Friend for Hainoa

Hoppy arrived yesterday, he is visiting us to keep Hainoa company until Islay is old enough (end of the year). He is a couple of months older than Hainoa and is less shy than she is. He seems very mellow and good natured which is good... and a bit surprising considering he is a bull. Highland bulls generally seem quite even tempered.
Apparently he is a very fine specimen genetically and conformation wise. He certainly looks very nice and is a pretty colour - rare colour called silver dun so we are told.
He has settled in well and the pair of them have been happily grazing side by side. It feels a bit of a responsibility looking after someone elses cow and it will be more embarassing if he escapes than when it is our cow, but it is nice to see Hainoa with a friend and looking so relaxed.

We had some friends round to lunch before he was delivered by the very nice cow man, so we had had a few glasses of wine and were able to speak French perfectly (?!) and have a nice chat about Highland Coos, how to look after them, their different colours, suitable fencing etc.

Islay - The highland cow

We have reserved this little girl, who we have called Islay, to keep Hainoa company. She is obviously still with her mum, she should be able to join us in November

We are borrowing a friend for Hainoa in the mean time. He was awfully cute as a baby too. Hopefully he is a good natured bull!
Here are some cute pics of Hainoa when she was a baby.

What else?

As well as bonding with the horse and cow and curing the sheepskin we have also mowed the lawn - would you believe this is the 2nd mowing of the year already - you can see how much it has grown in the past couple of weeks.

We have cut and partially put together the remaining 6 raised beds - to be finished next week

Poppy has finally come out of heat. Her training is proceeding, she is getting used to the horse and the cow and remains her normal energetic self.

The sheep and lambs all seem to be doing well. The great white wooly whale STILL hasn't had any lambs. We still expect she will, but occasionally worry there is something wrong with her rather than pregnancy as it seems to be dragging on so long!

Sambuca is getting in to spring by slaughtering pretty birds, a shame but she gets more rodents than birds.

The chicken eggs are still in the incubator. They are due to hatch in under a week. We will see!

We moved the Col's flock and Haiona from the orchard where the grass was starting to get a bit tired in to an enclosure in the unfenced area that will eventually also be orchard. The first enclosure has wire stock fencing and the new enclosure was the electric mesh fencing. Haiona obviously hadn't met this before and busted out before we had the power turned on (the sheep keep clear of the fence even if it isn't on for a while) so we had some jolly fun rounding her up again. It was a bit easier than when she escaped on the first day with us because she knows us now and knows she likes the food we are offering. However we messed up getting her back through the fence and she made a run for it again. In the end she broke back in just as she had got out by ploughing through the fence. We quickly powered it up and there hasn't been a repeat incident.

Sheepskin progress

After a few false starts the sheepskin is beginning to look good.
In theory our process went like this

• Salt skin
• Rinse
• Paint skin with oxalic acid
• Rinse and neutralise with bicarbonate of soda
• Stretch while the sheepskin dries
• Enjoy lovely sheepskin

However during the stretching phase it went crispy and brown when it was meant to be pale and flexible.
It was possible that the acid phase wasn't quite right as the skin was a bluish colour at the end of it. Most descriptions of curing a hide have it being blue then going either white or brown but I couldn't find anything very descriptive about what to expect with acid. We left it for ages and ages and the blue didn't seem to be fading at all so we just decided to proceed.
After more research I decided what we needed to do was soap/oil tan the hide as something was not quite right and the acid hadn't properly cured it. To do this I did the following

• Re dampened the hide 
• Beat together 3 tbl spns neats foot oil (made from cows feet you know) to one tbl spn hand soap (molton brown - only the best!) until the mixture looked like mayonnaise (ie
• Spread the mixture on the hide
• Folded it in half with a damp towel between the two sides and left it for 24 hours
• Applied 3 tbl spns of neats foot oil and rubbed it in and left about 12 hours
• Stretched the hide by pulling it and also by rubbing it over a pole with a smooth end (brush handle)

After this it seems to be going well. It needs a bit more stretching and is still slightly oily. We are planning on sanding the surface a little bit.

There is one place where a bit of the wool has come off. I think we know who to blame for that don't we... Poppy...

Hainoa update

She not only looks cute, but she has the sweetest personality too. She is a bit shy but she is getting used to us now and is pretty keen on cow nuts which helps her like us! We have been brushing her a bit, haven't managed to get much past the shoulder, but we will get there in the end. She licks us in return. Her tongue is very rough and wet!

Riding Miss Daisy

We have been riding almost every day. One of us walks with the dog and the other rides, then we swap. We have been some places that we have been before and some we haven't. We have ridden on the road a reasonable amount as it has been raining a lot making it muddy in a lot of places.

We had a dramatic thunderstorm (there will be many during the Spring months) where 30mm of rain fell in a few hours. The drive turned in to a river and the drainage was filled with gravel that had washed down from higher up. We need to do some more channel digging before there is another storm. Excitingly the power went out too. Luckily it was just the trip switch (although it took us a while to find this as there are two, one inside and one out that had both gone). We were out on Daisy at the start of the storm, she seemed quite mellow about the thunder - not sure what she made of the lightening strikes straight overhead later on when she was back in her field. We were glad not to be out then!

It is lovely having her in the field and being able to go and visit her any time. Much better than the 2 hour tube and train journey to get to the place we rode near London. However there is a lot more worry that comes with having your own horse. Are we feeding her too much? Are we feeding her enough? Does she need salt? Will too much salt poison her? Are we going to ruin her with our crappy riding? Is she taking the piss out of us sometimes? Does her tack fit ok or does that explain why she tosses her head so much (or is that just trying to yank the reins so she can eat the grass??? So many questions... so little knowledge!

Her previous owner advised us that we needed to let her feet dry out everyday so she doesn't get foot infections and also that we need to limit the amount of lush grass she gets. To do this we have made a small enclosure for her partially on one of the concrete pads behind the barns. Doug is getting good at putting posts in for fencing and also for a hay holder in this 'dry(ish)' area. She seems happy there and not bored.

Sad news about Ilona (2nd cow)

When the 'cow-man' delivered Hainoa he had sad news about the other little cow who was meant to be joining us in September. She died a few days ago of tetanus. Apparently it is rare in cows so they are not vaccinated as humans and horses are. Obviously we were very sad to hear this.
They have another girl calf who was born a few days ago. She is black and we are planning on taking her - we have named her Islay - she will need to stay with her mother for 9 months so it won't be until the very end of the year or possibly next year that she is here. We hope to borrow a friend for Hainoa in the mean time, a little boy called Hoppy. Photos to follow.

Active day - In Doug's words

I have stolen Doug's words from an email to describe today as I am a bit knackered and cannot think of my own (I got up earlier than usual to give someone a lift to the airport)! Thanks Doug!

Exciting day today. Made hard standing/limited grass area for Daisy-horse this morning. Then we were moving the sheep off the drive (mainly to make it easier to get Daisy out for rides) when our new cow turned up! She is extremely cute.

Some friends turned up almost simultaneously to meet Daisy, so we bunged the cow in with the sheep, admired her for a while, went and admired Daisy for a while then settled down to tea & cakes on the lawn (its almost like summer here!). I then noticed that the cow was no longer still in the enclosure with the sheep... She led us a merry dance all over our neighbour's fields trying to recapture her! Poor thing in a strange new place, no mummy, strange people chasing her! Luckily cow-man had told us to leave the head collar & lead rope on her so eventually I managed to get close enough to step on the rope & recapture her... Phew! She is now in the orchard - it has permanent deer fences all around, not flimsy powered-off elec fencing!

 Then (after more tea & cake of course) we tacked up Daisy & sent a friend off on her for a ride (she is very horsey & came to see Daisy on our first trip there) while the rest of us & dog walked along behind. She loved her & thinks she is a very nice ride too. All v tiring, but have now retired to the sofa with a glass of vin sauvage.

Cold frame has FINALLY arrived

We ordered this MONTHS ago so we could get started planting things. FINALLY it has arrived. In the event it hasn't particularly held us up as the weather has been too cold to plant even with this protection.
We need to spend any spare time we have from playing with Daisy getting some stuff planted now though as we are in danger of falling behind schedule.

More lambs

The two ouessant ewes have had their lambs now. One was born on the 19th and one on the 20th. The one that was born first, started off quite weak, we never saw it feeding and it was smaller and wobblier than the one born a day later. Although we have still never seen it suckle, it seems to be getting stronger so we presume it must sometimes. We think it is a girl (from happening to see how it pees) but not sure about that yet. Both of them are tiny and cute, no clues to the sex of the other one yet.

Mums and babies

Of the sheep we expect to have lambs (the others being too young) there is only one remaining still not lambed. She is looking giantly fat and we expect it any moment. Last year she had one lamb, not sure if she might be having two she looks so huge, or maybe just a big one. We call her the great white wooly whale at the moment.

D(aisy) Day

Daisy was due to arrive at about 11.30. For some reason her imminent arrival threw us in to a frenzy of house cleaning. We cleaned the dog hair off the cooker, we cleaned the dog hair off the top of the washing machine, we cleaned spots of dog blood (dripped through the never ending heat) off the floor, we hoovered the dog hair off the floor (are you spotting a pattern??). I think we had an irrational fear that her previous owner would judge our house and land not good enough for such a lovely horse.
We paid a neighbor of the previous owner to deliver Daisy (she is a horse trader). They had a bit of a setback on the way when the car broke down. Luckily she knows the owner of the equestrian center a few minutes down the road from us, who went out and towed the horse box the rest of the way then took them back to the car afterwards where the mechanic was waiting. The upshot of this though was that they didn't have time to come and see the house or the field or anything. But never mind at least the house is cleaner!

We read lots of stuff on the internet (as we do about everything) which suggested we should leave it a few days before riding Daisy and that we should spend time bonding with her by grooming her and spending time in the fields. However the previous owner and the transporter suggested it was a good idea to ride her as soon as she was calm so we took her for a very short ride this evening.

We now need to get our own saddle. We have borrowed one for a couple of weeks. There are SO many it is almost impossible to chose.
Now it is raining. I hope she is ok out there on her own. There are plenty of trees for her to shelter under but she is not used to such steep slopes I think. Be careful Daisy!

Egg update

The eggs are on day 11 of incubation (out of 21 days). We 'candled' them on day 9, this means shining a bright light through them to try to work out what is going on inside. We have a candling torch which has a rubbery ring to stand the eggs on and create a seal round them so get all the light going in to them. Apparently it is difficult to see what is going on in dark brown eggs, we didn't do them all because we couldn't see much - and we have no idea whether what we could see was good or not! The eggs all had a dark area on one side, filling about a third of the egg. Perhaps this is the embryo growing, or perhaps not.
We removed 3 eggs from the incubator and gave them to one of the chickens who seems to have gone broody. This was because the incubator was a bit crowded and we were concerned there would be issues when/if the chicks hatched. We didn't want to trust the chicken with too many eggs as it seems they are pretty likely not to see the thing through having been breed to lay a lot rather than to raise broods well.
The dividers fit in to the incubator now which hopefully means the eggs will turn more evenly.

Sheepskin - rinsing and neutralising

We painted acid on to the skin side of the sheepskin for 6 days. After this we were not sure whether it was done or not. It was a kind of bluish colour all over and did not seem to be changing. If you use alum for curing apparently it is 'done' when the bluish colour has gone (all the way through), but I couldn't find an equivalent test for knowing when it is done with oxalic acid. We decided to proceed with the next stage and see what happens.
To do this we washed the skin in bicarbonate of soda to neutralise the acid. I rinsed it in the washing machine (on cold) with a cup full of bicarbonate of soda twice and then once with some wool wash.
When the skin came out it seems there must have been a fold in it for the entire time as half the skin was rinsed and half not (I put my tongue on it to feel that it was still acidic in that part - then washed my mouth out very thoroughly - eeergh, perhaps pH paper would have been nicer)
So I put it back in the washing machine again with more bicarbonate of soda. This didn't seem to help, one half still looked different, so I did it AGAIN with the part that seemed rinsed folded in half to try to stop it getting washed even more. Then I soaked it in the bath in a bicarbonate of soda and salt mix before running through the washing machine one more time with wool wash.
It is now on the drying rack drying 'until it stops being slimy', we will then pull and stretch it frequently while it finished drying over a period of a number of days.

We bought a horse!

We went and saw her again today. She is called Daisy. She is 10 years old and has had a couple of foals, the last a couple of years ago. She is a registered gypsy vanner (in the UK and France). She was only broken a year ago but seems very calm about the whole thing, but has a nice spark of enthusiasm too.
We took her out just the two of us - one on the horse and the other walking/jogging alongside (or behind). She didn't always want to do exactly what we asked, but it is us that are not asking in the right way - we need to get tuned in to her, and her to us - she is not like the school horses we normally ride who are used to all sorts of idiot commands. We plan on some lessons at the local equestrian center with her to continue her and our education.
We have quite a bit of fence fixing up to do in the next few days, along with some tidying away of rubbish in the field before she arrives. It may well be that Hainoa (the highland cow) will turn up this weekend too. Exciting!

The idea of the savage fauns made me laugh - yes I know it doesn't mean the same in French. Don't spoil my fun!

A horse!

A large part of 'the dream' is to have our own horses, this along with skiing drove what kind of place we bought.
We have been keeping an eye out for something suitable, but not really looking in a full on way, as having horses is time consuming and we don't seem to have quite enough time to do everything now (and we haven't even started the renovation yet). However we saw an advert for a lovely looking horse quite close by, so we decided it would be a good idea to go and see her. If nothing else it would give us some experince of what to expect, what to look for etc.
We have managed to be a bit more sensible than sometimes (bought the first house we saw) and didn't buy her on the spot. We took a friend who has owned a number of horses along, she was positive too, so we are going back on Tuesday for another ride. Hopefully we won't find that sensible just ends in disappointment (when someone else buys her first!).
She is a Gypsy Cob. We like her nice gentle temperament, ideal for the first time horse owner, but also she seems to have a spark to her and is not just a plodding placid horse. She is very pretty (in a giant arsed kind of way) too.

Animals rear ends

Caring for animals seems to mean an unusual amount of time spent looking at their rear ends for various reasons.

Poppy is still on heat (3 weeks now). Lots of time spent staring at her swollen fanny as she drips blood on the floor wondering - when is it going to end.

I noticed a bald spot on one of the chickies under her tail as she was having a dust bath. I managed to catch one of them a few days later and after rummaging around in the feathers of her rear end I saw that she had lice. Euuuugh. There were loads of them running all over her and hundreds of eggs stuck to the bottom of the her feathers. Poor chicky. I rushed around various shops and the vets before finding a treatment while Doug cleaned out and disinfected the house. We need to treat again in a week but they seem gone for now. I feel bad I didn't manage to inspect them sooner after spotting the bald patch.

No more lambs have been born. We spend time trying to peer under the sheeps tails from a distance - to see either swollen vulva or whether the udders are swelling as they apparently do just before giving birth. We don't want to chase them down and look closely because if they are about to give birth that wouldn't be the best thing for them.

The lambs that have been born we managed to catch one of and have a look at the under carriage. This has shown he is a boy. His twin is a boy too as we saw him peeing which gives it away too. Both definately food then.

Fortunately Sambuca hasn't needed her backend inspecting for any reason recently as she is in a frisky mood. We put her upstairs to deal with some rodents that we could hear scrabbling around up there - presumably woken in the warmer spring weather. There was a lot of crashing and banging, there weren't any dead bodies in the morning, rodents or Sambuca, but the rodent scrabblings seem to have stopped or at least greatly diminished.

Hainoa (the highland cow) we expect to turn up in a weeks time, doubtless she will need some part of her rear end inspecting before long. People dealing with animals often seem to have to stick their arms up cows bums after all. Bags I not doing that!

We are not alone

Searching for information about the various things we are doing or want to do (
how to buy a cow,
how to incubate eggs,
how to make soap from pig fat,
how to tell whether a sheep is about to lamb,
how to get rid of lice from chickens,
about dogs in heat,
how to make Tabasco sauce,
how to painlessly learn french,
renovating a farmhouse
etc ) I come across a lot of blogs from people doing a whole variety of things. Some seem quite similar to us with similar ideas and dreams and some seem to overlap in only one area and perhaps are coming from a different angle. For example, for some reason, soap making brought up a lot of 'preppers' (survivalists), with whom we don't have that much in common. It is nice they are keen to be clean when society as we know it breaks down though. A lot of people doing something similar to us (growing veg, keeping animals, renovating) have a much stronger 'eco' reason than us for doing it, sad to say but we are doing it because we think it is (and will be) fun rather than to make the world a better place. How selfish!

I hope the owners of the blogs don't mind me putting links to them..

This entry 'spoke' to me with the vision of the future house which is sparklingly clean - a large feature of what I dream about the future is that it is clean, possibly unrealistically given how much mud there is in the countryside. I am getting more used to it than I thought I ever would, but it does get a bit wearing sometimes just how quickly the house fills with mud, and that anytime you go outside whatever you are wearing needs washing or is permanently scarred by meeting with a cats claws, a fence post or some kind of goop.

I enjoy the whole of this blog, I found this entry good. It is easy to write about the fun stuff, the pretty stuff and the interesting stuff, but it is more difficult to write about the less good bits.

How's the sheepskin going?

The answer to that is that we are not sure :)
Having left it for a few days with salt on it (see the start of the process here) we scooped the salt off. At this point it had gone a bluish colour (which is good apparently). We then painted it with a solution of oxalic acid and salt (2l water, 1/4l salt, 30g oxalic acid powder). We have been doing this for 3 days now. The blue colour is meant to turn to white through the skin over a period of 4-6 days but I am not convinced I see it changing.

If it doesn't change in a few days we might try washing some of the salt out to let the oxalic acid work better, or perhaps dip the whole skin in an oxalic acid solution. It is tricky to find detailed descriptions of processes, why they work and alternatives on the internet (the font of all knowledge)

The weather

We are having what may be the last gasp of winter... or may turn out not to be quite the last gasp...

These were taken a few days ago and the snow round the house as melted now. We went up skiing and there had actually been a bit less in the ski area than down here. Nice anyway though. Although it was the school holidays still it was relatively quiet. There seemed to be a lot of children round and not very many adults. Perhaps parents had sensibly stayed in by the fire but sent children to lessons as they had been paid for.

Oeufs Fécondés

Our next crazy start is trying to hatch chickens from eggs. As we don't have a cockeral (the noise you know - maybe in the future) we had to buy some fertilised eggs. We got Marans eggs to see if the eggs taste any different and because we think their dark brown eggs will be a nice contrast to the white eggs of the Gascones that we already have. Clearly even assuming we manage to hatch any, it is going to be quite some time before they are ready to lay eggs (or be eaten)
The incubator looks huge, but it only has 23 eggs in it. 20 would have fitted better, but we bought 24 (because it said 24 hen eggs would fit - they would have to be minature hen eggs...) and didn't want to waste more than was unavoidable. We have one left over unfortunately, but c'est la vie!

A Marans egg

The incubator

The eggs need turning twice a day, which is done by pushing (one time) or pulling (the other time) the blue stick you can just see sticking out the incubator on the right of the picture. The ground under the eggs is moved and they all roll over. They roll one way then the other, it would be bad if they kept being rolled over and over the same way because there is a cord that connects the yolk to the shell that would get twisted.
The incubator has a little reservoir you fill with water to give the eggs a humid environment and a thermometer sticking out the top so we can check the temperature is constant. A fan in the top of the unit very gently moves the air around to keep the temperature constant all over the incubator and to ensure the eggs get enough oxygen. All sounds v high tech, can't possibly go wrong... although reading the internet about how to incubate eggs makes it sound very complicated and that most things you do will kill the eggs.
We don't have a room with a warm enough and constant temperature for best operation, we shall just have to hope for the best!

Sweet spicy slow roast pork ribs

We have quite a lot of pork ribs in the freezer and hadn't got round to eating any of them - despite us both finding them tres yummy. Finally I remembered they were there and got round to cooking some.

Enough ribs for 2 people (we had 8 each - but I think they are only half length)
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp black pepper and 1/2 tsp white pepper
1/4 cup dark brown sugar

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl
Put the ribs on foil in a baking tray and cover both sides of the ribs with the rub

Put the tray in to the oven at 120°C for 2 hours
Put 8 tbl spns of water over the ribs and cover with more foil
Return to the oven and cook for a further 2 hours.
Check occasionally and add a bit more water if the ribs are getting a bit dry. You want there to be a syrupy sauce under the ribs when they are cooked, not too watery
Serve with chips and salad (the salad makes it healthy!)

Butchering 'Whiteface' the lamb

We got the meat back from the abattoir today. There is a lot of disagreement on the internet how long you should hang lamb for, although people seem to agree that as the animal gets older you should hang for longer. This lamb was just about a year old. I believe they still count as lambs at this age although they become hoggets at some point before becoming mutton later on. This one was slaughtered Wednesday evening and hung until Monday morning, so four days hanging.
We didn't get any 'innards' apart from the kidneys (and for some reason the slightly inflated bladder - with skinned willy still attached! Eeeurgh!). We brought it back from the abattoir wrapped in black bin bags. Stylish!

We have got a bone saw, cleaver and boning knife as well as a giant butchers 'steak' knife. The boning knife went awol unfortunately but we struggled on without.

We mostly followed this guide from The Guardian. We started middayish, had lunch and finished about 6ish so it did take us quite a long time. It should be quicker next time now we can visualise better what we are aiming for. Boning the shoulders took a long time and so did just getting the carcass divided in to various sections. Things like cutting the chops was quite quick once the section was prepared, removed from the spine etc.

The first cut

 Stamps from the abattoir certifying it is fit for human consumption

 Sawing through the bone in various places was pretty hard work. Maybe our saw is crappy!

 Divided in to a few pieces. Working on the shoulder here which was hard work.

 Soon to be lamb chops (it could have been a rack of lamb but we went for chops)

 Some of the chops. There were 15 in total (should have been 16 but we miscounted ribs on one side)

 'Barnsley chops'. There were 4 of these

 The back end

Chops for lunch. Fried with salt, garlic and rosmary. Very tasty! The meat is firmish, I guess because he is quite an old lamb rather than a young spring lamb. We did intend to slaughter a bit earlier. Maybe around 8 months of age, but things got in the way so we didn't.

 Shrink wrapping some chops

 All the meat except the chops (which were already in the freezer)

The kidney fat. Generally beef kidney fat is used for suet, but we thought we might try dumplings in a lamb stew with this. I would guess it is not normally used because it tastes quite 'sheepy' and that from cow has a less destinctive taste.

 The kidneys

Cooked to a Nigel Slater recipe. Doug said 'Not bad - considering it is kidneys' (apparently they have a foul texture and gross flavour - shame as I love steak and kidney pudding) which I think is high praise given his views on the sense of eating them.

We have read some interesting ideas for lamb charcutery which we are interested in investigating more with future lambs.