Wasn't it Just Spring Last Year?!

Spring is the season that catches me out every time. Weeds go from nonexistent to knee-high. I find myself wearing only one sweater and that my feet are now sweating because I forgot to swap my insulated socks for regular ones. (Wellies are still essential, of course.) Spring rains cause the grass to grow so much I swear I can hear it creaking. Little fruit buds are swelling on the trees in the orchard, and the idea of all that chutney-making potential makes me way more excited than any normal person should get about fruit.

Garden birds are bringing their fledglings to feed at our bird feeders (I keep the feeders stocked with mealworms). On the lakes, the mallard family has six well-grown ducklings, and a pair of Canada geese has a brood of tiny goslings that dart about too fast for me to count.

Turkey hen still has her one chick -

That would be the small brown dot above and right of the turkey.

I let the pair out of their sheep trailer home every morning, and turkey takes her brood-of-one for a walk around the garden. Turkey is happy to stay out in the open ground of the orchard, but the pheasant chick is cautious by nature and keeps to the shadows - patches of weeds, clumps of grass, or the hedgerow for protection. Turkey will sit down and let the chick warm up under her, and she's very talkative.

It's certainly been a more successful fostering than I expected. So is the chick a turkant? Maybe a pturkey, where the p is silent.

We had our biggest hatch yesterday, including pheasants, partridge, and some quail - the last as a favour to our underkeeper's mother. (She who sends the homemade farmhouse cakes, rules the world.) I made a little video: it's a box of partridge chicks boxed and ready to go into warm sheds, and we're helping the last few stragglers out of their shell -

It's school vacation so the little hands belong to a local lad who's been helping us pick up eggs every day. The "payment" for helping with the hatch is a cup of tea, biscuits and some homemade cake with the last of the rhubarb from our garden. All served on the tailgate of the truck, of course.

Yesterday's hatch filled the stone shed. The shed was once a lambing barn, but it's been converted for raising pheasants. Kitty's shelter is built into the side of the stone shed, so she watches the flurry of our activity between tearing mouthfuls of grass in her pasture -

Pheasants hold little interest for Kitty. If she can't eat it or scratch her butt on it, it's not worth her attention.

It's an oppressive heat inside the sheds if you're a person, and perfect if you're a growing chick. Mike is decanting the chicks from hatching room boxes into the little rings where the precocious chicks will start feeding and drinking almost immediately -

The pheasant chicks will stay in here for a few weeks, then be let out during the day in protected runs for sun and fresh air. They can't all have turkey moms to care for them!

The partridges go into freestanding sheds, delivered and knocked together at a mad pace by some very kind Polish builders at the same time we were hatching the chicks to go in! I supplied the builders with tea and cake from our tailgate cafe to keep their energy and morale up, and they got it done-

Phew.

Without a lot of the infrastructure here necessary for pheasant production, we have had to adopt a "build it and fill it" approach. We're only just keeping ahead of ourselves, but we knew we were in for a tough first year.

It's been a quieter day today, just checking on chicks and performing our daily ritual of collecting eggs. The elderflowers in the hedgerow are just right for picking, and I managed to start a batch of elderflower cordial, now currently steeping on the stovetop-

And I dug out a secret stash of sloes from my freezer to make sloe gin. It needs to be started now, in order to mature by autumn. It's a traditional eleven a.m. shoot or hunt day tipple. Gin, sloes, and sugar go together in a pot (in this case, an old jam tub) which needs to be shaken once a day for the next month to dissolve the sugar. I leave in the cupboard where the teabags are kept. With the amount of tea I brew, I'm sure to see it there and remember to give it a daily shake-

What spring jobs have snuck up on you?

Small World

Turkey mom is down to one chick. And of course anything else she chooses to tuck under her enormous bulk. Being a big fan of the game "What Will This Cow Eat?" (pat pending), I devised a variation: "What Will This Turkey Incubate?" I removed the food pot and left my pocketknife in its place and waited.

No dice.

My deeply flawed experiment (but fun game!) has proved that the turkey will sit on a) chicks b) fake eggs and c) chinese takeaway containers filled with bird food. The pocket knife elicited no maternal feelings whatsoever.

That answers that burning question.

Speaking of burning, my tennis elbow hasn't been improving on a regime of no treatment and never resting it, but wearing a ulnar strap like it was some kind of superhero exoskeleton that would fix everything. I went back to the doctor this morning. Living in the country means that your mini-hospital is situated between the village hall and a fish and chip shop ( n.b. the shop holds a Guinness World Record for making the largest bag of chips). It also means you see this at reception-

A dog tied to the railing while its owner pops in for a consultation.

How sweet is that? I would also hazard that this dog looks like it's no stranger to a fish and chips dinner now and then (Well, someone had to eat that record bag of chips, right?)

I saw a new doctor, and it turns out that besides the elbow stuff, I've torn something in my shoulder and there's a capsule of blood, yadayada, limited range of movement etc etc. So I've been bumped up to steroid shots and painkillers. He told me to rest it, so I immediately came home and butchered a lamb for our neighbour.

I really don't understand why it's not healing.

None of that is interesting, I know. It was the conversation with my doctor that was interesting. My doctor was also severely burned in an accident ( an ill-conceived plan to start a bonfire with petrol) and was treated in the same specialist ward where Mike was treated. Since his accident, my doctor has specialised in chronic pain management, something that is still a huge problem for Mike too. In our move, we may have found just the right person to help Mike regain more of his quality of life.

If not, well, at least there's a nice doggie he can pat on his way out.

Hatches, Matches, and Dispatches

We're in the middle of pheasant hatching season now. We've taken off ( gamekeeper speak for "dealt with") four hatches so far, and hope to have six more.

This is the Thursday Night Transfer: Mike takes the nearly hatched eggs out of the incubators -

And Ian and I put them in the hatching machines. Like the incubators but more humid -

We remove the eggs from their individual holders, and put them loose in trays so the chicks have the freedom to move about and kick their shells off, somewhere between Sunday night and Tuesday morning. The hatch gets "taken off" on Tuesdays.

We're aiming for ten hatches in total, and each hatch has to average about 3,500 chicks over the season to balance our budgets.

Yes, of course there's a hitch.

Our laying birds caught a chicken virus.

We brought our laying stock from Dorset, and what we didn't realise is the sheer volume of chicken farms in our new area. Or that an airborne virus could transfer from chickens to vaccinated laying hens. Our old girls don't have immunity and there's no effective vaccine for what they have. The vet tells us to expect losses of 50% of our pheasant laying birds.

The good news is the offspring will have some degree of immunity. I don't understand the finer points of virology but we're trusting the vet's prognosis.

As if on cue, both Mike and I promptly contracted our own virus (human not bird), and although it didn't take 50% of us, we both felt near death for a couple of weeks. We actually did some chores on our hands and knees at one point. I think this is how the turkey got out and I didn't notice.

Fox + turkey = no turkey.

So we have one turkey left (and ham for Thanksgiving this year). The remaining turkey has gone broody with a vengeance. Capital B broody. She will not be dissuaded. I gave her a china egg to sit on and figured she would lose interest eventually. That was six weeks ago.

With limited options, I decided to give her three pheasant chicks from yesterday's hatch. This is the Hail Mary pass of poultry rearing because a) pheasant chicks are dumb and b) turkey moms are gargantuan.

Little and Large

Also, I didn't have a spare hen house, so I improvised (you know, for a change) and the family is living in the sheep trailer -

It's safe and weatherproof, if temporary.

The turkey is still not satisfied with her handful of adoptees, and I found her this morning with the chicks, the china egg, and their pot of chick food all pushed under her to "hatch".

Which is how chick no. 1 met its demise. It must have tried to eat from the pot under the hen and she sat down firmly on its neck.

I can't risk bringing in chicks from the poultry sales with our pheasant stock already in jeopardy. The turkey and remaining chicks will just have to ride out the broody storm on this occasion. 

Sometimes it seems to all go wrong on the farm. Why can't it be more like it is in books? 

The Comfort of Routine

I would love to be more organised. I really try. I make 'To Do' lists, and keep a diary on my phone with an alarm to remind me of appointments. I have bursts of tidiness - spring cleaning the house, and tackling the grey badger stripe that appears in my hairline with alarming regularity. I wake up every morning with an efficient plan to make best use of my days.

Pfftt. Who am I kidding?

In Dorset, I was flying by the seat of my pants. Now that I've moved counties and haven't yet got a routine to lean on, I am flying by the edge of the hem of the overstretched elastic of my knickers. Just. Without a routine, I am in a state of constant adapting and reacting in order to get the basics accomplished.

Take Kitty. I rented a paddock for Kitty, but the spring grass hadn't yet come in. With my winter hay supply still in Dorset, all I could do was to take Kitty for a walk and let her graze the grass verges 15 minutes in the morning and evening. The locals have rechristened her "Kitty Four-Legs" as it seems that there are already two Kittys of the human variety living on the estate. The "number of legs" nomenclature avoids confusion I'm told.

Kitty will be pleased to know that she is a topic of conversation on the estate, alongside current topics like who's heard a cuckoo (me!) and the Pothole Problem (capital P).

Sheep grazing has been even worse. My flock quickly ate their winter grazing down to the roots. There were only two small paddocks available, so I rented those, then fenced off the orchard in our garden to make a third paddock.

Our new view from the window

My flock is now divided into three mini flocks. Grazing the garden also solves the additional problem of not owning a mower big enough to tackle the new expanse of lawn. My "lawn" is now "sheep keep". It's all in the renaming.

Hey, this nomenclature thing really works.

The garden sheep are like a roving party of drunken louts, knocking down every bench, birdbath, and chicken fence they wander into. They freed the chickens today, flattening the electric netting around their house while trying to get to the wheat in their feeders. In turn, the now free-ranging chickens are scratching up my newly planted seedbeds. It's Farmageddon out there.

Our Land Rover is still languishing in Dorset with the hay. Besides towing trailers, the Land Rover was our dog transport vehicle. The new truck (which I've named "Truck") has no back on it. So as a temporary measure I cable tied a dog crate to the rings in the bed, and used old rubber car mats as non-slip flooring.

Spud and Quincy off on another wild goose chase - resulting in 40 lbs of goose meat!

It will have to do for now, and it's fine for short trips around the estate. I need to fetch the Land Rover before winter and shooting season.

When not walking horses or driving dogs, I am finding my way around the estate - locating pheasant pens, shortcuts to town, and safe lanes for riding Kitty. The locals use landmarks when giving out directions. I was confused when, out for a hack on Kitty, I was told to "ride to the rabbit in the hedge, then turn left".

Wait. The what in the who now?

Oh right.

There's also the "take a left when you see the silver birch", and "over the second cattle grid where the Suffolks lay up at night".

Suffolk sheep getting ready for bed?

Which begs the question: how do I plug these directions into my car's GPS? And where exactly do those sheep go in the day anyway?

I have been driving around looking for other fields suitable for grazing my flock (You know, seeing as the prime real estate over the second cattle grid has been taken by those lazy Suffolks.) We were offered a local castle. Yes, CASTLE. The remains of a 12th century Norman castle. How many shepherdesses can say their flock of sheep maintains the grounds of 900 year old castle? It's poor grazing, but tempting from a purely historical point of view. Would that make the meat from my lambs artisanal and historically interesting?

Next to the ruins of the castle is the Kilpeck church, built around 1140. It's still in use today. I'm told there are 12 churches in the local area serving a total of 150 parishioners. That's only a dozen per church if everyone shows up and spreads out!  If I was a church-goer, I would definitely go to the Kilpeck, just for its aesthetics. The door has Celtic-style carvings of serpents and dragons -

There's a basilisk (sometimes interpreted as a manticore) -

There is a "green man" on the column -

And 85 of these corbels running along the top of the stonework, described as a bestiary -

The Agnus Dei symbol in the centre

This is the most pagan looking church I have ever seen. There's even a Sheela na gig corbel that apparently so offended one of the more puritanical parishioners that she tried to knock it off repeatedly with a stick. Or so my neighbour told me, between his offerings of directions based on strange landmarks.

I wonder if the other eleven parish churches are equally fascinating. Even if the churches aren't, I'm sure the directions to get to them will be.

It will take time to find my way, and find a new routine. It's an uncomfortable process. A few landmarks is all I have to go by at the moment. We have our third pheasant hatch next Tuesday. Whether I'm organised or not, whether my phone alarm reminds me or not, they come every Tuesday. Well, I suppose that's a routine of sorts. It's a start.

Mother's Pride

Readers in the US will be very familiar with bumperstickers that say "Proud Parent of an Honour Student" or My Child is an Honor Student at --- School". I get that. Parents should be proud of their children's achievements. I only have fur kids, but I'm proud of their abilities too. So proud, in fact, that you may want to turn down the volume before watching this video:

That's Quincy retrieving a goose (in spite of my enthusiastic overhandling). 

She's never retrieved a goose before this morning, and she retrieved four out of four, all shot and lost last night on dark. All were blind retrieves (she couldn't see the bird) on cold game (scent is not so good as when freshly shot), in water, with the wind in the wrong direction for scenting (to her back - carrying any smells that might help her locate the bird away from her). Everything was against her and she found them all.

I'm so proud of that dog. 

I want a bumper sticker that says "My Kid may be crap at calculus, but she can scent dead game and swim carrying a 10-pound bird in her mouth". 

Canada geese weren't such a problem in Dorset, but they plague farmers in our area, eating the young maize crops. The old legal classification relating to common land grazing says is that two geese will graze as much as one sheep. We counted 40 geese lifting from the small pond this morning. The pond adjacent to a farmer's crop of maize. 

There is no closed season on Canada geese. However, wild goose meat cannot be sold in England. And there is a lot of meat on a goose. Each breast is about 3/4 lb of meat. That's over ten pounds of meat from the seven geese shot last night. It wouldn't sit right with me to shoot something and waste the bounty, so the dogs are eating goose alongside their pheasant egg omelettes, and we're having goose breast schnitzel for dinner. Courtesy of my wonderful girl.

Moved

As a paid up member of the "I've recently moved house" clan, I can say officially that it sucked, and I hope I don't have to do that again soon. We didn't just move house, we moved farm and workplace with us as well. The logistics of moving your livestock to make sure it's in a place where someone can look after it is complicated. Our solution was to leave Mike in Dorset catching pheasants - fifteen hundred pheasants! - and send underkeeper Ian and me to Hereford to keeper them as they got delivered. In the interim, I had to move one horse, 43 sheep, 16 chickens, 2 turkeys, and 7 dogs, and 24 years' worth of Mike's accumulated possessions, two and a half hour's drive up the road.

Did I mention that the Land Rover, our towing vehicle, broke? It's still in Dorset now waiting for a new engine. The truck decided to follow suit when I was halfway to Hereford, loaded with all the dogs and guns. I managed to limp it here at exactly 56 miles per hour, fearing the alternative: convincing a tow truck driver to let me decant a pack of excited dogs, 60 lbs of dog food, and a small armoury of weapons into his cab.

I got a moving company to drive the contents of our house to Hereford. The stuff in the house was the least of my concerns. The movers get our stuff to this end, dump the boxes and run, but there's nothing to feed or water - unless you count the houseplants. While they loaded their vans, I organised a bank loan and bought a new truck. I drove to our new cottage and found it filled with boxes that, in hindsight, I should have labelled more clearly. Along with boxes, I found a visiting relative who dropped in for a week's stay on his way back from Germany. While I wrestled with the contents of the boxes, he made shims for all our furniture, as the floors of the new cottage are less than level -

Our Tim Burton-esque architecture - top of the stairs

Hell, I'd sag and sway too if I were a couple hundred years old.

At the same time, our house was full of workmen trying to rewire the incubator shed via the house. The electrics needed upgrading to run the six incubator and hatcher machines we'd brought from Dorset - well, the machines that a pair of specialist incubator service guys had dismantled, driven up, and reassembled in the shed.

The incubator room, pre-tidying! The hatching room is to the left.

My technical knowhow ran to brewing coffee and tea for the workmen, and cooking dinner for my visitor.

I also wished that I hadn't given up drinking for Lent.

As everyone worked furiously to get the electrics and machines working, the pheasant hens started to lay eggs. The first batches were too early, so I fed them to the dogs in a ginormous omelette mixed with out-of-date foods I found while unpacking. So, dogs' dinner was pheasants eggs with soba noodles one night, and cooked barley the next.

As of last night, we have two incubators up and running - enough to get the earliest eggs in and get the dogs back on dry food.

With our trucks out of commission, farmer friends stepped in with their trucks and trailers. Mike H towed Kitty in my horsebox, and Dominic and Bridget from Simply Dorset took time off during lambing to drive my flock up to Hereford. They now have our mobile high seat, a spare shed, and our unending gratitude, none of which is recompense enough for their help.

Unloading the top level of the trailer onto the new field

Towing a trailer full of livestock turns a 2+hour drive into 4 hours. One way. The sheep had a long ride in the trailer, carefully driven for their comfort by Dominic. They had been under Mike's haphazard shepherding care the week I was moving house, and he'd let poor Pumpkin go backwards. We almost lost Pumpkin from the stress of the move, but he toughed it out (after a dose of wormer and some TLC from me) and he's pulled though yet again. Man, I wish all my flock were as hardy as that ugly, runty Pumpkin.

They've hammered the paddock of fresh grass I rented, so I have to supplement with forage and ewe nuts until I can fence off our small orchard as a temporary stop gap. Bill the retired shepherd on the estate says when you start putting your hands in a bag to feed your sheep, you start putting your hand in your pocket too. I'm so glad that there's an experienced shepherd on our new doorstep.

The dogs settled quickly, and we're starting to explore the estate on daily walks. My little yellow hedonist has already claimed her new spot in the sun porch -

On reflection, the move could have been worse. Things can always be worse. Yes, we're all tired before we even start our busy time of year, my tendonitis is so bad at the moment that I can't even lift a tea kettle to pour water, and I'm fretting about how to pay for the new truck.

But, people and animals are all safe and housed, our sticky livestock problems were made un-sticky by great friends, and Mike has finally moved up for good this week. He seems OK about leaving his home and beloved pheasant ground of the last 24 years. Well, he's getting there anyway. There's no time to look back when the ground in front is covered in this year's pheasant eggs. The eggs are the potential, and the new start. We're moved in and moving on.

The start of this year's crop!

Almost moved

I'm still here in Dorset, but Hereford bound this week. Our move was delayed by a month in total while the previous occupants of the cottage moved out and the estate very kindly refurbished the inside for us. In fact, I only had a full tour of the house for the first time yesterday. It's an old black and white house, the vernacular architecture of the area.

There are exposed wooden lintels holding up doorways, curvy plastered walls inside, and the floors slope in every conceivable direction. Basically your standard oldy-Englishy workman's cottage.

The owners added the sun room at a previous keeper's request. Another huge kindness on their part. Even the kennels are above standard: brick-built but lined inside. And heated.

Mike's incubator barn faces the kennel -

With under keeper and apprentice

It's conveniently right outside the house. Incubators in one room, then hatchers in the next, and the final room is where chicks are boxed and ready for transport, some to pens on this estate but most to other shoots in England. And the laying field is just across the lane -

The sheep will graze down the laying field when they arrive at the end of the week. We took Kitty up yesterday, a 3 hour ride in a horse trailer for her, but she's settling in fine.

The new place seems even more rural than our old place. A man in a horse and cart was the only vehicle that came down that lane all afternoon. The local shop sells milk, horse feed, and ammunition. And there's a working outhouse in the garden. That bit is quaint. The downside is our broadband speeds average 3 mb/s. The guy in the horse and cart could drive the data to my house faster than that. No fibre optics in Hereford.

The garden is enormous. I'm going to have to trade my push mower for a ride-on. There is a small orchard of perhaps a dozen fruit trees - with a crop of mistletoe in them! - at one end, and a neglected vegetable patch at the other. I won't be able to grow any vegetables this year, but the big house has a walled veg garden complete with gardener. I will offer my weeding services to him in trade for some produce this year. At least I know I won't be short of apples or mistletoe.

The extra month in Dorset was as busy as ever. Unable to move house, a two week visit from my sister turned into an unexpected holiday - if feeding sheep and walking dogs is your idea of a holiday. Lucky, it is for Kerry. 

The weather was all rain and howling winds so when we weren't caring for bedraggled animals, Kerry was beating the pants off of me at Scrabble, sometimes by candlelight when storms knocked out our power. Her reward was wine and puppies.

Something that's never in short supply here.

The weather has turned dry but the work continues: lambs to ice camp, giving the odd hand to friends who are spring lambing, working on my own flock of sheep in preparation for tupping (mating). The Land Rover broke again, the fields are still waterlogged, and the government needed all my forms filed for this year's farm payments. And I've been packing. 

Lord willing and the creek don't rise (anymore than it already is anyway!) I'll be a permanent resident in Hereford from Thursday.