Telling Them Apart

Mapp delicately samples a small wedge of apple.

When our pigs arrived, apart from being totally unfamiliar (our first ever pigs), they seemed as alike as two peas in a pod. We wondered whether we would ever tell them apart. Even the ear tag numbers (371 and 372) are not visible from the front, so are no use when a piglet is nervously checking you out face to face. 9 days on we are starting to get to know them better and they are getting a bit used to us. I spotted that although Mapp (371) has a full 'pelt' of bristles across her shoulders, her sister (Lucia (372) has a bit of a threadbare patch between her shoulder blades.

Sometimes all you can see is two ginger backs
among the buttercups and grass!

Once separated, we could start to see differences in their little personalities, especially as they started to come up and eat food near to us. They are currently on a commercial pig-ration ("pig nuts") which they quickly recognised as edible, and we are introducing new things to try them out; so far mainly apple and tomato. Banana, carrot and pear were all declined.  We started with them sharing a bowl but they started to squabble over food, so we've moved up to separate bowls.

'Greens' for the keets - chopped grass and cucumber.

Mapp seems to love her fruit and piles in to that first, leaving the pig nuts till she does not have a scrap of apple or tomato left. Lucia, in total contrast, concentrates on the nuts and leaves the fruit till last. If I'd had my camera with me this morning I'd have taken a clear picture of this - ten minutes in you could see the shiny, nut-free bottom of Lucia's bowl and 8 intact wedges of fruit, while Mapps had no fruit and a complete layer of pig nuts. Sometimes, Mapp will suss that Lucia may have fruit left and abandons her 'ration' to try to a sneaky bit of piracy but Lucia, who is possibly slightly 'alpha' will usually butt her away. She's not that bright and sometimes will grab the one slice of apple and dart away as if saying "No! It's MINE!" leaving the bowl, of course, completely undefended. Mapp is then in there like Flynn!.

The roses are doing well in Liz's "Rose Walk".

As I said, they are slowly getting more used to us. I sat in there on the grass for a while yesterday and one of them came right up and butted my shoe, but then sprang away nervously. I have not yet got to being able scratch their ears and backs yet. Patience is the thing, obviously. We are, as I said, only 9 days in and these are still very small and nervous babies. They have met the dogs through the orchard fence and were happy to graze 6-8 feet away from the 3 whimpering, excited, bouncing, tail-wagging, would-be-hunters. They seemed unconcerned, but were not taking any chances with closeness.

They got me again - one gooseberry bush defoliated by
gooseberry saw-fly larvae. 2 others untouched.

No such differentiation is possible between the Hubbard youngsters, 'poults' now rather than 'chicks'. They are all white and fully feathered. The only differences are that 3 or 4 of them are developing the bigger, redder wattles that make us think 'rooster' rather then 'hen' and we have seen pairs of them squaring up to one another. They are on day 45 today and all growing well. Our friend Simon tells me that he has found the same as us, they seem to be a far healthier group this year than last, as if some work has been done to improve the strain. We had no lameness this year and the legs seem sounder all round. I am sure they are gaining weight faster too, but I did not take any detailed records last year. These birds are hand-reared. Last years were under our 'clocker' Broody Betty. Hen or 'roo' does not actually matter this year, they all face the same fate come July or August.

Does Min 'know' these are her babies? She is quite often
hanging around, pacing up and down and peering in.

In the guinea fowl keets we have 3 distinct colour types and one poor little soul who is very easy to tell apart with his/her unfortunate scrunched up toes. My experts on the web forum tell me that our hen bird 'Min' would be called 'Lavender' for the purple tint in her cape feathers. Henry was "Pied", with his white chest and underside, so the babies, still in chick-fluff and just starting to feather up are either fully brown and stripey (They will be the Lavenders), brown-stripey with white chests and neck-fronts (Pied) or fully silver-grey. The latter (2) will presumably come out white like our brief resident "Blondie".

Last year's lambs continue to yield well -this huge leg of
'16A' - a big lad, fondly remembered!

In the lovely sunny weather we have been letting them out to feel the grass under foot and the sun on their backs and on one warm night, even to let them sleep outside, shut into the 'bedroom' bit of the rabbit run. On cooler rainy days we rescue them to indoors, the crate and the Infra Red light, all be it the latter is so far up above them it must feel like a distant sun! They are doing well and we are very pleased with them. They have a very amusing way of zooming up and down the run, flapping their tiny wings and managing short flights 3-4 inches above the grass. I need to build them their big aviary. Apart from anything else we will need the rabbit run for Goldie's "kits" - 5 weeks old now and soon needing to be taken off Mum as she stops lactation.

Pulmonaria (lungwort)

Soon something a bit different. We are off to 'spring' niece Em-J from her 3 week session in the Irish speaking Connemara, just to take her out for a picnic. She could not have chosen a more remote bit of Ireland if she'd tried - she is in Baile Lar, way down in the bottom left hand corner of Galway, on a headland surrounded by Atlantic.

Well done Lidl! One of my favourite
'foreign' beers is on special offer!

I am secretly hoping that it is the kind of Atlantic that might have the trad wooden sailing work-boats 'Galway Hookers' nipping about but whatever, we will surely enjoy the time with Em-J and the beautiful scenery. More on that when we're done and back.

Day 84. A Good Day to Die?

Hubbard chickens at Day 83

For our Hubbard variety chickens, tomorrow is Day 84 from hatching. In the cut and thrust, hard nosed world of commercial free-range and/or organic meat production, this would be the target slaughter date; game over. Hubbards are the variety now widely used in Ireland for this type of system produced in commercial hatcheries (in this case one up by the Northern Ireland border) in their hundreds of thousands and sold to growers as day old chicks. They are then kept in conditions which pass (maybe only just) the minimum standards of welfare and feed to earn a 'Free Range' or 'Organic' certification to produce a big breasted, broad chested, heavy looking but still tender, oven-ready carcass. Even a small amount of research will tell you that 'Free Range' here does not quite mean happy chickens scratching in the sunny farmyard; these are still fairly intensive, crowded systems in which feeding is closely controlled and, although chickens must have 'access' to the run outside, they do not necessarily get out much.

Our 'Mini-Buffs'. 2 hens or one of each?

We got our birds on August 1st (as day olds), you will recall, mainly in order to give Broody Betty something to 'mother' when we took away 'her' ducklings. We took 8 of a batch collected by Anne and Simon from the hatchery, Anne kept a further 8 and the remaining birds went to a friend of Anne's. We had, therefore, the potential for a small scale simple comparison between the groups under our three different systems. We do complete free range (they can go where they like around the 2 and a half acres and beyond) and mixed with the other birds but have, as a result, limited control over diet. Anne does organic starting off indoors but then in a large pen, separate from her other birds so they have a lot less freedom to move but she can give them generous amounts of cooked rice and potato etc. At any given date they seemed to be a quarter to a third bigger and heavier than ours and feathered up much more slowly. The third batch are even more confined and we believe would be legally 'Free Range' but not organic and, says Anne, have put on a deal of weight even more than her birds and possibly been slaughtered by now.

Pure bred Buff Orpington cockerel and hen.

You can see from our first picture that ours look decidedly 'adolescent' and lanky rather than fat and wide-chested. Their legs look massive and out of proportion to their slim shape as if they have a lot of growing left to do. Just for the record we weighed some of them and got a weight range (live, obviously) of between 6 lb 3.25 oz (2.81 kg) and 7 lb and a quarter ounce (3.18 kg). We have decided not to slaughter any time soon. We will keep these as a living larder while they put on some more weight. Anne has warned me that because they are 'designed' (yoiks!) only to go the 84 days they may over run their 'tender' spec and become sinewy and tough, only fit for casseroles and coq-au-vin but that is not an issue for us - we LOVE a coq au vin! I know Anne is off weighing hers today or tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see how the little 'trial' went.

My 2nd and 3rd picture here are of the 8-Ball birds, now approaching 25 weeks and well into lay if they are of that persuasion. Our 'mini buffs' (some kind of bantam-y cross) turned out, we are sure, to be both hens. That is to say that we are both sure we have seen both of them being 'trodden' by roosters and I am fairly sure they are both laying eggs and neither has crowed. My uncertainty today is just seeing them both in this picture the bird on the right seems to have pink legs rather than yellow, maybe a bigger comb and wattles and a more upright tail? Doubts are creeping in!

The 2CV saga moves on one step. I managed to get my official form signed and stamped by a nice lady Guard in Castlerea Garda Station. Now I just need that mixture tweaked one last time by the boys in the garage for our real last, final, ultimate, tail-end, conclusive shot at the NCT emissions test. I have promised myself that this will be it. If it fails this time then I will take it off the road officially (on Statutory Off Road Notice (SORN)  and it can become an interesting garden feature till a better offer comes along. I may sell it. I may keep it till it is 30 years old and doesn't need an NCT. I will have run into the buffers, defeated by the system and fed up with having spent more on tests and re-tests than I have on the car.

The ex-Hastings fig cutting

A quick catch up on the gardening. This pic shows the current state of play on the ex-Hastings fig tree cutting. Grown in Faversham for a year or two in a half barrel, we decided to bring it over with us when we moved, so it was coppiced hard and root-washed. The remains lived with me at Pud Lady's in a fertilizer sack in her front garden till we moved. We planted it in the gravelly soil at the top of the front drive here but then it got driven over by a JCB laying drains. We thought we had lost it but Liz did some detective work using early photos and found it. It languished for a while, then just about managed to produce a few leaves where upon last years sheep browsed them all off and it went into winter as a bare, inch thick 'stick'. Again we were sure it was a goner. Spring came and no leaves emerged till way into June but then it suddenly put on a spurt of 3-4 small branches reaching the 18" or so you can see here. We will give it special protection through this winter. We dream of a bright future for this tree. May it do as well as it's parent which now fills most of the gap behind Pud Lady's garage and over-tops the roof gutters (OK it's a bungalow). I want to see it shading our terrace corner on the SE corner of the house, clearly visible as you come up the drive.

And finally, I know it has been a weird late season and I know these raspberries are Autumn Bliss, but I never expected to be starting to pick a decent crop on October the 22nd. They are not the sweetest raspberries, so maybe lacked sun, and they are very juicy (plenty of rain!) but I am hoping they will stay sound on the canes for just the next couple of days till Liz returns and can enjoy them with me.

Sheep Tracks and Milestones

Growing up in Sussex with regular access to the chalk Downs and being able to watch a bit of sheep farming in action, I was always taken by the fact that sheep will all use very definite regular paths from A to B across a field, not wander willy-nilly. They soon wear definite tracks across the fields which are clearly visible on the short-grazed turf of the steep scarp slopes where they are actually a lot easier to walk on as a human as they are like a leveled out ledge along the hillside. I was amused to note that our 5 are now doing exactly that in our small, one and a half acre sheep field, so that we now have a series of definite worn tracks radiating out from the feeding station and gate area. If they are way away in a corner of the field when you whistle them up for supper, they will canter across to you but in line-astern within one of these tracks (or two, in the case of this picture). Curious things, sheep.

I recently posted on the subject of Liz's recent 'milestone' Birthday. There's a lot of it about at the moment, this mile-stone, significant age thing. Ginny's and Padfoot's baby bunnies hit the 3 month stage on 2nd September. Not a one of them has sold for pets, so I am afraid the freezer beckons for these guys but because they are only 'pet' rabbits, rather than any meat breed, they are still tiny. You'd need one each to make a decent meal, so there are no plans to do anything with them yet except let them keep on mowing the lawn, which they are doing very nicely at present. This did, though, steer us into a definite decision NOT to do any more pet x pet breeding. We may put G and/or P to a meaty buck, as we did in 2012, which gave us very nice carcasses at 3 months in that year, but other than that they will just get to live as pets seeing out their natural, as it were.

La Bresse cross cockerel at 21 weeks

On the 11th, Goldie's remaining babies (2 bucks) hit the 3 month stage and these, being meat breed, are doing a lot better, but regular readers will know that these keep on popping their clogs for no obvious reason, possibly a developmental issue to do with blockages in their urinary tracts. One is albino white, the other a dark wild-rabbit style brown. If either one survives, we may actually keep him as our breeding buck and try crossing him with the pet does but they, too, are currently doing a good job as lawn mowers.

The '8-Ball' chicks, hatched at Easter under Broody Betty, are now (today, 19th Sept) at a very significant milestone. They are 21 weeks old, the date by which even the difficult-to-sex breeds should traditionally make their minds up and either lay an egg or shout cock-a-doodle-do! We were expecting to get to today and have to cull out the roosters from the group because there might start to be fights between William the Conqueror and any young pretenders, or between the boys themselves and the 8-Ball roosters might start to harass the ladies. Certainly we might be going deaf from the amount of crowing. In fact we have only had to 'off' one, a Sussex Ponte 'roo'. Only the La Bresse cross has done any crowing and his is a rather yodeling comic shout. He has tried treading a few hens but he generally gets chased off by one of the Sussex girls. Most of them are now bigger than the Sussex anyway. with only the Mini-Buffs being smaller. 

Deefer at 7 years old.

These boys will probably get a stay of execution all the time they do not cause us problems, until such time as we have no meat in the freezer.

On 17th Sept was Deefer's 7th Birthday, so Happy Birthday Deefer. In this land of no raw pork ribs, where 99% of pig meat seems to get salted into bacon before the public can get anywhere near it, her 'Birthday Cake' came in the form of a pork and leek sausage. Happy Birthday, too, to her brother Archie and sister Ellie-Bez back in Kent. 

The Hubbard chicks at 50 days

The Hubbard chicks, meanwhile, them of the Operation Fowl-Switch of an earlier post, made 50 days today. They are doing well and growing fast but give a definite impression that they will get HUGE, that they need to grow into their legs which seem out of proportion to their bodies. These guys, in any commercial system, are reckoned to be 'ready' at 84 days. I think ours, fully free-range, are possibly going a bit slower than that and may take longer. We will try to weigh them at day 84 (23rd October) just for the sake of getting live weights to compare with Mentor Anne's 8 organic, outdoor-penned birds, but these guys will also not hit the freezer any time soon. 

It's all go.

The 8-Ball

Sussex Ponte young rooster

Cast your mind back, if you would, to my post of 28th April this year (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2013/04/of-hatching-chicks-and-flying-geese.html) and those little multi-coloured fluffy chicks hatched out under Broody Betty on her first sitting of the year. Those little mites are 'all growed up' now and most of them are bigger than the existing hens including BB herself. They are 16 weeks old now and approaching that significant poultry keeper's milestone 'Point of Lay'. Here even the ones which are very difficult to sex like the white Silkies we had back in Kent, and the black Jersey Giants we have here now, should either lay an egg or shout "Cock-a-Doodle-Dooo!" and give the game away.

La Bresse cross with a Buff Orp (head obscured)

There are 8 of them all still surviving and they have formed a tight-knit group who range around the 'farm' quite independently of the 'grown ups', always together. We call them "The 8-Ball" because they remind us of a group of golfers wandering round a golf course bantering with each other about who is playing with Top Flite balls because there's one here in the rough, who's sneaked onto the green, who's just played a blinding wood shot and inventing spurious scores to "card" (a well known 'verb' known only to golfers and sports commentators).

Jersey Giant (black) and Mini-Buff

The 8-Ball were hatched from eggs which came 5 from our own (Sussex Ponte) birds and 7 as a generous donation from Mentor Anne and Simon; a mixed bag of the main breeds they stock - Buff Orpingtons, Jersey Giants and a La Bresse cross. As luck would have it, only one of our 5 eggs hatched but all 7 of Anne's managed to. The 8-Ball now comprises one SP, 2 Buffs, 2 JGs, a La Bresse cross and 2 of a cross between Buffs and something smaller and possibly bantamised; these two are way smaller than their siblings and a lovely dark golden colour - we call them the 'Mini-Buffs'.

Buffs, the Sussex rooster and the La Bresse cross

As I said, some chicken varieties are hard to sex till they are at point of lay. Anne and Simon who are way more expert than us are not even prepared to take a punt on the Jerseys. Others start to show shape differences much sooner, so that we have known that the Sussex was a boy for weeks - bigger legs and feet, sticky-up tails, more developed wattle and combs and so on. They also seem to start behaving like roosters or being treated like hens by our existing rooster, William. He tries to mount them and we say "Ah ha! She might be a girl then!" Two of the youngsters start squaring up to one another as if to fight, and we suspect they are boys (though Simon tells us that sometimes 2 hens will do this as part of the pecking order process).

The 8 Ball gather round (and on) the keyhole bed.

Taking all this into account we think we have a male SP and a male La Bresse. We think the big pale pure Buffs are one of each. Both the mini-buffs may be hens and we have no idea on the Jerseys. I do not need to tell you that this can be bad new for the boys. You can only have one rooster in this set up and William the Conqueror is filling that slot, though the main rooster can tolerate and become quite matey with a 'buddy'. We quite fancy starting a Buff Orpington group, so we are hoping that William will get on with the Buff we think is a male. All the other boys may have shorter careers, possibly in the catering line. All the girls we hope will join our laying flock.

In other news we have been out this evening observing the Perseids Meteor shower. It was, to start with, a gorgeously clear night of the sort we have only ever experienced in Ireland, clear skies and no light pollution. There was a small amount of cloud low down on the NE horizon, just where we were expecting the Perseus constellation to rise. Liz was on an ironing marathon today and still going strong at 11 pm, so I went out to see what I could see. I took the bat-detector with me and very quickly started to hear the patter and squelch of either lots of bats or one bat lots of times. This was at 45-50 MHz, so we guess pipistrelle.

Sure enough, I saw a quick burst of 6 meteor streaks tracking from North across the Great Bear. Brilliant exciting stuff and I was keen to get Liz out there too, so that she could see some. When a hazy cloud came across from the west I feared she might miss the show, so I interrupted the ironing and called her out but sadly, too late - that was it. The bats kept whizzing around, one so close to my face I could feel the draught from his wingtips, but the haze grew thicker and we saw no more meteors. At 11:45 we called it a night and Liz came in to finish the ironing. There's dedication! Never mind, the Perseids are 'on' for a few days yet and we might get another clear sky tomorrow or the next day.

Operation Chick-Swap

Everyone loves a happy ending and here we have a strong possibility. We seem to have swapped out the ducklings at ten days old, with our new 'Hubbard' variety one-day-old chickens in a move so successful that even Mentor Anne and Simon were amazed, both knowing enough about chickens to know all manner of things which MIGHT have gone wrong, but luckily didn't. The general concensus among friends and contacts on the internet poultry forum is that we have, in Broody Betty, one amazing chicken, a 'keeper' worth her weight in gold and worth hanging on to and keeping happy!

To recap the story, BB had already done one brood of chickens this spring, successfully hatching 8 babies who are now 14 weeks old and strolling round the place collectively known as 'The 8 Ball' because they remind us of a gang of golfers wandering round a golf course discussing who's playing with what brand of ball, who's in the rough, and who can invent the most proposterous score card. She'd then gone broody again and , having no fertile eggs to put under her we had borrowed ten Indian Runner duck eggs from Anne, for BB to sit on. She sat tight on those for the 28 days required, successfully hatching 5 ducklings on Monday 22nd. We rescued the remaining eggs and Anne subsequently hatched 3 more in her incubator.

Feeling for poor old BB and not wanting to steal her new babies without giving her something else to 'mother', we hatched a plan to obtain some day-old chicks of the meat-variety of chicken which is used widely in Ireland where birds are free-range or grown organically, the "Hubbard", but we were unable to get hold of these quickly and it was not till the ducklings would be 10 days old that we'd be able to do the swap.

The chicks were duly fetched from up by the 'Norn Iron' border on Thursday 1st Aug (Anne and Simon had gone up to get chicks for three 'customers' including Broody Betty) and delivered at 5:30 pm. With all sorts of apprehensions, Simon and I crept into BB's house, lifted out the 5 ducklings and put them in sight in a box on the floor, in clear view of BB, who was only a bit concerned, being used to me lifting her ducklings down every morning to let them out free ranging.

Then, instead of letting her down we slid in the 8 confused, LOUDLY cheeping chicks who milled around her feet drowning out any duckling noise. Betty then amazed us all by starting to cluck contentedly and gather the chicks to her, the ducklings apparently forgotten in the racket. He who shouts loudest gets heard, obviously!. We disappeared the ducklings in their box to outside the door and watched while Betty clucked and fussed the new chicks into her 'bedroom' and settled down with them on the hay nest, completely enclosing them under her skirts, looking every inch the contented hen. Not for her to worry why her babies had turned from 5 puddle-ducking, wet-loving ducklings into 8 dry chicks (as well as grown younger). Everything seemed right with the world.

We checked on her hourly that evening and brought them all breakfast in the morning (back to finely mashed hard boiled eggs and chick crumb!) which Betty immediately started to show them how to peck and scratch at.

Obviously we are not out of the woods yet, these babies are still only 3 days old as I write this but it's all looking very promising. As I said, so much could have gone wrong. Betty is not even 'meant' to be a broody, a "clocker" as they say here. Sussex Pontes are a modern egg laying hybrid developed by a huge commercial hatchery, where broodiness would just be a nuisance. They try to breed it out of the birds. Then there is the going broody twice thing. Then there is getting them to accept ten duck eggs which they know they didn't lay. Next up, the low chance of a hen sitting for the full 28 days - chicken eggs only take 21. Next is them keeping up the mothering of ducklings for ten days - ducklings are programmed to do all the wrong things by hen standards - they love to get wet and play in puddles, they do not scratch for food and they do not eat much seed and grain. This 'disobedience' can quickly upset the hen who will abandon the babies and go off in disgust. Finally there is the chance of a successful substitution after ten days of duckling fostering by which time mum and ducks will be well bonded and babies are very active. Broody Betty had to not only accept the change, but also almost a start-again-from-scratch (if you'll forgive the pun) with newly hatched chicks. The ducklings, of course, also have to cope with being wrenched from 'Mum' but in this case they were slotted in with their (12) incubator-finished and reared siblings and the multi-fowl life of a bird on Anne's place and appear to have thrived on it.

So, for now Broody Betty is disguised as 'Old Mother Hubbard' and we will report her continuing adventures on here.

Gig Driving and Pony Rides

You'll have read in earlier posts that we are currently entertaining the Silverwoods on a week's 'holiday'. Just Mrs S and the children this time, as Mr S has to work. They arrived Sunday afternoon and are here for this week till Mr S comes back this weekend to collect them all up again. Not much time, then, to post on here; the usual run of farm based entertainments and front lawn games.

We have been getting to know animals and poultry, training sheep to eat from buckets and to come up to the gate for food at meal times, helping Broody Betty to scratch up worms for the ducklings and giving the baby bunnies a good amount of handling practise. We have played tennis, badminton, soccer and GAA football. We have lost shuttlecocks and balls all over the shop. We have built wooden toy sailing boats and bird houses. The sailing boat is exhausted from many voyages on the pond.

The highlight of the week (for me at least) so far was a session we arranged with Charlotte the mini-horse owner to come down and let the kids have a go at driving the gig pulled by Romeo or just riding in it and, for the two smaller ones, a bit of bare back riding on Bob. The older children and adults also went for a spin down the lane, dicing with the local traffic.

The horses were due to arrive at midday, by which time it was raining quite hard, so we retreated indoors for tea and to let it stop. The rain obliged by about ten past and we got a lovely hour or so of sunshine to do our stuff and to get some lovely pictures.

The kids, Mrs S and I all took a spin round the front lawn on the gig being shown the reins and the very soft-mouth, gentle action steering of Romeo. Charlotte, of course, drove him in some of the shows where they won all the awards, so she can make him reverse, turn tight round, go slow and fast, but we were just beginners so we were on the very basics.

Mrs S and I both had a go and took pictures of each other but the camera chose that 5 minutes of the day to mis-fire, so we have dozens of lovely pics of the children but none of the grown ups.

We had a whale of a time and everybody loved it. We all thank Charlotte so, so much for doing this for us. She was quite enjoying being able to do some actual training on 'sensible' horses. Round here, she tells me, all the riding schools are for specialist work like show jumping using highly strung, competitive thoroughbred horses which are 'away with the fairies' and not really for inexperienced children. Hence, she says, none of the children are ever into horses.

Hay Cart

We like to do things by the traditional methods over here as you know, so when we go hay carting we use the traditional Irish farm implements, the 2CV and pedigree Argentinian miniature horses (!). OK maybe not seriously but we had some great fun getting the baled hay in for Carolyn and Charlotte. The field which is to be home to the 'boys' (Romeo, Bob and Cody) is only yards from the house and is accessible by hard roads and flat dry gate entrances, so it was perfectly good 2CV territory. My little 6 foot by 4 foot trailer did a good job, taking 21 bales on our best load.

Once the morning mist had cleared the hay was beautifully dry and the baler man gave it one last shake through and rowed it up about 1 pm, returning to bale it at about 2:30 to bale it. We got just over the hundred bales off the 2 acres, which is not bad for a field which had not been fertilized or limed recently, all be it the baler man may have had his eye on the per-bale rate and had set the machine up to do them short and a bit light and fluffy, but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt; he may have just been being nice to the ladies he assumed would be carting the stuff.

We went into the field at about 3 pm and we were all done with our 6 loads by half four. Hot work in the sun but when the 'cavalry' turned in the form of another helper with a big 4 x 4 and a stock trailer, there was precious little left for her to do (she didn't mind at all!) and we also had to save 2 bales for Charlotte so that she could have the pleasure of getting mini-horse Romeo back between the cart shafts for a bit of exercise. I got a ride in the cart down to the field, so it was fine by me too!

It was hot work in the sun but, as I said, the bales were smallish and light; none of the lumpy, dense, long things I remember from my student days while sometimes took 2 of us weedy students to lift before we'd built up a bit of muscle tone over the working weeks. We have all the bales now stashed away in one of Carolyn's barns and I was 'paid' 6 bales for my efforts, so I too have a little mini-stack in a barn which will see the geese, chickens and rabbits through the winter (and beyond) for bedding.

In other news I was back at the carpentry today creating 4 more nest boxes. The '8-ball' chickens are now approaching point of lay and I want them to get used to the idea of being able to lay their eggs somewhere sensible. Their aunts are still laying either out in the nettles or, sometimes, in the pile of our own hay in the goose house. That's fine in the hot weather when I wedge the goose house door open with a log to get a bit of breeze onto Broody Betty (who you can see still on station on her duck eggs in this picture; she was completely un-fazed by me turning up with another 4 nest boxes and filling them with wood shavings and hay. She has got her little private drinker there (a sawn-off milk bottle) and her Sussex County crest above her head. She's due a happy event on Monday, 4 days time.

And last but not least, I promised a pic of the dozen baby bunnies - I've got up to 11 here I think, so I ask you for your continued patience. These little whizzers do not stay in one place for long enough to get a picture AND count them.

Ahhhh Look! He has his Father's... Tail!

Our gander has a condition known as "wry-tail". If you look at the right hand yellow circle in this picture you will see his tail is swung round to 45 degrees or so to his left; this is not because I have caught him wagging it, as they do, but this is its resting position. This is a common, known condition in all sorts of domestic poultry; it does not hurt and they do not suffer in any way, they develop normally other than the tail and their fertility is not affected. It is genetic, though 'recessive' and so can be passed on to offspring. What happens is that the pelvis, which should be fairly long and narrow, and aligned north-south (as anyone who has carved a chicken will know) develops bent round to around 45 degrees behind the hip joints, either left or right. Aft of the pelvis all the tail bones and muscles are normal, so that the goose has normal mobility of the tail, feathering and so on but starting from a resting position at a jaunty angle.

Now that the goslings are starting to sprout true feathers through their fluff, including tail feathers, we have noticed that 4 of the 5 of them also have left handed wry-tail. Normally you are advised not to breed from a wry tail bird but as he's all we've got and we are breeding only to eat them ourselves, we are taking that with a pinch of salt. I assume it is a rare condition in wild geese because it must seriously impair flying but in the domestic flock nobody is flying very far and the main selection process is not 'survival of the fittest' but the farmer saying 'will I breed from that bird or not?' Thinking it through, it did occur to us that if this is a recessive condition, then one or both female geese must be heterozygous for wry-tail (half wry-tail or 'carriers' if you like) so we were left wondering whether these geese and the gander may actually be siblings rather than a true breeding group as advertised. Once again, though, we think that as we are only breeding internally, and the goslings we have do not seem to be too in-bred, we will carry on.

This week, in the fierce heat of our hot-spell, we have given up on demolishing the earth/rubbish bank and moved in under the trees of the bit we call 'the woods'. This area was beautifully grazed short by the sheep till spring but has since gone a bit mad with nettles, ground elder, hog-weed and goose-grass (cleavers). We decided to have at it with the sickle and cart away the green tops in wheel barrows. Not only would this tidy the area up but we also might find the stashes of eggs we believe our badly behaved Sussex Ponte hens are hiding in there.

The first half of this plan is working well and we feel as if we are getting a whole chunk of garden back but on the latter we are less successful; having only found one stash of 7 eggs so far. In case there is a problem with the age of these eggs we crack them carefully into a separate bowl before using them in any cooking but so far we have never had an off one. From being a bit short of eggs we suddenly have over a dozen on stock.

Even better, one of the hens has come back into 'the fold' as it were, having discovered my stack of new home-made hay in the goose-barn. I have been leaving the door wedged open to let some air through so that Broody Betty would not overheat and the hen, finding the hay, discovered that she could creep in round a feed dustbin and make a little nest out of sight at the bottom of the hay. One of the Marans followed her in today, seemingly led there by the rooster and added this nice speckled one. We are allowing this as at least we know where to find the eggs.

Scorchio!

Liz's phone picks up the Twitter feed from Irish weather forecasters, Met Éireann this morning reading "Sunburn Index for Tuesday, High Country- wide" and we know we are on for another scorcher. I am going to start setting myself an 05:00 alarm so that I can get out and do useful stuff in the garden and poly-tunnel without passing out quietly from the lovely but oppressive heat. I was just asleep and now Liz has gone for a nap in the shade of the caravan (her preferred location) and I think as of now, at 2:30 pm, every animal and bird we own or manage is lying up in the shade. The horses are in the deep shade of the Secret Garden, the geese are under my hay-making frames, the '8-Ball' (young chickens) are under the caravan, the grown up hens in the car port or the woods out front, Rolo is lying on the 'pick-axe' bank, rabbits are in their shaded bits of run and dogs are stretched out on furniture or dog-beds indoors, here where it is coolest. We love our thick concrete (18") walls and insulation panels today.

Broody Betty is hanging in there on her duck eggs but does tend to come off them for half hour escapes feeding and scratching. Today she came and visited us out on the front table while we were stopped for a coffee, hopping up onto the table to see if there might be a cake crumb to scrounge. Her 'house' also has the thick walls so is reasonably cool but for the corrugated iron roof. We just worry that these long 'skives' might be signs that she is losing the humour. Ah well, can't be helped if she does, you can't force a 'hin' to go broody, so we hope that Mother Nature knows best and it's OK to leave eggs in a heatwave.

Betty is easily our best looking hen at present. By going broody twice she has avoided a lot of the attention of the rooster, getting grabbed by the nape feathers when he bites, scraped by his spurs and claws as he pushes his 'romantic' notions, or muddied up from his feet on wet days. She is clean and white, fully feathered and with her tail in perfect condition. A Sussex Ponte to be proud of.

We are currently delighted with a couple of things. One, the superbly gin-clear pond we have finally achieved, and we spend a while each day kneeling on the banks gazing in to the water watching the tireless activity of the many species of pond animals which have arrived and are now breeding and multiplying in great numbers. We very quickly 'got' half a dozen adult types we recognise; pond skaters, water boatmen, diving beetles, whirligig beetles, etc. We are now finding miniature, immature versions of these and a variety of nymph stages of other stuff; we find new ones all the time.

The latest is, we think, a damsel fly larva. It is roughly the size and shape of an earwig but delicate and more transparent. It has breathing tube(s) at the rear which it swims to the surface to open, and swims by passing a rapid succession of 'beats' down its 3 pairs of legs in sequence. We also have many tiny baby water snails, presumably from the egg-masses we noticed on the undersides of the water lilies we bought from Mimmack's. My book (amusingly an old 'Observer's Book of Pond Life' from my "LVI Sc" (Lower Sixth Science) school days which we still have!) indicates that this is a "Zygopterid type" nymph. A Baby Damsel Fly to you and me.

We also have new leaves and flowers coming on many of the aquatic plants we bought from Mimmack, most recently the tiny white buttercup shaped flowers of water crowfoot (Ranunculus aquatilis) which poke above the surface. This plant has, in theory, feathery frond leaves below the surface and a more recognisable flat, lobed, floating shaped leaf at the surface though, as delivered, we had half a dozen posies of 'bits' which we weighted down at the lower ends and 'sank', so some of our lobed leaves are currently submerged. I expect R. aquatilis can sort itself out; it must be able to cope with "changes" in water level.

We are delighted too, with progress in the garden and, in particular with the produce. I may well become a bore on the subject of this being the best I have ever grown of various things including all my time allotmenting in Kent (and certainly compared to 2012's wash out and crop failures). We are enjoying superb broad beans at present from our over-winter stands and now lovely, well-hearted, lettuces which were stuck rather carelessly into a sandy-soil raised bed when I ran out of proper intended space. They were pretty much neglected but also (unlike the planned lettuces) ignored by slugs but have plugged away at it and grown into wonderful, clean fresh heads which we are enjoying daily with our supper.

The various flowers on this post are just some nice hot colours to go with a hot day; from the top then if you don't recognise them, a dwarf lily, a Calendula marigold growing with perennial wallflower in one of our tractor tyres, a nasturtium, some pale yellow snapdragons in one of our cauldrons out front, and a gift (Thank you, Mentor Anne) Campanula in the front terrace bed.

Stay cool in the hot weather. Plenty of sun block!