Back in Lay

I was out changing the geese's indoor water for fresh and clean, and noticed the top of a white egg part hidden in the little bit of hay which has been in that house since lame-goose Fotherington Thomas ceased to need it. A quick rummage found me two more eggs - we had three and one of the geese is obviously back in lay. I had not seen any mating behaviour and was not aware that geese laid eggs except for the spring time mating season but, no, apparently they can come into lay if the weather suits, pretty much any time from February to September, so says Mentor Anne. Anyway, we had another last night and we are delighted with the extra kitchen supplies. These eggs will be used up as eggs. Regular readers will know that we are no longer breeding geese with the almost certainly brother/sisters combination we currently have, so if she goes broody then we'll just have to discourage her.

As autumn rolls round we are thoroughly enjoying the fact that we are using almost exclusively our own vegetables. The meal of sausages pictured was one of my 'roll your own' specials cooked while Liz was off at Knit and Natter. It has our own onions, peas, yellow French beans, kale and new potatoes. We are also doing very well for herbs like parsley which Liz notes is the best parsley we have ever grown. The magnificent mound of green was started from a supermarket pot which we had taken all the leaf off for cooking but were loath to throw out so I heeled it into the kitchen garden. Tonight we had gammon, spuds, beans and leeks and Liz was able to make a gorgeous 'boat' full of parsley sauce to go with. Irish Heaven.

Yesterday was a day for neighbourliness, visiting and being visited. In the morning I was off to little ol' lady down the lane, Una where I'd volunteered to clear fallen Leylandii 'needles' off her gravel drive, clip a hedge and dig out the ditch to her 'swolly hole'. The needles thing was interesting - she was worried that I'd sweep up a load of gravel with the needles and she wanted that 'back', so I invented a way of dibbling wads of the needles/gravel mixture in a bucket of cold water so that the gravel would sink and the needles would float. "I never would have thought of that!" said she. Ha ha, I thought. That's probably because you were raised as a sweet young lady, and I was down there playing mud pies and puddle ducking! A 'swolly hole' turns out to be where nameless household liquids drain away. We ended up in her lovely rustic farmhouse kitchen drinking 'tay' and eating homemade fruit scones with homemade blackcurrant jam. Heaven.

We were just about to sit down to supper, rice cooked, table laid, plates warmed all ready to go, when neighbour from the other side, John Deere Bob rocks up. We love him. He is completely unfazed by us being about to serve up and plods in in his boots, sits down in his chair and accepts a glass of blackcurrant cordial. He's going to do the standard half hour chatting anyway. We burble away happily about village stuff, the imminent Referendum on getting rid of the Senate (equiv to House of Lords), geese, sheep etc till his mental half hour is up and he stands up with a 'Well, Good Luck now!' (he has a strong local accent, so he says it 'Good Luck No') and he's back off down the drive to his tractor, parked at our entrance. The supper (curried bunny) was no worse for the wait.

I love all this stuff and I always take it as reassurance that I have not fallen into the 'ex-pat' cliché trap of seeking out and only associating with other Brits. Plenty of our friends are actually Brits and I am delighted with that, but that is more by accident than design.

Despite the Best Efforts...

Despite the best efforts of Met Éireann and of lone New Zealand writer and weather-herald, Ken Ring (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2013/07/ok-im-ready-now.html) August has mooped past without delivering any really hot weather and delivered us to the threshold of Autumn. We can't REALLY complain; we had amazingly hot dry spells in June and July and our August has been warm even when breezy and cloudy, so it has not stopped us doing anything and the garden has cropped away and the livestock has all got on with the job.

Hubbard chicks at Day 30 stretch out in a sunny patch catching the rays

We have been fascinated to see the Hubbard chicks develop. These guys were bought as something for Broody Betty to 'mother' when we took the ducklings from her and, rather excitingly, our 8 were only part of a larger batch which ended up in 2 other destinations and would enjoy 2 other feeding and brooding regimes. It has been fun to compare 'notes' with Mentor Anne's batch - indoor brooded under a heat lamp to start with and fed organic (and GM-free) chick-crumb.

Ours were brooded by Betty, of course, and were quickly out free ranging and scratching for worms and grubs, but were fed 'ordinary' mass-produced (i.e. not organic) crumb. By 20 days they were very different. Anne's seemed to be 10 to 20% bigger than ours but still covered only in chick fluff. Ours were smaller but were well feathered up, with wings showing primary,secondary and covert feathers, with well feathered bodies and with tails. It is interesting to think about whether the active outdoor life has them cooler and quickly growing feathers, while the indoor, heat lamp version has them not needing feathers as quickly, so able to put all that protein to body weight. It would be good to know how the third batch are doing and under what regime.

Now, at 30 days, Betty's work seems to be done and she is rarely with them. She has rejoined the 'Lovely Girls' and possibly re-started laying eggs. We have found a couple of new eggs; we have not seen who is laying these yet but BB may well be credited with them. They now find their own way about without her, moving round as a reasonably tight group like the 8-Ball did and take themselves off to 'bed' all piling into one of my new nest boxes rather than perching with their 'Mother'.

Achillea

Time finally ran out for our unfortunate little under-developed gosling, Fotherington Thomas. He lost the use of his right leg and did not look at all like improving despite a week of enhancing his Vitamin B3 and giving him physio-therapy swims on the big pond. We culled him out yesterday and now that he has been put through the kitchen-preparation stage we think we know why. His poor little scrawny, thinly muscled body (he was only 790 g 'oven ready' at 3 months) was built on a frame with what looked like every structural mis-shape of skeleton he could have inherited from his wry-tailed Father. His whole spine and pelvis curved round to his bad side and his neck had a serious 'chicane' double-bend half way down. We are now convinced that our adult geese are a sibling group and not, as advertised, a breeding trio, so we have been guilty of extreme in-breeding, brother to sister(s). At least that is a mistake easily corrected - we will just use the eggs next year and not let anyone go broody. At some point we may swap out the gander for one from a different blood line. The three remaining goslings all look fine, so they may just be the lucky 3 out of the 17 eggs originally 'set', in the DNA lottery of life.

Our orchard, you will recall, is all very new and has only been 'in' a year with planting started in August last year with one or two year old whips and 'feather' trees. We intended only to let it all sit for the first year getting established. We were happy that it blossomed but were not expecting any great fruit crop this year, so we were not disappointed when little fruit set but the Victoria Plum down at the far end of the orchard has quietly been getting on with producing a couple of dozen good sized plums. These are now colouring up well and starting to feel a bit ripe. There will not be enough for jam, but we should get a few desserts out of them and maybe a few for the fruit bowl.

The vegetable garden continues to pump out a lovely selection of vegetables more than enough to keep us and all our guests going and to make a big dent in the freezer space. We will need to invest in a decent size chest freezer this year to cope with the lamb meat. I was out this morning picking a yellow builder bucket full of runner beans and climbing French beans. I have been digging new potatoes of varieties Foremost and Ratte which fortunately escaped the blight. I have not started yet on the double-length row of Sarpo Mira main crop but they have such healthy foliage I cannot believe there will not be a shed load of tubers underground. I am storing them dried a bit but unwashed, in paper sacks in which I buy seed-wheat.

You can see from the pictures that I am still very good for rainbow chard, flat leaved kale and black (Tuscan) kale and calabrese and my small, spring-sown globe artichokes are even producing tiny chokes (which we will probably not actually eat; we will let the plant build up strength and start on that next year). We started into the carrots for the coq-au-vin this week. I have also been making sure to succession-plant to ensure a continuing crop which is not anything I was particularly good at in Kent so that I have more peas and radishes about to start and young beans at the 'first true leaves' stage.

The Jerusalem artichoke plants are huge, towering, 8 foot 'trees' so we are hoping for some good yields there, the French beans keep on coming and the turnips, which we found way too bitter, have kept the rabbits very happy for weeks as a supplementary food and a nice change from grass and herbs. The crunchiness of the turnip roots will also have been good for their teeth.

As crops finish and we move into Autumn proper, I need to be thinking about over-winter crops like onion sets, broad beans and Spring cabbage. It's all go.

Of Poorly Goslings and Vitamin B3

Carolyn of the Mini-horses phones seeking our help. 2 of her (4) 6-week old goslings over successive days have suddenly gone lame, unable to stand and then quickly died within the next day or so and a third is going the same way. Will I post a query onto the poultry discussion forum which I moderate, to see has anyone met this before and knows a solution? Meanwhile she rescues the poorly third goose to an indoor pen under her heat-lamp. My poultry 'lot', as usual, quickly come back with helpful suggestions. Sudden lameness in water fowl can be the result of waterfowl not being able to extract Vitamin B3 (Niacin) very well from cereals. As most poultry feed is either cereals or is cereal-based , feed for water fowl can be supplemented with Brewer's Yeast (tablets or powder) or with "Abidec" baby-vitamins in their drinking water. Apparently you do not use niacin itself, as this can caused liver damage. Thank you, if you should ever read this, 'Landkeeper' and 'Rho-B' for those suggestions, which I passed back to Carolyn.

Well, Carolyn's sick gosling is back on his feet and the healthy fourth one is still healthy after a night under the heat lamp and never got as far as being given Brewer's Yeast but, blow me if we didn't wake up this morning and only 6 of my geese came paddling out of the goose house when I opened the door. Our small, backward fella, Fotherington Thomas had gone lame over night and was suddenly unable to lift himself off the bedding. I carried him, protesting, out to the orchard to be with his family but he just sat down on the grass while they fussed and honked around him. I wondered whether he might just be a bit stiff or pins-and-needles-y and had slept badly on the leg and might recover.

Well, he was still there at 8 am. He seemed to have the same symptoms as described by Carolyn - his body, wings, neck and head all fine and bright, alert and still with an appetite. One leg also, apparently, still OK but his other (his right leg) being useless and limp so that he could not stand or walk. Thanking my stars for having done that enquiry on the poultry forum, I headed for Balla-D to obtain Brewer's Yeast powder (and got lucky when the pharmacist turned out to be an experienced and knowledge-able keeper of chickens and rabbits, all be it with no knowledge of geese lameness specifically).

Foth' was rescued back to the goose house where I set him up in one of the cattle feeding-bays on a bed of wood shavings and hay into which I put a hot water bottle wrapped in dog-towels and within reach of him I put a pot of water with the yeast powder suspended in it, and a bowl of various foods including chopped grass, sprinkled with more yeast powder. He settled down to quietly get on with it and, I noticed, took some of the water and the feed.

In the afternoon he was still nice and bright, so we decided to try him out on a bit of physiotherapy, swimming on the clear water of the big pond, where we could see if he was using the right leg at all and where the family could see him and know that he was not yet in the freezer (!). He was using the leg a bit but not a lot, but he seemed to enjoy the bath, a chance to duck his head under, preen, eat some of my aquatic plants and swim about. The other geese, we fancy, were looking on through the orchard fence a bit enviously; they are not allowed anywhere NEAR the big pond now.

One of my 'things' is that I hate to use or hear used the expression 'runt of the litter' It always strikes me that people who use the word, or the expression 'there is always a runt of the litter' go about expecting a runt and quickly latch onto the smallest baby and mentally set him aside for lower expectations, or a cheaper price if he's a puppy, or for some kind of Class 2 treatment. Runts also seem to get culled out first by anyone trying to be 'hard nosed' about their small holdering or farming. Well 'Foth' would definitely have been 'down there' if we were so inclined (and maybe hadn't had the real poor do-ers, Lucky and Dip). He has always been about 2/3 the size of his thriving siblings, day dreaming while they scoffed food, a bit bullied and pushed aside, left behind when they all tear about the orchard. We don't have 'runts', though. We may have babies who are a bit smaller than the rest but they are grand and they will catch up. We have fallen in love a bit with Fotherington Thomas and actually suspect that if he recovers from this one, he may be a 'keeper' if the grown ups will have him. Don't get your hopes up, mind. If his leg will not mend he will have to go down that route.

Meanwhile, the La Bresse from the '8-Ball' woke up and crowed to match William. Bad decision, La Bresse. Should have gone down the egg-laying route. It can be better news all round.