This morning was one of those gloriously beautiful days that demand that I do, indeed, just stop everything and take the time to stare around, admire the scenery and realise how lucky I am to live here.

And again, this time with running commentary by Hannibal.

Truly magnificent.

It’s also been a good working day – I’ve ticked off several jobs, including putting two new perches inside the henhouse, so the expanded flock can all get inside out of the weather through the winter, ripping out the battered old stock fence that separated the goose paddock from the rest of the place, dragging several scaffolding planks out of the grass, where they were quietly burrowing underground, uprooting a chunk of tangled, weed-infested chicken wire and deciding where to run new fences to make three good winter paddocks. I’ll use electric fencing to separate them – that way I can adjust as required and it’ll all be easily moved as and when I want to.

Michelle came up and strimmed a lot of weeds, and Mum did sterling work with the long handled shears.

We also have guests – Evie and Isla, two ferrets belonging to a friend of mine, are once again residing in the spare room for a week, while their human goes off to Ardnamurchan on holiday…. taking plenty of peanut butter and hoping to see pinemartens! I was delighted to be able to recommend the Salen Jetty shop to Gill, and to reassure her that there’s petrol available at Struan.

By the end of the day we’d achieved a great deal, though I may soon have to save up for a skip to get rid of the rubbish!

As an added and delightful, not to mention delicious, bonus, we’ve now correctly identified one of the fruit trees. It’s not a cherry, it’s a plum – and they’re nicely ripe!

Finally we got our act together and put up the last couple of hundred metres of wire to complete the final paddock, so the horses have fresh grass! There is quite a noticeable difference between the grazed and rested paddocks already so as I slowly lengthen the time each paddock is rested, the grazing should get better and better. Fingers crossed!

The geese have discovered that the fence of their paddock is open (it’s only taken them a few weeks…) and last night they appeared in the yard. As far as I know they slept in the yard – they were over by the henhouse when I got up and have explored around a bit. There was a short fracas when the horses discovered the geese in their part of the yard and objected slightly, but the geese escaped back to the non-horse side of the fence safely. I may have to run some chicken wire along the bottom of the fence if the geese insist on trespassing.

There’s a rat visiting the hen house, judging by the tunnel dug under the side wall of the run, and there’s also a rat hole in the feedroom. I plan on doing something about this… I know rats are inevitable but I don’t want hungry rats eating my poultry, so I need to ensure that either the rat leaves (which only means another will move into the vacant territory) or that rats in general can’t get into the hen house.

The latter is preferable.

I’m not a woodchuck but chucking wood has become a regular occupation!

Yesterday we put in some good work. The workshop has been emptied, swept, everything sorted and stacked up tidily, which freed up the space to move  the ferrets in for the winter. They seem quite happy about it.

We also tidied out the woodshed and started moving the smaller wood from the field into it. I took the strimmer over the grass where the wood had been sitting, so that’s all tidied down flat – hopefully there’ll be a decent bit more growth on it before the winter sets in.

This morning I started the day with 45 minutes of wood-chucking, and the answer to the question in the post’s title is… about half a ton of green wood in the time available. After that it was time to take my mother to her podiatry appointment, where I delivered her and headed off to the pharmacy to pick up Michelle’s prescriptions. Returning to the podiatry clinic, I sat and waited until Mum was ready to go, at which point we discovered she’d mislaid her purse somewhere. She was adamant she’d had it in her hand when she sat down on the treatment couch, but frankly I doubted that from the outset (seriously, why would anyone do that?) In the end, after they’d searched the treatment room twice, I took Mum home and we were about to start searching around the house when Michelle told me she’d seen Mum put the purse in the drawer of her bedside table last night.

I can safely say my mother has never, ever put her purse there at night in her life. Until now. If Michelle hadn’t seen it, we might still be looking for the wretched thing!

I went back to the clinic and paid for the session, then took Mum’s bank card back to her again. I also made sure I noted the next appointment down on my phone, so we will get to it!

It took a while to gather everyone together again but we managed to put in a few more hours of work in the afternoon. The silkies and quail are now installed in their winter corner and we’ve taken the torn wire off the damaged bunny run, ready to put in a fresh piece of wire. I just need to find the staple gun and I can get to it… but the last time I saw my staple gun, it was in my mother’s hand. Goodness only knows where it’s got to, but I’ll start dowsing for it in the morning.

We finished off with some wood-chucking and while we eventually persuaded my mother to stop trying to move huge chunks of timber and she settled to picking up the small stuff, Michelle and I teamed up on the big pieces, hoisting them into the barrow and taking them under the fence (taking turns holding the wire up – with the electric off, of course!) and tipping them the other side. We’ve shifted a very good amount of wood – possibly as much as half of the stuff! We’ve also cracked the barrow, but never mind. ..

George had a flash of brilliance this morning – I confused the herd by going into the paddock and wood-chucking, so they milled in and out a while before mostly settling to graze. George hung about inside longer, hoping for human company, but he was just giving up and heading out to graze as I finished and headed in. We paused and looked at each other across the goose paddock, then I gave him the ‘turn around’ arm signal, followed by the ‘walk this way’ arm wave.

He pricked his ears and lifted his head a bit, clearly thinking, then swivelled around and ‘walked this way’ beautifully – I met him in the yard and gave him a handful of nuts in reward! That’s the first time I’ve given him the signs from a distance or out of the yard, so he had to work them out without the usual context and from a vastly increased distance – twenty yards instead of twenty inches! – and I’m very impressed with his achievement.

Tomorrow I hope to get some uninterrupted working time – the district nurse is due to come out and see my mother at some point but when I called the community nursing team office to check, they could only tell me the day, not the time, since it depends what else comes in for them to do. Accordingly, Michelle will text me when the nurse arrives and I’ll nip down and listen to what’s said (so someone remembers anything important!) but with luck it’ll be later in the day and I’ll be able to barrow the majority of the wood out of the muck heap paddock and round to the woodshed, measure up the feed room window for perspex (instead of a 40mph road sign!!), do the same for the work shop windows, mend that bunny run and start ferrying breeze blocks round to build the base for all four runs.

Well, some of that might happen, with luck!

 

We’re coming up fast on the autumn equinox and that means winter’s on its way – so I’ve been planning and plotting how best to arrange the critters for the winter.

The horses, of course, will continue to have free roam between whichever paddock is open and the barns. I want to move the geese around to fresh pastures and put them into the patch of ground where the muckheap is. I also want to rearrange the muckheap severely, build a series of New Zealand bins and move the unrotted parts of the muckheap into those, use the composted material to level out the lumps, bumps and holes in the yard verges and current goose paddock and over-sow in the spring with a wildflower meadow mix, if I can’t manage to do it this autumn.

I want to move most of the small animals into the small dairy, apart from the adult hens who’ll stay in the henhouse just outside the barn. They’ll be able to snuggle together on their perches to stay warm through winter nights.

The ferrets will probably move to the workshop, where they’re further from the prey species – I’m not totally convinced it’s kind to the ferrets to have them watching dinner running around out of reach, nor to the small critters to have predators living that close.

The bunnies will have semi-permanent runs along the outside wall of the small dairy – I’m going to build them bases to fit their runs from the breezeblocks I have sitting about still, which will give them a bit more headroom in their runs, secure footing to the walls and since I don’t plan on mortaring the blocks together, I can just move them aside to muck out easily. I need to repair the spare run and then I can make a start on getting that set up.

The quail will be moving to the corner the ferrets are currently in, which is dry and out of draughts, as well as safely far from curious horse-nose-reach. I’m going to move the silkie chicks’ run over next to the quail, so they’ll also have a dry, draft-free site for the winter.

I can then use the dry end of the large dairy for storing extra hay and straw, move the feed bins into that corner as well (George has developed the habit of suddenly looming over the barrier at me in the current feed room! It’s very disconcerting to have him abruptly poking me with his nose when I haven’t even heard him silently padding up behind me!) and use the free space in the small dairy for storing shavings or wood pellet bales and the like.

I’ve made a start on getting things organised for all this by measuring up spaces, counting blocks and turning out the feed room thoroughly. I’ll keep the bins I currently use for the horses’ feeds there for the moment, but everything else will get stored in the big dairy shortly.

During the turn-out of the feed room I unearthed a young toad, so I relocated him or her safely into the depths of the clematis thicket next to the greenhouse.

I’ve also managed to finish strimming the yard, I’ve decided where to stack the wood from the field and all around taking Mum for another set of blood tests – apparently her sodium levels showed up low at the last lot and they want to confirm it wasn’t a false reading or a flukey low salt day.

A flurry of late night emails has confirmed that I will be getting 6 more rescue hens – and the date’s been brought forward, they’ll be available to pick up on 29th September!

Definitely time to get the perch situation sorted.

With Mum being on doxycycline at the moment, she’s supposed to stay out of direct sunlight so when I saw that today was overcast and dry, if a little breezy, it was great! We’ve spent the bulk of the day outdoors working and achieved quite a lot.

We started by cutting down the second of those yellow conifers outside the stable shed, so between the bits of that and the various bits of rubbish that’ve built up over the past couple of weeks, we filled the trailer and took it to the tip, then came back, refilled it and took that to the tip, too!

We followed that up by three of us all heaving wood out of the field, so we’ve made inroads into the timber nicely.

I’ve also nearly finished strimming the yard down neatly, though it really hurts to just cut down perfectly nice, tasty grass and clover that way!

I’ve put my name down for some more hens from the Little Hen Trust – they’re trying to rehome another 800 hens at the end of October and the four we already have are more than paying their way; a bit of mental arithmetic happened in the back of the car on the way to the tip (the advantages of my daughter’s mathematical skills!) and she reckons with equivalent eggs from the Happy Egg people being £1.50 for 6, my four are laying £1.50 a week, and I’ve had them now for about 2 months, so each one has ‘earned’ about £12. A sack of layer’s pellets is about £8 and they get through a sack a month, shared with the quail and the silkie chicks, and they also get through a sack of mixed corn a month, shared with the quail, the silkie chicks and (by far the biggest consumers!) the geese, which is another £15. That means they’ve ‘made’ £48 and cost less than £46, so they’re ‘in profit’ even given they’re ‘carrying’ all the other poultry costs with them!

I need to sort out some lighting for them through the winter. My grandmother used to hang a kerosene lantern in the henhouse through the war, apparently – I have a couple of kerosene lanterns but I’m not sure I want to hang naked flame lanterns in a wooden shed! A battery-operated version should be perfectly ok and it’ll just give the birds those extra few hours a night when they can still feed and drink freely before roosting.

I also need to fix some internal perches in the enclosed part of the house, so they can all fit in snugly out of the weather through the winter. Tomorrow I plan on finishing off the strimming early, then I’ll rake through the various bits of wood and see if there’s anything suitable for the job lying about. If there isn’t, it’s probably time I pruned the willow in the north paddock anyway – amongst the various prunings I plan on planting (almost all of them!) I’m sure there’ll be two or three suitable to use as perches.

It’s been a quiet couple of days, getting Mum’s new routine sorted with the additional pills and twice daily anointing of her legs – but there’s already a marked improvement in the dry skin on her legs, some of the dead skin flaking off, so fingers crossed things continue to improve there.

I didn’t manage to get much work done yesterday but today I’ve started shifting the cut wood out of the first paddock, nearest the house. As yet, I’m just heaving it over the fence so I can barrow and stack it at leisure, but it’s going to take a few days to complete the task even that far! The hens have loved helping, since there’s all sorts of beetles and earwigs and so on lurking under the pieces of wood so they’ve been diving in and grabbing protein snacks as I lift each chunk up.

I’ve also strimmed most of the yard down tightly – hopefully it’ll grow more yet this year but in the meantime I’m trying to get on top of the grass-cutting situation. I have plans to acquire some more four-legged grass-mowers but we’ll see – it might happen next month, or possibly next year! Watch this space…

I also did a bit more fence connecting this evening as George was leaning over the back boundary helping himself to the neighbour’s headland! Hopefully next time he tries that the fence will bite back.

I got a text from Michelle just after midnight suggesting it’s time to check for infections again as Mum apparently had trouble remembering where her bedroom was last night, so I swung by the pharmacy first thing and picked up a couple more sample bottles. I arrived at her house to find her slumped over the kitchen table, her speech faint and  slightly slurred, quite slow to respond to anything and generally limp. I gave her a cup of tea and some biscuits, organised her morning meds and called the surgery to ask for a home visit as a priority. It didn’t look like a stroke – no facial asymmetry, no problem with bilateral grip, pupils responding evenly – but it certainly wasn’t right!

By the time one of the local GP practice’s nurse practitioners arrived to check things out, Mum had revived somewhat – in fact it reminded me of watching my late father, who was diabetic, coming back from a hypo. Mum’s not diabetic and doesn’t have any of the usual risk factors for that, but the nurse checked her blood sugars and tested for any urinary infection again – both of those came back clear of any problems, perfectly normal. Blood pressure was fine, temperature was fine, so she did a complete neurological exam and ruled out any kind of stroke. A quick check of ears confirmed nothing wrong there, either. She checked lung function and that was ok – a few basal crackles so there’s a bit of fluid down the bottom of the lungs, but apart from Mum wheezing when she exerts herself there’s no lung infection and no coughing. Finally, however, she checked for oedema and we discovered Mum’s been hiding severe infected cellulitis and oedema in both lower legs! We now have a two-week course of antibiotics to add to the daily meds, which means Mum’s to avoid being in the sun for the duration, together with a topical ointment to soften up the layers of dead skin which is highly inflammable and some diuretic tablets to try and help shift the additional fluid out of the body. On top of that, we need to remind Mum to put her feet up when she’s sitting down, and I need to find some big, chunky unused books (I wonder where the old Encyclopaedia Brittanica got to?) to raise the foot end of her bed a little.

All in all, something of a mystery but at least we’ve found something else that’s treatable, so it’s being treated.

All of this meant, of course, that the last paddock hasn’t been completed, but I have managed to snatch time to play with George a couple of times. He’s now handing me (hooving me?) all four feet politely and readily several times a day, so I want to start working on duration – when I get the time! Abe had a slightly puffy off fore this morning, leading me to suspect he’s possibly been fooling about with Dancer in the mud and tweaked a tendon, but he’s not lame and the swelling had gone down this evening so I’m just going to keep an eye on it rather than do anything more. Poppy remains her normal quiet, sweet little self with me – and a monster towards the poor lads! Dancer and I had Words – I got between her and George this morning in time to get a smart rap on the knee from one of her hind hooves, the wee menace! Things were Said (mostly under my breath as I was bent over rubbing a smarting knee!) and she did get her rump spanked, though as far as I can tell she didn’t actually notice.

 

I got up this morning after a night’s sleep, which means the kaolin has worked for Wicket and her innards are doing what they’re supposed to again, to find the horses were not where I’d left them. Poppy and Dancer were right down the far end of what I think we might call the Back Paddock, which was fine, but George and Abe were beyond the paddock fence and grazing happily in what will be the odd-shaped paddock three, given a few more days! I set off to investigate and soon – with George’s cheerful escort – discovered they’d snapped the wire on the far side, flipped the plastic post a good twenty yards away and then settled to graze quietly. I repaired the breaks, recovered the post and planted it back where it came from, then went back and put the fence back on, collected George’s head collar and some nuggets, and set off again.

George was easy to catch, of course – in fact the challenge was moving fast enough to get the head collar in position as he tried to dive bodily into it! Abe was a bit of a nuisance, coming asking for treats while I was trying to lead George and making George a little antsy in case some of his nuggets escaped in Abe’s direction, but after a couple of circles we organised ourselves and headed for the nearest gate onto the back paddock again. To get George lined up on it correctly I had to either circle him around me again or push him away from me a little – and knowing his issues about being pushed away, I wasn’t sure if he’d accept it. We haven’t tried for a good while, though, and he’s had a lot of leading training since then, so I put my hand up on the side of his nose and pressed slightly, ready to back off if he had a snit, but instead he merely altered his direction placidly and lined up on the gate flawlessly!

I unclipped his rope and popped him through the gate, then hooked it up again and went back to collect Abe, who’d stopped a few yard back and was looking horrified, possibly by being asked to walk towards a gate where Poppy was now standing demanding treats!

Fortunately Poppy moved off to bully George after a minute and I got Abe out with just the rope looped over his neck and closed the gate behind him safely, walked them all along to the gate they should be using, and watched them all pad through meekly.

This afternoon I bought another 250m of poly wire (I’m saving up to replace it all with rope – one day!) and we got the fence line of the paddock nearest the house cleared of weeds, posts all up and then wire up as well, so now there’s just a few wooden posts to go in and then insulators and wire for the final paddock – weather permitting, we’ll make a start on that tomorrow.

I found out where the chickens have been sneaking off to lay their eggs – the disgusting little dinosaurs have built a den at the back of the muck heap! I retrieved nine eggs this morning –  I expect they’re ok, they’ve been under weeds behind the heap, not on it, and they’re only a couple of days old. I’ll keep them for myself and the dogs, rather than giving them to my mother or daughter, though, and make sure I pick up each day’s eggs smartly in future.

Slightly belatedly, here’s the photos from the day I moved the silkie chicks to their run, with supervision and conversation from the adult chickens!

I notice I’m getting a little erratic on my blogging – I shall try to get back to a daily post.

Since the last post, we’ve got the second paddock up and running at last, so the horses are on fresh grass and I’ve shut off the soggy end paddock, now officially named ‘Bog End’. When I opened the gate into their new paddock George went straight through, Dancer lingered near the gateway looking nervous and calling for her mum, and I ended up walking down to fetch Abe, who followed me amiably back and padded straight through the grass with an expression of polite interest, then Poppy strolled straight in and Dancer fell in on her hooves meekly. This evening they’d forgotten where the gate was so I had to go down the field and extract them for their meals – then run for it as they caught on and came thundering out! By the time I’d taken the short cut under the fence to the yard, they’d gone cantering round the house and I just got to the door in time to steer horses to their proper buckets!

I must take some photos of George at dinner time, he looks absolutely magnificent, all arched neck and a fine upstanding hunk of a horse!

Michelle found the short and eliminated it, by the way, so that’s done.

We’ve trimmed a lot more weeds today and I just have a short stretch left before I can put up the next piece of wire to make the next paddock.

Tomorrow I need to stalk the chickens when they leave their house in the morning – I don’t know where they’re laying but it’s not where I can find them!

The silkie chicks have been moved to their next enclosure – bigger again, with both food and water suspended so they’ll get used to the idea before they join the flock and have to fend for themselves in the henhouse. While I was doing that, of course, I had the four adults all ‘helping’… standing around my feet chattering about it and pecking me!!