a child moving from primary school into the echoing corridors and complex politics of secondary school.

The time was right:  Fluffy has been a great mother to Frillz but is now bored to her back teeth with her.  There was a time that Frillz would squeak in alarm at something she had spotted – a stripey beetle, a flower that had Looked At Her, and Fluffy would come running, prepared to defend her chick to the death.  If Frillz squeaks now, Fluffy glances over, says “yeah, whatever!” and goes on doing whatever important piece of sunning herself or pecking at something she had been doing when Frillz disturbed her.  Frillz got bigger and the broody ark got smaller, and there are some new chicks coming on who need the ark, and Fluffy laid an egg (a clear message that a hen has done with child rearing and wants to start again) and the sun has come out on a rare visit to England today, and so the move was made.

Fluffy was simply overjoyed to return to the hen run.  There was a brief flurry of activity as she re-established her previous high ranking in the pecking order, then there was dust bathing to do, ignoring Wenceslas to do, marching about in the sun with friends to do – the world is currently her oyster.

It was different for Frillz.  Chicks usually come to the hen run in a gaggle, and have each other for company in the scary early days.  Frillz was an only child, a precious princess, and has not yet learnt group politics.  Now she is automatically at the bottom of the pecking order – even Eugenie, who until today was a doormat to all the other hens, discovered that if she walked towards Frillz with her beak open, Frillz would rush hysterically away.  Eugenie is thrilled and is spending a happy day chasing Frillz and telling the others that the new girl is, like, soooo pathetic.

It won’t last.  Nobody is physically hurting her, and Fluffy occasionally tells the others to back off the kid.  Frillz is young and beautiful and sooner or later will be Pavlova the Pekin cockerel’s hot totty, which will send her rocketing up the pecking order.  But in the short term it’s a steep learning curve for Frillz.

It’s raining!

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I don’t want to sound picky, but running a smallholding gets less fun when it rains and rains and rains (you get the idea).  The new frizzle chicks aren’t very waterproof yet, even less so than non-frizzle chicks, because their new frizzle feathers stick out at odd angles and let the rain in.  Once chicks have reached a certain age I like to put them on the lawn in a little run every day, so they can potter about in the sun, eat the occasional bone-dense fly that strays into their path and generally start getting street-wise.  Not a hope at the moment, they are all indoors with the heat lamp on, doing the chick equivalent of playing video games and getting on each others’ nerves.  And needing their newspaper replaced with astonishing regularity for such small birds.

Back in the henrun, Wenceslas’ dustbath is awash so he’s hanging about in the shelter with the rest of the flock and reminding them of why they couldn’t take him seriously in the first place (I am still amazed that he has fathered at least 4 chicks – all the bantam hens will peck him as soon as look at him).  Pavlova the Pekin cockerel just doesn’t get up at the moment.  He spends all day in the henhouse, presumably wrapped in a duvet and sending out for pizza.  He says he will reappear when the sun does, and not before.

The sheep look tattered and grouchy.  They should be shorn by now, but the Gribbles say they won’t do them until it is dry (at least I think that is what they said, I needed a Babel fish to properly translate “Oi’ll kumana droi like moi dear”, which is what one of them said to me last time I rang.  At least there is no worry about fly strike at the moment, I think all the flies have drowned.  And the sheep are nice and cosy inside their fleeces unlike their cousins in neighbouring fields who have been shorn and look cold, wet and depressed.

And the horses are back in their winter rugs.  I haven’t ridden Slip for days and he’s rapidly turning feral, while Harry has disappeared into the field shelter and tells me he’s applied to emigrate.  Anywhere that doesn’t rain, at all, ever.

On the plus side the geese think it’s marvellous and have discovered puddles in places where we don’t usually get puddles, like the herb garden, and are dibbling happily away with random shouts of joy.  And everything looks lovely and green.  Positive thinking rules (but it’s getting harder …)

Bombshell from the henrun!

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And now for the bombshell from the henrun (we’re talking a very local level bombshell here, nothing scary).   When we returned from our Saharan camping adventure, I put some bantam eggs in our little incubator out of a spirit of adventure.  Long time readers of this blog will know that we had a Polish Frizzle cockerel called Wenceslas who didn’t like the ladies.  The bantam hens used to sneer at him and kick dust in his face, and when it came to a fertility test I discovered that only 1 out of potentially 12 eggs had anything in it.  That thing, by the way, is now called Frillz and looks more like a cockatoo than a bantam (see photo of 4 June).

So Wenceslas was retired from stud duties, and Pavlova the Pekin cockerel came to join us instead.  The hens adore him, and follow him around in a groupie sort of way.  He struts, and preens, and crows, and does everything expected of him.  He’s also a puff of pleasingly bright white feathers with a bright red comb and looks just great (and very masculine) (for a Pekin bantam).  I was ready to rehome Wenceslas if he fought with the new boy, but there was no need.  Soon they were slapping each other on the back and buying each other drinks, and as the weeks progressed Wenceslas retired to a particularly fine dustbath in one corner of the run, while Pavlova told the girls amusing stories and complemented their egg laying prowess in another.  Peace reigned.  It was great.

Back to the new chicks.  6 healthy chicks hatched out and started pottering around and being cute like chicks do.  They were all shades of yellow, so will end up in a pleasing selection of Farrow & Ball cream tones.  Then their first feathers started to grow.  I was watching some of them, and thinking “those chicks are a real mess” as their tiny feathers started sprouting on their shoulders, turning back back like the petals of a daisy rather than laying flat against their bodies.  And then the bombshell hit me:  THOSE CHICKS ARE FRIZZLES!!

Genetics:  some surprisingly weighty tomes have been written on the subject of frizzle breeding, but put very simply, for a hen to be a frizzle, one parent has to be a frizzle and one smooth.  To my certain knowledge my bantams have no frizzles in their backgrounds, ever.  So step forward, and out of your dustbath, Wenceslas!  He is the Daddy of at least 4 of the chicks.  And what Pavlova will say when he works out why his baby girls have Big Hair, remains to be seen.  There will be trouble.  I’ll keep you posted.