Spring skiing

Poppy admiring the view from outside the flat

View that Poppy is admiring

Snow that rain has made pretty patterns on

Some slips and avalanches

Doug and Kirsty skiing

Sunset light on the mountains with the moon (from a bit above the flat while walking the dog)

Cute eggs for Easter!

Day 22/23 of incubation

Chicken eggs should hatch on day 21 if all has gone well.
However the temperature can affect the hatching, a little too low and they 'cook' slower and hatch a bit late, a little too high and they 'cook' a bit faster and hatch early. Much too high or low and they just won't hatch at all.
One egg started hatching late on day 22 and two more on day 23. None of the others made any attempt at it. This is clearly disappointing!

The incubator had read correctly throughout, so we are now looking in to what happened. I measured the temperature of the eggs and they were nearly 3C below what they should have been though the incubator readout was showing the temperature they should have been at. It appears from studying the internet that there may be a fault with the incubator, which can be fixed by resetting to factory settings.

Of the three that hatched two got trapped at the side of the heat pad and died. I suspect they were weaker than they should be from having grown so slowly and then had more struggle than normal to hatch. The one and only remaining one is called Chesney (after Chesney Hawkes who had a song 'The One and Only')

It is a shame as I really wanted some Orpington chickens. The person we got the eggs from has a waiting list at the moment so we will put some others on to test the fix... fingers crossed the setting reset has worked and all will be good this time.

I have also thoroughly cleaned the incubator having taken it apart. They do get clogged up with chick dust and little tiny feathers etc. It seems a bit drastic having to dismantle it to clean it, but apparently this is a good idea...

Mr and Mrs Koala have mated

They have been with us around a month now so it seemed like they should be settled in enough.
There should hopefully be little Koala babies in 31 days time. They will be born black and then get the silvering as they grow.

Mrs Koala

Mr Koala (blue patch from the antibiotic spray on his abscess (which as far as I can tell is healing well)

Skiing skiing more skiing and POWDER

Sorry yet more photos. We had unseasonably cold and snowy weather for March with a few days of lovely light powder.

The first day we skied in the trees at Barege because visibility not great and the trees help with that.

The second day we stayed in La Mongie and bounced around various runs including a steepish gully that we may have done before but not often. Lovely.

Dog didn't come skiing but got frosty eyebrows on a walk in the evening

Little walk to a nice slope

V happy!

Mostly our tracks, we went round the same bit a few times

Steep though it doesn't ever look it in photos

Me in Doug's goggles

Day 18 of incubation

The eggs started at 1477g and are now 1308g so they have lost a bit over 11%.
We are aiming for between 10 and 13% in total so should be good.
I candled them again, and only 7 look like they contain chicks.
You can see the difference between an ‘empty’ egg and one with something in it is very big for eggs with as light shells as these. The something is hopefully a chick though occasionally it can be horribly rotted matter. None of them smell so I am hoping for chicks.

Egg with nothing in. The darkish patch is the yolk. You can see the air cell just about in the big end at the top.

Egg which hopefully has a chick in it. The big end with the air cell is at the bottom here. You can see the whole egg is dark compared to the very light glowyness of the other one.

This is not a good rate of growth from the eggs at all. You normally hope for around 80 or 90% (this is 25% and some will fail during hatchng too most likely). These were sent in the post which doesn’t help and were not as new as they could have been because of storms and snow stopping them being posted.

The eggs are now in what hatchers call ‘lockdown’ which means they are not being turned any more and the incubator shouldn’t be opened until all the eggs are hatched. They should start on day 21 (Saturday) and it could take a day or so to all get out. I have turned the humidity up to 60% now and plan on 70% on day 21 until they are all hatched.

More baby rabbits

Frosty had her babies while we were in La Mongie. First time mums don’t always do a great job. She has built them a nice nest which is a good start, now she just needs to feed them.

Their aunts and uncles are a week old now.

Naan bread recipe - attempt eleventy billion

We recently had a curry in a restaurant in Tarbes (the Taj Mahal) which was DELICIOUS.

Intermarche has recently started doing curry sauces which are pretty good, so I decided to try yet again making naan bread. They never ever come out as good as in the indian restaurant.

250g plain flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 table spoon oil

1/2 cup yoghurt

1/2 cup milk

Mix everything together and kneed. The mixture should be a soft dough, you may need to add a bit of extra flour.
Leave for approx 3 hours in a warmish place, the mix won’t rise particularly but you are letting the gluten form.
Form in to 6 or 8 balls, use flour if needed to stop them sticking.
Roll each ball flat to about 3mm thick (again use flour to stop sticking) and fry one side then the other until golden brown in patches and cooked through.

These are the best I have made, v tasty and nice texture but just not the same as the indian restaurants. Perhaps I need to try cooking in the pizza oven...

Chicken Tikka Masala made with a kit from Intermarche and one of our chickens. Yum!

We are going to try the butter chicken next

Lorne sausage

1kg pork
1kg beef
200g breadcrumbs
2tsp nutmeg
2tsp black pepper
1tsp ground coriander
4tsp salt (or to taste - better to add to little then add more)
250ml water

Some people do all pork or all beef or even lamb. But to me this is the ‘real’ mix of meat needed. Presumambly it was origionally whatrver scraps were left over from other things...

Mix everything together
Fry a little bit and taste to test the seasoning. Add more ass required...
Press in to a bread tin and chill
Slice in to slices around 2 cm thick
Fry until crispy on the outside and serve in a roll or with an egg on top or as part of a fried breakfast.

Balsamic Pickled Eggs Recipe

We have many many eggs at the moment, we will incubate some shortly and having killed half the chickens should reduce the new incoming numbers...

In the meantime we need to reduce the backlog somewhat. Having seen pickled eggs somewhere I felt inspired to give it a go. Doug isn’t keen on vinegar, but finds Balsamic ok, so I used that...

1.5 liter jar with water tight lid

15 eggs
1 1/2 cup (350ml) Balsamic vinegar
3/4 cup water
Some picking spices (I used the ones I use for chutney) approx 1 tsp
Half an onion (finely sliced)
1 clove garlic (finely sliced)
1 1/2 tblsp sugar

Put the vinegar, water, spices, onion, garlic and sugar in a pan and bring to the boil. Remove from heat and leave to cool.
Hard boil the eggs, then cool a bit and peel.
Put the eggs in a jar and pour over the other ingredients.

Leave for about a week in the fridge to mature. The eggs will go black on the outside. Should keep some months

Day 14 of incubation

The eggs now weigh 1332g in total incuding the plastic cradle (from 1477 at the start).
This is a loss in weight of 9.8% approx.
As I am aiming for approx 13% over the 21days I am going to turn the humidity up a bit to slow the loss.

I haven’t candled again yet. I will do this on day 18 and discard any that have definately not grown.

Baby bunnies (in a new nest box)

A few babies from the last litter got pulled out of the nest box by their mother (it happens to the strong ones if the lip of the box isn't high enough to scrape them off when the mother decides she is finished feeding them - she only does it once or twice a day)

So I designed a new nest box and Doug built it

It is very cold, so we hope that having the lid on the box, and the nice nest that Blondie has built will keep them warm enough.

Some of the babies will be white and some the same colour as the mother.

Day 7 of incubation

The eggs have been incubating for a week now.
We normally don’t candle our eggs at all, our theory being that although it is interesting to see what is going on, we will do more harm than good as we can’t actually DO anything at this point if they are not growing and it is possible to damage the shell or the growing embryo inside by handling them.

However we had a few hatches with poor rates so we are interested to see a bit more what is going on to try to work out the problem.

• Do the chicks start to grow then die - suggesting an infection.
• Do they not grow at all - suggesting poor fertility or possibly temperature problems.
• Do they grow fully then fail to hatch - suggesting humidity issues or possibly infection killing them late on.

You can see more of these things if you candle a few times rather than just break the unhatched ones at the end as we have done in the past (a scary job although we have never yet had a stinky exploding one).

Not grown at all (I don't think - though there is a darker and lighter section it is much less distinct than one ones that are definitely growing)

Grown then died (blood pools in to a ring)

Growing- you can see dot that is the embryo and just make out blood vessels

I also weighed the eggs to check we have the humidity about right. They should lose 10-13% of their weight over 18 days. I weighed them all, together with the tray they are in which creates a small inaccuracy.
They were 1477g at the start and 1415g today. If we extrapolate this means they should lose a bit over 10% in the 18 days. This is at 45% humidity and 37.5 °C.

Hopefully I haven't damaged any of the live ones. There were only 9 I was sure about, out of 24 eggs. There were a few more I wasn't sure about and 2 or 3 that looked like they had started and died.

These eggs were sent in the post so we would expect a less good hatch rate than normal. Some of them were 10 days old by the time they got to us (snow meant he couldn't post them straight away), which is older than we incubate normally.

I marked each egg with what I thought it's status was - I was hurrying to get it done and get the lid back on, so I didn't note the dates on the live ones (they all have the date they were laid pencilled on by the person we bought them from) but assuming they hatch we will see then.

Chicken processing day

We generally kill a chicken and perhaps a second one when we want to eat one, because we never have the stamina for more one each in a day - plucking is hard on the fingers.
I got a plucking machine for my birthday, we tried it out today and did 11 chickens (8 hens and 3 cockerels) in just the morning. So pleased! That leaves 9 hens and the cockerel (called Warren).
It does take some time to set up, so you would want to be doing a few at least to make it worth that effort.

The chicken gets scalded  before going in to the plucker. We did them at 65C for about 30 seconds. You test they are done by pulling a wing feather and when it comes out easily they are ready. You can scald for hand plucking also but the wet feathers weld on to your hands so we just pluck them dry.

Then maybe a minute in the plucker and they are ready.

All ready for gutting

Some of the chickens we hatched last year seemed to be stunted. These were hatched at the same time.

Experimenting with making stock from the heads and feet.

In the afternoon, I made sausages and Doug put together a rabbit nest box... Productive day!