Looking Forwards

With Christmas and the New Year all done, dusted and packed away we start to feel like we should be looking forward to the new season, Spring, new stock and all the fruit, flowers and veg leaping into action. In the previous post, I wrote that we were waiting on the splatter of tiny feet with a batch of 7 duck eggs in friend Sue's incubator. That has all now happened with three lovely healthy ducklings hatched over the 6th and 7th, collected by us on the 8th and now going through the first "brood box" week.

We use a semi-transparent plastic crate for this (well, a series of crates of increasing size to suit the growing babies) and our "electric hen" (warming plate) and we feed chick-crumb with plenty of water on the side (as these are ducks and they prefer their food dibbled in the wet) plus, for the first week, finely mashed hard boiled egg with the shell finely chopped and mixed back in.

Curiosity might not kill the cat in this case!

We are reminded each time we do this, that ducklings do not naturally creep under mother's skirts (if she is swimming, they'd submerge!) but climb instead onto her back. The ducklings are the same with the electric hen and you can generally find them all hopped up on top in a huddle. As I write this they are 3 days old and thriving. They have good appetites and have quickly learned about food, water and keeping themselves clean. You can not let them out onto the water properly till they are about 3 weeks old, as their preen-glands have not yet developed or started to produce the water-proofing oil for their feathers. In nature their mother would have oiled them up in the nest.

Hopefully the parents of this years piglets, pregnant sows
Iris and Plum.

I may also have mentioned that we had been in contact with our piglet-breeder, a guy called Adrian who farms over near the town of Boyle. You may recall that although last year's piglets came from a chap called Dermot in Wicklow, 3 hours drive away, we did not have to make that drive ourselves. Dermot was coming most of the way here and if we'd meet him in Boyle, we could get away with a half hour drive and a bit of piglet-wrangling in Boyle's market car park.

Half grown piglets at Adrian's place.
These are about 5 months old

The reason Dermot was up here was to collect a sow from Adrian and take it 'home' to get it pregnant by one of his boars. That sow and another have now produced a couple of litters each and are pregnant again (pig-people like to keep their sows in pig as much as possible because if you 'rest' them they can be a devil to get back on heat). One is due this month and the other in March. We hope to take 2 gilts from the January litter, which will be weaned after 8 weeks, in March. Sue is hoping for the same. Obviously it is all in the lap of the gods at present - as with humans there is no telling whether they will successfully 'farrow', or when or how many piglets might result and how many survive to weaning. Litters can be as big as 15 piglets or down in the 5s. All we can do at this stage is wish them all luck and pray hard.

Polly with last year's twin lambs in March (2016)

In the sheep department I had been getting a bit concerned at a stiffness or lameness I had seen on a couple of cold damp mornings in our oldest ewe, Polly. At 9 years old, Polly is at least 5 years older than any commercial 'serious' sheep farmer would keep a breeding ewe. They are allowed a couple of seasons and then generally turned into mutton at 4 years old. Well, every day is a school day with livestock and I now know a bit more about shepherding after seeking advice from Mayo Liz, the person who we are sure knows more about elderly sheep than anyone - she supplied us with Polly (and Lily and Myfanwy) in the first place aged 7 and still has some of her other ewes at 13 years old.

Mineral Lick for sheep.

Every time I see a lame sheep, I have been reaching for the foot-trimming shears and paring away any shaggy edges of 'toe-nail' I found. Well, apparently you should not always do this - restrict foot trimming to 1 or 2 times a year. Sheep get over most foot problems much faster untrimmed. Then, too, I have learned all about "The Mineral Bucket". This I possibly should have known because way back when I was a student doing a bit of milking, I remember the cattle had access to great big salt-blocks to lick. Also I know, in theory, that those goats you see creeping out along the sheer vertical walls of dams in Europe, clinging on by the edges of their toe-nails to the joints in the stone, are doing it to get to the salt deposits encrusted on the wall by water seeping through the dam.

Polly beats Myfanwy to the mineral lick. 

Be that as it may, Mayo-Liz always gives her sheep mineral licks in Winter because the quality of the grass falls away and they might lack minerals in their diet. This might be why Polly is getting stiffness in her joints, especially if she is starting to lose teeth through old age. The 'lick' is a mix of minerals and salts thickened up to a very stiff, clay-like consistency with molasses and is dark brown in colour. All the sheep love it and the older 3 (born at Mayo-Liz's) all piled in with delight. It was like an old friend! They lick and nibble and try to rasp away at the stuff goo with their lips, teeth and hard-pad (top jaw) trying to beat all the competition off till they have had enough. The bucket is now a stop on their endless circuits of the field. I THINK I can detect a new spring in Polly's step but that might just be fond imagination.

Not so chatty now, Mr Fox?

Finally a bit of fun to close off the fox story. We are fairly sure that we have solved that problem for now with our shooting of the boy-fox back in November and our new habits of keeping the birds in if we are both off site seems to have driven off the older girl (plus my man-with-shotgun from Jan 2015 has shot 2 other animals recently on his own place). Well, I thought it might be fun and cathartic to take a stuffed toy fox to our first archery club session on Sunday - we are for ever shooting at coffee cups, balloons and other bits of junk when we get bored with shooting at the official targets.

The only good fox?

So it was - we sat Brer Fox on a little wire hoop in the target at 40' range. I was actually the first to hit him and with a very lucky first arrow (right in the mouth) but he was soon getting peppered by all and sundry and starting to leak stuffing. Ah well. All good harmless fun. I should quickly re-assure my readers who do not know this story or about archery, we would not dream of taking a bow and arrows to the real thing. It is illegal throughout the British Isles to hunt any animal or bird with a bow and arrows. I am told you can still hunt that way in parts of Europe and USA but have to use the very powerful "compound" style bows and even then it has to be under license.

Towser.

So there you have it. 2017. Bring it on.

Sixteen to Sit On

In our 'book', geese are meant to come into egg laying in spring when they start to receive the attentions of the gander. They will then accumulate 12-14 eggs before conveniently going broody and sitting on them. These "facts" are based, of course on what we've read plus picked up from Anne and Simon plus one chaotic breeding season when our gander was probably the girls' brother and the two geese nested so close together that each could rob all the other's eggs while she hopped off the nest to bathe and the other would then rob them back in her turn. In short we never knew WHERE we were and resolved to do it better this year. Anne will tell you, though, that these 'facts' are no such thing and birds will do what birds will do, unpredictably and surprisingly to keep you, the poor human, on your toes.

The purr-fect excuse to not do the ironing today?

One of our geese ( you may recall they were named Goosey and Goocie for a laugh but between Liz and I we never knew which one we were talking about, so they now have new add-on names which refer to distinguishing features, Goocie is 'Smudge' and Goosey is 'Black Feather'), Smudge, stayed in lay all winter, all through Christmas and is still there now, an egg every other day. She became (Gander) George's first love and he started 'loving' her a good month ago. We decided to let her start accumulating a clutch. Black Feather came back into lay on the 8th Feb but she was sleeping in separate quarters. We knew she wasn't getting mated, so we have been collecting her eggs for the kitchen. Since then, George has now accepted both the geese, so we are all happy families and Black Feather is now laying in the same nest as Smudge, so I have just had to know which day it is and let Smudge carry on accumulating (odd day dated; e.g. 5th, 7th, 9th etc) while robbing Black Feather's even-date (4th, 6th, 8th) eggs. So far so good. Smudge, though has now got up to 16 eggs and is showing no sign of going broody. The weather might be the reason.

Making up bee hive frames. This one for a honey 'super'

After a nice dry, spring like week which had us out gardening and even enjoying a rain-less St. Patrick's Day parade, we are back to wind, rain and wintry showers. This morning I got a nasty surprise while out chain sawing up some logs when I felt a rat-a-tat on my hard-hat and the mesh visor started to get less 'see through'. Snowy wet hail was hammering down on my hat, sticking in the visor mesh and going down the back of my neck. A joke's a joke, but that wasn't.

Finished hive frame. This one for the deeper 'brood' box.

While we are on the 'egg laying' subject, we are now convinced that Guinea Fowl hen, 'Min' is laying eggs in the hedge or scrub at the far side of the field opposite our property. For 4 consecutive days she has nipped off secretly for 2-3 hours, returning at about 3:30 pm. She announces her return with her 'Buck wheat buck wheat' call and Henry is ridiculously delighted to see her, like some sloppy love story re-union. Yesterday she called from the gate and Henry flew the full length of the driveway at 5-6 feet above the ground to be back with her. It's quite sweet. We had seen him hovering around the bit of hedge we think she is using, and once she was back we went for a sneaky check of the brambles etc but could see no sign of the eggs or nest. We are a bit lost on what to do about this so we are clinging to the fact that she should be safe enough in that thicket from Mr Fox (who is still keeping, much to our delight but also surprise and confusion, a very low profile; we (touch wood) never seem to see foxes or mink). We hope (barely able to believe that this could happen) that she goes broody out there, successfully sits for the 28 days and then leads the keets home in a picturesque little 'crocodile'. We are not happy about this but short of trying to contain these wanderers in some kind of aviary, that seems to be our only hope.

Meanwhile a prompt email shout from the Two Marys sorted me out a bit of confusion over assembling bee hive frames. I have two sizes to build, the tall, 'thin' sort for the (11 in the) brood box, and 10 less tall, 'thicker' ones for the honey comb in the 'super' (as in 'upper') boxes. I had a random collection of parts not assigned to either type as well as being a pair of side bars short, so I was a bit stumped. Mary McN has now sorted me out and I am 'away on a hack'. Indoor craft for rainy days. Mustn't put the sheets of foundation in yet though. Being wax, if it gets warm it can sag in the frames making them all uneven for the bees to build from. If it gets cold it can be brittle and can shatter in the frames, so we build the frames up to part-complete and store the sheets of foundation flat at room temperature.