Hen and Two.

White foxgloves - seed from Anne and Simon.

I was only talking in the last post about work days and all the really good, decent people I had the pleasure of working alongside. So, sad sad news today to learn that one of them, a great friend and team member, Steve Flatt has passed away in a hospice in Kent after a short illness. RIP Steve, taken too soon. Thoughts and sympathies to his wife Jean and the family and to all his friends and anyone who knew him. He will be sadly missed. He and Jean were also the breeders of our eldest bitch, Deefer whose name titles this blog, so we have a nice living memory of the guy and a link back to those better times.

This whole mass of flowers from an original single cheapo
bulb bought from a Supermarket as a pack of three. All three
are now doing this well seperately in our raised bed .

If you have stayed abreast of this blog you will have heard of the exploits of "Hen with One Chick". Well, H+1 has now been trumped by the broody from under the elderberry bush, who now holds the name "Hen with Two". She is still sleeping under the elderberry but is out every day parading her two tiny chicks, one an orange colour that points to a possible Buff Orp pure-bred, one a paler chick which suggests a hybrid Sussex Ponte or Hubbard. Dad will still be a Buff as those are the only roosters currently operating on the holding.

New mum, "Hen and Two",

She seems to be doing a fine job of protecting them and showing them round, finding them food and even leading them into the melée of hens in the yard. I am sneaking out extra rations to them - I wait till they are seperated from the bulk of the flock and slip them a jam-jar lid loaded with finely chopped hard-boiled egg, chick crumb and a bit of hen-grub to keep mum interested. She straight away starts the low clucking which signals a food-find to the babies and they are all over it like a rash. If any other adult hens discover them at the feeding (even 'Hen with One') then mum starts a wide-wing display and drives them off till her little ones have filled their crops. If a rain shower threatens she quickly rounds them up under her skirts to keep them dry till the rain has done. We have hopes that she will be as good as H+1.

Parsnip seedlings.

Meanwhile, the geese have given up on the broodying game and gone back to grazing in the orchard. We are not sad that they hatched nothing this year. I had been stealing the eggs all spring so that they had nothing to go broody on - we even passed some on to Anne as she wanted to hatch a few and they have done OK. We hoped they would not go broody but eventually one did, so we let her have the benefit of the doubt with just 2 eggs. Her sisters subsequently added 4 more but for what ever reason nothing came of this.

Dublin Bay does well against our Kitchen Garden wall.

A third broody has now claimed a nest, this another Buff Orpington hen (it seems that Buffs are doing the broody thing this season all on their own, 3 out of the four so far - no contributions from Marans, Sussex Ponte, mini-Buffs or Hubbards). She has gone broody in the former rabbit 'Maternity Unit' which is actually in the hen house, so I have had to lock her in in the mornings to stop everyone else trying to lay eggs in that nest, She is such a gentle soul that she does not fight them off, but meekly hops down and wanders around clucking disconsolately till they have finished and let her back on. This way she gets a bit of peace (and a stable number of known-start eggs to sit on).

A good stand of Autumn Bliss raspberries. This type are cut
right back down to ground level in February, so all this is new
growth this year.

In the garden a good range of flowers are in full bloom and the veg, after a bit of a slow May, is starting to pick up the pace. The Summer fruiting raspberries did not enjoy the poor spring weather and are looking a bit frazzled and tired-of-leaf, but the flowers have had bees on them so we still might get a crop. More hopeful are the Autumn Fruiting canes which are getting nice and tall and starting to bud up at the top. We are also about to start cropping artichokes, though we seem to have lots of small chokes this year rather than fewer. bigger ones. We will have to make portions up out of a few - normally one choke suffices one person for their 'five a day'.

Lemons and elderflower heads for the brews.

It is finally the elderflower season. It seemed a long time coming on this very late season, where even the hawthorn did not start till 19th May. Liz has been out there cutting a million flower heads and shopping for cheap deals on sugar and lemons. She has had requests for the elderflower cordial, a great favourite of the teenage Silverwoods, but will also be making quite a lot of the elderflower "fizz" - the recipes call it 'champagne', but we make no such high-brow claims.

Elderflower cordial

It is light and very quaffable, and if you can get the 'fizz' just right, it is a bit like a Prosecco. You have to judge when the bucket ferment is almost over and then rack it off. We save the screw-top wine bottles through spring time. The wine is then stood with the tops screwed lightly shut but you need to check it on days 1, 2 and maybe 3, just by opening a few bottles very gently to listen for a gentle "pssst!". Too much and you daren't screw the tops down for good or you get at best bottles going off like fire extinguishers at the table and at worst, exploding. Too little and you have missed the boat and produced a rather thin, very young, flat wine. In the middle and you have a gently sparkling wine which does not fizz up any sediment from the bottom of the bottle and is a gorgeous refreshing drink chilled from the fridge. Sláinte!

Nice little light job for a hot evening. Just spread that
3 and a half tonne of gravel, could you?

Finally, we had our gravel delivered. We'd phoned a number supplied by our friend Mark at the garden centre and I thought the voice sounded familiar. It was only when I started to give the guy directions and said we were in TK Min's old house that he recognised my voice and said "..and didn't I come and shoot your foxes?" and I realised it was our handy man-with-gun driving the lorry. Small world.

I Can See for Miles

With apologies to Pete Townsend....

To the East and North of our allotment site has been, for at least as long as Meggie can remember, abandoned farmland, gradually being taken over by hawthorn, birch and brambles, and always threatening to turn into a massive housing estate at the hands of a local developer.

It's been fantastic dog walking country, criss crossed as it is by the paths opened up by trail bikers, and you'll have heard in this blog of any number of circular "loop" walks that use it - the Levee loop, the concrete bridge, the high path, the short-levee. Meggie's a bit old now for the full levee loop, but we still enjoy a charge about down there and only weeks back I took myself off for a rabbit hunt through its thickets (see blog called "Only gone for 15 minutes")

It abounded in wild flowers at the right season - rosebay willow herb (fire weed to our US readers), thistles, bristly ox-tongue and blossom from the brambles and hawthorn (may), blackthorn (sloes) and morello cherries. It ran with rabbits and we could regularly see foxes, nightingales, pheasants, cuckoos and kestrels.

Now suddenly, with the credit crunch clipping the wings of the developer, we hear that it is to be returned to farmland, cleared, ploughed and planted to oilseed rape and wheat. So out there now, all across the "Abbey Fields" (as they are known) big machinery is at work - huge hydraulic tracked diggers, JCB's (back-hoes) with telescopic jibs and grabs, tractors with massive tillers etc, clearing the scrub, piling it into huge pyres and torching them. You can see the boiling brown smoke for miles.

You can see for miles, too ! It is surprising how the hawthorn and bramble rises up to hem you in shrinking your horizon to a few feet. Today, on the high ridge path we could see for miles across the feilds - even a dog with her eyes 8 inches from the deck has a clear view.

We don't know whether to be pleased that the threat of the Housing Estate has gone (for now) or sad for the foxes made homeless, the birds forced to move on, and the end to a goodly crop of blackberries. Farmland is OK, but ecologically and in terms of bio-diversity, a bright yellow field of OSR is almost sterile, and wheat sprayed 3 or 4 times a week might as well be scorched earth.

Ah well, the farmer guy is promising to keeop some paths open and allow we dogs continued access.

As for Megan, our walk today to see the fires and clearances is an hour and a half, which is just about at her limit. She is dawdling like a pro by the time we walk back down hill to the house. She's walked those fields since she was a pup - for nearly 13 years we've had that lovely wild place - almost a nature reserve - to walk in, just minutes from the front door.

Ah... waxing lyrical
Deefski

Moonlight Swim

Those ol' foxes are still creating noise on a nightly basis and about half one or so each night we have to wake Dad and get him to let us out to deal with them. You never KNOW with foxes. So here goes Dad, all bleary eyed chasing us down the stairs and crying "Havoc". We three race off down the garden barging each other to stay in front, and as we dissappear down the steps, Dad can hear the spray of gravel as we pass the big pond, then usually a bark as we squeeze through the wooden arch shoulder to shoulder, turn right next to the chicken run and then left down to the greenhouses.

As we bark Dad often imagines one of us being barged off course and into the pond, but we always re-appear happily a few seconds later, job done

Except last night.....

Haggis didn't come back. No sweat, for a while - one of us is commonly distracted by the needs of a dog, or by things that go bump in the night. But seconds dragged onto minutes, and then 5 minutes. Haggis is usually first back, so Dad's getting a bit concerned at this point. So he grabs a coat and torch and comes looking, only to find Haggis standing in the end of the pond, back end in the depths, only his shoulders out of the water, covered in duckweed and not quite able to spring up out. (There are plenty of excape routes out of the pond, but not that one!)

Dad helps the H out and races for a doggy towel. No harm done - H is dried off very thoroughly before he's allowed anywhere near the bed again.

And Dad..... don't do that back garden thing again in your wax-jacket waistcoat, jocks and wellies - it's not a good look for you - all white legs and knobbly knees. Soooo embarrassing! What if the neighbours had been watching. I'd never be able to show my face in the town again!

Get fresh at the Weekend!

Deefs

Call of the Wild

Behind us, the big building site is progressing well, but the bit immediately behind us is destined to be car parking, and is scraped clear and currently used by the builders' cars. Bordering on this is a foxes' earth, and the foxes come out and yowl and yap when it gets dark, sending us carreering down the garden at speed. They are long-limbed skinny ones, so we think they are this year's cubs, now grown up to full size

We race down to the beech hedge and shout and yap at them till we are told off and dragged back indoors bythe spoilsport humans. Yesterday though, Haggis decided to try a new tactic and told the foxes what Westies could do - Owww-oooooooooooo....OWWWWWWWWWWOOOO. He was magnificent. It was like "Call of the Wild" out there! Go "H" !!

Meanwhile, Dad's been up mowing around the allotment in a rare dry opportunity and come back all green-footed.

Mum has made up the bed with some oh-so-posh, brand new Fenn-Wright-Manson Egyptian cotton sheets , duvet cover etc and sends Dad an email at work that says the "mutts" are barred, and that if any of "them" get into the bed before she does, she's off out looking for a cookbook with dog recipes. Seems a bit harsh

Dad decides to thoroughly wash the ol' green feet before he gets in!

Scaring ourselves to death with the inland waterways pre-holiday guidance DVD. Those boats look very very very long!

Deefs

Streaming or Screaming?

At this time of year, Dad is glued to Springwatch on BBC2; lots of footage of birds rearing babies in their nests, foxes, badgers, otters, the Island of Islay etc etc. The Beeb also lay on a service where they run webcams on various nests and you can stream the action live, 24/7 into your PC. So Mum decided to have a click around and see what was on offer.

She's been studying, so Haggis and I were crashed out on the put-me-up bed. Mum found a Jackdaw nest, where all was quiet, as 3 replete, sated baby Jackdaws were sleeping silently. Thinking there was something wrong with the sound track, Mum tweaked up the volume. Just then Mum-Jackdaw came back and the chicks awoke and started such a catawauling crescendo of raucous noise, H and I were up, leppin' off the bed and charging down the stairs a-woofing and carrying on, with Mum yelling "Oy! Silly dogs!, It's only me and the PC! It's on here!".

Tonight had us glued to the TV downstairs,as a bit of footage of foxes, making that all-too-familiar noise that usually has us going tearing down the garden , this time has us racing round the living room to find where the foxes are hiding. Today's pics show me glued to Bill Oddie and Kate Humble, with the second pic showing a fox in a garden. In this case it's about to be whacked by a tawny owl on it's rump.

Entertainment.

Deefs