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Nick de Cent Blog Archive
Nick de Cent is a journalist who lives and works on a small-holding near Colyton in
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This is an archive of Nick's articles. For his latest news, see his most recent article.
August 2011
Top Ten Tips for Acclimatising to Country Life!
It’s getting on for ten years since the family uprooted itself from a busy South London suburb and moved to Blackacre, our three-acre smallholding in the heart of the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. There’s no doubt a move from the city or the suburbs to an isolated rural area can be a culture shock for many people, and I got to thinking about you adjust to such a move.
It’s all very well searching for the ‘good life’ but moving into close-knit community of remote farms and villages in the valleys around this area of East Devon is definitely not for everybody. In many ways, agricultural communities have different rhythms, different concerns and a different outlook on life compared with urban folk. That said, it’s probably this difference in lifestyle that many city folk are hankering after, anyway; and it’s my view that people are pretty similar the world over.
It’s important to go into your move with eyes wide open. After all, this is real life, not a dream. For starters, living on a smallholding is never going to make you rich. Indeed, it’s a struggle for many rural people to keep up with their bills.
The countryside can also be isolating; you may spend a great deal of time travelling back and forth to the local population centres to go shopping, visit the pub or take your children to school. I know various city folk who have compromised and moved into the local small town of Colyton from more remote properties in the area, simply because they found they needed to live somewhere more convenient.
Nevertheless, the move was relatively easy for me. I grew up for much of the time in a village in nearby West Dorset and went to university in Exeter where I lived on an isolated farm near Dartmoor. When we moved, it was a definite help to be familiar with the area, to have local friends to show us the ropes, and to feel some emotional connection: it also meant that I knew what to expect in terms of country life.
So here then are my top ten tips for anybody thinking of making the move from the city to the countryside....
If you have school-age children, engaging with other parents and their families is a short-cut to community integration.- Other community institutions include the village hall, the local church and the pub.
- Take part in local activities but don’t be pushy: people will initially be welcoming but you do have to respond.
- Remember, rural communities thrive on mutual help – especially in agriculture: I’ve found that help is freely given and it’s important to reciprocate.
- Take time to chat and remember who’s who. People in the country have more time to talk.
- Don’t judge by appearances: take time to figure out the lie of the land – understand the dynamics within your community.
- Ostentation never goes down well.
- Shop and source products and services locally to become part of the community.
- Moving to the country is not about escapism; it’s real life.
- Try to ensure that you conduct whatever business you’re in locally as much as possible (if you’re not going to be farming full time), otherwise you will constantly be pulled back to the city and spend a lot of time on trains or driving down the A303.
Energy Update
Photo Courtesy: REC
Here at Blackacre, our drive to reduce our reliance on energy suppliers continues apace. We have now had a survey by a local woodburner expert and are due to have two units installed next month. Unfortunately, things never quite go according to plan and this is proving somewhat more expensive that we had first anticipated but, in the end, it will be a small price to pay to have pretty much free heating during the winter months. I will provide further details and pictures during the actual installation process, as there are quite a few technicalities to take into consideration.
Our solar PV (photovoltaic) system has also been specified and ordered, but this isn’t happening until October: reputable installers are understandably extremely busy as they try to keep up with the rush to beat the 31 March deadline. Next year, the so-called feed-in tariffs are due to be revised so home energy systems may become less attractive to install. However, the price of the systems themselves are coming down all the while, so this should ensure that solar remains an attractive option for anyone planning to stay in their home long-term. Even if you’re not, the income associated with installing a system should be a powerful plus point when you come to sell your property – I’m told a PV system adds about the same value to your home as building a garage.
Flavours of August
Here’s my monthly snapshot of what’s in season in the garden, your local farm shop or farmers market at the moment.
In the West Country, blackberries are all over the hedgerows during the holiday season, and blackberrying remains a popular activity amongst jam-makers and walkers looking for a tasty free snack; even better if you’re on horseback and can reach the higher fruit denied to those of us on two legs! Everybody knows to pick blackberries and, as such, they are probably the sole remaining reminder of a time when we were all much more familiar with the hedgerow harvest.
I guess the other wild fruit that people know are sloes. However, while their close cousin, the plum, is ripe or almost ready, we shall have to wait until next month or October to gather fruit to make some delicious sloe gin.
Speaking of fruit, our second crop of strawberries ripened in the cool greenhouse towards the end of last month and is still producing yet more succulent bounty. As a slightly more healthy alternative to strawberries and cream, I often like to eat them with Greek yoghurt and local honey. Am I just kidding myself that this is in any way less fattening? Our chickens don’t miss out either: any fruit that are damaged by woodlice or slugs I throw to the chooks, who appreciate having a main course and dessert all in one go!
We’ve been harvesting a range of tomatoes for a few weeks now, including the early Sungold, which are still going strong, as well as some delicious beef tomatoes. Again, these have been attacked by woodlice, so I tend to cut out the bad bits and use what’s left in cooking. We have a second batch of tomato plants grown from seed: these have caught up fast and the vines are heavy with large but still green plum tomatoes.
In the veg patch, we have courgettes, red chard, runner beans and peas. Onions have swelled and are ready to dry off, while we are using some of our garlic harvest fresh and drying the other bulbs. Cucumbers have made a very slow start but are now growing away well.
We have eaten our way through our crop of first early potatoes, while the pink fir apple variety had already begun to form tubers when I dug up a plant a couple of weeks ago. Although these delicious waxy darlings taste exactly like the best-quality new potatoes, they are actually a main crop variety, so I’m going to leave them awhile longer. That way I’ll still have a tasty reminder of summer as we head on into autumn.
Over in the orchard, the grass is absolutely littered with small apples, presumably casualties of the near drought conditions we’ve had these last few months; but it still looks like we’re going to have another bumper crop. I think, this year, I’ll freeze some fresh-pressed juice as usual but have yet another attempt at making some decent cider.
Cheers!
July 2011
Time for an Energy Revolution
Winter seems a long way away with the long evenings and foxgloves blooming everywhere. Yet the revolution still flaming across the Middle-East, continuing riots in Athens and the recent public sector strikes at home all serve to underscore the fragility of our current situation.
Here at Blackacre thoughts are turning to how we can keep a lid on spiralling costs: taxes, utility bills and food being three particular concerns.
Rearing and growing your own food, is of course, what small-holding is all about, and I suspect that the recent E.coli crisis (should that be ‘Bacteriagate’ in media speak?) in Germany and France can only have lent momentum to people’s determination to grow more of their own produce. More of what’s in season on our veg patch later....
But what of the other two issues – utility bills and taxes? The two seem inextricably inter-twined. Landowners – particularly smallholders – tend to be a self-reliant lot and I’ve been discussing with friends and neighbours how best to reduce my engagement with both government and the utilities. Unfortunately, this is not as easy at it first appears.
Take water, for instance. Here on the small-holding, we have a spring in the paddock behind the house; it emerges where two layers of rock meet, at which point the water is fed into a collecting tank. Up until the famously hot summer of 1976 (I was doing my A Levels then and well remember sweltering in sticky exam halls) the spring provided all the water for the house here at Blackacre.
However, quite apart from the recent dry weather which may well have reduced the amount of water available, all thoughts of tapping back into our supply for household use evaporated (excuse the pun) when a farming friend pointed out that, for this to be strictly legal, you may need a licence to extract the water and that it has to be tested annually for quality. Surprise, surprise but the price a local water company tends to charge for its water quality testing service is almost exactly the same as the annual water rates!
So, we have now turned our attention to saving money by changing the way we consume energy here in the home. Like many relatively isolated houses, we have electricity but no gas: our choice of how to heat the building and the water we use to keep clean has, in the past, been limited to electricity, oil or solid fuel. Well, we all know what’s happening to the price of oil, and as far as I’m concerned, suppliers shot themselves in the foot last winter with their failure to deliver – at any price – when people needed fuel the most.
Hopefully now, technology is coming to the rescue of small-holders wanting to reduce energy costs and live in a far more sustainable way. There are systems which can link water heated from a wood-burning stove to more ‘traditional’ boilers and, for those with deep pockets, a specially built thermal store will allow you to combine various hot water systems, including solar, so that you are always heating your water using the most energy-efficient source available to you at the time.
We are looking at seeing how we can link up a couple of woodburners to a system that will provide hot water through the winter, when oil tends 
to be at its most expensive. One resource that we do have plenty of is wood; we’re starting to build up a big store of seasoned logs this year, from our own copse, by pollarding various standard hedgerow trees and from the regular work of maintaining our hedges. As soon as we have the results of the survey by the woodburner experts, I will share their recommendations.
It may be the recent spell of relatively fine weather that is inspiring us, but we also have some solar power installers coming around to do a survey the following week. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the production of solar or wind-generated domestic electricity over the last few years but, for us, solar power is looking like an increasingly realistic option.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a small turbine on his property across the valley but this is not really an option for us given the small wood that (thankfully) shelters our house from the worst of the prevailing south-westerlies. However, the back of our farmhouse, with its traditional slate pitched roof, has a southerly aspect; and this should make it ideal for installation of a photo-voltaic (as opposed to thermal) solar system.
With so much interest in the area, there are pitfalls to avoid, not least the huge number of cowboy installers seeking to take advantage of the more naive members of the public. Long lead times may be another issue, especially as the rules surrounding so-called feed-in tariffs look set to change next April.
One thing that has changed for the better, however, is an easing of the planning laws which allow households to proceed with environmentally friendly projects even where there was previously tough council control. A quick call to the East Devon planning office ascertained that we would be free to install a system without planning permission, provided it didn’t sit more than 200mm off the roof and didn’t extend higher than the roof line – and this is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
A prospective local contractor (you always want to know where you can find them if there is a problem!) is coming round to do a survey and quote over the next few days, and I will report back on the conclusions we reach in terms of feasibility, expected time taken to implement the project, pay-back period and any other practicalities.
Flavours of July
Well, back to the veg patch, fields and hedgerows, and our regular monthly snapshot of what’s in season in the garden, your local farm shop or farmers market this month.
In terms of the wild harvest, elder flowers are now almost over in our part of the world and the fruit should be ripening this month. The first blackberries will also be ready towards the end of July.
Our initial crop of strawberries is well over but a second flush is now ripening in the cool greenhouse. We are already harvesting the first of our tomatoes, a sweet yellowy-orange cherry variety called Sungold, while some massive beef tomatoes aren’t far off – it’s been a good year so far. Meanwhile, a second sowing of salad leaves is starting to grow away fast.
In the fruit cage, the red currants are over but the gooseberries are still going strong – how I hate their thorns when I’m picking! Loganberries and raspberries are already starting to ripen as well.
Last month’s summer storms devastated the cherries and walnuts in the orchard but the plums, apples, pears and, hopefully, quince are coming on well.
We’re still lifting our new potatoes but they have developed a far better flavour now they have swelled a bit with some rain. Broad beans and mange-tout are in full swing – remember that you can eat the young shoots as well if you want – while runner beans will be ready by the end of the month. We’re in danger of having a real glut of courgettes later this month, but for now the baby fruit are a bit of a novelty. Onions are harvestable at the moment as continental-style salad onions, but I’m leaving ours to grow big in the traditional British way.
Beyond the veg patch, lamb is just starting to become more affordable again after some sky-high spring prices, and we have had some excellent Ruby Red Devon beef delivered by our friends the Rumsbys at Haye Farm (www.hayefarm.net). They have just had exciting news on their small farm: not only have there been several new arrivals to swell the numbers of their small herd but they’ve just been told that Waitrose is to start stocking their beef and that of other local small producers through a scheme organised by the breed society.
June 2011
Top Tips for Surviving the Smallholding Experience
Ah, those dreamy days of summer! It’s during the long, beautiful June days that you really appreciate being a smallholder: unearthing new potatoes and harvesting produce aplenty from the veg patch; enjoying your own spring lamb with fresh mint sauce from the garden for Sunday lunch; washing it all down with a glass or two of homemade elderflower fizz....
But hang on a minute! I think I’m waking up....Perhaps it was the sight of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in a local gastropub a few days ago, or recent fox attacks on our poultry, or the ravages of greenfly on our greenhouse salad crops, but reality is slowly dawning on me. A combination of factors has prompted me to ask myself again whether the dream of the good life can ever be more than that – an escapist fantasy peddled by lifestyle television programmes.
Let’s be clear, the peasant existence is hard, if all that you ever do is work the land on a small scale and have no other income to support the family. Being a hobby farmer is one thing, but to rely on what you produce to feed hungry mouths and provide a modest income is a different matter altogether.
According to a recent report from property specialists Savills, agricultural land prices have continued to rise in the first three months of 2011, driven by a shortage of supply and strong demand. Farmland values in England rose by 2.7% to £5,700 an acre in the first quarter of 2011, the largest first-quarter growth in arable land prices since 2008. In reality, prices are often much higher: a farming friend of mine went to an auction recently and the land was going for silly money. It seems it wasn’t just City boys and investors who were buying, either. Farmers were determined to buy lots adjoining their own land at prices per acre of two to three times the ‘going rate’.
Of course, it’s not just land that’s expensive: in an otherwise flat residential property market, rural farmhouses continue to appreciate: according to rural specialists Carter Jonas, the average price of a farmhouse rose by 1% in the first quarter of 2011, compared with a 0.6% fall in the average house price in Britain over the same period.
But let’s suppose you can afford the property of your dreams plus a modest plot of land, that’s still not the end of the pressures currently faced by smallholders. Two of the biggest issues are the cost of fuel and the price of feed; chemicals (if you use them) are also expensive. Then there’s our unpredictable climate to contend with (show me a person who works the land and doesn’t complain about the weather!) and endless official red tape which adds both to the administrative burden and the cost of production.
Diesel is almost essential in terms of working the land these days. At the very least, you’re going to want a compact tractor as a reliable workhorse on your smallholding. Many people still use diesel as their primary heating fuel in the countryside and, inevitably, it’s always at its most expensive when demand is highest. Feed prices have been high due to a combination of high oil prices (which drive the cost of fertilizers and chemicals as well as fuel for planting and harvesting) and recent poor harvests in some large grain-producing countries.
So, where does this leave us? The stark reality is that, unless you’re really sure you want to become a smallholder and are committed to that way of life, my advice is don’t become one. Even people who have made substantial money and ‘retired’ early to the countryside with relatively deep pockets are currently finding it difficult, with low interest and poor returns depressing their investment incomes.
If you are absolutely determined, then you’re going to need to run as efficiently as possible and do absolutely everything you can to keep costs down, while exploring every available avenue for generating an income, because you will need one, even if you can produce almost all your own food. Don’t forget council tax and every other kind of tax from income tax to the TV licence, the cost of utilities, the cost of transporting and slaughtering livestock, telephone and broadband charges, and the hundred and one other reasons we need money in today’s world.
OK, so we’ve got the health warning out of the way: what can we actually do to make our lives a little easier if we are determined to press ahead with our ‘good life’ ambitions? Here are my top five tips for running a successful smallholding (apart from constant hard work and the need to keep a level head in the face of a roller-coaster of excitement and frustration).
1 Become as self-sufficient as possible
Looking ahead, my plan is to move towards creating a smallholding that closely mirrors the traditional mixed-farming environment of yesteryear, but brought up to date with as much of today’s sustainable technology as possible. Try to build an integrated system where all you activity – what you grow, what you do, what you produce – supports some other activity in the system. Work with nature as far as possible rather than against it.
Part of being successful at self-sufficiency is having the right mind-set. You might not have every luxury in life but you do have what’s important – very high quality fresh food, clean air and a healthy lifestyle. Understand that what you can produce on your smallholding – if you do it well – is what people are paying through the nose for in London’s Borough Market.
2 Reduce costs in every way that you can
One way of reducing costs is to make your home as economical as possible to run. Obviously, ensure that your home is well-insulated. Explore all the available schemes for reducing the cost of power including generating your own. At the very least, move away from oil-fired central heating and invest in a woodburner or two, preferably a system that can heat water your water as well.
We have a small copse that not only provides several food items – cob nuts, chestnuts and elder flowers and berries – but also coppiced wood for stakes, poles and firewood plus standard trees that can be felled in rotation. In addition, we pollard various trees around the holding and collect brushwood and kindling from routine hedgerow maintenance.
3 Grow as much of your own animal feed as you can
In terms of animal feed, it is absolutely possible to minimise your outlay by letting your hens free-range (but keep them away from your vegetable patch) using layers pellets, mixed corn and the like as a top-up rather than their main source of nutrition. Equally, rearing pigs becomes more cost-effective if you can supply as much of their food from the smallholding as possible. Depending on the time of year, you might be able to feed them maize, root crops like turnips, swedes or potatoes, windfall apples from the orchard, field peas or alfalfa; let them clear patches of land you’re bringing into cultivation. Obviously, though, there is a trade-off in terms of time and convenience, so use commercial feed when you need to and don’t worry if the thought of growing and harvesting grain for pig feed seems just a touch too daunting.
4 Learn good husbandry
It is essential to practice good husbandry to get the most from your land, and it is expensive to learn by your mistakes – not only in monetary terms but emotionally as well. Sticking with the pigs for a moment, I have seen friends who have reared traditional-breed pigs for the first time only to get their timings wrong and face utter disappointment when the meat came back from the abattoir: the sausages were inedible because the fat content was way too high and you had to cut a two-inch layer of fat from the chops before cooking them. That said, you could do worse than have a good supply of quality lard.
Others have let their sows grow too large before they attempted their first litter. It definitely pays to learn all you can in advance – preferably from those with experience – rather than from trial and error. At the same time, do learn from your mistakes: we’re always learning in the smallholding game.
5 Take advantage of nature’s bounty
Anybody who has land, particularly here in the West Country, will be aware of quite how much wild food is available. I would recommend getting a couple of guns – a shotgun and a rifle – learning to shoot well and going back to your hunter-gatherer roots for a few days a year.
Rabbits are obviously abundant, especially at this time of year, while deer have never been more numerous in our countryside apparently. (Do take note of your legal requirements, particularly with regard to the type of firearm and ammunition specified by law for shooting deer; and I would stress once again the need for training, experience and thorough compliance with all legislation.) Roe bucks can be shot 1 April-31 October and does during the remaining six months of the year in England and Wales, meaning that you could potentially have venison in your larder all year round.
During autumn and winter, our own land is swamped by pheasants from the neighbouring shoots and, seeing as they help themselves to my chicken feed, I wouldn’t feel too bad about bagging one or two. Perhaps less controversially, one can shoot woodpigeon at any time of year and enjoy great food while reducing the number feasting on your crops, but especially in autumn when tens of thousands are migrating.
Please do always respect your quarry: generally, a good rule of thumb to follow is to keep things sustainable by never taking more than you need. And, if all this sounds a little gory, remember also the abundance available in our woods and hedgerows. Some time and effort, the right knowledge and a little luck will yield a fantastic array of wild food, not least the mushrooms that diners pay a fortune for in posh restaurants up and down the country.
Elderflower cordial
Speaking of wild food, now is the time to harvest one of my favourites – elderflowers. The elder has been flowering quite early this year (from the middle of last month) but you should be able to find some shadier places to gather a few heads, especially further north or at higher elevations.
Last year, we looked at making elderflower fizz (July 2010) – a heady, sparkling alcoholic brew. For some, this is too dry and, during hot weather we don’t always want an alcoholic drink, so what better than elderflower cordial? Nothing could be simpler to make.
Basically, all you need is sugar, water, elderflower heads and some lemons to add acidity. Some people also add a little citric acid to their brew. Put a kilo of sugar in a Pyrex bowl or saucepan and pour in 1-1.5 litres of boiling water (it depends how concentrated you want the cordial to be). Stir to dissolve all the sugar and leave to cool. Add up to 4 lemons (2 is fine – again, it depends how tart you want the mixture to be) which you have previously ‘zested’ and sliced, together with 20 elderflower heads. Don’t wash the flower heads but do avoid any brown flowers and preferably collect them on a sunny morning. Leave the brew to steep for 48 hours and then strain carefully through clean muslin placed in a sieve, set over a clean bowl. Using a jug and funnel, carefully pour the strained liquor into scrupulously clean, sterilised bottles: this will ensure it will store successfully for many months unopened.
Aside from making the most refreshing summer drink, elderflower cordial can be used in jellies, added to salad dressings and fruit salads, and I’m told, is also a delicious accompaniment to chicken. A wholesome alternative to all that processed sugar in the above recipe – especially if you keep bees – is to flavour some honey with the elderflowers and some lemon zest and then mix with sparkling water to make a delightful elderflower pressé.
Flavours of June
With summer well and truly here at Blackacre – the house martins are building their mud nests, the spotted flycatcher has arrived all the way from Africa and the paddock behind the house is a sea of yellow flag iris – I thought I’d leave you with a snapshot of what you can expect to find in your veg patch, farm shop or farmers market this month.
We have the sweetest strawberries in our cool greenhouse, while gooseberries – that quintessential English fruit and a traditional accompaniment to mackerel – are now ready; cherries and plums are not far behind. We are into the second half of an eight-week asparagus season, so it’s not too late for one of the supreme delicacies of early summer.
We’re lifting our first early new potatoes as and when we need them – I love it how the skin just rubs off the freshly dug baby potatoes when you rub them between your fingers – and already re-sowing salad crops after the greenfly descended on our first greenhouse lettuces (the chickens enjoyed a treat!). If you’re lucky, artichokes may be coming into bloom at the beginning of their season, while our outside courgettes have been flowering for a while and are already bearing fruit.
Beyond the veg patch, new-season lamb, mackerel, crab, rabbit, sea trout and woodpigeon are all in season and ready to enjoy.
May 2011
The Darling Buds of May
I guess May is when we really begin to believe that spring is here to stay: it’s a month of burgeoning fertility; down here in the West Country, even the latest of lambs is gambolling around the fields and the veg patch is racing away.
The old saying ‘April showers bring forth May flowers’ has been as true as ever this year even if the weather has been unseasonably dry (luckily the beginning of this month is helping to make up for the mini-drought!). You know it’s really spring when the horse chestnut trees open their white or pink candelabra-shaped blooms, the Marsh Marigold or King Cup shines golden in pond margins and damp places, and the May Tree is in full bloom.
The hedgebanks have turned a patriotic red, white and blue: red from the campion, the white of the cow parsley – also called Honiton Lace here in Devon – and the blue reflecting from a sea of bluebells. This year, despite the cold winter, the hedges draped themselves in the colours of the Union Flag quite early, thanks to a lengthy spell of dry, warm weather leading up to Easter; so the lanes were appropriately bedecked in floral bunting in good time for the Royal Wedding at the end of last month.
Fertility
Yes, the merry month of May really is the month of fertility, and time has woven together pagan and Christian customs to create a heady brew of folklore and tradition associated with this season. The name of the month is almost certainly derived from that of the Greek goddess Maia and her Roman equivalent who was also known as Bona Dea (the good goddess), a fertility deity whose festival was held in May.
It is also the time of the old Celtic festival of Beltane, and May Day itself (1 May) is still celebrated across Europe, not least in some notable events around Britain. Perhaps most famous – thanks to coverage by celebrity chef Rick Stein in his popular television programmes – are the ‘Obby Oss’ shenanigans in the Cornish fishing port of Padstow, where cowslips are worn; another event celebrated in Oxford sees a Jack-in-the-Green cloaked in hawthorn (May tree) leaves career through the streets.
Known as la bealtaine to the Irish, this festival was one of vegetation and farming, marking the beginning of summer, but now best known in Britain for our celebration of the May Queen and maypole dancing. Folklore relates that fairies and witches were active at this time of year and milk, butter and other farm produce was likely to be stolen or bewitched, while protection from such mishaps was derived from powerful ‘magic’ plants such as the rowan, the marsh marigold and, of course, the hawthorn which is also known as the quickthorn, whitethorn or may.
Harbinger of Death
Hawthorn itself is a bit of a double-edged sword, known in folklore not only for its protective qualities but also as the bringer of misfortune and a presage of death if you were careless enough to bring May blossom into the house. However, this could be more to do with the heady, slightly musty smell associated with the flowers – described by poet Ted Hughes as that ‘aniseed, corpse odour – which contain triethylamine, a chemical compound produced by rotting tissue and gangrene.
That said, even the smell of the blossom can be interpreted in different ways; others portray it somewhat differently. H E Bates described hawthorn blossom as the ‘risen cream of all the milkiness of May-time’, while triethylamine is thought by some to be reminiscent of the smell of sex. Presumably, this accounts for anthropologist Jack Goody’s explanation for why hawthorn is venerated outside but becomes a threat when brought inside: ‘The hawthorn or may was the special object of attention at May day ceremonies that centred on the woods, the maypole and the May queen.... In contrast to Christmastide greenery and Easter willow, it is a plant kept outdoors, associated with unregulated love in the fields rather than conjugal love in the bed.’ ‘Ding, dong,’ as a certain Leslie Phillips used to say.
Calendar Change
There is one more aspect of hawthorn that is of interest to those watching the natural calendar: if the plant was such an important part of May Day celebrations (which were held on 1 May) how come it doesn’t come into bloom until the middle of the month across much of the country? The answer lies, say many authorities, in our switch from the original Julian calendar to the more accurate Gregorian version in 1752 (here in Britain we were a bit late making the move as the new calendar was seen as a Catholic-inspired initiative). That September, Parliament decreed that 11 days should be omitted from the calendar, so Wednesday 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday 14 September 1752: afterwards, dates ran 11 days later; what would have been 1 May became 12 May the following year.
In these days of climate change, many of our native plants flower much earlier anyway so this realigns the flowering date with the calendar; certainly this year, the May Tree has been flowering right at the beginning of the month and even earlier down here in the West Country. However, people who have been scientifically recording the date on which hawthorn blossom opens down the years say that its flowering date is notoriously variable, being greatly influenced by late winter and spring temperatures.
Guide to Planting
Nevertheless, this is why the plant makes such a good a guide to what we should be getting on with in the vegetable garden and smallholding. The old proverb ‘Cast ne’er a clout ere May is out’ is said by experts to refer to the flowering of the hawthorn rather than the end of the month. Basically, it means you should hang onto your warm clothing until the hawthorn is in blossom and this also applies to keeping delicate plants under cover from late frosts.
Country Uses
The plant itself has many traditional country uses which are potentially of interest to the smallholder. Another name for hawthorn is the ‘bread and cheese tree’, which refers to the young leaves and buds which were plucked from the branches and eaten. They taste nothing like their name but have a sweet nutty flavour and can be added to salads along with the flower buds. A number of edible wild plants have ‘bread and cheese’ as a country name and this probably refers to their food value (bread and cheese being staples of the country diet in times gone by). Also, a liquor was made from hawthorn buds and brandy while, come the autumn, the fruits can be made into a country wine.
Here’s a recipe for making a pie out of young hawthorn leaves (courtesy of the classic Food for Free by Richard Mabey). ‘Make a light suet crust, well-seasoned, and roll it out thinly and as long in shape as possible. Cover the surface with the young leaves, and push them slightly into the suet. Take some rashers of bacon, cut into fine strips and lay them across the leaves. Moisten the edges of the dough and roll it up tightly, sealing the edges as you go. Tie in a cloth and steam for at least an hour. Cut it into thick slices like a Swiss roll, and serve with plenty of gravy.’
Wild Garlic
Finally, don’t forget that now is the time to gather ramsons or ‘ramps’ as they are called on many a posh restaurant menu. Wild garlic makes a delightful pesto with the leaves ground with salt and oil, or you can use them to flavour mash potato or as a sauce with butter for fish, according to Gerard’s herbal. Their strong aroma diminishes into subtlety when cooked.
If you are interested in plant folk lore and usages, I can recommend the following books: The Englishman’s Flora by Geoffrey Grigson; Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey; and Food for Free, also by Richard Mabey. For colourful but not entirely scientific usages of plants, try any of the old herbals like Gerard.
April 2011
Chooks Go Walkabout!
The lawn in the orchard here at Blackacre is not a pretty picture at the moment thanks to the two big chicken runs positioned either side of the old cider apple tree. One of the runs, though very large, is home to ten hefty Blue Orpington hens and cockerels and the ground took a real battering over the winter: unusually for the West Country, the grass stopped growing for weeks due to the prolonged cold spell and it really only started getting going again in the middle of last month.
What to do then? It seemed unfair to make these delightfully gentle giants wander about in a dustbowl that turns to mud the minute it rains, which of course is what April is renowned for. In the end the solution was simple: I opened up the run on two sides by doubling up the electric netting and let the boys and girls range free across the whole of the rest of the orchard. They had started to find their way out anyway as they went in search of green stuff so, once I was convinced that the flock would not wander too far, it seemed like the easiest solution.
Now the chooks are out and about, they root amongst the old leaves in the wood pile and on and around the compost heaps. They have also taken to dust-bathing in an old pig trough we were trying to convert into a flower garden. Some of them had even started to investigate the new rose bed by the fruit frame but the Other Half decided that this was a peck too far and fenced it off. At least now she’s happy and the chickens are content too, with their vast new playground to explore.
Luckily, the Orpingtons don’t ever seem to wander too far and haven’t really found their way onto the lane as yet. Even when they’re out of sight, they seem to know when food might be on the way and always come running whenever I venture down into the orchard, greedily mobbing the Bearer of Snacks.
Fox on the Prowl
Completely free range chickens are a joy to behold but you do have to be careful. The dogs don’t bother them but I am slightly concerned about foxes, especially as our three dogs disturbed one lying up in our paddock only about 50 metres from the top chicken run which is home to the Cuckoo Marans. I reckon that if I hadn’t called the dogs off, there would have been an almighty fight: our two Springers (Flint and Freckles) and a Jack Russell (The Stig) obediently came away but they did then make sure they ‘escorted’ the fox off our land, where it turned at bay briefly on the boundary with the neighbour’s wood before slinking away.
There are other pros and cons of chickens free-ranging around the garden. The lawn gets fertilised for free which is a good thing, but that can also be a bad thing of you step in it! Chooks will put paid to any leatherjacket problem but, equally, they love digging the dirt, scratching for insects and dust bathing, which means they can wreak havoc as well.
So far the girls have been returning to their coop to lay, but I’m waiting for them to decide that they want to choose their own nesting spot, which is when the egg hunt will begin. But I guess that’s kind of appropriate with Easter this month!
Blackacre Cover Girls
On the whole, it’s all working well, which is lucky because we’ve just had a photographer from the new Your Chickens magazine over to take some cover shots: they were looking for cute photos of kids and chickens free-ranging around the garden. Daughter Ellie and her school friend Izzy spent a happy, if slightly embarrassed, Sunday morning posing and pretending to be Britain’s Next Top Chicken Models.
The friendly Orpingtons were the stars of the day, outshining the other breeds in terms of their patience and willingness to put up with being posed and man-handled. They say you should never work with children and animals – and bird-brained ones at that – but the cheerful and long-suffering photographer Alex made it all look so easy!
More Fulfilled Resolutions
My list of partly fulfilled New year’s resolutions is getting longer – not that I’m getting smug, mind you! The good work started early in the year is already paying dividends with tomatoes planted out in the greenhouse, growing alongside neat rows of lettuce and radish.
They have been helped along the way by a good spell of dry weather and warm days last month. All my plants have come through some quite chilly nights, though I have helped out the tender greenhouse seedlings with a bit of night-time heat provided by my new paraffin heater. This twin-chimney affair heats up very rapidly – watch your bare fingers on the metal – and keeps the chill out of the air on particularly cold nights, just enough to avoid frost damage.
One thing worth noting is that twin-wick heaters can get through a lot of fuel so, even in cold weather, it probably pays to limit the heater to overnight use and remember to ‘turn it off’ in the morning.
Out in the vegetable patch the rhubarb is looking very good, while the lovage is starting to point skywards and will eventually be as tall as our dovecot: its leaves and stalks smell of celery and make a wonderful soup, but 
they say the roots smell of gravy though I haven’t actually checked this myself. In Europe, they sometimes call this the Maggi Plant because the flavour is reminiscent of Maggi Sauce. We also have onion sets and garlic in the ground along with first early new potatoes and pink-fir apples, which taste like new potatoes but are actually a main crop.
Back in January, one of my other resolutions was to ‘make some cheese and sausages’. I can’t actually tick that box yet, but I hope we’re well on the way to becoming more professional about our smallholding activity here at Blackacre. The old lean-to and wood store built around a fantastic old oak tree has finally succumbed to the elements: half its side is missing and the roof leaks like a sieve. It’s really got to go!
This paves the way for a lovely new set of wooden buildings incorporating a couple of stables, a shelter for the quad bike and topper, a tool store, wood shed and... a smallholding room. This is going to be the place where I bring together all the paraphernalia that goes along with running a smallholding in a, hopefully, much cleaner and more organised environment.
I’m aiming to find room for the incubator, broody box and egg cartons, and will also use the smallholding room as a place to make minor repairs to the coops and arks; there’ll be a spot for the smoker and the apple press, for brewing and bottling. I may even be able to use part of it as a place to store potatoes, onions, apples, cheese and air-dried sausages. The aim is to consolidate all the disparate smallholding activities that are currently spread across the garage, kitchen and conservatory and make everything much tidier and more efficient. One thing’s for sure, the Other Half will certainly be pleased when I’ve taken all my junk out of the garage!
The stables may even lead us to being able to keep some goats in the spare stall next to Rodger the pony, in which case I might be making my own cheese from our own goats’ milk more quickly than I was originally expecting. I’ll keep you posted.
March 2011
Spring Fever!
It’s been a long, dark and exceptionally cold winter at times but we’re definitely out the other side now. And, goodness knows, we could all do with a bit of cheering up – what with the current economic climate to contend with as well as the weather!
Over the last few weeks, my friends on Twitter have been getting understandably excited about every tiny, little sign of spring and it’s already in full flow here at Blackacre. The relatively mild climate in the West Country means spring usually comes early and, despite the cold winter, the leaf buds on the quince tree broke in late February, while the wild daffodils on the banks and in glades and hedges have been poking their sunny faces through the herbage for a few days now. They’ll be over by the end of the month.
For fruit trees like the aforementioned quince, a combination of a cold winter – to kill off pests – and a mild spring, with warm sunny days that favour the bees and pollination, is ideal. And that, I’m hoping, is what we’re going to get again this year after last autumn’s bumper harvest.
That said, the climate is still giving off somewhat confused signals to the wildlife around here. Local birders report a blackcap (this warbler is usually a summer visitor) which has been around since December in nearby Seaton, while bramblings (a northern version of the chaffinch and a winter visitor) have been spotted in Colyton at the same time. I guess the blackcap never made the hop across the channel last autumn: it must have got a real shock during the pre-Christmas cold snap!
Now that the spring migration is getting under way this month, it’s a perfect time to see birds on the move as the winter visitors leave to be replaced by the incoming summer species. What’s more, the songbirds are relatively easy to spot with the trees still largely bare of leaves. And, of course, you just have to listen to locate them as they busily proclaim their territories in song like so many avian town-criers.
Speaking of fruit trees and birds, one of my favourites is the bullfinch. We’re lucky enough to have a pair of these colourful birds in the area and we love seeing them in our orchard or flitting down the lane, unmistakeable in flight with their white rumps. The startlingly bright pink, black, grey and white livery of the male in breeding plumage positively glows in spring and they bring a smile to my face every time I see one.
These days, like so many other species, bullfinches are not so common as they used to be. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, bullfinches used to form massive flocks and were a major pest in our orchards. In spring, the bullfinch’s habits change as it moves away from its winter woodland haunts and into gardens and orchards, when fruit buds become the staple diet. When a flock of bullfinches descended on an orchard, this spelled serious trouble for a grower: a single bullfinch can gobble 30 or more buds in a minute and it didn’t take long for a flock to strip the trees. The fruit-growers fought back by trapping bullfinches using cage-traps and a live decoy bird during the winter and spring months, with reports of some farms catching up to a thousand birds annually.
The population began to decline in the 1970s so now bullfinch numbers are much reduced and they can’t cause the same extensive damage as in the past. Which, no doubt, is why I find them a welcome sight even when they are helping themselves to a free breakfast amongst my cherry and plum trees.
Who let the dogs out?
Spring is of course the breeding season for many – not just birds. Our dogs have been driving us mad over the past few days; well, the two boys have. A female black Labrador from a farm along the valley has been roaming the area, provoking unbridled lust in Flint the Springer and Stig the Jack Russell. The fact that Stig is probably too short to do the business doesn’t seem to dampen his ardour, while the moans of longing from Flint whenever he scents the bitch are shameless.
It would all be quite funny except that the Labrador has taken to visiting at two and three in the morning, which causes pandemonium amongst our dogs in the kitchen. The amusement value of trudging downstairs in the early hours – sometimes times twice a night – has long since worn thin.
Lack of sleep notwithstanding there is plenty to do on a small-holding this month. Many people will be well into the lambing season already and with egg production picking up it’s time to get some fertile eggs into the incubator. (See my April 2010 blog for more information on hatching out chicks). We’ve been busy posting off boxes of hatching eggs to enthusiasts wanting to rear their own traditional breed chooks.
Fulfilled resolutions
There are also plenty of jobs to do in the veg patch now that the growing season has really got into gear. I’m happy to report that I have fulfilled at least one of my New Year’s resolutions already and I’m well on the way with another. Back in January I vowed to ‘get organised on the sowing and planting’ and that’s exactly what has happened for a change.
Pots and trays of seeds cover the benches in the greenhouse, which heats up quite rapidly during the day when it’s sunny – and we already have a range of salad greens growing away – lettuce, pak choi and various mixed leaves. Growing in the greenhouse beds, various herbs have started to come back nicely including Italian flat-leaf parsley (for the third year) and French tarragon, which has a much better flavour than the Russian variety often seen at garden centres, and is an essential ingredient in béarnaise sauce and various chicken dishes.
So this brings me to another of my New Year’s resolutions where I am also making progress – ‘grow more of what I like’. There’s such a variety of specialist growers, nurseries and seed catalogues these days that there really is no excuse not to try all sorts of vegetables and herbs that at one time might have been considered unusual. And our warming climate helps us along the way here in the south-west.
If you like exotic Asian food and curries, you will find a bewildering choice of Chinese and other greens to grow from seed in the catalogues. Nurseries in Devon and Dorset offer varieties of chilli that are amongst the hottest in the world. I even found a variety of coriander last year that I could grow successfully from seed without it bolting.
Speaking of herbs, if you like classic French cuisine, it really is no trouble to scatter some chervil seeds in an out-of-the-way corner and grow what it is sometimes referred to as ‘gourmet’s parsley’. It is best seeded where you want it to grow as the long taproot can make transplanting it tricky. Remember also to sow it in a cool, moist location to prevent bolting, and harvest the leaves regularly.
I think it’s important to do as much as possible to grow what we can at home, obviously depending on the space available. There are many advantages, not least that it’s much cheaper! If you harvest what you need on the same day, it will also be considerably fresher – you can’t beat the flavour of new potatoes dug an hour or so before, with fresh garden mint, or tomatoes straight off the vine mixed in with leaves from your own basil plants.
Bear in mind, too, that you’ll be able to grow a much greater variety of traditional fruit and vegetables at home – with a focus on flavour – compared with the limited selection in supermarkets.
Of growing importance is a reduction in food miles and our duty to support local producers. Unfortunately, with the food industry, things are not always that easy. A recent BBC report unearthed some extremely worrying statistics, not only about supermarkets but also about restaurants and the food industry in general (though food manufacturers came off best). It concluded that almost a fifth of foods labelled ‘local’ in England and Wales are doing so under false pretences.
Local Government Regulation (LGR) inspectors tested 558 items in 300 shops, restaurants, markets and factories and found misleading labels including ‘Welsh lamb’ which actually came from New Zealand, ‘Somerset butter’ from Scotland and ‘Devon ham’ from Denmark. The LGR said 18% of the local claims were ‘undoubtedly false’, with a further 14% unverifiable, so probably false as well.
It really does make sense to rear and grow as much as you can yourself. That way you’ll know exactly what it is you are putting on your plate, and it will probably taste better too.
February 2011
Just getting started?
Keeping chickens has never been more popular as more and more of us take this first step into producing our own food. However, without the advice of a friendly expert, how do we know where to start?
Well, a good place to start is to take a look around this website and read the advice on Keeping Poultry in the Smallholders section. By all means also read a good book on the subject (I can recommend some if anybody would like some suggestions) and definitely do some research on the internet – there are dozens of websites devoted to the art of keeping chickens, where you’ll also find friendly people willing to offer you advice in the online forums.
You’ll find practically all you need in terms of equipment here on the Mole Valley Farmers site but how do you go about choosing the actual chickens themselves? There are literally hundreds of breeds of chicken around the world so the choice can be quite bewildering. Therefore, I thought I’d offer this brief introduction to help you on your way with your researches.
Which Breed?
The first question to ask is whether you are keeping chickens for pets, to show, because you want to preserve traditional breeds, for meat or for eggs. Most people start off with a view to having a reliable source of very fresh free-range eggs. If you want consistent, reliable egg-layers then the advice would be to go for one of the modern hybrid types. They lay pretty much continuously for two to three years and then egg production drops off because they have been bred to lay continuously and this eventually exhausts them.
Traditional Fowl
I keep traditional breeds because that's what I find interesting, and there are pros and cons of each breed. No traditional breed will match the egg-laying performance of the modern hybrids as the ‘old-fashioned’ birds tend to stop laying during the annual moult and may only start again in the early spring as the weather improves and daylight lengthens.
There are three types of traditional fowl: large fowl – which can be divided into heavy and light breeds - and bantams, which may be miniature versions of the larger fowl or ‘true bantams’ which have no large fowl counterpart and are mainly kept for ornamental purposes or for showing. Bantams will do less damage to your lawn (as they’re smaller – a quarter the size of the large fowl equivalent), eat less and you can fit more into a specific space. They may also be easier for young children to handle, but they do lay smaller eggs.
I keep only large fowl because I want that size of eggs: of these I find the heavy breeds easier to handle because they are less 'flighty' than their lighter cousins.
Eggs
Once you've decided on the size of bird you're looking for, there are a few other considerations – egg production, egg colour and the colour and character of the birds themselves. Many breeds lay tinted (light brown or cream) eggs but Marans and Welsummers are the ones to go for if you love dark brown eggs. We keep a flock of Cuckoo Marans here at Blackacre and I couldn’t recommend a better chicken as a good all-rounder: they’re friendly but independent, lay lovely rich brown eggs on a regular basis and generally look after themselves provided you give them daily food and fresh water and clean them out thoroughly on a weekly basis.
If you want blue eggs, then you need to get Cream Legbars (I keep these but they can be a bit flighty) or you can go for Araucanas, which come from South America and are the origin of all breeds that lay blue or green eggs. There are also various breeds, especially the Leghorn, which lay pure white eggs.
Character
In general, it is the heavy breeds that are most placid and, of these, Orpingtons are well-known for being friendly (if a little greedy). The Buff Orpington (also in bantam size) is the most popular and with good reason: they don’t seem to mind being handled (though they’re quite big birds), they look nice (very fluffy) and lay reasonably well. Originally bred as a ‘utility’ breed, they are supposed to be dual-purpose; in other words they lay eggs and are also good for the table, though in reality no general-purpose bird will have as much meat on it as one specially bred for the table. We keep Blue and Splash Orpingtons, which along with the other Orpington strains are mainly kept for showing these days, though we also get a good supply of eggs.
You'll find that many breeds of chicken are available in different colour varieties, so there’s bound to be a breed that suits your purposes and your colour-scheme! For more information on choosing chickens to suit your circumstances, take a look at this useful guide on The Poultry Club of Great Britain website. You can also click through to a handy egg chart which offers a quick guide to egg colour and the number of eggs you can expect from each breed. You'll see that the Sussex and Rhode Island Red are two traditional breeds known for their particularly good egg production.
New Year’s resolution update: 1 – stop wasting food
Last month you may remember that I vowed to cut down on food wastage as one of my five New Year’s resolutions. This applies equally to the livestock on the smallholding as it does to the human population. We throw away very little food these days, make use of leftovers and feed appropriate items to the dogs, cats and chickens.
But it is animal feed costs that are particularly worrying, as the price of grain on world markets sky-rockets. The Grandpa Feeder is now installed in the big run with Gandalph and Solo’s flock of Cuckoo Marans (Gandalph is the boss cockerel, while his son waits impatiently in the wings to take over: Solo sees his role as playboy cockerel-about-town and is never happier than causing trouble by chatting up the younger birds!).
I personally found the Grandpa Feeder to be a bit Heath Robinson – a company needs to do what Omlet has done for chicken coops and inject some design panache – but it certainly does the job. The feed goes into the big bin at the top, while the chooks have to step onto the treadle in front to open the lid to the feeding tray. And, of course, the chickens won’t know how to do this at first.
What I wasn’t expecting, but now seems obvious, is that you have to ‘train’ the flock over a couple of weeks or more to feed happily from the bin. This involves locking open the feeder lid for the first week so the birds get used to this shiny, alien contraption and also to standing on the treadle. The trouble is, to do this, you have to screw in a couple of bolts every morning and unscrew them every evening – the last thing you want to do with a busy schedule and with frozen hands on a cold winter’s morning.
You then repeat this exercise for the second week with the bolts in a different position to let the lid come half-way down but still open enough for the chickens to see the food. It was quite comical when the first hen first stepped apprehensively onto the treadle and the lid swung up: the poor bird clearly wasn’t expecting that, so she backed hurriedly off the treadle, causing the lid to clang down onto the bolts like the jaws of some ferocious beast.
Eventually, however, the chooks became used to the system, with the more timid ones learning from those higher up the pecking order. After a couple of weeks it was time to take the bolts out altogether, which was a blessing as I kept losing them in the grass anyway. This was a much more challenging test of the chickens’ nerve and memory because they couldn’t actually see the food any more and the lid springs up at quite a pace, causing immense consternation amongst the more timid birds.
Now, the feeding routine has settled down and I’m happy to report that the feeder has so far kept pellets and grain dry and secure from vermin, cutting down quite considerably on wastage. However, I’m keeping a close eye on our doves because I’ve a sneaking suspicion that they’re planning Mission Impossible. The doves are too light to trigger the lid individually, but it was interesting to see that it started to come up when two of them landed on the treadle together. I’m hoping that the doves are not intelligent enough to learn how to co-operate because I’m pretty certain that they’re already plotting a mass break-in!
New Year’s resolution update: 2 – Get organised on the sowing and planting
As you can see from the last picture, I’ve also been having lots of fun keeping one of my other New Year’s resolutions – cleaning up the greenhouse ready for some early spring crops. Rather than scrub the glass with bleach or Jeyes Fluid solution, I decided to blitz the greenhouse with the jet-wash. This approach is obviously a lot more fun (you know men and their machines!) but it’s also a lot messier. If there’s one quick way to cover yourself in dirty, slimy water then this is it, but jet-washing did blast off two years’ of accumulated grime, a hefty algal incrustation and the moss from the greenhouse roof in double-quick time without the need for a ladder.
I have now washed the glass inside and out – and what a difference in light levels that makes – so the next step is to dig over the beds, clear out the old seed trays, burn any weeds and old tomato plants and then sow some early salad crops. I’m planning to do this towards the end of the month – with germination hopefully helped along the way with some propagators and a greenhouse heater. I’ll let you know how I get on, next month.
January 2011
My New Year’s Resolutions
I’d like to say that it’s been an extraordinary Christmas period here at Blackacre as a result of the December white-out, but looking back to a year earlier, it was exactly the same: ice had turned the lane outside our house into the Devon equivalent of the Cresta Run; in early January, families were having fun tobogganing up on the hill beneath the beacon; and it took twice as long to feed and water the chickens each morning – latches on gates froze shut, water drinkers required de-icing and metal feed containers clung to ungloved fingers.
The freezing conditions have brought wildlife – and birds in particular – into much closer proximity to us humans, affording the opportunity to see many species we might not ordinarily encounter. Reports from local Axe valley birders and amateur enthusiasts have included a pair of Teal, Brambling, Fieldfares, Redwings and even some Waxwings in gardens, but my own favourite encounters have been the Snipe which rocketed up from the ditch beside the lane as I drove to and from my mother-in-law’s on Christmas Day. The cold weather has also forced secretive Woodcock out into the open and some were spotted feeding on a playground in Seaton. All this has been in sharp contrast to the balmy weather of only a few weeks ago when it wasn’t Snipe feeding in the ditches but Little Egrets – those graceful herons from the Continent which have been slowly colonising the Coly Valley as they exploit our generally warmer climate.
And it’s all a far cry from two years ago when we had some (very early) December primroses blooming on a bank in the front garden. It might have been milder back in winter 2008/9, but I prefer the current weather: it feels more normal, the seasons seem to have recovered their senses and the cold weather is a great help to smallholders in terms of controlling pests and vermin.
Nevertheless, there can be casualties: we lost a carp which we found floating in the pond once the ice cap had receded though, interestingly, all the gold fish came through unscathed. The bitter weather has also indirectly taken its toll on one of our Silkies. A desperate and determined rat gnawed its way inside one of our nursery arks and killed an almost-grown chick, though fortunately the traumatised mother survived and she is now recovering back with the cockerel in the main Silkie run. I’m not sure hers has been the easiest of convalescences, however, as Sergeant Silko (the cockerel) greeted his returning wife by immediately pinning her to the ground, climbing aboard and giving her a thorough and complete rogering! One of my jobs before the next clutch of eggs hatches will be to repair the pop-hole door to the maternity ark and also ensure that I stand it on welded wire mesh to prevent any more rodent tunnelling activity.
Perhaps surprisingly, the colder weather has had little effect on our dove population which has continued to breed right through the winter, replete with an abundant supply of food from the chicken feeders. Every morning our own birds are joined by a flock from down the valley and I have finally had enough of these interlopers hoovering up all the chicken food as well as anything I put out for the wild birds. Conveniently, this leads me to the first of my New Year resolutions....
1 Stop wasting food
My first resolution is to stop wasting chicken feed, which has become increasingly expensive as world grain prices have soared. My other half kindly bought me a Grandpa’s Feeder for Christmas – a feed bin which the birds can open by standing on a treadle mechanism. This is going to be placed in the top paddock with the Cuckoo Marans and where our own doves also live. I’m hoping the chickens will be quick to learn how to operate the feeder and that the wildlife will be more wary of it. Anything that avoids wild birds coming into close contact with domestic fowl is also good: it helps prevent the spread of red mites, worms and avian flu.
I’m also going to try out some peck feeders from Mole Valley Farmers to see if this reduces wastage in the other chicken runs. A local farm has an abundant supply of suitable plastic buckets with lids and handles to use as grain containers, so it should be an easy task to set up some of these by drilling a hole in the bottom to take the special spring release mechanism. Then, by simply hanging a bucket in each run, the system should deliver grain or layers pellets to the birds every time they take a peck. Hopefully, this will fox the rooks, jackdaws and doves but I’m not expecting it to be any kind of deterrent to the local pheasants, all of which have been brought up on the system!
More generally, I’m aiming to throw away less food. We’re pretty good as a rule and all of the suitable fresh waste goes to the chooks for a tasty snack, but I’m determined that this year we preserve all of our produce and lose less to pests and diseases. This means bottling, pickling, freezing or storing any surplus fruit and veg and making jams, pies and preserves whenever there is a glut. During the summer and early autumn days of plenty I find one tends to forget the lean winter period ahead!
2 Get organised on the sowing and planting
My first task of the New Year will be to clean down the greenhouse inside and out. The usual warm, damp climate of the south-west means that the glass quickly becomes covered in algae, while the gutters and roof edges start to clog with moss. Scrubbing the glass with a weak bleach solution (you could also use Jeyes Fluid) soon has the panes gleaming again, which is important for good growing conditions: more light through the glass means stronger, healthier plants and I can always put up some green mesh netting or similar shading to prevent scorching during the height of the summer.
Getting the greenhouse dug over, cleaned out and set up for the coming growing season is one of my main priorities, so I’m also going to prepare by ordering any seeds I need ready for a flying start. I’m hoping that I will be able to get some early salad crops underway, and also germinate tomatoes and broad beans, but I won’t be relying on the usually mild West Country weather to see me through. Many frosty nights lie ahead before spring, so I have invested in a paraffin greenhouse heater, which has the dual benefit of keeping the greenhouse from getting too cold while simultaneously boosting carbon dioxide, which will help the plants grow quicker (provided conditions are light and warm enough).
3 Grow more of what I like
I’m also planning to grow more of what I fancy rather than standard crops that I can easily buy from local farm shops. For me this means plenty of tomatoes – and making sure they’re from a cross-section of good, tasty varieties that extend the growing season – along with unusual lettuce and salad crops, and early potatoes. The key with salad crops is to sow a little and often to avoid gluts and to provide a constant supply. I don’t usually bother with main crop potatoes as they’re so abundant commercially and it’s the waxy new potatoes I really prize for their flavour.
As a confirmed curry eater, I also grow plenty of onions – a crop that always seems to be successful (touch wood!) – and garlic, along with chillies in the greenhouse. Perhaps surprisingly for such an exotic-sounding vegetable, chillies are available in huge variety and grown very successfully by specialist local nurseries in Devon and Dorset.
4 Make some cheese and sausages
Being a bit of a foodie, I have been driving everybody mad at home with a plan to get some goats to milk for cheese. However, there has been a certain amount of resistance from my other half to buying yet more animals, as owning livestock makes life so complicated when it comes to going away on holiday. Don’t get me wrong, our long-suffering friends have more than stepped up to the mark with offers to house-sit, but there are only so many times one can impose.
How then to fulfil my ambition of producing some of my own yummy Blackacre goats cheese? My pal Chris Rumsby (who has featured in earlier blogs with his traditional breed Ruby Red Devon cattle) came up with the obvious answer – so obvious, in fact, that I hadn’t thought of it! – buy in the milk from a local goat breeder. So, if anybody reading this piece keeps goats and would like to sell me some milk I’d be grateful to hear from you.
Fortunately, there are plenty of suppliers of traditional breed pork in our valley and the surrounding areas. Local abattoirs are already geared up for making sausages from small producers’ own pigs but you never quite know what flavourings and preservatives go into the mix. My plan is to buy a meat grinder and sausage machine and use bought-in minced pork from friends as the basis of an experiment to produce some French-style cooking sausages with a high meat content, along with salamis and chorizo. I’ll let you know how I get on.
5 Switch to more sustainable fuel
This last cold snap has led to well-publicised problems with the supply of heating oil. Despite ordering fuel well before snow hit the south-west, I’m sorry to say that we spent the whole of the Christmas period watching the fuel gauge and mostly without central heating because the requested delivery never came. It didn’t matter too much as we had an abundant supply of logs from a massive cherry tree blown down in the autumn gales along with a huge branch from the largest oak tree on our land all cut up and ready to go as back-up for our supply of seasoned logs. Luckily, we could also keep clean as well as warm thanks to the electric showers we had fitted a few years ago.
But, of course, when you are forced to change your ways, you start to consider whether or not you really need to carry on as before. Doing without the central heating was no great imposition even when it was -10°C outside because the farmhouse has thick walls and the loft is well-insulated – the snow stayed covering the roof until the thaw. Our open fires are pretty efficient but this year I’m definitely taking the one out in the room we use as an office and replacing it with an even more efficient wood-burning stove.
We have plenty of wood in our little copse to supply logs and kindling even if we leave a few branches lying about to benefit the wildlife, but I’m not convinced we have enough to run a complete central heating system. So, a wood-burning stove will have to suffice for the moment, while I also investigate whether or not it is feasible (we’re in a conservation area) or economic to install solar panels or a wind turbine. Whatever we manage to achieve, our plan is to spend less on fuel oil and use more energy from sustainable sources.
Well, those are my five New Year resolutions. I’ll aim to keep you up to date with how successful I’ve been in sticking to them over the coming months. In the meantime, I’d like to wish everybody a very happy and bountiful New Year.
December 2010
Star of Wonder, Star of Might
These short days and freezing nights are in many ways enough to try the patience of a saint, let alone a smallholder! Breaking the ice in troughs or unfreezing drinkers in the sink simply adds to the number of chores during limited daylight hours; meanwhile, bare hands stick to frozen gate latches and the log pile is already starting to dwindle alarmingly. Yet there are bonuses to be had at this time of year by both night and day....
To my mind, one of the benefits of living on a smallholding right out in the sticks is the lack of light pollution: when the sun goes down it actually becomes properly dark. During clear winter nights, the stars seem to blaze even brighter across the heavens, dominated by the Milky Way (our home galaxy) and the constellation of Orion. Everybody knows Orion, with the three bright stars of his ‘belt’ – The Three Kings – an instantly recognisable signature.
Orion the hunter is visible in the sky at some point from mid-August to late April but appropriately becomes most prominent during the winter hunting and shooting season. The constellation has appealed to the imagination for millennia, from the times of the Babylonians when it was known as the Heavenly Shepherd. It plays a major role in Chinese and Indian mythology as well as Native American, aboriginal Australian and European folk lore: amongst old English names for the constellation are Jacob’s Rod, the Golden Yard Arm and the Magi.
Orion the constellation is mentioned three times in the Bible, while his descendants were known as the Nephilim, a race of mythical giants. In Egypt, the three pyramids at Giza are claimed by some to make up a map of Orion’s belt with the size of the pyramids in direct proportion to the brightness of the individual stars; the very name of the constellation tells us where to look to look to find it, towards the Orient or east.
If you have a bird-spotting scope or some binoculars, it’s worth braving the cold night air to take a closer look. Hanging from Orion’s belt is his sword, and you may notice, even with the naked eye, something different about the middle ‘star’: it appears fuzzy to keener-sighted observers and is actually not a star. Looking through binoculars or a telescope you will be able to make out what is in fact a star factory, the Orion Nebula, consisting of extremely distant clouds of luminous gas and dust. It’s here that stars are born from collapsing, swirling clouds in an area approximately 24 light years across. Intensely studied by astronomers, the Orion Nebula is helping scientists understand how stars and planetary systems are formed.
Nearby to the Hunter is his dog Sirius, part of the constellation of Canis Major and the brightest star in the sky (apart from the sun). Actually a binary star system, the Dog Star is twice as bright as the next brightest star in the heavens, an attribute reflected in its name which is derived from the ancient Greek Seirios meaning ‘scorcher’.
Ancient Egyptian astronomer-priests used to mark the time of year when Sirius first becomes visible above the eastern horizon for a brief moment just before sunrise – the so-called ‘helical rising’, as heralding the onset of the agriculturally vital flooding of the Nile. In ancient Greece, the appearance of Sirius was associated with the beginning of the hottest part of the year; it’s where we derive the expression the ‘dog days of summer’. Conversely, in the southern hemisphere, the appearance of Sirius was identified with winter by the Polynesians and was an important navigational marker.
Winter wildlife
But what’s happening down here on Earth? The days are at their shortest now so it’s not only farmers and smallholders who are busy making the most of the available daylight. Those of us lucky enough to have Barn Owls on our patch may notice them hunting more during daylight hours, while other birds form huge foraging or roosting flocks.
Here at Blackacre we see vast numbers of rooks wheeling in the sky, as well as substantial movements of Lapwings, Mallard and Wood Pigeons. Migratory thrushes like Fieldfares and Redwings have long since stripped the holly berries along with their resident Song Thrush and Blackbird cousins, while mixed flocks of tits and finches – mainly Blue Tits, Great Tits, Coal Tits, Greenfinches and Chaffinches – along with Nuthatches and the occasional Marsh tit or family group of Long-tailed Tits forage in the woodland or descend on our chicken feeders and the wild bird food we put out during the worst of the weather.
Generally, the intense cold tends to bring wildlife much closer to our homes as birds and animals seek food and shelter from the elements. It’s now that we can do most to help them survive. Here are a few tips:
We all know about putting out food for the birds but, please, do make sure that it is fresh and the feeders are clean. I like to make ‘bird cakes’ by filling a suitable mould like a ramekin with some of the chickens’ mixed corn, adding chopped bacon rinds and then pouring in rendered pork fat – something you may have quite a lot of if you keep traditional-breed pigs. Place these in the fridge to set for a few hours and then turn them out onto a bird table or the ground and you have an instant high-energy feast for wild birds (or your chickens) at a fraction of the cost of similar products you can buy in the shops.- Birds and animals also need fresh water, and this can be in short supply when everything around is frozen. There’s no need to break the ice on your pond for the sake of the fish, but I find that if you gently make a few holes near the bank, the water wells up onto the ice and wild birds and our doves have the perfect drinking and bathing platform. If you don’t have a pond, you will be performing a valuable service by putting out a large, shallow dish of fresh water every day. Of course, plenty of wild birds share the chicken drinkers with our chooks.
- Shelter is extremely important during the worst of the winter weather. Most of us know to check piles of leaves and bonfires for hibernating hedgehogs before lighting them from one side only. However, we can give all sorts of animals a snug home for the winter without too much trouble. Bird nest boxes often serve as roosts for wrens, while log piles will harbour a variety of invertebrates (try not to put them on your fire!); a shed or outhouse may provide a safe place for tortoiseshell or peacock butterflies to hibernate – but, again, please do remember to leave a window or door open so they can fly off in search of food when it gets warmer.
- Finally, as a general rule don’t be too tidy across your garden and the whole of your land: wildlife gardening offers the perfect excuse to be slightly scruffy. Leaving a few drifts of autumn leaves will be much appreciated by small mammals and birds as shelter and places to forage for invertebrates. Seeding plants offer a good snack to finches as do windfall apples which are loved by our winter thrushes. Log piles and decaying wood also provide shelter to invertebrates as well as a food source for fungi and burrowing insects. Ivy straggling across old walls supplies an emergency feast of berries for wood pigeons, a roosting spot for wrens and a hunting ground for all sorts of creepy-crawlies in the colder months, as well as being an important food plant for Holly Blue caterpillars. At the very least, try to keep a compost heap going, not only is the compost good for the veg patch but, again, it provides food and a snug place to hide for many creatures.
Remember, too, that our domestic birds need looking after at this time of year. We add higher-energy food like sunflower kernels to our chickens’ mix and supply as much green-stuff as possible when it is in short supply on the ground. Chopped up cabbage or the outer leaves and stalks of cauliflower are much appreciated, as are diced apple and pear. You can feed the occasional raisin or grape as well if you’re feeling generous!
During the worst of the cold, your chooks may appreciate warm mash and ours absolutely love cooked potatoes, pasta, rice and bread but please note that, since the last bad foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, it has been illegal to feed kitchen waste. Check out the Defra website for more information. Here’s a handy government guide.
At the moment the cold may seem interminable, but there’s a lot to look forward to. By the end of the month it probably won’t be getting any warmer but the days will have started to lengthen again. It won’t be long before our hens begin laying regularly and we can start sowing our first greenhouse crops ready for spring.
November 2010
The Tale of Bowser and Britney
A surging interest in sustainable farming and generally knowing where our food comes from has prompted many of us to take our first tentative steps into growing and raising some of our own food. Maybe we’re lucky enough to have an allotment or large veg patch or perhaps, like an increasing number of folk, we’ve decided to buy a few layers for the garden so we can enjoy the freshest of eggs from hens kept under genuinely welfare-friendly conditions.
Sounds perfect, right? And for many of us it is. But it’s absolutely essential to think things through before you buy any kind of livestock, because animals are a real commitment. To my mind, chickens are relatively low-maintenance but they still have to be let out in the mornings and closed up at night, 365 days of the year. They must be fed and watered everyday and cleaned out properly at least once a week; occasionally they will become ill or need to be treated.
Thus, although keeping chickens – or any other kind of animal – may seem like an attractive idea it is not an activity to be entered into lightly; the reality is most definitely not for everybody.
A couple of years ago around Easter time, a neighbour kindly began incubating some eggs for us, partly so our daughter could have the fun of seeing the chicks hatch out and also so that we could enjoy fresh eggs each day. The chicks duly emerged and some turned out to be pure Welsummers while others were Welsummer x Copper Black Marans. Both types were excellent for laying lovely dark brown eggs.
Life is never that easy, though, is it? In the meantime, we had bought the nucleus of our own flock at auction, having decided that Cuckoo Marans would be the best breed for our purposes. Because the eggs from the cross-breeds were sometimes difficult to tell apart from those laid by the Cuckoo Marans, the confusion soon started to interfere with our breeding programme – not least because, in those days, we kept all our chooks together as we couldn’t afford to keep buying new coops.
Furthermore, some of the chicks inevitably grew up to be cockerels! This played even greater havoc with our system when we decided to keep a cross-breed male (whom we named Bowser after the baddy in Super Mario Bros). This decision eventually altered the whole pecking order amongst our flock.
Meanwhile, our neighbour had decided to sell all her chooks at auction and concentrate on ducks because her free-range cockerel had started to act very aggressively towards her toddler grand-children playing in the garden: she simply couldn’t risk any accidents. Consequently, there was no chance of returning the excess birds, and we were left with several chickens that we didn’t really need.
In the end, we were faced with three choices:
- spend more money on an additional run and housing for the Motley Crew as they came to be known;
- put the whole lot in the pot or send them to auction (which could possibly amount to the same thing); or
- find a good home for them.
A few months later, when a friend mentioned that he’d like to give some chickens as a surprise birthday present to his wife, it seemed like a good solution all round. We sent off three hens – a pure-bred Welsummer, an Orpington x Cuckoo Maran and a Welsummer x Copper Black Maran, who had come to be known as Trailer-trash Britney but was in fact a nice-looking bird with black feathers tinted a stylish metallic green. Meanwhile, the husband bought a coop and all the necessary feed and equipment to make the surprise complete.
Yup, you’ve guessed it! His wife absolutely hated her surprise and what had seemed like a wonderfully spontaneous gift became a nightmare. It turned out that she had been planning to buy him a hot-tub for his birthday and this was destined to occupy the exact same space where the new chicken house now stood. What’s more, the regular cleaning out of the hens, their demands for food and the fact that the family couldn’t now go away on holiday without first finding someone to look after the chickens, meant that he was well and truly in the dog house!
The situation went from bad to worse a few months later when a badger forced its way up into the coop through the floor of the nest-box, which was not screwed down. Two of the hens were killed while Britney was left as the sole survivor with a bad flesh wound and too traumatised to lay any more.
Well, the story does have a happy ending. Britney has been nursed back to health and returned to us here at Blackacre, while we have acquired her coop in exchange for a nice bottle of wine. She has been joined by Bowser, who has been taken out of the Cuckoo Marans’ run, which also solved our breeding problem up there.
The two misfits keep each other company and are allowed to free-range around the orchard. So far, there have not been any problems with Bowser trying to fight the cockerels in either the Orpington or Cream Legbar runs. Indeed, poor old Bowser has suffered considerable loss of face since being ejected from his domain amongst the Cuckoo Marans, and it’s Britney who seems to be the boss in the new partnership. Now, with everything calming down after her trauma, we’re hoping that she will start to lay her lovely dark brown eggs again next spring as she settles back into her old home.
Animal hospital
It’s been a terrible year for mite infestations, according to many of the chicken-keepers I’m in touch with. Here at Blackacre we’ve spent a fortune on spray treatments for the various hen houses and have had to learn rapidly how to become ‘chook doctors’ when an infection caused by red mites started to take hold amongst our prized Splash Orpingtons. It has proved costly too – are we the only people who take chooks to the vet? – what with the price of antibiotics, mite powder for the birds, eye ointment, spray for their legs and salve for the birds’ faces. Even worse, we had to withdraw some chooks from a rare-breed sale (having already paid the entry fee) because they had not recovered their good looks in time.
Clearly, the answer is not to let red mite or scaly mite take hold but an infestation can be difficult to spot in its early stages. Unfortunately, the warm weather over the summer has proved to be ideal breeding conditions for the little menaces so I’m hoping that the recent October frosts and the oncoming winter cold weather will help deal with any lingering problems.
When you clean out the coop, it is important to inspect and spray every crevice where mites can possibly hide. I’ve found them at varying times living in the grooves holding a sliding window in place, in a knot in the wood on the underside of one of the perches and, of course, in numerous nooks and crannies near nest-boxes and the ends of the perches.
Mites don’t like light, so tend to hide away during the day but swarm all over the poor birds when they go in to roost at night or even when they venture inside to lay. It’s vital to keep the mites in check: at the very least, the nasty little blood-suckers cause your birds to lose condition. In the worst cases – such as we experienced with our Orpingtons – they can quite rapidly cause bronchial and eye infections which are costly and time-consuming to treat. One cockerel became so bad so rapidly that we had to take him to the vet for a shot of strong antibiotic. We isolated him in a ‘hospital ark’ and then had to apply antibiotic ointment to his eyes twice a day along with skin salve to his face where he had been scratching.
Thankfully, all are now fully recovered and we have learnt some valuable lessons: not only is it necessary to keep on top of any emerging mite problem but also to be ultra observant for the early signs of an outbreak. It’s also probably a good idea to keep youngsters segregated from their parents if you do have the space. We reckon that the younger birds were more vulnerable to mite attack because they weren’t roosting on perches, instead preferring to stand on the floor of the coop. This was probably a pecking-order issue, which meant that not only could the mites attack the young birds more easily but the youngsters were also standing in the litter underneath the older birds and tended to become splattered with droppings if they roosted in the wrong place – an easy way for infections to be passed on!
Inexperienced mum
We’ve had to battle the red mite problem across all our chicken runs and we found it especially difficult to tackle where the houses have lots of places for the little bugs to hide. The ark in which we keep the Silkies has been particularly difficult to keep clear, as it’s full of crevices and built of rustic wood.
That said, both Silkie hens are currently out of the ark and in temporary maternity accommodation. Silkie number two – Edelweiss – has also become a mum now, following on from Lilly, whom we reported on last month. However, as a first-time mother, Edelweiss’ inexperience showed: as soon as her first chick hatched and was cheeping merrily away, she rushed off to find some food. Unfortunately, the remaining chicks became chilled in her absence and they didn’t make it out of the shell even though we tried to save them by transferring them to an incubator. Nevertheless, this story has a relatively happy ending and here she is sitting with her youngster under her wing – both mother and chick are doing fine.
October 2010
Silkie Chicks
It’s October and we have newly hatched chicks here at Blackacre! People usually associate them with Easter time, not the rain-swept days of autumn when the nights are drawing in, birds are moulting and egg production declining.
However, a couple of our white Silkie hens have been broody recently – to be honest, when aren’t they broody? – so I left them sitting on their eggs to see if they could hatch a clutch outside in their ark. I had just given up on them and asked my daughter to clear out the nest box – the Silkies are her pets, after all – when she excitedly announced that at least one egg had hatched and there was a small bundle of fluff nestling under a motherly wing.
So began a swift operation to move mother and chick, plus the remaining eggs, into a broody box in our conservatory. Not only is this out of the rain and convenient to inspect, feed and water mother and baby, but also necessary to keep them out of the way of the cockerel, in case he decided to bully the youngster.
If all goes according to plan, this little chap (or, hopefully, a ‘chapess’ – we can’t tell yet) will be full grown in about six months, taking us to March 2011 and just before Easter when the majority of chicks tend to hatch. If you’re into selling your surplus birds at auction, prices will be higher then – when there are fewer good-quality young adult birds about – compared with the autumn when there is a glut of birds which have matured after the spring hatching.
Under the Hammer
We found this out on a recent trip to the Salisbury Poultry Auction where there was an abundance of birds for sale and prices were considerably lower than in the spring. The trip, for me, was something of a landmark, in that I had only ever visited the auction to buy stock. This time I was also selling.
Selling birds at auction can seem a little daunting; certainly it’s an anxious time as you wait for your birds to be sold, so I thought it would be worth putting down a few hints for those of us who are new to the game. Here are my top ten (OK, eleven!) tips for selling chooks at auction:
Do what you can to get an early catalogue entry. This means registering for the sale as early as possible and perhaps also contacting the auctioneers to find out how they order the lots. It was obvious that later lots were fetching lower prices, with many buyers disappearing after committing early. It seems that many people do not have the patience to wait for later lots (even if they are superior birds) and these were snapped up cheaply by professional dealers waiting for a bargain.- Fix a ‘reserve’ for each lot, ie a price below which you are not prepared to sell, especially if you are not desperate to unload your birds at any price. In fact, one of our lots of Cream Legbars did not reach its reserve price and the pair was initially ‘unsold’. However, the story had a happy ending thanks to a gentleman from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust contacting the auctioneers during the sale and offering to buy them for the reserve price. I was pleased in the knowledge that my chickens were going to a good home.
- Try to sell when there are fewer birds available and when demand is highest, ie in the early months of the year. If necessary, ask the auctioneers when the highest prices are being achieved.
- People naturally sell their surplus stock. My recommendation is that you sell birds of the highest quality you can part with, because the best examples do command higher prices and you start to build a solid reputation as a breeder.
Pick your breeds carefully. Obviously, you are limited by the birds you have available but some breeds are more in demand than others, although there is a certain element of ‘following fashion’ in terms of what sells. For instance, there was a glut of Buff Orpingtons at the sale this autumn and many of these did not achieve high prices, despite being immensely popular in the past – probably a simple case of over-supply. If you attend a few auctions you can get a feel for which breeds tend to sell well.- Hens on their own will almost always sell for higher prices than those paired with a cockerel, simply because many people – particularly urban chicken-keepers – only want to buy hens: this is because of the noise issue or perhaps because they don’t want to breed and have to feed an ‘unproductive’ mouth. Many breeders also unload their surplus cockerels at auction by selling off pairs of birds. However, a word of warning is necessary here: do check whether or not the auction has high welfare standards and try to familiarise yourself with the type of buyer likely to attend (perhaps by visiting a couple of sales before you actually enter anything). It is possible that buyers will keep the hen and dispose of the cockerel, in which case you might as well have despatched the cockerel yourself, confident that it had been done humanely.
- Come equipped for the auction with shavings to place in the bottom of the cages, a plastic water container for each cage (you won’t be able to retrieve them afterwards so old margarine or large yoghurt pots will do), maybe some food to keep the birds looking lively and alert, and a small but attention-grabbing label to fix to the front of the cage – this really does help to attract interest in your birds.
- Get up early on the day of the sale so you arrive in good time. The auction starts promptly and won’t wait for you! It’s also easier to catch and handle the birds while its dark and they’re still roosting.
- Have all your transport boxes standing by plus food and water containers, shavings and chicken feed packed and ready to go the night before.
- Make sure that your birds are free of disease, have been wormed and deloused. All reputable sales are monitored by Defra and obviously poorly birds will be excluded and, anyway, wouldn’t sell well.
- Take some wipes and tissues to clean up the birds if they have soiled themselves during the trip to the auction. Obviously, ensure that the birds are as clean as possible before you load them for transport. It’s not really sensible to take birds for sale with bedraggled feathers after they have been standing out in the rain, for instance.
Our first experience of selling poultry at auction was mixed, my feelings largely one of relief that the birds had all been sold and gone to good homes. There was an anxious wait while the auctioneer sold earlier lots and came closer and closer to our birds while more and more buyers melted away. You can’t help worrying whether your birds will reach a good price or sell at all.
You’ll definitely never get rich by selling chickens at auction, especially after all the deductions – the per-cage entry fee and auctioneer’s commission (to which VAT is added!) – and do bear in mind the cost of travelling to and from the sale.
On the positive side, the auction is an excellent place to meet fellow enthusiasts, to gauge the market and to swap stories, and just to experience a different side of poultry-keeping. And, if you’re going to buy some more breeding stock anyway, selling a few birds can help fund this activity. Along with poultry shows, auctions are also a great way of building your reputation as a breeder. I recommend that everybody tries it at least once!
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| Legbars ready for sale | Characters at the auction | Our birds ready for inspection |
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| Sale underway | Selling the lot before ours | Hatching eggs sale, seperate side auction |
September 2010
A Walk on the Wild Side
Following on from last month’s discovery that rare Greater Horseshoe Bats have been using our paddock as an aerial feeding ground, I thought I would introduce some of the other animals which share our land here at Blackacre...
At ground level, there’s no shortage of small rodents living in the paddock behind the house – field mice and bank voles – not to mention some larger ones like brown rats – while there are plenty of grey squirrels scampering amongst the trees. Up in the copse there’s evidence of rodent activity as well, particularly as we get into autumn and can spot the gnawed cob nuts amongst the leaf litter.
There are small predators too: underground moles chomp their way through earthworms while shrews are busy catching beetles, slugs and other invertebrates amongst the grass tussocks.
Slightly bigger are the various members of the weasel family: earlier in the year, I saw a stoat – distinguished from a weasel by the black tip to its tail – strolling as bold as brass across our front lawn. Normally, these are quite shy creatures, so it obviously hadn’t spotted me watching it; but I was on alert as we’d lost a hen only a day or two before. Even larger members of the weasel family are occasionally reported from the Coly Valley: escaped mink are often blamed for raiding poultry pens and have been responsible for decimating the local water vole population (now thankfully being re-introduced) but there is also the rather more welcome news of otters returning to the river.
Then there are the bigger mammals like rabbits – which are closely related to the rodents – foxes, badgers and roe deer, all of which we see at Blackacre on a regular basis. You can encounter hares, too, if you venture into some of the more open fields along the valley.
As well as the mammals, we also have a few reptile and amphibian species. I’ve never spotted a snake at home but wouldn’t be surprised to find an adder amongst the bracken or some grass snake eggs in the compost heap, given the abundance of available prey.
The smallholding is home to a couple of species of lizard, however: the common lizard favours a grassy mound at the end of one of our raised beds, while slow worms frequent the long grass and bracken near the hedge on the lane. I have to be really careful when strimming at this time of year in case I disturb any young. Earlier in the season I keep a close eye on the top chicken run, which is home to our cuckoo marans, as I have occasionally had to rescue a slow worm from the hens, which see this harmless legless lizard as a tasty snack.
Some years in early spring, when the lane outside our house turns into a small torrent after heavy rain, great clumps of frog spawn are washed out of the drainage ditches and onto the road, making it a treacherous place to walk. So there are plenty of common frogs about, as well as common toads (you can distinguish its spawn which is laid in strings rather than clumps) and we also have smooth or common newts in our garden pond.
All of these reptiles and amphibians help keep down the local population of creepy-crawlies, as they chomp away on slugs and snails and various other invertebrates. But it’s no secret that smallholders, farmers and growers have, shall we say, a somewhat ambivalent view of the wildlife with which we share the land.
Take deer for instance. Recently on a couple of occasions, our dogs have disturbed a roe deer fawn lying up in the long grass in our paddock while they have been out exercising. Young roe deer typically remain hidden from predators in vegetation until they are ready to join the rest of the herd around three months after their birth in June; in the meantime, their mother visits the hiding place several times a day to suckle them. A cornered fawn makes a pitiful noise but, luckily, someone has always been on hand to call off the dogs – and ours are only ‘soppy’ springer spaniels. On a neighbouring farm, however, I’m told that one roe fawn was not so lucky: an encounter with a couple of lurchers left it seriously injured and it had to be put down. It really is important to keep one’s dogs under control and this applies as much to country folk as ‘townies’.
Nevertheless, with no major predators, there has been a population explosion amongst deer and, however cute they are – and I do love to see them – they bring with them a whole bunch of problems. On the lesser end of the scale, the deer come into the garden and devastate the roses in the early morning, annoying yes, but not really deserving of a death sentence!
Far worse was the recent experience of my friend Chris – we have met him in earlier blogs – who lost one of his prize Ruby Devon Red cattle to a nasty disease called ‘red water’, so called because the cow’s urine turns bloody in the later stages. Red water is caused by a single-celled parasitic organism which invades the red blood cells, divides and eventually ruptures them. It’s not at all easy to detect in beef herds early on and is transmitted by ticks which, in turn, are carried by – yes, you’ve guessed it – deer!
Red water is by no means the only disease carried by deer. Experts consider there to be a relatively low risk of their spreading bovine tuberculosis and foot and mouth disease, but they may aid the spread of bluetongue by acting as a reservoir in which the virus can over-winter, and in which new viral strains can establish.
What to do? The interaction between domestic animals and wildlife involves a lot of complex ecology, and precipitate action can often have unintended consequences. The debate over culling badgers as an effective response to bovine TB has been raging for years, while the role of foxes in the countryside is by no means clear-cut, depending on whereabouts you live: leaving aside the hunting issue, foxes are not generally welcome around the Coly Valley as farmers diversify into organised shoots and small-holders seek to protect their ducks and chickens; yet, in arable areas, foxes may actually perform a valuable service, helping to keep the number of small rodents under control.
Every time my sweet corn gets devastated by a foraging badger or my raised beds are chosen as a place for a young rabbit to start excavating its first home or a rat is tempted to gnaw the bottom off my greenhouse tomatoes or a slug decides to graze across my new cucumbers, I get predictably hot under the collar. But then, as a resourceful or even halfway competent smallholder, there is always something I can do to defend my produce.
I can fence off my vegetable patch properly and remember to shut the greenhouse door at night. I can manage my plot effectively to maximise production and limit the impact of pests and diseases by using sound husbandry and horticultural techniques. I can take the dogs on patrol around the land to deter the local foxes and badgers from coming too close to the chicken runs which are, anyway, protected with electric netting; and I can remember always to shut the chooks up securely at night.
Plus, of course, it’s not always the wild animals that turn out to be the pests. Sometimes during the winter, it seems like we’re hosting half the pheasants from the surrounding shoot to a massive banquet at our chicken feeders, while my other half’s pet fantail doves are just as partial to a free blow-out!
Live and let live is my recommendation, and try to work as much as possible with the environment rather than against it. At the end of the day, like many other modern-day smallholders, I am not entirely dependent on what we produce, so I’m always happy to spare a little to share with the local wildlife simply for the pleasure of seeing these natural creatures cross my path.
August 2010
Bat Country
Just the other day, there was an unexpected knock on the front door here at Blackacre: our visitor turned out to be Pete Youngman from the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty team. He’s the lucky guy who gets to look after the 103 square miles of stunning countryside on our doorstep, complete with ‘intimate wooded combes, vast areas of heathland, fertile river valleys and breathtaking cliffs and hilltops’. As if this weren’t enough, the AONB also includes the East Devon section of the Jurassic Coast – England's first natural World Heritage Site.
The East Devon AONB, which was designated back in 1963, is supporting the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity, so it’s no surprise that the team is working on a number of conservation projects, including the important ‘Looking out for bats’ initiative. What was surprising and particularly exciting for us to learn, was that a Greater Horseshoe Bat had recently been detected here at Blackacre in the paddock behind our house. Of course, we regularly see the more common Pipistrelles fluttering around the garden at dusk but the Greater Horseshoe is something different altogether.
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At the cave entrance |
‘Looking out for bats’ is a three-year landscape-scale bat conservation initiative centred on the Beer Quarry Caves near the coastal village of Beer. The initiative is mainly supported by the SITA Trust, with additional contributions from Devon County Council, East Devon District Council, the Sid Vale Association and Axe Vale and District Conservation Society.
The project has sponsored farm bat surveys, enabling farmers and landowners to discover which of the 17 breeding species of British bats they have living and flying around on their farm. Earlier this year, these studies had identified 71 separate bat roosts for five different species of bats and had also extended to several local churches – with church wardens keen to find out what sort of bats they have in their belfry!
The team has been using radio tracking to keep tabs on the Greater Horseshoes as they go about their business, following them from their maternity roost in order to identify prime feeding areas and corridors of travel. A valuable component of the work is habitat enhancement: the focus has been on improving hedgerows identified by the radio tracking activity as important routes for the bats as they travel and feed around the maternity roost. This has involved gapping up hedges, planting new hedges and hedgerow trees. Not only will these measures enhance the landscape visually, they will also improve the habitat for the Greater Horseshoes. At the same time, the project team has repaired the roof of the barn that supports the maternity roost, helping both the owner and the bats.
The Greater Horseshoe Bat
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Greater Horseshoe Bat |
So why is it important to help Greater Horseshoes and other species? All UK bats are insectivorous and even a tiny pipistrelle bat can eat up to 3,000 insects in a night, so they’re doing their bit to control pests and are a prime indicator of a healthy environment.
The Greater Horseshoe Bat, specifically, has experienced a marked decline. It’s now rare in Britain and confined to south-west England and south Wales: scientists estimate that numbers have plummeted by over 90% in the last 100 years. This decline may be due to disturbance of roosts and intensive agricultural practices, including loss of permanent pasture. Greater Horseshoes are particularly sensitive to disturbance at their nursery and winter roosts, and these sites need to be specifically protected and entrance holes left unobstructed, according to the Bat Conservation Trust.
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Planting a new hedge for the bats
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Suitably inspired by our visit from the AONB, we decided to keep a look out for bats at dusk, something that was easy enough to combine with our evening rounds, shutting up the chicken houses and collecting the feeders and drinkers. Conditions on the following day seemed perfect: it was a warm, clear evening; the westering sun had disappeared, but it was still light enough to spot any bats silhouetted against the sky. There were the usual pipistrelles about, fluttering around the orchard and the garden: two of them were even chasing each other, seemingly playing a game of tag around the eaves of the house.
Looking up the hill out over our paddock, the rooks were returning to their roost and the field itself was busy with the steady thrumming of insects. As if on cue, we spotted a much larger bat – probably about twice the size of the pipistrelles – traversing back and forth across the field. Its behaviour was quite different, too, as it flew up and down above the long grass trawling for its insect supper. Was it a Greater Horsehoe? I’m not expert enough to know but I am rushing out to buy a bat detector so I can identify these fascinating creatures by their echolocation calls in future.
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| Sidbury Primary School at the cave entrance |
If you want to spot bats, August really is a great time to see them. The females will usually have given birth to a single pup in June and fed them on milk, just like any other mammal. The tiny young are less than an inch long initially but grow rapidly. This month, at around six weeks old, the juveniles join the adults on the wing and begin to catch insects for themselves. The summer maternity colonies begin to disperse and bats may move to mating roosts. Keep a look-out for them; they really won’t get caught in your hair, honestly!
If you want to check out what the ‘Looking out for bats’ team have been up to, you can watch this video of the kids from Branscombe Primary School visiting Beer Quarry Caves, an internationally important bat hibernaculum. It also explains why Devon is such a species-rich area for bats. If you want to know more about the lifecycle of bats you can also check out A Year in the Life of a Bat from the Bat Conservation Trust.
July 2010
High Summer
Well, the summer solstice has been and gone, and England did finally, excruciatingly, limp their way into the knock-out stages of the World Cup. Here at home, Flaming June lived up to its name with perfect weather, barely a cloud in the sky and balmy temperatures for most of the month. Thoughts have already turned to Wimbledon, ‘Glorious Goodwood’ and blissful West Country summer holidays. At Blackacre, we’re optimistic folk and so we’ve been busy making ready for further perfect days to come; and this, of course, means putting together a refreshing brew or two!
If you managed to forage any elderflower heads from the hedgerows as suggested last month (there may still be a few around in shadier places or further north) then you might already have tried your hand at making elderflower fizz. I won’t call it champagne lest I invite the wrath of the French, who guard the name jealously! Indeed, I’m told by the purists that the drink is actually a type of ‘metheglin’, ie a mead flavoured with elderflowers and would originally have been made with honey instead of sugar. Mead has been known in Britain at least as far back as 2,000 BC.
For those who haven’t tried it yet but still want to have a go at brewing up some elderflower magic, aim to gather your blossom on a sunny day when the flower heads are at their most fragrant – it’s never a good idea to collect any fruit for wine-making when wet. Some people say that blooms picked in the morning have a slight aroma of bananas while those gathered in the afternoon smell pungently of cat wee: certainly, my other half remarked on the pong in the kitchen where the flower heads were waiting to go into the vat.
Here’s the recipe we followed, and I’m happy to say that it worked out just fine....
- 50 elderflower heads, completely open, with no dead flowers and, preferably, with any insects shaken out;
- 6 lb/2.7kg of sugar (granulated is fine) – some recipes advocate honey but this would be very expensive unless you have your own hives;
- 11 tablespoons of white wine vinegar – I used a French cider vinegar as an alternative;
- 11 large lemons cut up and juice extracted – I grated a bit of the zest for extra flavour;
- 50 pints/25 litres of cold water; and
- a couple of teaspoons of baker’s yeast – you can try getting it to ferment naturally without using extra yeast but, if nothing happens within 24 hours, you’ll need to add some.
Put all the ingredients in a large, very clean tub – I used a specially designed plastic fermentation vat with a lid but you could equally well use a household bucket (for smaller quantities) or a plastic dustbin (don’t use metal as it will corrode and taint the brew) if you’re really going to town. I like to leave it for up to 72 hours (some recipes recommend only a day or two) in this large container so fermentation can really get going before bottling.
When it’s time to bottle your fizz, siphon off the liquid into suitable containers, filtering through muslin or a plastic sieve (this is much easier if you use a plastic funnel as well). The choice of bottle is important because, in order to get the champagne effect when you drink it, the elderflower liquor needs to carry on fermenting. Ordinary wine bottles simply won’t do, as the pressure will blow the corks out: the containers really do need to be strong, so I use thick brown ‘Grolsch-style’ bottles with a ceramic cap held in place by a strong clip. I also leave a little airspace at the top in a bid to prevent too much of a pressure build-up.
Other people recommend using plastic fizzy drinks bottles and loosening the screw caps to relieve the pressure (and then re-tightening) every few days. Whatever you choose to do, store your elderflower fizz in a cool place – I can guarantee explosions if you don’t – and you can cover the bottles with an old blanket to absorb any mess as an extra precaution.
Your fizz will be ready for drinking within a week or two – that’s the beauty of this brew – though it will also improve with age. In theory, if kept cool and dry, it should be ok until next year’s elderflowers are blooming and you’re ready to make another batch. As it continues to ferment, the fizz may get slightly more alcoholic over time – at least in the first few weeks – but remember that this is supposed to be a thirst-quenching summer drink, so you don’t want anything too pokey.
Serve very well chilled (this also helps avoid accidents when opening the bottle), sit back and enjoy!
If you don’t have time to gather elderflowers or can’t find any left in your area, why not try your hand at making one of the other great traditional summertime drinks – ginger beer? There’s nothing more refreshing than a long, aromatically peppery, slightly sweet drink balanced with lemon acidity after a hot afternoon’s work: and your ginger beer can range from almost non-alcoholic to a somewhat stronger brew, though you won’t want too much oomph if the main aim is to quench your thirst!
To make 2.5 litres, boil up a tablespoon of fresh, grated ginger (or simply peel a piece of ginger root and bash it with a rolling pin to bruise and release the aroma) along with one thickly sliced, un-waxed lemon, 250 g of sugar and half a teaspoon of cream of tartar (this will help prevent the sugar from crystallising out, amongst other things). Simmer this mixture for five minutes and then pour into a suitable non-metallic container before adding 1.5 litres of cold water; sprinkle three-quarters of a teaspoon of dried yeast over the surface, cover and leave to stand overnight.
The following day, it’s time to bottle your ginger beer. The same rules apply as for elderflower fizz: use strong champagne or heavy-duty beer bottles or plastic ones with screw caps so you can release the pressure. Store in a cool, dry place covered with a blanket or in a cardboard box for extra safety and enjoy after only three to four days. It can be stored for longer but becomes much more alcoholic. Chill well. Cheers!
Bugs and pests
One of the major bugbears of summer (if you’ll excuse the pun) is the vast army of creepy crawlies determined to make a meal out of your lovingly grown fruit and vegetables. It would need a whole book simply to list all the common types of insect pest you’re likely to encounter on a small-holding but surely some of the most annoying are aphids, and particularly black bean aphid – better known as black fly – which have been merrily tucking into the soft shoots of my broad beans.
We’re pretty anti the use of chemicals here at Blackacre and so have an abundance of natural insect predators, including ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies and various parasitic wasps. Unfortunately, aphids are prodigious breeders which can reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis, routinely producing billions of descendants and causing huge population explosions. A mixture of washing-up liquid and water sprayed on the plants helps to control their numbers but occasionally we have to resort to the trusty Bug Clear gun (available from Mole Valley Farmers) which can be targeted solely at the affected parts of the plant and kills black fly on contact, while also acting as a systemic insecticide.
Watch out, though, that you choose the right spray gun for the job. Some are designed only for use on flowering plants and you are not advised to spray them on any produce destined to be eaten. Even those deemed safe for certain vegetable and fruit crops often contain the pyrethroid ‘bifenthrin’, which is quite persistent in the soil and highly toxic to fish and aquatic insects (we have a pond a few yards away) so we have also tried commercial organic alternatives based on fatty acids in an aqueous solution. Unfortunately, the organic option is twice as expensive as the ‘chemical’ version and only guarantees to ‘control’ rather than eradicate the problem, so I was pleased when a friend on Twitter offered a home-made alternative.
Thanks go to ‘@SonofHood’ for his recipe for ‘firespray’, a fearsome-sounding stew of hot chilli and garlic in water, which you then strain before adding a ‘touch of washing up liquid and a little sunflower oil’. He says the resulting mix works well as a spray and, although it killed the aphids, didn’t seem to affect the attendant ants which picked up the casualties to take back to their nest. I’m off to mix up some of this deadly brew and spread a little organic ‘shock and awe’ around the veg patch!
June 2010
Salad Days
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| Blackacre this month |
Ah, the early summer days of June! These are indeed our salad days. Summer still seems fresh, the evenings are light and the greenhouse, kitchen garden and orchard are heaving with quintessentially English crops like late asparagus, strawberries, gooseberries, very early cherries, red currants, the last of the rhubarb, mint, broad beans and new potatoes.
Of course, at this time of year, in any well-managed veg patch you’ll also find a host of ‘continental’ salad crops, exotic Asian leaves for stir-frying, Mediterranean staples such as courgettes, fennel, peppers, aubergines, tomatoes and artichokes at the end of the month, along with traditional produce like carrots, radishes, cucumbers, spring onions and peas (don’t forget to use the young, tender shoots) – provided you have a glasshouse, polytunnel or cloches to help the more exotic sorts along a bit. Remember, also, that many salad crops like lettuce and radish don’t store well, so make a series of small, successional sowings through the summer months to avoid a glut and to maintain a fresh supply.
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| Tomatoes ripening in the sun |
In the hedgerows, your foraging will reward you with a few tasty morsels as well. There should still be some wild garlic around at the beginning of June – ideal for grinding into a delicious pesto – and, later in the month, Elderflower: for small-holders and ‘free-foodies’, this is an extremely versatile expression of nature’s bounty. The scented flowerheads can be turned into a refreshing cordial or a heady ‘champagne’; fried up in batter to make delicious aromatic fritters; combined with gooseberries in a fool or to flavour panacotta. One word of warning, though: you should never eat elderflowers raw – like the berries, they contain a mildly poisonous alkaloid.
More unusual, but coming back into fashion, is the tangy Marsh Samphire, stocked by some fishmongers and a trendy staple of upmarket fish restaurants. Also called Common Glasswort, the plant haunts the muddy places in salt marshes, and is well known-from East Anglia and Lancashire but can easily be found along the South-West’s extensive coastline, provided you know where to look. According to Richard Maybe’s seminal book Food for Free, you can eat it early in the season as a crisp salad vegetable or boiled and served with melted butter; alternatively, you can pickle it. Samphire is traditionally ready for picking on the longest day (21 June) and the best plants are said to be those that have been ‘washed by every tide’.
Making it pay
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| Local lamb |
But all this talk of growing your own and foraging for free food, is it realistic? Can a small-holding ever really pay or is this all just a pipe dream? The short answer is that running a small-holding will never make you rich – in cash terms at least – but, for most people, this is a lifestyle choice. Working your own land certainly provides rich returns in terms of an abundant supply of fresh, local and tasty food of unimpeachable provenance, while the outdoor life helps counteract the stresses of our modern world, even if the weather and ravening hoards of greenfly, caterpillars, foxes, rabbits and badgers do try our patience from time to time!
That said, we do all need some cash to pay our bills and, if you’re canny, a small-holding can help you generate some. As with more mainstream farming – or, indeed, business in general – the key is all about finding your niche unless you’re going into large-scale production where costs can be driven right down so you can compete on price. Again, like commercial farming, diversification is important: and that means doing something different from your neighbour – it doesn’t help if everybody diversifies into the same new activity en masse!
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| Local rare breed pork |
Here in our hidden-away area of east Devon, there has been a massive increase in the number of hobby farmers, inexorably replacing the dairy producers who have found it impossible to make ends meet. In a way, agriculture is starting to turn full circle in our part of the world as smaller, mixed-farming enterprises supply their owners, friends and neighbours with meat and other fresh produce: we have at least four friends who keep our freezer stocked with lamb and traditional breed pork, while others also offer Red Ruby Devon beef.
In these days of legitimate concern about ‘food miles’, I feel that it’s important for as many of us as possible to make a contribution to the country’s food requirements, whether we’re simply seeking to feed ourselves and our families or also to benefit the wider community. There are some innovative schemes about, not least near Blackacre in the three valleys area to the west of Colyton, where local producers are currently discussing how to club together to supply produce to holiday cottages and the local community. When the scheme is in place, visitors to the area and locals alike should be able to benefit from the freshest and tastiest of produce.
Over in the next valley, one farm has switched from milking cows to sheep. Why? Because there is a huge demand for sheep milk to produce organic yoghurt. The milk can be frozen successfully and collected periodically rather than everyday like cow’s milk, which makes the logistics easier as well.
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| Dairy farms are closing down |
Even if you’re not aiming to start a full-scale enterprise you can often sell your surplus produce. The days of successful farm-gate sales are probably over unless you live in an especially convenient location, but traditional livestock markets, farmers markets and farm shops offer useful outlets for your carefully nurtured livestock and crops. You may even have a captive market on your doorstep if you run holiday cottages.
That said, it’s still important to think in terms of ‘adding value’ and doing something different: don’t sell veg (unless its high-cost and exotic), sell chutney; don’t sell fruit, sell jam, curd or cordials; don’t sell meat, sell ‘salami’, pâté, cured meats, pies or curries. Offer whatever there is a demand for locally and not widely available.
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| Our colourful eggs |
We sell our colourful traditional-breed eggs to the largest farm shop in the area. Don’t be shy! I simply walked in one day and asked if they would like to sell our eggs, even though the shop obviously had plenty available already. The owner took a look at the half-dozen I’d brought with me – which I also offered as a free sample – and immediately jumped at the opportunity to stock them because our dark brown, white and blue eggs always look so enticing. And, because they’re so fresh and genuinely free-range, they also command a premium: we receive a very good price in an area that has no shortage of egg-producers, while the shop is able to sell all the eggs we can bring them with a sensible margin on top.
Of course, if you keep chickens, selling your surplus eggs is only one way of making a return. You could instead go into meat production, but this would be unlikely to appeal to a small-holder given the intensive nature of poultry meat systems, the investment required and regulations involved. Yet, if you think outside the box, it is possible to make your flock pay for itself. We’re finding that the current massive demand for rare-breed hens from urban ‘good-lifers’ and backyard poultry-keepers has generated a healthy market for the more attractive or unusual breeds and those laying coloured eggs. You can sell your birds online, at auction, through small-holding and poultry magazines or to friends: you’ll find that, if you sell the right breeds at the optimum time of year, you’ll make a healthy return.
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| Blackacre in late May |
And think even beyond cash. We hear a lot about bartering these days: it’s an excellent system, not least because the ‘income’ is often largely informal and kept within the local community. Thus, we receive a discount on our daughter’s weekly piano lesson in exchange for a box of eggs, while the gift of a home-cooked gourmet curry, dessert or jam to neighbours has been reciprocated with fresh pork and access to apples for making juice; we’ve exchanged free grazing for lamb chops, a glut of red currants for a few bottles of wine made from the fruit, or even copy-writing services for sausages and chicken-feed!
We also lend our house to trusted friends when we go away on holiday, something that live-stock owners often struggle to do because animal-care can be prohibitively expensive: our friends enjoy a free holiday cottage in an area of outstanding natural beauty and all the eggs and vegetables they could possibly want, while we know that our doves, dogs, cats, chickens and garden will be fed, watered and well looked after.
Let’s face it, if you’re running a small-holding you need to be resourceful, but that’s just part of the attraction of this type of lifestyle!
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| Runner beans | Artichoke | |
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| Ramsons, or wild garlic | Courgette flowering |
More of the produce that is currently abounding in our veg plot and hedgerows
May 2010
Season to be Cheerful
Peace and quiet broke out for a while in the skies above Blackacre here in East Devon, late last month.
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A view of Blackacre from our copse |
We sit right at the beginning of the westerly flight path down to Exeter airport, but when the Eyjafjallajoekull eruption in Iceland started pumping volcanic ash into the atmosphere and caused the authorities to close British airspace, we suddenly had a taste of how things used to be: no vapour trails tracing their way across the heavens, no holiday jets lining up for their final approach and, best of all, a complete absence of Chinooks and other military aircraft roaring over the house or hammering low along the Coly Valley during low-flying practice. The only intrusive sound from the skies was the buzz of an occasional small plane, which I can only imagine must have been controlled by an absolutely fanatical amateur pilot, utterly determined not to miss his Sunday aerial jaunt, volcanic ash or no volcanic ash!
In reality, though, it is not ever very quiet here at this time of year, even though we are right out in the sticks. As the weather improves towards the end of April and into May, there is a multiplicity of tasks to do – whether you’re a full-time farmer or part-time small-holder – especially after a cold winter that has put so many jobs behind: with winter having clung on so long, the transition into spring is rushed!
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Wild cherry blossom in the copse at the top of our paddock |
Farmers are busy with their tractors in the fields right up until late at night, while the milk lorries follow their usual routine collecting from those larger dairy farms still operating. Nature itself is also in fine voice. The dusk and dawn chorus is building to a crescendo as more migratory birds arrive to join their resident colleagues in proclaiming their territories for the nesting season. The abundant pheasants, which cannily survived the winter’s shooting season, shout their intentions every evening as they roost in the surrounding trees; the fields are full of bleating lambs – they were born much smaller this year because of the harsh winter – while the rookery now rings to the sound of noisy nestlings along with their parents.
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Orange tip butterfly |
Quieter, but just as welcome, signs of spring include the appearance of violets, bluebells and wild garlic (or ramsons) in the Devon hedge-banks to join the wild daffodils, anemones (or windflowers) and primroses. In the damp meadows, lady’s-smock or cuckooflower (but, sadly, not so far any cuckoos) is everywhere, and made all the more lovely by the emergence of beautiful orange tip butterflies which sip the nectar and lay their eggs on the flowers.
Although the days are now warm and sunny, let’s not be fooled! The nights are still cold whenever we have clear skies. Only the other day, I had to remove ice from the chicken drinkers in the top run, while it is also wise to keep a close eye on tender seedlings – especially Mediterranean crops like tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes and melons – if you have them sprouting in a cool greenhouse. I forgot to close our glasshouse up the other night but got away with it as, thankfully, the frost wasn’t too severe.
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Peas and beans hardening off awaiting planting |
Outside, our early potatoes have been in the ground for a few weeks: the traditional time for planting is Easter, but as that is always a variable date in the calendar – literally a ‘moveable feast’ – it is sensible to be guided by the prevailing weather conditions and your local climatic knowledge. For those who are interested, Easter (or Çostre, an old Anglo-Saxon goddess and Germanic name for the month equivalent to April – a time of growth, hence the word oestrogen) has its origins in the pagan lunar calendar and is defined as the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox (21 March): as a result, it can fall on any date from 22 March to 25 April and was relatively early this year (4 April), so mind the weather warning!
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A pic of the bank behind our house with primroses, dandelion & lady's smock |
Our second early potatoes have also now gone in the ground and we’re hoping they don’t show above ground until the frosts are over. We will also be planting some late main-crop potatoes – Pink Fir Apple – for their marvellous flavour but don’t tend to grow the commonplace main-crop varieties as these are so abundant and cheap to buy in season.
Now that it’s May, our peas – mangetout and traditional – plus our broad beans, runner beans and climbing and dwarf French beans have all been planted out and are growing away nicely. The carrots, beetroot and radishes sown in the cold-frame last month are also coming along, while the early salad crops and more tender vegetables have been given their place in the greenhouse border.
So, why do we grow so much veg? Firstly, because we can, here in the mild south-west, and also because it is so much cheaper than buying it in the shops. However, the main reasons are the superior flavour and freshness of home-grown veg, plus the availability of many more varieties than are usually stocked by supermarkets or even traditional greengrocers. Finally, there are seasonality and food-miles to consider.
Brooding season
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Growing Cream Legbar chicks while still in the brooder |
It’s pretty hard not to be cheerful when spring comes along, what with the warmer sunny weather that literally lightens the gloom, the bird song and the home-grown produce burgeoning in the veg patch: but if there is one thing guaranteed to bring a smile to your face, it’s seeing a brood of newly hatched chicks cheeping away! We’re on our second lot now, with the first brood (see last-month’s blog) out in an ark and enclosure of their own in the orchard.
Young chicks are surprisingly easy to look after, provided you give them three essentials: warmth, fresh water and chick crumbs. They need a draught-free home – basically a wooden box with tall sides: ours is rigged up with a pole from which to hang a heat lamp (don’t buy the cheapest type of infrared bulb as we find that these don’t last). The idea is that you gradually raise the lamp over a few weeks to acclimatise the chicks to the weather, but they must start off really cosy as, in nature, they would be snuggling up to a nice warm hen with her feathers as added insulation.
You can tell if the chicks are too cold as they will all be huddled together in a group: if they chill they’ll quickly die. If they’re too hot, they’ll be spread out as far away from the heat-source as they can get, and may well become dehydrated. The ideal is to position the lamp so you find a happy medium with the chicks sitting around the edge of where the light falls – not too hot and not too cold.
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The same Cream Legbar chicks but now outside and a few weeks older |
I like to use dust-extracted softwood shavings as bedding (straw is too large-scale) while you need to provide food in the form of chick crumbs, as this is not only the right size for small beaks but also contains the right nutrient formula. The chicks can be introduced to growers pellets, grit and a wider variety of appropriate food at around six weeks, when they will be able to survive in a home outside, being well on their way to adult plumage. (You’ll find that they don’t stay fluffy and chick-like for very long, with their primary flight feathers well in evidence at the end of their first week.)
Fresh water is, of course, another essential. I like to change this often, as it can quickly become fouled with the frenetic behaviour of young chicks, and avoiding dirty water goes a long way to eliminating any disease problems.
One final word of warning, do make sure that your brooder has a wire-mesh lid, both to stop the chicks from escaping – they’ll grow increasingly flighty – and to prevent unwanted attention from any pet cats or dogs you may have around the place.
April 2010
Spring Fever
In case we needed any further signs of spring beyond the wild daffodils and primroses brimming over the hedge-banks and the incessant noise and twig-collecting activity in the local rookery, it was the croaking coming from our garden pond in late March: the frogs had returned to mate and lay their clumps of frogspawn, hopefully not all of which were destined to be devoured by hungry goldfish.
Other animals are also bringing up young at this time of year, not least foxes; it is now that you need to be especially vigilant if you keep vulnerable livestock. Having given birth in March, the vixen is likely to have hungry cubs to feed this month. This can make her especially bold and persistent in her search for a tasty snack and, of course, the odd chicken is a very welcome meal.
We have already lost one of our Cream Legbar pullets under mysterious circumstances – she simply disappeared – so I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been taken by a fox, although there were no stray feathers around to suggest an attack. We’re still hoping she’s gone off somewhere to lie hidden and be broody, and that one day soon she’ll come back leading a miniature flock of her own. In the meantime, we’re making sure our electric netting is in good repair and working well, and being careful that all the chooks are locked away safely before it gets dark.
Hatching a plan
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Set up and ready to go |
Luckily, we now have six new Cream Legbar chicks growing on nicely, hatched back at the end of February. The process started with the unwrapping of a shiny new Octagon 20 Advance incubator, which we carefully cleaned and set-up on a worktop in the kitchen. (Don’t choose anywhere liable to wide temperature fluctuations like a windowsill or a conservatory.) There were a few bits to put together but this was all very easy and completed in less than five minutes.
We started with nine eggs, basically all the blue eggs laid that week, but left out the smaller ones from the youngest birds. When selecting eggs for incubation, you really only want to choose ones of a good size, otherwise you will get smaller chicks. Try also to pick clean ones: we decided to dab ours with a damp cloth to remove any muck because the warm, damp atmosphere in an incubator makes a perfect breeding-ground for bacteria. Note, however, that if you wash your eggs to clean them, it’s best to do so in a disinfectant solution designed for this purpose, because the process removes a protective layer from the surface of the egg, designed to keep out bacteria. Eggs are porous because the developing chick inside needs to breathe.
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Eggs awaiting incubation |
It is good practice also to date the eggs you collect, marking them with a soft pencil, so you can check which ones hatched. Generally, eggs up to a week old have good hatchability (provided they’re fertile, of course!) but viability does tend to fall off quite dramatically after ten days. You might also want to mark the egg with the breed and, even, which pen it came from, if you’re into serious breeding.
Don’t worry that some eggs are a few days older than others: they’ll all hatch together over a couple of days. This is because the embryos don’t begin to develop until incubation starts and the eggs are up to temperature. A hen will lay a clutch of eggs – always an odd number so they can be arranged in a circle, I’m told – and then start to sit.
Some experts suggest running the incubator for 24 hours to ensure the temperature is stable and humidity is correct. Once we had filled the water channels beneath the egg trays and replaced the lid, we found that the temperature quickly climbed to the requisite temperature (pre-set by the manufacturer at 37.5°C for chickens but easily re-set for other species) and then stabilised, while the relative humidity could be controlled by opening or closing the small vent in the lid: for the first couple of weeks this needs to be 40-50%. We were all set to go within the hour.
Carefully positioning our eggs in the special racks (don’t leave them pointed end upwards), we replaced the cover. A word of warning here: don’t be tempted to keep removing the lid to have a look, because it’s important to maintain a fairly constant temperature and humidity in the incubator. It doesn’t matter, however, if there are short periods when the lid is off – in nature the hen may occasionally leave the nest – so long as the eggs don’t chill. And you will need to top up the water reservoir every few days to maintain humidity.
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First chick out |
One other thing a hen does with her eggs is to rotate them every so often: this is to stop the developing embryo and the various membranes from sticking to the inside of the shell and being damaged. Our incubator came with a motorised cradle which slowly rocks the eggs from side to side to mimic what a hen would do naturally. If you don’t have one you will need to rotate the eggs manually every few hours.
Time then, to sit back for three weeks and wait for the hatching – well, almost. If like me, you’re looking forward to seeing the chicks, you’ll want to know whether your eggs are going to develop into anything. With most types of egg you can do what is called ‘candling’ – basically, holding a very bright light behind the egg – after it’s been ten days in the incubator. (Some people do this after one week and then again after a fortnight.) It should be possible to see the developing blood vessels through the shell if the egg is fertile. Unfortunately, with Cream Legbar eggs, the blue pigment runs right through the shell, making them extremely difficult to candle, so we were unable to tell.
Cracking good time
Hens eggs usually hatch after 21 days and, in the run-up to hatching, you should be well prepared. First of all, you need to step up the humidity in the final week. When we were using a broody hen, we used to spray her and the eggs with a houseplant spray full of tepid water: in the incubator you can close the vent a little more (but not entirely as the eggs still need to breathe!) and place clean tissue or cloth in the water reservoirs to act as wicks. Some experts recommend boosting humidity to 55% on day 15 and then again to 65% on day 19 (two days before the hatch): it is vitally important that the chicks and various membranes don’t dry out during the hatching process.
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Two days old in the brooder, these chicks are both female |
Two days before hatching is due (day 19), it is time to remove the dividers and leave the eggs loose on the tray; some people also lay muslin on the tray to make it easier for the chicks to stand once they hatch . Then, just as expectations are reaching fever-pitch a day before hatching is due, you’ll hear the first cheeping coming from inside one of the eggs: it’s then that you know that your patience is going to be rewarded! The chick inside will tend to cheep if you move the egg around but, please, don’t be tempted to shake it.
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The three chicks sitting together at the front are males, the three at the back with the dark stripe on their backs are females. One of the boys has a bit of shell still stuck to him. You can tell the sexes apart in the Cream Legbar as soon as they have fluffed up which was an advantage for commercial breeders in the 1930/40s before the development of modern hybrids.
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On the day of the hatch, you’ll spot signs of ‘pipping’ where the chick makes a hole in the shell from the inside of the egg using its special egg tooth. Eventually, the chick creates a crack all around the egg and forces the two halves apart – the hatch is complete! During the hatching process, the chicks call to each other from inside the eggs and, in nature, the broody hen may also call to the chicks by clucking (I like to think of it as encouragement) and may even intervene to help a struggling chick by carefully pecking away at the shell. If you think that a hatching chick is not making progress after several hours or has got part of its body trapped outside the shell, it is possible to mimic the hen by carefully picking away bits of shell with tweezers, but I would only recommend this as a job for the experienced.
I can’t stress enough that, during the hatching process, it is vital to curb your enthusiasm to keep removing the incubator lid ‘to have a peek’ because you must keep the humidity high and the temperature up. After hatching, leave the newly hatched chicks in the incubator until they are completely dry and fluffy – they come out looking wet and bedraggled – or they will quickly chill and die.
The chicks will be quite happy drying out inside the incubator for a few hours: they will have absorbed enough nutrients prior to hatching to keep them going for at least 24 hours. Once a chick has fluffed up, you can place it in a prepared brooder – essentially a box with tall sides, a source of heat, food (chick crumbs only) and water – but more of that next time.
The verdict
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Octagon Advance |
So, was our experience with the incubator successful? I would say unequivocally ‘yes’. Of the nine eggs we started with, seven hatched successfully; one chick died in the shell and one egg was infertile. The incubator was easy to set up and operate, and then clean down after use. The Brinsea Octagon 20 Advance came with useful instructions and background about the whole incubating process but I would also recommend reading some articles either online or in the various poultry and small-holding magazines if you’re a first-timer.
What are the advantages of the incubator? The two main benefits are that you don’t have to wait for a hen to go broody before you can incubate and the incubator can obviously hatch a far higher quantity of chicks at any one time compared with a hen. This makes the process more convenient and predictable with everything controlled from start to finish, provided you follow the instructions.
And the potential disadvantages? For some, the cost of a good incubator may be prohibitive, but I would say that the Octagon 20 Advance – which comes with the Autoturn Cradle – is good value at £205.16 including VAT. You can also buy the R-Com SURO Automatic, which has a similar egg capacity and specification, for £159.74 including VAT. Obviously, you will run into problems if there is a power cut for an extended period, though I guess you could keep the eggs warm in other ways. My mother always used to tell me that it’s possible to incubate eggs by keeping them in your bra while farming friends once left an egg on top of their Aga and it hatched unexpectedly (true story). They named it the Aga Khan!
March 2010
Spring is in the Air!
The early morning drumming of a greater spotted woodpecker on the old lightning-blasted oak growing in the hedge opposite tells us that spring can’t be far around the corner, even if the weather remains alternately frosty and wet. Here at Blackacre, the mild south-east Devon climate means we often see early primroses flowering in December – not so this winter!
But there are signs of new life everywhere: snowdrops are in flower, while the daffodils in the orchard and copse are pushing determinedly upwards; new leaves on the elder bushes – always one of the earliest – are unfurling. Along the lane, the arum lilies are already displaying their brightly variegated foliage.
Robins and blackbirds have been defending territory for a while now and the dawn and dusk chorus is growing. The residents of the local rookery in the big oak and ash trees on the edge of our paddock are getting rowdier in anticipation of starting to lay their clutches this month. They’re busy squabbling over the best nest sites, repairing and fortifying old nests, fetching twigs and generally getting ready for the breeding season.
And, of course, down in the chicken runs, our own birds have noticed that, with the lengthening days, spring is about to happen. For the hens, this means most of them are laying regularly again: egg production is starting to climb nicely and we’re back to an egg a day for the younger birds.
The cockerels, too, are changing their behaviour as their hormones kick in: the younger males are getting frisky, while the older flock leaders keep a close eye on their harems and dish out swift punishment to any young upstart foolish enough to get caught chatting up the ladies.
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Dumbledore |
Hermione and Luna |
Even the magnificent and usually docile Dumbledore – our male Splash Orpington – is assiduous in escorting his two ladies – Hermione and Luna – out of the hen house every morning and displays typical male aggressive behaviour (similar to the usual pre-mating routine) of shuffling sideways towards me if I get too close.
I’ve noticed that he and some of the other cockerels have, on rare occasions, flown out of the run towards me as I’ve approached: whether this was eagerness to get at the food I was carrying or aggressive behaviour, I’m not entirely sure. Whichever it was, it’s quite an alarming experience to witness a large male chicken launching itself towards you at almost head height. What I do know is that this has always happened when I have been wearing a rather stylish Akubra hat. My theory is that the cockerels see this as a kind of super-coxcomb and rush out to deal with the oncoming rival.
Unfortunately when the gallant Dumbledore tried this trick, he turned out to be a tad too heavy to clear the fence and caught himself in the electric netting, which was on at the time! As a consequence, he had to be disentangled in front of the whole flock and then carried ignominiously back into his run. Sadly chastened – but older and wiser for the experience, I feel – he remained in a state of shock (no pun intended) for quite a while, but has now fully recovered his dignity and rules the roost in the fruit frame as a relatively benign despot.
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Gandalph |
Solo |
Solo, the young Cuckoo Maran cockerel hatched last summer, is bottom of the pecking order in his particular run but, when the hormones are raging, doesn’t let something like a little matter of lack of status cramp his style. He has been known to seek his thrills with any hens still lingering in the coop, while his dad Gandalph has been out and about on important flock business – the chicken equivalent of a quickie around the back of the bike shed!
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Bowser |
But woe betide him if he tries to jump one of the girls when Gandalph or Bowser (the second-in-line cockerel) is anywhere near. The surprised hen understandably kicks up one hell of a fuss as soon as Solo grabs her, which brings Bowser and Gandalph half-flying, half-running to the scene in a fury of retribution. Gandalph pounces and Solo is well and truly knocked off his perch! To be honest, Solo is pretty unsuccessful with almost all his romantic encounters and is treated with abundant disdain by every hen in the flock, receiving short shrift in the form of a sharp peck whenever he tries it on.
With an increase in the number of eggs being laid, we’ve taken a few from our Cream Legbar hens and put them in the incubator. Last year we hatched all our chicks using Silkie broody hens, so it will be interesting to see how the two methods compare. I’ll let you know how we get on in next month’s posting.
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Cream Legbars |
Even at this early stage in the season, we’re collecting far more eggs than we can possibly eat as a family, so I was very pleased when one of our local farm shops agreed to take our surplus. What’s more, because our hens are all free-range traditional breeds that lay large eggs in such beautiful rich colours, we get paid a substantial premium compared with the typical rate for mass-produced ‘barn’ eggs. We certainly won’t get rich selling eggs but the income does mean the birds have begun paying for themselves. And when we start taking a few nice specimens to the rare-breed poultry auctions in Salisbury and Newton Abbot, our relatively modest flock will be making even more of a contribution.
February 2010
All the Colours of the Rainbow
This week we’re celebrating a real landmark here at Blackacre: we have just started collecting lovely new-laid eggs from one of the pullets we bred from the chickens bought last year as the nucleus of our breeding flock. Hatched at the beginning of July 2009, we reared our first chicks with the help of a very broody Silkie hen; she was an excellent surrogate mum! The latest eggs are a light brown colour and almost certainly from Cinnamon, the Cuckoo Marans x Splash Orpington cross we bred as an experiment to see what she would turn out like.
And this leads me onto the question of egg colour. Duck eggs are blue and hen’s eggs are brown or white – right? Well, not exactly! There are certain breeds of chicken that will lay blue or, even, green eggs. So what determines the colour of the eggshell, because they’re all pretty much the same inside (assuming they’re free-range and of comparable freshness)?
All eggs are initially white (the shell is about 95% calcium carbonate) and shell colour is the result of pigments called porphyrins being deposited while the eggs pass down the chicken’s oviduct. In the case of a breed like the Rhode Island Red, the pigment protoporphyrin, derived from haemoglobin in the blood, is what gives the shell its light brown colour.
The coloured pigment is laid down on the outside of the shell and you can actually rub it off if you collect eggs when they have only just been laid and are still wet; once the eggs have dried the colour remains fast, however. For this reason, some producers of brown speckled eggs prefer not to use wood shavings in their nest boxes because the bedding smears the shells before they’ve had a chance to set. You can prove for yourself that the brown pigment is only on the outside of the shell: crack open a dark brown egg and you’ll see that the inside of the shell is white.
Originally, chickens probably all laid brown eggs. Over time, people selectively bred hens with progressively lighter eggs, ultimately producing white ones, and these came to be the norm. At one time, white eggs were extremely fashionable though, now, people may pay a premium for the brown variety.
Though not an absolute rule, you can often predict the colour of the egg a hen will lay by the shade of her ear lobes! In many cases, a chicken with white ear lobes will produce white eggs, while chickens with red ear lobes lay brown eggs; egg colour has nothing to do with the colour of the bird’s feathers.
The ancient Araucana breed is unique in that it produces a pigment called oocyanin (a bi-product of bile formation) and lays blue or bluish-green eggs. Interestingly, this pigment is added at an earlier stage of the egg-formation process and goes right through the inside of the shell, so you can’t rub the colour off. This also makes the eggs difficult to candle during incubation.
Pure-breed Araucanas originally came from South America, kept by the Arauca Indians of Northern Chile. Blue and green eggs have been reported from South America from the mid-16th century onwards.
In the United States, Araucanas have been crossed with other breeds to produce the Americauna, sometimes called the ‘Easter egg chicken’ in a reference to the multi-coloured eggs this breed lays. Here in the UK, there are Araucana genetics in the Cream Legbar (a traditional autosexing breed developed in the 1930s), which also lays blue eggs. We breed Cream Legbars here at Blackacre.
You can have fun cross breeding hens to produce a variety of coloured eggs. Essentially, crossing a breed producing light brown eggs with a blue egg layer should result in offspring that will lay green eggs. If the cross involves a breed that lays dark brown eggs, you should end up with olive-green/brown eggs.
Mid-January 2010
Not so cold comfort farm!
Well, even if our own battle against nature has recently been put into perspective by events in Haiti, nobody can say it hasn’t been an interesting few weeks for the smallholder here in the UK!
In the relatively sheltered valleys of south-east Devon we haven’t had to contend with the avalanche of snow seen in other parts of the country, though my daughter still managed to go sledging a couple of times. However, we have had serious ice since 20 December right up until mid-January. This time a couple of years ago, primroses had been in flower over almost exactly the same period!
Harsh weather means we smallholders have to ensure that our livestock is well fed and watered and as warm as possible. Adequate shelter is a priority in the cold, particular when blustery conditions create a high wind-chill factor. And, where possible, the same goes for the wildlife in the surrounding fields.
For our chicken flocks, the cold has meant that we have been including a proportion of high-energy-yielding (but expensive) sunflower kernels in their normal feed mix of corn and layers pellets. Our thoroughly spoilt chooks have also enjoyed a range of green stuff plus currants, grapes, bread, porridge, pasta, rice and even baked beans – but I didn’t tell you that (in case the man from Defra is listening!). The starchy carbohydrate is gobbled up to provide essential energy while the fruit & veg supplies essential vitamins and minerals.
We soon learnt to bring the water drinkers in overnight during the very cold weather because, even if we emptied them, they froze when left outside, making them much more difficult to re-fill. Filling drinkers with tepid water also helped the chooks cope with the extreme cold; we found that, on the coldest days, we had to break the ice at least once a day and sometimes refill the containers. It was a blessing that we didn’t have automatic drinkers because they would have frozen solid – all our outside taps did!
Freezing conditions also meant we had to keep an eye on some of our trees and plants. We smothered our lemon tree in fleece; it’s looking a bit sorry for itself but has probably survived. In the greenhouse, our coriander was decidedly limp after the coldest nights but seems to have recovered now. In any case, we will be investing in a greenhouse heater soon, so we can grow salad crops all year round.
Speaking of heat, we’ve been running down our log store at an amazing rate with lovely open fires every evening in a bid to conserve expensive oil. Luckily, we have a copse to provide plenty of sustainable wood and kindling, but next year we will definitely be investing in a log-burner (which operates much more efficiently) to heat our home office.
Surprisingly, although egg production from our sturdy Cuckoo Marans, Welsummers and Orpingtons died off completely, our plucky little Silkies laid a clutch of eggs or two and we were also treated to a blue egg every day or so from our Cream Legbars. The girls done good!
Wildlife on the small-holding has been much in evidence during the past few weeks. Animal tracks revealed the nightly perambulations of all sorts of species – not least the odd rat hoping to grab a free meal of spilled grain in the runs! We didn’t see any fox prints but there were plenty of pheasant tracks and our three dogs enjoyed listening for and pouncing on small rodents under the blanket of snow in the paddock.
Wild birds became surprisingly tame and made free with the contents of our chicken feeders. We also put out mixed fruit and grain on a patch of lawn and were treated to visits by redwings and fieldfares as well as the more usual (for us) nuthatches, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, marsh tits, dunnocks, robins, song thrushes and blackbirds. In the wider Axe Valley, all sorts of normally hard-to-see birds have been spotted, not least snipe, woodcock and bittern.
One other advantage of the cold weather has been a reduction in the number of insect pests and vermin. In a mild winter, here in Devon we would still expect there to be plenty of flies about, but they seem to have disappeared temporarily (though the midges are now returning at dusk!). And I’m hoping that not seeing any more tracks towards the end of the cold period means that the local rat population has been substantially reduced by the cold weather.
December 2009
Drying Out
It was a sight for sore eyes looking out across a frost-encrusted Coly Valley on 1 December, the dawn flushing the clouds a flamingo pink and orange across a cerulean sky. Out in the chicken runs it made a pleasant change to walk across the frozen ground rather than having to trudge through the mud. You could tell that the birds, too, were enjoying the novel sensation of having dry, if somewhat chillier, feet. Maybe winter was finally here?
But it wasn’t to last; the weather soon returned to its familiar pattern of grey skies and drizzle, interspersed with some vicious little squalls and extended periods of driving rain. Days – weeks – of this meant that autumn 2009 was officially the third-mildest since 1914, and November the wettest on record. Back at the Met Office those rain gauges must have been filling up quickly as they recorded getting on for double the average rainfall last month.
Not only dispiriting, this warm, wet weather can bring all sorts of practical problems for the small-holder. And, of course, we’ve recently seen the major devastation that can be caused by flooding in the country.
Thankfully, down here in the West Country we have not so far been on the receiving end of anything like the scale of the terrible floods seen in the Lake District but our area of East Devon has been on flood alert quite frequently of late. Luckily, Blackacre stands on the side of a hill so any flooding tends to happen in the river valley below; however, with a natural spring in the paddock behind the house, the ground does tend to get really soggy in this weather.
One’s natural inclination might be to drain the land – and we have partially done that – but wet grassland is a fast-disappearing habitat and one that is worth preserving. All of which means that conditions are not exactly ideal underfoot in the chicken runs or in the veg patch (we use raised beds to mitigate poor drainage).
Our top run was getting so muddy and, with no opportunity to mow the grass under the electric netting (which meant it was operating very inefficiently), that I decided to take the electric fence away altogether and let the chickens venture out into a wider area bounded by post-and-rail with mesh. At about four foot, this clearly isn’t going to keep out foxes and other hungry predators, so we’re now doubly assiduous about closing up the coops as soon as all the birds are inside at dusk.
But there’s one kind of danger that electric fences won’t deter, whatever the circumstances, and that’s rodents. The heavy rain tends to force rats out of their sodden burrows in the fields and they come in search of shelter around the outbuildings. So much the better if there is a ready supply of poultry feed in the runs and tasty left-overs in the compost heaps!
I’ve noticed an increasing rodent problem these last few weeks and have decided it’s time to declare war, because rats do carry a number of very nasty diseases which they spread indiscriminately as they move about. Just as bad, they are a danger to chicks and small fowl and not averse to snacking on the odd egg or two.
Some of the action you can take comes under the category of ‘defensive measures’. Make sure you keep all feed in secure metal, weather and rodent-proof bins; and take all feeders and drinkers in before dusk, when the little blighters feel safer to venture out. Removing the drinkers is good practice as it avoids the danger of water being contaminated through the rat’s habit of constantly urinating as it goes about its business.
Think about the birds’ housing, too. Here at Blackacre, we have a range of more traditional types of coop built on skids so they’re easier to shift about; but they sit close to the ground and provide the perfect dry spot for rats to tunnel underneath. So, now we’re looking at raising the houses up a couple of feet on blocks or wooden stilts – it’s certainly worked with the compost bin which, until recently, was constantly being raided.
All of this is good practice and helps keep the rodent situation under control but, because rats breed so rapidly when conditions are right, it’s often necessary to take the fight to them. I’m a reasonable shot with an air gun so, providing I’m patient and stand quietly for a while, I can pick off one or two before it gets too dark – or else I suddenly switch on the car headlights to illuminate an area. I recently bought a tin of 500 Napier ‘Power Hunter’ .22 pellets from Mole Valley Farmers and I can verify that they pack the required punch.
Then, of course, you can also trap or poison vermin. Traps tend to be either the traditional sprung impact type – watch your fingers! – or live cage traps. Some prefer the latter but then you have the problem of dispatching the trapped animal quickly and humanely when you return, which may not appeal to the more squeamish of us: it is not legal for you to release the animal somewhere else for another person to deal with.
If you’re going to put out poison – and this can be very effective – please ensure you follow best practice and don’t leave it anywhere where you livestock, pets or wild birds can ingest it!
Finally, get a terrier: we have a Jack Russell called The Stig, and he’s faster after a rat than his namesake around the ‘Top Gear’ test track!
Dear Santa
Well, now it’s mid-December and we’ve had several days of colder, drier weather. Everybody is happier: the dogs don’t tramp so much mud into the kitchen and the two Silkie hens have returned to their customary pristine white fluffiness. The chooks need plenty of food in the cold and I have added sunflower kernels and wild bird seed to their normal ration of layers pellets and mixed corn – more expensive, I realise, but we feel it’s important to help the birds through the worst of the winter as they work hard providing eggs through most of the year, and we feed our doves and the wild birds anyway.
With the frostier weather, thoughts are inevitably turning towards Christmas. Small-holders are resourceful people but every so often something can’t be mended or a newer and better product comes along, so it’s time to buy a replacement. And, of course, we like to extend the range of things we raise and grow, so here is my personal ‘wish list’ of items I’d like to see Santa bringing me this year....
1 Wheel barrow
Really, there’s nothing more useful around the small-holding. We’ve got a couple of trailers we can hitch to the mini-tractor for lugging larger loads, but there’s no replacement for a good wheelbarrow to help fetch the daily logs from store, move muck and earth around the veg patch and clear out the chicken coops. What’s more, with modern designs, you can take your pick of one and two-wheeled barrows, with pneumatic or solid tyres, in plastic or metal, with a super large load capacity and even some that tip.
2 Saw horse
I’ve promised myself that sometime soon we’ll switch from the fuel-guzzling combi boiler recommended by (guess who?) the oil company, to a more climate-friendly system incorporating solar panels and a wood-chip boiler. As a half-way house, we’ll probably get a good wood-burning stove, though our existing open fires are already more efficient than many. Of course, these options require feeding with a plentiful supply of logs, all of which we get from our own timber and coppicing or by recycling old fence posts and telegraph polls on the land. And, when you’re cutting up any quantity of wood, a good saw horse is essential, whether you’re using a chain saw or good old-fashioned muscle power.
3 Mulberry tree
I like to add fruit trees to our land on a regular basis, for a number of reasons. Obviously, the more types of fruit we can grow, the better in terms of providing a healthy diet and cutting costs. Many of the trees are also decorative – particularly when in blossom – and there is a need to replace the thousands of acres of orchards that have been grubbed up over the past few years. Naturally, our chickens (being descended from jungle fowl) prefer to be under light tree cover rather than totally exposed in the open.
One tree that used to be popular, and now seeing something of a revival, is the mulberry. They first became popular after King James I planted one at Charlton House in London. He was hoping to use the foliage to feed silk worms but, unfortunately, planted the black variety Morus nigra, which the caterpillars don’t eat – their chosen food is the white mulberry Morus alba.
Still, the dark-fruited mulberry provides the better-tasting fruit, which look a bit like raspberries but with a different flavour. (The white fruit is reputedly more insipid.) But don’t expect to see mulberries in the shops because the fruit falls as soon as it’s ripe – hence trees are usually grown in short grass – and doesn’t travel well. This is a strictly grow-your-own fruit.
Much used in folk medicine, this majestic tree also packs a unique defence against fungal diseases: mushrooms are said not to grow close to mature specimens and some people grow their grape vines around mulberries to avoid fungal disease, like botrytis. It’s also said that the raw fruit and green parts of the plant have a white sap that is intoxicating and mildly hallucinogenic.
4 Bread-maker
If like me you don’t like supermarket-bought bread which is often full of flour-enhancers and other chemicals, you may buy your loaves from one of the wonderful organic suppliers we have in the South-West, like Town Mill Bakery or Otterton Mill (to mention a couple that we use). Particularly when the range is on in the kitchen during the colder months we make our own bread from the organic flour ground at Otterton Mill, which also supplies fresh yeast.
But if you have a busy life, it’s sometimes difficult to fit in time to make fresh bread by hand, so this year I have persuaded my other half to buy me a top-of-the-range bread-maker for Christmas. The idea is that the machine mixes, kneads, proves and bakes the bread (and other items like croissants) for you, so you can set it going overnight and wake up to fresh-baked bread in the morning. I’ll let you know how we get on!
5 Torch
One thing that is absolutely essential on these dark winter evenings is a good powerful torch, and one of the best I’ve tried is from the electric fencing people Hotline. Their Explorer ‘Dual-lite Rechargeable Handlamp’ is exactly what it says on the box. Basically it’s two torches in one, with a halogen main beam that will last for 3.5 hours on full charge and a 12-LED ancillary ‘working beam’ that is good for a full 24 hours. You switch between main beam, LED mode and off by simply clicking the large button on the carry handle.
Guaranteed for a year, the Explorer is weather-proof with a shock-proof case and comes with a mains adaptor and in-car charger.
We were given an Explorer as an early Christmas present by the manufacturers and it has proved absolutely indispensible over the few weeks since we received it. I keep it plugged in and ready to go (it makes such a difference not having to replace batteries all the time) and use it when doing the rounds of the chicken runs after dark, fetching logs or taking the dogs out last thing at night.
My daughter also takes it when she’s cycling down the lane to and from visiting her pony after school. The only criticism we have of the Explorer is that she finds the torch a bit uncomfortable to hold when the clips for the carry strap are attached; but you can easily remove them.
Really you can’t go wrong with this product. And, at a price of £17.36 (including VAT) on special offer from Mole Valley Farmers, I expect the Explorer to find its way into many people’s Christmas stockings!
Late November 2009
Wet, Wet, Wet
It’s late November and the leaves have all but disappeared from the trees; the weather is unseasonably mild but squally and extremely wet. At Blackacre, our small pond is full to the brim and water is gushing in torrents off the hillside down to the River Coly below.
Here in the south-west, our winters tend to be damp and mild: it’s what keeps our grass growing almost 12 months a year to the benefit of grazing animals like sheep and cattle. But it can also be an uncomfortable time for livestock; chickens in particular – especially those breeds with feathered feet – are not ideally suited to wet conditions.
Chickens don’t really like getting wet and prefer to remain under cover during a downpour. So, first of all, do make sure your birds have a place to shelter from the rain. Ours tend to go back in their house during the worst of the weather, or else they take shelter underneath one of the arks. Trees provide some cover (and prevent the ground becoming so sodden), but if your run is out in the open, you could build a shelter out of corrugated iron or other suitable sheeting, with the benefit that it will double as a sun shade in the summer.
With a lot of rain, there are often small pools of water in the chicken run, unless it has very good drainage. Inevitably, the birds start to drink from the puddles and this can lead to problems, particularly with parasites: intestinal round worms are common in chickens drinking from standing water. Worm-infected chickens may generally appear healthy but can seem extra hungry, while still looking slightly scrawny. You may also observe worms in their droppings.
Both chemical and herbal poultry wormers are available Mole Valley Farmers or your vet and these will generally take care of the problem. (Do ask your vet or SQP if you need advice, however, and when using wormers, make sure you follow the manufacturer’s directions for safe use of these products.)
Remember too that you often need several treatments to kill off a parasitic infection. This is because, although the first dose may have done for the adult worms, there will still be eggs waiting to hatch. Life-cycles vary between different species of worm but you will usually need to repeat a treatment two to eight weeks later.
Flubenvet is a medicated feed supplement and currently the only licensed poultry wormer in the UK. The manufacturer says there is no adverse effect on egg laying and hatchability and, at lower dosages (up to 30 ppm in feed), it should not be necessary to stop consuming the eggs while the chickens are being treated if used at the recommended inclusion rate. You must leave at least a seven-day gap after treatment before slaughter.
Many smallholders like to minimise the amount of chemicals they expose their birds to and opt for herbal products: Verm-X is suitable for use in organic production and is available both as a pelleted feed supplement and as a liquid for adding to drinking water. However, if there is standing water in the run which could act as an alternative supply of drinking water, it would probably make sense to use the pellets to ensure the birds are actually receiving a dose.
Irrespective of any worming treatment you decide to use, much can be achieved by sound management of houses and runs. Keep litter in poultry houses fresh and ensure it is dry. At the same time, do not feed corn or scratch feeds in the litter if there are droppings in it.
And, just as you would rotate vegetable crops in your garden or larger livestock on your land, it makes sense to move your chickens around from time to time to prevent worm infestations building up. Bear in mind also that keeping the grass short allows sunlight to penetrate, which will naturally kill worm eggs.
Happy as a pig in...
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Over at Haye Farm near Musbury, it’s also very wet. Little egrets patrol the fields in which my friend Chris runs his Ruby Red traditional breed cattle.
Chris keeps his cattle out of the barn as long as possible – and the mild weather means there is still quite a lot of grass – so his small herd usually goes inside after the turkeys are finished at Christmas. One major factor is that, as with all deep-litter systems, the litter simply builds up too high if the Ruby Reds stay indoors for long.
Anastasia, the very friendly and inquisitive Oxford Sandy & Black sow, is as happy as the proverbial pig in sh*t! By now she has rooted up all the grass and the rain has turned her run into a quagmire but she doesn’t seem to mind – check out the photo. She is due to go on her holidays soon to visit the boar before having her next litter about 114 days later.
Meanwhile, this year’s offspring have been transferred to the barn where it is cleaner and their food rations can be closely monitored as they are fattened up before going for slaughter in a couple of weeks’ time. With traditional breeds, it’s important to control the weight gain so they don’t put on too much fat.
Why free-range is best
Finally a little bit about eggs because, after all, that’s the reason most people keep chickens. Free range is clearly best for all sorts of reasons, but principally taste, nutrition and the welfare of the hens.
The yolks of eggs from genuinely free-ranging hens are often darker and tastier than the mass-produced equivalent thanks to plant pigments and invertebrates scavenged by the chickens as they scratch a living and hoover up the household scraps. It’s simply not the same if you feed your flock solely on proprietary layers pellets, good as these are at providing balanced nutrition.
But it’s not simply a matter of taste and appearance: recent tests carried out by one American magazine found that eggs from chickens which range freely on pasture provide clear nutritional benefits over eggs from chickens kept in sheds.
‘Mother Earth News’ collected samples from 14 pastured flocks and had them tested at an accredited laboratory. The results were compared with official US Department of Agriculture data for commercial eggs and showed the eggs from pastured hens contained:
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1⁄3 less cholesterol;
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1⁄4 less saturated fat;
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2⁄3 more vitamin A;
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twice as much Omega-3 fatty acids;
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three times as much vitamin E; and
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7 times more beta carotene.
The magazine also looked at vitamin D, because eggs are one of the few food sources of naturally occurring vitamin D, which is normally produced by the action of sunlight on our skin. Its most recent tests found that pastured hens lay eggs with 4 to 6 times as much vitamin D as typical supermarket eggs.
Mid October 2009
Turning Colder
Despite the recent trend for Indian Summers, the weather can turn unexpectedly cold – even here in the mild South-West – as autumn peters out into winter. Check out this picture of a snow-covered Blackacre in November from a few years ago.
As winter approaches, there are still plenty of jobs for the small-holder, inside as well as out, particularly if you keep some of the larger domestic animals like pigs, cattle or sheep. We don’t actually have any large livestock on the holding at the moment; all the Defra paperwork involved is a major issue and, besides, we have many friends locally who can provide first-rate high-welfare pork, beef, lamb and even turkey. So, we’re firstly going to take a stroll over to the other side of the Axe estuary and visit Haye Farm.
My friend Chris farms a few acres in Musbury (not far from River Cottage) and produces fantastic traditional breed pork, beef and lamb. Haye Farm has a small herd of 25 Ruby Red North Devon cattle, a breeding Oxford Sandy and Black sow (an excellent traditional breed) with piglets, and 80 breeding ewes with three rams; sometimes Chris also finishes turkeys for the Christmas market. (If you are interested in staying at Haye Farm check out www.hectorshousecottage.co.uk.)
As you can imagine, all of this keeps Chris pretty busy, particularly in the run-up to Christmas with the turkeys. Bought either as day-old chicks or at six weeks old at the end of August (more expensive but less hassle), the turkeys are fattened in the barn with constant access to good food and clean water. Turkeys are more difficult to free range than chickens because they don’t put themselves to bed at night when it’s time to roost and are at greater danger from predators. The only practical (but expensive) option for keeping them outside is to have high fox- and badger-proof fencing.
The flock is slaughtered on 15 December, plucked immediately and then the birds are hung for a week. They are then drawn and dressed – basically the guts are removed and the turkeys are prepared for the table – before being delivered to customers on 23-24 December. Of course, it’s a lot of work and doesn’t pay for itself if you take into account all the hours involved, but is worth it just for the superior flavour and the attention to the birds’ welfare.
Keeping a few turkeys in the run-up to Christmas is something every small-holder can do relatively easily if you have a spare outbuilding or suitable shed and run. The young birds and feed are widely available and the only real issue is ensuring the birds are killed humanely and then plucked, hung and prepared properly.
However, I have to admit that when I plucked turkeys by hand for a Christmas holiday job while at Exeter Uni, it was not really my idea of fun: the dead birds tended to poo on you while you were plucking them as their bowls relaxed – a just revenge I guess! The key to getting the job done quickly was to pluck them while they were still warm as the feathers came out far more easily.
Apples
However, if the thought of plucking turkeys is enough to drive you to drink, it’s lucky that there is usually a glut of apples at this time of year. Indeed, with the thousands of traditional varieties available in the UK, you’ll likely find an apple tree in fruit from late summer until the onset of winter.
Making your own cider is not a difficult endeavour, though sometimes it is better left to the experts, I feel. Our home-made cider is always bone dry – astringent even – so, lately, I’ve been casting around for other ways to make use of the bountiful supply of apples from our own orchard and those of our neighbours. One way is to forget the fermentation stage and press apple juice.
The raw juice from our cider apples (plus a range of eaters) is simply delicious. The steps are the same as in producing cider: you pick barrow-loads of apples, then chop them up and push them through an apple crusher (a bit like an old-fashioned mangle but with fearsome spikes on the rollers!).
Some juice will come out in the bucket (make sure it is scrupulously clean) at this stage. Next, pack the minced apples into a fruit press to create a so-called ‘cheese’, and squeeze – by slowly tightening the screw – until all the juice runs out into a plastic bucket (again, this must be well-scrubbed). Keep another container handy so you can swap over as one fills; that way you don’t lose any of the juice you’ve worked so hard to extract. (The spent crushed apples which you empty out of your press after each pressing can be fed to pigs or composted.)
Decant the juice into those dark brown bottles with sprung ceramic caps (designed for home-brew beer) and it will keep well in a cold fridge for a couple of weeks if the bottles are properly clean. To keep the juice longer, we bottle it and place it in our chest freezer, remembering not to fill the bottle right to the top so there’s room for expansion as the contents freeze.
Home-made apple juice is extremely refreshing and really quite delicious – so much better than the pasteurised supermarket equivalent – and I would wager that it’s also extremely good for you. Really, this is the true ‘amber nectar’.
Quick Fact
For those of you interested in the history and origin of our language, the Celtic word for apple, Abhall, persists in many place-names, while the sacred island mentioned in the tales of King Arthur – Avalon or Abalon – apparently translates as ‘apple orchard’.
October 2009
Keeping Tradition Alive
Welcome back to Blackacre, our small-holding in the Coly Valley, nestling in deepest south-east Devon, a couple of miles upstream of Colyton along the River Coly.
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Blackbury Camp |
Reputedly derived from the old English word ‘culli’ meaning narrow, the Coly has much to interest the countryman, with a summer run of sea trout and salmon plus resident brown trout. The river is home to abundant wildlife including little egrets (recent colonists), kingfishers and, hopefully soon, a returning water vole population.
Colyton itself is of early origin, being one of the first settlements established by the Saxons in Devon: the older parts of this pretty little market town have a circular street pattern typical of the Saxons. In 827 AD, the ‘ton-ship’ had a Saxon Parliament or Witenagamot and, sometime between 800 and 900 AD, the people erected a beautifully carved cross; today, the restored cross can be seen inside the parish church.
The place is also notable for being the birthplace of an early form of municipal government in England. Back in 1546, a group of local merchants persuaded Henry VIII to return lands confiscated from local grandee Henry Courtney (after his execution! ) in exchange for 1,000 marks and a promise that the income was to be spent on ‘good and commendable" uses for the community’.
Inaugurated in 1546, the so-called Feoffees still form the town council today and carry out the terms of the Deed of Enfeoffment for which they are the trustees. Indeed, when my daughter was at the local primary school only a very few years ago, the surnames of the original Feoffees were read out in assembly and pretty much all of them were carried by a 21st century descendant actually standing in the school hall almost 500 years later.
Colyton is also proud to style itself ‘the most rebellious town in Devon’, having supplied more men for the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated uprising of 1685 than any other town. The last rebellion on English soil, it ended in defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset. Over 100 Colyton men marched off to the revolt: 14 were hanged after Judge Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes and a further 22 were transported to the West Indies.
What has this got to do with running a small-holding? Not a lot other than providing a sense of place and continuity and a deep-seated understanding that people have been living and working on the land, fishing and trading around here in much the same fashion for at least 2,500 years. The Romans settled a mile-and-a-half south of Colyton and the area was important strategically and commercially: the nearby Fosse Way stretched as far as Lincoln and marked the original western boundary of Roman lands in Britain, while further roads radiated from Colyton to Sidmouth, Lyme Regis and Exeter.
Roman ships would have been able to sail up the Axe estuary to within almost a mile of Colyton. The nearby port of Fleote (modern-day Seaton) is reputedly the site of an ancient Phoenician (a maritime empire centred on modern-day Lebanon) trading post, while Blackbury Camp, close to the village of Southleigh, is the site of a Bronze Age settlement from around 400-500 BC.
Around us, we still have field systems that date back at least a thousand years and, as commercial farming slowly succumbs to the pressures of the 21st century economy, one can predict that a fair proportion of the land may return to a different style of land management which our mediaeval ancestors might have understood. Certainly, the small-holders and ‘hobby farmers’ are moving in as the smaller commercial farms are selling up.
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Thatching demonstration at the Goose Fayre |
Some of these mediaeval traditions have been revived, not least the annual Goose Fayre at nearby Colyford. Held on the Saturday closest to Michaelmas, it was restarted in 1980; however, its lineage stretches way back to 1207 when Thomas Bassett, Lord of the Manor of Colyton at the time, obtained a grant from King John for a seven-day fair at Michaelmas.
This event is well worth attending for the budding or even more experienced small-holder: quite aside from the colourful mediaeval pageant and revelry, there are all kinds of games and a plethora of country skills – metalwork, bodging, thatching – crafts and traditional fare on display as well as produce for sale.
You can admire birds of prey or buy delicious local honey while brushing up your bee-keeping knowledge chatting to the local experts. There’s traditional cider-making – the press turned by a donkey or pony (our local scrumpy is called ‘Suicider’ because it is so strong) and, of course, real ale – the area is blessed with an abundance of excellent micro-breweries.
Let’s not forget where our food actually comes from either. At the fayre, there’s a small selection of livestock on show, and the day ends with the main event – the goose auction. This time of year is when geese are in their prime and roast goose was for centuries a traditional Michaelmas treat.
Originally, live birds would have been auctioned but lately this has become a mock auction: understandably, many people are not keen on obtaining a live goose, which obviously entails killing, plucking and drawing the bird before you can eat it. Is keeping geese something we’re planning to do here at Blackacre? Well, I’m not sure, even if they do make excellent ‘guard dogs’, but I’m definitely thinking about cooking a lovely roast goose to celebrate this autumn.
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A selection of animals at Colyton Goose Fayre |
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September 2009
Colder Nights, Misty Days
Autumn is one of my favourite times here on the small-holding at Blackacre. A time of contrasts and transition, it is both the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ so vividly described by the romantic poet John Keats – full of nature’s bounty – yet also a sign that it’s time to prepare for the approaching winter.
Here in the Coly Valley, the mist hangs over the river every morning and, by night, the harvest moon is a massive orange disc. Harvest festivals – rituals that date back to pagan times – are traditionally held on or near the Sunday of the Harvest Moon: this is the full moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox (22/23 September); in two out of three years, it falls in September, but in some years as late as early October.
It’s a time for sparkling beads of dew on the silken spiders webs spun in the paddock and for the resident rooks to perform their spectacular rolling and tumbling display flights – we have a very noisy rookery in some of the big ash and oak trees on our land. Summer wildlife has now largely left for warmer climes, although here in Devon many more species linger longer thanks to our mild winters.
Autumn is also a time of plenty for our chickens. Two of our pens are on the lawn in the orchard and the flocks enjoy a real bonus with the windfalls and, later in the season, a chance to scratch amongst the drifting leaves for insects and other titbits.
Through late summer into early winter our birds have enjoyed all sorts of fresh treats: plums, strawberries, flaked apple, blueberries, chopped cabbage and beat tops are just a few of the supplements that add variety to their basic diet of layers pellets and mixed corn. Any time we wander near their run, the flock comes rushing over to the fence in the hope of a tasty snack – and so much the better if it’s comfort food like cooked rice, pasta or bread.
But winter isn’t far away and the autumn is a good time to ensure that your birds have secure draft-free housing to keep them safe and snug through the winter. Check that there is no loose or rotting timber that could allow hungry predators to gain access.
Here at Blackacre, jobs for the autumn include giving the hen houses and arks a thorough clean: I find a jet wash is easiest, provided you’re wearing overalls and old clothes. Chicken manure gets everywhere as it’s blasted off by the high-pressure water; it’s a messy job but someone’s got to do it! Then a good going over with an animal-friendly disinfectant is also a sensible precaution, and why not take the opportunity to add another coat of non-toxic paint or sealant to make sure the house stands up to the worst of the impending winter weather?
And remember, if you or any close neighbours like to celebrate Guy Fawkes night with loud fireworks, this can have just as much of an unsettling effect on your chickens and other livestock as it does on your pet dogs and cats. Keep them securely shut away in their house and any fireworks well away. Some people even go to the extent of taking their chooks into a barn or house, keeping them snug inside a straw-lined cardboard box or pet carrier.
Don’t forget also, that, if your birds are completely free-ranging when you let them out in the morning, they will unerringly head for that tempting pile of smouldering ashes thinking it’s a manure pile or compost heap... and then you’re likely to see an entirely new way of cooking roast chicken! So, just as you would check the bonfire for hibernating hedgehogs prior to lighting, so afterwards, it’s wise to ensure your flock can’t get anywhere near the remains of the bonfire until it has cooled right down.
As the days and nights turn chillier, the first frosts can mean frozen water drinkers and a not-quite-so-pleasurable routine, especially as egg production is also falling off so there’s no instant reward when you go to visit your hens. The best plan is to make life easy for yourself. Store feed and bedding as close to the hen house as possible (but secure from vermin – we use galvanised dustbins with a brick to weigh down the lid), and bring the drinker into a shed overnight so you don’t have to break the ice in the morning. If the weather is really cold during the day, it may be sensible to place the drinker inside the coop.
Keeping them Safe
One of the biggest potential problems for any small-holder is safeguarding your flock of chickens, duck and other small fowl from predators. There’s nothing more soul-destroying than seeing the aftermath of an attack on your flock: at the very least it will cost you money in terms of lost egg production and replacing fallen stock, but for most people, there’s a huge personal element as well.
We tend to think of the number one chicken killer as Mr Fox, but badger and mink can be equally dangerous in country areas. And then, of course, chicks can fall prey to smaller predators like the various members of the weasel family and opportunists like rats. Even worse, attacks can come from the air: earlier this year, a friend of mine lost all his growing chicks to a sparrowhawk with a hungry brood to feed!
Whatever your views on hunting as an effective way of controlling predators, the first line of defence has got to be the security of your chicken house and run. Buy the best quality house you can afford; do shop around as there is a multitude of coops on the market. Avoid anything that seems flimsy or damaged – foxes, rats and badgers are persistent beggars and can exploit any weakness in construction.
It seems obvious but don’t forget to shut your chickens away at night. Friends who have lost birds say it is almost invariably when they have not been back to shut them away on time.
We keep all our birds in large open runs surrounded by specially designed electric mesh netting. This has the advantage of keeping pet dogs away from the chickens and also acts as a significant extra deterrent to foxes and other predators. Our Springer Spaniels and Jack Russell have learnt to keep well clear after being zapped only a couple of times!
I have found the Hotline poultry starter kit particularly useful, as almost everything you need comes straight out of the box. (Mole Valley Farmers offers especially good value, selling the kit some £60 cheaper than some other suppliers in our area.) All you need to add is a suitable 12 volt battery if you can’t use the supplied mains adapter. And, if you want to extend the battery life between charges, consider adding a solar panel trickle charging kit. Remember that you need to push the earthing stake as deep into the ground as possible for maximum effectiveness and keep grass and vegetation from touching and shorting out the fence by mowing or strimming as often as necessary.
Finally, take time to visit your birds and keep an eye on them whenever you can. You’ll know they’re safe and they will repay the compliment with many fascinating hours of amusement if you take time to watch them go about their daily business.
August 2009
Welcome to Blackacre
Here at Blackacre, we’re lucky enough to live in one of the most beautiful parts of the South-West, if not the whole of England. It’s perfect country for small-holders; so much so that the smart modern house across the valley is reputedly the new home of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall... although I’ve yet to meet our illustrious neighbour.
Part of the Colyton Conservation area and plumb in the middle of the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural beauty, our three acres nestle on a hillside overlooking the River Coly (derived from ‘Culli’ an old English word meaning narrow) amid trees and pasture. The scene is not so different from when the parish tithe maps (www.eastdevonaonb.org.uk/dro/index.html) were compiled in 1840.
Our holding is much smaller than the original farm and the outlook is slightly different: the chicken farm opposite has long since switched production, and the abundance of wild daffodils in the hedge banks and riverside glades during late March is all that remains of a once-thriving cut-flower industry. The dairy herds are disappearing too at an alarming rate, but there are still sheep – one enterprising farmer milks them for the yoghurt market – horses, and the occasional alpaca... and, of course, hundreds of pheasants!
We’ve been growing our own veg for several years now. You name it, we grow it – from artichokes, beans and chillis to zucchini (or courgettes as we usually call them). We cultivate fruit in the greenhouse and in a frame and are also lucky enough to have an orchard – apples, pears, cherries, plums, quince and walnut – as well as a small copse that supplies logs, stakes and, sometimes, hazel nuts and sweet chestnuts.
Why do we grow so much? Well partly for the fun of it, but mainly because the produce tastes so much better freshly harvested and we know that what we pick is chemical-free. We can also raise a much wider range of varieties from seed than you would ever find on the supermarket shelves.
Like all small-holders, we’ve had our ups and downs. We don’t use chemical fertilisers or pesticides, so there was an occasion when a crop of Chinese greens was totally devoured by the local cabbage white population instead of finding its way into our wok for a stir-fry. Aphids can cause devastation if you don’t catch their presence early; badgers have run amok though our sweet corn and the squirrels and birds make free with the plums, cherries and walnuts if they’re allowed.
But by and large, we are supportive of the local animal population: wildlife was one of the reasons we moved here. And it wasn’t long before our thoughts turned to raising some livestock of our own. But where to start?
Chickens seemed the obvious answer. Poultry-keeping is reputedly the fastest-growing hobby in Britain and a small flock of hens laying a daily supply of fresh, free-range eggs was tempting. Besides, friends were raising sheep and rare-breed pigs and cattle, so there was always plenty of good-quality locally sourced meat available, and the paperwork and bureaucracy involved in raising the larger farm animals seemed a step too far for the time-being.
As complete novices at poultry-keeping we asked around amongst friends, read books and the small-holding magazines. A hen house duly arrived (all the way from Scotland, I have to admit – though we’re now getting a local friend to build us some more),while the local agricultural supply merchants were extremely helpful when it came to recommending feeds, electric netting and other vital equipment.
A neighbour kindly incubated some of her Welsummer eggs for us and, after three weeks, several of them duly hatched into the most delightful little chicks. However, we had also set our hearts on some Marans (for their shiny dark brown eggs) and we were looking for hens that would start laying immediately.
So, a 6am start saw the family blearily heading for Salisbury Livestock Market and the monthly rare-breed poultry sale. We had been recommended to attend this auction as the prices are often keener than going to a specialist dealer, and there’s a huge variety. What’s more, being a Defra-licensed sale, the market is a relatively gentle introduction for novices to the art of buying poultry at auction.
What a sight! Hundreds of cages full of every breed of chicken imaginable – fluffy Orpingtons, exotic-looking Silkies and majestic Brahmas – not to mention the ducks, doves, pheasants, geese and turkeys all adding to the cacophony inside the shed.
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At Sailsbury Auction |
Gandalph at the auction |
Gandalph at home with the hens |
Initially, it seemed quite a daunting process but we soon got the hang of it by watching the first few bids and chatting to other buyers. Eventually, the auctioneer came along the row to the quartet – three hens and a cock- that we wanted to buy. The bidding was fierce, but we were determined, and eventually the hammer came down at a price not so far above what they were really worth!
Being novices, I’m ashamed to say that we had to ask one of the stewards to help us get the birds into our carriers, and then we took our chickens proudly home. Checking that all was OK, we released the birds into their new house, but kept them shut in for a short while to acclimatise.
It turns out that Cuckoo Marans were a good choice – they’re robust, self-reliant and friendly – so we have had few problems. The hens duly layed some eggs on their first day with us and Gandalph, Bella, Rosalie and Alice have settled in nicely. Our only complaint has been the 4.15am wake-up call from Gandalph, but it’s a small price to pay in exchange for fresh eggs everyday and the fun of keeping these friendly birds. And now we’ve bought some ear-plugs!
Words and photographs by Nick de Cent.
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