I got a nice little blaze going last night with kindling and added some house coal, which took well. I gave it a few minutes, raked it level and covered it over with another layer of coal, closed down the air flow and then sat back to see what happened.

Twenty minutes later the thermometer on the chimney was pegged at the top of the scale, the fan was zipping around not far short of breaking the sound barrier and the radiators were piping hot!

I used the metal shovel to hoik out some of the burning coals onto the ash pan and whisked them out to the wet gravel in front of the house, where the rain beat them into submission nicely. Three trips like that and the thermometer was returning to ‘too hot’ instead of ‘danger’, sparks had stopped emerging from the chimney pot and the dogs weren’t panting furiously anymore.

Less coal in future. It’s been a couple of decades since I last dealt with a coal fire, I’m clearly out of practice!

I called my local coal dealer today and discussed it with a nice young lady on the phone, who assured me she uses ‘ovoids’ in her stove and they stay in all night with no problems. We drove down to Tipperty, just south of Ellon, and picked up 25kg of ovoids (apparently a processed coal product, which in my mind sort of equates to ‘smokeless coke’) where the nice young gentleman who took my money assured me that he uses ovoids in his stove and they stay in all night with no problems!

We’ll see if they’ll do that for me, too. It may take a couple of nights to get the hang of how many to put in, but the house coal rushed away to nothing in just a couple of hours, so that clearly burns far too fast even with the dampers shut down. If the ovoids are the answer, then I’ll move all the tools out of the shed and it can revert to coal shed for deliveries of ovoids through the winter. We can easily bung a few hundred kilos of the things in there and that should last a while!

I experimented today with a log one side of the firebox, with a little glowing coal under it, then another log next to the first with a little more coal the far side of that, in the hopes that by the time the fire had gone sideways through everything, it would take time. I was back at the croft 3.5 hours after leaving and there was a little warmth in the firebox, but nothing more than that.

The horses went out today, since it’s finally stopped raining, so we managed to muck out some of the accumulation in the barns. It’ll take a while to catch up on the job properly! We also cleaned out the duck pen and left them happily squottering away in the clean straw, running it all through their beaks and apparently having a lot of fun in the process. The silkies managed to be out all day in the small dairy – they don’t seem to explore far yet, and the big hens didn’t go and bully them today, it seems.

I’m getting very used to cock-a-doodle-oodle-oo in the mornings. If Snowball goes back to the traditional version I shall miss the extra oodle in the middle!

We have some very large storage boxes, thanks to B&Q, so we’ll be starting to stash stuff from my mother’s place in them and move them out of the house and into her shed. My brother and I dismantled all the old rabbit cages and got them to the tip over the weekend, so we now have space to move stuff out of the house in boxes, which will give us the chance to reduce clutter, tidy up, reduce the trip hazards and see what’s actually wanted and what can be thrown, recycled, sold or handed to the nearest charity shop!

Graham from Mintlaw Stove Installers came out yesterday to sweep my chimney and advise on stoves. I liked him – a very straight-up Yorkshireman, quickly found the way from the inside of the stove to the chimney (more than I could!) and made a neat, swift job of sweeping it and handing over the usual certificate for insurance purposes. He measured up the alcove the stove sits in, searched all over the stove itself for a maker’s name (I’ve never found one either) and then inspected the little grate and chimney in my bedroom.

In summary, the bedroom chimney isn’t worth restoring as a working fireplace, but as a decorative feature it’ll be fine and I’ll get the top of the chimney sealed and a cowl fitted. The stove in the lounge is probably a 25kW and should be very capable of heating the house – and why don’t I try keeping it in with some coal and slack overnight, before looking at spending thousands on a new stove?

Definitely d’oh!

He also suggested I check the radiators for sludge build up, which comes out as radiators hot at the top but cold at the bottom. I fired the stove up and packed it full of wood last night, got the radiators really good and hot, and sure enough the bedroom and office radiators were hot at the top, cold at the bottom! The lounge, kitchen and bathroom were all fine, equally warm top and bottom.

I’ve thrashed through the situation with my brother Martin, who came up to visit this weekend, and we’ve agreed I’ll try a sack of anthracite and a sack of slack and see if I can keep the house warm through the night with those. I can still save the wood ash for the compost through the day – I just need to empty the ash twice a day, that’s all, and separate the coal ash from the wood ash. Once the coal ash has sat and weathered somewhere out of the way for a bit I can use it for making paths (cinder paths), so it’s not completely useless.

If I can keep the house warm overnight with the current stove, then we’ll replace the radiators with new ones, which will automatically involve flushing the system and de-sludging, then we’ll replace the bath with a nice big shower tray, waterproof the bathroom walls and move Mum in.

I already have a Hive smart hub which was a free gift from BT when I signed up for broadband from them, so we’re going to fit smart thermostatic valves on the new radiators, which means I can control the heat through the house from my phone or iPad, or put them on a schedule to warm bedrooms up before bed and shut them down through the day (and do the opposite with the other rooms, of course), or even couple the valves to smart thermostats to manage the house’s heat distribution that way. I’ll also put in a motion sensor in the hallway outside Mum’s bedroom door that’ll turn on the hall light if she gets up in the night, to make sure she’s not stumbling about in the dark wondering where the light switches are, and I’ll put a simple alarm on the front and back doors so I’ll know if she goes wandering outside in the dark.

Technology has its uses.

Tomorrow I shall find a local coal merchant and acquire a sack of coal and some slack, so by Tuesday morning I should have some real progress to report to the family.

The horses still haven’t bothered going into the field – they’re perfectly happy in the barns and yard and devouring hay endlessly! I’ve been comparing feed schedules with my sister Katrina and I’m gong to shift mine to two feeds a day, to match her Rhapsody, and she’s going to move Rhapsody’s evening feed from 6pm to 4 pm, so when Rhapsody arrives here on her holiday later this month, all the horses will be ready for their feeds at the same time. Rhapsody doesn’t eat hay, though, and she has terrible manners towards other horses (the foulest horse language ever seen, according to Katrina – but then she folds if another horse challenges her on it) so she’ll be in a paddock on her own rather than joining the Herd.

It will fascinating to watch Dancer’s reaction when she sees the first other bay mare she’s ever encountered..!

Under the house! Michelle and I braved the crawlspace yesterday to find out what’s under the hearth in the lounge – and it’s a lovely, solid brick plinth! I can only assume that in the 1920s builders just assumed any farmhouse would have a nice coal-fired range installed. That clears the way to consider installing a bigger stove with a specific wood grate, instead of the current stove with its coal grate, upgrade the radiators and then just keep the fire lit as much as possible!

I have a local sweep and stove installer visiting tomorrow afternoon to discuss options (and clean the chimneys, too!)

I have to admit, I like the look of some of the stoves on the market at the moment – the La Nordica ranges are rather good-looking, though they don’t seem to have hob covers on most of them – which is a drawback in terms of safety. We used to find the cats napping on the Rayburn when we lived in Wales and I wouldn’t want either an elderly parent or a whippet scorching extremities on an uncovered hob. There’s also the Lincar Ilaria which caught my eye – I would like to see the flames rather than have a solid lump of metal in the lounge! Anyway, tomorrow I’ll have a good natter with the bloke and see what comes out of it.

Fresh hay arrived today and the horses are very cheerful about it, despite the non-stop rain. They haven’t bothered going out at all, bar quick trips to drink in the yard.

Snowball, the white silkie cockerel, has mastered that other syllable and added in a couple more, so he’s now cock-a-doodle-oodle-ooing all over the place! I haven’t heard his black brother crowing properly yet, but I’m sure he’ll get there soon. Snowball had a go at one of the hybrid hens this morning but then six more arrived and they ganged up on the little silkies, so I had to intervene, chase out the hybrids and untangle Snowball from the sack trolley.

My brother Martin is visiting over the weekend so I’ll have more time at the croft – I hope to muck out thoroughly, hopefully get some of the rabbits cleaned out before they don’t have room to cock their ears under their lids and, of course, get some quality time in with the horses!

Something of a non-event here in the traditional pumpkin style, but as Samhain I will be doing something tonight!

In the meantime, yesterday I had a salesman round from a renewables company who gave me a quote for an air source heat pump and upgraded radiators – slightly over £15k.

I’m thinking about it. It’s a lot of money! I also had an idea last night that I want to look into further – the wood stove actually does a reasonable job when I’m here to keep it going, so why not just upgrade that and put in more modern, efficient radiators? If I switched to a modern efficient stove that’s also a cooking range and heats water, I wouldn’t need to worry about powercuts and cooking or heating at all. The current stove is, after all, a multifuel with a coal grate, rather than a grate optimised for wood burning (coal likes its air to come from below, while wood prefers to sit on a bed of ashes and get its air from above) and I’ve lived with solid-fuel ranges before – we had a Rayburn when we were in Wales in the 90s, which did heating, cooking and hot water very adequately – and it would keep in all night, too, which is the biggest gripe with the current stove.

Yet again, a pause to rethink…

The gates were open for quite a while when the bloke was here discussing heat requirements and various renewables, so the poultry went exploring. I had to herd all the ducks and both geese back down the drive after he’d gone, and the chickens were still trailing back and standing outside the gates looking plaintive an hour later. I counted beaks at dinner time and they were all safely back by then!

Oh, and Dancer has broken the flipping fence again, so the electric fence is off until I can get back down the field without the help of the horses and get it all tied back together again….

I noticed this morning when I let the ducklings out that some of them are definitely putting on serious size! I think they’ll probably end up as the drakes, since Muscovy boys are apparently twice the size of the girls. I’ll try and get some pix tomorrow, if I have the light and some compliant ducklings!

George came in to help while I was doing haynets and small critters, so we had some excellent practice with his hooves and he was very polite while I was tying up haynets – sometimes he’s impatient and rassles me while I’m trying to tie them up, but this morning he was patient and only nudged my ribs to let me know he’d finished the previous nugget now and it was time for another please – and then he turned his head away and waited for the handout courteously. I was able to put up three nets with his help this way, which is two more than usual!

After that it started raining so the others came in, and I spent some time with Dancer working on her putting her ears forwards. It took a while but we got there eventually – although along the way she accidentally bitted herself on the shovel handle!

This came about because she was trying to bite my fingers to encourage the handout of nuggets (where she got this strange idea from I’m not sure – I’ve never rewarded teeth with food!) I dropped my hands further down the shaft out of tooth range, so she bit the handle. It’s a D-shaped handle and her lower jaw clearly just fits through the space, because suddenly she was standing with her head up as high as she could, mouthing furiously at the plastic bar in her jaws! I steadied the shovel so it didn’t swing, kept talking to her soothingly and scratched up her crest – and then she responded to feeling my hand behind her ears, dropped her head and the handle slid out of her mouth neatly. I put the shovel out of the way after that, of course!

I’ll keep working on happy ears with her until she has it firmly instilled – at the moment her default setting is ‘pin ears and roll eyes while walking straight at human’ – but I’d prefer her to reset that to ‘prick ears and stand politely near human’!

The cockerels are nearly there on crowing properly – we’ve reached ‘cock-a-doo-oo’ now, so one more syllable and they’ll have it nailed!

The chiropractor has crunched my back into shape, given me some exercises and stretches to work on three times a day and wants to have a check in two weeks. We had an interesting discussion about the effect of weight on blood flow in horses’ backs, too, along with agreeing that human backs haven’t evolved entirely perfectly for upright locomotion yet… always fun leading professionals off along slightly variant tracks from their normal ones, I think we both learned things there!

After that it was down to the village and my mother, who greeted me wearing a home-woven dress she made years ago and has never, to my knowledge, worn before, over pyjamas and fluffy winter boots! I don’t know what she’s been up to with the locks on her wardrobe doors but after failing to turn the key with my fingers, Michelle failed with her stronger, younger grip, we both failed with pliers (and then the key snapped), and I failed again with the jigsaw; eventually I managed to open the door by putting a long thin screwdriver through the gap and thumping it with a hammer until the back of the lock fell off. After that we were able to hand Mum her clean socks.

The other door lock now just doesn’t work. We’re baffled, because they both worked perfectly last night!

Mind boggling. Roll on next weekend when my eldest brother is coming up. I plan on dumping him right in it to look after Mum for 24 hours… he’ll get a good idea of what it’s like that way!

It’s been a long gap in the blogging this time! I’ll get to the reason shortly.

George is making strides – not only is he staying civil around the other horses when treats are involved, bar the occasional back-end bunny-hop threat to Abe, but he’s started lifting his back feet swiftly, politely and with both excellent height and duration, just on the request ‘hoof?’ and a touch of my hand on whichever quarter it is I’m asking him to lift. The front hooves don’t lift so high but they come up promptly and he hasn’t tried to nibble me for a while – possibly because I’m not bending down to reach his hoof, I’m only running my hand down the back of his shoulder to the elbow.

Dancer is making progress in learning not to pin her ears as a default expression! I blame Poppy’s attitude to the geldings… though Poppy never pins her ears at me and her daughter needs to learn that, too!

Abe is, as always, a sweet and affectionate little fella who doesn’t get the time and attention he really deserves – which also describes Poppy, come to that.

The ducklings are growing well, not in the slightest intimidated by the hens and, indeed, liable to nip any chicken slow to give way to an oncoming duck! They and their mother seem to enjoy catching up with the geese first thing each morning when they’re let out but then the two species tend to go their own ways – though rarely all that far away from each other. It’s very amusing watching the ducklings grazing – they find a nice patch of grass, flop in the middle and then graze all around as far as they can reach before getting up and moving a little way to new grass to flop in the middle of it again! Mother Duck doesn’t flop in the grass, she stays alert and on her feet. She still hisses at me but for the last few days she’s stayed on top of the barrier while I come up to shift it, only flapping off the top as I reach out to lift it, and twice she’s come to me to eat corn from a dish.

If I’m filling water buckets and one overflows, I can almost guarantee the ducklings will be in the stream of water running down the yard! The horses regard them with tolerance and I’ve seen George carefully herding them out of his way with his nose.

The silkies are coming out more – though still under careful supervision as the top hen from the outside flock is quite aggressive, as yet. I let them out to scratch around in the shed while I do the rabbits, quail and hay nets each morning, then put them away safely again. The larger black silkie is now crowing, too, so that’s two cocks and a little black hen…. typical of poultry!

We’ve had to rearrange the schedule here so I’m not spending anything like the time I want around the critters. My mother is taking up more of my time as she won’t do as Michelle suggests very well, and in order to keep her safe I have to be in the village more. I go down as soon as I’ve fed and spoken with all the critters in the morning, make sure she’s had her morning pills, then embark on the long battle to get her to dress properly. Left to herself, Mum often wears two or three pairs of pyjamas under her daytime clothes and doesn’t wash or shower. Even getting her to flush a toilet and then wash her hands is a matter of constantly reminders! Once she’s down to not more than one pair of pjs under her outer clothes, we try to find something to do – either up at the croft or around her house, depending on the weather, and then she needs reminding that it’s lunchtime. Every afternoon we come up to the croft again to feed the critters in daylight, then back to the village: I’ve also taken over making her evening meal, as otherwise it’s invariably cod fillet and peas, so now she’s getting a varied diet. It has improved her health somewhat, though she’s in the throes of a nasty cough at the moment. She had a course of antibiotics last week in the belief it might be an infection, but nothing changed so this week she’s back on diuretics to see if it’s a fluid build-up, with a chest X-ray in the works as well.

We finally have the appointment with the memory clinic – 13th November – so hopefully we’ll get a formal diagnosis there and can think about treatment options. We had a visit from the local care team representative, which wasn’t very helpful as Mum basically refused to consider anything they offered by way of help!

By the time we’ve eaten the evening meal, it’s time to start the long struggle around getting Mum into bed again. It normally takes a couple of hours to get her to change out of daytime clothes and into pjs again; left to herself she sleeps fully dressed, and the process of getting her to take off the multiple layers of clothing and put clean pjs on involves repeating simple instructions over and over as Mum loses track of the process within a few minutes and needs reminding of what she’s trying to do. She’ll also get sidetracked into rearranging her clothes drawers, turn up with a piece of cloth to explain to me exactly how she wove it years ago or just come back into the kitchen to say she’s finished – which she usually hasn’t! After that, she needs to put ointment on her legs, then we put olive oil in her ears (upcoming ear syringing appointment!) and finally she goes to bed. I stay another ten or fifteen minutes to make sure she’s staying in bed, then come home.

I usually get back to the croft to feed the dogs around ten at night, go round and do a fresh round of hay for the bunnies, nets for the horses and a general counting of noses, topping-up of water and closing of doors. By the time I’ve done all that, cuddled George a bit and walked the dogs around before bed, I haven’t much energy left to blog!

I’m wrestling with my own health problems as well – back in 2002 I ruptured my spinal ligament and it’s left me with a tendency to sciatica. If I take care to keep my back muscles strong, it’s fine for years on end and just needs the occasional tweak from a chiropractor to sort out – but in the past few weeks I’ve been aware that my spine’s on the wriggle again and I’m currently suffering if I try to stay in any one position  for more than a few minutes. I’m seeing a local chiropractor this morning, though, so hopefully that’ll sort it out again and then I need to get back to some regular stretching and weight-lifting to tone up my back muscles again.

I’m collecting estimates and quotes on getting a backup central heating system here – my local plumber advises an oil boiler, but then he installs them so he’s a vested interest! I’m  hoping to find a renewable system that’s not too much more expensive and is reliable, not reliant on mains power (because the croft’s at the end of the line for power distribution here, and vulnerable to power cuts in winter) and fairly quick to install. The sooner I can get the house here suitable to get my mother in, the sooner I get time back for the croft and the critters – not to mention cutting down the diesel bill!

 

A massive step forward for the Big Ginger Job!

Over the past few days I’ve been working on him allowing another horse to get treats at the same time he does, and he’s accepted that now.

The entire herd is still lounging around the barns rather than going out, so this morning I needed to get fresh nets up while everyone was milling about. I did the first two and hung them for Poppy and Dancer, because Poppy scowls at the boys so it’s quite peaceful putting nets up for her – I can just tie them up, say hi, scratch necks and chins and move on.

With the girls anchored to their nets, of course, that meant negotiating  two more nets up around George and Abe. Abe’s never a problem, but trying to tie up a net with George rassling me is not easy to do nor on the nerves! He’s such a big lad that a little over-enthusiasm trying to keep me to himself can easily lead to injury, so I always try to have a quick escape route open. That’s not possible when I’m wrapped up in tying a net up! Sometimes I’ve had to just drop the net and beat a retreat when he gets too much in confined quarters, then come back and sort things out later.

I got the first one up relatively easily – he accepted ‘head away’ each time he started nose-hassling me and I rewarded  him each time he turned his head away. Abe was standing behind him at that point, not alongside, so George just filled the doorway with his mahoosive back end and stayed calm. The second net, however, hangs in the middle of the big barn, so when I took that one out I first had to ask George to move back so I had space to get in with it, then walk along the barn and tie it up with Abe alongside George and joining in the nose-hassling. It was a little tense but a great deal of ‘whoa! stand!’ and ‘head away!’  kept them both relatively civil, I was able to manoeuvre around a slightly antsy George to reach the string to tie the net to and then he actually waited while I first put the net string through the dangling loop (then gave him a treat),  pulled the end of the string through a bit of the net (treat!) and then quickly tied the quick release knot (handful of treats each!) before allowing me to escape back into the small dairy – though he was on my heels!

Now all we have to do is consolidate this new courteous behaviour in him and teach him to let me muck out around him without (a) trying to sit in the barrow, (b) trying to push the barrow over with his nose, (c) hassling me, (d) stealing the shovel and (e) stealing the broom!

Still, it’s major progress for him and I’m thrilled.

 

Today was a PITA, waste of my time day, infuriating and frustrating – but last night was lovely.

I had to do an emergency stop on the way home last night – a badger popped out of the ditch to my left as I was climbing the hill towards the croft, bundled across the road and leapt into the forestry to the right. The car stopped fine, the dogs were ok (in the boot) but three sacks of animal food and a sack of carrots all hurtled off the back seat, whacked the back of the front seats and wedged themselves into the rear footwells, from which resting place I had to wrestle them this morning before I could get them into the various feed bins for the various animals concerned!

Nice to see the badger, though – a big one, probably an adult boar – and thank goodness I take that road steady and have my eyes skinned for wildlife! They were here first, after all – some badger tracks are thousands of years old, the knowledge of their territories handed down through the generations that have lived in ancient setts founded before my ancestors were more than summer migrants from the northern shores of Spain. The sows will be sort-of pregnant this time of year since they usually mate between January and May, but they practice delayed implantation of their fertilised embryos, so the undeveloped cells are held in suspended animation until December, then start developing ready to be born in February or March. Like all the weasel family, there’s a tendency for males to be bigger than females, which is why I think last night’s large specimen was probably a boar – my impression was that he was probably about as long as a Labrador dog, including tail, which is a good size for a badger.

.The horses were all out when I got home after that, so when I’d mucked out, done the usual rounds, hung a couple of new hay nets and fed the dogs, the dogs and I walked down the road to see if we could spot the horses in Bogend Paddock. Dancer saw us coming by the light of my head torch and let rip an enormous snort, bouncing away from the fence with George leaping after her, but the moment they heard my voice they turned round and George came up to the fence to say hello, looking splendid as he was still up on his toes! Abe and Poppy joined us out of the darkness after a minute, so that was everyone safe and sound.

This morning I overslept, so instead of letting out the poultry at 7, it was nearly 9 and everyone was jostling at their doors to be let out! Mother Duck steamed out past me the moment I opened their barrier, her ducklings nearly running over my feet to keep up, the chickens were nearly hysterical with eagerness and all the horses were in and claimed they were fainting away from lack of attention (they hadn’t finished their hay nets so it wasn’t starvation!) I opened the ferret cages to feed them and they ignored their breakfast of defrosted day-old chicks and hurled themselves into my arms instead, wanting attention and playtime, so while I was feeding the quail, silkies and bunnies, the ferrets were all tumbling about in their playpen happily. It’s nice when they’re eager for me rather than breakfast – but trying to cuddle 8 ferrets with only one pair of hands is frenetic!

After this delightful start to the day, however, things went badly downhill. I got to my mother’s house just before eleven to find her sitting in the kitchen wearing her pyjama top under a jersey with her coat over the top, two woolly pullys tied round her waist, hiking boots on her (sockless) feet but no trousers. It took me nearly half an hour to get her to admit that putting trousers on would be good, and then she put on pyjama trousers. I found her some proper daytime trousers and convinced her to change out of the pyjamas, unpacked her suitcase (again…. its a daily task!) to retrieve clean socks, then  she said she hadn’t put ointment on her lower legs yet (to help deal with cellulitis) and went off to do that.

Which involved taking her daytime clothes off and putting her pyjamas back on, for reasons that totally escape me.

By the time she’d done her legs and I’d talked her into changing out of her nightclothes and back into daytime clothes again, it was already coming up on 2pm and lunchtime, so she had lunch.

We managed to get half an hour’s actual work done in the croft this afternoon. Michelle and I cut down the heavy weed infestation to reveal the concrete blocks that need shifting and managed to lever and roll half a dozen of the lighter chunks out, using fence posts for levers. There are still much bigger pieces that need to be broken up in the field before we’ve any hope of getting them out, so we paid a flying visit to B&Q in Peterhead and brought back a new sledgehammer and a pointed chisel-like implement for use on the project. We need to remove the chunks of wall before we can get the wire fence out, which I need to do before I put Rhapsody the horse in there, of course!

There’s a story behind this mess in the paddock – which I got from the farmer next door. Apparently someone came down the hill far too fast, lost track of the road on the point of the corner, careened along the wall of the barn and came to rest on top of the wall, having battered it down with the nose of the car first That does explain the huge gap in the wall, the makeshift barrier of a gate tied to stakes to block the hole and the huge chunks of breeze blocks still mortared together scattered several yards into the field! Alan came down from Skillymarno with a tractor to remove the wreck, so it was definitely a story straight from the horse’s mouth!

By then it was time to feed all the animals. Poppy was on edge for some reason and nearly kicked out at me, George was miffed because Poppy was threatening him and tried to herd me in as his own personal prize possession when I was trying to hang fresh hay nets, but Poppy responded to me speaking calmly to her and George desisted with the application of some stern words, a hand uplifted in a ‘stop’ sign before he actually stepped on me and several handfuls of treats for incremental backings-up and shiftings-over while I worked my way safely out of the corner he was trying to push me into! He hasn’t tried resource-guarding me like that for a couple of weeks now but old behaviours do tend to resurface under pressure for anyone and he does at least back off now just from being spoken to!

Apart from that all was ok, so after everyone was fed and watered, we spent a few minutes shifting wood round out of the paddock ( an ongoing job – there’s still lots of tree left to move) and then came back to organise dinner for my mother. If I don’t do that, she eats a piece of battered cod with boiled-to-death peas, so in order to keep her on anything even resembling a decent diet, Michelle or I have to cook for her every night – and Michelle’s not good at thinking up new meals.

Mucking out will be a bear tomorrow, unless I can get it done tonight by torchlight again, and I’m gritting my teeth and hoping we can get some kind of help from the social care team soon!

 

It wasn’t raining when I got up, but by the time I’d done all the critters it was raining heavily and has stayed that way most of the day, with brief interludes of mere dampness.

The horses were out first thing but Poppy saw me as I was just finishing off the mucking out and started whinnying as she came in, so of course all the others came in too. They stayed in for the rest of the day, eating hay – it feels a bit like swings and roundabouts as at least they’re not poaching the field into a sea of mud, even if they’re scarfing down three bales of hay… I’ve introduced George to a whole new bizarre idea (at least in his opinion) – getting treats while someone else also gets treats! If he starts pinning his ears at Abe, I step backwards and nobody gets nuggets. If he keeps his ears up, everyone gets treats. He seemed startled but he caught on quickly and is now permitting Abe to eat out of one of my hands while he has the other handful of treats. I’m doing the same thing with Poppy and Dancer, since Dancer started putting her ears back at Poppy!

Mother Duck has taken the ducklings out to graze and paddle in puddles whenever it stopped raining – but then ushering them back under cover the moment the stair-rods started falling again! They took over the henhouse run for this, to save the ducklings having to climb the step into the feed room, so the hens have all been standing about doing wet feather duster impersonations in the feed room! The silkies, of course, did not get the outside play I’d planned, since they’re not in the slightest waterproof and still quite small to get sodden, so they’ve been stamping about their pen complaining. The white one is getting the hang of the tune of cock-a-doodle-doo, even if his grasp on the lyrics is still limited to ‘erk’! It’s progress, of a kind, however, and he does have the most gloriously turquoise ear flaps under the snowy white pompom, so he gets some leeway just for being cute. The black ones are starting to show hints of the usual black chicken iridescence on their wings and tails, which is very pretty, too.

The geese, of course, don’t mind the rain at all.

I put the dog guard into the boot of the car yesterday, rather than behind the front seats, so now I can fit two extra humans in the car and still take the dogs around with me. They approve enormously!

 

 

 

 

A couple of late nights have left me too whacked to blog! I apologise.

The geese and ducks are reaching an agreement. It’s been a fascinating negotiation to watch in action – but gradually, they’re finding common ground and settling in together. Lucy sat down to look after a couple of stray ducklings the other morning while Hannibal marched up and down just outside keeping a stern eye on the world, and yesterday they were warily not too far from each other most of the day – though also not too lose! This morning Mother Duck allowed Hannibal and Lucy to graze alongside the ducklings, and here’s what I saw this afternoon:

Hannibal on guard duty for Lucy (on the right), Mother Duck (just in front of him on one leg!) and the ducklings (all spread everywhere, sunbathing).

I do hope Lucy manages to bring off some chicks of her own next year – the geese are clearly eager to parent!

I brought the silkie chicks out for their first free range experience this afternoon, too. I carried them out of their pen in the small dairy and popped them into the run by the henhouse, where they scratched about enthusiastically. The laying hens all vacated the premises hurriedly, but then a few came back and tried attacking the chicks. Michelle fended off the adults briskly (I was grooming Poppy and Dancer – the horses are moulting and everyone’s been rolling in the mud!) so the chicks are back in their pen for the night. I’ll bring them out every day for increasing lengths of time and supervise to keep them safe, until they all settle down and I can move the chicks into the henhouse with the rest of the flock.

I’m hoping to get to grips with the next section of paddock by the house in the next few days – I’m guesting my sister’s ancient horse Rhapsody for a holiday later this year and she’ll need to graze separately from my herd. She’s one of nature’s doormats and has in the past been bullied by Shetland ponies, plus her teeth are so decrepit (she’s 28, after all!) that she’s not supposed to eat hay, only grass and four soft feeds a day. She’s also had rheumatism since her early teens and can’t be confined or her joints all seize up! I don’t want my lot stealing her meals or her stealing their hay, so she’ll be grazing the poultry paddocks – which, of course, means I need to get them ready for her. The goose paddock and the orchard don’t need much more doing to them, but there’s still rubbish in the grass at the top of the top section and I need to clear the old muckheap, get it all re-stacked and consolidated, remove the barbed wire and wire netting by the wall and give the grass and weeds a good trim to encourage some fresh growth..