Not enough eggs!

On Wednesday I put a small item on our local community page on Facebook asking whether anyone would be interested in buying some of our eggs. In my last blog I talked about my hope that a couple or three people may want to buy our surplus eggs rather than them going to waste.

Well a few minutes after I posed my question on the community page something amazing started to happen. Someone responded and then someone else and then quite a few more and then it became a rapid stream of people saying that they'd be interested in buying our eggs. As I type there are in excess of 230 responses! It seems that I won't need to do a delivery service, folks are more than happy to travel to collect them from us.

I spent Wednesday evening feeling more than a little overwhelmed, the positive response was a delight and they have kept on coming steadily ever since. As a way to communicate with quite so many potential egg purchasers at once, I set up a Facebook page for the smallholding. And I've amended the original post to say that I've set up a farm page, but still the comments from people interested keep appearing.

Anyway, I ordered some plain egg boxes from eBay (this is an affiliate link) and will spend a while designing a suitable label that I can stick on top of the box. 

Thursday the first of the local residents arrived to buy some eggs. It was very nice to know that the girls' eggs were going to be appreciated by someone else and not assigned to the food recycling bin. Since then several more boxes of eggs have been sold and although I will never become rich (or even make a profit) from farmgate egg sales, the few pounds each week will help towards the cost of the chicken and duck feed for at least part of the year.

The response was so good, that I feel it would be worth having some more chickens, but only if they are good layers and are dual purpose birds that can be used for the table when either they stop laying in the winter or slow down with age. Having additional birds here that cost us money to feed throughout the winter, purely so I can sell their eggs in spring and summer would be pointless. Even I know that it wouldn't make economic sense to do that!

I spotted an advert in our local farmer's store for a trio of Light Sussex birds for £20 and when I texted to see if they were still available, I was told that there were only two left but that they were free to a good home. Well, I consider us to be a good home and so delightfully, we will be picking up the new birds this evening.

There's another positive to this, one that is less obvious, but in some ways more important. And this is that I have met almost more local people in seventy-two hours than I have in the sixteen months since we moved here! It's not that folks here are unfriendly, just like everywhere, they are mostly lovely, it's just that I don't really go anywhere to meet anyone. I am more than happy pottering around on our smallholding and most of the time don't feel the need to venture further afield. I don't go to cafes, pubs or other places that I might bump into people and start chatting and I don't go to the local shop regularly as Mr J does the local shopping. So the lack of socialising is entirely of my own doing and while I am very happy in my own company, it has been jolly nice to meet some new people.

I have however made lots of friends via social media. A group of smallholders chat to each other regularly and at the end of summer last year some of us met up for a barbecue at the home of one smallholder. We had planned to have another meet up in November, but the Avian Flu Prevention Zone meant that it was unwise for smallholders, all of whom are poultry keepers, to go trekking across the country to meet  up, so we delayed the gathering.  
Now that the Prevention Zone measures are relaxed a little, we decided that the next week or two was a good moment to meet up. We can't wait too much longer as lambing will begin for many of the smallholders, so next weekend a few friends are coming to our smallholding for a bite to eat and a bit of socialising. Not only is it nice to be able to see other's smallholdings, but it's great to be able to pick a few brains about ideas for our smallholding. It certainly won't take people very long to walk around it, but the compact size of our land means that we have to make every inch count and work well for us.

As spring has arrived, Mr J and I have started to tidy up after the cold winter months prevented us from tackling too many tasks outside. Of all the maintenance jobs that there are, picking the weeds out of the gravel in the yard is one of our least favourites. So on Saturday, I grabbed a padded kneeler (block of foam) and got down on my hands and knees to work on a particularly weedy and grassy corner. It doesn't take too long to clear a patch, it's just rough on the hands and knees!

And as another growing season is starting my thoughts have turned to the greenhouse and planting seeds. I spent one morning a week or so ago planting seeds into module trays and am pleased to see that some of them have already germinated. Next week I hope to continue with sowing seeds to fill the greenhouse with small plants that are strong and healthy before the end of May when it is safe to plant out the more tender of the plants.

Back to today, before we collect the new birds this evening, we need to clean and prepare the isolation house for the new birds so that they can have a few days in there before joining the rest of the flock. We do this to give the birds a little time to acclimatise to their new surroundings and get used to us and for us to be sure that they don't have any illnesses that they could then pass on to the rest of our birds.

But before I prepare the isolation house, I think there's just 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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Women, ducks and chicken

It's International Women's Day and while I was letting the birds out this morning I thought back to the first IWD celebrations that I remember taking part in, all the way back in 1986, over 30 years ago. I was thinking about how much life has changed, how many differing roles I've had in that time and yet, hopefully, I am still true to myself. I thought about some of the amazing women that I've met, that I've been inspired by, watched (and as best I can supported) struggle through adversities and still hold everything together. And I thought about another woman, one who has inspired me the most throughout my whole life, my sister, who if she wasn't my sister, I would choose to have as a close friend.

Over the last year or so I have met a group of adventurous, bold, brave and inspiring women who have chosen to live a life not too dissimilar to ours. Some are pig farmers, others keep sheep, most have poultry and some focus on plant crops, but all of them have a great sense of humour and a level of grit and determination that has allowed them to thrive in their smallholding lives. Happy International Women's Day to every woman everywhere.

Back to our smallholding.

Yesterday we took a trip out to Stroud in the Cotswolds to buy a secondhand incubator. It's the same as the one we use now, a Brinsea Octagon 20. It will allow us to incubate two sets of eggs at the same time, which means that we can hatch some ducks. 

As if the ducks knew our plans, this morning I found three eggs in the duck house, so all of our girls are now laying. I'll leave it a few days for the new layers to settle into a rhythm and then I'll check for fertility by putting a few eggs into an incubator and candling them after a week to see whether there are tiny embryos developing inside the eggs. As soon as I am sure that they are fertile, I will pop a batch of duck eggs into the incubator to hatch. We have one girl that is smaller and noisier than the others and I think she is a Cherry Valley bird rather than an Aylesbury (although I purchased the hatching eggs as Aylesbury), I don't really want to breed from her, so I will select the larger eggs laid by the other two for hatching and keep the smaller bird's slightly smaller eggs for eating.

Once we have had the first hatch of ducklings of the year (and I've got over the sheer joy and excitement) I will be able to offer hatching eggs for sale secure in the knowledge that they produce good birds. We will grow the hatched ducklings on, keeping a couple of the girls to increase our flock and depending on numbers, sell the other ducks and dispatch the drakes for our freezer. And we will repeat the process throughout spring and early summer to give us a small income and a well stocked freezer giving us some food security for the rest of the year.

We are now getting lots of chickens eggs each day, actually we have way more eggs than I know what to do with. The daily egg count is now in the region of 18 eggs and however much Mr J and I like eggs, even we couldn't eat that many. So I need to find a suitable way to sell some eggs locally. To that end, today I am going to put the feelers out a little more and see if there is a market in the next village for some fresh eggs from chickens that are raised on organic principles. 

I thought that I might do a weekly delivery of eggs to folks who have already ordered them. I would put an honesty box at the end of the lane, but I don't think that there is a safe place for cars to pull over to buy them and the last thing I want to do is cause an accident. I will put a sign out on our lane to show that we have eggs for sale at the farm gate, but securing a regular order of eggs is much more sensible. In an area of lots of smallholdings and farms, selling eggs is not necessarily as easy as it might be, but I hope that there are some local folks who would prefer that their food is raised organically and would like to have our eggs.

Delivering the eggs to the local village would also limit the number of vehicles coming on the smallholding. I am still trying to restrict movements to reduce the risk of the spread of avian flu, although I've put a deep strip of straw drenched in disinfectant in front of our gate which, hopefully, would kill of any potentially harmful microbes from tyres as they drive through it. There's a fine line between suitably cautious preventative measures and utter paranoia about others coming on to the premises. I choose to stay on the suitably cautious side of the line.

I was pleased to see yesterday, that this article in Country Smallholding was published online. I made a contribution to it by sharing my thoughts and ideas with Kim, who wrote the article and by being a case study. You can read it here.

I now need to head outside and tackle some fencing issues, but first I think it must be 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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Compost boost

 Ooh, I've been sent what may turn out to be a rather nifty product to try out. Bio-Enzym make a range of products for the garden and first of all I'm going try out their Bio-P4 organic compost accelerator.

Now those who are familiar with my blog will know that I love making compost, that I make quite a bit of compost, in fact I make loads of compost! The reason for my composting enthusiasm has less to do with any green credentials and more to do with the soil here. Or should I say the lack of soil.

Photo from old property details

The field next to our house used to have commercial greenhouses on it, but sadly they were in a dilapidated state and so taken down by the previous owners of our smallholding. Inevitably some (a lot) of glass ended up on the ground. Then, when they were having the kitchen extension built, the sub-soil that was dug out for the foundations was put on top of the glassy grassy area. Grass and weeds grew in abundance on the field and for three to four years it was grazed by alpacas and a pony, which compacted the soil into a concrete hard base during the summer and a water-logged swampy area in the winter. I exaggerate of course, but only just.

Anyway, the lack of decent soil and the inability to get a spade into the ground to dig it over meant that I decided to create raised beds in which to grow our fruit and vegetables and to adopt a no-dig method of cultivation. But raised beds require soil and the best way to make more soil is through composting. We bought in some top soil but it's £40 a ton and it takes a ton to fill one raised bed to a 4 inch depth. I'd ideally like the beds to be about eight inches deep, so that would cost £80 per raised bed and there are twenty-two raised beds. My budget for creating the annual vegetable garden was, well, zero. So bought in top soil was not a sensible option for filling all the beds. But making my own compost was. It meant that a little top soil could be mixed with a lot of the compost to create a reasonable growing medium. 

Trying to be realistic about my capacity to make compost I've started with beds that are three to four inches deep so that I could at least start growing some food and I plan to build the depth of them year after year. I also didn't make all the raised beds in the first year, but I hope that by the end of 2017, all the raised beds will have been created.

So my composting adventure began quite soon after we moved in, I made one compost bin from three pallets that were lying around the smallholding and that was it, I was hooked on pallet compost bins. 

Since then I have built a fence made from pallets around the vegetable garden, which has made a series of compost bays. Some of the bays will also be for storage and for water collection, but most of them will be filled with compost in its varying stages of decomposition. 

At first I struggled to find enough material with which to make compost, but now that we have the poultry I have a never ending supply of woodshavings with poultry manure and the grass cuttings from the areas that could be loosely described as lawns, masses of leaves from the huge sycamore trees and of course all the green matter from the vegetable garden.

I used a fair amount of straw in the first compost heaps, but I am less convinced now that this is a very good idea. The straw has to be bought in and we have no way of knowing what chemicals were used on the crops before they were harvested and the straw cut. So I will use what is already on site, but will wait until I find a source of organic straw before buying in more for compost making.

Anyway, back to my trial of the compost accelerator, I plan to make a couple of compost heaps next to each other and try as best I can to fill them with the same proportions of materials, so that whenever we take out the kitchen compost bucket, I will divide it between the two heaps, likewise grass, woodshavings, wood chippings etc. will all be divided as equally as I can between the two heaps. Once the compost bays are filled I will use the Bio-P4 on one of the two heaps and see how it works. 

I can check the temperature and also see how well the organic matter is breaking down. Health permitting, I hope to turn the heaps at least a couple of times to add air and mix the 'ingredients' and will water them if necessary during dryer weather.

I will be honest in my assessment of this product, although I was given the product to try, I am not being paid for a review. I will give my honest opinion and as the two heaps will be next to each other, it should be fairly easy to compare the results.
You can find more information about Bio-P4 here and if you want to try it out too, I see that the product is currently half price. If you do decide to give it a go, please let me know in the comments below and we can compare our experiences with it.

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

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Sofa day and the vegetable garden

Goodbye Big Red, goodbye Squeaky

I don't usually put up two vlogs in one day, but yesterday's vlog was delayed and I felt it was important to put up today's vlog promptly.

FAST AND EASY making a door for the chicken house

Attacked by the rooster

I love having the chickens and ducks, I really do, but there are some aspects to chicken keeping that I'd happily do without. This is the first spring that we have kept poultry and so I am learning daily about their behaviour and it's fascinating. It seems that as the days get longer and lighter, the boys get more, well, everything. They are growing again, into tall, broad fine cockerels, they are 'paying attention' more and more to the girls and they are getting decidedly feisty, actually it's more like aggressive, with each other.

The boys that only a fortnight ago would come up to me for a cuddle are now unrecognisable, gone are the sweet natured youngsters, they have been replaced by proud, strutting adults with one thing on their mind - and nothing nor nobody had better get in their way!

Today I learnt to give the boys a little more respect and a wider berth. The Australorp boy that lives with the two girls and Dieselette (also a girl but not an Australorp) has been getting increasingly feisty over the last week and I have sensibly taken to using a poultry panel as a guard to put a little distance between me and him whenever I go into their enclosure. The poultry panel is a wooden frame about 3 feet by 2 feet and is covered with chicken wire. It means that he can see me and I him, but by holding it between us, we have a polite distance in which we can manoeuvre.

Well this evening, he caught me off guard. I had the poultry panel with me and had been using it to give us our own space and then just as I turned away to leave their enclosure he tackled me. 

Actually what he did was to peck the back of my leg. Hard. Hard enough to make me yelp! He really went for me.

But he hadn't finished with his assault, two more hard pecks on my calves and as I moved the panel between us, just for good measure he threw a couple more pecks at my hand.

Cockerel 5, Liz 0.

What's a girl to do? I am not going to have a go back at him, he is just defending his territory and protecting his girls, which is what I want him to do. Just not against me. I don't know if he finds the poultry panel threatening, but I am still going to use it when I have to go into that enclosure. Naturally I am now a little wary of going into the Australorp field, but I will still have to enter it at least twice a day, to open and close their house, but also to collect any eggs. Perhaps this is what made him so cross today, I have been into that part of the field several times today, to see if the girls had laid as I wanted to add a couple of Australorp eggs into the incubator.

Hey ho, whatever the reason for his aggressive behaviour, I have learnt my lesson and I won't be turning my back on him again any time soon. When I came back into the house and washed the five little bleeding wounds and felt thoroughly sorry for myself. I also felt somewhat foolish for having let my attention slip at just the wrong time.

I will monitor how he behaves over the next couple of months. I can't keep a bird that is going to have a go at me whenever I am nearby and I certainly don't want to breed from a bird that has a bad temperament. However, I suspect that today's grumpiness is due to a surge in hormones and being disturbed several times and that over the next couple of months his hormones will level out and die down and he will once again become a pleasant member of the flock.

Sadly if he doesn't settle down again by mid summer, he will have a date with a pot. There is no room on this smallholding for birds that aren't safe to be around us.

It's all change tomorrow in the chicken field. Squeaky, the Cream Legbar cockerel is going to a new home (in Aberdeenshire) where he will have lots of girls around him to woo. 

Big Red will be dispatched, we have two of his offspring and I have just set several eggs into the incubator that may well be his offspring too. It will be a sad day and I have mixed emotions about dispatching Big Red, but the bottom line is that we have more cockerels than we need and I would rather keep a rare breed boy than a mixed breed one and we only have so many spaces in which we can keep 'spare' cockerels.

So the mixed flock will be attended to by another Australorp boy and I can only hope that he doesn't get feisty with me too. This other boy has been living in the chicken palace with the Jersey Giants, but Big White (formerly known as Little White) has made it clear that he doesn't want another chap in his space and to prevent any fighting between the boys I have separated them and the Australorp boy will go into the mixed flock field tomorrow.

The other change that has happened is that this evening, after the birds had gone to sleep we moved the two young Jersey Giants into the chicken palace so that they can live with the rest of the Jersey Giant flock. They should have been moved weeks ago, but the lockdown messed up our plans and only now are they going to the space where they should be. I will keep a close watch over them tomorrow that they aren't being picked on too much by the other Jersey Giants and no doubt in a few weeks they will be fully integrated into the flock.

Thinking ahead, I am not sure how Big White is going to like his flock being increased by quite such a large number when we move the youngest chicks into his care in seven weeks time. There are ten little Jersey Giants in the nursery pen and assuming we haven't sold many of them by then, he will certainly have a boost to his flock.

I will be glad when the hormonal rush of spring subsides and the chicken fields can once again settle down into a gentle rhythm.

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

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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