On Not Getting Your Ducks in a Row.

Our 3 young ducks prior to yesterday's dramas. 

Ducks. A sore subject round here at present and definitely not our strong suit this month. Not only have we only produced 3 hatchlings from the first 2 sets of eggs in the incubator but now we have had a total fail on 14 eggs set, due to hatch last Thursday.

Badly mauled duck in the sick bay. It did
not survive the night.

To add to our tale of woe, our attempts to introduce the 3 new birds to the old-hand drakes have resulted in a load of bullying and rape and now a youngster chased into the jaws of terrier, Poppea. That unfortunate bird was rescued to the sickbay but was badly mauled and died during the night.

Enormous poppy.

The eggs were a motley collection of our own plus some gifts from Sue and Rob. We are not at all convinced by the fertility of our drake/duck combination(s) and all the gifts were from untried, very young birds including Sue and Rob's new Muscovies; these were the first ever eggs from those ladies.

At least we are good at chicken chicks

The complete lack of action despite having candled them at day 12 and found the majority to be under way, has me wondering whether we have overheated and 'cooked' them in the incubator during that hot spell. The incubator is a Covatutto, so a low-price model. We know they are good at keeping things warm, but how good are they at not producing any heat when the ambient temperatures approach 27ºC.

On the left the little grey chick I saved the life of on hatch day,
now 2 weeks old.

One part of me was going to keep them going till Help-X Laura's last day to give them every possible chance to make a late showing. The more pragmatic half says this is a waste of time, and I might, instead, break the duds open in her presence so she can see them part-formed. Maybe I'll leave it up to her.

As to the dog-attack, I'd been doing the standard thing when trying to introduce new birds to established ones. The youngsters had been in a rabbit run in full view of the very interested drakes for most of their growing up weeks thus far. They are now 12 weeks old and plenty big enough to take care of themselves.

Elizabeth is delighted with this self-seed aquilegia.

What I expected to happen was the usual flurry of mad excitement while they all sorted out who the boss was, plus a bit of 'rape', which is normal for ducks. What we got was several days of the drakes making nuisances of themselves and giving the new birds (male and female) no peace. The drakes kept coming into the yard, where cowered the new ducks, hunt one down and chase it about till it submitted to being 'jumped upon'.

The hot spell has given us some lovely sunsets. 

Sadly, on one of these hunts, the frantic youngster tried to escape into the dog-pen where sat a very excited Westie, Poppea. The dogs have been good as gold and can now move among the calm chickens without anybody getting eaten but this squeaking, flapping, terrified runner was all to much for Poppea's 'red mist' instincts. She fell on it and bit it badly across the pelvis and 'saddle'.

Thriving on neglect? This climbing hydrangea,
stuck in by the dustbins and the water butt,
has finally started to look the part and is
producing flowers.

I rescued it's limp, wet-with-dog-drool form and we quickly did all we could in terms of hospitalising, checking it over, cleaning it up and bandaging the wounds. Sadly, it died during the night.

We went all Moroccan at supper - slow roast lamb, tomatoes
roasted with goat's cheese, aubergines with onions, flat bread
and hummus. 

After all these duck-failures we are left with only 4 living ducks - those horribly aggressive drakes whom we may never trust again with our youngsters, and the 2 slightly traumatised 12 week olds who are back in safe custody. I am not sure how this will end. Some tough decisions needed here over the next few weeks.

Round and round and round she goes. When she'll stop,
nobody knows. Loves her mowing, this one!

Meanwhile, in most other areas, all is well. Our current Help-X volunteer, Laura, who earned (above and beyond!) a third week with us is continuing to delight with her hard work and her dessert cookery. We've had her back at the mowing and the nettle-pulling. She has helped me strip old rotten wooden panels out of the stock-trailer, then make up replacements using all the carpentry tools and a tin of varnish.

Laura at work on the trailer.

She has come with me several times when I have been helping a friend repair fences. She has helped clean out the geese even with a broody goose in attendance, and has since done those ducklings and our geriatric hen Doris. She has also walked some more of those huge walks she loves doing.

A very careful coat of Yacht Varnish. 

On Sunday I was at indoor archery, so we were in a different part of Castlerea but not to be outdone, Laura worked out a route home on her smart phone up through the 'Demesne' (park with river) and back through the lanes of Cloonboniffe and Lough Glynn. Most evenings she takes herself off upstairs to watch a movie on 'NetFlix' through her 'tablet'. She is absolutely no trouble. We will miss her when she leaves. That is currently likely to be this coming Saturday when she is off to her next posting in Kilkenny via a weekend off with a friend.

Easily our most used book these past 3 weeks.

That is probably enough for this one. Hopefully a more upbeat, happy, positive post next time. Apologies for the sad tone at the start of this one.

A short lived Duckling

Connie brings the one surviving duckling off the nest and
quickly has it feeding like a pro.

A quick post this time, as befits the little recovery period we are having betwixt our busy, visitor bedecked Christmas and the New Year weekend. With the French off the premises, Liz headed for Silverwood land for another very quick tour of Mum-minding duty. A family meal with a 3-line whip had been planned but then cancelled without anyone telling Liz so she ended up just doing the one night. Mum is 'fixed' enough to no longer need random daughters fussing about the place. She is signed off now till 15th Jan. 

Little Paddler.

In the mean time, Friends of the Blog will recall that we have a Sussex hen who went broody in late November and then hatched, we think, 4 duck eggs just as the French visitors left. This lady only managed to bring 1 survivor off the nest. I found only one part-chewed corpse, so I guess that the nest got predated by a rat and the other babies were taken alive or dead. 

This double yolker was to be the duckling's Day 4 breakfast.

The survivor ("Little Paddler") was going great guns. His 'Mum' quickly taught him to feed and he was gobbling up the tiny portions of chick-crumb and hard boiled egg I was taking to them 4 times a day. It was alternating snow, hail and sleet outside, so I shut them in the Tígín to be 'safe', warm and dry. By day 3 (Thurs 28th) he was looking very promising and Mum was sleeping on the floor with him under her skirts.

Horrible, sleety, haily weather. Yes, I did get caught with
a line of washing out!

Sadly, this morning, (Day 4) when I went in with breakfast, Mum came down from a higher perch and there was no sign of the duckling. Mum was fussing and clucking around as if asking me where the baby was. We looked everywhere but could find no sign, no sad little corpse. If she had gone up there to perch and left him 'peeping' on the ground, then he'd have frozen to death in minutes and/or been carried off by the rat(s). Maybe he was taken by the rat and she then flew up to perch higher in her angst? We will never know. Ah well. These things happen. Mum spent part of the day all stressed out clucking about, presumably missing him but by afternoon seems to have calmed down and forgotten him. Sorry, Connie. Better luck next time. 

Just a light dusting of snow this time.

We are still determined to do more ducks, so we have decided to buy a Covatutto incubator like the one we used to borrow from Charlotte of the Mini Horses. We will set a dozen eggs in that in the spring time. We may also try Muscovies; not so good for eggs, but much better than the Khaki Campbells for meat. Also,more fun, apparently with their keenness to fly and sit on your roof tops!

Opening up the new Parma style ham.

We finally got around to 'opening' the Christmas leg of 'Parma' style ham. It had been missed off menus and side lined by the sheer amount of food we were trying to cope with, even with the French visitors. 

Roscommon style 'Parma' ham. 

This leg was from the 2016 pigs, so was 16 months at the air-drying / curing and is deliciously sweet. Liz has pronounced it my best so far. I am quite impressed too. We obviously have that job sussed and if any readers would like to come and have a sample (I know Charlotte likes a 'Parma' ham and may be around at present, down from Dublin) then do drop by.

That is about it. We are now all battening down the hatches for the next named storm, Storm Dylan who is meant to roar through on Saturday night. We are under Orange warnings here for 70-80 kph winds all across the Province of Connaught, though inevitably, coastal areas have the highest predicted wind speeds. 

Beyond that, assuming we aren't blown across to Longford, we will also be enjoying the New Year weekend which will also bring me to the end of my latest stint as curator on the @smallholderIRL Twitter account - where I am sharing a fortnight's shift with account boss @foodborn Margaret Griffin. We are nearly done - finishing, neatly, on Sunday 31st Dec. 

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.

Royal Relief

Honey bee on swede/turnip flower. I left the last half dozen
to run away to seed and the bees love them.

Bad weather, strong winds and heavy showers have kept us a bit pinned down of late. I have to admit to having got badly behind on the gardening. It has been fairly warm, so the weeds have charged onwards even when it's been too wet to get out and tackle them, so I have ground still needing clearing before I can plant things, and seeds still sitting here in packets which should have been in the ground long ago.  Any big projects have been parked for the moment and we have been snatching opportunities to do little jobs in the sunny intervals. These have mainly been livestock, so this post will be a bit of a livestock update.

Our bees on our apple blossom. We are delighted with this
'first' for Feigh. 

The biggest news is that we finally got a chance to crack open the bee hive and were quickly able to establish that we had larvae in the brood frames which told us immediately that the Queen Bee must still be alive. This was a huge relief as we were worried that we might have squashed her in our clumsy, amateurish efforts to re-hive the donated colony. This would have been serious and embarrassing. To lose one colony in a year, as they might say, is unfortunate.... but to lose two...... But no, it is now 25 days since our re-hiving, so any eggs laid by the queen prior to that would have long since completed their larval stage, pupated and even emerged as adults. We are happy bee keepers.

The swarm-box is strapped to the big ash tree, top right. 

At this time of year, beekeepers start to think about swarming, potentially losing their queen and half the work force, possibly catching them or, even better, bribing someone else's absconded colony to fetch up and stay at your apiary. We have our swarm-box strapped to the ash tree but this year, anyway, it is unlikely to catch any prime-swarm of ours. Our queen, we know has been wing-clipped as well as colour-marked, so if our workers decide to swarm, they would boot her out of the colony but then instead of flying off with them to hang in a tree, she will fall to the ground and probably get lost in the grass.

Colour codes for queen-marking.

Some bee keepers do this to try to stop the swarm taking off (the idea is that they realise they have lost Her Majesty and return to the hive). If we are lucky she will gather a small number of workers around her on the ground which we might spot and be able to rescue into the skep, where we can then gather some of the swarm or some workers from the hive to make up a new colony. It's a long shot. You have to hope that the swarm only leaves the hive when it has set up replacement queens ready to emerge from their own pupae and that these (virgin) queens get successfully mated on their mating-flights before returning to the hive to carry on the good work.

Poppea talks to Mary through the fence while Towser watches

Meanwhile, in the pigs dept, our two young ladies have reached the 3-month-old mark. They are thriving, very strong in the appetite area and now grown bigger than the dogs by quite a way. We are very happy with them. They have also become quite tame by now and allow me to measure them with the tape measure (see earlier post) to estimate weights. They seem to be about 17 kgs, possibly a bit smaller than last year's Tamworths but we did not manage to measure those till they were a bit older. I am being a bit more careful to control food intake on these girls as we are aiming for a carcass with a bit less fat covering. They also seem to be a lot more into rootling and churning up the ground, but again, when we got the Tams the ground was dry and hard for their first month, where these animals have had plenty of rain and easy-peel turf.

The Hubbards at 3 weeks feel some first sun on their feathers
and grass under their feet

The Hubbard chicks are cracking on too and have quickly out grown the bodged-up brooder box (made from 2 big potato crisp box 'outers') we have them in upstairs in the spare room. Luckily the weather has turned nicely warm, so we have been letting them out in the sunshine in one of the rabbit runs, all be it with one end well wrapped against the rather chilly breezes and a good layer of shredded wood and hay in the 'bedroom'. They are also just outside the front window where Liz can keep a close eye out for any signs of chilling - there have been none - the birds race about happily chasing each other, scratching for food among the grass and doing some practise play-fights as they set up their pecking order.

The old tumble-down apple tree is in full bloom. It never
ceases to amaze me. It looks almost rotted through at the
broken base but there must be just enough intact sap-wood
to keep it going. 

We rescue them back indoors at night for now, but will soon be letting them do a 'sleep over' in the rabbit run. They are only 3 weeks old tomorrow but these are no ordinary 'little cute fluffy chicks', they grow and put in weight like no other bird we have met. I should probably weigh some tomorrow but in the commercial world these guys make oven-ready weights in 80 to 100 days. It will take longer in our free range set-up - we normally give them 4-5 months. At 6 weeks we usually let them start to explore properly by lifting the end of their run in the morning so that they can escape, and then, for a while, we chase them all back home with a food bribe in the evening. They may voluntarily start to use the proper chicken coop.

New ear tags for the twins. 

Also cracking on are the twin lambs, who made their 6-week birthday on the 7th May. This means that they need to get ear tagged, so we had some fun rounding all 5 sheep up into the cattle race so that we could tag these and check everyone's feet, trim and spray if necessary. No foot problems this time, so with Louise now officially (IE0455809)00002H and Thelma 00003A we are all legal and booked into my paperwork. You don't tag till 6 weeks because the ears would be so tiny and the tag so huge compared to the ear, it would be uncomfortable for the lamb and there is a risk of nicking a blood vessel. Hulking 6-weekers have their blood vessels nicely spaced apart on acres of ear - you can aim more reliably with the pliers.

Turkey eggs in the borrowed incubator
(many thanks, Charlotte!)

The new turkeys did not miss a beat on their egg laying with the move here, so we were able to give the half dozen asked for by a possible new friend of ours requested by Charlotte. This is a lady with a tup (ram) who we may be able to use come August, to service our Polly and Lily (plus one?) so we are looking to schmooze her up a bit, with turkey and Buff Orp eggs as the main bribe currency. Our turkey hen, though, Barbara carried on a-laying, happily joining in with the chickens' current habit of dropping the eggs in the known stash under the elderberry tree in the woods, but also (once) on the nest of the broody Buff in the Tígín. We decided that we might as well incubate a few of these just to see how we get on. We borrowed Charlotte's incubator again (Thanks C) and have set 8 in it. They take 28 days to cook, so are due on 8th June.

(Top to bottom) Chestnut, soapwort,
lemon balm, sweet woodruff and
comfrey in the nursery area

That broody Buff has stuck with the job tucked down between the concrete blocks and the camping toilet and is almost there now, with the 'proper' eggs due in 2 more day's time. 'Proper'? Yes, we were rather horrified to see on Sunday that she had left the nest and there was 'now' a white Hubbard adult hen sitting there, presumably laying an extra egg. Moments later Miss White was off and cackling and the broody Buff had nipped back in, so we could not see if there were extras. The next day we caught them again and discovered that Miss Buff was now sitting on 13 eggs (!), 7 more than we'd set under her and one of these the aforementioned turkey egg. We recovered that one.

Cheese and bacon 'swiss' rolls.

You do not have to be a chicken expert to see that these eggs have turned up at some unknown time between our true start-date (April 24th) and now, so will only be part-incubated by our Day 21 (Thursday). When (if) the 'proper' six chicks hatch and start to get active, Miss Buff will abandon the nest and take them off to play, leaving the unhatched eggs as failures to go cold. We have an option, if we see the move and can rescue the eggs still warm, to nip them into the incubator but that way madness lies. You end up with baby chicks of all ages moving through the rearing processes not necessarily compatible with each other (size differences etc). It is not going to be dull, anyway! We have, meanwhile, closed the Tígín door on the broody. She can do her last few days without interference from her 'sisters' and sitting just on the existing eggs. And yes, we could have marked the original 6 eggs, but hey, that would have been way too sensible.

Dunhills all? The gang on the calf-muck heap. 

That about wraps it up for this one, with most of the livestock covered. The rabbits have not had a mention but they are just mooching along calmly enjoying their big new run. The dogs and cats are just the dogs and cats. No news is good news.

21 Days Later

Mr and Mrs Buff, suppliers of DNA and 8 of the eggs

Regular readers will recall my post of 15th July, where we had just set in the incubator, 17 Buff Orpington eggs, 8 from our own 'Mrs Buff' hen, plus 9 from Mentor Anne's Buffs. Well, time flies and 20 and a half days later we were delighted to see the dogs suddenly taking a keen interest in the incubator; they could presumably hear the first, almost inaudible cheepings of baby chicks starting to 'pip'. Obviously the poor dogs get evicted at this stage except under supervision. The incubator is in the Living Room, so we can sit in there in the evenings keeping an eye on dogs, reading books and listening to the ever louder commotion in there as eggs break open and chicks start moving about, steeling ourselves not to peek too often in case we let out the heat and humidity. We are still new enough chicken 'breeders' to be as excited as kids at Christmas watching the tiny cracks appear and the first tiny flakes of shell to be thrown off.

Just hatched this second - still wet and unable to stand.

Well, it's going extremely well. Over that night just 2 chicks hatched (one of Anne's eggs first and then one of ours) but several more started pipping. We are amazed by the speed that these babies burst out once they are pipping; the membrane around the blunt end of the egg seems to tear rapidly right round the egg starting at the pipping 'hole', as compared to the Guinea Fowl eggs where the babies seem to have to laboriously chip their way all round the circumference. 6 more babies 'fell' out in quick succession so that we had 8 hatchlings by mid afternoon of day 21.

First 8 are out and drying. 

The plan is to rescue them to the brooder box (but see also more on this later on) when they have dried out and got up walking about after 24 - 48 hours - they hatch with enough reserves of yolk in their fat little abdomens to go that long without food or water. I was going to leave them till tonight (Day 21 evening) but this morning we had our only failure (so far), one failed to make it all the way out and died half-emerged. I noticed the chicks pecking at the broken shell, and when I put my hand in to rescue this baby, they also tried a few tentative pecks at me - they looked hungry! I decided to rescue the 8 dry ones into the brooder where I could feed them and give them water, leaving a wet, just emerged, noisy one to encourage the remaining pippers and non movers.

A lettuce spinner bowl to transport the chicks.

Now it is 8 o'clock at night, Day 21 and we are still going strong. Anne was delighted to know that of the 13 we now have emerged safely, 9 were from her 9 eggs - a 100% fertility and hatch rate which is quite something in the chicken rearing world; we are both enormously impressed too by this little, reasonably priced (€190 several years ago), unsophisticated incubator for the loan of which many many thanks to Charlotte of the Mini Horses. Last time I looked there were numbers 9 through 13 drying and cheeping noisily in the incubator and at least one more of the remaining 3 eggs maybe starting to pip.

Buff Orpington chicks only hours old.

We will leave all this running through the night after which we may candle any remaining eggs and if they are fails, we will call it a day. What ever happens it has been a very successful incubation and hatch. Not so successful, the other half of this cunning plan. You will recall that 2 days before we set these eggs our 2013 Hubbard hen, Miss White went broody for her first time. We put half a dozen less vital eggs under her and dreamed that she might go full term, hatch them and then adopt, in addition to her real clutch, any Buff chicks we might be able to hatch in the 'incy'. Well she went full term and is actually still sitting there on her day 24, but in the process she managed to lose or break 5 of her real eggs, so she has been sitting for the last week on just one real egg plus 2 dummy (rubber) eggs. We toyed briefly with the idea of swapping the 2 dummies with a couple of pipping Buff eggs so that she might 'hatch' them, but there is a risk she will freak out and kill the intruders, especially if they smell or look different. So, No, we'll 'hand rear' these babies and leave Miss White be, sitting on that last egg for a few more days.

Feta cheese and courgette cake

Meanwhile, not satisfied with being able to cook other people's recipes really well, Liz had a go at inventing a new recipe for using up some of the current mini-glut of yellow courgettes. She took our standard recipe for Dorset Apple Cake, subtracted apples and sugar and substituted in equal weights of feta cheese and grated courgette. She baked it as you would the apple cake and it became our 'carbs' in a meal which included lamb's liver in creamy onion sauce and broccoli. It was gorgeous and will now go into the home 'cookbook' for further uses. We also think you could do any number of versions of it, maybe fishy ones, different cheeses, a bacon/lardon one and so on.

Bee hive 'smoker'

Tonight I am self-catering as Liz is at 'Knit and Natter', and I have used up the left overs (actually that piece I photographed on the plate above) with a thawed out portion of shepherd's pie and some steamed black kale and more yellow courgette. I can vouch for it's deliciousness and texture a second time round.

More news on the Buffs in the next post.