Wildlife Camera

Previous wildlife camera conked out so we bought a new one.

Still getting the hang of it… got some pretty strange animals!

I think this is a fox, we were trying to find out what lives in the hole (below and a little right of center), we are none the wiser on that, maybe it has been eaten by a fox…

Not doing the house

 We are meant to be getting on with doing the house…

But instead we had covid and now trying to catch up with outdoors work for the animals and land… aaaaaany moment we will get to it.

Did a tiny bit of preparing for some work we will do at the end of July with an artisan - to extend one of the doors. Not the clearest picture, but the closest door on the house. This will be a large door in the dining room.

We can’t go quite as high as we were thinking as there needs to be more space for the lintel, but all good!

Home grown vegetables

Kale and courgette are the veg I can grow the best. But we do have a few other things for variety.

Sugar snaps (with bbq sausage.

Mange tout with toad in the hole.

There are some cabbage, some carrots (which may well not survive the vole), tomatoes and beans. Also some cucumber and melon tht never do well for me, but I don’t give up!

I have planted kale, but they died in the heatwave.

Extreme chicken protection needed

We have been having terrible problems with birds eating the chickens (sparrow hawks and kites) and their eggs too (crows).

They have also turned their area in to a muddy waste land. 

The plan now is to instal some cages. This will be on top of the electric fence already round the area, so they won’t need to be fox proof. 

This will have the added advantage of keeping the different breeds separate, which will make the chicks easier to sell (I went mad hatching different breeds and can’t settle on a favourite!). I’ll try to get the rest of the fenced area back to grass and then they can have some time roaming free and eating grass, hopefully without overloading and killing it…

I’ve actually sold this guy and his 3 wives because they aren’t used to living in this smaller area and although the cockerel is happy not to be attached by Lucky all the time, I think ones that grew up in a smaller area, and more used to me will be happier, so I am keeping some of their eggs to hatch more…

Lucky checking out the new accommodation… I have some worry it will blow away, maybe he does too…

There is a chance I got a bit carried away cutting some branches off the trees in the encosure to make room for the 2nd cage…  Should be doing the house instead! but poor chickens need their safe home…

Rainbow!

A break in the stupidly hot weather with a little bit of rain to clear the air

Sooo hot!! Canicule!

We are having a crazy crazy heatwave. It’s JUNE and getting on for 40°C, even here in the mountains. It has been days and it is really unpleasant! We still feel a bit weedy from the corona…

Beer, water and salty snacks - how to survive a heatwave (plus fans and not doing too much in the heat of the day)

Soft white rolls

650g bread flour

400ml milk

1.5 tsp yeast

2 tsp sugar (or honey)

50g softened butter

1tsp salt

1 large egg

Put the flour and other dry ingredients in a bowl and stir together

Stir together the wet ingredients (it’s fine if a few lumps of butter as long as they are soft) and add them to the dry.

Knead for 10 mins

Rise for 30 mins or until doubled in size

Shape the rolls (makes 10 or more or less depending on size) and leave to double in size again.

Bake at 180°C for 30 mins

Really yummy with kofka, sausage and many other things…

Silkies are pretty cute

We like to have animals on the farm who are useful (except the dog obviously) and not just cos they are cute…

The silkies don’t look much in the way of useful, as they are small and don’t have proper feathers. But they  are very useful chickens. They are super broody and good at raising chicks, I am hoping them will help with the incubation, but more importantly the keeping warm of young chicks, we shall see…

Because they don’t have proper feathers they need better protection from the weather than other chickens. They have been super sweet so far..

As with breeding any chicken you need to consider what you will do with extra roosters, they are difficult to sell and you can only have a small number compared to the females. We plan on eating the extra silkies as we do the other breeds, there is something interesting through about their meat that it is black! Not just black skin, black right through the flesh and the bones and even the organs. Very interested to see how they taste!

Punk chicken!

Snelgrove board

Look what Doug made!

It is a snelgrove board - you’ll need to google what it is for. The interesting thing about it is that it is made from our own wood! Doug cut it in to planks and now look at it!

In situe

Reduced chicken numbers

I hatched too many chicks last year, no doubt about it. There were thirty of them…

I have finally got round yo selling and ‘harvesting’ a sufficient number to get us back down to a sensible number of chickens. But then I have hatched 15 more and one of the chickens has hatched 10!

I am hoping to be on top of the situation more this year and sell some sooner to avoid their not huge area getting over populated!

Remaining chickens with chicks (and their mum) in the background. I’d love to be able to get a bit of grass regrowing in their enclosure, they are just death to all plants though!

Legbar chicks

Bye bye ducks

The runner ducks are very funny, but they are terribly scary and not keen on people, so we decided to stop having ducks for now as we prefer animals who enjoy interacting with us. We loved the eggs and they had a lot of character, we hope to get some other breed (Peking?) that will be more friendly in the future when we have more time (once the house is done!)

Bye bye (paid) work

I recently stopped working (remotely for Citi) so we can focus on getting some stuff done on the house (and because of the focus of getting people back in the office…)

Sadly we then got covid a week later, which has set progress back a bit. We both feel really tired still after it and there was all the stuff we didn’t get done for 3 weeks.

Still, onwards and upwards, we’ll get there!