Rural Life

The problem of a broody chicken

It hasn't happened to us before, partly due to the type of chickens we have had before I suspect, but White has gone broody.

For the past week, she has been clamped to the nest bit of the coop, only coming out to feed and poo once or twice a day before rushing back into the coop and continuing her vigil.  We have removed, over the past week, about a dozen eggs from under her.  She has given up laying, but steals Black and Spot's eggs and sits on them.

We aren't quite sure how to deal with this.  The special boxes and coops for broodies seem a bit cruel and also a bit of a pain in a small area like ours.  We have tried to make life uncomfortable by removing more and more of the nesting straw (but we have to leave some as Black in particular is a bit rough when laying eggs) and replacing the eggs with freezer blocks from the freezer (as a substitute for ice eggs which we hear are effective).  We also open the roof of the coop all day and are threatening to send in the cats, but still she sits.

A photo of the brooding one will follow when we get it off the camera - but think of our nice standard Light Sussex, then double her size as she puffs up in anger at being disturbed!  Finally, as she flies out of the coop for her second feed of the day, picture her flying straight into the chicken wire fence - she has done that every day for the past week too!

And here is the picture of White in all her broodiness!

Peach Leaf Curl

We have one main peach tree and a few ferals around the place.  When the main peach tree has fruit (and it is itself a feral grown from a mouse's winter food store), they are lovely white peaches and because they are fresh off the tree and not picked until they are ripe, have the most wonderful flavour.  One year we had 40 peaches!

Last year was a disaster for fruit like peaches as it never really got warm after April, and this year will be just as bad.  The blossom got frosted, there wasn't much of it anyway, and when there were flowers, there were no bees.  I think I have found 1 tiny fruit ready to develop on the tree, so will use this year as a year to do the formative pruning I have had in mind for a while.

With all the rain around this spring as well, all the local peach trees, not just ours, are suffering badly from peach leaf curl.  While there is a spray remedy, I don't like to use it because of the wild and not so wild life in the garden.  The British remedy of taking the plant into a green house or covering it with protective fleece doesn't work here, where the trees get big.  However we have found that after the first flush of nasty and distorted leaves fall off, you do get a nice flush of normal leaves to nourish the tree.

In case you have never seen it, the photo below shows the ravages of peach leaf curl - a rain borne virus.

Nearly Broad Bean time!

Late April and the broad beans are in full flower.  In fact they are even starting to set, so provided the baby beans don't get too badly attacked by a cat pretending to be a Raptor from Jurassic Park, it shouldn't be too long before some are ready to eat.

Conditions are ideal currently for swelling the pods - not too hot and nice and damp (brilliant for growing lawns but other things are suffering).  While the cats are doing their best to keep bees away from the beans, as they are only outdoors for a couple of hours a day, it is not too much of a problem.

The potential problem with broad beans, and also why we sow so early, are black fly.  We don't spray - partly due to vague organic principles, but mainly due to feeding the chickens with any garden scraps that are doing the rounds, particularly if there is a chance of a bit of extra protein.  Instead, once the beans start to set, we pinch out the growing tips of the plants.  It is recommended to do this after the fourth group of flowers, we do it where it feels right.  The chickens get the growing tips and regard them as a treat, and as there are no new succulent growing tips, the ants that farm the black fly aren't that interested.  Well, it works for us anyway!

Broad bean recipes to follow once we start harvesting!

See these entries to compare the growth - November and February.

Update on tree planting

Earlier in the spring, we tried to offset our carbon footprint by planting a tree.

Actually that is overly pretentious - we were in a garden centre with a bit of spare cash and saw a medlar tree for sale and I had to have it.  That is much more the truth!!

Anyway, in a previous post I showed the large leaf buds on the medlar tree - it has been so cold since then that they have only opened slowly and we are still waiting to see if we will get any blossom this year, however in the photo below you can see the tantalisingly slow progress of our new tree. 

Hopefully the roots are spreading out nicely underground, as it is wet as well as cold here, and the root system will be more important for the future health and development of the tree than any pretty leaves or flowers that I can see!

Wot you lookin' at?

Normally I stick to writing about our animals or those that we look after, but the photo below just had to find its way onto a blog!

This is one of the two "hard" chickens from next door.  They have attitude - well they need to.  They share their garden run with a number of cats (occasionally including ours), two ducks, and numerous pigeons and doves.  They don't have anything as namby-pamby as a coop to spend the night in, they just hunker down where ever they are when the sun sets.

There used to be 3 of them, and they could make quite a good chicken stack (best to be at the bottom as you kept warm) or chicken pyramid (for rainy days and nights, rain runs down backs, heads and tummies stay warm and dry).  We don't know what happened to the third one, and none of the neighbours are admitting anything, however "Droopy" didn't like them as they kept climbing into his garden and trashing the compost heap.  We haven't found any remains in our cellar, so we don't think a cat got it, and their owner is a self-proclaimed pacifist, who can't remember killing it, so we have to believe him.

So if you see a chicken with as bad an attitude as this, send it back to us, to rejoin her flock.

While I was away....

I would love to say that the reason I haven't added to this blog for a while is because I have been too busy outside, sowing, planting, walking, cooking and generally doing all sorts of good rural stuff.  The sad fact is that I have been preparing for, undertaking and recuperating from the sort of business trip that I have to do to support that life style.  So what has been going on while I have been attending to Statistics, Skills, OR and consultancy type stuff?

• The pear and cherry are now in blossom, the quince has ever larger leaves and blossom buds coming through while the medlar leaf buds are slowly starting to unfurl.
• The pigeon couple in the eaves have hatched and nurtured a young pigeon (or feathered rat depending on your point of view).
• Poirot and Maigret have dispatched said young pigeon, by breaking out of the attic into the eaves of the house, catching it, dragging it back into the house and doing what cats do.....
• White has been laying an egg a day for the past 2 weeks - I must remind her that as a Light Sussex, she is allowed the odd day off!
• Black is starting to look happier about the world (she has been having a senior sulk), particularly now they have been given a bigger run as they have learnt to go into their coop at night.
• Spot has started to lay eggs - Poirot is currently trying to take the credit for this development as she found Spot out of the chicken run, went for her, and presumably frightened her into laying.  Spot can do 6 foot vertical jumps with a cat behind her.
• The peas and spinach that I sowed about 3 weeks ago have started to come through - the peas despite being walked over repeatedly by two cats.
• The broad beans are in flower.

I am now officially behind with sowing for the kitchen garden and have lost the chance to have the asparagus bed strimmed so that I can try to weed it to see where the new spears come up.  Over the next few days I hope to mix desk work with being out in the garden, taking advantage of the light evenings to put that right.

I will finish with a photo of the savage hunter that we harbour in the house - scourge of chickens and pigeons, who dreams of taking down a duck next!

Tree planting

Back in February we bought and planted another tree.  To keep the aim of a productive garden going, it is a fruit tree.  Because the theory is that we spend most of the summer in the garden, we have also stuck with the philosophy that the tree should be attractive, as we will have to look at it a lot.

To that end, we have bought and planted a Neflier (french) or Medlar Tree.  Currently it is only about 3 foot high and without branches - technically called a whip.  It is planted between two chestnut stakes, commensurate with its size, and is in a smalled boxed bed in the lawn in line with the young quince we planted 3 years ago to celebrate our arrival as permanent residents here.

We are assured that it has handsome leaves and lovely large blossom, while the fruits themselves are brown.  It should provide an attractive companion to the quince.

We do have wild medlars growing in the One Acre Wood, and last year were able to taste this rather odd fruit as it softened.  However the fruits on the wild version are so small that it makes it difficult to share them with friends or use them in recipes.

The photo shows the leaf buds on the young tree - I will update with photos of the developing tree as it grows.

Introducing Black, White and Spot

We did finally manage to get a photo or two of the new girls - not at all flattering to any of them, but then they are still a bit grubby and tatty from their former lives, or in Spot's case, still growing.

Black is one of the fairly ubiquitous blackish with a gold head variety that you find round here and is a bit older than the other two - you can see this from her comb and beak.  Once we got her home and had a good look at her, we could also see this from a bald patch on her tum where she is coming out from a moult.  She seems to have lived in a shed, as she doesn't really know about scratching or greens, but she is enjoying dust baths a lot, which is good.

White is a Light Sussex, still quite immature (size and development of comb), but seems to be the one laying (second egg today).  She is a good size and will get bigger but is also rather grubby - we hope she will shine a bit later in the year.  White has got scratching sorted out, and is starting to be interested in greens - sort of!

Spot is probably a Marans, but we won't really know until she starts laying as the big hint of a Maran is the practically chocolate colour of the eggs they produce.  She is definitely the youngest of the three and can get shoved out of the way when heading for food, but is also quite adventurous in her own way - she pecked one of the cats yesterday that shoved a paw through the wire.

More tales from the chicken run to follow......

New Chickens

Today is marked in some people's view as having the worst storm of the winter with winds of 82mph recorded at Berry Head and The Mumbles and 105kph winds in land at Cholet.  So it seems obvious to us that today is ideal chicken buying weather.

Yes, we have finally succumbed to the lure of new chickens - well they are such fun, and helpful at ridding the garden of pests, and they lay the odd egg (previous chickens have laid very odd eggs - wind eggs, shell-less, double yolkers).  John checked out the market this afternoon with little hope and called in to say that there was a good selection - he would get the feed and bedding and collect me for purchasing.

Now, we have had a bit of damage from the gales, so perhaps this wasn't the best idea, but what the heck.  We selected a fine white with black bits (probably Light Sussex), a very pretty black with golden head, and a really rather cute grey speckled chicken, and watched them be stuffed into the obligatory cardboard carrying box tied up with blue string (it HAS to be blue).

On the drive home, we reminded Black, White and Spotty that they really were the luckiest chickens in the market that day, as they had found English owners, and once I had lined the coop with all things a chicken needs, rebuilt the cover for the feeding trough and tipped them out of their box, it took them 30 seconds to find the scran and agree with us.

Then the rain started, hence no pictures and actually the chickens might not totally agree with us on their luck.  But we are once again poultry owners and life is good!

Hedgehog paradise

We have a lodger in the garden.  It has been around for a number of years and we have seen some of its children tramping through the raised beds of the kitchen garden.

During the spring it hides out in and around the potager, possibly among the compost bins or in untidy patches under shrubs.  It battles with the chickens (when we have any) for the rights to keep the slug population under control, as we do not use slug pellets.

During the height of summer it goes down the garden and hangs out around the back of our house and our neighbour's house, where it is relatively cool, reasonably well stocked with slugs, no chicken competition and where it might get the odd baby lizard to boot.

During the autumn, we know it goes walkabout, but this winter we found where it made its winter snug (under the black rose bush, and up against a south facing wall).  You can see it in the photo, warming its nose in the February sunshine and preparing for being bounced on yet again by Maigret and Poirot!

Also, if you are feeling compassionate, read the other blog I do (follow this link) or go direct to this point and add to the petition to free Ingrid Betancourt.  She is not nearly as comfortable as the hedgehog.