Tag Archives: mud

Where’s everybody gone?

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Slip’s hurt his foot and is on box rest at the moment, which is trying for all concerned.  Slip hates being confined indoors and makes his feelings known by bellowing at the top of his voice and jumping up and down on three legs.  I have to wrestle with his foot, a hot poultice, a disposable nappy and a carrier bag twice a day, sometimes while he’s trying to dance the Charleston at the same time.  The poultice goes on the foot, the nappy goes over the poultice as padding, and the carrier bag goes over the whole lot to keep everything lovely and dry.  That’s the theory anyway.  Slip has mastered the art of kicking the entire package off in one fluid movement if he’s feeling emotional, which he is quite a lot of the time at the moment.  As I say:  trying for all concerned.

Anyway, because of Slip’s little problem I walk up and down our lane several times a day to reach his stable without having to wade through the lake of goo that our pleasant meadow has become, and it’s quite remarkable how empty the place is at the moment.  It feels as if the entire village has been abducted by aliens leaving only me.  And of course Slip, trying to kick his manger off the wall.  I don’t think the aliens wanted Slip – too noisy.

In normal times I would meet Frank, swatting at the hedgerows with his stick.  Or Julia, training for what was initially a marathon until she decided to lower her sights to a half marathon and has been recently been overheard saying that fun runs are actually very taxing.  I think she’ll end up doing a bracing walk, but I haven’t seen her out training for anything for weeks.  Or Audrey with five terriers on leads, each terrier heading in a different direction.  I haven’t even seen Mr Addington who normally would appear out of nowhere and tell me I was doing Slip’s poultice wrong.

Nothing.  I blame it on the mud – the lanes are thick with it and the bridlepaths and footpaths are more or less unusable.  I think that the villagers have given up the unequal struggle and are hibernating like hedgehogs until the sun comes back and the mud dries out.  I can’t blame them and I think I’d join them if it wasn’t for my daily poulticing duties.

Mud, my specialist subject

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Mud.  Looking positively (it takes effort but it’s possible) mud means that the water troughs aren’t frozen and the animals are reasonably warm and comfortable.  I wasn’t here for our recent cold snap, but I’ve heard many reports of cold fingers fumbling at horse rug straps, and hens refusing point-blank to come out of their hen houses, and geese denting their beaks on frozen water tubs.

None of that applies at the moment, it’s mild and deeply, deeply muddy.  Mud was a specialist subject anyway, as it will be to anybody with a smallholding in England.  Now I’m bringing it up to PHD standard.  And here are a few of my findings:

Hen mud.  Loose and slidy, pale grey in appearance and thin in texture.  Taking a hen at random (Frillz) it turns sparkling white feathers into tatty and grubby rags.  Frillz is cross about this and blames me.  She’s a girl who is usually high in self-esteem, but not at the moment.  She adds that if I want any eggs I can whistle for them until the hen mud goes.

Goose mud.  Soft and glutinous.  Goose mud doesn’t happen naturally, it has to be worked up into a froth by the orange rubber beaks of geese.  After they have spaddled mindlessly for a few hours the goose mud is ready to go.  The plan is (if you are a goose) that you stand in it, then walk calmly but with intent to the hay barn where you stand again.  The goose mud transfers to the floor of the hay barn where it sets like concrete and is nearly impossible to shift without power hosing.  A success in every way (if you are a goose).

Dog walk mud.  Deep, intense and yielding.  Contains nameless horrors.  The innocent bridle paths and footpaths where I have walked the dogs every day for ten years have become bottomless pits of filth, often with spontaneous streams running along them.  The Labradors come home coated from stem to stern.  Indie (whippet puppy) has several times needed saving from a slough of despond, and his pretty white party socks disappear daily behind a coating of dark brown yuk.  Not recommended, even in a positive mood.

Field mud.  Dark, sticky, reaching down to Earth’s primal core.  Pockets of rainwater in every hoofprint.  Field mud swallows buckets, hay bales, salt licks.  It forms deep pits in gateways and (the real point of this blog) I lost a wellie in it this morning.  It was bad enough hopping around in a rather nice sock (why or why did I wear a Christmas present cashmere sock in my wellies?)  But the sheep and Harry came to watch me and I know, I just know, that the whole lot of them were laughing at me.

Thank heavens for a mug of coffee and some CHOCOLATE back at base.

Merry Christmas, and lets forget about the mud!

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To take the clear-eyed view, it’s not very Christmassy in England at the moment.  It’s green, grey, mild and the land feels squelchy like a sponge that’s been taken out of the bath and left dripping on the side.  It’s been almost exactly the same since April, quite honestly, the whole concept of seasons seems to have gone out of the window.

In our nomadic lives we’ve celebrated Christmas in places as diverse as Berlin (freezing cold, sparkling white, serious Christmas trees) and Adelaide (swimming in the warm Pacific, Christmas pudding flavoured ice cream).  We’ve bought the boys tasteful wooden toys in Hameln Christmas market (footnote:  the boys rejected the tasteful wooden toys and fastened on cheap tubes of plastic cars instead.  We’ve kept the TWT and intend to inflict them on as yet unborn grandchildren at some distant date).  We’ve gone carol singing in driving sleet in Belfast.  But for sheer, unadulterated mind-over-matter you just can’t beat an English Christmas.

We hosted a village Christmas drinks party a couple of nights ago and reality was suspended.  We served warming mulled wine, although outdoors it was just as mild as the unpleasant June that is still a recent memory.  We cooked mountains of comfort food type drink eats – sausages, devils on horseback etc – the high calorific sort of thing designed to see you home through the blizzards.  Except there was only mud to trudge home through.

People wore big, jolly jumpers, and silly Christmas hats, and gave each other Christmas cards with pictures of snowmen, and sheep in snow, and cottages with snow on the thatch.  And everybody pretended that we’re in the middle of some Victorian memory Christmas season, where you blow on your frozen fingers and drag a Yule log home through the snow drifts.

And in a sort of way I’m all for it – indoors the house looks wonderful, with the Christmas tree full of decorations, and holly and ivy everywhere we could shove it.  Outdoors is one huge mud bath filled with muddy animals, but at least their water troughs aren’t freezing over, and we don’t have to worry about burst pipes.

I’m going to go with the village flow, and wear Nordic jumpers and pretend that I need to eat vast mountains of calorific food to keep the cold out.  Merry Christmas one and all!  Ho ho ho!  Mud, what mud?

Muddy hens

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My hens are having a trying time at the moment.  Long term readers of my blog will know that, when I choose hens, common sense and practicality fly out of the window.  I’m steely eyed and sensible when it comes to sheep (well, up to a point I am.  Apart from teaching Teazle to shake hands that is) and I know that this is how I should be with hens.  What I need are good solid hybrid hens to lay eggs and keep out of trouble.  But when I see frills and feathery feet, I lose my head and what I actually get are the very opposite of sensible.  My flock is composed of pekins, frizzles and other impractical bantams, and they give me a ridiculous amount of pleasure and the occasional egg.

On a summers’ day, when they are pecking around the garden you’ve never seen anything so pretty.  The frizzles look as if they’ve got on the wrong side of an industrial wind tunnel, while the pekins are soft fluffy feather balls.  And of course when a frizzle feels a Special Something for a pekin (or vice-versa), the resultant chicks are truly fab – blobs of twirly feathers with frilly slippers sticking out from underneath.  Prize for the maddest chicken goes to the frizzle Polish cockerel (remember Wenceslas?) who combines the wind tunnel look with seriously Big Hair.  His chicks are fluffy, and frilly, and have inbuilt fascinators, and just to make it perfect the whole lot come in a delightful rainbow of colours.

Then Indie (whippet puppy) came to live here, which means that for the moment (for their own safely) the hens are banned from the garden.  Indie’s not that bad, and getting better, but the hens are liable to panic and shed feathers if he looks at them in a funny way.  So it’s better if they don’t meet until Indie has reached the age of reason.

So the hens are confined in what used to be a pretty, grassy henrun.  Because of the recent extreme rain it was tending to mud but the hens, in their fury at being incarcerated, have trodden it into a wallow.  Pekins have practically no ground clearance and frizzles are just silly, and everybody has got plastered in liquid mud.  The hens now spend their days doing very obvious preening and giving me dirty looks.  And if I think I’m going to get any eggs at all until I’ve got Indie under control and they are allowed back into their flower bed dust baths – well, I can forget it.

Rain (again)

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Rain.  It’s always at the forefront of my mind at the moment.  I’m sure I can remember a time when green, trembling Spring developed into glorious warm Summer followed by mellow golden Autumn then by crisp icy Winter but all we seem to get in this particular corner of England is grey soggy sameness.  Whatever the time of year it’s damp, mild-ish, grey/white skies, heavy dew and usually drizzle.

This morning for instance I struggled into wellies, coat, hat to go and do the round of feeding and checking animals.  A horse came past and a friendly voice hailed me, and when I looked up all I could see was a cone of Gortex riding along.  Could have been anybody – all identifying features of both horse and rider were swathed in waterproofs.  It’s like living in a grey-tiled bathroom with the shower constantly dribbling cold-ish water down on us.

The English, bless them, rise to the occasion.  We still plan fetes, garden parties, shows and ploughing matches and either trudge about in them underneath serious hats and umbrellas saying things like “I’m sure they said it was going to improve by teatime”, or if they get cancelled “do you remember five years ago?  It was lovely then”.  But really, by the law of averages, we deserve just a little let up soon.

We have a sort of stream running through the property.  I say ‘sort of’ because it’s a winterbourne – only flows in the winter months.  In between it’s just a grassy ditch in which lambs like to hide and then jump out to surprise their mothers.  Not this year though: it’s run steadily since April.  In a way it’s nice, because as time goes by it looks more and more stream-like and I start to wonder when the first minnows and crayfish will arrive.  But it’s not spring-fed, it’s just a drainage ditch and it’ll never really be a proper stream.  It’s a shame for this year’s lambs.  Without a ditch to play tigers in they were at a loose end until I brought a bale of straw into the field for them.  Then they played king of the castle instead, until the bale gave up the unequal struggle and exploded, and their mothers boringly ate it.

The horse field is mud, and the sheep field is dripping grass, and the hens are on strike because their dust baths aren’t dusty.  The geese love it, and spaddle about in the puddles sneering at all the less aquatic animals.  The dogs are continually getting muddy up to their armpits and coming indoors and shaking messily over everything.  Cat gets wet and zips rapidly upstairs and onto somebody’s bed where he cleans himself thoroughly and transfers the debris to the duvet cover.  And my wellies leak.  Please come back, sun, you are so badly missed!

Sun! Yes, really!

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It’s happened!  The sun is shining and (you can’t always take this for granted) it’s warm with it.  Not hot yet, that would be too much to hope for, but the forecasters are quietly confident that we may yet ‘bask’.  And basking would be nice after so much shivering and sheltering.

The village has burst into colourful life after months of hibernating under grey skies swollen with rain.  Over the weekend my neighbours split into traditional roles, easily and naturally and without discussion.  Mars dug out the lawnmower/strimmer/any other power tool that he could seize and make noise with, and roared about the garden cutting things down.  Venus either made a trip to the farm shop if she could be bothered and bought steaks/burgers/BBQ chicken portions or disinterred frozen sausages from the very bottom of the freezer and in both cases gave them to Mars to burn on the barbecue.

Sun umbrellas were erected.  People tried to remember how to mix a Pimms, and some of the loudest jollity came from the gardens where people had forgotten and got the proportions wrong.  And Mr Addington appeared in a pair of empire-building shorts that were belted just beneath his armpits and reached nearly down to his ankles.  For months now he has been telling anybody who would listen that a second ice age is on its way and we are doomed.  Yesterday he was flagging down passers-by and telling them that global warming has now arrived and we are doomed.

Meanwhile every farmer in the vicinity has leaped aboard their biggest tractor and taken to the lanes and fields.  Most cut their hay yesterday, though some waited another 24 hours for the unprecedented sun/ breeze combo to transform lakes back into meadows.  I’m just back from walking the dogs, and the air is full of the unforgettable, primal, glorious smell of drying grass.

As for my animals, we have mixed reviews on the change in the weather.  The hens are thrilled, and are lying about in attitudes with their wings fanned out, sunbathing.  The sheep say it’s Too Hot and have withdrawn to the back of the field shelter.  The horses, though swaddled in fly rugs and face masks, are the centre of a buzzing mass of flies and have joined the sheep in the field shelter.  The dogs are two black lumps in the shadow of a crab apple tree, and Scarab the cat is sun-worshipping from the depths of a cat mint bed.

In fact it’s fab here right now.  Looks good, smells great, and helps me remember all over again why, despite everything, North Wiltshire can be a sort of earthly paradise.  Once the mud has dried up.

Mud

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I’ve read somewhere that Innuits have 100 words for ‘snow’.  Maybe an urban myth, maybe true.  Over the last couple of days, since the thaw, I’ve been developing a slack handful of words for ‘mud’.  Here are a few of the printable ones:  first of all there is splat, which lives in the hen run.  It is the product of lots of little scaly feet rushing about and is viscous and sticky, and the main reason I let the hens out of their hen run every day so they can lay their eggs in sly nests which I never find until far too late.  Then there is gloop.  This is made by the geese, when they overflow their bath and then spaddle in the resulting mess.  Gloop is semi-liquid, the mud equivalent of tomato soup.  The geese love it, I don’t.  Next up is scrunch, which you will find around the hay rack.  It is semi-frozen and very, very deep.  Some of the holes made by the horse’s jackhammer legs are big enough to lose a small sheep in.  Or me.  Or one of my wellies.  And I’ve just come from tackling slick, the thin layer of thawed mud over a frozen underlayer which can be found on the steep slope of the orchard, and which I have to tackle twice daily while holding buckets.  There are more, many many more.  But the Book is calling – I’m onto August – and I’m on a roll.

Sheep (and mud)

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This is the time of year when the sheep get mud stuck between their toes.  75% of my flock, which currently numbers 4, ignore this.  They know (and don’t believe what they say – sheep are clever in their own way) that it will either drop out, giving instant relief, or I’ll spot the prob at feeding time and dig it out for them.  Either way, it’ll be OK.  The other 25% of the flock, who is called Mamba, sees it differently.  She is a drama queen.  Normally at the very bottom of the pecking order, mud in her toes gives her a chance to shine, to emote for her public.  So this morning she waited until the village rambling club, numbering about 30, trundled past her field and then gave an Oscar winning performance of Sheep With Dreadful Problem.  The ramblers lined the fence of her field and watched aghast as she trailed slowly past them, waving the muddy foot in the air.  They came to the door in a deputation and said they were sorry to tell me that one of my sheep had broken her leg.  When I went out to the field, some of them had already dug out their rambling first aid kits, and Mamba, by now well and truly spooked by the gaze of 30 well-wishers, was circling the field at warp speed on three legs.  The ramblers were obviously expecting me to ring Air Ambulance, but I said she’d need to settle before I could do anything, and they finally trailed off looking over their shoulders at the poor, poor sheep.  Once they had gone and Mamba had regained Planet Earth, I lured her over with some feed and dug the mud out, it took a second.  The ramblers came thundering back over the horizon in double-quick time, obviously expecting a scene of stretchers and IV drips.  What they got was Mamba, completely sound, feeding peacefully with her mates.  I gave them a consoling jammy dodger, said we all valued their concern and there was nowt so queer as sheep.  But I really wish Mamba wouldn’t do it.