Oy! Git Orf Moy Pond!

Here, then, is the post that plenty of our friends and fellow small-holders will have been expecting since February when we revealed that we were "getting ducks". Followers of the blog will recall that I had always been dead against ducks because of the damage they do, particularly to ponds. All manner of other species came and stayed or came and went, even including geese who were easy to keep off the main pond and were supplied with 3 alternative water-bodies in which to bathe and play. Ducks, though were always beyond the pale. Ducks would reduce our lovely pond to a stagnant, shit-loaded, lifeless mess with brown 'muddy-desert' margins.

Pond plants left broken and floating - the
well known downside of having ducks

The duckless pond established and then flourished with a rich mixture of plants and some good pads of waterlilies developing. It was a-buzz with damsel flies, water beetles, dragon flies, water boatmen, pond skaters, whirligig beetles and we had a good number of smooth newts. Some visitors asked why we didn't have a few fish (gold fish, Koi Carp or the local favourite 'roaches') in there but we always fended them off with the insect larvae and tadpoles arguments.

Cattle-race side gate shored up with mesh
and woodwork. 

Regular readers will know that we 'cracked' back in February. We decided that such a well established pond would have enough 'ecology' going on to be able to stay in balance with just a few ducks... perhaps 3, a drake and 2 ducks. That way we could let them breed and enjoy the sight of Mumma duck leading her little crocodile of yellow fluff-balls out onto the water. There was even a little duck house on the bank in the plan somewhere.

A run under construction for the Hubbard poults to keep them
 out of the yard and sheds.

We nipped out to the local poultry sale in March looking for a pair of Muscovies and came away, instead, with half a dozen Khaki Campbell eggs for the incubator. 6 hatched in early April and delighted us through the fluffy stages. They even convinced us for a while that, now fully feathered, they would still avoid the pond and preferred their little paddling pool.

Having another go at the Feta cheese - this time with moulds
(yogurt pot with bottom cut out) lined with cheesecloth "socks".

Well, if that was the honeymoon period, then it must be almost at its end and the true nature of this 'marriage' is taking shape. They are now 3 months old and no longer ducklings, but full size, chunky ducks (all be it not sexually mature yet, so none of the curly tail feathers on the drakes' rumps.) We have watched them with increasing alarm and decreasing conviction that we might get away with the duck thing, that they hadn't eaten ALL the plants, or damaged the edges and we were definitely not stagnant.

Cubing up the Feta 'rounds'. The cubes now get 4 days
of being sprinkled with salt and dry curing. 

They have though, pretty much eaten all the floating plants (water lilies, floating pondweeds, hornwort) plus the tops of all the emergents except bog-bean. They have dabbled up all the oxygenators which were rooted into the light sediment (there is a rubber liner) leaving them shredded and floating in a tangled mess. We also seem to have no more beetles or boatmen, damsels or dragon flies and we have not seen newts lately.

Good firm Feta cubes dry-curing (in the fridge)

We jointly decided that this was not working right and that we would keep the ducks but try to keep them off the big pond. Friends advised that they should be perfectly OK in with the geese - they would quickly learn to steer clear of the gosling, the Mother goose and George the Gander. I have now started to confine them into the orchard and the "old dung heap bit" and am having an interesting time with one particular bird who has a talent for escaping. I think my sheep wire and hurdles are duck-proof (they do seem to be for 5 of the ducks!) and I have shored up a few leaks in gates and fencing found by the Houdini-Duck. They have been satisfyingly NOT ON THE POND today anyway - even Houdini doesn't go onto the pond if he's alone. We will have to watch the pond with interest to see how it recovers.

Larch

On a related subject, I am creating a run this year for the Hubbard poults. These guys have always been fully free range before but their winning growth rates are a result of eating MOUNTAINS of food which, being chickens, they convert into meat but also a fair quantity of... um.... "guano". They are friendly (or mercenary) souls and tend to hang around lazily in the yard waiting for the next feed, and taking shelter from rain in our good sheds. Not for them the extensive grass ranging or a scratch of the woodland floor.

You can probably guess where I am going with this - all that guano tends to end up in the 'human areas' (yard, feed-sheds) and we get fed up with wading through it or slipping on it as we move about, not to mention how much can get walked into the house. The down side of full free-range? So, this year, now that they are approaching Day 50, they are getting moved to the baby-forest (also overgrown dock and thistle patch) behind our Darby and Joan chairs beyond the big pond. We have no problem with them clearing that to a brown desert - it could use it and they will not damage the young trees.

The kittens explore the "foothills" of Mount Matt. Pic by Liz

Finally, we have been enjoying a 'take 2' on the cheese making. We have learnt from the last Feta batch and this time we bodged up some moulds and Liz created cheese-cloth 'socks' with which to line them. I also cut the curds in the saucepan stage much smaller (cm cubes instead of 2 cm). You can see from the pics that these changes have all made the finished cheese 'rounds' much firmer and they taste and feel very genuine. The rounds now cubed up again get sprinkled with salt and gently dry-cured for 4 days before they get packed in brine (where they should last 3 months in the fridge). It is all looking a bit good!

Blink and You'd Miss It

My pathetic best silaging picture so far. 

I am, as you'd know, always on the look out for new subjects for the 365 photographic project. A year in the life of our village and its townlands (sub-parishes). Silage making time was upon us; surely a crucial, can't miss, event in the year of a farming community. The weather forecast predicted a violent end to our lovely run of hot days so you'd KNOW the silage contractors would be biting on the bit, raring to go. On Wednesday evening I heard my first mowing machine roaring away a few fields out so I expected to be able to photograph the cutting stages followed by the baling and wrapping.

Last of the blue skies for now. Our next
door field with the suckler herd. We call it
(Vendor) Anna's 5-Acres. It probably has a
(better) real name.

Not on your life! So fast were these crews working that I saw a couple of fields mown and in their drying/wilting rows (I'd missed the mowing) but by the time I could get out again with the camera the grass was baled, carted and wrapped. I was left looking at a tightly shorn, rather surprised looking field. These boys do not hang about. The nearest I could get to a picture for '365' was a long-lens shot across the valley, of some baled silage awaiting the carting stage. All we had here was the to-ing and fro-ing of the contractor's bale-trailers gathering the harvest in to the local farm yards rumbling up and down the lane setting the dogs off barking.

A lovely stand of Aconites still going strong in the garden
 of a long-abandoned dilapidated cottage.  

In theory the hot spell has currently ended and we are returning to "normal" weather for June in the 'Wesht' of Ireland. I have to say that I had not noticed it getting much cooler. The clouds have returned and, mercifully, the little grey midges have departed so that I was able to clear a ditch and hedge for a neighbour without being driven to distraction. I don't have a problem with the 'bitey' ones - the real mozzies and midges - they don't seem to find me tasty. My beef is with the tiny grey ones who land in your sweat and then just walk about on your face. I hate them.

Dublin Bay rose always does well for us.

It seems we may have the daftest bunch of ducks in the land. These are our six 'Khaki Campbell' youngsters hatched at the beginning of March and now fully feathered and, you'd guess, as waterproof and buoyant as any duck could hope to be. For some reason they are frightened of going into the big pond. They love a splash about in their paddling pool and even though it is quite a big one, the 6 of them in there together leave very little room for any of them to move about.

Liz's pic of the ducks as close as they ever get to the water.
Feet on dry land and tips of bills in the water.

These guys are fully free-range and can walk pretty much anywhere on the 'farm' in their amusing waddling 'crocodile' of single file ducks. They have been all around the pond and seen it from all (dry land) angles but the nearest they ever get to getting in is when they all line up on the bank, feet on Terra Firma, to dip their beaks in and dabble at the marginal plants.

Interior of our local (RC) church for the
365 project.

I should quickly say that I am more than happy. Regular readers will know that I was always against having ducks because I think/thought that they destroy ponds leaving you with a stagnant, shitty mess with no pond life in it. Your standard village duck-pond in effect, an ecological desert, ringed by bare, brown, eroded bank mud. So to be able to have ducks and not get your pond wrecked seems too good to be true and I am leaving these ducks well alone. If they want to wash and brush up in the paddling pool and touch my lovely pond only with their bill-tips, then I am not going to argue with them. Neither of us can actually see this lasting and we are both quietly hoping to be the one out there with a camera when our little file of 6 ducks set off serenely across the pond leaving just a V of wake and their little feet under the water going like a train, out of sight.

You are Kidding!

Flowering Cherry

When I 'went to press' on the last post, the last night of the village play was still going on and everyone was a bit anxious to give it their best shot and impress everybody. Well, I can happily tell you that like the other two nights, it went down a storm and was very well received by another sell-out audience. The cast and the whole team are delighted with it all and there has been lovely feedback and comment all about the place, so huge kudos in the village to all involved. They are all now wondering what they can do for next year and Liz fully intends to be part of that, possibly as "continuity" (that's what the programme said - she prefers just "prompt").

Half a dozen Khaki Campbell ducklings

We all needed a day to recover from the play and the new piggies, but that was all we got before the next bursts of excitement sploshed like pebbles into the calm mill-pond (ha!) of our small-holding life. A text from Sue early Sunday morning announced a "Clan Gathering" in her incubator - our duck eggs bought at Roscommon Poultry Sale a month back were all hatching. We needed to nip over and collect them and start the duck-owner phase of our lives. This also gave us a neat excuse to go admire the 6 (orphan?) baby lambs they have bought to bottle-feed, which includes a fine looking Suffolk lad who may well end up being our sire/tup/ram for this autumn.

Liz unpacks the precious cargo

We brought the ducklings home, cheeping away (yes, they do 'cheep' or at least 'pipe' at that age, rather than quacking) in a small expanded polystyrene box, quickly photographed them, and then let them loose in the baby chick's brooder where they could soon get warm by creeping under the 'electric hen' heat-plate. They got the same baby food as the chicks - finely mashed hard-boiled egg (incl. shell finely chopped) and commercial chick-crumb and they are thriving. They are little, very cute and utter charmers.

They quickly adopted the habit of climbing on top of the 'electric hen' instead of cosying down under it and the reason never occurred until Carolyn told me today. The electric hen works by having a warm plate facing downwards and running at broody-hen breast temperature (36ºC, I think). The top of the plate is plastic and well insulated from the hot plate so that birds can rest up there as extra space but only get mild benefit from the plate.

Of course (said Carolyn), ducklings have no instinct to burrow under Mum to get warm - Mum is generally swimming about on a cold pond with her feet underwater! That would NOT be a good plan for the babies. Instead they climb on her back and hide under a wing or the body feathers. Obvious once you have been told. Duck owners generally use the Infra-Red heat lamp option. It turns out that the Sitting Room is so warm here that the ducks are fine 'living' on the back of the 'hen' and only nipping down their with their chicken-cousins every now and then. I have even started feeding them their share of food up there.

Seconds old, the kid gets a good licking

If I had thought that ducklings, more log splitting and another testing archery session were enough excitement for one day and I needed to relax, then the small-holder gods were definitely not listening. We almost had supper on the table, and I had laid same and it was 7 p.m. when suddenly Towser started kicking off barking upstairs in a determined fashion. Suspecting that our stray dog might be about, I quickly got my wellies on and went to check. I could hear all manner of pained groaning and moaning coming from the top of the East Field and could see Nanny Óg rolling on the ground looking in distress. I now know that this is what goats DO in labour and all was probably well but I was straight onto some goat expert advice to check.

Mum cleaning up in the first minutes.

By about 7:15 p.m I could see a small white tuft protruding from Nanny's vulva, looking for all the world like an extra tail. Before I could react, Nanny groaned loudly once more, rolled over again, squirted the baby kid out onto the grass and stood up all in one movement. Apparently fast labour is another goat thing. I now raced to get Liz - the supper was stew, so that was not going to spoil - and we watched Nanny give the kid a thorough licking (plus tidying up the 'surroundings') while we sipped our wine the other side of the fence, only yards away from the action.

This was our first ever goat-kid so we were fascinated watching it quickly try to get to its feet (back legs first!)  and then to suckle, all the time being thoroughly licked all over by Mum who was grunting and chuntering away to the baby all the time. We were also wondering, of course, whether there might be more as well as needing to text the real owners of the goat (Carolyn and Charlotte) with the great news. It was also getting dark. We watched for as long as we sensibly could while the kid got closer and closer to the teat but then decided to leave them be so in case they were distracted by our presence. We'd check on them in an hour - we dived indoors for our stew.

Struggling to its feet - back legs first.

Well, safe to say now that this kid (which is male and has been named "Henry Óg" by Carolyn's young son) was indeed the only one, it did get to its feet and suckled successfully. It is still with us, is now 48 hours old and is thriving. It has been duly admired by all the interested parties. There is only one minor issue with this and we have read that this can happen with singleton kids. They can tend to favour one side of the udder and ignore the other, so that you need to help the Mum's comfort by milking out the un-used side for a few days, till baby gets big enough to start needing output from both 'barrels'. Nanny is a bugger to catch when she is out loose in a field, even when limited by not wanting to abandon the baby kid, so I have not yet been able to catch her, single handed. That is maybe one for tomorrow.

That was definitely enough excitement for that day and we are quite glad that there are no more births or babies due now till one of the birds goes broody.