Six Chix

4 more chicks hatch among the duck eggs.

I left you with a bit of a spoiler in the last post. We had just saved the life of the first chick from the broody hen whom we had named "Cat Basket Lady" having found the little mite hypothermic and revived her with the warmth cradled in my hands. She had been returned to Mum and went on to survive the night. We had sat back happy with our one chick. Elizabeth even made the conciliatory comment that she had "always wanted to find out whether that cliché about being 'as fussy as a hen with one chick' really worked". However, the story did not end there - there was plenty more drama to come and a plot twist or two.

Feeding the new babies indoors before reintroducing them to
Mum

On that first day, Mum decided to come off the nest, which is usually a sign that she is done, has hatched all the good eggs and now has to rear those babies and leave the duff eggs behind. Ready or not, those eggs get chilled and die. When you clear the nest they usually prove to be infertile, or part-developed and dead-in-shell, so you find out that she is a good Mum and knows what she is about. This lass, though, is a first time broody, so she came off the nest with her one (we thought) then went back on, and off and on and so on. We just had to wait and watch.

Mid morning, the hen came off properly, fed the one, and went for a sit down elsewhere, so I knew I could clear the nest but wait, another hen had nipped in to lay today's egg, so at least the abandoned eggs would be kept warm. Meanwhile a fully dry, mobile black chick appeared with Mum. It must have been with her all along, but staying hidden under her skirts, perhaps carried between Mum's wing and body. Then there were 2. Eventually, the laying hen finished her task and hopped off the nest, so I was able to clear the old nest. Another surprise was in store.

Mum with 4 of the babies.

When I looked into the nest I could see a fully hatched but still wet baby chick in there and at least 2 more eggs 'pipping' (starting to break open with the baby pecking inside). I decided to gather up all 8 eggs and bring them into the incubator where there was just enough space between the nearly 'cooked' duck eggs. By evening, 2 more had hatched and overnight another bird emerged.

Mum with all 6

We were fairly confident we could introduce these to Mum, giving her a total of 6. Hens do not, in our experience, reject 'foreign' babies in these early days. You would normally sneak them in when it gets dark at roosting time so that Mum would wake up and just take on board that there were a few more mouths at breakfast.

Upside of being woken early by the dogs. This lovely 05:30
sunrise over the East Field.

We went with a slightly earlier (braver?) method. We fed them all indoors that afternoon and found them all to be very quick learners, all happily copying our chop-stick 'pecking' mime at the food. So we went out to the Mum+2, put a plate of food in front of her and our 4 'foreigners' beside her. Like magic, the 4 merged with the 2 and Mum accepted them all seamlessly. We now have a hen-and-six wandering round the yard in the sunshine, and she is mothering them like a pro. Happy days.

Short back and sides? Anything for the weekend, Madam?

On Wednesday, we were back at the sheep shearing, this time, over at Sue and Rob's where Rob was actually in the UK (Mum's 90th!). I knew that if I took my Help-X volunteer, Laura, along we'd be able to give her some real work, not just standing watching the "experts" (ha!) at play. That was exactly what she got - she was as exhausted as the rest of us. There were 4 ewes to shear, those same 4 to be given liver-fluke meds and 6 lambs to ear-tag.

First up was the tagging. I showed Laura how to do the first one but after that I was the only one nimble enough to catch them. I was grabbing them, holding them up for Laura, and she was banging in the ear tags. One for the CV - "I have ear tagged 5 lambs". The shearing went well, too. Laura wound up as chief 'holder', hanging onto the collar and lead that kept each sheep fairly still, whispering 'sweet nothings' into their ears to keep them calm, while I sheared.

I am delighted with this ewe - my 'personal best' ever shearing
job.

I was delighted with one ewe in particular, a 2nd-time sheared Suffolk cross Galway. For some reason her fleece was beautifully clean right down through and she was a big calm lady who stood for the cut as good as gold. The sides came off almost in one piece each and I never needed the trimming 'scissors' (Jakoti hand shears) or nicked her by mistake, even once. I'm calling it a 'personal best'. By comparison the other ewes just got 'normal' treatment and I should confess I made one bleed a little (oops).

Next.....

Sue introduced a bit of mischief into the job by spotting one of the girls with so many squirts of the blue anti-septic spray, she looked like a Dalmatian. Anyone passing their place is going to think I have cut the ewe to ribbons. Sue has told me since, that it was foot-rot spray she was using, so it all washed off or faded in the night, to save my blushes.

Can we go back out now?

What else have we been at? Actually some good honest, Help-X partnered 'garden' tidying. We have cleared through some big nettle patches up what we call the 'Primrose Path', the 'Keet Run' and into the East Field. Sitting here by the Dining Room window I can actually see through into the sheep. Before we did the job, the new nettles almost reached up to the lowest branches of the hawthorn bushes.

Dressed to kill. Laura and the brush cutter

Today we broke out the brush-cutter and did battle with the tall weeds (docks, goat-willow(!), rushes and creeping buttercup) in the area briefly known as my veg' patch. Friends of the Blog will know that I literally "lost the plot" 2 years ago, and then brush cut part of the wilderness and covered it with black plastic last year. This year I am re-attacking the paths and the beds that did not get sheeted over. One of these days I may even plant something in there.

Somewhere out in that wilderness....

The only other 'landmark' worthy of note is that today was the day for the vote on the all-important Constitutional Referendum on the '8th Amendment'; that thorny abortion issue. These referendum votes are only allowed for Irish citizens, so I had to sit this one out, but Elizabeth, of course, went down to tick the box.

Laura joins the ranks of #PigWimmin 

We now have to try to get a night's sleep with only the data from an exit poll at 11:30 pm, as the real count does not start till 09:00 tomorrow morning. The Woman of the House will be glued to that news feed; of that you can be sure. By the time I next write we will all know the result.

Myfanwy (Price)

Myfanwy Price and Dylan.

Welcome aboard Myfanwy Price, a very Welsh name for a Southdown x Hampshire ewe. She is so named because she continues our run of female members of the cast of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood which already includes Polly (Garter) and Lily (Smalls). She comes with a young (June-born) ram lamb at foot whom we have called Dylan (as in Thomas, of course). When I last posted we were all ready and with a working trailer tow-hitch, eagerly awaiting a phone call from Mayo-Liz our 'supplier' out by Kiltimagh.

Myfanwy and Dylan check out 'Hen and Two Chicks' on the
front lawn.

As it happened, the phone call came just as we were preparing to go out shopping for new bed linen. We were expecting Sparks and his good lady for an overnight on Monday and thought it would be nice to fit out 'their' room with all new linen. We were just drinking that final coffee before departure when the phone rang. I had to look pleadingly at Liz for a change of plan; she probably saw a future of trying to keep me focused on linen shopping when there was a ewe and lamb awaiting collection. Anyway, plan B was set in motion - hitch up trailer, nip to Kiltimagh to collect sheep, drop sheep back here, leave me to commune with new sheep while Liz took off for Carrick, solo, for un-pressured bedding shopping.

Our full complement on the front lawn.

Off to Mayo then and we knew where the pair would be even as we pulled up, so we got a good look at them over the split shed-gate before Mayo-Liz and husband Ray had even appeared to welcome us and we liked what we saw. The ewe is a relative youngster (18 months), so rather slight and slim compared to our 'mumsie' 3 year old and 5 year old, but she will fit in well with our plan to roll 3-4 ewes through the flock at 2-year age intervals. That way any anxious new first time mums can get reassurance from the calm, experienced old timers as their bodies go through all those unfamiliar and potentially upsetting changes.

We're big chicks now, so we want to sit
up in the grown-ups chairs.

The new ewe here is, in fact, a one time Mum and has her first lamb already with her; him a fine sturdy chap reminding us of our own first-born, Feste who was also 3/4 Hampshire. He is not quite weaned but he is big enough to need to kneel down to get at Mum's teats and she is already a bit impatient with him and walks off after he's had only a quick suck. Our plan is to put all three ewes to the borrowed tup (Rambo) at around mid September, so the ram lamb needs to be weaned fairly soon, so that she can come back on heat by then. We do not anticipate a problem. Ideally the tup serves all three ewes quickly on arrival, so that we get a nice synchronised lambing (Feb/March) but if she's not quite ready to stand for him, he will be around for a month and will catch up with her later in the visit if she's a bit slow.

Light summer fare ? In the awful wet weather we have been
lighting the range some evenings and using up frozen
winter-warmers like this haggis, neeps and tatties.

Rambo is good and ready and will almost certainly have tupped the ewe 'Pink' whom I sheared recently and may also have had a go at one of Sue's goats to produce a 'Geep'. The goat is looking very pregnant when we last saw her but Sue tells us that Geeps are a rarity. The mother (generally the goat) may go to full term but will usually pass only still-born 'babies'. However there are American 'experts' on the internet who say that, no, they have loads of them running about as fit as fleas. We wait with eager anticipation but also disquiet - no-one wants the gentle mother to suffer or even experience the anguish of still birth.

Not the brightest place to sleep, Soldier.

So, we trundled home with our new purchases and had a quick discussion on how to introduce Myfanwy and Dylan to our 'old' 4. We can no longer drive car and trailer across the front of the house and right into the East Field due to the new gravel/rose garden and the combined rig would ground out on the slope at the end of the cattle race.  Liz came up with a cunning manouvre where we move the 4 to the East field and then let the new ones in from the lane into the top of the Primrose Path. We were not sure of the keen-ness of the newbies to follow me and my unfamiliar feed bucket, but we knew we'd have no problem with the 4.

Some first outdoor mange-tout, went in well to the Indian
(Madhur Jaffrey) meal Liz cooked for Sparks plus one. 

The new animals got an hour or two alone on the front lawn while Liz shopped and they got their bearings and shouted much baa-ing conversation to the 4, one field away. When Liz got back we distracted the new pair while I ran the old 4 on to the lawn so they could meet. That went off as smoothly as you could hope, so, come 6 pm, all 6 were run back to the East Field to spend the night, a little minor stampede after my feed bucket which was actually led by Myfanwy and Dylan. Job done. Our little flock is now complete.

Another classic depression cruises up the Western Seaboard
- no Summer sunshine for us just yet.

We will have 'produced' 4 lambs this year which meets all our needs. We have had a little rash of friends and relatives asking 'can you do one for us' but we are not inclined to go down that road. However, we have an outstanding order in with our old friend, the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, Kenny O'C. He never replies to texts, calls or voice messages but has been known to turn up without warning with a trailer of "the sheep you wanted" and if he does, he's such a nice guy that we'd not want to let him down by saying "Ahhh, but we've gone elsewhere because we thought you weren't interested....". We may end up with 9 sheep yet, these 6 and Kenny's 2 (female) store lambs and a breeding 'yow'. Don't put the Under MIlk Wood back on the shelf just yet.

Wheel Tappers and Shunters

Cylindrical "Sausage" turf

Way, way back when I was a student (70's?) there was a rather silly variety show on TV known as the "Wheel Tappers' and Shunters' Social Club" about which I can remember very little, but the name, which I found intriguing. It derives from the fact that in railway engineering there was a task to check whether the steel wheels of rolling stock (carriages, railway trucks etc) might be cracked and this was done by whacking each wheel with a hammer and listening to the ring, or otherwise. Sound wheels rang, cracked ones answered the whack with a dull 'clonk'.

Achillea millefolium (a Yarrow cultivar)

I only mention this because we had 'The Man from ESB' (Our electrical supply company) all around the property and surrounding fields this week testing the "telegraph poles" for soundness in exactly the same way. Walk round whacking them high and low with a hammer and listen (I presume knowledge-ably and skillfully) to the noise. If a pole proved to be suspect, then phase 2 of the process involved hammering a 6 inch nail into the wood and seeing how easily it sunk in. We got chatting to him and he proved to be a fascinating bloke, brilliantly chatty and a mine of local lore to listen to.

One of two hugely spreading "Orion" geraniums

We have a pole on this property which has been concerning us because it is (now) well buried in the earth bank and surrounded by elder trunks and branches as well as having our previously mentioned buried clamp of 'sausage' turfs at the base. We wondered whether the burying of the first 5 feet or so of the pole would have given it damp-rot and also then whether our works to unearth all the turf and re-model the bank might undermine the pole (cutting off power to the rest of the lane!).

New Keet Run

Well, the pole is one of a batch now about 52 years old, most of which are still sound (others in the area, only 11 years old are rotting badly already) but our particular one is indeed rotten and is now marked for replacement in the next 2 months. The sausage turf is not, as I had guessed, ancient, hand-won stuff. It is cut and extruded by a machine like the modern (rectangular) stuff, but a different machine which favours the wetter bogs and is still in use in much of Mayo. So it could well be from our previous owner, TK-Min's days on the farm, maybe only 20 years old or there-abouts.

Keet run from the south end.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we have met our ever-growing Keets' need for more space by slotting a clever little run into a bit of waste-ground between our 'Primrose Path' and the Eastfield. This is basically a 6 foot tall, 9 feet wide and 30 feet long rectangle with a coop and gate at one end. It was cheap as chips. The 'walls' are made from a donated roll of 6 foot high 2" chicken wire, held up on the big trees or existing fence posts, and the roof is a piece of fruit-cage bird-netting held up by polypropylene 'rope' and the gate wrangled out of rough-cut 2 by 1 and a half inch timber.

Keets at 5 weeks explore the new big space.

We successfully moved the ten half-grown guinea fowl keets (babies) which are now well able to fly and to run much faster than Liz or I can (!) using a cat-basket method suggested to us by Charlotte (Thanks, Ch!) who was reported to have been in fits of laughter telling her Mum how we had originally proposed doing it, but I will draw a veil over that bit. There was one small hiatus when we went back to check on them and saw, sitting cutely in a row on top of the coop (inside the run), a row of nine keets. Nine? Didn't we have ten? Number ten was sitting up on the polyprop rope on the top of the run - he/she had found a tiny corner where we had left a gap twixt wall and roof and got out somehow. That one was quickly rounded up and gap closed with a bigger, more powerful cable-tie (Thanks again, Ch!) and we have had no escapes since.

We were not actually looking to sell these keets (yet, anyway) so we had not advertised them anywhere, but John Deere Bob had let a friend know we had them, when talking to the guy and finding out that like us, he had lost his male bird. We had no sooner released them into the new run and I had snatched these pics of the ten, than this guy (Declan G) arrived wanting to buy 3 (un-sexed) birds hoping there would be a replacement cock-bird among them. We sold them for €8 each which will nicely pay for most of their chick crumb and growers' pellets. I have since had a 2nd call from a lad who wants 2 more, so the word may be spreading but we will not sell any more after that - we want to know what these guys taste like after all this hard work!

It's not ALL glamarous cooking - a first go at
home made pizza.

We also managed to sell, at last, a couple of baby rabbits. We seem to be plagued on the local 'classified ads' website, Donedeal.ie with getting very few bites and a huge percent of those who make contact prove to be time-wasters who do not phone back when they say they will, or don't show up. You also get short text conversations which end without apology or 'goodbye' when they say something like 'where are you?' and you say County Roscommon.

Possibly the best Black Currant Clafoutis ever.....

It seems to be perfectly OK here to just stop texting. There is no need, apparently to finish with 'Ohh, that's a bit far, I'll pass' or 'OK, sorry to trouble you'. I am not alone in this - plenty of sellers complain of the same problem. One trap I have not fallen into yet and do not intend to is to hang around the house waiting on a call or a visit. If I'm in, I'm in. However, you do occasionally get the exact opposite, a serious, well meaning, polite buyer willing to drive all the way from Galway; in this case they got a bit lost en route and took 3 hours but still turned up. They were a Lithuanian couple, again brilliant people who we felt would have stayed and chatted for hours. They took 2 female bunnies at €20 each. They had actually wanted a breed-able pair but ours are all brothers, sisters and litter mates. They will keep hunting for a Giant breed buck.

Hubbard rooster at 10 weeks, carcass weight 2.012 kg.

Rather early, on Day 72, we decided to start 'harvesting' our Hubbard chickens, delivered as 1 day old chicks on May 1st. Although they are a bit young yet, the roosters in particular are already starting to look huge and are starting to clutter up the place - we get that feeling of too many chickens under foot when we walk in the yard. So, pretty much as an experiment, this guy got the chop and turned out to have a live weight of 3.016 kg, a carcass weight of 2.012 kg (plus 232 g of 'bits' (liver, heart, gizzard for us and the neck for the cats!) Not bad for a free range bird only just over 10 weeks old!

Pioneer gardening. Liz hefts a rock.

So that's about it for recent adventures. Opening up the run for the keets showed us that we have yet another untamed bit of 'garden' which needs sorting, so Liz has been out pioneering in the stinging nettle proof gloves and rock-proof wellies, breaking off only to study the gardening books for the 'dry shade under trees' species. Convallaria, anyone?

Make Do and Mend

Another lovely day in our current run of warm ones, brings us to the end of June and day 28 for the Guinea Fowl keets. They are thriving and seem a very happy little group despite our decision that these would never get to go free-range. They are in a rabbit run at present but we are creating them an aviary between the 'Primrose Path' and the East Field. It will be roughly 30 feet long and a 6 foot by 6 foot rectangular 'tube'. You can see from the picture that they are getting their long necked, slightly stooped, adult shape but have so far not shown any sign of losing feathers from the parts of their face which will be bald and 'splashed' with vivid white and there are no signs of the bright red 'chilli pepper' wattles which their mother (Min the Hin!) has. They have a high, piping version of the adult 'buck-wheat buck-wheat' call and amuse us every evening with a joint chorus at bedtime. We have no idea what they are discussing (with hens it is traditionally meant to be Danish politics!). They group together and drift slowly towards the pop-hole calling continuously. Bizarre birds!

Also growing fast are the pigs, now 10 days off their 3-months birthday. They are well used to us by now and well familiarised with what time meals should be - if they see either of us walking about when they think they are due one, they are up at the fence, grunting and then starting to squeal to get our attention. I tried to get a pic today of their lying-on-your-back-getting-your-tummy-tickled thing but they were too interested in the food and too playful for lying down. Of course, after supper they strolled out into the grass by the orchard and stretched out in the sun, bellies exposed to the warmth, catching the rays - if only I'd have taken the camera.

Rolo sleeping in the strawberry patch.

We did our weekly bee-inspection today. I was hoping that the colony would have expanded outwards from the original 6 'nucleus' frames across the remaining 6 of the brood box (3 either way) but we could not see sign of this. Maybe the frames were not all full, and the brood in them very young. Still, there is plenty of activity each day and we've seen plenty of pollen brought back to the hive (that is the protein to build little bee-larva bodies, so it is a sign that your queen is laying eggs each day). We will just have to be patient. We put the 'super' on anyway because we'd taken it down there with us. For those who know about these things we are not yet using the Queen excluder, so we are running the so called "Brood and a half" system. If the bees fill this, we will give them the 2nd super over the excluder, so that the top super will be just for honey. Mrs S (and little niece R) will be delighted to know that we used the smoker today properly and the bees were calm and relaxed - only a hundred or so came out to repel boarders - we were all done in about 10 minutes. Nobody got stung.

Meanwhile, Liz has diversified from the pure knitting into a bit of seamstress-ing. She is enjoying remembering her needlework classes from very young school days (so young that when you had a hem to make on a napkin, you had to get Mum to iron the creases into the hems). She has bought herself a very full kit of cottons, threads, needles, elastic and measuring tape as well as some nice fabrics. All the old saggy PJ's are suddenly as waist-hugging as new, many clothing items have been repaired for the little rips and tears from the barbed wire and I have seen an excellent fringe benefit in the work-shirt department.

Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

When I was working in the UK I had amassed quite a collection of reasonable quality cotton shirts (Marks and Sparks was the 'tailor' of choice!) and for a lot of these, the only thing which went wrong was that the collars would go threadbare at the neck crease. Those would get 'audited out' and join the rag-bag. Not any more. Liz has found that they can be very neatly and professionally de-collared and go back into service over here where no-one is making rules about wearing a tie. I also have quite a few more 'posh' shirts for going out in - we bought Jaeger and Louis Copeland and neither of these got used for work or saw much use, so I am very much the snappy dressed pig-wrangler when I feel like it. It's not all 'grunge'. We are not quite 'Make do and mend' with the wartime ends-to-middle bed sheet fixes, but we do feel a bit green and recycling-orientated. Usefully, my beekeeper suit also got elastic thumb-loops on its sleeves today - they keep the sleeves pulled down nice and tight into the long gauntlet gloves. No gaps for the stinging marauders.

Snake's head fritillary seed pod

So that's about it for June 2014. My final picture is of the snake's head fritillary seed pods now ripe and opening. These plants flowered back in Mid April, so you can immediately see why they can not survive in the wild in any commercially used grassland - grass in these parts is either grazed down hard by cattle, or it is zizzed off very short by the silage-mowers once in May/June and then again 10 or so weeks later. Plants like this simply do not have the time to flower, set seed and then ripen and shed it as they would have done in the more traditional July/August cut hay making regimes. In fact the silage boys got lucky this year and a lot of them saw good weather forecasts and left the grass which had been cut for silage on the ground, shook it through a couple of times with the hay-tedder and then baled it as hay. A lot of old, little-used equipment was getting greased up and dusted off. Fair play to them - make hay while the sun shines.

(Officially) Off the Road

Well, the year rolled round and the belovéd 2CV finally ran out of tax, so we had to make our unwillingness to battle against the 'machine', official. We want the car to stay registered in this country, so we had to submit a "Statutory Off Road Declaration" promising that we will not use, park or stray at all on the public highway. This stands for 12 months after which time you have to re-new it.

Nectaroscordum.

My hope beyond hope is that the rules around classic/vintage cars will change and exempt the car from the NCT, specifically on the emissions bit which I repeatedly failed. The cut-off is currently fixed at 1980 registrations (mine's 1986). The UK recently changed to a rolling '30 years old' so that, yes folks, even the Morris Marina and Austin Allegro are now "classics" (yep, square steering wheel and all!). Till then the 2CV is an untaxed farm vehicle used for hauling trailers full of tree branches about within the small holding but not allowed on the road.

Pirate the Cat. Sorry about the rubbish picture. 

We MAY have acquired a new cat. We are being visited by a starving stray who is not in the best of health. We have not yet been able to get a hold of this cat and have a good look, but he/she seems to be very manky around the ears, may have a sunken, useless eye and is definitely very thin and undernourished. I am not going to expand on where these cats come from and the animal abuse and neglect by some folk locally; this is neither the forum nor the method. This one though was born locally and is now haunting the area in search of food. Liz  hates to think of the poor mite starving and has started putting food down for him. His one eye and his stealing of our own cat's food (we wondered why the cats here were "suddenly eating their bowls of food right down to the last scrap") got him the name "Pirate".

First 2014 produce - broad beans and radishes.

We now put our own cat bowls outside, topped up with more meat out of the tin, at about 9 pm and sure enough, he slinks in and polishes it all off. Sometimes the dogs are awake and they detect him and bark. Other times he is a stealthy and secret as can be, and he gets away with it. Our plan is to feed him up so he is strong enough to fight off some of "what ails him" and possibly get him tame enough to accept being handled, when we will be able to get the vet, Aoife, to have a good look round him.

George Junior at 4 weeks, looking a bit more goose shaped.

Maybe one day he will join our existing 'pride'. He can be no more than 6 months old. He did not get a lot of numbers in the feline lottery of life. We know that one of his siblings was hit by a car in the lane and that 4 more may have been trapped in mink traps and shot by a farmer. It is not a barrel of laughs being an stray cat in this part of the world. The poor picture is because he is so nervous at the moment that he scoots as soon as we appear, so the pic was taken through the (closed) kitchen window.

The keet gang, hatch plus 8-9 days. A bit of fresh air.

The keets continue to thrive. At day 7, it was so warm in the spare room, that we took them "off heat"; i.e. we turned off the IR lamp and then with day temperatures up in the 17-19 degree range we decided to try them out of doors, out in the sunshine on our front lawn on some genuine grass. They do OK. They tend to patrol around the run a as a close-knit group of 11 birds, steering clear of patrolling cats and visiting the food bowl as a Rugby scrum.

Monkey flower (Mimulus luteus) in the pond.

Who-ever finds the best bit of shredded lettuce first then zooms off with it pursued by the others, so we have the amusing sight of 11 keets zooming about the place in a wing-flapping charge. There are plenty of other bits of lettuce in the bowl, but the one that your 'mate' has got is way more attractive! We have a nice chunk of 'waste ground' between the Primrose Path and the East Field where we can build these guys a run 30 feet long by about 6' by 6'. They should enjoy 'zooming' around that. Tonight we are promised a warm night, so we have actually put them to be in the 'bedroom' bit of the rabbit run outside, with a bit of plywood blocking up the opening. We reckon then will be warm, dry and cosy enough in there in their 'huddle' and not need to be indoors any more.

The pigs? They are well settled now and we have found a food that they love and use as a treat - apple! They have got used to us and our routine. They come piling out of the ark and up to the fence when I approach, calling "Pig Hoo-ey!" (see PG Wodehouse for details), giving my two-tone whistle and tapping my plastic beaker (= food scoop) on the top of a post. They love the pig nuts, and the apple cut into 8 segments (like a Terry's chocolate orange)
and (lately) some chunks of tomato. I was amazed by the delicacy of their nibbling and chewing.

Brought up on all the old clichés of snouts in the trough etc, I was expecting them to hoover up food with a noise like a waste-disposal. Not these delicate ladies. They carefully select a segment of apple and then nibble small chunks out of it, chewing each piece rather squelchily like a child who has been told to chew it all 40 times before they swallow. Takes them AGES to eat an apple. We have been feeding them in an old cat litter tray but now it seems that they have taken to squabbling over the food. One 'claims' the food and stands over and in it, eating their share and defending the rest of the food with the rest of their body, manouvring their flanks to shoo the other girl off, till the other nips round to the other side and head-butts them in the midriff to get back in. We have now bought them a bowl each and that seems to have sorted that out. It is hard to believe that we have only had them a week. They have grown so much - It would not be so easy to tuck one under each arm now for a repeat of last Thursday's post picture!

Foxgloves.

The only other live-stock news is that Squawk, our remaining Marans hen seems to have moved in with the other girls. The Marans ladies had had their own house since they arrived but the sister 'Bubble' expired of old age (as far as we could tell) last week and she has now given up the solitary life and joined the bulk of the hens in the concrete out-building. This is good - it frees up the wooden house; we wish the Hubbard poults would do the same.

Meanwhile, another story which I cannot go into any detail on, so I shouldn't even be mentioning it here, but here is a pic of Deefer celebrating a medical 'all-clear' with a glass of Prosecco. Life goes on.

Kindling and Horse Play

June the 2nd - due day for our two 'pet' rabbits, Ginny (pictured here, grey and white) and Padfoot (lop eared black and white, 2nd time around Mum). Both of these girls were taken off to Charlotte's rabbit collection for mating with two different bucks, on the same day that she came to collect our "buck", Buck Rogers. Rogers, you will recall, turned out to be an on-heat female, so we hurriedly changed 'his' name to Ginger Rogers. Charlotte took her anyway and mated her to yet another buck and she has now 'kindled' (given birth).

These two were due today but, as is the way of these things, you see very little and if you are wise you don't go looking. Anxious mother rabbits will quickly eat their young if put under stress, while they are still at the new born, pink, naked, blind stage. You are best off leaving well alone for 2 weeks and waiting for any tiny, fur-covered, baby bunnies with eyes open, to emerge from the nest. All you might see is fur in the grass - the rabbit will pluck some of her own fur to line the nest and we have seen this fur in both the females' runs. Any babies will be detectable from about the 16th by which time our big doe, Goldie, may also have kindled.

Now a part of the post which you might want to miss if you are an experienced horse owner (or even if you own these particular horses, Carolyn and Charlotte). You will either be laughing fit to bust or horrified at our cack-handedness, and especially mine rather than Liz's. I admit I do not know horses and I expected them to be biddable and steerable like sheep. I also do not know electric fencing and I expected it to keep the horses 'in'. Big mistake which resulted in some fun and games but, let me add quickly, no injuries or loss of life!

We have borrowed this electric fence and I had deployed it to give the horses access to the 'Primrose Path'. I tested the fence with the back of my hand, as you do and got a decent jolt off it, so I knew it was working. The horses were let out of their field and grazed happily in the new space for a couple of hours. Then Liz went out to wash some spilt fruit-squash from the front step and spotted Cody calmly grazing in the middle of the front lawn. Not a bother, Liz went for a head collar, got it on him and walked him back to the fence where-upon he happily ducked under the fence-strand as if it wasn't there! Fence too high on the posts? We lowered the fence in the escape zone but judged it to be OK for the rest of its length.

A little later I spotted that Cody was back out again, this time apparently having ducked under again but at the lane end of the lawn. I walked over to him, gently grabbed a hank of mane and steered him gently back to the fence thinking he'd just duck under again. Not this time - he stopped dead, rooted to the ground. At this point I am afraid I become an incompetent idiot. I let go the horse and nipped down to turn off the fence so that I could make a gap to let him back through. Instead of him going back through the other horses trotted up and piled through the gap. I now had 3 horses loose on the lawn, heads up and an excited look in their eyes. I yelled for Liz. Cody and Romeo got into a canter and headed for the woods. They weren't about to be stopped by me calling 'whoa' or doing any of my sheep-steering hand gestures. Our only saving was that the road gates were all closed.

Liz grabbed the Polo mints and got Bob's (The Shetland) attention, so he , at least, wandered over and was amenable to having a head collar and lead fitted, so Liz was able to get him back into the field while we tried to catch the other two. Not a bit of it. They were straight way galloping round the whole place, all fired up at the new freedom. The charged through the woods, scattered the geese and chickens, thundered past very close to our new pond (Argghhhh, No! Visions of ponies galloping through shallow water in cowboy films!) and down into the allotment where they, thankfully, ran down the path-ditches, not across the raised beds and crops. I thought I had them cornered but 2 excited horses are not anything you can corner, and they raced back up the allotment, along the dog-wood path and, luckily into the orchard field where I could at least close the gate on them and contain them in a small area.

Here the galloping turned into play-fighting and then, as far as we could see, to a proper fight. They raced in circles around the orchard doing 2-footed high kicks on each other, biting necks and legs as if to try to make the other guy fall down or sit down. The rabbits in their runs had never seen anything like it and were racing about all over the place trying to take cover. The horses avoided hitting any trees but were careering into fences and at one stage clunked the big goose-house to one side. It was a hot day so we thought it might run out of steam, but Liz suggested fetching a bucket of cold water to throw over them. I got Romeo a direct hit and this did seem to slow him up. Both horses stopped the running-battle and stood, panting hard with nostrils flaring. I was able to get head collars on the pair and Liz and I led one each back to the field where we bolted them in and sat back to draw breath. What a relief!.

In the afternoon we had to go out, but when we came back we thought we'd better lower the fence strand all along the length and let them out again. I noticed that the 'jolt' from the fence was by now very faint, so perhaps the batteries were going flat and Cody had spotted this. Things went OK in the afternoon session. With the fence lowered none of the horses challenged it and when it was time to go back into the field, the carrot-bribe worked as normal. Charlotte is possibly coming round to check the gear out. We might stick to the tethering for now, till we are sorted properly.

We have, sadly, one piece of bad news to report, which is the loss of one of the 7 goslings. We do not know how or why; the most likely reason being a snatch-raid by a hooded crow. When the goslings are as tiny as ours, the crows can swoop down, grab one by the head and nip off even with the parent birds standing guard. Anyway, by what ever method, we know we had 7 goslings this morning till about lunchtime, but by mid-late afternoon we could only count 6. We did a thorough search of the garden in case the little mite had simply been left behind in the various wanderings of the family. Ah well. These things happen.

All 8 chickens are still with us and now at almost 6 weeks of age have formed a nice little tight-knit group who move around together independently of the grown-ups. Broody Betty has little to do with them now and has re-joined the main flock and William.

With the pond now almost full after 2 days of hose-pipery, we have been able to start doing the edges and, in particular, our flat-stone 'beach' and some of the surrounding stone edging. Tomorrow we should be able to play 'bury the rubber edge' under the bits where we want grass edges. It is all starting to look rather good. We are very pleased with it.