Two Vets

Poppea - Westie cross fruit bat at 3 months

A day for two vet visits, both successful but with very different outcomes. First up, Poppea's visit to the town vet to get her stitches out. Being a bit of a drama queen as dogs go, I was expecting her to squeal and scream at every stitch, and was joking that we might have to warn up anyone sitting in the waiting room to make sure they didn't de-camp, thinking that the vet was torturing the animals that morning. In the event, no such worries. The vet had me lift Pops up onto the table and then stand her up holding her front legs and head/chest off the ground, so that her belly was stretched out in his full view. He tinkered around out of sight with Poppea barely twitching but looking at me a bit anxiously. "OK, all done" he said. He'd nipped out all of her stitches in a few minutes and brave soldier Pops had not whimpered, squeaked or squealed at all. Proud of her.

Pirate enjoys a good brush out.

Then this afternoon, not so much fun. RIP then, poor aul' Pirate, former diseased, emaciated stray cat with lots of bits missing. We had him put down today. Never the most handsome cat, we called him 'Road-crash chic'. He never did get over the missing eye, open to infections thing and recently picked up a bad infection of the chest, face, possible whole head, Poor aul' sod. Didn't really get any good numbers in life's lottery, but at least we gave him 18 months of being warm, dry, safe and fed. Now he's in a bit of garden where the golden autumn beech leaves shade him and the slanting evening sun lights up the grass and his memorial 'rock'. We'll miss you, Pi.

As for you fellow chicken keepers, when you are carving out your Hallowe'en pimpkins, remember the chickens. We all knew that pumpkin seeds and innards were a natural womer, didn't we (?). I had certainly heard it from 'people' but I did wonder whether it was one of those old wives' tales, with no grounding in real science. Up stepped biochemist/chicken nuts 'Martin Woods Farm' with the following.

"If you're planning on carving a pumpkin this Hallowe'en, don't forget your hens! They will adore all the insides of the pumpkin and, as an extra bonus, the seeds act as a natural wormer for chickens.

Pumpkins are part of the Curcurbita family and the seeds contain a naturally occurring chemical called Curcurbitacin which can paralyse worms in the digestive tract (I love it when my 2 passions, chickens and science, come together!). As well as this, pumpkins are also a great source of Vitamin A, Vitamin E and Vitamin C! What a winner! Make sure your birds have grit available to them to help digest the seeds and, as with all treats, feed them in moderation and as late in the afternoon as possible."

So now you know.

Mr and Mrs D?

When I left you at the end of the previous post, our visitors D+D were just leaving us, belly-full of dippy goose egg breakfast, off on the next leg of their surprise (for lady-D) holiday tour of Ireland, bound for Galway and then Bunratty Castle via our suggested scenic tour of Connemara. The 'public' intent was to enjoy a Medieval Banquet at Bunratty. However, as well as the whole trip being a surprise for lady-D, it seems that Mr-D had one more plot twist and 'present' up his sleeve. Bunratty was just a cover story.

Year 2 of the living willow hedge

The couple drove through Connemara enjoying the scenery and (we are told) stopped at a likely lake to get out, stretch their legs and enjoy the view. Lady-D promptly took off down the 'beach' "babbling on" (she says) about how much fun it would be to get the canoes 'up here'. It took her a while to spot that it had all gone a bit quiet behind her and that Mr D was not keeping up with her, or, indeed, part of the canoe conversation. When she turned round she found that this was because he had gone down on bended knee and was clutching an engagement ring! Congratulations the pair of you, D and Mrs D to be. With the banquet now off the books, they adjourned to a fine pub also in Bunratty called 'Durty Nelly's'.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we have finally run out of the miraculous 20 days of windless and rainless weather. We just squeaked D and D in at the end of it which was very nice for their 'petting zoo' stuff. The purple wellies stayed clean and dry.

The cat 'Soldier' is pretty much over his operation and dashing about inside and out like before, eating us out of house and home.

Unsubtle hedge-bashing down our lane.

Poppea, always more of a drama queen (and also, to be fair, subject to a much more serious operation) is healing a bit more slowly. She reminds us occasionally that she has a sore place as she gets down from a chair, emiting a piercing shriek or a whimper, but she has joined in the walks again and joins the rest of us for the half hour off-lead exercise in the orchard. We have to take her back to the vet on Friday week to have her stitches removed. That is going to be a bit of a squeak-fest too, I should imagine.

Roadside hedge or a row of coppiced ash trees?

On a sadder note, we remember our great friend, Liz's closest and longest term Kent chum, frequently mentioned in this blog, 'Diamond' (Diane Loraine Walsh) who died this day last year. Diane's ashes were scattered by husband John at a favourite canal-side site in Surrey and John has driven up there today with our other friends Mazy and Anne to remember her and to scatter flower petals at the place. Thinking of you all. Sympathies at this sad time.

Scorchio!

One of those happy garden coincidences, two nice
purples next to one another.

These are stultifyingly hot days. We are reduced, by lunchtime, to pathetic, drippy, exhausted shadows of our former selves, crashed out somewhere in the shade to keep cool. I have taken the mower to bits to rid its airways  and throttle mechanism of dried (and some black scorched) grass, and I have painted undercoat on wooden parts of the trailer and the new gate into the bee-hive area / rabbit run and I have walked the dogs, but that's about my lot; Liz has battled through a load of laundry. At least now there is a tiny breeze. Mad dogs and Englishmen? We are sitting under the terrace furniture parasol sipping cold drinks.

Only the bees continue to show any enthusiasm and it is in their job description; in hot weather you go foraging. The hens are all laid up in the shade of trees at the top of the Secret Garden, the rabbits under their shade sheets on the lawn, or in Ginny and Padfoot's case, the shade of the big ash tree. The pigs are making good use of the rain water ditch as their wallow, as was the plan.

and there let us wallow in glorious mud.

When we were doing the build we connected up all the rain down-pipes to 4 inch underground drains running under the yard and joining up just by the end of the chicken house. These tip out into a deep ditch to the right (East) of the Secret Garden which takes the water away down to the stream at the bottom Anna's land. We had this cleared by mini-digger but inevitably it has since become a glory-hole for stinging nettles, ground elder and over hanging hawthorn and ash. The piggies quickly discovered it almost on Day 1 and reveled in nipping up and down it under cover like taking the subway from top to bottom of their patch, popping up at either end with a quick and impressively nimble gallop up the almost sheer bank. Since then they have enjoyed the wetness of the place after rain, when the rest of their patch can be a bit dry and pine-needly, good for dust bathing but not so useful as a wallow.

Spring onions - "scallions" in these parts.

Mapp in particular seems to like a good wallow and regularly comes to supper in an attractive (?) pie-bald version of herself, ginger above the plimsoll line, black below. Black too from her nose to her eyes, so that you can see she's been rootling down to a good 6 inches but has kept her eyes out of the mud. The pair are still charming me and amuse me regularly with new versions of 'play' especially when they emerge, full bellied from supper to join me and the dogs for a conversation through the orchard fence. The dogs are off the leads for their evening half hour running about and the pigs gambol over, 'talk' to them and then play running up and down the fence, dogs one side, pigs the other.

Guinea fowl Min is still laying eggs, usually hidden so we
never know the dates. This one was in the clump of mint.

Yesterday I put the following in Facebook."The pair are relaxing with full bellies, lying on the grass. Mapp lies on her right side, eyes shut. Lucia comes up and shoves her nose in under Mapp's belly, amidships and hefts upwards. Mapp gets flipped over , rolling across her own spine, her legs flopping over in a great arc till she whacks down on her left side, still apparently asleep with her eyes shut, grunting with joy. Lucia works her way around so she can flop her sister back over. Very funny to watch. Mapp seems to just suck it up, completely un-bothered." Daft as a brush the pair of them.

Finally, our membership card to the Bee Keepers' group

"Gardens, like cities, are store houses of personal myth and memory. A tree, just like that particular chair in that particular courtyard café, has its place in many other stories besides your own. Who knows who planted it, and why; who stole a first kiss under it a hundred years ago; who sat beneath its branches looking up at the sky the evening war was declared, or paced up and down around it while his children were born upstairs? We think of gardens as 'ours', when really, all we are doing is adding our own chapter of experience and memory, along with the plants we plant or the seeds we sow, to a long-existing story" Amen to that Elspeth Thompson, late garden writer for the Sunday Telegraph, whose book I'd forgotten we had and which I grabbed recently off the shelf when looking for something to read. I love it for its descriptions of early fumblings and beginner-ish exploration attempting to do 'organic' in a small city garden and an allotment and I love it for being in small weekly-column bite-sized pieces. It can go a bit weird on you, possibly as she was by then a famous newspaper type and prey to all manner of creative types suggesting ideas for her garden and column (which they could then, presumably sell to the readers). In one article she is visited by a garden feng shui expert who is looking for twisted underground energy (chi) lines and unblocking the energetic log-jam with dowsing rods and hammering in metal 'acupuncture' needles. Each to his own, I guess; I just 'clicked' on through. Rest in Peace, Elspeth. The book is 'Urban Gardener' pub 1999 Orion, ISBN 0-75282-699-9

Sunny snooze for Pirate

Meanwhile Pirate the cat has settled in nicely and, as far as we know, now stays around the caravan and 2CV and is always there for his regular meals, which he no longer feels the need to wolf down, gorging himself. His over all health is improving nicely and we have had only one setback - the empty eye socket, stitched shut with dissolvable stitches has now popped open again once the stitches dissolved. He will need to go back to the vet for another try but this means sedation and Aoife is loath to sedate him too many times a month, so he's waiting till next week.

Enjoy the heat and sunshine. I'm off to find another ice-cooled elder flower cordial.

Stitches Out

Just another quick pic of the Birthday boy, Haggis.

I mentionned "birthday cake" the other day. Regular readers will know that this comes in the form of raw pork ribs with plenty of meat still on. These are seen as "safe" bones - they do not shatter into sharp bits and we dogs spend happy minutes gnawing and grinding, slurping and chewing them up. Ever wondered where that chalky white dog poo you used to see everywhere comes from?

When Mum and Dad first had Meg and the H, there was much talked about on the net, a system of feeding dogs called (S)ARF, which meant (Species-) Appropriate Raw Food diet. It might still be "out there" - we'll have to google it. These people reckonned that modern tinned foods and mixes are full of in-appropriate cereal, rusk, veg's and other rubbish, that a wild dog would never get hold of. Not sure how purely true this is, as certainly the foxes round here eat blackberries and other fruit.

The ARF types advocated feeding the dog entirely on raw meat from species appropriate to the dog's size - for example a Westie might have raw chicken, rabbit and so on. I hasten to say that we are never given any "long bones" of poultry, but we are commonly given "chicken-backs" - Dad spatchcock's the chook cutting alongside the spine either side with kitchen scissors, so we get from parson's nose to neck, taking in pelvis, lumbar and thoracic spine, neatly lopped into 3 thirds, one for each of us. The ARF people seemed to be getting hold of regular supplies of "chicken backs" in bulk from their suppliers, but the specific ones we talked to were American - not sure how possible that is "over here".

ARF advocates swear that after a few days and weeks of feeding only raw food their dogs are in superb condition, good immunity, glossy coats, healthy guts and their poo that hard chalky white. The theory further goes that ARF dogs never get that problem (nor do we, thankfully) of impacted anal glands - the straining to push out the more solid "waste" self-strips the oily fluid from them, emptying them at each "evacuation".

Read all about it and make your own mind up.

Meanwhile, I'm over to the vets today to have my spay stitches out, and I'm a very brave girl, and do not utter a single squeak.

Deefer (Arf arf)