Oh Holy Sat Nav

The "Greedy Cockerel" - as named by the kids - has obv been a  busy rooster as 7 chicks have hatched out this week.  Each time we have new chicks I forget quite how cute one day old chicks really are. Thanks Sam for helping me move the two mum hens and the chicks into a separate hen house and run. 

 

 

The cockerel is still aggressive however, and has a nasty habit of attacking you as you walk away from him, unsuspectingingly, with your back turned.  People have taken to sort of shimmering across the chicken field, side stepping, so as to be able to keep one eye on the Greedy Cockerel at all times. Still, with 7 babies produced, I have a new fondness for the old boy.

 

 

Elsewhere, we are finally making progress with the planning for the riding school.  Its really exciting, designing the yard from scratch and being able to choose exactly where the windows should go, how the yard should be configured and what size everything should be.  I am now thinking rubber floors, asphalt yard, roof pitch and drainage.  Not to mention ventilation!

My training with the RDA (Riding for the Disabled Association) is going well and I have started being able to offer riding here on the field once a week too, which is great.

We have not been at all successful with the quail.  After starting with 6, we are now down to only two.  A ferret / rat or similar had been digging in and taking one quail away each night.  Anyway, hopefully Russell has now fixed the problem and made the quail enclosure safe.  None of the eggs hatched either:-(

However the turkeys are still going strong.  I have taken quite a few orders and have only five or six more to sell.  They are absolutely driving me insane now at bed time.  We're going to have to trim their wings again to stop them flying up on to the turkey house.  It takes me about 15 minutes every night in the pitch dark to chase them round the field and into bed. 

A few weeks ago we went to Peppa Pig world for the day as a treat for the kids.  We were very late home and when we finally got back it had been dark for hours.  I was so worried that a fox had got all the turkeys that the car journey home was stressful to say the least.  When we finally got home the turkeys were exposed, sat on the roof, but all fine.  Luke cheered me up on the car journey home though by saying that the sat nav woman must be God's wife, as she always knows where we are and which way to go.

I am a firm, firm believer in the Hugh Fern Whittingstall approach to eating meat: that it is ok to do as long as the animal has had a life worth living i.e. that it is better off having being bred for meat, rather than having a horrible, sad and miserable existence from which slaughter is actually a relief.   I also agree that it is too easy to buy processed meat without any thought to the animal from which it has come.  Having said all that, I am finding it hard to eat our own cockerels - they have had a natural, free range life and so I am doing what I believe in, but it does feel rather odd.  Hopefully it is something we will get used to.

My vegetation step daughter was here when I cooked a cockerel recently.  It was a little unfortunate, she came home just as it was , without any dignity, defrosting in the roasting tin on top of the oven. She said "that's a funny looking chicken".  I said "ah, its actually one of our cockerels", "Oh my God, did it die?" " Erm, yes, sort of ............."

Anyway, blog about the farm not the kids, as Russell keeps telling me.  So the final piece of news is that we are making plans to plant around 100m of native hedging, bare rooted, in the new 12 acre field we have seeded with grass.  To try to keep costs down, Russell and I will do this ourselves.  First job is to cover the area we want to plant the hedges in with plastic, so that the new grass dies off.  I am very excited about growing this hedge, very excited.

xx xx