Mighty meaty

It's been a highly sociable week. On Saturday, my daughter and two grandsons came for an overnight visit. It's the first time the boys have stayed with us and grandson number 1 was very excited about staying on 'Grandma's farm'. They arrived mid afternoon on Saturday and played a bit, ate supper and got settled in for the evening. On Sunday morning it was still damp outside, but dressed in our not-so-glamorous waterproofs, we still managed to get outside and do a few chores. My older grandson helped us to move flexible fencing, feed the chickens and ducks and move wood chippings onto a particularly soggy and slippery area in the duck enclosure. 

 My daughter took this photo of us on our way to get yet another barrow load of wood chips, it made me realise that I really need to invest in some waterproofs that don't give me a Michelin Man look. I loved spending this precious time with him and hearing his squeals of delight as we raced around the yard. It seems riding in a wheelbarrow is the mode of transport for a five year old, although I'm not sure which of us enjoyed this more!

 Yesterday morning Mr J and I cleaned out the chicken shed. The eight inch deep bed of sawdust certainly made interesting scratching material for the chickens and it also helped to soak up some of the rainwater that was sitting on the surface of the ground unable to drain away fast enough.

 The chickens will scratch through this and turn it over and over during the winter months and then, in the spring, I will fence some of the area off and plant kale, spinach and other vegetables that the chickens like to eat. It will be quick and easy to feed the chickens some of their favourite leafy greens when they are growing in the chicken's field.

We then refreshed the deep bedding sawdust in the chicken shed and I treated the perches and fixings with diatomaceous earth as a preventative measure against red mite and then we headed indoors for a quick wash so that we didn't smell of chicken poop for the rest of the day.

Martha of @MarthaRoberts arrived early afternoon to deliver a couple of boxes of pork. I met Martha via Twitter, which has proved a great place to get to know some like-minded smallholders. She has a smallholding near Abergavenny on which she raises rare breed pigs that happily spend their days foraging on her hillside amongst woodland and grass. 

Photo courtesy of  Martha Roberts

A few weeks ago I asked Martha for a half a pig when the next batch of free range animals were despatched. She gave me plenty of notice so I was able to make sure that we had lots of space in the freezer.

I asked for some of the parts of a pig that aren't as popular now as they were in the past. So yesterday I took delivery of my half a pig together with some liver, hearts, kidneys, hock and leaf fat (the fat from around the kidneys).

I'm going to make liver pate, a coarse pate for Mr J and a smooth one for me. I'm going to render the leaf fat to make lard, which is high in omega 3 and I understand that if it's rendered very slowly and makes a very white lard, it is perfect for pastry as well as for using as a cooking fat. I'd like to try a rich slow casserole with the kidneys and slow roast stuffed hearts.

I'm really keen to experiment with old recipes and find ways to use as much of the carcass as I can because I feel that so much of the animal must go to waste. While we love a pork joint for a roast dinner, there are an awful lot of other dishes that can be made using other cuts.

Photo courtesy of  Martha Roberts

This experimentation has a reason. Mr J and I have been discussing our mid term plans for the smallholding and have decided that we may have a couple of pigs in the future. This certainly won't happen in 2017 and depending on how far we get with upgrading the dilapidated piggieries, it may happen in 2018 or later. In the meantime, we can learn how to make the very best use of as much of a pig as possible. There are some parts of the animal that I can't face trying, it makes no logical sense at all, but still, I don't fancy the lungs or spleen despite finding several recipes of how to cook them.

I've been searching through my mother's cookery books (like this 1961 edition of Mrs Beeton's) and looking online for recipes, hints and tips of how to prepare our new food. My plan for the next couple of months is to try out new recipes and decide which appeal to us the most and to share the successes on my blog. 

This morning Helen and Jane came to visit. Actually, Helen came to collect the flexible fencing that she kindly lent to us earlier in the year. We spent a lovely couple of hours drinking tea, eating cake and talking all things smallholding. Helen keeps pigs and Jane has sheep, so we swapped stories of muddy incidents, rainy days chasing our animals and shared lots of laughter.

This afternoon I started turned my attention to the pork. I started with the easiest joints to cook, the roast shoulder joints with crispy crackling.

I unwrapped the joints and left them to get to room temperature. I put them into a roasting tin. I scored the skin and rubbed some sea salt over the skin and into the scoring and put them into the oven on 220 degrees C. After about 25 minutes I turned the temperature down to 170 degrees C and cooked the joints until they were ready (I like meat well cooked). I poured off some of the fat and juices into a bowl after the first hour and again once they were cooked. Once they are cold, the fat and juices can be separated and I will freeze the juices in small portions until I want to use it as a base for gravy.

This evening's supper was a celebration of smallholders' food. We had roast pork, crackling, apple sauce that I made in September using our neighbours' windfall apples, gravy and purple sprouting broccoli which I picked from the garden just before dusk. We took a few moments to appreciate how lucky we are.

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A sociable weekend

On Friday morning my daughter came to visit. It's been several weeks since we had a chance to just hang out together, doing nothing in particular, but sharing our time and chatting all things family related.

She was enchanted by the five littlest ducklings, although not as much as I am besotted with my grandson number two, who at ten months old has developed a lovely personality and is now getting speedily mobile.

She went home with a food box filled with vegetables from the garden, chutney and sauces that I've been making and an organic butternut squash that came from a local shop. She hadn't cooked a whole butternut squash before so I gave her a recipe suggestion and a few hours later she sent me photo of the roasted squash filled with goat's cheese and pumpkins seeds, which she said was delicious.

In the afternoon I continued to plant out the perennials and shrubs given to us by Jane and to transplant young plants that I have raised from seed. I started to think about which plants to take cuttings from so that they have time to form root systems before winter stops their growth. It's such an easy way to propagate plants and every year I forget to spend the short amount of time it takes to take the cuttings. This year I will get around to doing it before it's too late.

Saturday morning was spent in the kitchen, my neighbours have kindly invited me to collect as many windfall apples as I'd like and I've taken them up on the offer and have been collecting a bucketful a day. So, I made apple sauce (to accompany pork) and froze apples to make crumbles from in the depths of winter. The kitchen smelled delicious.

I have had some poor nights of sleep this week and have become very tired, so Saturday evening by the time we had got the birds safely tucked away in their houses, I was ready to sit quietly for an hour before I went to bed.

On Sunday we were up and about bright and early and after doing the morning chores, I baked a lemon and poppy seed cake. We were going out for the day and I was very excited to be heading off to Carmarthenshire. Ten minutes before we were due to leave the Dirty Dozen made a bid for freedom and more than half of them escaped from their run. Mr J phoned me from the chicken field to request my help in rounding them up. Over excited chicks who are hell-bent on being outside their run are not the easiest to herd back into their confines, but with a bit of extra coaxing and a lot of bribery with armfuls of green leaves from the vegetable garden, we got them safely back into their run.

We hadn't got very far in the car before I fell asleep (which is why I am not driving at the moment - falling asleep at the wheel really wouldn't be too clever) and I woke up just as got the to sign that read 'Welcome to Carmarthenshire'.

We were headed to the smallholding of Annette and her partner. I 'met' Annette via Twitter and a few weeks ago she invited us (and several other smallholders who tweet) to visit their home for a barbecue. And what a lovely smallholding they have! 32 acres of Welsh hillside and a pretty house nestled into it with beautiful views across the valley.

The barbecues were lit and heated up while we all took a tour of the smallholding. Their flock of sheep in one field were lovely as was the dog Edwin who was very well behaved. They have eight chickens and a number of ducks free-ranging around the back garden. 

 We ate a feast of food (everyone brought something to share) including burgers, lamb chops, roast pork, rabbit, vegetable kebabs, salads followed by cake, brownies, Eton mess and New York cheesecake. It occurred to me that any gathering of smallholders was bound to have fabulous food and Mr J ate so well at lunchtime that he only had a few biscuits with cheese for supper.

Mid-afternoon we said goodbye to the new friends we'd made with promises of having another get together before too long. I was more than happy to offer to host the next one here on our small patch.

After a much wanted cup of tea, I headed out into the garden and pottered for a while, planting some herbs and moving some more of the huge pile of wood chippings from the front garden into the area that will be the food forest.

Once the birds were all in bed, we curled up on the sofa and switched off our brains for a while by watching television.

It has been a lovely weekend and I'm looking forward to getting to know the other smallholders better as time goes on. Today we are starting to make an improved run arrangement for the Dirty Dozen, but before we begin it must be time for a cuppa.


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Starting a Food Forest

Friday 2nd Spetember. I've been researching ways to increase our harvest whilst also improving the land on which we live. Time and time again I come back to a permaculture idea of a food forest. It seems to me to make absolute sense to work with nature, not against it and emulate it as it is so successful at being self sustaining.

The idea of a food forest is that just like any forest there are several layers of growth from tall canopy trees to root crops, each layer is comprised edible plants of some sort and as leaves drop from trees and annuals die off, the forest floor becomes richer with organic matter feeding the plants for the next year. This is a long term plan. We can't plant fully grown trees and shrubs, so we will plant young trees and plants and over time they will grow to provide the layers.

Image source: Permaculture a Beginner’s Guide, by Graham Burnett

 By recreating a forest with it's multi layers of growth I can have a highly productive area of edible plants that doesn't need constant tending and planting each year. It will become more productive as years pass and will build better and better soil. We want to leave this small space in better condition and with more trees and vegetation on it than when we arrived.

 So I've identified an area that would be ideal for a food forest. Ideally I would lay down a very thick layer of cardboard and cover it in around 30 - 40 cms of wood chippings, but I don't think we will have access to that volume wood chippings and so, to start off with, I am going to put down a weed suppressing membrane and a 15 - 20 cms layer of wood chippings and then in a couple of years remove the membrane disturbing the soil layer as little as possible and let nature take over.

 I ordered some membrane which arrived yesterday and to keep myself distracted from the latest hatch that was happening in the incubator I started to lay the membrane.

This first section of membrane is six and a half feet (2 metres) wide and approximately 40 feet (12 metres) long and it seems to hardly make a dent in the area that I've earmarked for the food forest. I am excited by this project, I like the idea of creating something more permanent on this land. It won't replace the raised beds which I will continue to use for growing annual food crops, cutting flowers and herbs, but it should add a new dimension to the smallholding.

 As luck would have it, on Wednesday evening the tree surgeon delivered another load of composted wood chippings. This is by far the most well composted material that he has dropped off. Much of it is a rich almost black colour, just like the soil found on a forest floor, so will be ideal for the food forest area as well as being used to enrich the soil in the raised beds.

Once I had lightly pegged down the membrane I loaded a wheel barrow to overflowing with wood chippings and tipped it onto the membrane. As you can see, it hardly shows on this large space and this sheet of membrane is only the first of many. It's going to take an awful lot of wheel barrow loads to cover this area! I thought that I'd cover the areas that I want to put plants in first and leave the pathways clear until later. As we are having some tall but spindly sycamore trees taken down from just behind the piggeries before too long, I will use the chipped upper branches to cover the pathways as these don't need to be composted chippings.

I already have some fruit shrubs and perennial herbs that I can plant in the food forest and will propagate as many more as I can from these small plants.

I've recently started reading the blog of a couple who live not too far away from us who have outgrown their garden and two allotments and are taking the plunge to become even more self sufficient and are buying a smallholding in Orkney. James and Dee's blog about their adventure to self sufficiency and living in a more environmentally friendly way can be found at Happy Homestead. It's well worth a read. 

I've been chatting with them via social media and invited them to come for a cuppa and to have a look at what we are doing here (what this really means is that I'm going to pick their brains and ask them for lots of advice). To my delight they have offered to give us some of their fruit bushes and herbs that they have growing in tubs and that are too large or too many to take with them to their new home. They will be ideal for planting in the food forest and I am extremely grateful for their generosity.  We are also going to rehome their chickens which they feel would be too stressed by a fifteen hour car journey to their new homestead.

Saturday 3rd. Yesterday I continued to add barrow loads of composted wood chippings to the first stretch of weed suppressing membrane and planted it with a tayberry and loganberry given to me by my daughter's father in law. I also put in some autumn fruiting raspberries which came from Mr J's mother's garden, a rowan tree that my daughter gave me for Mother's Day, some herbs that I grew from seed and some currants that came from the local garden centre. I am starting to think that the food forest will be filled with plants that came from, and therefore remind me of, friends and family.

I've identified a small area that is lower than the surrounding soil and it seems to be a perfect place to have a small wildlife pond. In heavy rain it fills with water and creates a puddle about four feet by three feet and around four inches deep. If I line the base of this area with waterproof membrane, it should fill up in no time which will give us a pond that ends up about seven or eight inches deep. It won't be very big, but it would be nice to have an area that attracts frogs, toads and other wildlife. There is a large sheet of bitumous liner at the back of the piggeries, I think it is what was used to line a large surplus water store as I can see a circular outline on a concrete base by the rear piggery and the liner seems circular, so I will use a piece of that as a liner for the small wildlife pond.

As I am creating pathways through the food forest area I will make sure that a path goes around the potential pond and that I leave some space for planting around the edges of it. The good thing about the location of the pond is that it will be away from the chickens and the ducks so that the wildlife won't be a sitting target for their beaky attentions.

It is very wet today, I have tried laying out the next section of weed suppressing membrane, but the wind has picked up and is blowing it all over the place. Instead of working outside, I am doing more research and firming up ideas about the food forest and catch up with reading a few of my favourite blogs. I'm looking forward to an afternoon curled up on the sofa under a quilt reading. It must be time to make a cuppa! 

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If you want to know more about food forests, this article on the Permaculture Research Institute is useful.

Putting the chickens to work

On Monday a dear friend came to visit. Kim lives in Mid Wales and when I lived there we became very good pals. Kim's work and home commitments mean that she rarely has a chance to get away for a day or two, so it has been a long time since we've seen each other.

She arrived here shortly after noon and I showed her around in the light rain. Luckily the weather improved all the time she was here and by the time she left on Tuesday afternoon it was positively scorching hot. Kim is another of those friends with whom the conversation can have a six month pause, but when we chat again we immediately get back to laughing together.

As with everyone, she was very taken with the ducklings and as she hadn't spent time close up with chickens before, was fascinated by the girls behaviour. She sat with me in the chicken field and fed spinach and kale to the older birds. Little White has such a gentle disposition that it hard not to like her, she is always happy to come for a cuddle (or at least she tolerates me cuddling her!). With still at least a couple more months of growing to do, she is going to be a splendid bird.

Early on Monday morning I organised a space at the back of the piggeries to use for dispatching chickens. This is not a task that I have been looking forward to, but having made the decision and the undertaking to raise our own meat birds there is an inevitable task that needs to be done to provide us with home raised organic meat. I did the deed. It wasn't a very nice process, but I am happy that it was done humanely, kindly and calmly.

As it turns out, a young Cream Legbar cockerel has very little meat on its bones, but he did have some fat, so I am comfortable that the birds are getting a good balance of food out in the field. We had decided that he was going to be dispatched because all of our birds need to serve a purpose, he was supposed to be 'servicing' the girls but they just weren't interested in him. I think it was because although he was potentially a splendid specimen, he only had one wattle and I suspect that is what put the girls off him. He also had a rough technique with the girls and they really objected to his attention. When he did try to tread them, he was so rough that they girls would squeal with pain and run away. It seemed to us that this arrangement was unlikely to produce many fertile eggs, so he has gone and one of the young cockerels can now take his place as the lead male of the flock and we just hope that he will have a better technique!

Last night we talked about the best way to put the youngest chickens to work in the garden. The older girls scratch through their 'circle of love' (the area where we throw weeds, food scraps, wood shavings and straw from their houses and wood chippings) turning it into rich compost for the vegetable garden. We felt it was time for the young ones to pull their weight too. 

Over the weekend I had removed the perennial weeds from a raised bed and lifted the last of the onions that had been growing there and the next task is to improve the soil before a winter crop goes into the bed. So today I have made a make-shift run in that raised bed. 

Pushing bamboo canes around the edges and using a couple of tube arches I created a structure to wrap in chicken wire. Once I was happy that it was secure I put the Four Horsemen into the run together with their water dispenser and they will spend the next few days in there scratching amongst the straw and soil. Each evening I will move them back to their hen house so that they are safe from predators over night.

Well, I've seen some stroppy children in my time, but these young chickens looked for all the world like they'd been slapped in the face by the proverbial wet fish! I gave them some spinach and chard (their favourites) and sprinkled some of their organic chicken feed onto the ground to encourage them to scratch about, but no, they were just not very interested in earning their keep.

Early evening I got them out of the chicken wire raised bed confinement and put them back in the field that they think of as home and no sooner had I done that than they ran off out of the field, squeezing through the flexible chicken fencing to their new favourite place on the smallholding - the shrubbery near the front of the house - and started scratching amongst the bark chippings, flicking them all over the drive!

I marched them back to their pen in the chicken field and locked them in for the evening. I could hear them crying to be let out as I headed back to the house, but none of others are allowed to destroy the shrubbery and neither are they.

After supper we put all the birds to bed, the chickens put themselves of course, but we close the doors to their houses and make them safe for the night and we headed back inside to watch The Great British Bake Off. The start of the new series signals to me that we are coming to the end of summer and starting to transition towards autumn. The fruit and vegetables in the garden are indicating the same thing. I think I have picked the last of the green runner beans and will leave the remaining pods on the plants to ripen and save to use as dried beans or as seeds for next year's plants. The blackberries that grow so well around the perimeter of the smallholding are ripe and I have been picking handfuls every couple of days and even the apples on the trees are starting to look ready to pick. I am now regularly awake and pottering around downstairs well before dawn and yet the weather for the last couple of days has been positively glorious.

Anyway, it's all change week for the younger chickens. The Four Horsemen are now eight weeks old and the Dirty Dozen are four weeks old. This means that the Four will move into the main chicken shed to live with Jack, Diesel, Big Red and Little White until we separate the birds into flocks of their own breed at some point in the future. Then I can deep clean the enclosed hen house and pen ready for the Dozen to move into from their nursery pen in the stable.

So, after we'd watched an hour of television and it was fairly dark outside, we headed out with torches to move the Four Horsemen. Good grief, they still hadn't gone to sleep and while a bit dozey, they certainly weren't in a deep sleep. Mr J was on door opening duty while I lifted the wriggly little Horsemen from their house and carried them to the chicken shed. I popped them onto the floor just inside the door and when they wake up in the morning they will be part of the big girls flock. Or at least, that is the theory. The chances are that there will be quite a bit of squawking from the shed as the sun comes up and the Four will race off, squeeze through the flexible chicken fencing and make a bid for the freedom of the shrubbery. At which point, I will scoop them up and take them over to the raised bed so that they can continue to scratch there, turning the soil and fertilising it, ready for the next crop to be planted in it.

The ducklings have already moved to their outside home, they have been sleeping in their house for a couple of nights and seem to be quite happy going up the (fairly steep) ramp to bed each evening. Once the Dozen are out in the house in the field the stable will be empty again, giving me the chance to empty and clean the chicken's nursery run and close it down until the spring and to prepare the duck nursery run for new arrivals. We have one last batch of duck eggs in the incubator which are due to hatch early next week. I know that it is quite late in the year to be hatching more ducklings, but we wanted to raise a couple more before next spring if we could. My guess is that they will spend longer inside before moving out if the weather get suddenly cool or, if we are lucky and have a mild autumn, they can move outside at four weeks old as the current ducklings have done.

It is now Thursday morning, the sun is just starting to lighten the sky and I am going to head outside and try to curtail any unpleasantness in the chicken shed, but first, as always, it's time to make a cuppa.

Thoughtful Thursday

Yesterday evening, after a lot of planning, Mr J and I (with help from our neighbour) bolted together the body of the second-hand shed. This will be the new chicken shed (a chick shack) to replace the mini village of small chicken houses that they currently use.

The small houses will not go to waste, far from it, they will become home to chicks and young birds until they are large enough to join the flock and can be used if we need to isolate a chicken due to broodiness, ill-health or if they are a new arrival that needs to be kept separate for a while.

This morning we had a visit from Anna, whom I have known since 1979 when I met her at the college we both attended. Anna and I have been firm friends ever since and although we don't see each other very often, we always meet up when we can and about ten years ago I went to stay with her for a week or so. When we were 18 years old, Anna moved to Australia. She only went for a year, to gain some catering experience and see another culture, but she decided that she loved it there and made her home on the other side of the world. She lives on the beautiful island of Tasmania and my memories of it are of clean air, good quality light and a very relaxed feel. We have one of those friendships that has little communication between visits, but then we pick up where we left off as though it was only yesterday that we last saw each other. I treasure our friendship.

After Anna had left I pottered in the garden for a while and as it was starting to get very warm outside, I headed to the shady area next to the piggeries. This back garden area is shaded by several very large sycamore trees and we have left the grass to grow long except for a couple of pathways through it which Mr J cut for ease of getting around. I enjoy the way the grass moves in the wind and the seed heads sit like a frothy foam above the rich green grass stalks. The previous owners had planted lots of flowering plants and herbs in this area and bit by bit I have been moving them to other areas of the garden. Today I spotted this lovely combination hiding amongst the tall grass. The sage has huge golden-green leaves and the grey leaves of the Nepeta contrast nicely with its purple flowers.

I spent quite a while watching the wind move the grass and listening to the birds singing. I think it's really important that we take the time to enjoy our environment and I probably don't do it often enough. Mr J and I are so lucky to have found this beautiful place and even more fortunate to have been able to make it our home.

While I'm walking around the garden I always keep a watchful eye for seedlings and young plants that have self-seeded. These voluntary plants are starting to form the basis of a hedge along the last stretch of fencing that doesn't have a hedge yet. Today I found a couple of hornbeam seedlings that have seeded themselves from the hedge that surrounds the back garden. In the next few days, I will move them to the other side of the smallholding where I have started the hedge with some willow, small conifers and honeysuckles. To this I will add the four small trees that my daughter gave me for Mother's Day earlier in the year, a couple of sycamore seedlings (which are around a foot high at the moment) and a horse chestnut seedling given to us by my daughter's father-in-law. I've potted up some tiny hawthorn trees, but will let them grow for another year or so before planting them into the hedge. I also plan to take cuttings from the young hedge that I put around two-thirds of the paddock in the early spring. Then I can add wild rose and dog rose to the final stretch of hedge.

My friends and family are being very generous in giving us plants for the garden and now our neighbours have invited me to have a look around their garden to see if there is anything I'd like cuttings or divisions of. It won't take long for the shrubbery and herbaceous border to fill up and fill out. The vegetable and fruit garden are also being planted with gifted plants. Loganberries, oca, herbs and seeds have been given and we have repaid some of folks' kindness by giving them eggs and the promise of jams and chutneys once the plants have grown.

By the greenhouse I've checked on the courgettes that I gave some nettle tonic to and they seem to have improved already, so this morning I watered the courgettes that are planted in the garden with the tonic mixture and hopefully in a few days they will have picked up too. I haven't noticed any flying insects in the greenhouse and there is also very little breeze in there, so I think I will need to hand pollinate the tomato flowers this evening to ensure that we get a good crop of tomatoes this year.

On Tuesday, while we were out and about, Mr J and I called at the garden centre and bought a triple blade hoe. So shortly I'm going back out to the garden to tackle some of the weeds in the herbaceous border, but first, as always, I'll make a cuppa.