Cull a Cock Curry

Skinny light-weights. These roosters we are
culling are not even 21 weeks old yet, so
they are only making weights of 1.5-1.7 kg
in oven-ready form.

A genuinely short post this time as very little is currently happening. Even the one positive 'story' we had planned for today was postponed for 2 weeks. That was the arrival of our two new Guinea hens. The friend who was going to arrive with them was not, for various reasons, able to identify 2 females for us and then isolate them. Sexing Guinea Fowl is notoriously hard and usually based upon the females calling "buckwheat buckwheat" and the males not. If you are looking at a pen full of birds who are not calling, you are a bit stumped, as you can imagine. Better luck in the next fortnight, Billy.

What's in YOUR freezer? Although ours (plural) are well set
up, organized and everything labelled we do sometimes get nice
surprises, like this goodly rack of venison chops.

We have started the process of culling out these spare roosters. I killed 2 last night after lock-up. Going in there in the dark with just the head torch is the quietest way we have found. Nobody panics around flapping. The bird just allows himself to be "grabbed" enfolding his wings and carried out. Our normal system here is for me to rear and then kill the birds, which are then presented to Liz who processes them through the plucking and cleaning out stages. She loves that job and gets herself set up with a Radio 4 "In Our Time" pod or an Agatha Christie play on the laptop.

4 litres of goat's milk for the next cheese.
Thanks Sue and Rob.

The roosters here are being culled out to remove a 'too many men' problem, rather than because they are ready to eat. They are less than 21 weeks old so quite light-weight and, when plucked out look very rangy and skinny. They weigh in, oven-ready, at 1.5 to 1.7 kg which looks and feels very little when you are used to meaty Hubbard carcasses which go 3.5 kg at 80 days.

Ginger Wine (also from S+R). Sweet and
a bit 'viscous', more like a liqueur.

We don't mind that at all though. The Hubbards we always joint up prior to freezing because the two of us cannot manage more than a few bits (a thigh each or maybe 2 drumsticks). These little fellas do not need any of that - we will roast (or curry, or 'au vin', or spatch-cock or whatever) the whole bird and eat half each like you would with a poussin.

Cream cheese under construction. 

We took our fertile (we hope) duck eggs over to Sue and Rob's to go in their incubator, this being our plan to up the number of ducks on site. I took, as well, a load of empty plastic 2 and 3 litre milk bottles, which they use for the goat milking. I also took a small incubator part (con-rod for the egg rocker servo) which I had repaired, plus got a chance to admire their newly borrowed Suffolk ram. This guy has come from a nearby farm and was the lad we were also going to use but we then decided to keep bought-in ram lamb 'Pedro'. He is 4 years old, big and magnificent. He has already been 'at work', Rob told me, so they are hoping for lambs in April.

"Play" Station? Liz is inputting the entire text of the Drama
Group's chosen play into a word document.

When you go to S+R's bearing gifts, you never seem to come away empty handed. I came away with 4 litres of goat's milk, a bottle of ginger wine to try and a stack of old egg boxes, useful for when we next in 'glut' mode. Thanks Sue and Rob. You guys are the salt of the earth.

That's about it. Just a couple more pics because I have them. This one is of me sitting down to enjoy a farming 'pod' and quickly being invaded by dog 'Towser' and cat 'Chivers'. It was taken by Liz but I was very amused by the state of my feet which look about 2" too long and pointy at the ends. My socks must have ridden down when I was last in my wellies and I have not noticed. Ah well.

Then we found in the fridge, in need of using up by Stir-up Sunday, one of last year's Christmas puds - it frees up the silver thru'pences and the basin, you understand. In this house we go with the Hastings tradition of making the recipient of the slice choose whether the server cut to their left or right, so that they cannot see the coinage sticking out and 'cheat'. Here the coin is arrowed in yellow. And , no, I am not going to wish anyone a 'Merry Christmas' just yet - it's still early November.

Foster Mother

Met Éireann are spot on again and we get the forecast small amount of rain on Tuesday and a deluge today, Wednesday. The big new water tanks fill impressively. At one stage water is coming off the 'wrong' end of the new gutter at the front of the house, so I probably need to get up there with a ladder and check it's not getting filled with spruce needles again. When we first bought the house it had had 15 years of neglect, the old gutters were full and the rotted in material was growing grass and peeled out of the gutter like old style peat-turf sods.

The garden, pond, East Field and 'allotment' needed it though. The pond was down about 3 inches from its brim-full level and the field is already looking greener for the refreshment. In the allotment the peas had been battered down a bit by the rain but the pods were filling well and from a 3 m row I quickly gathered 3.74 kg of pods in the rain.

We sat these down on the dining room table between us and chatted away while we podded them and listened to a fascinating Radio 4 programme about 1913. The presenter ranged across Stalin, Trotsky, Einstein, Hitler, Freud, Jung and all manner of artists and writers while we shelled away, producing 1.6 kg of peas for eating short term and freezing. The Silverwoods are now staying here next week and there are plenty more pods on the row for the children to pick and shell. They should enjoy that and, presumably, eating them.

Broody Betty managed to sit tight on her duck eggs through the first one hatching and a couple more days, by which time she had 5 adventurous ducklings on her hands, all keen to get off the nest and go exploring. At this point the 'hin' will generally give up on the remaining eggs and go off to do protective Mum and trainer for the babies; hard luck on the unhatched eggs which, the advice goes, were obviously 'wrong 'uns ' and would chill and die.

Mentor Anne, of course, can do better than that as she has the incubator already set up on other duck eggs, so we rescued the 4 remaining eggs, wrapped them in a towel on a hot water bottle and whizzed them round to her place before they could chill. We have since heard that one more is hatched, another started 'pipping' and squeaking and a third is squeaking away inside but not yet broken out. The fourth, when held against their candling light proved to be addled, so was dumped.

Betty and the 5 babies now sleep in one of the 'Maternity Unit' rabbit hutches in the now chicken house where we have been feeding and watering, feeding with the usual mix of chick crumb and finely mashed hard boiled egg (including finely chopped shell). Today, in between the rain showers, we decided to let them all out for a bit so that the Mum could do her finding-food training and the babies could start pecking at grass, herbs, grubs and so on.

Fascinatingly, this is where the Foster Mum thing can all start to go awry. The Mum is programmed to train them to scratch in the ground to overturn grubs and seeds and to keep them dry and warm. She stays on the ball because baby chicken-chicks do what they are told and quickly move on to lessons 2, 3 and 4 etc. Ducklings, however are not programmed to be trained to scratch at the ground and have a very different diet (grass, pond weed, slugs etc) plus a natural attraction to water and swimming. The positive reinforcement of Mum's training all breaks down and the hen rapidly starts to lose interest and presumably her instincts are all now saying "give up on this bunch - they're ALL WRONG".

The plan was always for us to only have the eggs and ducklings for a short while before they went 'home' to Anne. We were a bit bothered about the effect on Broody Betty of stealing her babies but happily Anne has presented us with a solution which might work. A poultry breeder up by the border produces by the tens of hundreds, day-old chicks, 3 days a week for chicken farmers to grow up to carcass weights and one of the varieties he carries is a meat breed called 'Hubbard' which Anne has known before and by which she swears. The organic meat lady at Boyle Farmer's Market does Hubbard oven-ready birds. Anne has rung round a few people and put together an order for 3 dozen, of which we are to get 8 at €1.95 a pop. The plan is to slide these under Betty as we, by sleight of hand, 'disappear' the duckling-shaped wrong 'uns and Betty may (we hope) breathe a sigh of relief, accept the chickens as her own and carry on the training, this time with markedly better results. That's the plan, anyway! If she rejects them, then we need to step in with a heat lamp brooder and she, presumably, goes back to the egg laying flock.