Rural Life

The disappearing rabbit

On one side, we have lovely neighbours who have been in the village forever, but on the other side, we get a new set of neighbours every year, normally in late April/early May, after the previous lot have been evicted for non-payment of rent due to the disgusting state of the house.  It is a real peasant dwelling - at the back there are no windows and the house is half buried in the garden.  In summer it is a picture of quaintness, in the winter it is a festering hole with rising damp, falling damp, condensation and just a couple of convector heaters to keep you warm.  Naturally with something built directly onto the earth, there is no damp proof course.

The current neighbour, J, is nice enough, but a bit scary looking and with some strange friends.  Last Sunday, one of them brought J a large rabbit that they had trapped, but he was out.  Could we look after it for him?  No, the cats would go mad - the thought of Poirot clamped to it for the next week while she tried to eat it all didn't bear thinking about!!  But we did say he could leave the rabbit on our cellar steps until J got home, and while we went out for a walk.

We got home again three quarters of an hour later, and J was back and the rabbit was gone so we thought no more about it until Wednesday, when P, one of J's strange friends popped in to see us about something.  At the end of the conversation, he got a bit embarrassed and asked about the rabbit.  We said we thought J had taken it when he got in.  No, J hadn't, and didn't like to ask us himself - perhaps a passing stranger had made off with it.  We didn't think that likely, we don't get passing strangers in our courtyard, apart from J and his strange friends like P!!

As a last resort, we said maybe it had been moved into the cellar, so John dragged P down into the cellar with him to look.  Behind the hot water cylinder were the head, paws and spine of the rabbit - everything else had been eaten by a cat or two.  We knew it wasn't our two, as they still don't go out, so J's two cats were in the frame.

So never underestimate what a cat will walk off with!!

Things to do with giant pumpkins

In the autumn I was worried about my giant feral pumpkin - see here.  On Saturday I strolled up to the greenhouse to check on it and the new locks for the greenhouse door.  The latter work a treat.  The former was starting to show signs of needing to be eaten.

Once I got it into the house, the monster had to be weighed.  It came in at 36 pounds or just over 16 kilos for the metric among us.  I have to point out that it must have lost some of the weight it had when harvested, as I could carry it this time, which I couldn't before.

We cut it open and tackled the bits that on the surface looked like they were going off.  This was very much spot damage and doesn't go more than 1 cm into the flesh, which is good news I think when you remember that I have 36 pounds of the stuff.

In my earlier post, I wondered if it would be OK to eat, as it ripened so late and the skin never got to the lovely rich red colour I usually associate with Vif d'Etampes pumpkins.  So far we have had a soup, which was a little insipid if I am honest, but was also a lot thinner than I usually make soups.  We also had pumpkin puree done with lots of garlic and butter and baked - the first time for one hour, the second time for two hours.  The second was better as more of the water had been driven off (36 lbs of pumpkin of which I estimate 25lbs of water).  We also had it in a savoury rice where it added colour and a certain sweetness.

More recipes to follow as we work our way through it all - if you have any ideas, please add a comment.  Here is the pumpkin again in all its glory!

Goodbye Battery Hens?

Normally I am pretty introspective here about stuff, but there was a report today on the BBC website about a planned end to battery farmed eggs by 2012 - YES!

Sadly a lot of the report was about how this would be impossible to implement, but for once something being right rather than economically easy seems to be winning the day.

In a battery egg unit, a chicken has about the space of an A4 sheet of paper living space if she is lucky - look at a piece of A4 paper then look at the photo of one of my sets of hens.  They do have a size roughly equivalent to an A4 piece of paper - so how do they move, find food, preen and so forth?  Actually my girls, although designed for a battery unit, were raised in a much larger space (in excess of Soil Association regulations) so they did actually get rather bigger than an A4 piece of paper.

I could add some fairly disgusting detail about the problems of the hybrid race that populates the battery houses, but I won't though I have hinted about it earlier.

Of course, eggs are just one product of battery systems - boycott battery eggs, but also battery chickens raised for food (Ross Cobb and Sunvalley Hybrid breeds in particular), and then the most difficult step of all, if you have cats, particularly elderly cats, chicken and rice cat food.  Well what do you think happens to the battery egg hens after a year?

Keep the home fires burning

The main obsessive tasks for the winter are ensuring we always have enough dry and seasoned firewood in the cellar for our needs and then getting the fire lit at the right time so that the living room and bedrooms warmed by the wood burner are comfortable when we need them to be without using more wood than we need to.

First the firewood itself.  We burn mainly chestnut, as there is a lot of standing deadwood on the coppiced chestnut stools in the One Acre Wood, and it gives out a good heat and burns cleanly.  I should point out that we can only burn chestnut as we have an enclosed wood burning stove, as chestnut does spit a lot.  Our living room can sound a bit like a war zone at times.

Then there is the marking up, cutting down, chopping into the right lengths, splitting large segments, stacking to dry, stacking to transport and stacking in the cellar before it finally makes its way into the wood basket under the stove and then into the fire itself.  It has been estimated that in the most efficient systems, one piece of firewood is handled at least 9 times, so that will be a lot more for us as we are still novices!

Then there is the whole science of building and controlling the fire so that it burns just right - to my mind this is very much Man Work, but that could just be me being a bit pathetic and not liking to move out of my armchair much in the evening.

Everyone is a critic as well, and we all have our foibles.  We like to see the flames and aren't too worried about banking the fire up to last all night, others will try to keep it going all night and will have a thick deposit of tar on the window.  The cats like a nice rosy glow that they can get as close to as possible without singeing anything - Shelley was particularly fussy about this (see photo), but Maigret and Poirot are younger and therefore easier to please.

Anyway, as dusk descends, it is time to get that fire set, ready for a cosy winter evening.