Callum Comes a-Calling

Storm Callum

Named storm 'Callum' arrives heralded by the usual colourful wind maps and weather warnings from Met Éireann and (National broadcaster) RTE. He looks from the first predictions, that he will split up either side of the island's SW corner and will mainly be a coast problem. Co Roscommon is a land-locked county, so we only got a 'yellow' warning (for rain).

Upholstery "stuff" will need an official
storage place.

And so it turned out. We'd taken all the normal precautions (hives strapped down, lumps of concrete on hutch roofs etc) and we have our new chicken house roof, so we felt safe enough but no-one here was complacent and we all saw the sorry pictures of the devastation caused by Hurricane Michael which took out great tracts of Florida. I was woken by heavy rain at about 3 a.m. and then again at 6 a.m. and there were puddles but we got away with no damage.

Rooster Gandalf (right) minds a group of hens sunning them
selves and preening. 

We had even got away with a 2 day "Indian Summer" prior to Callum, with the south winds bringing unseasonably warm air up from Spain. We'd been able to sit outside, in my case with the camera, and take a few pics of the various birds relaxing in what might be their last warm days this year. For 2 days we did not light the range (I have now!). There was plenty of bee activity in both the hive and the swarm box.

Despite appearances, we think this may be a hen.

I noted in a recent post that we did not seem to be able to produce here, a white coloured hen despite having Sussex birds in the flock for all the 6 years we have done chickens here. All our white babies seemed to grow up into roosters, way outside the Law of Averages.

Rooster Gandalf has had enough of being magnificent and full
of breeding season glory. He goes for the moult.

Very recently we 'offed' the last youngster as it started to shout Cock-a-Doodle-Dooooo! and grew an impressive long tail and the big facial features (wattle, comb) of a cockerel. He also started trying to jump/rape women belonging to Gandalf and Herme and was getting a good kicking from those two boys. It was not going to end well.

Now, that lad was one of a small clutch of babies hatched in spring, a 2nd one of which was also white, and we watched anxiously as the two white "boys" both grew up, were seen play-fighting one another and seemed to be heading for similar tall stature. We were sure they were both roosters.

Pretty hen enjoying the sunshine

Then a month or 2 ago, the 2nd bird suddenly stopped growing and never developed the tall tail or big face, never crowed and did not start harassing the 'sisters'. She(?) is a bit rangey and long limbed so she will be a big bird but we think we might just have a hen, there.

Turkey hen, 'Deo' seems quite happy solo.

We have been keeping a close eye on the turkey hen, 'Deo' after we had to cull out the 'tom' ('Excelsis' - there was a bit of a Christmas theme developing there, for a while). Turkeys can form very close pair bonds and can pine away and die at the loss of their partner. Deo seems to be OK and happy enough hanging with the three Guinea Fowl cock-birds. So far so good anyway.

In line for some culling action, these two "spare" Appleyard
drakes.

Also in this inadvertent tale of culling and death we have 2 'spare' drakes quietly getting on with enjoying a bit of a stay of execution. They were due to go on their final journey back at the end of our Help-X visit by Sonja and Asbjörn but that was when the turkey-tom decided to lose the plot and attack me. He stepped into harm's way and the processing department had enough on its plate. Never mind, the Lady of the House will not be that busy for ever and their turn will come.

I can never see how this is comfortable.

Did I say 'busy'. Oh yes, I have not yet mentioned that that other big 'time-suck' that mops up our free time each year, is about to re-start..... The Village Play. The Lisacul Players wake up about now each year and start planning the next Easter's production. The 'wake up' meeting was on Wednesday and involved a big gang of them (13) reading one of the (3) plays short-listed by main man and Producer Tommy C. I went along as the reading started late enough that I had all the birds locked up safe from Mr Fox. I am sorry I did not make a note of the play or writer but it was by a well known and prolific local play-wright.

Plenty of bee activity round the swarm box in the warm days.

The Players have to try to find a play that suits their male/female cast balance and they also prefer plays where there is not just one major spoken part. We prefer well balanced 'ensemble' plays. The one we read was very good and very funny and may end up being "The Play", but the Players are going to read another one next week and another the week after, and then decide. I will keep you posted.

Finally, we came to time for the big 'Parma' ham legs of pork to come out of their dry salt/sugar cure and to move on to the next phase: 4-18 months of air drying hanging up from the ceiling in a nice airy, well ventilated space. This change involves having to scrub off all the encrusted salt using cider vinegar (or the odd splash of hot water which you must quickly pat off once the salt is gone).

Legs scrubbed clean of salt

They get wrapped in a muslin sheath or a pillow case to deter the flies but they should not really need that, being so salty and vinegar-y by now on all the cut surfaces and skin. I could not actually find the muslin when I went to do this but pending a rescue, hung them up naked anyway and I have seen no flies on or around them, so we should be OK. They hang for 4-18 months gently drying out and maturing, and losing around 30% of their weight.

That must be about it for this post so I will wish you Good Luck and hope you all survived 'Callum' as painlessly as we did.

Oh - one last thing. We have had our first goose eggs of this season

A short lived Duckling

Connie brings the one surviving duckling off the nest and
quickly has it feeding like a pro.

A quick post this time, as befits the little recovery period we are having betwixt our busy, visitor bedecked Christmas and the New Year weekend. With the French off the premises, Liz headed for Silverwood land for another very quick tour of Mum-minding duty. A family meal with a 3-line whip had been planned but then cancelled without anyone telling Liz so she ended up just doing the one night. Mum is 'fixed' enough to no longer need random daughters fussing about the place. She is signed off now till 15th Jan. 

Little Paddler.

In the mean time, Friends of the Blog will recall that we have a Sussex hen who went broody in late November and then hatched, we think, 4 duck eggs just as the French visitors left. This lady only managed to bring 1 survivor off the nest. I found only one part-chewed corpse, so I guess that the nest got predated by a rat and the other babies were taken alive or dead. 

This double yolker was to be the duckling's Day 4 breakfast.

The survivor ("Little Paddler") was going great guns. His 'Mum' quickly taught him to feed and he was gobbling up the tiny portions of chick-crumb and hard boiled egg I was taking to them 4 times a day. It was alternating snow, hail and sleet outside, so I shut them in the Tígín to be 'safe', warm and dry. By day 3 (Thurs 28th) he was looking very promising and Mum was sleeping on the floor with him under her skirts.

Horrible, sleety, haily weather. Yes, I did get caught with
a line of washing out!

Sadly, this morning, (Day 4) when I went in with breakfast, Mum came down from a higher perch and there was no sign of the duckling. Mum was fussing and clucking around as if asking me where the baby was. We looked everywhere but could find no sign, no sad little corpse. If she had gone up there to perch and left him 'peeping' on the ground, then he'd have frozen to death in minutes and/or been carried off by the rat(s). Maybe he was taken by the rat and she then flew up to perch higher in her angst? We will never know. Ah well. These things happen. Mum spent part of the day all stressed out clucking about, presumably missing him but by afternoon seems to have calmed down and forgotten him. Sorry, Connie. Better luck next time. 

Just a light dusting of snow this time.

We are still determined to do more ducks, so we have decided to buy a Covatutto incubator like the one we used to borrow from Charlotte of the Mini Horses. We will set a dozen eggs in that in the spring time. We may also try Muscovies; not so good for eggs, but much better than the Khaki Campbells for meat. Also,more fun, apparently with their keenness to fly and sit on your roof tops!

Opening up the new Parma style ham.

We finally got around to 'opening' the Christmas leg of 'Parma' style ham. It had been missed off menus and side lined by the sheer amount of food we were trying to cope with, even with the French visitors. 

Roscommon style 'Parma' ham. 

This leg was from the 2016 pigs, so was 16 months at the air-drying / curing and is deliciously sweet. Liz has pronounced it my best so far. I am quite impressed too. We obviously have that job sussed and if any readers would like to come and have a sample (I know Charlotte likes a 'Parma' ham and may be around at present, down from Dublin) then do drop by.

That is about it. We are now all battening down the hatches for the next named storm, Storm Dylan who is meant to roar through on Saturday night. We are under Orange warnings here for 70-80 kph winds all across the Province of Connaught, though inevitably, coastal areas have the highest predicted wind speeds. 

Beyond that, assuming we aren't blown across to Longford, we will also be enjoying the New Year weekend which will also bring me to the end of my latest stint as curator on the @smallholderIRL Twitter account - where I am sharing a fortnight's shift with account boss @foodborn Margaret Griffin. We are nearly done - finishing, neatly, on Sunday 31st Dec. 

The Quality of Mercy

A hen called Doris

That's it. It's official. We have gone soft. We are no longer the hard-nosed, mercenary, calculating, efficient small holding managers we may have claimed to be in the past. We have a PET chicken. Yep. A completely useless, non-productive birdie eating up the 'profits' (Ha! That'd be nice) and not contributing a single egg or any meat.

Meet 'Doris'. I am not sure how we came by that name; it was nothing to do with the storm as far as I know, but the name is a recent acquisition of hers; she's only been Doris for about 3 weeks. Doris has been through the wars with us a bit, surviving all manner of ill and harm, putting up with too-frequent attention from our series of various roosters and faithfully knocking out a good egg each day right round the year, sometimes as the sole egg layer in our motley band of better looking hens. She is a survivor of both fox attacks and the mink's visit, the bad winter storms, snow, ice and heat waves.

Giving the invalid a bit of sunshine in the dog-crate.

She has always been a stumpy-legged thing who walked with a waddle and, because of the frequent attentions of roosters, usually with a baldy back and a bald top of the head. She is just your generic 'red' hen with darker wing and tail feathers, possible from 'Sussex' DNA. She came to us as a 'day old' from Mentor Anne which we hoped would be pure Buff Orpington but she and her sister had a different father. They stayed short and 'bantam'-y and were named the "Mini-Buffs" but, as I said, they were excellent reliable layers so we kept them alongside the buffs for all these years past. We love(d) them. One died of natural causes last year.

Enjoying a 3-day mini heatwave.

Doris was relegated from 'productive' status to pet by our 2016 fox who, we think, bit her and damaged a leg, though she survived. On that day all the surviving chooks were scared to go back into their real coop and moved into the Tígín for 'safety'. Most then recovered and ventured back out doors (or died of their injuries) but this hen, obviously crippled and hobbling, stayed put and we went through winter bringing food and water to her where she hid under some planks.

I've been minding 20 bullocks for a guy down the lane.
This is a handsome Limousin lad. 

It was obvious she was not going to walk properly again and our then three 'spare' Marans roosters all picked on her and 'gang raped' her till we realised what was happening and separated the birds for her safety. She was in a sorry state and the sensible hard-nosed thing would have been to cull her out. Hey ho. She's still with us and still in 'protective custody' given that new name and even carried carefully out in the recent sunshine to enjoy some warmth in the dog-crate. Still has a healthy appetite and was last seen schmoozing up the sex-change hen-rooster "Herme". She hops along on one foot with the other leg jutted out at a jaunty angle, used as a crutch to stop her over-balancing but mainly held off the ground. She stretched out her wings to sunbathe, lying on her side like any other chicken. Bless her. She always looks to me on the point of "falling off her perch" but never quite does so.

Finally making a start on the daunting task
of weeding this jungle bed.

The last three days have seen us enjoying superb weather - you'd say "Spring like" but really it was more like a Roscommon Summer. We have been spending all our time outdoors and got stuck into some long overdue gardening. Weeding, to be precise. We have attacked all the railway sleeper beds in the 'Kitchen Garden' and started on the rather daunting task of rescuing the 100' x 25' veg' patch from its sorry neglect of 2016. Long story but I lost the plot, nearly literally.

4 of the 'lads'enjoy some afternoon sun
with their 'meal' in the trough. 

I have also been minding 20 bullocks for our chum down the road, who was over to the UK for family reasons. This was no problem at all as I love some part time cattle involvement. They needed feeding (forking silage to them)  and checking in the morning, then feeding again plus letting some of them out for a drink in the evening.

The 'slatted house' boys. Well, 5 of them.

16 of them have an automatically filled drinker in their 'slatted house' (as in slatted floor - all the muck falls through to a big sump and can be pumped out) but another 4 have no such facilities in a concrete floored barn. They have to be let out to access an enamel bath which you refill from a hose. Getting at water only once a day gives them a big thirst. 4 of them will half-empty the bath at one 'sitting'. These guys also get mucked out, sometimes by me, but not this weekend. They'd just been mucked before I arrived and would not need it again till my friend was back from the UK. Easy life. Beef farming? A breeze! (OK, maybe not).

'Creeny' sheep's cheese from Corleggy of Belturbet, Co Cavan

Finally, we have "found" a new artisan cheese-maker. Well, technically it has been found for us by a friend who knows of our cheese-love and was visiting a Farmers' Market in Carrick. They tried the cheese, 'quite' liked it and decided to buy a chunk for us as well as some for themselves and generously brought it to me for us to try out and see what we would 'pair' it with.

Concrete floored barn.

The cheese-maker, 'Corleggy' (it means small windy hill!) is based in Belturbet up by the Northern Ireland border in Co. Cavan and this cheese is made from unpasteurised sheep's milk. It is called 'Creeny'. It is fierce and tangy and has quite a 'pong' coming off it. I love it but for Liz it was rather too fierce/sharp. In blue cheese Liz would love the creamy "Cashel Blue" but finds the sharp twang of Danish Blue too much. Creeny would be the same to her. It has just stepped over that line from 'very tasty' to 'too much'. 'Very nice', she says, ' but you'd need to pair it with a sweet chutney' (like the mango/kiwi chutney she makes here).  Our friend who bought it originally was last heard of "still trying to decide whether (she) likes it or not!

This post has been squeezed in just prior to us starting a whirlwind of visits in and out, but more on that in the next post. One of the visits promises to be VERY EXCITING but you will have to wait and see.

First-Born Feste Finished

61 lbs of ram lamb carcass

This is another one of those posts you might like to avoid if you are not happy with the butcher's stage of the production of those New Season Lamb cutlets that look so delicious on your plate. Our main event this week was the collection of the carcass of our first-born ram lamb, Feste, taken off on his final journey last Tuesday. My fears were that in having to get him out of the way because of the risk of him tupping his Mum or Auntie, he was killed at 5 months old and I thought he'd be a tiny carcass. No such thing. He was a chunky lad, and had made similar weight to the store lambs we have done before, at 61 lbs.

That old favourite job - portioning, bagging and
labelling the cuts for the freezer.

The butcher's 'mate' Joe was even given to a mutter about him being 'too big' and bigger than the ones they'd handle through the shop, but main butcher Igantius G reassured us that as he was a ram lamb he'd not be fat, just nicely conformed. That was true - we got very little 'suet' off him.

A lamb chop and a salad "of incident"

Due to Feste being born so early and therefore finished early, we actually still have a bit of last year's lamb in the freezers which we will use up before we start on this 'New Season' meat, but we couldn't let this event pass without at least trying the lamb out, so we saved a chop each from the ice and had it for supper with a lovely salad. Very nice he was too. We now need to plan those 2014 lamb shanks, cutlets and the stewing 'breast' meat into menus to clear the decks. As to lamb for those readers who are normally  included in this largesse, do not worry. We only produced three of our own lambs this year, so we are back in contact with our old sheep-supplier, Kenny about store lambs to make up the numbers. Kenny is doing his usual 'Scarlet Pimpernel' routine but we expect he will turn up all of a sudden with his usual request to meet him with a trailer and some cash somewhere.

Meanwhile, Liz has joined me (again) in being a blogger. Again because she has written a private blog for a while, but this one is a bit special. The guy running the website for nearby village 'Kilmovee' put out a shout for anyone living in the area who would like to write a guest-blog, just light hearted stuff about living here, once a month. Liz thought she would give it a try and contacted him, and got accepted/selected. She has just written her 2nd one. Liz called it "Smallholder Life" and you can find it on this link.

 https://kilmovee.info/smallholder-life/

Scraping the floor of the cattle-race clean

We are both very pleased with it  and happy to help out - we both know how hard it can be to keep a website fresh after the initial surge of enthusiasm has worn off. Mind you, Kilmovee seems to have quite a lot going on at the moment in particular with the completion of a new 'astro-turf' (all weather playing surface) sports facility as well as a thatched roof heritage centre both of which they have managed to photo from the air, I suspect with one of those new-fangled pilotless drone camera-platform thingies.

Young European Lime tree finding its feet

What else have we been up to? We have been loving a recent burst of just a few hot days and we've spent most of the daylight hours outside. We have been digging along a new front garden bed, formerly lawn and we have been giving the cattle race a thorough blitz. The concrete of the race is a bit old and pitted and the cracks and dents accumulate pine needles and muck plus, I guess, sheep-poo, daggy bits of wool, spilled feed. It all makes for a great substrate for grass and weeds, so in the few years since we first stripped it clean for the caravan (ahh the nostalgia!) it was getting quite a healthy turf layer; it needed mowing, never mind scraping! Well, that's all done now and we are back to pristine concrete - it even got hosed and brushed down which was a job which took me right back to student days, cleaning up the cattle pens at the end of a milking down in Westfield (Sussex). Moor Farm. Even more nostalgia. See also the haymaking pic below.

Local lad Kevin R gets the vintage gear out for a spot of
haymaking in the field opposite this house. 

Back in 2015 we have now made contact with three more local beekeepers, we are suddenly over-run with them. When I first got into bees I was a bit worried that I was the only bee keeper for miles and that any new virgin queens which went out on mating flights from our hive(s) might not actually find any male bees (drones) with which to mate. We now know of beekeepers at most points of the compass within the required 10 km or so of us, so this should not be a problem.

(Spoiler: Bee facts paragraph(s) - skip on by if bees are not your thing). You may not know that an emerging queen bee must get out and get mated on a mating flight (or more than one) within a few weeks of 'hatching', or she is doomed. Male bees in warm weather go out in numbers from the hive during afternoons and gather in specific patches of 'sky' called Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs) and these have to be found by the virgin queen - she zooms through the DCA chased by a 'comet-tail' of sexed up drones who each try to mate with her. She plans to be mated by 12-20 drones in quick succession (they get about 10 seconds a pop and actually die in the process), each 'successful' drone falling away from Her Majesty, to be shoved aside by the next suitor. In this way, amazingly, she takes in enough sperm from many different Dads to keep her laying fertile eggs at up to 1500 per day for up to about 4 years. It is presumably a short sex-life but a happy one. She returns to the hive to be welcomed home by her workers and never leaves the hive again till swarming time.

New toys for the chicken dept - an 'electric hen' chick-heater
and leg rings. 

No-one really knows why DCAs are where they are, though many have been 'there' consistently for decades. Some research in the German Alps suggests that the position has something to do with 'U' or 'V' shaped horizons, but beyond that it is just something hard-wired into bee DNA all around the world - the males know where to congregate and the females know where they will be. We just trust that somewhere around here, devoid as we are of alps, there will be a piece of sky which suits the boys from Moyne, Kilmovee, Driney, Feigh and is find-able by the ladies. Party on, bees. Bee genetics is a bit complex, partly because your queen is the mother of all the 50,000 bees in your hive, but also that drones are 'haploid' (they only have 50% of the chromosomes, 16 not 32) and are produced from unfertilized eggs (they have no father, only a grand-dad!), but suffice it to say that it is better for the queen to mate with a good mix of bee gene-pool from your area, not just the drones from your own hive(s). Enough, I suspect, on bees for now.

One of our honey bees on Summer Fruiting Raspberries

Anyway, our new friends are a young couple (A and TS) from beyond Lisacul to the west of us. They have a lovely neat place but no livestock as they are given to long tours of Europe in the summer months. The other is an aul' fella called Joe who comes from near the village of Moyne, to the east of us. We all met round at A+T's place just to drink tea and chat but also so that Joe could help them go through their 4 hives to check on general health and queen-right status. All good clean fun. We also met their lunatic female Patterdale Terrier, Patey who would, literally, play retrieving tennis balls all day if you had the strength in your arm to keep throwing it for her. Settle her down for a breather and relax for a few minutes but then, if your hand was low in your lap and palm upwards, you would soon find a ball dropped into the palm as Patey was bored now and needed some more ball throwing fun. Unusual name? Apparently, when she was a puppy her fur was black and velvetty like the cover of a 'Patey' style trad horse riding hat. (http://www.pateyhats.com/).

Lookering (Sook sook sook sook)

Nothing to do with the 'story' at all.

In Sussex (UK) where I was born, especially down on the Romney Marshes, the farming is mainly for sheep (The Romney Marsh breed are famous for their resistance to foot-rot and have been crossed with breeds all over the world to improve this attribute) and there is a long tradition of shepherding, shearing and related tasks in the area. One of the less well known ones was 'lookering'. Men (Lookers) were employed to go and live among the sheep to look after them and check on them and they were provided with a very rudimentary, single room 'Looker's Hut' where they could get out of the bleak, cutting winds and sleep. Some of these huts are still there now as listed buildings. Plenty of the modern farmers now have sheep down on the marsh and would still use the word to describe the act of going down to check on your sheep. I've got to go lookering. Obviously now they'd be heading off from their nice warm farmhouses in a Land Rover or a posh 4 by 4.

Not a very helpful sleeping place, Rolo!

Over here the word is not used and I was telling John Deere Bob all about it. Bob is currently without tractor as he has killed the clutch and it is in the repair shop, so I have been driving him about to the shops, Post Office and Doctor's clinic but also out to check on his cattle. He has a group of 13 young bullocks recently back out in 12 acres on the far side of the village, by the 'Swally Hole' about which I posted recently, so we nip out there to check on them. Bob is a gentle, quiet, calm man and it is lovely to see him with these cattle. He calls them over to him with just a quiet repeated calm call, almost whispered, saying "Suck suck suck suck" but in the local accent it has the longer vowel sound (as in forsook, or look). The first 'sook' is quiet enough, but the other three fall away to a whisper, as if he is calming a crying child with a 'Ahh hush now....." The cattle all come over and line up to look all doe-eyed at Bob while he counts and checks them visually.

Larch in flower

I have never seen him get excited or angry or loud with them  and I have never seen him engage in that popular pastime among local farmers of walking along behind them whacking them gratuitously with a length of flexible water pipe across the rump to keep them moving. Liz and I both grumble about this and we know it is an issue but it is widespread. We saw it a lot in the Castlerea Agricultural Show where it seemed to us that the cattle were moving well enough to or from the show ring and the lads driving them were maybe just putting on a bit of a show for the public of being the big man, in CONTROL of his beasts. We have seen in farming papers, items written from the slaughterman's and butcher's angle saying that these whacks leave bad bruising right where the most expensive cuts of meat are - the rump steaks - and can reduce the value of the killed out carcass, pleading for the herders to abstain. My cattle experience is based around dairy animals but we never used to whack them. You could carry a stick if you felt the need, and tap the back of a cow's hocks if you needed to, but you'd never whack them. I'd go with Bob's way every time.

Absent Without Leave. Blondie

Meanwhile, our re-homing project Guinea Fowl, Blondie has gone AWOL. She wandered off eastwards towards Una's (again!) on Tuesday at about 6 pm. She strode up and down the gate looking like she wanted to be let through but we know by now she can fly and sure enough minutes later she was gone, away to roost, we assumed as it had gone dark and cloudy and looked like rain. We noticed her absence very early on Wednesday morning, the way (like "The Silence of the Lambs") you miss a noise you've got used to, rather than hearing a new one. At first light, before we were even up we were both aware that we could NOT hear the strident, distant 'Buckwheat' calls coming from across the field. Blondie is as loud and carrying as a good rooster-crow; we could hear William and Buffers OK. The silence gave us a sinking feeling, fearing the worst.

Bee Heaven, hedges white with blackthorn, grass yellow
with dandelions. If only we had a few bees...

All that day we listened out expecting her to pop back up. I called, whistled and tapped my plastic feed beaker on the gate-piers. I walked up the lane and round those gardens to look and even walked the dogs deliberately eastward to Shannon's Cross instead of west to the bridge. No sign. No sad squashed body on the road and no pathetic slew of feathers among the grass. The previous owner (Dawn R) tells us that she "has form" and is a bit of a wanderer  and has also at some stage in her past, been found sitting on a stash of 32 unfertilized eggs, so we are clinging to those hopes but we may never know. Has she been snatched by a predator? (Fox, mink, pine marten, dog, cat, car driver with an appetite for roast Guinea Fowl, local farmer with gun? Who knows?) Is she just plain lost or even exploring, still looking for her late mate?

Hornwort in the big pond

Our work here is mainly about weeding those bits which we have not been able to get onto due to the wet but which are now running away with weeds, the 'allotment' and the raised bed by the car port. We are also gearing up for some imminent happy events. We add a 'lip' to the rabbit's bed chamber to stop the baby kittens from being able to fall downhill out onto the grass, and also to make sure that when Goldie gets up from her nest having fed the babies, any kits still clinging to her teats are gently rubbed off as she climbs out.

Rhubarb and Ginger Jam under construction.

We have also had to cut a larger hole in the former-rabbit Maternity unit 'bedroom' wall because we will let the Buff Orpington broody have her hatch in there (where she is) but she's a big girl and would not be able to get into the open mesh-fronted bit of the 'hutch'. The doorway as it was was only rabbit sized - 6 by 6 inches - that would be a tight squeeze for our rather Mumsy Mum-to-be. We have also heard from Anne and Simon that they are doing the Hubbard Run again this year - they drive all the way to the border to a commercial hatchery where they know the people and are let take away our relatively tiny order of a few dozen one-day-old Hubbards.

Lovage coming up well in the
Kitchen garden

These places do most of their sales by the tens of thousands and would not generally entertain Joe Public, but A+S were in the business and are known, so they make the exception. We benefit by being able to buy just the 12 and Anne collects in one go for a number of 'customers'. These birds are due next Thursday afternoon, so we need to be ready with a warmed brood-box (Infra red lamp etc) although we are half wondering whether we might be able to work a fiddle with either Broody Betty, who has shown no broody urge yet this year, or Mrs Buff who is sitting on 7 eggs, due date 7 days later. Would she notice if she suddenly went from 7 to 19 chicks, 12 of which were a bit bigger? Ah well. Watch this space.