The Chick With Two Mums

Every year several of my hens go broody.  Every year I get excited and watch for signs of chicks.  Until now, every year I’ve been disappointed.  I’ve heard so many theories about why it never happened.

Howard, our first rooster was a bantam, he arrived with his mother Mrs Wolowitz.  I called him Howard after The Big Bang Theory character because of the way he’d sidle up to my hens (who generally were bigger than him), do a little dance and try to jump on.  He didn’t give up even when they wouldn’t have a bar of him, he’d puff himself up until he nearly exploded and keep on trying.

The dog killed him.  I’ve since trained the dog to leave the chooks alone, he was still a puppy at that stage and would chase anything that ran.

Then I bought Captain Jack.  A big beautiful Australorp rooster.  I still got no chicks, but only Mrs Wolowitz, my little bantam hen, ever got broody and she’d change which nesting box she was sitting in every couple of days, so there was never any chance of eggs hatching.   I got a few more hens and was given Midnight - another big beautiful Australorp rooster.  Midnight and Captain Jack didn’t get along.  I spent several hours cleaning up the blood and cleaning Midnight’s wounds.

Captain Jack (after the fight)

Captain Jack died, not sure what from, so Midnight became cock of the walk.  By then though, he was servicing 50 hens.  I was told that he had too many hens and that the ratio should be somewhere between one rooster to 6 hens up to one rooster to 10 hens (depending on who you talk to).  Dad said to look at the condition of my rooster, if I had too many hens, he'd be in poor condition and thoroughly hen-pecked (the origin of the term is a literal thing).  He was always fully feathered and looking fantastic, all showy and glossy and proud.

Midnight after the fight

Last summer, one of my hens sat from September until late March to no avail.

Then we got two new roosters with the turkeys.  Roofus and Rory.  They found their way into the chook run with my old girls, although it took Roofus about two weeks of roaming free (and crowing from about 4am outside our bedroom window) to find his way in to meet the girls and Midnight.  They all seemed to get along okay, so I figured that three roosters to 50ish hens was a much better mix.

Roofus (in the middle)

Rory

Midnight died - probably from old age and then there were two.  We lost a few hens along the way as well and were down to 43 ish - they are hard to count.

My hen that sat for 6 months went broody again and for the first time in several years, I was feeling hopeful.  She's been sitting for about a month and was joined in her nesting box about a week and a half ago by another hen.

On Monday I was excited to see we had a chick hatched.  I called Miss Eleven in to see and she was quite excited by it too.

On Tuesday, that chick was dead.  Not sure how, but it looked a little flattened.  There was another that had only made it halfway out of it's shell and never got any further.  

I could have cried.  Although chose to remain excited about it since this was the closest we'd gotten in five years and five roosters.

On Thursday there was a new chick, living and peeping at us.  I wasn't going to get my hopes up.  I cautiously checked in on Friday and it was still alive, in the corner of the nesting box.  Both hens that had been sitting suddenly got all worried and both came back and sat on it, glaring at us.  It had made it to two days, I was more hopeful.

Today (Saturday), it was outside with both Mums, neither straying far and both making their special "talking to baby" sounds.  I can't be sure which of them was the one that sat for the whole duration since they're both Barred Rock hens and close to identical.  I thought maybe that "I will cut you" expression I had been getting from the one who was broody for longer would give it away, but she seems to have lost that now that she's hatched a chick.

I also thought that maybe the newcomer would continue to sit on the remaining eggs in the nesting box.  I was wrong, she can't bear to be parted from the chick either.

Meanwhile, we have a chick with two Mums.

Taming the Triffid Garden

My vege gardens have had their various successes and failures in the last few years.  This year though, I've been determined that we need to have a successful garden.  There is an extra motivation for this, well several motivating factors to be honest.  The first is that my parents have moved into a retirement village - my mother's dementia or alzheimer's (seems to depend on which Doctor you talk to) has worsened to the point where the village was the sensible step for Dad - he won't put her into full time care and the village has a dementia unit if she does worsen too much or if something happens to him.  Dad asked if he could have a patch for veges, but hasn't had the time to come out and do anything with it yet, so we'll just grow enough for them too.

Recent earthquakes and the American election make a lot of things seem unstable so making sure we have the resources to feed ourselves healthily becomes more important.

Last year, I had great success with my broccoli.  I always leave it after I've cut the main head off and pick the side sprouts.  Side sprouts are usually bite sized, but if you keep it up, you can get a few extra meals out of them.  Last year, those side sprouts grew to be only just smaller than a normal head of broccoli, so I got at least ten heads per plant.  They also just kept on growing, the sprouts getting a little smaller as they went until I just didn't bother anymore and I left them to go to seed.  I only stopped them from doing that about a month ago when I decided it was time to start sorting out that garden for this year and pulled them out.

Within a couple of weeks, baby broccoli plants were popping up everywhere.  There has to be at least a hundred self-sown broccoli plants in that garden.

I left the remainder of my spring onions last year to go to seed as well.  They're still flowering so we'll see how well that goes, but they still haven't died off since last summer either.  I also have silverbeet and what I thought was the red stemmed version of silverbeet but has turned out to be beetroot - so I'll leave them to seed and look after the babies a little better.  At the moment, I just pick the leaves and stems as treats for cattle and chickens.

This was the garden that we put several hours of work into yesterday.  The weeds had also bolted, to the point where I couldn't even see the tomatoes that Hubby had planted in there.  They're now clear, staked and laterals removed.

I wish I'd taken a before picture for comparison.

I filled one of the gardens with chicken manure and sawdust (the sweepings when I cleaned out the chookhouses) at the start of last year - nearly two years ago.  Everything grew very fast and very tall.  Too fast and too tall in fact and most of it bolted straight to seed.

All the brussels sprouts I planted last year bolted to seed immediately and I'd left them to seed.  That patch of garden also had radishes that had also bolted and the seeds had grown and then bolted too.  I started cleaning the flowering radishes out and found a heap of small brussels sprouts plants.  Because they had been tucked in amongst a lot of much taller plants, I've been slow weeding that garden, giving each handful I uncover a few days to toughen up before exposing them completely.  I haven't seen what is growing deeper in that patch, because I'm afraid of stepping on a baby plant, but I am working slowly through it.

In the other main vege patch, we planted some potatoes probably a month ago.  Two weeks ago, I mounded them up with year old cow manure.  Hubby had planted out some tomatoes in between the rows of potatoes.  He was sure he'd left lots of space between them, but I was starting to mound them too with the potatoes.  In a week, the potato plants had grown to over a foot above the mounding I'd done.  I don't want to risk using more cow manure in case it ends up too nitrogen rich which would mean lots of plant, but a few small potatoes, so I'm finding some rather sour old clay soil to do the next layer of mounding.

We still have 60 odd seed potatoes waiting or us to plant them, so we're filling tyres again.  And I still need to figure out where I'll be planting peas and beans.

Earthquakes 14 November

As you may remember, we moved to our lifestyle block after the devastating Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.  Generally, we feel the odd quake, but only mildly and very few of the quakes that hit Christchurch.

So when we were shaken out of bed just after midnight this morning by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake, it was both familiar and a rude shock at the same time.  However, having been there before, I found that while the quake was still rocking and rolling us around I had already assessed how much food we had, how much water was available, our ability to cook and keep warm.

It was somewhat satisfying to realise that because of our efforts towards self-sufficiency we would be okay for quite some time.

We recently had two cattlebeasts and two pigs slaughtered, so the freezer is full of meat.  I also have several male turkeys that are overdue for slaughter, so there was always that available too if the power went out and we didn't want to open the freezers.  My veges are starting to grow well for this season, but except from some neglected carrots and silverbeet that has become triffid-like, most of it is still in the early growing stages so that would be a little tough, but there was still some of last years broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer.  I've also got shelves and shelves full of various preserves in the pantry.  We'd be okay for food.

We have a 900 litre header tank on the roof full of water, a 2000 litre tank up the hill and there is always the water in the creek although that would take some boiling. We'd be okay for water.

We have the coal range for heating and cooking if the power goes out.  We have plenty of firewood in the shed already and there is a lot of old gorse wood in various spots around the farm.  We have gas barbecues and gas in the bottle.  We'd be okay there.

We have tents and shelters and sheds.  We have jackets and gumboots hanging up outside the door.  We have torches galore.

We were going to be okay.

Lemon Curd

In my last post, I mentioned that I give something I've made back to the person who gave me their excess.  Unfortunately (or fortunately I suppose, depending on how you look at it), giving lemon cordial back to Mum and Dad resulted in another bag of lemons.

I'm all out of bottles for cordials, I still have more than enough cordial in the pantry to last us at least a year.  So this time, I made Lemon Curd.

I've found many recipes for Lemon Curd, although sometimes under the names of Lemon Honey or Lemon Cheese, but they're all very close if not the same recipe.  Even going back to the one I found in my Great-grandmother's recipe book from the early 1920s.

If sealed properly, Lemon Curd will keep for months in the pantry and years in the fridge.  Seriously, I just finished a jar of lemon curd that I made 3 years ago and it was still perfectly fine.

In my experience, this recipe will make approximately 500ml of curd - roughly one jam jar.  Increase it by how many jars of curd you want to make.

Lemon Curd

2 lemons
2 eggs
4 tbsp butter
1 Cup sugar.

Lightly beat the eggs.  Grate the lemon rind and juice the lemons.  Add all ingredients together in the top of a double boiler and cook gently until thick - don't let it boil.  Bottle.

It's really that simple.

Lemon Cordial

I've been given lots (and I mean lots) of lemons.

I'm the person people give their excess to, because I can always find something to do with it.  Sometimes what I do with it isn't particularly successful, but I learn from my mistakes and make something better next time.  I also make a point of giving something I've made with the various excesses back to the people who gave the original source material to me.  If that's not practical, I give them something else instead.


At the moment, it's lemons.

I started with lemon cordial.  It's always useful to have, it's great hot for coughs, colds and flu, and it's refreshing as a cool summer drink.  I've used a recipe that was given to me by a friend, she got it from her grandmother who used to make it every year and swore by it at the first sign of a sniffle.

It was nice, but I didn't find it particularly lemony.  You can kind of taste the lemon in there, but it's mostly a sweet drink.

This year, I decided to increase the lemon content in the recipe - partly for that lemon taste and partly as a way to get through those lemons.  The result was a strong lemon flavour, but it's still a sweet drink.  My family love it.

Lemon Cordial

4 litres hot water
4.5 kg sugar
75g citric acid
30 med-large lemons
1 or 2 oranges (optional)

Squeeze lemons and orange.  Dissolve sugar and citric acid in hot water.  Leave to cool before adding juice (boiling water will kill all vitamins).

Lemon zest may be added for a healthier (and stronger) option.  Add while syrup is quite warm and leave overnight or until cold.  Strain before bottling.

This made about 7 litres of cordial.

Turkey For Dinner

Warning:  This blog deals with killing and dressing a turkey - some pictures and other parts may be upsetting to some people.

Since we got our 16 turkeys, the plan has always been to eat most of the boys.  I've been making enquiries about swapping a couple of boys with someone else so I can have some that are unrelated to mine, but the person I was talking to is overseas on holiday at the moment so that's all on hold.

The need to thin out the ranks has become more obvious lately as it's the start of their breeding season.  There were two of the smaller boys spending most of their time hiding in the house and their normally bright faces were blackened - I don't know if that was bruising or because they'd had their faces in the dirt often.  They were consistently chased away from food and from the rest of the flock.  There is always a layer of feathers, mostly tail feathers, on the grass in their pen.

I've heard lots of varying ideas, stories and opinions about killing a turkey.  Most seem to go with breaking their neck, either by the picking them up by their neck and sharply swinging the bird, or by holding the bird by it's feet, pulling the head down at an angle sharply.  The other method I'd had recommended is to cut it's head off, although after watching an episode of something on tv where the guy who did that had his stomach cut to ribbons by the thrashing around that immediately follows, I was wary of this and had a plan if this did become the way we did it.

Several times over the last two weeks, I've geared myself up to go and kill a turkey.  I've never actually directly killed anything bigger than an insect before.  That's not true, I've been fishing, and held the salmon I caught while it was hit on the head with a hammer.  But I wasn't sure if I could do it.  I'm fine watching someone else do it, I'm fine with the thought of doing it, but doing it myself is a different thing and I believe you never really know until you're there doing it.

The turkeys are brave enough around me to stick their heads into the bucket of food I'm holding when I go into their run, but I haven't been quick enough to get them, perhaps that was some of my hesitation about having the nerve to do it, perhaps it was fear of doing it badly or perhaps it was fear of getting hurt by them.  I've been hit in the face by a wing and that hurt me, if there were flying feet (which are big and sharp and pointy by the way), it could be very messy.

Yesterday, hubby came with me to feed them.  I suggested turkey for Father's Day dinner tonight.  My parents are coming out for dinner, so it could be a point of pride for me to be serving one of our turkeys that we'd processed.  Catching one was the first problem.

Eventually, we herded one into their little house.  We caught him, but it turns out that breaking their neck is not the simple or easy process it's usually been described as.  I think in the end, we broke his neck, but it didn't kill him.  He was still gasping and blinking and we had a very subdued and silent walk up to the house to chop his head off as quickly as we could.  We were both feeling rather cruel in that we'd obviously incapacitated him, but not killed him quickly or cleanly.

I tied his feet to reduce the ability to thrash and potentially injure one of us and we laid him out on a large flat tree stump.  Hubby wielded the axe and my best laid plans of lifting the rope I'd tied his feet by so he'd be thrashing around in mid air proved impractical.  I couldn't hold the rope, I'm just not strong enough to hold on to that while a large bird flaps and thrashes.

The books I have giving practical tips on plucking and dressing recommended scalding birds in a large water bath at about 80 degrees C.  Finding something big enough to contain this bird was difficult, I wasn't going to bring him inside and use a bathtub.  A 60l crate did the job, but it took a bit of moving and rearranging to get all of him underwater.

One large headless turkey awaiting plucking

Then I started plucking.  Most of the feathers came out easily enough.  It reminded me of waxing, hold the skin fairly tight and pull against the direction of growth.  The wing feathers were something else though.  Each feather took a lot of strength to pull out and several times I broke the spine of the feather off rather than pulled it out.  A pair of long nose pliers took care of that eventually.  After about an hour and a half I had all but a few small fine feathers left to do.  Miss Ten got excited and helped me for a while, then her gloves got some holes in them and she didn't want to do it anymore.

Partially plucked turkey with Miss Ten's help.

Fully plucked - well except for some of the small fine feathers.

Gutting was not what I expected.  Bits were easy, but I tore the gullet and spent a bit of time washing fine grains of mash and grass out of the neck.  I also tore a small hole in the tract between intestine and vent and spent even longer washing that off - in the end I cut out the bits that had been in contact with it.

After probably three hours, I had a plucked, dressed and very well washed turkey.  Dressed weight is 12kg, it's a little bit too big for my largest roasting dish, but hopefully it'll shrink a little in the cooking.

Ready for stuffing, trussing and roasting.

Turkeys

Hubby came home from work a few months ago and asked if we wanted turkeys.

After hearing from him several times over the last few years that we were never getting turkeys, I was quite surprised to hear this from him.

One of his workmates has a friend who has 60 turkeys free-ranging and they were becoming a problem and needed to go.  Because she'd started with two originally, they were all her babies and she didn't want to eat them or know about it if anyone was going to eat them.  She wanted to be able to tell herself they were going off to be pets for someone who would love them like she did.  She'd tried selling them on TradeMe, but because of the recent push for certified humane animal breeders and sellers, her ads kept getting removed.

We talked about it for a few weeks and I rang her.  We converted a pen in a paddock to a turkey house thinking that if we clipped wings, the deer fencing would be sufficient to contain them.  Then we finally went to pick them up with a covered box trailer.  The theory was that if we threw some food in, they'd go in after the food.  I think it took about half an hour for any of them to brave the trailer - after the roosters had been in and out a few times.  After a while, we figured we had all in there that we were going to get and shut up the trailer.  We got six turkeys, four boys and two girls.  And two roosters who escaped as soon as we got home.

Six turkeys investigating their new house.

In my head, I knew turkeys were big.  I hadn't physically seen a turkey since I was a small child though and then they seemed like ostrich size.  I was still surprised by just how big they were.  Then seeing how high they could jump (even without flying) meant that the deer fencing would not be sufficient to keep them contained.  The paddock next door to their paddock had been planted in green feed, mostly oats and kale.  I'm fairly confident our neighbour would shoot and eat any that he found in his greenfeed and I couldn't blame him honestly.

We'd planned to shut them in their newly built house for a couple of days anyway, like I do with any new chickens I get, so they get to know where home is.  The need to create a covered run meant they got to stay confined for a week while the run was created out of deer fence waratahs (or Y posts as they're more correctly named) and 2m wide chicken wire.  Dad and Hubby sat down and did the maths to figure out what would be the best size, utilising existing fencing to get the most area out of 100m of chicken wire (including roof).  Then they discovered that the roll of chicken wire was only 50m and they'd run out with the run only half roofed.

Exploring the covered run.

Finishing the run took a little longer than expected, or rather it took longer than planned because delays, dramas and holdups are pretty much expected these days.  But the turkeys seemed to like their new run and spent a lot of time exploring it.

I worried a little on and off as their wattles seemed to be going white.  In chickens, white comb and wattles are a sign of ill health and I assumed that turkeys were the same.  I spent some time on google but couldn't really find anything definitive - one website suggested that wattle colour in turkeys was more a sign of their mood.

Pale wattles 

Last weekend, ten more joined them.  The lady I mentioned earlier has been feeding the turkeys in a caged trailer for the last month or so and they're used to going into the cage on the trailer for food.  It made shutting in more turkeys a piece of cake.  She and her hubby thought they'd even enjoyed the hour drive to our place.  They'd been quiet but still alert and watching everything around them.

This is the four boys just as the new turkeys were joining them.

As they were backing the trailer up to the turkey run, the six we already had found it quite threatening.  The girls rushed off and hid in the house, while the boys puffed themselves up, tails fanned, wattles bright red and snoods hanging halfway down to their chests.  The new turkeys coming to join them had come from the same place they had, they'd only had approximately a month apart, but obviously the pecking order had to be re-established.  There were lots of fanned tails, red faces and thrumming noises over the next hour or so.  

Pecking order being sorted

They seem to have it mostly sorted out now, but our head count shows ten boys to six girls, so those numbers will need some serious adjusting very soon.  A friend has mentioned she has another friend who has turkeys, so I may try and arrange a swap for some boys just to get some fresh bloodlines in - I think all of mine are related.  I'm fairly sure the lady we got them from said she started with one pair and from them came the other 58.

She also told us that the facial colours are a sign of mood.  Red wattles and blue-purple round the eyes is when they're agitated, upset or fighting for dominance.  Pink and white is a fairly relaxed and normal state.

We did managed to drive the escaped roosters towards the chook run.  Once they realised that there were 40 or 50 odd hens on the other side of the fence, they were no longer worried about me chasing them, they suddenly started posing and nonchalantly showing off for the girls.  One wouldn't go into the chook run for another two weeks.  He nearly became dinner as he'd start crowing outside our bedroom from about 4am, but we did eventually get him in there.

Five Year Anniversary

Last month marked five years on our little block.

I still remember moving in.  It was hectic, filling up a rented small truck several times over, loading up cars and trailers and driving more than an hour in convoy to our little block.

For those who don't know the story, we were living in Wainoni in the Eastern suburbs of Christchurch.  Those Eastern suburbs suffered badly in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.  Mostly because the land we were on was only soil on the top maybe 40cm and sand underneath that.  The house we'd just spent 7 years gradually renovating needed to be started again from scratch.

In some spots, the foundations had sunk enough that you could pull bricks out of the outside walls without any sort of resistance.  The lino had bunched up in this corner but had a gap in that one.  There were cracks of up to 10mm in some of the internal walls.  Walking across the kitchen floor made you feel seasick but according to EQC we were still officially liveable and I had several arguments about what was existing wear and tear and what was new.  We could probably have coped with that, if it wasn't for the constant wearing on your nerves that goes with this kind of event and the tens of thousands of aftershocks.

We'd have a noticeable aftershock at least 5 times a week.  Cars driving slowly past my house felt like aftershocks and made the house shake and tremble.  Everyone was on edge all the time.  Nerves were frayed and we were all brittle and uptight and irritable.

Hubby came home one day and told me he'd arranged for a mortgage broker to come and see us and find out how much we could borrow.  He didn't want to come home to our place anymore, his daily commute had doubled because of all the road damage and he found himself dreading coming home from work every day.  We found that if we rented out our house, the amount we could easily borrow was much higher than expected and I shortly realised that it was possible for us to finally live our dream of having a lifestyle block.

We looked at a lot of places, some okay and some dreadful.  None quite ticked all our boxes.  Then with the help of friends who were real estate agents, we came to have a look at what became our block and immediately fell in love.  Several times since, those friends have said that they've never seen buyers and a property more suited to each other.

It was a very quick process because the tenants we'd organised needed to be out of their previous place by a particular date.  In five weeks, we had finance sorted, insurance sorted (although that had it's dramas), schools mostly sorted for the kids and an extra moving with us - Miss (then) 15's boyfriend found himself homeless and they had this dependency thing going on. It was easier to have him move with us (with some strict rules of course) and then I knew Miss 15 would come home each day, which had also been a problem.

We moved into an old farm cottage that had been extended a few times and needed some love.  Our block took some months to get our heads around the size of our land.  It felt like I was walking in a public park.

Hubby needs a project, he's a busy relaxer.  The gorse that covered half of our block provided him with that.  I make jokes now and then that he and the gorse are like Jean Valjean and Javert - there are times when there have been more important jobs that need doing, but he'd be cutting and burning gorse.  When we got our first chickens, I picked them up before he'd finished the house so that he had to get it done quickly.

Achievements:

We've fenced the half of the property that hadn't previously been fenced.  Where there was a huge open area, there are now four distinct paddocks.  We've strung them with electric fencing, there is undergate wire to continue the circuits, we've put gates in.  There are still two more fences to put in.

We've planted a small orchard and managed to keep it alive.  Keeping it alive might not sound like a big deal, but given the hot, dry gale force Nor'West winds we get every spring and two years of crippling drought, I find it rather impressive.  We even got fruit this year from some of them.

We have taken out more than half of our grocery bill in foods we provide for ourselves.  I haven't bought meat, dairy or eggs in a year and a half.  I only buy potatoes for a few months of the year (depending on how my crop went) and I have plenty broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer.  There's usually tomato pastes and pasta sauces frozen to last at least six months too.

The renovations we've done have made the house warmer in winter, more vermin proof, far more pleasant to live in.  The leaks in the roof have been fixed, the rotten floors in two rooms have been ripped out and replaced and we're slowly insulating the external walls.

I handraised a cow that I am now milking.  I am currently taming two heifers (that are the daughters of my older cows) so that I can milk them when they calve.  I can touch them briefly without them bolting now, they just shake their heads and step away and you can almost hear them telling me to go away.

Paddocks that were probably three quarters gorse are now cleared.  There is still and will most likely always be the odd small plant that pops up, but they're easily managed in under an hour.  Compared to the weeks that each paddock took to cut, burn and spray.

Lessons:

Sometimes a visual barrier works as well as a brick wall to keep livestock contained, but sometimes it doesn't - it's important to know when it will and when it won't.

Hay is a commodity that is worth more than gold, treat your hay with respect.

If you have livestock, you have dead stock.

There is a right and wrong way to set up an electric fence.

It pays to learn how to do your own plumbing and drainage repairs because getting a plumber to even return your calls in less than a year is a major achievement.

There's no such thing as "Unusable land".

Never say never.  Animals that you (or rather Hubby) declared you'd never get can easily become a well-loved feature of your farm.
In the last five years, we've had our ups and downs, we've had successes and failures, joys and heartbreaks but there's still nowhere I'd rather be.

Sheep and Flystrike

This post has been wanting to be written for a few months.  At the same time, I haven't wanted to write it.  However, I am hoping that my painful lesson may help someone else.

During our humid summer, flies were a huge problem.  I'd been waiting for the shearer to come and shear my sheep and he was very busy - it was put off twice taking an extra two months.  As February rolled on with temperatures in the high thirties, I was worrying about my sheep - especially my hoggets which had never been shorn.

Then one afternoon, my neighbour called and told me that my lambs had flies.  He dropped in with instructions and a bottle of dip.  He told us to clip their dags and legs but leave about 1cm of wool and liberally pour the dip over.  He said to leave that layer of wool for the dip to soak into and keep working.

I cleaned up the two lambs with flies and dipped them.  I caught the other two and although they had no sign of flies, I dagged them anyway.  I caught my two hogget ewes, checked them and dagged them too.  No sign of flies on them either.  It was quite obvious with the lambs because the flies were hanging around them, but not the other sheep.

I was quite surprised about one of my hoggets, I'd noticed her across the paddocks, spending a lot of time lying down while the others were up and around.  I'd been sure she had flies, but she seemed clean.

I had a hard time sleeping that night.  I kept seeing the maggots eating the lambs.  It's a nasty thing to see.

About a week later, the neighbour rang again (apologising profusely for 'interfering') and said we'd missed one.  I went back to check, I thought it was the same hogget I'd been worried about as she was still spending most of her time lying down and listless.  She got up and ran, it was very hard to catch her, but catch her I did and I could find no sign of flies or maggots on her this time either.

Perhaps it was the heat?  That was all we could think of and the shearer was supposed to be coming that weekend.  On Saturday, we penned the sheep up ready for him.  The ram we'd borrowed nearly a year earlier was going home after shearing.  We'd just gotten back to the house after penning them up for a cuppa when we got the message that he'd called and won't be able to make it today.  The place he was going to just before us had considerably more sheep than he'd expected and it was going to be too late by the time he finished with their sheep.  Give him a call during the week and he'd come out one evening.

We managed half a cup of coffee before the ram's owners arrived.  So we went back to separate the ram from the others.  Getting him onto the trailer was fun - it took four of us to drive him half the way and then a flying tackle from the owner as he was charging at me before we finally got him under control. It was a good thing that he hadn't been shorn because fistfulls of wool at scruff and rump was the only way to move him.  I warned the owners that we'd had issues with flies, they checked him over and said he was fine and rams rarely suffer from it anyway.

While I still had that hogget penned, I checked her over again.  I checked between her toes, I pulled apart the wool to see her skin for at least half of her body.  I found nothing.  It was bugging me that she seemed unhappy and lethargic, I worried that I was missing something and that my sheep was unhealthy.

The shearer didn't come that week, I left messages and didn't get a call back.

A week or so later, I saw her lying down in her paddock with a heron picking over her wool.  She wasn't moving and I was afraid that she had died.  We went to have a look, as we opened the gate for that paddock, she got up and ran away with half her wool hanging off her and dragging on the ground.

We managed to get her into a pen to check her over.  Her entire rump and back legs was bald.  No wool attached at all.  Around her middle was a wide band of scabs and maggots.

How did I miss this?  How could I check her over thoroughly a week earlier and not see a single wound, fly or maggot?  I clipped the rest of her wool with my dagging shears.  The neighbour came down with some fresh dip and to check her for us.  He thought she'd survive since she was up and eating when he came over.  He said to be sure that she had shade because sunburn could be an issue.  He also said that once the shearer had been, give him a call and he'd drench all of our sheep and give them a pour on.

I went away on holiday for a week.  It's a trip I make every year.  The shearer came while I was away.  The neighbour did his thing and iodined that hogget's healing wounds.

She went down and wouldn't get up.  Hubby and Miss Ten made a sling for her to hold her up.  They rang and told me about it and sent me pictures.  She survived the night, but still wouldn't stand on her own.  The next morning, they found her.  She'd gotten out of the sling, but had put her head through the wooden railings and broken her neck.  They figured she'd given up and wanted to die.

I beat myself up for it for weeks.  It didn't matter how many stories I heard about experienced farmers getting caught out with flystrike this year, that it could have only been a few days and it takes them that fast.  It didn't matter that I'd checked her over three times in as many weeks.

While I know that if you have livestock, you have dead stock and that's how it is, I still felt responsible for the suffering of my sheep.  Death by flystrike is a brutal and truly dreadful thing and I blamed myself.

Then I told a friend who is a vet.  I think it was part of my self-flagellation.  I told her and sat back waiting for the accusations of negligence and the telling off that I was sure I deserved.  Instead, I got an explanation about how sometimes the maggots burrow inside the animal instead of staying on the surface and eat it from the inside out. I was told the chances of finding the tiny entry point early enough to save the sheep are very slim to none and how there is nothing you can do when this happens.

It helped.  After a while.  At first I was disbelieving, I thought she was trying to make me feel better.  Then I thought about the kind of person that friend is.  She's not going to lie to anyone to soothe a guilty conscience, if I'd been negligent, she would have given me both barrels like I'd thought I'd deserved.  What she'd said about the maggots going internal was also later backed up by others.

I'm still upset about my sheep, but now I'm okay with it.

Dear Weather Gods,

I wish to lay a formal complaint.

I understand that weather is variable and that there are never any promises or guarantees regarding what kind of weather we will get.  I've always had faith however, that the weather will at the very least suit the season and time of year.

It's the first of May today.  We're supposed to be approximately halfway through Autumn.  We can usually count on the first frosts around now.  In any normal year, they're not too surprising as nights are usually getting colder over the previous month.

28 degrees for most of the day, dropping to 25 just before the sun disappeared behind the mountain is not a normal temperature for May.  It's almost as though we're getting a normal (if short day length) Summer finally after the Summer on steroids that we've just escaped from.

I became rather excited last week when I saw that we were forecast for rain this weekend.  The ground has gotten drier than it was all Summer.  Imagine my disappointment on Friday night when I saw that the forecast had changed and the rain was no longer coming (and sadly, the forecast was accurate) and we're still left high and dry.

Normally, I prefer the heat, Summer is my favourite time of year.  I will confess that the Summer we've just had challenged that somewhat.  I found myself hiding from the sun and the heat rather than revelling in it.  I am enjoying still wearing t-shirts without an extra layer and hardly ever getting the fire going even though that is not normally possible at this time of year.

I do find myself wondering whether there is some sort of shenanigans going on up there.  Have there been staffing changes or a new quality system that no one really understands and doesn't seem to make any sense but the management believe in it so you just have to go along with it?  Is this some kind of hold out for more prayers or rain dances?  Has the sheep mortality rate due to new and nastier flies encouraged by the unseasonal weather not been sufficient sacrifice to you?  Do you have it in for North Canterbury farmers so much that we have the wettest January ever but the driest Autumn?  Did someone forget to flip a switch or are you all drunk up there?

Please get it sorted before we feel compelled to try another company for this service,

Yours sincerely


Most of North Canterbury.

Dried Plums

As I said in a previous post I had been thinking about drying plums as a way to preserve the huge amount of wild plums I had already picked.

My first batch, I thought I'd cut a slit in the side, down to the stone and assumed that it would dry around it and the stone would sort of pop out and be standing proud of the rest of the plum.

Yeah.  That didn't work.

Plums are dried and stuck rather firmly to the stone.

So I cut the plums in half and took the stones out of those I could easily (the others went into a plum syrup type thing that I'll explain below) and spread them out on the dehydrator trays.

It took a few days of drying - I don't like leaving my dehydrator on when I go to bed, the noise alone is a nuisance - but I started to fill my jar with dried plums.  I think I'd done several batches before I thought to actually try one.

All that delicious juicy sweetness that these plums fill your mouth with when they're ripe must evaporate with the moisture.  These were so face-puckeringly sour as to be almost inedible to me.  We tried a few each to be certain it wasn't just that I'd picked a bad one.

Well bugger.  I have kept them, sure I'll find something they can work in.  A Phillipino friend who visited tells me that the Chinese would love them, they use a lot of flavours like this in their food.  Sadly I don't know any Chinese people to give them to.

The plums that didn't get dried - the slightly over-ripe ones that squished when I tried to halve and stone them - were stewed up with sugar and sieved.  I'm using them to make a plum fruit leather.  Unfortunately, I think there may have been too much liquid.  This is taking forever to dry out enough to remove from the paper and roll up.  I have been trying to dry this for more than a week!

Butter and Buttermilk

Since we weaned the calf from Brownie, the volume of cream we're getting with our milk has increased significantly.  It becomes so thick and rich that if we don't scoop most of it off, it forms lumps in the milk jugs and looks as though you have melted butter in your coffee.  I don't mind this in the slightest, but it can be off-putting for others.

I finally understand the "double-cream" that I see in usually British recipes.  This is no good for a cream sauce as it splits and melts and looks quite disgusting.  So I make butter.

Butter is really simple to make. Put the cream into a cake mixer and beat it until it's butter and buttermilk.  With my cream, it doesn't take long.  In fact, it's quicker than whipping cream with store bought cream.

Cream

Nearly there, but not quite - note there's no liquid

Now we have butter

Once you have butter, press it together lightly and strain it through a sieve, making sure to catch the buttermilk in a jug.  Then run the butter in the sieve under the tap until the water runs clear.

Buttermilk.  You can see the tiny butter blobs around the edge of the jug.

Put your butter into a clean bowl and beat it quite firmly - more liquid will come out and more rinsing will be needed.  If you want to salt it, add 1 tsp of salt to 500g of butter and beat it through at this stage.

From there I turn it out onto baking paper, shape it into a block, wrap it and freeze it.  It doesn't keep as long as store-bought butter.  I don't know if this is because I don't always get all of the buttermilk out or if it's because I only pasteurise and do no further heat-treating.  Freezing has the added bonus of being perfect for making pastry.

The latest attempt at spreadable butter on the left.  A block for freezing on the right.

Several times I've tried to mix it with olive oil or rice bran oil to make it a simple sandwich spread - my mother used to do this when I was young, but it's hard to tell when you've added enough oil as it's soft and spreadable when it's freshly made.  So far, all of mine have been rather firm.

Many people ask what do you then do with the buttermilk.

Anything you like!  Choices are endless.  Miss Ten likes to drink it as it is.  It works nicely in my cheesemaking.  I've used it making bread and baking.  There's nothing particularly unpleasant about buttermilk, except maybe the odd tiny globule of butter that may be floating in it - and even then that's only if that is unpleasant to you.

Summer Abundance

While my kitchen is being rebuilt, I've been finding things to occupy Mum and keep her busy.  Fortunately, this summer has been abundant so far.

I picked the broccoli sideshoots and blanched them.  For some reason I'm getting huge sideshoots this year.  Normally, they're about bite-sized, this year, they're getting to the same size as the original head of broccoli and I'm getting at least ten per plant.  I currently have several kg of frozen broccoli in the freezer and there's no sign of them slowing down.  I've also missed picking lots of them in time so there are several that have gone to seed.  I don't consider that to be a problem though, I should have plenty of broccoli plants next year.  I was also told recently that after November, you might as well pull your broccoli out because you don't get anything useful from it.  I beg to differ.

The cauliflower was a bit of a bust though.  Out of 18 plants, I've gotten four caulis.  Two bolted because I wasn't quick enough, the rest turned brown and black before they were fully grown.  Luckily the pigs like them and Brownie the house cow assaults anyone who goes into that garden and won't let them leave without giving her some cauli leaves.  The entrance to the garden is right next to the gate for her paddock.  

We found a local fruit and vege shop selling sauce tomatoes 4kg for $4.  20kg bought so far has become 10 litres of tomato sauce, 10 jars and 9 ziplock bags of spaghetti and 5 ziplock bags of pasta sauce.  The ziplock bags are in the freezer.

Tomato sauces cooling on the bench.

I have two favourite recipe books for various preserves, both from the 1960s.  One is the New Zealand Country Women's Institute Cookbook and the other is 575 Recipes by the Good Housekeeping Board.  Their recipes for tomato sauce are different and each year I face the dilemma of not remembering which one I used last time and which one I prefer.  So this year, I made the tomato sauce in two batches - one from each book - and labelled them with which recipe book.

The spaghetti is a recipe from my father-in-law.  Hubby remembers him making it when he was little and went out of his way to get the recipe for me to make for him.  I did it a year or so ago, but it went off in the jars.  This year I sterilised the jars more carefully and followed up with a water bath.  We'll see how this lot turns out.  

Wild plums.

A glance down the gully showed that the wild plums are coming ripe.  Hubby, Miss Ten and I spent about an hour picking plums after it cooled down enough to be bearable outside.  I explained to them both that the best way to tell which were ripe was that the ripe ones fall off when you touch them.  It rained plums on all of us for a while.  The terrain around our wild plum trees is rather steep, with the added bonus of plenty of fallen plums making for treacherous footing.  At one point, Miss Ten slipped and went down several metres of slope on her backside - stain removal on her shorts will be fun.

We didn't get very far through the gully before it became too dark to continue safely.  We came back with 7kg of plums.  Not bad considering they're only slightly bigger than the average cherry.  I still have several jars of plum jam made a few years ago.  I've decided to stop making jams until we actually get through some of what we have in the cupboards.  Just how much was in the cupboards was fully revealed when we had to move them for the kitchen rebuild.  This time I've made plum sauce so far and used maybe half of that picking.  My issue now is that I've run out of bottles for sauces, unless I resort to using soft drink bottles.

Spaghetti and sauces on top of the fridge for now.

I've been looking for recipes for plum chutneys and relishes.  Maybe some that can also utilise the frozen rhubarb my neighbour gave me.  I've found a few, but none that keep for longer than a few weeks without refrigeration or freezing.  I want recipes that will keep in jars for as long as I need them to.  I'll have to keep looking.

I thought about drying some, but given how small they are, I'm not sure if the result will be worth the work.  I may try it with some and see how it turns out.

Meanwhile, we've also had more rainfall this month so far than we had all of last year!  Not enough to officially break the drought, but certainly not the worst El Nino summer and drought that was predicted (so far - touch wood!).  I went for a wander yesterday to see if the combined rain and heat had provided any field mushrooms and came back with over a kg.  They were sliced, sauteed in butter and frozen in single serves.  This is the only method I've found for preserving a glut of mushrooms that we'd actually use.

Even with my kitchen still in partial disarray, I'm using it flat out and making jokes about how this pantry will be full by the time it's finished.  In all honesty, I greatly doubt it, the plan for the pantry is to make the shelves the size of what will go on them.  I find current pantry styles frustrating.  The shelves are spaced so widely apart that what looks like a full pantry actually has a lot of wasted space or double stacking which isn't always safe or practical.  A friend sent a video to me that showed a practical pantry built for a woman by her husband.  It looks like the video was purely shared to facebook so I think the only option to share it for others is a link and not embedding - it can be found here.  I found the video truly inspiring and showed it to anyone who would watch it.

Now the kitchen is usable again, I also had a mad cheese-making day.  It was a bit hectic but I got cream cheese, quark, edam and (blue) stilton made.  Christmas present vouchers paid for a vacuum food sealer which I'm now using for cheese.  I enjoy the look of waxed cheeses aging on my shelf but on a more practical level, I can't tell if there's a tiny hole in the wax until it's leaked everywhere and I've effectively lost that cheese.  This can also be more challenging if when it leaked it's dripped onto other cheeses - it means I can't be sure which one is the leaker.

Vacuum sealed cheese.

Coming up probably in the next few days are mustard pickles.  I chopped up the stalks trimmed from the broccoli (no point in wasting them) and will be having a look around to see what other bits I can put into them.

Rebuilding The Kitchen

Most of our time lately has been devoted to redoing our kitchen.  The floor was rotten and there were spots that you'd feel seasick if someone walked past you while you were standing there.

It has been a long and slow process.  The kitchen is a room that five other rooms are only reached through, three of them from a small hallway. Because our house is an old farm cottage that has been added on to and rearranged several times over the last 90 years, it is a bit like a rabbit warren.


One of the first things to do was to take out one of the hall cupboards and cut a doorway through the back wall to meet that other little hallway.  That was always part of the plan and it was something that needed doing first so that the toilet and bathroom were safely reachable.  Part of that little hallway is going to be the new big farm pantry.

Hall cupboards

From the other side

Doorway cut

From other side.

The dining room can be reached through the lounge, but that took some rearranging of both rooms where various kitchen stuff and removed cabinetry were being stored.

I have found it interesting that there are several places where it seems we are restoring the original design, rather than making huge changes.  When we took the wall covering (mdf not gib) off in the old small hallway, we discovered wood paneling that showed that where my new big pantry is going to be, was previously a pantry.  Old water pipes that had been left partially in place - although they were just metre long lengths sitting inside the walls - showed that we're putting the sink and taps back closer to where they were previously, Some of the power points in the house are in the old steel pipe conduits, not all of the conduit pipe was removed when power points were moved, this made it amusing to be cutting a hole in the wall for a power point and finding a conduit pipe right next to where I'm putting this one.

I think the paint missing in lines shows where pantry shelves were previously.
It's also interesting that restructuring it for food storage was at least planned.

In a pleasant change from the lounge, not all of the joists or bearers were rotten this time.  Although the outer wall is going to need a lot of work in the near future.  One window had been framed properly and done well and was structurally sound.  The other, well, an attempt had been made to do it properly, but that was as far as it went.  In all honesty, with this house, I am more surprised and disbelieving when I find something done well than I am when I find corners cut or shoddy work.

Removing the old floor

Working out the new joists

Nearly done.

Floor down

So after a week and a half, that included my housecow coming on heat and jumping a gate to run with her steer calf, the pigs becoming serial escape artists, Miss Ten going on Girl Guide Jamboree and needing to entertain my Mum who has vascular dementia while Dad and Hubby worked on the kitchen, we're close to the finish I think.  Hubby has gone back to work today and the kitchen is almost usable.

The external walls have been insulated and when I was covering them, I sealed everything that could be sealed.  Hopefully that will work to keep drafts and rodents out and warmth in.  Hot water pipes have been lagged, underfloor insulation is coming.

External walls - I hadn't removed the lining from the one on the left at this point.

Insulated wall.

Gibbed, roughly stopped, and sealed.

Painted.

The floors are in, except for a few small spots that will require some tricky bits - doorways joining to other rooms etc.  I'm looking at a laminate flooring that looks like wooden floorboards.  I found one that even with the foil underlay stuff will cost approx a third of what all others do.  It seems too good to be true though, so I will investigate further before buying it.

The stove has been moved to a more sensible position - one that will allow a rangehood.  The cabinets that we pulled out have been reconfigured and put back in.  This time, the stove and dishwasher are in line with benchtops and cupboards and are not sticking out.  No drawers are blocked from opening fully by the stove, and the dead space beside the old stove has gone.

We were going to reuse the old benchtops, rearranged somewhat to suit the new layout, but Mum and Dad offered to take me shopping for new ones, far better ones and they just asked that we keep them in meat for the year.  I didn't need to hear that offer twice, I leaped at it.  Especially as it included a new double sink and sink mixer.  They'd found some great specials that meant it cost less than half of what we'd thought when we originally looked at the possibility.

Getting the benchtops home made for a nervous drive - that was sitting almost on my shoulder.

Joining benchtops and waiting for silicon to dry.

Bench fixed in place.  Sink and mixer fitted.

Cutting and joining the benchtops was challenging, but I think we've done well.  Dad thinks that at one of our joins is less noticeable that his (professional job) at home.

Now that Hubby and Dad have gone back to work, we're down to evenings and weekends, not counting the little bits that I potter around with during the day.  The new hallway and linen cupboard is coming along and the new farm pantry is this weekend's mission.

Where we're up to with the kitchen.