Category Archives: Care Farm

Men in Sheds, eating scones

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Bob brought some of his store of plum jam and Julia provided the scones. Really we should have made scones but we haven’t been able to get into the kitchen much this week (due to the preparations for the run) so it was off to the shop.

Everyone seemed to enjoy them, anyway and we will be making more jam in a fortnight when he is going to bring us some plums.

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Next Tuesday we are going to visit a permaculture project. It’s not that Men in Sheds are particularly interested in permaculture, but the Farmer is interested in using them as free labour to build a permaculture project in the allotments. Presumably that means another year when we can’t plan anything for the allotment.

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With any luck it will be something like the one we planned two years ago but weren’t allowed to do.

Planning is not a strong point of this project…

Can you add your own version of a heart-rending sigh here please.

Anyway, I enjoyed the scones and some chicks have hatched so it’s been a good day. In a moment I’m hoping to take Julia away for lunch and have an afternoon off.

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Incubator Diaries (part 5)

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I didn’t post a picture last night after all, but this is one from this morning. It’s not the world’s greatest picture but I don’t want to keep the top off too long or the humidity drops and this might make it more difficult for other chicks to hatch.

It’s just fallen awkwardly as far as the timing goes as they may be hatching over the weekend while I’m not here. Looks like I might have to change my plans.

In theory you can leave a chick for 72 hours before it needs food and water (it still has reserved from the yolk sac until that time). I like to give them access to food and water as soon as practical, which in this case means as soon as they are dry and fluffy.

When I worked for a hatchery (have I mentioned that before?) we used to fly day old breeding stock all over the world and they always arrived OK thanks to the yolk sac. There are very few places in the world you can’t reach within 48 hours.We did inject chicks with saline solution a couple of times just to be sure, but it wasn’t a common thing.

At the moment we have two dry chicks and that is still drying out. There are two more eggs that are pipped and so far that is it.

In breed terms we have two from the blue eggs and one Polish bantam.

Everybody likes blue eggs. I upset someone when we were collecting hatching eggs by refusing to sell them a blue egg to eat (I still only had three to hatch) and someone has already asked to buy the chicks from the blue eggs. I might have to upset them, as I want them for the farm so we can continue producing blue eggs.

That’s all for now – some success but not as much as I’d hoped.

Stop Press: Just had another hatch out. Tried to get better photos but they keep moving and the black and yellow of the chicks merges with the  black and yellow of the incubator.

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Phew! (Incubator Diaries part 4)

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I’m in the centre, preparing to close up and pick Julia up from work. It’s been a quiet day and I  have done a reasonable amount of work, albeit of an unpaid nature.

The main part fo the day has been spent in researching historic bread recipes, and after five hours of reading the internet I’m left with the impression that although a few things may have changed (such as better yeast, electric ovens and more refined flour) bread is basically the same as it was 1,000 years ago. White bread, brown bread, rye bread. I suppose we don’t have to eat peas, beans and acorns but apart from that I’m not sure there’s much difference.

If I want to bake some historic breads I’m going to have to turn to spices rather than making plain loaves, or maybe run up the outdoor oven. It probably isn’t worth the effort as you can get that outdoor oven finish by baking it at high temperature and throwing some ash at it as a finishing touch.

Meanwhile, when I haven’t been thinking of bread I’ve been looking into the incubator.

Three of the eggs have now pipped and there’s a weedy chirping sound emerging from the machine.

This is a long way from the end result I’m hoping for, but it’s a start. At least I know some of them have developed properly.

I’m resisting the temptation to help nature along by peeling some shell off as I’m sure it’s better for chicks to do it themselves.

I’ll take a picture or two before I go and load them when I get home.

Fingers crossed!

Six more chicks!

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The group was walking across the yard for a final look at the bantams tonight when Alasdair spotted a mouse. He’s not fond of mice and he’s very good at spotting small scurrying things.

However, it wasn’t a mouse, it was a chick. There were six of them altogether, four black, one yellow and one stripy.

They took some counting because Mother Hen wasn’t happy at the idea of us having a look. She was protective to the point of being aggressive and a number of the photos show a black blur attacking the photographer.

Amazing. I’m still waiting for the first signs of hatching but another hen, with no electronics, has just hatched six. That’s Hens 25 – Incubator Nil at the moment.

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Cake! (Reprise)

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We didn’t have many people on Tuesday, but the ones that did come all had fun, and plenty of cake.

We also did salt dough, made paper sheep and visited the animals. Yes,the hand print that doesn’t look human is from a Labrador. Next week is the final session and we’re planning a big finish.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

 

A mystery solved!

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Gemma and I were looking at pictures of the peacock this morning when a lady called and asked who was in charge. I pointed to Gemma because I try not to admit to things like that. It seems that a local painting group would like to pop in tomorrow to paint the Ecocentre and surrounding area.

She was surprised to see the pictures. It seems the bird roosts in one of her trees and belongs to her neighbour, who bought it at auction some months ago. They wondered what it did with itself during the day so we were able to solve all our mysteries in one go.

They were happy to learn that the peacock walks with the guinea fowl as they think it may be lonely from the way it keeps approaching other birds. At last, with the guineas, it seems to have met some suitable companions. I use the word in terms of eating and browsing habits. In moral terms I feel that guinea fowl, with their disregard for private property and road safety, are probably very unsuitable. In literary terms it’s a bit like Oliver Twist falling in with Fagin’s gang of street urchins.

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As we spoke, a Painted Lady fluttered round the buddleia and the gentle whirring of the incubator’s humidifier could be heard working in the background.

As yet there is no sign of hatching. Only five hours to go, and if there is no sign of hatching by then my name will be mud.

 

 

The Incubator Diaries (Part 3)

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I haven’t done a lot with the eggs, because I thought it was probably better to leave them alone and not be always fiddling. It’s better to leave the lid on, as this preserves the heat and humidity.

Does that sound plausible?

In truth I just didn’t get on with it because I had other things to do. That’s the story of my life – “other things to do”.  That’s on my list of things to do – improve my time management.

Fortunately when I weighed them and checked the weight loss they are just about on target. The blue eggs are spot on – weighing 153 g against a target of 152.9 g. The Polish eggs are out by 0.2 g per egg, which isn’t significant. The brown ones are a bit out – 2 g per egg. However, they are bigger and they are from older birds so the shells will be more porous and the expected loss will be higher as a consequence. We will just have to see what happens. In an ideal world we wouldn’t mix such a diverse selection, but they needed to go in when they did to hatch on a Wednesday when we could see them.

That’s the trouble with keeping a small number of birds, you end up keeping the eggs until you have enough and as they age the hatchability declines. I just checked the exact figures – keep them for 7 days and you are OK, after that they start to decline both in terms of hatchability and the health of the chicks you hatch.

It also says (which was something I once knew, but had forgotten) that they will take a little longer to hatch.

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Ready to hatch – I hope!

I am now hoping my calculations are right, because if they don’t hatch on Wednesday my life won’t be worth living.

We should have candled them by now too, but I didn’t get on with ordering the right light and I don’t have a powerful enough torch to do the job. Candling is shining a light through the egg to see if it has a developing embryo inside.  For now it will have to remain a mystery.

The turning gear is now removed and the humidity turned up to 65% (as you need to keep the egg membranes moist to help the chick get out of the egg).

By Wednesday all will be revealed!

Fast forward to Thursday and Stupidity

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After the delay in posting Tuesdays events I’m going to give a quick overview of Wednesday and then plunge into Thursday – a much more interesting day.

Chickens, eggs, butterfly count (which included green-veined whites), Canadian visitor, made a get well soon card, a volunteer called to see if they could help us with anything (as if!), a discussion on seeing tigers in Indian National Parks, a meeting (which I avoided), another meeting (which I didn’t) and a feeling that things could be better.

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Move on to Thursday and I managed to take a poor picture of an immature Green Woodpecker through a dirty windscreen. We’ve seen a few flying and heard many more but this was my first chance to get a photo. Still, it was better than the one of the Green-veined White butterfly I took on my phone yesterday.

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I then checked the office emails and found a gem from a local college.

To put it in perspective, we have them out on the farm for six days in a year. We charge £5 each (which we were told was all they could afford) so we take about £50 – £60 a day. If you cost it up strictly it takes about 16- 20 man hours to plan and deliver the visits, and we have to pay the farm rent for using  the facilities.

The college sent us a letter once, telling us it could send lecturers out if we needed any help delivering education and they would only cost us £70 an hour. Yes, they would charge us more for an hour than they are prepared to pay us for a day.

I didn’t read the payment terms because I was spluttering too much, but I can tell you their terms. They pay at the end of the month following the month in which the service was delivered. We had a visit from them in the first week of June and we got paid last week. And they wonder why small businesses have trouble.

Today we had a 300 word email which contained this gem of a paragraph.

As a part of our due diligence process we audit our suppliers on a regular basis and will only work with organisations who also commit to the eradication of slavery and human trafficking.  Our procurement appraisal process will incorporate a review of the controls undertaken by our suppliers and now also requires, from all suppliers, an annual statement of their commitment and actions taken to eliminate modern slavery.

I’m happy to eradicate modern slavery, but is this really going to help?

I will say no more.

 

 

Cake!

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It was another Kids in the Kitchen day yesterday, with seven kids and five parents. It’s a good number to work with, even if the kitchen does look like the aftermath of a food fight by the time we have finished.

We did other things as well, including walking across a log (Health and Safety – just look at us!), digging for buried treasure (which turned out to be mainly novelty pencils), a nature walk and collecting eggs/feeding chickens.

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These are always good days because there is plenty of supervision from parents and everyone (including us) can relax. There is also plenty of adult company, so it’s very different from the days where you have 30 kids and a couple of supervisors.

Originally we were asked if we could run a playgroup during the summer, but the idea of being abandoned with a load of kids while the parents were at work didn’t appeal. It provides a valuable service, but it isn’t a lot of fun and it needs a lot of extra admin and insurance.

I can’t add the photos at the moment because I’ve forgotten my camera today. Will add them when I get home.

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Another day, another peacock…

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Look what we found this morning.

As Julia was going to check the poultry before our visitors arrived she called me across to see a group of guinea fowl and a peacock browsing the flower beds around the bird feeders.

I’m not well up on peacocks, but I’m hoping this one is a young one, hence the lack of tail. If that isn’t the case then we have a faulty peacock, or the survivor of an accident. Nothing would surprise me round here!

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The first time I ever came across peacocks I was working on a poultry farm in the village of Babraham. A group of them were walking down the road, and knowing that they came from the pub, I went to tell the landlord that his peacocks had escaped.

Wearily, he looked over the top of his spectacles at me as he polished a pint glass.

“You’ve never had peacocks have you?” he said.

They are, it seems, very much like guinea fowl in that they are noisy and wander wherever the fancy takes them. Unlike guinea fowl, according to what I have read, they don’t taste good. However, having just obtained a copy of Tudor Monastery Farm I’m wondering if it may make the centre piece of a period banquet. It doesn’t have to be nice, merely look impressive.