Two Fat Ladies

Continuing to enjoy those blue skies and
getting great blocks of pure azure into as
many pictures as we can! 

An hour ago I was sitting on the parapet of our local bridge with the dogs, watching a sparrow hawk soaring in the thermals while being mobbed by 5 house martins (the hawk - not us!). From there back here to lunch and finding superb left overs in the fridge (beef liver cooked in cream with onions and mushrooms) and a tray of very generously gifted eggs, the answer was a liver omelette. Next I wandered round to look in on an elderly lady neighbour with whom we catch up periodically and was fed her home made treacle-bread and 'tay' in her lovely old kitchen. Coming home through her gorgeous garden I noticed that her yard-wide clumps of poached egg plant were a-buzz with 30-40 (of presumably our) honey bees. This truly is a small bit of Heaven which I must have done something really good in a former life to have inherited.

Generous gifts of eggs and a couple of all-spice cookies to
try out. 

Ah well, enough of this indulgence. I will change subject or risk starting to be horribly smug. Too late? Those podgy wenches of my post-title? No. It is not Jennifer Patterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright of whom I speak nor indeed any human females*  but , on this occasion, sheep. Specifically two of our ewes, Lily and Myfanwy.

Myfanwy is now lifted off the ground
when her "baby" lambs try to suck

In the last post you will have read that we were visited by Carolyn and Charlotte of the Mini Horses, here that day to collect the guest-goats whose work here was done. Charlotte is our go-to advisor on all things sheep-health and we are always happy to receive her comment, criticism, advice etc. This especially regarding what sheep folk call "condition" or the fatness of the animal particularly around the spine.

Polly (grey) is a nice 3.5 condition. Lily here is way too fat at
around 4.5

You may have seen judges at sheep shows prodding and poking the back of the sheep, squeezing up into the pelvic girdle and behind the ribs. They are feeling for the 'processes' of the vertebrae which stick up (spinous processes) and out sideways (transverse processes). If they can feel them sticking up and out sideways through the muscle blocks then your sheep is down in the 'under-fed' area (Condition 1+). If you can't feel them at all and there are dimples where they should be, then she is up to condition 5. As you would expect, somewhere in between is about right.

Rosie, our 'keeper' ewe lamb is nice and chunky at 3.5 months

Now that our ewes are sheared you can see a bit of this. An expert would be able to judge them without the prodding but you should prod to confirm your visual assessments. Charlotte could see that where I had continued to feed the sheep plenty of crunch despite the grass now growing and becoming quite plentiful, my two Suffolk-y ewes were getting decidedly porky though Polly, our Jacob cross, being more of a range-y, goat-like mountainy beast looked OK at maybe 3.5.

Poached egg plant - great for the bees.

This wouldn't be a problem now but come November and we would be trying to get the girls back into lamb, the condition has a huge effect on fertility. Your ewe wants to be between conditions 2.5 and 3.5 to be at her best, and preferably rising through that range, not falling. We therefore need to get this weight off them through the Summer and Charlotte and Carolyn have jointly advised some changes to grass regimes (rotating and resting various bits of lawn and field) as well as cutting the crunch right out to 'tit-bit' levels. This is especially so because this Autumn our 'tup' is likely to be Sue and Rob's "Silas", full of hormones and teenage vigour but not necessarily that knowledgeable on how the biology works. He is one of the 'suck lambs' from this Spring and not yet 3 months old. We need our ewes to be cracking out multiple eggs to have the best chance of getting more than one lamb per ewe next year.

More blue skies for these '365' pics.

Small quantities are allowed (and even advised) because they make it easy to see all your sheep every day and quickly let you spot any lameness or other health problems. The 'diet' though, is not so popular with the girls themselves and there was much 'Baa-ing' at times of day formerly know as 'elevenses', 'lunch' and 'supper' (yes, I know - there was NO grass and those ewes were all trying to suckle multiple lambs). In fact I think I heard a Management Meeting going on at one stage and the hot headed young lambs were planning to march on a certain house in Sligo with flaming brands, pitchforks and a signed petition. Oy! We want a WORD with you, Charlotte!

Darina Allen's trad Irish nettle soup. Superb!

Of course, in practise, the front lawn was so shaggy with long, rested grass that the sheep have gorged themselves in the sunshine, laid down in the shade with their tummies all spherical and rotund with grassy largesse, fallen asleep and forgotten all about being hungry for crunch and marching on Sligo. They have settled into the new regime quite happily and the out-of-time baa-ing, when it does happen is all a bit half-hearted and unconvinced. Baa????... maybe?... worth a try?

Our Cuckoo-Marans hen 'Squawk' dust bathing

Meanwhile, you may have heard me speaking of the ambition to evolve our chicken flock over, by natural wastage, to just the variety Buff Orpington. Well, it turns out that we are both in love with the oldest hen in our gang, 10 year old 'Squawk', our Cuckoo Marans girl who is still laying lovely dark brown speckledy eggs. The Marans are an all purpose (Western) French breed from down in the 'Charante-Maritime' area.

Happy Birthday Blue, 4 today.

So we have decided to go with Buffs AND Marans and we have been looking around for possible birds or 'hatching eggs' and, once again, step forward Carolyn who tipped us off that Mayo-Liz (our sheep supplier) has a farrier named Roy, who happens to breed three different colours of Marans - Cuckoos, Coppers and Golden. We have put our name down for a dozen eggs of unknown colour hoping to get some Cuckoo birds out of this or, failing that, Marans of other colours which we will probably fall in love with just the same.

Poppea at 4 years old.

Finally I need to wish Happy Birthday to three of our animals. 4 years ago today (June 3rd) while we were anxiously waiting on news of the whelping of Lily (bitch this time, not ewe) down in Silverwood, unbeknownst to us, just around the corner a rather disreputable she-cat (several handsome strangers had been there and she was "no better than she should be" apparently) was kittening to beat the band. Mrs S joyfully phoned her chum round the corner to tell her "our" good news and could hardly get the story out before chum was bubbling back about kittens.

Towser at 4. Please turn a blind one to the grubby wall.
Towser's decorating I think.  

Anyway, long story short, we ended up with 2 pups and 2 kittens. Blue's brother Rolo sadly 'lost' in a fight with a vehicle in the lane a couple of years back and has since been replaced by Soldier whose birth date we know not. Many Happy Returns, then, you lot. Live long and prosper.

*There may be bit of a health-kick going on here at present - no wine, less booze, cream, butter and rich sauces, more exercise etc but nothing is to be inferred from that re any words in my title.

56

Today I am 56, my 2nd birthday in Ireland and my first in the "new" house. We made a bit of a weekend of it with special meals both Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday we invited Mentor(s) Anne and Simon over and Liz cooked up a rather superb supper. Being all chicken keepers this has to be fitted in around 'bed time' for the birds, and with the evenings being now bright till around 7 pm, that means rounding up your birds by about 7.30 pm and socialising after that. The new hearth tiles are now fixed in place with their glue dried, so we were able to light a gentle fire in the main fireplace - it looked very good with the shiny hearth tiles reflecting the light from the flames. Our starter was a pomegranate and goats cheese salad. Main course was an 'Elizabethan Rabbit' recipe from the "Two Fat Ladies" cookbooks served with our own home made naan bread (Madhur Jaffrey recipe). The rabbit was actually one of the progeny of Anne's late buck Peter and our own doe Padfoot (late as in 'since sadly taken by a fox') which was rather nice. Pud was a chocolate mousse. We seemed to crack through a bit of Rioja and French red between us and the chat ebbed and flowed, taking in a fair amount of the recently deceased Maggie Thatcher and the Savita Halappanavar Galway Hospital case, till way gone midnight. Effortless and very enjoyable entertaining in lovely company. Thank you very much for coming, Anne and Simon.

Today we are just 'en famille' with no visitors and Liz is back in action creating a delicious potato-cake breakfast in which I get to eat the 2nd of our latest 2 goose eggs, with lunch as home made soup, coffee breaks featuring lemon drizzle cake and Dorset apple cake and a steak supper. Spoiled I am. I get a rake of birthday greetings through social network site 'Facebook', some cards, a superb (if not that tuneful) rendition of 'Happy Birthday to You' over the phone first thing from the assembled Silverwood Choir (cough), a more tuneful rendition later from Diamond and a lovely phone call from Pud Lady. I am taking a day off the pond-digging mainly because it has finally rained so my gardening is restricted to sowing seeds in pots, trays and tubs in the poly tunnel. The rain seems to have changed the appearance of the grass overnight and local farmers breathe sighs of relief that they might get some grazing for their cattle after all. Careful what you wish for, guys! I have clipped all three dogs, instead and very neat and summer-cool they look.

Meanwhile, in an exciting development in the poultry department, we have a goose (or geese) in lay. The photograph might look like a pile of hay but, trust me, it is in fact a hay box containing the start of a clutch of eggs. Let me explain. We were getting a bit concerned that the geese did not seem to be laying any eggs, although to be fair it was frosty most mornings and that awful NE wind had been whipping through for almost 3 weeks. We had even seen the gander 'treading' at least one of his ladies. Seeking advice from the  poultry discussion forum on the internet I was advised that if the geese were getting 'seen to' by the gander then they were almost certainly either laying or would soon start. Search through the hay in the hay-box and delve into the wood shavings, they said. Geese are pretty good at hiding eggs.

Goose eggs (Simon told us) stay viable for quite a long time while the goose accumulates her clutch at a rate of an egg a day or every 2nd or third day, trying to amass 12-14 eggs before she will go broody and sit on the clutch. So the next morning I headed for the goose house to let them out and to rummage and delve, but was presented with an egg in full view in a lovely cup-shaped, goose sized depression in the hay in the box. There proved to be a 2nd egg under the hay, so we collected both for use in the kitchen but then resolved to see if we could manage a clutch. All this had happened over night, quietly and with no drama from the geese.

The next day (now yesterday) that all changed and we seemed to move into a new format and level of excitement. We noticed during the morning that the geese were all hanging around the goose house door and waddling in and out of the house with much honking and noise every time the three got separated (by one being inside or outside and not visible to the others). It seemed this was the first time they had ever done anything other than as a threesome - they are normally glued together as a group, find one and you found them all. This separation was obviously stressful stuff! Eventually they sorted themselves out and Goocie sat on the box of hay while Gander and Goosey took them off a small distance to graze while Gander continued to honk and shout every few minutes, as if to reassure the sitting goose that he was still around. I went off to dig pond and after a half hour or so, Goocie emerged from the house and waddled over to find the other two.

Liz and I waited till they were safely out of sight and sneaked a peek into the house. At first we thought there was no egg but, no, there was indeed and egg but so carefully hidden under hay pulled across the top that it was invisible from above. I noticed in the evening when I went to round up the geese that Goocie went into the house and straight over to the hay box where she poked about checking that the egg was still there. We hope this means that she is now in 'accumulating a clutch' mode, so we have left that egg intact and will wait and see. There were no more eggs over night or today. Anne and Simon tells us that we may need to try to separate the 2 females if they both start nesting as they can hassle each other and start interfering with each others' nests, stealing or breaking eggs etc. This might have practical problems in our set-up; we'd struggle to fence the two halves of the family apart but still give them access to all their other needs and the gander, so we are just keeping a watchful eye. We will cross those bridges when (and if) we come to them.

Happy Birthday to me. I am told it is also the anniversary of the Titanic hitting the iceberg; that happened not long before midnight on the 14th and Titanic sank on the 15th. So now you know.