March Madness

Spring has arrived in our part of Dorset. We were spared a hard winter this year, so the transition was nearly imperceptible, unless you take notice of the signs. Like cock pheasants sparring - usually in the middle of the road, oblivious to cars bearing down on them. And the dawn chorus which has been amazing, though the closing act is a bit of a let-down: our little bantam cockerel crowing his high-pitched squeak.

Partridge are pairing up. Hares are moving too; the phrase ‘mad as a march hare’ refers to their boxing competition for breeding rights. Our hare population is so small, there appears to be room for everybody, so no fighting is necessary.

courtesy of www.geoffreyfieldjuniorschool.co.uk

Our pheasants have started laying too - 3,000 of them. We picked up eggs for the first time today, and we’ll set our first hatch on the 30th. Egg collecting causes a kind of madness. Seven days a week, rain or shine, for the next three months. Mike has already poured me a large gin and tonic to help ease my trauma

It’s not just the animals that are pairing up. Our young underkeeper has a new girlfriend. The local farmer-oracle summed it up: “T’will pull a man farther than gunpowder will blow ‘im”.

I finished digging over the vegetable patch this morning, and then joined the throngs of gardeners at the feed store to buy my seeds and compost. We’ve used up all our overwintered onions, and have only a few potatoes left which are edible but starting to sprout. Home-grown vegetables are off the menu now until my early lettuces are ready. Dinner tonight is a leg of our home-produced lamb, and swedes which I stole harvested from a farmer friend’s field. He plants it to feed his sheep, but a few find their way into our kitchen. The same farmer has helped me solve Eudora’s chronic foot problem, and looked over all this year's lambs for me. I traded him a dozen eggs for his services, but between the shepherding help and the root vegetables, I think I at least owe him a cake.

This is Meaty. He's going to Ice Camp.

Eudora's daughter, Matilda, who I raised by hand. She's grown on fine, and is doing great.

Besides egg picking, the other spring chore on the gamekeeper’s calendar is vermin control. We have traps set for magpies, moles, crows, rats, grey squirrels, and foxes. I have a personal vendetta against the rats. Rats ate my entire garlic harvest last year and a good percentage of my potato harvest straight out of the garden. B*stards. They snack with impunity out of our chicken feeders and, most unforgivably, they have eaten the clutch of blackbird eggs out of the nest in our log pile.

This caught magpie is going to another trap, to lure in yet more magpies

Now I am on an unstoppable, one-woman rat annihilation mission: poison, rat traps, shovelling in holes. I even had a .410 laid out on the picnic table while I was digging over my vegetable garden because a rat kept peeking out from beneath a hedge. I got a shot at it and missed, though I think I scared an extra dozen eggs out of the chickens with the noise.

Gotcha! One down, about a bajillion to go...

Mike is trying to teach me to set snares for foxes. Snares are legal as long as they haven't got a self-locking mechanism. That way, if something harmless finds its way into the snare, it's easy to loose the wire and let it go. Podge the cocker spaniel can attest to this.

A fox in a snare has to be shot. Last Sunday morning I was in the shower when the phone rang. I answered it in case it was Mike. It was. He needed a shot gun to dispatch a fox. I got out of the shower, still wet, and pulled on the nearest clothing - flannel pyjama bottoms with cartoon reindeer on them and a fleece from our feed merchant with FLUBENVET embroidered in big letters on the front. A woolly hat on my head completed the look, and I drove up to the field, shot the fox, came home, put the gun in the cabinet, and got back in the shower to wash soap out of my hair.

What do I have to do to get one civilised Sunday morning with croissants and a newspaper?! Not be married to a gamekeeper, that's what. Although, now I have the unique distinction of having shot a fox in my underwear AND in my pyjamas. How they got in there, I'll never know...(aaaand rim shot! Thank you, Groucho.). It's March madness I tell you.

Easy Sunday Morning

It's perfect Sunday morning weather: grey, foggy, a bit of drizzle on the windows. I don't need much of an excuse to drink a pot of coffee and read. The weather is a sign.

Still, livestock has no respect for my lazy tendencies. Eudora is limping so after coffee and a few chapters, I checked the sheep and caught her up to trim her feet and jab her with an anti-inflammatory. I'm not sure what god has against sheep, but he's cursed them with every disease going, and the propensity for having only three working limbs at one time. The lambs have stopped dying - for now - though Matilda had a bad case of bloat that kept me up one night on lamb watch. She pulled though but I weaned her the next day. She's got to make her own way in the field now, with an evening meal of lamb nuts and barley of course.

The weather hasn't turned cold yet; in fact it's been so mild that I'm still finding ticks on the dogs, a week before Thanksgiving. Most of the dogs were still in their beds this morning, with their noses poked up their bottoms, when I brought them breakfast. We've been shooting most days, though it's illegal to shoot on a Sunday so all are guaranteed a day of rest. On the last drive yesterday, I watched Spud excavate a little sleeping nest for herself and lay down to nap, while waiting for the action to start. She's getting experienced enough to know to take a rest when she can get it.

I'm also learning to maximise my time. On shoot days, there's a lot of time stood waiting for guns to get ready and birds to move, so I now keep a small knitting project in my coat pocket. I'm knitting Mike's Christmas present: a hat knit from our own sheeps' wool -

Still life with 3/4ths of a hat and footrot spray

Living in my coat pocket means there are a few feathers that have accidentally been knitted in with the wool, but I can extract those later, or leave them in and tell him they're part of the design. Poultry chic. I'm working on a pair of socks too, but those are my evening project, as they take more concentration than a knit 2, purl 2 hat.

Shooting season means means a glut of meat. The dogs are eating so much now to hold their weight that I ran out of dog food. So did underkeeper Pete. I'll breast off a load of pheasants from yesterday and cook them up with rice and oil - that can double as our dinner, as well as the dogs'. I know it's shooting season when I open up the fridge and find pairs of legs poking out between the butter and the bacon -

Giving Quincy her breakfast this morning, I noticed spots of blood in her bed. Quincy is having her first season, which means she's no longer a puppy. It also means all the loose, male dogs in the neighborhood will be pining outside our kennels for the next fortnight. I'll have to protect her maidenhood during our training sessions in the field. Quincy is doing so well. She's passed her Gun dog Puppy certificate and is moving up a grade.

Quincy and her partridge dummy

She's just shy of a year old now, born Christmas week 2010. She is going to be a happy, talented little worker. She'll take Pip's place next year. Pip was always going to have an early retirement with her dodgy hips. I'll take Pip and Quincy out together, so Quincy can gain a bit of confidence following a more experienced dog. So far, all Pip has taught Quincy is how to make a dent in the couch.

Speaking of making a dent in the couch, Christmas movies have started on TV and I have a crop of dried beans to shell for next year's spring planting. I don't feel guilty watching TV if my hands are busy shelling beans or knitting. I love schmaltzy Christmas films because of the themes of hope and redemption. It's the same thing I feel when I think about the vegetable garden. I can visualise a whole crop in a tiny seed. I plant all my hopes that a successful harvest will come to fruition, even though I know there are bound to be some failures.

I hope your Sunday is equally as restful - accompanied by the sound of snoring dogs, and next year's seeds.

6pm last night, two tired workers.

Tunnels of Love

It's Sunday night. Mike and I are spending a romantic pre-Valentine's evening together in front of the fire...making tunnels for pheasant catchers.

I'm using chicken wire to form cone shapes. The tunnels are wide at the entrance and narrow at the exit. They allow the birds into the catcher but prevent them from getting out again.

The dogs soon got bored of watching me, but were happy to stick around and share the heat from the wood burner.

One down, another 19 to go.

The oven is still broken so no cooking for another week at least. Mike's providing Valentine's Day dinner: take away curry for two, and probably another night of making tunnels (No, that's not a euphemism).

It's apropos in a way; the catchers bring together the hens and cock pheasants so, in spring, they can mate and lay eggs which we will hatch and raise as next season's birds. Maybe that's less romance than reproduction. As the hens can't escape, maybe it's more like abduction.

The more I learn about gamekeeping, the more I realise the romance of the rural idyll exists only in books, like romance only exists in books. Real life is tough, but far more rich and rewarding, like real love. The kind that is contented to make tunnels on Valentine's Day and to share one's poppadoms with a labrador.

Finished!

I've started my "last day of shooting season" rituals. Consigning the blood-spattered tweeds to the dry cleaning pile, putting the walkie-talkies away in a drawer, and the worn but comfortable shooting socks in the darning pile. It was cleansing, in all senses of the word, to hoover up all stray feathers that have followed the dogs or Mike through the back door (I found one in a kitchen drawer), as well as taking all the towels off of the sofa. The house smells better already.

The end of Spud's first working season. I hope it will be the first of many.

The dogs know it's over. Each got a big knuckle bone from the butcher shop as a thank you for their hard work. I'm writing this post to the accompanying sound of scraping and crunching.

Is that a bone or a lip plate, Pip?

I'm just as happy (if less noisy) drinking my pot of Green Mountain Pumpkin Spice coffee which I've been saving as a reward for this last day of the season. Laurie from Dog Hair in my Coffee sent it to me in a care package, along with The Bucolic Plague (a book, not a disease). Just out of the kindness of her heart. Laurie provided me a damn fine cup of coffee, and I supplied the dog hair.

The woodcock are for a Moroccan Pie, the partridge will be plucked for roasting later.

I'm also processing some of the game hurriedly procured before the season ended. Usually it could hang a day or two longer but the weather's warming up and I don't want to risk it spoiling.

I didn't shoot any of what I'm butchering now. I walked up the hedgerows yesterday with the cocker spaniel and the flat coat. The pair did a bang up job putting the birds over me, and I did a crap job bringing any down, missing 3 pheasants and a woodcock. Mike brought home 2 partridge and another woodcock from his day's shooting, so no one's going to go hungry. The way I was missing everything, I thought we were going to have to eat the flat coat.

One of the young lads who comes beating is completing his Gamekeeping qualification at college. Having been brought up on a dairy farm, he's already used to hard work. His father lets him run a duck shoot on the farm, and he brought me two oven-ready mallards for my larder this morning.
The ducks - I'm making confit with the legs, and crowns are for roasting late

He's only 16 and can't drive a car yet (the driving age being 17 in the UK) but because of arcane agricultural laws he can drive a tractor. So he drives ten miles to our shoot every Saturday in their farm's brand new 3-ton tractor. It makes me smile to see this teenage boy, thinner than a pencil with the wood shaved off, climb out of the cab in his too-big tweeds ready for work. It's funny moments like that I'll miss, now that this season's over.

There's a dinner tonight in the village cafe for all the shoot workers, venison stew washed down with port, homemade sloe gin, and more port. It's rarely a sober affair. Let's just say we're not surprised when we find a Land Rover abandoned in the hedge in our garden, or an underkeeper wrapped in a horse blanket asleep under another vehicle. I have to stay compos mentis so I can prevent our revellers from dying of exposure, or suffering a severe near death-by-pecking experience from the chickens.

Tomorrow it will be the start of the new season, and a new set of worries. Mike won't take the day off, and he'll be up before dawn ready to start building his catchers, to catch up the next season's laying stock. My thoughts will also change from harvesting, to sowing and growing: vegetables and a good crop of grass on Milkweed. I need to improve my soil fertility programme, get contractors to put down a base for the stables/lambing shed at Milkweed, and find a ram to put to my flock of ewes.

Our Cobb meat chickens are growing on well. I like this breed so far.

It's the start of making our smallholding pay and there are some serious obstacles. Our sales tax in England has gone up to 20%. The cost of feed has doubled and is still rising. There's a shortage of hay, and if we have a long winter I'm in danger of running out. I dread another month where the Recently Called list on my mobile reads VET - VET - HORSE VET.

Worst of all diesel is now the equivalent of $9.70 a gallon. I need to pursue a path less dependent on fuel and chemical fertilisers. I will have plenty of time to ponder growing systems while I'm painting the kennels, which is the first job on tomorrow's list.

Feet up time, at least until the morning

Sheep and Deer and Fox and Dogs

I got up this morning in anticipation of catching the partial solar eclipse, but instead I was treated to the flat grey fog that England is famous for. I missed the lunar eclipse last week for the same reason. All the grandeur of astronomically significant events scuppered by a low front. I sulked for a bit, until the clouds dropped fat snowflakes. Nothing accumulated, but it made a lovely wintry backdrop for my morning chores.

One of my chores is still handfeeding Eudora. Her sight, or perhaps her neurological impairment, is preventing her feeding properly without help. I'm still hoping this is a temporary set-back, and I've called the vet yet again. To tempt her appetite back, I feed her all her favorites: molasses-flavored water, sugar beet, and barley. Ivy is a good tonic for sheep so on shoot days while I'm supposed to be watching birds overhead, I'm picking young ivy leaves and stuffing my pockets full, to bring back for Eudora.

Even I know I'm a bit of a sucker for spoiling her with treats. Eudora can't be that impaired as she's already learned that if she bleats she gets fed. You could argue that I'm the impaired one, handfeeding a sheep on demand. I'm thinking of re-naming her "Eudora, Queen of Sheepa". I draw the line at building her a throne.

From sheep to pigs: we took delivery of half a pig from Peggy, my butchery teacher. She kindly saved me the belly in one piece, so I could try curing my own bacon.

A side-view of the pork belly in cure

I've used her recipe, and the pork is now submerged in its curing solution, salt, and water. I need to leave it soaking for the next 5 days. It will be ready to hang in the chiller for drying on Sunday, just as the two deer hanging in the chiller now will be ready for me to take out and butcher.

I didn't shoot these two; Dave the stalker shot them for me so I could have a bit of time off over Christmas with Mike. I still need to cull three more roe does from that area by the end of March because I culled a buck there last summer. The roe deer management ratio for our area of England is 2.5 does per buck. I will aim to take an older buck out of the area this coming summer.

Nearly all keepers' wives help on shoot days working the dogs or cooking, and in the off-season we help raise the chicks, but only a few of us stalk deer or help with vermin control. We're a large shoot but have a small staff, so we need all the help we can get: outside stalkers, ferretters to control the rabbits, contractors with tractors to put in crops for the pheasant. And willing wives of course.

To add to the workload this time of year, it's mating season for foxes. Vixens call up dog foxes, who flood in looking for a good time. Underkeeper Pete and Stalker Dave have shot a few, but I'm taking the lazy option:

A fox cage, baited with cat food. It's on duty all night protecting my chickens (I already have to get up at 2 a.m. to feed Eudora). I set it this evening, and almost immediate caught Podge in it. She knows a cage trap means tasty treats, and that we'll eventually come and let her out. Gun dogs are too smart for their own good.

And Mike's just this minute told me we're about to adopt a chocolate labrador! It's a temporary arrangement. One of our clients has been looking for another chocolate lab, and we've been offered a 3 year old bitch that needs a new home. I will settle it in with us, and make sure it has all its basic gun dog training before it goes to its new home.

I'm glad it's a labrador, as they're pretty easy going. Spaniels have more energy than I do. However, between 6 dogs and a self-important ewe taking up all the kennel space, I will have to make room for the new dog in the house.

Thankfully, one of the perks of shoot season is that the shoot guests never finish their wine and kindly give the keeper the extra bottles from their well-stocked cellars. The availability of good wine helps me to cope when my husband tells me he's bringing home another dog.

We've been so busy I've not really had time to think about the New Year or relevent resolutions. We celebrate slightly different holidays, based around the rural calendar. Our holiday period starts Christmas eve and officially ends on Distaff Day, which is this Friday. Traditionally Distaff Day is when women resume their work, picking up the distaff and starting to spin wool I suppose. Typically, men's work doesn't start until Plough Monday, two days later than women's work starts. Read into that what you will.

Anyway, it's only 352 more days til Christmas eve.

More foxes

Underkeeper Pete organised a fox drive last night. The concept is a few people with guns stand in a field on the edge of a woodland while others walk through the wood. The fox is disturbed by the walkers and breaks cover in front of the waiting guns. It's a more common practice on the continent. In France, I often saw a line of men dressed in country clothes, guns ready, almost vibrating with excitement on a roadside, while others walked through crops of corn disturbing wild pigs or foxes in their direction.

We only had one fox for our evening's work - a vixen. Her milk was dried up so her cubs were old enough to fend for themselves. Mike saw her leave her earth and run in the opposite direction, no doubt to draw our attention from her cubs. I called her and Dave shot her. She's still moulting her winter coat, and she's thin from feeding her young.

Fox driving doesn't seem the most efficient way to clear up foxes. Unless you get lucky and move quite a few through at once. But there is a social aspect, and this time of year when outdoor folk are busy cutting hay or lambing, this in an excuse to get together and catch up. When all the grass is cut, we'll go back to calling foxes to us, instead of chasing them. Fox calling is a solitary pursuit - one hunter and her rifle. And maybe her husband to call the fox because she's pretty rubbish at making the noise.

Besides the camaraderie, the views are great. I can see my house from the first drive -

 It's right in the middle of the picture. It looks very small from here.

I can see the sea from the second drive. I often forget how close we are to the ocean.

I have been practicing my squirrel trapping too. Here's my barrel -

It's a standard pheasant feeder. Our feeders are upcycled from a shipping container used by a local leather factory. We cut mailbox feeder slots into two sides -

For trapping squirrels, just enough wheat is put in to cover the bottom of the feeder (so pheasants can't reach) and a fen trap is placed on top -

I've left too much wheat in the bin and it's jamming the plate from beneath, stopping the trap from snapping shut. I would stop and check my trap, just to find a squirrel pouring out of the letterbox slot like quicksilver and making for the nearest tree. I've taken some more wheat out and set a second fen, so I'm hoping to find two full traps in the morning.

The springs are strong. I can attest to this as I caught the tip of my middle finger in one a week ago and it still hurts. I was lucky it was only the very end. It's perfectly capable of breaking bone. It needs to be, to ensure a quick death. I make sure the springs are strong, and I check my traps more often than is required, just to be sure nothing's trapped awkwardly or going to suffer. I have recipes for squirrel but so far I've been feeding them to the crows as an excuse not to eat one myself.

Some of the dogs came out with me to check traps today -

They almost look well-behaved here. Don't be fooled. When I took this picture they'd already been running, flat out through the woods, for nearly an hour. That's why all the lolling tongues. Pip, the yellow lab was full of energy this morning but skipped the evening walk, as she found a better proposition -

Shotgun!

That's what I get for forgetting to make the bed. The chickens were more helpful -

I've moved a few chicken houses and decided to turn their nitrogen-rich earth into a couple of vegetable beds. The chickens are clearing any tasty pests and refining the tilth for me. (All that and eggs too -  chickens are great!) It won't be a pretty veg patch, but it might keep us in lettuces over summer, if I can chicken-proof it. Well, at least I know one of us will eat anyway.

Mike's gone to do his final check of the incubators, and I'm off to bed. If I can convince Pip to go halves with me on that side.

Fox vs. chickens

I think the fox cub in the trap was a portent of things to come.

These warm evenings mean we can sleep with the window open. Besides a pleasant night breeze, I can hear any chicken stirrings or unwanted predators. One is usually caused by the other. At 1.30am I jumped out of bed - I could hear chickens being attacked. I looked out the window and all was calm in our garden. It was Simon the gardener's chickens. He's only a couple doors down from us (door number four in a village with six doors in total).

I took the shepherd and a flashlight, and jogged down the road. Dakota will see off any predator and I hoped we could help if Simon and his brood were in trouble. No fox. All the chickens were fine. Theories are that a rat got in or the neighbor's cat had been the culprit. They were just a bit spooked.

Simon's lucky that I sleep in pyjamas. I got back home and found Mike standing in the garden in his birthday suit (which I told him needs ironing).

Other chickens were not so lucky last night. Ronnie, another underkeeper, shot a fox in his chicken run while it feasted on one of his hens. And down the Big House, a hen brooding on eggs was taken off her nest. It's always the hens. I think we might go out tonight with a rifle and a lamp and see if we can stop any foxes before they drop by for another visit.

My crow traps have gone quiet again. I sometimes think when I'm "controlling" the crows and magpies if, in future years, we will be working to protect them. I was looking at a book from a century ago about large sparrow hunts. House sparrows were considered a pest and hunted in great numbers. Something to do with thatched roofs (rooves?) on houses which were the norm then (they are not uncommon now). Whether they nested in there or ate it, I have no idea.

In the past few years, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds decreed that house sparrows, along with starlings (also previously a pest species), are on the decline. I feed the birds in my garden to help re-establish the numbers. One century's pest is another's protected species.

The common buzzard (Buteo buteo) courtesy www.english-country-garden.com

Buzzards, a sort of hawk, are increasing in numbers so much that there has been a push to take away their protected status. Gamekeepers traditionally loathe buzzards because of their taste for young pheasants, but aren't allowed to shoot or trap them. I found a dead buzzard this morning while walking the dogs. It hadn't been shot, and there was no outward sign of trauma (see, what did I tell you, there should be an CSI: Woodlands). Overpopulation can result in the death of weaker members of a species. Maybe dead buzzards will become a more common sight.

Gamekeeping students have been here today helping with jobs on the shoot. This has freed me to catch up with paperwork and make dinner, not just tonight's but tomorrow's too (Lamb lasagne in case you're desperate to know). For the first time in days we're eating dinner before 10pm. I'm eating mine while I write this. My multitasking is improving.

As a woman I'm supposed to excel at multitasking, but as I get older I've reached the point where my multitasking skills are being hindered by my ageing brain. I've adapted by making sure that one of the two tasks being done simultaneously is a no-brainer task. For example:

I can catch up on my reading while filling all the hatcher trays with water, and keep the door propped open with my foot. Here, I am the embodiment of multitasking. And if you are coveting my fashionable footwear, you too can get the same look if you start buying your clothes at the same place you buy your animal feeds and drill bits.

I wished I could have brought my knitting instead. I bet Mike £10 ($15) that I could finish the cardigan I'm knitting by the end of April. When I realised I couldn't make the date, I proposed double or nothing for the end of May. I have half a side to finish, and the sewing up, and only 4 days left. I'm already trying to argue for extra time in lieu of the fact that I've been helping to put up pheasant pens, deliver chicks for the shoot, and fill hatcher trays out of the kindness of my heart. Mike's not budging. I may have to start my day at 5am tomorrow. Unless my need for sleep is more stubbornly unyielding than my need to win. Both are pretty strong.

Finally, a chicken update: my two offenders have been dealt with. Leniency prevailed. I put the game hen in the pheasant pen in the woods. She immediately took up with a bantam cockerel in there from last year, so they now have each other. Myfanwy is going to live with a local family who just like having chickens but aren't worried about eggs. The perfect home for an egg-eating chicken. And I don't have to take anything for a walk to the log pile.

Well, that's not exactly true. The last remaining meat chicken has decided to start eating eggs. She was given a reprieve because she was laying. She has sealed her own fate. Now she will be sealed in her own juices. When the weather cools down, we will be visiting the log pile together. 

Coming up short

Everything's growing. The chicken babies are getting bigger; some are foraging without their mothers now. Others are big enough to go to roost at night. Pheasant and partridge chicks are spending the warmer days and even nights now in their outdoor runs. Their adult feathers begin to grow and make their wings hang down which give them a slouchy teenager walk. The lambs are so fat it's almost obscene. And the horses have round spring bellies.

The only thing that's not growing well is the grass.

It doesn't matter what you farm: sheep, cattle, even alpacas. You are only ever a grass farmer. Everything depends on grass. Lactating ewes need it to make milk to feed this year's crop of lambs. Lambs and calves need it to graze. Even deer need the long grass as cover to hide their young.

A cold winter and a dry spring mean the grass has been slow to grow. Most of my time at the moment is spent moving grazing animals to any available patch of grass, even if I have to stand there with them as they eat it. Sometimes I'm patching fences with whatever I can find in the back of the truck: wire, baling twine. I had to tie two gates closed on a paddock this morning with the horses' bridles so they could graze the best of the grass in there.

The permanent pony paddock is left of the fence. It's horse sick and needs fertilizer and time to grow without being pestered by two gluttonous horses. I have let them onto the track the other side of their paddock, to let them eat what they can from that small piece of field, and for emergency fencing purposes ---

I blocked them in with the truck. The ingenious part of the plan was that I brought my knitting and a flask of coffee and was able to sit there and have an hour to myself.

The local farmers have a saying "Fog in March, Frost in May, isn't any good for hay". Which is exactly what we had. This means that hay is going to be short again this year. We need to get bales made, or bought and stored, before the end of summer.

We've just about come to the end of crow trapping season. I will pack up my traps by 1 June. I was surprised to see what was waiting for me in a crow trap this morning -

It's a fox cub. He climbed into the trap and got himself caught.

He might look like he's being cute in this picture, but he's actually hissing and snarling at me. This cub is the sign that it's time to trade in my crow traps for a gun, and do some fox control in the evenings. They get bigger alongside the pheasant poults. The foxes will have their share of the pheasants before pheasant shooting season.

Country Life

I'm just about through the sack of bread flour I bought from our village co-op. By lucky chance, we took delivery of 10 tons of wheat yesterday from a neighboring farm for pheasant food. And the previous evening I finished reading the chapter on breadmaking in John Seymour's book I'm a Stranger Here Myself . The forces of nature were aligning to tell me to get on and grind my own damn wheat for bread.

Here's the wheat in its "berry" form, which I took straight from our storage bin. It's as we feed it to the pheasants and chickens -

Get off chicken! This bowl's mine

It's already been separated from the chaff, so it's ready to be ground into flour. I haven't got a special machine for that, but I do have a coffee grinder and I figure it's the same principle.

 I set it on the coarsest grind and pressed the button, just like the farm wives of yore did -

wheat berries before grinding (L) and after grinding (R)

It looks like flour to me. I stuck it in the breadmaker on a basic wholemeal programme (again, like the farm wives of yore) and -

Ta Daa!!

Bread! And a very tasty loaf too. Next time I might add a bit of vitamin C powder to help with the rise, and maybe a few seeds for texture, but all in all a success. The wheat is grown within 3 miles of here, and it gets delivered by the ton. I don't think I'll need to re-order any flour from the co-op this month.

This also works on dried corn (maize) and produces a nice fine cornmeal. I assume it also works on coffee beans.

I also bought some more sheep yesterday - 3 Polled Dorset ewes to double my small flock. Buying sheep is starting to feel natural now, where it used to feel like a part of a farming dream that was out of my reach (I mean hey - what did I know about farming?!?). I stood in a field of lambs and ewes with the farmer. He was leaning on his crook and his sheepdog lay down at heel, waiting for instruction.

What a marvellous invention the sheepdog. We stood by the gate and with one whistle the dog was gone, out, behind the sheep, and bringing them back to us for inspection. None of this walking out to look at your flock nonsense.

I tried to picture some of our dogs in this sheepdog role: Jazz and Pip would be clinging to my leg in mortal fear of the sheep. Podge would try an initiate a doggie play game with them. Nellie would ignore the sheep as being obviously inferior. Dakota would look at the flock as a culling mission. Nope, the sheep may be a reality but the sheepdog is still very theoretical. You need a larger flock than mine to give a sheepdog enough to do. Looks like I'll be fetching my own sheep then, at least for now.

I chose three ewes of short, stocky confirmation with a decent wool length for spinning. I left them with the farmer to be shorn and serviced by the ram. I will pick the girls up in a few months time, hopefully in lamb and ready to deliver in the autumn. This gives me another year without the need for feeding and looking after my own ram, and a chance to get the fencing on Milkweed farm finished in the next couple of weeks.

I'm off to the agricultural merchants this morning for the posts and wire to fence the field, and for some timber to build broody coops for all the chicks that are about to hatch. They can only live in a bucket under a light for so long. I'm also picking up another batch of day-old meat chickens this Saturday, which will be ready for the freezer towards the end of July. Underkeeper Pete and I are sharing the batch. He's having them til they're off heat as I'm already inundated with chicks. I'll finish them outside on grass. All of us will be needed to process them.

Speaking of eggs and chicks (and the preservation of) - I have started setting my own Larson trap and learning the art of trapping crows. Here's how it works in principle: Once you've trapped a crow/magpie in a trap baited with an egg, you can use this bird to lure others into the trap. Crows and magpies are territorial and dislike interlopers on their patch. They will defend their territory by challenging the interloper which we've secured in a little cage with a drop box either side (this is the Larson trap)-

There's a spring-loaded door which I hold down with a wooden perch. But the perch is split -

Dakota is working out how to get in the trap and get the bird for herself

When the challenger lands on the perch, his weight causes the split perch to giveway. The crow falls to the bottom, and the trap door snaps shut. We can then use that trapped bird to bait another cage. A live bird used this way is called a Judas bird, for obvious reasons. The Judas bird is always given food, water and shelter while in the trap (you can see one of the rabbit carcases from our other night's bunny harvest in with this bird).

If you don't catch your bird within a day of putting out your trap, move it to a different location even within a small area (like our garden). As a Judas bird, magpies will lure both crows and magpies in. A crow Judas bird will only lure other crows, as crows have a pretty fearsome rep, even among other corvids. A magpie will rarely confront a crow.

Trapping is a touchy subject. My trap is in the garden, and I'd put it on top of my sheep trailer under a tree where it would be noticed by other crows, but have a bit of shade too. Unfortunately it was visible from the road. Two walkers yesterday stopped and said how lovely my "pet" crow was. I should have said "Thanks" and been done with it. Stupidly I said "Oh it's not a pet. This is a crow trap." That got a frosty reception. No reply, they just gave me a sour look and walked on.

What can I do? At least they enjoyed their "country experience" visiting my little lambs grazing in their verdant paddock amongst the daffodils. That view of country life is more broadly palatable. In my head I see the too many times I've found crows pecking out the eyes of a still-living sheep that's gone down in a field and can't get back up, can't fight off its attacker. I don't like those images, but that happens in the country too.

The transplant was a success...

I swapped Barbara her dummy egg for a pair of ducklings, and she settled right down on them. No questions asked. I've been checking every hour in case of 'rejection' but both parties seem happy with the arrangement. I even tried to feel under Barbara, and found a tiny head poking up from under her wing, and was given What For by the new mother. So far so good.

The incubator was quickly washed out and a new batch of eggs set this morning, as a favour to a neighbor. She'll take delivery of those day old chickens, and I expect I will have some of my own Pekin and Barbu d'Uccle eggs to put in there next.

Mike finished catching up hen pheasants for breeding stock yesterday. And just in time as the first eggs are appearing in their enclosures. I think there's about 2,000 breeding pheasants in there this year. We're going to start collecting the eggs this week, and every day for the next few months.

Pheasant breeding pens, in the middle of summer and a nice dry spell

Unfortunately, this year egg season is coinciding with mud season, so we'll have to wash all the eggs before setting them. At peak time, we pick up 1400 eggs a day.

A few day's worth of pheasant eggs, trayed and ready for incubation

That's a lot of washing. I really hope the weather picks up soon.

Sunday

At the moment, the lambs are still sleeping in the kennel where they're safe from predators and where there's a heat lamp to keep the chill out. During the day they're coming out onto the grass to get some sun and to watch the world go by. They're keen to follow me as it's nearly lunchtime -

Who needs a sheepdog?

And when it's time to go back to their kennel for dinner, they are just as happy to oblige -

And then the clean up crew moves in to tidy any leftover lamb pellets -

Everyone's happy.

While the animals were feasting, Mike and I went to the clay shooting ground. Mike mounted and fired his gun for the first time since our accident. These are the tools of his trade and he's been worried he won't be able to employ them to any effect, and afraid the recoil would aggravate his shoulder.

He tried the 20 bore and the semi-auto. He's not mounting a gun as well as he used to yet and it took its toll on his shoulder. But it's a first step. I can fill the vermin shooting gap (along with others) until he's better. It will just take a bit of time.

Food for Thought

We're past Christmas now and the not-so-festive stomach bug that hit us Christmas day. Mike soldiered on and made Christmas dinner, but neither of us could eat it. We are having leftover Christmas cockerel tonight in a chicken tetrazzini, our first real meal since the illness.

Pip and/or Dakota also scarfed a plateful of cocoa-rich cookies on Christmas night so we were on the 'phone to the vets calculating how much chocolate per body weight they might have ingested, and whether or not we were going to have to get out of our sick bed and take them to the vets. I'm glad to report we all made it through.

A few days' illness meant we needed to catch up on some chores. I re-pressurised the heating system and cleaned up broken glass - the winds blew a pane out of the greenhouse during the night. Mike split logs. The weather's been cold and wet, but the fire's roaring away so much so that I'm stripped down to my long johns now. (note to self - no future career as a phone sex operator...)

A Christmas addition to the freezer

Although we haven't been eating much over the past few days, we have been discussing food. Particularly that our diet has been a bit meat heavy recently. Understandable as we're harvesting a lot of (free) game this time of year, and our garden is empty due to my poor planning and limited space. Traditionally only the estate owners and wealthy people would have had a meat rich diet. Workers like us would get their calories from carbohydrates like grains and root vegetables, and lard (which explains the British proclivity for suet puddings and pies).

I gave Mike a hand feeding the pheasants, and as we were driving around the cover crops I realised that they were in fact cover CROPS. Maize and kale and stubble turnip. Turnips may be sheep fodder but they are also a root vegetable, and there are acres of them. Kale is likewise edible, and not bad with chili vinegar dressing. Maize, aka "cow corn", when dried and ground is essentially polenta. Flour is just ground wheat, and I was emptying bagfuls of it into pheasant feeders. It's different than proper milling wheat, but worth further examination.

Why did I never notice this before?

I picked some turnips for this evening's dinner, and extras for the animals: the chickens eat the green tops and the sheep will eat the whole plant. Mike said as he set off to walk the dogs, Nellie the old spaniel was tucking into the green tops alongside the chickens. I guess even she's fed up with venison leftovers.

Before

Mike was dubious after enduring the Great Swedefest of '08 (too much of a good thing..). But, having just finished dinner, I can confirm that the turnips were a success. Granted I mashed them with marscapone cheese and topped them with a parmesan breadcrumb crust which added flavor, but definitely edible. I see turnips in our culinary future.

After

Santa brought me a coffee grinder for Christmas and now I'm thinking that I might collect and dry a few maize cobs and see if I can grind them into a rough flour using the coffee grinder. Turnips with a polenta crust??

Santa also brought me a leather punch and rivet set which was fortuitious as I found a broken raddle harness abandoned in a field. I've hung it up to dry and it looks like it can be returned to work with a few minor repairs. I think it's a good omen as I intend to start my flock of Gotland sheep this year. Santa also brought me a set of butchery knives which is a bad omen for Big Lamb and Little Lamb.

A working raddle courtesy of donaghys.com

Now if only I could find a crop of peanut M&Ms...