Rural Life

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.

Goodbye 2007!

The final group walk of the year had to be cancelled yesterday due to the illness of our guide - winter vomiting virus strikes, or a surfeit of oysters.  Either way, Hugette looked awful when we saw her, so I hope she feels better soon.

Instead we took ourselves off for a walk - more modest in kilometres at probably just about 6, but welcome for all that.  It was good to get moving after a few days of concerted sloth. 

In the afternoon we went round our wood as well (it doesn't take that long), but as the afternoon was so beautiful, we also wandered a bit around the lanes and found a footpath that we just had to follow for a kilometre or so.  I will need a bit of time with the maps to see where it comes out so we can do a circuit next time.

At this time of year it is so important to take advantage of the good weather when it happens - today is not so appealing for walking, with fog and low mist, cool and dank air and limited views.  Here is a picture with blue sky however, as a cadeau for the New Year!

The Cold Greenhouse

It is a funny time between Christmas and New Year, when you start thinking about the detox and diet, but don't do anything about it, as you still have one more lot of festivities to get through.

One of the nicest things is to go through the seed catalogues and plan the planting for the new season and my Jardiniers de France seed catalogue turned up yesterday to draw me to my armchair.

The unheated greenhouse is providing a refuge for mice (not seen but suspected) and the plants that need a bit of shelter from the cold or the rain or both.  The double geraniums that grace the window sills in the summer are in there, along with the aloe vera, the prickly pear scrumped from a derelict garden at Collias, the distinctly ropey Brugmantia and the agave - not to mention the feral pumpkin.  I haven't dared go up the garden and open the greenhouse for a few days however as I am not sure everything will have survived the glacial temperatures we had up until Christmas.

Perhaps another slice of Christmas cake and another look at that seed catalogue instead!!

Mistletoe time

In the UK, a small sprig of mistletoe, ideally with a few berries on it, is hung over doorways to encourage people to kiss - or so it seems to me.  The Tenbury Wells mistletoe fair used to be the main market for wholesalers to flood the market with this parasitic plant.  Much has been made in the past few years of how little home grown mistletoe there is and how this is due to the dearth of mistle thrushes and the clearance of old orchards.

However it is thought awful to use french mistletoe, as that lacks berries.

Hmmm.  We have 3 clumps of mistletoe in our wood (it doesn't need to grow in orchards).  The one high in the Rowan tree is covered with berries but is a good 35 foot above the ground in a very spindly tree.  The other two clumps are on hazel coppice and therefore close to the ground, but not old enough yet to produce berries (I gather 5 years of growth is required).  The better one is shown here.

The poplar plantations that you see in the area are often covered with huge balls of mistletoe.  In part this is a sign of poor management of the plantation as the mistletoe "roots" damage the wood.  We were commenting to a friend about all the mistletoe around but that it was so high in the trees, and she said that the way to get a good big ball of mistletoe, was to get a hunter, early in the hunting day, to shoot a ball out of the tree for you!

A seasonal thought that!

It's cold!!

Over the past few days here, the temperatures have plummeted.  Yesterday we didn't get a positive temperature until after 2pm and the high was 0.9 degrees Centigrade.  Now I know that isn't much when you compare it with what they are having to put up with in Quebec, but it is more than cold enough for me.  Especially as the goats need looking after.

These are not our goats - they are adoptive goats that we look after when their owners have to go away.  Bessie and Lucy are about 10 months old and Nanny is nearly 2 (Lucy is her kid).  They are dwarf goats and their duty in life is to keep the grass down in their meadow, but they much prefer acorns, oak leaves, brambles, trees and maize to boring old grass.

In this cold snap, they are doing fine - there are still loads of acorns around, plus they have a bale of hay to nibble on if required, loads of grass still and we pop in (theoretically) every three or four days to give them some extra feed and make sure nothing is bothering them or that they haven't trashed anything.  Currently we are having to go over more frequently to ensure they have unfrozen water.  Their bowl doesn't defrost during the day, and their stream has now frozen over as well.

They are extremely podgy and have very thick coats, so they aren't suffering, whatever the goat care mafia might say.  It is just the need to keep fresh water available that causes the worry.  Below are pictures of all three during the summer.

Too wet to walk

We did a bit of a road trip last week - not a particularly green thing to do, but it had to be done for work reasons.

For part of the time, we did our third ever trip to Wales, this time the South Wales valleys and the Brecon Beacons.  I know December isn't a good time to do this sort of thing,  but we did hope that the weather would be kind enough to give us an hour or so's respite to walk up a Beacon and get some good fresh air.

Sadly every time we stopped the car at a likely lay-by, the heavens opened.  Even with boots, walking tents/cagoules and warm clothes, we felt it was too dangerous to set off across unknown territory.  The scenery was stunning however, as demonstrated by the photo.  Next time.....

And now comes winter

What a difference a week can make in the wood.  From there being some faded colour and lots of brown leaves on the trees, particularly the young chestnuts, only a few of the oaks (not sure if it is the Sisal or the English ones) are hanging on to a last few leaves.  The views across the wood have changed dramatically once again and with the honourable exception of the far north west corner, you can see pretty well every part of the wood from the wood pile in the central glade.

This time of year makes tree identification a bit challenging, when you are working with buds and bark only, but it is a great time to take stock of what we have and what we want to do with the trees.

We have identified a load of large but mostly dead chestnut stems that will come down for firewood either this year or next - felling them will also regenerate the tree boles and bring on a load more shoots and poles for future years.  We have identified a whole load of Wild Service that we can either play with a bit, trying copicing and pollarding techniques, or we can fell for wild fences - the wood is pretty useless for most things, including fire wood.

There are a bunch of hazels that need to be managed - either copiced for future poles, woven to create barriers, or nurtured to produce more nuts in future.

We don't do much with the oak trees except tidy up the lower trunks, getting rid of ivy and small branches, and pay our respects in the appropriate manner!

Autumn blues

It's that time of year - not quite time to start preparing for Christmas but too far from summer.  It is a tricky time of year to have a birthday - although many thanks to my mother for pushing me out on a date that many would say is totally memorable.  If you are of a certain generation, you certainly know what you were doing when I was born!!

This autumn, with the dry weather and sudden cold snap, we have had fabulous leaf colour - no need to go to Canada (apologies to all Canadians) when you have autumn colours like these - and this was past the peak!

For tree twitchers everywhere - the particularly yellow tree just left of centre is an elm!

But like I say, the leaves are gone, and it is that time of year - so what to do to cheer me up?  My erstwhile work colleagues have some pretty awful ideas - how about a nice Skype conference?  No thanks!  I am depressed enough as it is.

John has come up with a much better idea.  The oyster beds of Cancale are not far away and (no really!) by the sea.  What better way to cheer me up than time by the sea, breathing fresh sea air, and eating prime oysters, and perhaps catching a jazz band in St Malo?  I can't wait!

Mutant Pumpkin

It has got cold here - really cold.  At least we are in the village, so it doesn't get quite as cold as out on the farms, but even so we have had two nights of frost already and "they" are predicting a frost of minus 4 degrees Centigrade tonight.

As an aside, this is in sharp contrast to this time last year, when my diary notes temperatures of 18 degrees Centigrade during the day, the ability to sit outside for lunch, and the fact that we drove off to Spain for a few days without jackets.  Currently Spain is under threat of snow, as is Corsica - climate change or the natural variation?

So the question is, what to do with the monster pumpkin I have grown this year?

The reason it is an issue, is that all the proper plants I had going did not produce any fruits at all.  The monster is on a feral plant that grew up on the edge of the chicken run, germinating in about mid-July.  This fruit did not set until mid-September and to my eye is not yet ripe, but it weighs a lot as I found when I cut it off the now dead plant this morning and moved it to the garden bench to dry off.

Will it be edible and sweet?  Please let me know what you think!!