Hatch-a-holic

I can’t stop hatching birds. It is so great ;)

But then raising them until they can live outside is a stinky business ;)

Plus then later I need to ‘do something’ with the males, I like eating them, but killing them is hard, you spend ages trying to keep them alive, grow to love them, then have to kill them.

There are 20 runner ducks (from our own eggs)

12 silkie eggs (mini fluffly broody chickens) and 16 cream legbar eggs (autosexing blue egg laying chickens). But as I mentioned before eggs that have been through the upheaval of postage don’t hatch very well :(

Dog walk

Haven’t been up here as often as normal, what with the burden of working. 

I’m very unfit having spent a year sitting at a desk, and it is a steep walk up!

The view is just amazing even when the weather is a bit marginal. I love these trees.

Some beautiful orchids

Bright spring greens

Stupid doggy

Bees swarmed!

A little before our French lesson, Doug popped outside to do some small thing, to be greeted with a loud buzz from the bee hive area. One of them had just swarmed!

Quick! Prepare the spare hive, suit up and catch them and do it quickly so we can make it to our lesson on time!

We think we got the queen, but need better weather for an inspection to be sure. 

It means they are very happy and felt they had the strength to split in two. But from our point of view it is not what we want as they will spend time gaining their strength back instead of making honey.

They obligingly settled not too high off the ground. They stay like this for quite some time while scouts go and look for good nest sights.

We knocked them off the tree in to a box and then poured most of the box full in to the spare hive, leaving the rest to follow through the entrance. You can’t really make out what is going on, so no way to be sure we got the queen other than waiting. Hopefully when Doug can open the hive when the weather is better he will see brood and other signs that there is an active queen.

The old hive that the swarm left will be busy making themselves a new queen. Hopefully we can combine the two parts back together with a bit more space and they can get on with gathering honey…

Incubating duck and chicken eggs

 I have put on some of the runner duck eggs to incubate. They take approx 28 days to hatch

This is day 3 and you can start to see veins growing that will feed the growing embryo (circled in the 2nd picJ. The large orange blob is the yolk.

I have also bought some Silkie Chicken eggs. They are a very small and impractical chicken with fluff instead of proper feathers which means they tend to get cold if not given good shelter. They don’t lay that many eggs either and those they do lay are tiny. I have a strange yearning to have them despite this, they are super cool with black flesh (not just black skin, even their organs and bones are black - but not their eggs). They are also very broody chickens and I hope that they will take some of the burden of raising chicks or ducklings in the future… We shall see. 

I bought 12 eggs and sadly it is difficult to hatch eggs that have been sent in the post - I couldn’t find any close by - because the structures inside the egg can get damaged. You can see on this one for example that the air cell has split in 2 (the darker curved shapes at the bottom of the egg - yolk is at the top of the egg), this means that when the chick tries to peck in to the air cell as it hatches it may miss it and suffocate during hatching. It is possible the two bits will join during incubation and it is possible the chick lucks out during hatching and hits part of the air cell anyway. We shall see!

I have seen people suggesting better results from setting the egg on its tip for hatching (in an egg box maybe) rather than on its side. Planning on giving that a go. That would be the other way up than it is here.

This one has a more normal air cell

Planted some more things…

I can never remember when has been successful for planting each thing. In the end when things get planted depends on when there is good weather to get the weeding done. The amount of compost/horse poo that has been applied also varies a lot (depending on the Autumn weather, our energy at the time etc etc), as a consequence, results vary year to year :)

The chickens enjoyed the result of all the weeding

Some beans, peas and cabbage

Courgette

Potatoes planted

Planted the potatoes and weeded somewhat for planting tomatoes and sweetcorn in due course.

We only created these beds last year and I ended up rearranging them somewhat to make them easier to mow around. The area around the bed is mainly nettles, but hopefully frequent mowing will help it turn in to grass.

Samoëns for a bit of extra skiing

 Visiting the apartment in Samoëns after our local ski area closed.

The Alps are BIG. The Grand Massif is a lot bigger than our local ski area (The Grand Tourmalet)

We left our place in the snow which was unexpected for the time of year and a bit stressful! The poor animals weren’t expecting it and we are still hoping for one more lamb.

Some snow on the way, but roads good. We arrived at the apartment all covered in snow too. Lovely!

Mont Blanc in the background

Samoëns village

Lots of lovely snow!

You can see Mont Blanc a lot. It is so big!

Super groovy lift in Flaine. 50s? 60s?

We ate a lot

Drank qsome

Low down didn’t stay snowy for long and we had a bit of rain. But up higher still plenty of snow.

View from the apartment car park 

Cool dudes

You can see that pointy mountain from just about everywhere in Samoëns.

Our apartment is in the left hand building looking in to the garden in the middle of the development

On the funky Flaine lift. You have to run after it to leap on and step off backwards.

The cheese sellers in Samoëns market all gave Poppy lots of cheese rind (and some real cheese!), making her 10th birthday her best day ever!

Walk to a waterfall on a wet day when the ski area was closed (due to wind)

Stocked up on the local (Savoie) white wine. Yum!

Pizza from the very convenient little pizza kiosk a minute from the apartment

We need to do a bit of work to freshen up the apartment as nothing much has been done to it since it was built in 2005

We are planning on adding a terrace to make the outside a bit nicer as well as updating the kitchen and bathroom. But not until next year.

Here’s Doug modeling the Samoëns t-shirt I made for him. Should have done one for Poppy too!