Moving ducklings

In today's vlog we move the ducklings from their brooder nursery pen to their new home outside.

If you are unable to view the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Homestead Tour July Part 2

If you can't view the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

July Homestead Tour Part 1

As it's the first day of August, it's time to look at the progress made by the crops and animals during July. To stop this being a very long vlog, I have split it into two, so the second part will be published tomorrow.


If you can't see the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Good Weather For Ducks and Ducklings

If the video won't play on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Chicks away! We're off to a flying start.

Last month I advertised our surplus eggs for sale locally. These aren't the hatching eggs that folks can buy to put in an incubator, but eggs for eating. The response was amazing (read about it here).

Since then we have found a gentle rhythm of folks who are now coming regularly to collect eggs from us. Today I have spoken with a lady who'd like the rest of our surplus eggs, so it seems that we are now going to just about break even in terms of feed costs and the chickens will be paying for themselves. At least until autumn arrives and they reduce or stop laying.

I have registered as self-employed so that our egg sales are all above board and as they should be and I've also asked about what I need to do if I want to sell any of our surplus fruit and vegetables. The member of staff at the local council was incredibly helpful and has sent me all the information that I need to decide whether that is a route I want to go down and in the next few days I will make that decision. So now I am officially a smallholder and trying to eek out a living. Thank goodness for Mr J working outside the smallholding as I can't see the smallholding making a profit for a goodly while, if ever!

But making a profit is not why we live here or why we chose to raise and grow our own food and as long as we keep our reasons for our lifestyle in mind, I don't suppose we can go too far wrong.

Back to the chickens; the older girls in the flock (those that we rescued last year together with Jack and Diesel) are definitely slowing down their egg laying activities. So that we can ensure a good number of eggs in the future we need to have young birds maturing throughout the summer and hopefully some of them will lay during the colder months.

The seven oldest chicks are now almost ten weeks old and have grown rapidly in both size and confidence since they moved into the mixed flock field. It's lovely to watch them scampering up and down the length of the field looking like they are without a care in the world. Taking a photo of them is now very difficult as they rarely stay still for long!

The chicks from the next hatch are now almost six weeks old and are going through that scruffy stage where they have most of their feathers but still have chick fluff on their necks and rumps. They are also growing well. I divided the hatch of eighteen surviving chicks into two houses, one contains solely white Jersey Giants (JG) and the other has some JG crossed with Australorps, Silver Laced Wyandotte and a couple of JG that are destined not to be breeding stock.

I advertised some of the JG chicks for sale and within a couple of hours agreed the sale of three of them. Inevitably purchasers only want the girls so that they don't have to deal with noisy cockerels, but that suits us very well. The boys are broader in the chest and longer in the leg than the girls and as table birds, they are ideal.

I'm relieved that these chicks are leaving us while still fairly young. Once they have moved from the nursery houses into the chicken field with the adult birds, I start to get to know their personalities and parting with them is a little harder.

The most recent hatch of chicks are still in the nursery pen in the stable and still need heat to keep them warm while they grow enough feathers to survive outside. We lost one of them, the weakest chick, after a couple of days, so that leaves us with twenty chicks racing around the nursery pen. There are Cream Legbars, a couple of hybrids (Big Red and Diesel's babies), some Australorps and more white Jersey Giants. All of these chicks are from eggs laid on the smallholding and I'm delighted to have such a healthy looking group of chicks from our own birds.

On Sunday I was contacted by a woman who helps to organise a 'hatching chicks in school' programme to see whether I'd be interested in giving a home to some chicks. Of course I jumped at the chance to have some other layers in the flock, even if they won't be laying for several months! She also organises duckling hatches, so I've expressed an interest in having some ducklings too and I'll wait to hear whether we can have any ducklings in the coming weeks and months.

So tomorrow we will welcome sixteen chicks that are almost four weeks old and give them a home in one of the nursery houses. While there are some Cream Legbars in the group, the rest are breeds that we don't have yet, so I'm excited to see the little bundles of potential brown, blue and cream egg layers. Of course, if there are males as well we will make a decision about whether to breed from them, find them new homes or pop them into the freezer at a later date. 

Our next hatch of chicks is due in a couple of weeks, this may, might, perhaps (probably not!) be our last hatching of chicks for this year. We also have the first of our ducklings due to hatch around the same time. I'm very excited about the duck eggs in the incubator, there are a couple of eggs that I bought in and eleven fertile eggs from our own ducks. I;m keeping my fingers crossed that this will be a successful hatch of ducklings.

In other news, all though still chicken related, I was delighted to see that Country Smallholding magazine have printed an extended version of an online article that included some of my input. This month's edition of the magazine has photos of the covered walkway that Mr J and I built, the metal pen that we use for the ducks and of the medium and low tunnels I built that safely keeps the birds' drinking water out of the reach of all but the most determined (and low flying) wild birds. It's nice to know that I've got our biosecurity right!

I am still vlogging daily and now that I am used to walking around with my phone (for the camera) and a small microphone clipped onto my top, it has become less time consuming and invasive of my daily routine. I record and edit one day and upload it the next, so if you'd like to see the new arrivals shortly after they've arrived, you will need to visit my YouTube channel on Friday 7th April.

I need to go and prepare the nursery house for our new arrivals, but first, as always, I think it's time for a cuppa!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Year One photo tour Animals

We lost our beloved cat Archie shortly after we moved here and haven't found another cat to fill his galumphing boots as yet. But we did find a lot of other animals over the year.

 Bluebell, Jack and Diesel were the first to arrive.

   And Jack has laid some huge eggs over the year (read about this huge egg here)

   The six Crested Cream Legbar girls arrived in February.

 And Laddie joined us a few weeks later, sadly he didn't survive very long, but it was long enough to fertilise a couple of eggs, which we hatched.

 And Big Red was hatched on 3rd May together with Little White, our first white Jersey Giant. (read about the hatching here). She was a beautiful chick, who grew into a beautiful chicken and we were very excited to be able to sample her first egg.

 At twenty-three weeks old she started crowing and we had to accept that she was not a she at all, but a robust and good natured cockerel.

 By twelve to fourteen weeks old Big Red was already a very promising cockerel, over the rest of the year he has grown into a large, happy and healthy boy.

 Our next batch of eggs gave us two more Jersey Giants, an Australorp and hybrid cross.

These four chicks have now grown into lovely birds, the Australorp is almost at point of lay and the Jersey Giants appear to be a hen and cockerel, but I'm not going to be sure that the hen is a hen until it starts laying.

This splendid looking bantam cockerel came to stay for a while, he arrived with scaly leg mite which we treated until his legs were clear and he fathered four little chicks, two with Jack and two with Diesel. The two Diesel chicks are sweet little white girls with the occasional black splash feathers who have joined the flock as potential layers, although I don't expect them to start laying before spring. The cockerel went to live with our friend Helen when we got a replacement for Laddie the Cream Legbar cockerel. 

His replacement was Jarvis who looked splendid, but the girls didn't take a shine to him and he was quite rough with them. They did, however, like one of the younger cockerels that we got at the same time as Jarvis. So Jarvis was dispatched and the Cream Legbar girls now live happily with Squeaky and Poo, who so far haven't fought over the ladies and seem to co-exist with relative harmony.

I continued to buy in hatching eggs.

   And the Dirty Dozen were hatched at the end of July. Eight Australorp chicks and four hybrids (the bantam's offspring).

 At eight weeks old, we separated the Australorps into their own enclosure. It looks like we may have one female and seven males. So together with the Australorp female from the previous hatch, we should be able to breed our own birds next year.

 

At the same time as raising new chickens, we also got ducks and raised ducklings.

 Frederick and Mrs Warne arrived in mid Spring, a young pair who had bonded well and she was already laying eggs almost daily. I added a couple of her eggs to the incubator and our first two ducklings stole our hearts.

 

  At around ten weeks old the ducklings joined their parents in the main duck field and have integrated well. 

The next batch of eggs were bought in from two different sources so that there is an introduction of new genes into the flock. From those eggs we hatched five ducklings which are seem happy and healthy and are now almost ready to join the flock. Once we have established which of the young birds that have hatched this year are male, we will select the one or two that we want to keep for breeding and dispatch any other males.

 As I type, I have one more batch of eggs in the incubator. It's very late in the year to be raising birds, but we will keep the young chicks under the cover of the stable until they are fully feathered and ready to venture outside in the winter cool.

Looking back over the first year on our smallholding, we have achieved so much, learnt so much and laughed so much. We still have much to do, much to learn and hopefully much, much more to laugh about.

I've written further blogs looking at the vegetable garden and permanent planting areas . The best way to ensure that you don't miss them is to subscribe to my blog, which you can do below!

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Moving the ducklings

 

This week I am being the guest tweeter on SmallholdersUK account on Twitter. Each week a different smallholder is featured, celebrating the diversity of smallholders' lives and this week I am taking a turn at sharing my plastic beads of experience (it feels like I haven't advanced to pearls of wisdom yet). I didn't have a grand plan of what I was going to write about, but I did make some notes of subjects I knew I wanted to include.

I am surprised at how much additional energy I have used up in tweeting throughout the day, how tired I am in the evening and how quickly I'm getting off to sleep. Sadly though, I am still waking up at silly o'clock in the morning and lying in bed wondering if it's too early to get up. This morning that process of waking, staring at the ceiling, getting over hot, then too cold, dropping back to sleep and waking up again started at 1.25 am. So by 5 am I gave up and made my way downstairs and, as I often do when it's too early to start rumbling around outside, I put the television on.

I spend quite a lot of time reading and researching. YouTube has become my go-to learning resource as I can find so many really helpful vlogs and films. Obviously I don't take the word of just one person who's posted a film on the internet, I make sure that I watch several (or lots) of films about any particular subject. The more that one certain topic is covered in the same way, the more I can trust it to be likely to be true. But in the end, there's nothing quite like first hand experience. 

The experience has once again been of making compost, raised beds, preserving food for the late autumn and winter and putting in a new fence.

On Monday Mr J banged some fence posts into the ground in the duck enclosure so that we could start to section off part of it for the ducklings to use. The posts were recycled ones from my sister's home. She had replaced her fencing and these posts were of no use to her any more. My brother in law had kindly cut points on the bottom of each post to make getting them into the ground more easily.

I then stapled chicken wire to the posts and used heavy duty ground staples to secure it along the base.

 We hung a gate that I had found lying around on the other side of the of paddock (there have been some very useful bits and pieces that I've found that were left by the previous owners).

 We moved the two ducklings from their outside nursery pen into the new enclosure and watched as they revelled in the additional space that they suddenly had. Frederick was less than impressed at having two new neighbours, but over the last couple of days he has calmed down and now seems more miffed than cross.

The vegetable garden is filling out even more as the squashes make a last ditch attempt to produce their fruit before the days get cold. The purple sprouting broccoli(on the left) is an early variety, I hope that it will withstand the howling autumn and winter winds and flower early next year.

 Mr J and I created the next raised bed late on Tuesday afternoon when the strongest heat of the day had passed. I had put down a layer of cardboard in the morning and we covered it in topsoil and then in composted wood chippings. 

I will plant this up today with some purple curly kale seedlings and rainbow chard seeds (because the chickens like the leaves and we like the stems).

I was delighted to find that the compost pile made in early July is now a deep brown colour and although it's still quite soggy and I think I may move it to around the base of some fruit trees and cover it in composted wood chippings to help feed the fruit trees which have been working so hard to produce lots of apples. I've made another compost heap using chicken manure and wood shavings given to us by our neighbours, grass clippings, kitchen waste (uncooked fruit and vegetable waste), spent brewery grain and straw. I also turned the drier materials from the previous compost heap into the new one. The last heap is starting to rot down, I can still see the individual components but the centre is going brown and I will top the new heap with the partly decomposed material to add microbes to it.

I've made several trips into the field that borders our smallholding to pick blackberries. I've been careful to walk on the scrubby edges of the field to avoid damaging the clover crop that the farmer has growing there. The field is buzzing with the sound of our neighbours' bees, so hopefully there will be some delicious clover honey available later in the year.

  I have also been gathering windfall apples from my neighbours' garden. They have invited me to collect as many as I like as they feel overrun with cooking apples. Their cider apples are also ripe and they will be pressing them in the next week or so. I like it that the neighbours have a surplus to different crops to us and that they make different products to us. We are starting to swap surpluses and produce which gives both of us a wider choice of food.

I have now ordered some bare-rooted fruit trees and more hedging trees to complete the hedge planting from The Woodland Trust, who have a Welsh Farm Tree Pack scheme, which enables those who farm in Wales to buy trees to create more woodland at a reduced price. They also offer help to other parts of the UK. You can find out more information here. 

It's time to put the kettle on.

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August round up

While I'm waiting for the eggs in the incubator to hatch I thought it would be an ideal time to have a good look around and see what we've been up to over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
The Four Horsemen chickens have been badly behaved. If you are a chicken, I imagine that you'd think it was super-dooper behaviour, but I'm not and I don't appreciate the chickens escaping to the front garden and then promptly kicking the chipped bark off the shrubbery and onto the gravel of the driveway and yard.
The answer to this problem was simple, I needed to finish putting the wind reducing netting onto the wooden fencing around the paddock. It's one of those tasks that I keep meaning to do, but had also found dozens of other things to do instead. So I stapled the green netting into place and blocked off their access to the metal five bar gate which then did a good job at keeping them in the paddock.

However, I had spoiled their fun and so instead they looked for something else to amuse them. It turned out that a kitchen garden filled with lush green leaves was the place to have fun. So each time they made a bid for freedom, they headed straight for the rows of spinach and chard. This was also an unsatisfactory state of affairs, we can't have four small birds eating the food that I am growing for us and all the chickens for the autumn and winter. 

The solution was to create a small pen by the chicken shed for them to live in during the day until they are too large to squeeze through the flexible chicken netting. They aren't very happy about being enclosed in the small space (it's about 12 feet by eight feet), but the alternative is that they go into an even smaller chicken run.

The Dozen are growing rapidly and have seem to have spent the weekend sorting out their pecking order. They have squabbled and argued a lot for the last couple of days and I need to research whether this means that they don't have enough space or whether that's just what they do. It wasn't noticeable with Big Red and Little White or with the Four Horsemen. They are at that awkward stage where they are losing the last of the fluff on their necks as their feathers grow through and it makes them look like funny little punky creatures.

 We have found a very local farm shop that sells straw. It costs 50p more per bale than the straw we've bought previously but it's an awful lot of closer, which saves us time and petrol. On Saturday afternoon we collected eight bales of straw so that I could refresh the circles of love. I am slowly moving the Cream Legbars towards the rear of their field, a few feet at a time so that the change doesn't upset them too much. I moved their shelter first and then built a new circle of love for them. In the circle I will dump all the wood shavings from their houses, weeds, greens, old straw and vegetable plants as I lift them. They then scratch through it and turn it into rich compost. The Legbars haven't really got the hang of keeping the material inside the straw circle, so I will add one more bale to make the access opening much smaller. I then plan to add a second layer of bales which should provide them with much needed shelter from the wind in the autumn and winter. The field shelter (a glamorous name for two pallets held together with baling twine and an old rug thrown over the top) is fine for providing a shady area in the summer, but the wind whips across this field and I want to offer them some shelter from the relentless gusts.

The area that has been the circle of love for the last few months is ready to be sectioned off and planted up. I will put some kale, chard and spinach in this spot that will be fed to the chickens (and possibly us too) in the cooler months.

 In the older girls' side of the field I moved their circle of love in May, so it is staying in approximately the same place until spring. Big Red and Little White know exactly how to use the circle of love and together with Jack and Diesel can spend hours scratching through the material finding good things to peck at and eat.

The vegetable garden is looking quite full in some beds and I am very pleased with how well some of the crops have grown in the not-very-good soil that they have in the raised beds. For our first year and given that we have had to make the raised beds and import soil and composted horse manure, I am rather proud of how much as been achieved in just a few months.

 The hedge that we planted with Jane in late winter is starting to spread nicely, I noticed that a couple of the wild roses had flowered and are now forming fat little rose hips. It will take a few years for the hedge plants to merge and form a thick dense hedge, but I can see the beginnings of it already.

 In other areas the weeds from the field next door have dominated. I understand that in the past the farmer who worked the fields that surround our smallholding had managed the weeds, but there is a new farmer working the fields and he seems to be leaving the weeds to grow. Unfortunately I think that they may well smother the hedge plants in a few areas and short of making masses of extra work for myself in managing the weeds outside our boundary, I may just have to accept that in these patches we will have to put up with massive clumps of thistles and thorny brambles.

Elsewhere in the garden some cultivated plants seem to be running amok. The pumpkin plants are looking very healthy and I now have six good size pumpkins and about a dozen smaller ones developing on the plants.

 It looks as though I will have a pumpkin that I can proudly give to my grandsons in October for them to use at Halloween. The next thing that they need to do is turn a rich orange colour as they ripen.

We've moved Frederick and Mrs. Warne's duck house to a more sheltered spot and turned it so that the doorway isn't facing towards the direction that the wind blows for most of the autumn and winter because having soaking wet bedding won't be much fun for them.

The young ducklings (that have stolen our hearts) continue to grow rapidly and on Sunday I extended their run to give them an extra three feet to play in. I have started leaving the cat litter tray filled with water in the pen. They are old enough now that they won't just sit in the water all day long getting cold, but will paddle in and out at different times during the day. We have identified an area in the duck enclosure that we plan to separate off so that the ducklings can have a lot more space to run around before they are large enough to join the adult birds free ranging in their space. It took us a little while to get the set up right for the chickens and chicks and we are just starting to get a set up sorted for the ducks and ducklings.

In between sorting out the birds and pottering in the garden I have continued preserving fruit and vegetables from the garden and have been blackberry picking in the hedgerow of the fields surrounding us and yesterday we made a trip to see our friends Jane and Dave. Jane has been a friend for the best part of thirty years, our children played together when they were young and Jane and I share a love of gardening. They have a small garden around their house and Jane has started an allotment area with a friend this year (I have parsnip envy having seen photos of her crop). Jane had kindly collected some poultry carriers for me from someone nearby to her who was selling them and it was time we picked them up from her and got them out of her way. While we were there she also gave us several plants to boost the perennial border, shrubbery and a fabulous fig tree which I'm hope will settle nicely in the new food forest that I will be planting over the next month or so.


The warm weather has brought with it some hazy dawns and beautiful sunsets, I wish my camera could do them justice. 

Now I need to go and check on the progress of the hatching eggs and of course, it's time for a cuppa!