Busy Weekend

I seem to have been very busy with barely enough time to come on the computer, never mind to update my blog. I'm thinking I should be a once a week blogger and I can just report in about my weekends all in one as really weekdays do not have enough hours in to do much smallholding work.

I was lured back here yesterday when I bumped in to Frugal in Suffolk and her husband. We were both at a yard sale of a fellow smallholder who is moving away and downsizing.
I love yard sales, there is so much there you never knew you needed!!

So yesterday morning we were there and this is our little haul

We actually got 3 orange crates but one is already in use! We thought they would be handy for holding the pots of seedlings when we start them off rather than them all being over the workbench in the greenhouse and would make carrying the seedlings to the top of the garden easier.

I actually went to buy a scythe, I ended up with a short handled one and then a long handled short one and then as we left we were told he has a full size one we can buy in August!!

The membrane was the biggest bargain we got - we paid £35 for it, who knows how much is on the reel but DH had been looking for some membrane ready for the gravel which is arriving on Friday and for the little area we wanted to do it would have cost about £35 alone. We have cut off what we needed and have tons left - not sure where we will store it!!

The pine shelves are for our kitchen (when we get round to decorating it); DH was going to make one but this is perfect.

We paid a total of £50 for all of this and we think we got a bargain. We are looking forward to his next sale!

My DH also got this item; he does not know what it is but it looked interesting so he wanted it, even the seller does not know what it is!! Can anyone tell me what this tool is for (someone else suggested a thistle remover)?


I also wanted to show you my turkey poults; we had 7 which we hatched - unfortunately 2 died (as turkeys are prone to do ) so we have 5. Also Mummy turkey had 2 with her - she has managed to rear them successful but has now moved on and has hatched 6 eggs over the course of a week and has started sitting again!!
They could be fertile even though she has been with us for weeks as turkeys keep the sperm inside them until they need to use it so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Here are my lovely 7..

It's quite funny because when they settle down for the night they stay in their 5:2 formation!! (We evicted the 5 from in the shed a few weeks ago as when they live on our field they will roost and not use a shed (although they have one available) so we thought it best to get them used to it early.
If you look to the bottom left of the picture there is mum in amongst some lovely big stinging nettles!
I have slowly been working my way towards that end clearing as I go so she is not as well covered as she was a few weeks ago but luckily she has her eggs in the end section which we will leave for chickens when we start rearing them (before they go up to our field).

This is what I have been doing so far at the top of the garden.

Before:

In progress:

We have planted our runner beans, french beans and peas - they are in the first 2 beds (which DH has kindly numbered!!) and in the far bed are my squashes.

The blue fence is part of one we got off Freecycle - this is the start of the fence for the rearing area we will have.

When I have cleared the rest of the stinging nettles it will look lovely.

This week I hope to start on the left hand side.

We have also used all our compost which has been festering untouched for a long time - I am surpised it is a lovely as it is as it has been somewhat mistreated. Most of the compost has gone into some raised beds down near the house and the rest has gone in these beds. I have taken down the composter so we can move it and the compost left behind is where I have planted my pumpkin (Alan Titchmarsh said it was a good idea!!)

So we have had quite a busy and productive weekend (I have also fallen in love with Aspall's new cyder, Isabel's Berry which I found at a local fete!)

How Do You Know If You Are Frugal?

I have found Frugal In Norfolk's blog and as I am so nosey I have started at the beginning and will hopefully catch up one day - at the moment I am on October 2011 posts and the one I read was about being frugal.

FIN said that one of the defintions of frugal is 'practising economy; living without waste; being thrifty' and this got me thinking that I see all of those as just normal but am I actually frugal?

I read other frugal blogs but I never seem to do what they do - one blogger only had a quick wash most days and then a short shower once or twice a week. Now I find that extreme frugalness.

Everyone in my household has a bath every day - we don't have a shower but when we lived in a house with a shower we still all had baths. I think it stems from my childhood, even though we were classed as poor we all had a bath every night, my best friend had a bath once a week and my DH also only bathed once a week.

Our little nod to being frugal is that we all share the same bath water, DD always goes first (she has an early bedtime) and the rest of us follow in order of cleanliness so the last person is the dirtiest.

I cannot bear to scrimp on water - if we need water we will use it. Our water usage is about £30pm as we are metered, I suppose we could cut back but do we really need to?

I cook a chicken and then keep the carcass to boil up to get the meat off the bones and then the stock is either used in gravy or as a base to a sauce to go with the chicken. I thought it was normal not to waste food but then DS' girlfriend came round and said she had never heard of anyone boiling a carcass to get the rest of the meat off it.

One thing I do that I know not everyone does is to make my own washing powder - DD has always been allergic to most washing powders so we always purchased non-bio but then over on MSE someone mentioned making their own so I have been doing that for nearly a year now.

I use Borax substitute and soda crystals from a local hardware store and buy unperfumed soap from either Tesco or Lidl.

Here is my box of goodies ready to start

I buy 6 boxes of Borax substitute (500g each) and 3 packs of soda crystals (1kg each) and 4 bars of soap. Total cost £15.04.

I then layer it up starting with 1 box of Borax, followed by half a bag of soda crystals followed by 1 box of Borax and the rest of the bag of soda crystals and then I grate 1 bar of soap. Then I give it a good stir and continue the process adding the extra bar somewhere along the line

This is what it looks like in the tub - I always think the grated soap looks like the topping on London Cakes!!

I brought the tub from the hardware place ages ago and also purchased a seperate grater just for soap!!

I use 2 scoops of powder in each full wash, obviously half washes get 1 scoop.

Here is my nice large tub of soap

This tub should last about 8 - 10 weeks and as I do about 6 loads a week it works out very cheap per load. I also find it gets whites whiter than normal supermarket soap powder.

So what do you think is frugal and what is normal?

7 New Additions

So we have 7 more additions to the fold!!

On Tuesday night 8 poullts hatched but by Thursday morning one had died - poults just love to die, they just cant seem to stay alive so it is quite hard work looking after them.

I seem to run between the house to the shed to check on the 7 and then up to the top to check on Mummy and her 2 and then back to the house for a little while.

This is the first picture - it's a bit red because the lamp is so low as they need loads of heat

I will see if I can get some better ones today.

Mummy is doing well, she is letting the poults explore but as soon as she sees me she calls them, yesterday one was outside the hut and flew like lightning up the steps and under her wing and the other one crouched down behind a lump of straw to hide!! It's quite good fun trying to get a glimpse of them.

She is bringing them further down the garden each day but I saw a jackdaw yesterday and I am worried he might take a poult.

I still think, despite the time taken to catch them, that we have done the right thing - if we had left them on the meadow they would have certainly died by now - either by a rat/bird or by dying of the cold.


Photos of the Poults

Well I have managed it, I have 2 photos of the poults (well only one can be seen in each picture! but it is a start).

When we got home from work the turkey had come out of her fenced area (we left the gate open just in case the poults jumped through the fence and she panicked) and was in the far corner of the garden with them.

This is what happened when I tried to get my first picture

Yup Mummy got in the way again!!

This is my next attempt

and another one

She still managed to keep one hidden though!!

I managed to herd them back in to the run where there house is but later on when I went to lock them up she was missing her babies and they were not calling for her. In her panic she flew on to the neighbours fence and I thought she might go in their garden so I did what all good smallholders do - I left her to it and walked up to the field to lock everyone else up.

By the time I got back she was not on the fence, I checked the neighbours garden and she was not there! I found her hiding in the stinging nettles with her 2 poults!! Crikey knows where they were!!

So they have not been locked up tonight but I am sure she is quite safe in the back garden hidden away.

Yesterday I was asked if Turkeys are too domesticated which is why they can't rear their young - I asked DH and he said 'No, they are just stupid creatures'!!
My turkeys are quite wild compared to some I have seen - ours free range on a 1 acre meadow and prefer to roost as high as possible and would rather eat insects than pellets.
Looking on the internet one website says Narrangansett (our favoured breed) are very maternal for a Turkey - I would hate to see the other breeds with their young.
I remember reading an article about why Narrangansett's started to die out (some of it was the large producers favoured quicker growing birds) and basically it was the increase in traffic on rural roads in America, they just didn't know what to do around traffic and kept getting run over!!

I know other Smallholders don't let their Turkeys rear their young and instead use chickens or buy in eggs or poults. I wonder if anyone does the same as us??

Forgot to say the poults are now about 4 days old.

New Additions To The Meadow

Gosh, it's been a week since I posted. I am not sure where the time goes - well actually I do; I work full time (I leave the house about 8ish and get home at 6pm) and when I get home I cook tea and then DD has her bath and we lock the animals up and by then it is about 8.30pm and I am usually so shattered I have been having a bath and going to bed.
I am also on the Committee for a large family event which is held yearly in the nearest town so with meetings every fortnight for that and all the associated paperwork it keeps me busy.
I have read back and see that last Sunday I complained of a pain in my stomach the night before which meant I had to go to bed early, well it has happened a few times this week and so I have been in bed very early - I have thought long and hard about this and did some google research and initially I thought I just ate too much at meal times and decided to cut down and then on Saturday evening I was in loads of pain but I hadnt eaten hardly anything all day as I was an organiser at a charity fun day but when I looked at what I ate I realised it was toast for breakfast, quorn fillet in a bun x 2 for lunch and chips and mushroom/spinach in puff pastry for tea - I then realised that most days consist of at least bread with 2 of the 3 meals I have a day!
I have had a read and think I am gluten intolerant - some people don't think this exists but having a read of the symptoms made me realise how much gluten I have every day so I am going to try 2 weeks gluten free and see how I feel. At the end of the 2 weeks I intend to have some toast and see how it affects me although if I feel really good I might not bother and just stick with gluten free.
I am 2 days in and I feel great, usually after every meal I feel so full I feel sick (even if I only have 1 slice of toast and an egg) but I thought I ate too much but now after each meal I don't feel anything (well after a roast dinner I did feel slightly full but not so full I felt sick). I have also noticed how little I am eating now - usually I would have breakfast and then need a snack and then have lunch by 11.30am and then more snacks in the afternoon but for the last 2 days I have not needed a snack and have not felt hungry. I know a lot of products which contain gluten also contain sugar, the more you eat the more you want to eat and the cycle continues.
So I will see how I get on - it will be interesting as breakfast is always toast and egg and I just adore pastry and of course no roast dinner is complete without yorkshire puddings.


Anyway on to the title of the post - we have 2 new additions to the family. We have 2 turkey poults hatched by Mummy Turkey.
Mummy Turkey had taken herself off a month ago to sit on eggs, we knew where she was and kept an eye on her - on Sunday DH noticed her in the main field with 2 poults.
Turkeys make very bad mothers - they are so clumsy and just don't seem to be able to manage their young. If they are not treading on them, they are losing them as they obviously can;t count and wander off with one missing and then they die of the cold. In previous years we have left Mums with their young and let nature take its course but we always end up losing all they hatch (which is why we also hatch in the incubator) so this year we decided Mummy and Poults should come and live in the back garden.
Well what a palaver we had yesterday trying to do this - the back garden was easy, we mowed a path through to the chicken hut at the top of the garden (pictures before) and put straw in the hut but when it came to bringing Mummy and Poults back it turned in to an hours nightmare!!
When we got up the field Mummy and Poults were on the edge of the field near where the hedges start so DH decided to coax her out in to the field for us to catch but instead she took off like a loony leaving her babies behind. I kept the poults warm down my top until Mummy came back for them. We gave them back and let her calm down but then she decided we were a risk and took them over the fence, down the ditch in to the next field!!!
DD and I scrambled the same route in to the other field (not ours) and found her but then she took off dropping her babies in the process (she has them under her wings usually), she kept calling them but they did not respond - by this time they were too cold and didn't have the strength to call so we were hunting through 2ft high grass/stinging nettles to find them. We found one easily and after 15mins when we were about to give up we found the other one (he let out a pitiful cry so we could locate him).
Then we took them back to our field and tried to catch Mummy but then one of the poults jumped from DD's hands and ran to its Mummy, I still had the other one and we tried to entice Mummy out but she stayed put and then my poult jumped and ran into the undergrowth!!
Mummy then ran off to join the other turkeys in our field and kept calling her babies but again they did not answer as they were too cold so then we had our 2nd hunt to find the poults who were in dense grass and nettles!!
Luckily after 15mins we found them both and then managed to capture Mummy in the fencing and we quickly jumped in the truck to bring them home!!!

They are doing well in the hut although Mummy was not keen last night and kept jumping at the door to get out (Turkeys hate being enclosed, they are wild animals and prefer to be in the open which is why in all the years of breeding turkeys only 2 have hatched eggs in a hut, the rest (about 10) like to wander off and hide and then reappear with poults in tow) and we were worried she would squash them but this morning everyone was doing well.
Throughout today they have been out for a walk in the top patch and she is doing well to keep them warm but also fed and watered.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the poults yet as every time I get close she makes noises at them and they run and hide under a wing!! But here are some of Mummy:

This is her hiding in the weeds

On her way back to the hut (she's camera shy!)

Nicely tucked up back in the hut

Tomorrow I will make sure I get some pictures of the poults for you.



Photos - Yay!!

I have had a play around and fingers crossed my pictures are working!!

Here is a picture of our cat run from the front

 and one from the side

The cat run was originally on the other side of the garden but we moved it when we took down the summer house and DH then extended his shed to include where the cat run was.
We purchased the shed and then DH had a vision of what a cat run should look like and then went and got the wood and after a few days of banging and sawing this is what he created.
People who have seen it thought we had bought it in kit form and just screwed it together. I am not sure how he does it, he doesnt even write anything down.

I am very pleased with the cat run and so are the cats!!


Here is a picture of the top of the garden

As you can see it is very overgrown, the grey patch in the middle is where we had small bonfires until the neighbours behind us complained. The tree in the middle is an apple tree that DH and DD planted from an apple pip 4 years ago, it had been kept in a pot all that time and this year we planted it out and for the first time it blossomed. I guess we have a bit of a wait for apples.

The chicken hut is one we have had a while and DH tarted it up last year for the meat birds. I am not sure where we will move it to yet as we will need it for when our turkeys get bigger but not big enough to go up to the field. We were thinking of dividing the top in to 6 patches for veg growing but the other option is 4 patches for veg and 2 for the hut and turkeys.

I have not managed any more digging tonight, after work I did tea and then we had to collect bread for the geese and pies for the feral cats we have and now I am ready for bed. I am going to read my Alan Titchmarsh book.

Not sure I have mentioned the feral cats before - about 4 years ago DH noticed some tiny kittens up on our field but I was convinced he was seeing things as some days they were there and some days not. After a few weeks they got bigger and appeared more and we realised they also had a mother cat with them. We didn't know where they came from but fed them with the pies from the bakery.

A few days later we went behind our storage shed to move a spare chicken hut and when we opened it up there was loads of cat toys - now these are the first cats I have ever known who left home and brought toys with them!! Clearly they had been dumped but the people must have known we would care for them otherwise why go to such lengths as to bring their favourite things?!

Over time more kittens have been born and as they got older they disappeared and the cycle has continued ever since - we have 4 at the moment and this is also the same number we started with.

At times we fed them proper cat food but not only did this cost a lot of money but it meant more survived and we were over run so we have gone back to feeding them pies/sausage rolls etc and the numbers have kept down with natural selection.

It also means they have to hunt and we have not had rats for over 2 years - they also keep the rabbit population down!

I know the RSPCA would come and get them but too be honest they do a great job and all appear quite healthy. One day I know they will disappear one by one, I assume the fox will get them as they are not tame enough to seek out human company (the only cat that we know that got ill had a huge scab across his eye and a few days later he had disappeared, he had obviously died but how would anyone have been able to handle him if we managed to catch him and take him to a vet?).

No eggs sold today as we did not have enough to put out. 



Plans

Sorry I have been missing in action - Friday night I had a meal out after work and by the time I got home I was shattered and yesterday afternoon I felt awful with a pain in my stomach which was only better when I laid down so I spent most of the afternoon and evening reading in bed.

I am much better today though so thought I had better post.

Not much smallholding going on here - yesterdays rain meant we couldn't do much outside but I did pop into the library to pay off some fines as my card had been barred (in Suffolk if you owe more than £15 your card gets barred!). My local library is lovely and lets me pay off what I want, I know Ipswich make you pay it all off before you can borrow again. I paid off £10 so I can have books again!

When I got to the library I could not find my card but gave the lady my number - for some strange reason I have memorised it! My account came up to say that I had left my card behind the last time I was in - luckily they keep all these cards safe in a drawer. My card is one of the old style white ones, my signature has faded now but it was in my maiden name and I have been married for 13 years so I was pleased to get it back - I didn't want a new purple one!!

Anyway while I was in the library I had a look in the gardening section - I had tried to reserve a book a few days ago that someone had read and posted on their blog about but it wouldnt let me as I was barred! I have found the updated James Herriott biography (They had no.1, 2 and 4 so I took 1 and 2 and will order 3 when I get to the end of 1) and also an Alan Titchmarsh book.

We are attempting to grow our own veg this year - we did potatoes about 4 years ago and haven't bothered really since but this year we are doing it seriously.

I thought the book would give me some handy tips although too be honest I have learnt a lot from reading other blogs.

So today DH had his eye test (I love the fact that Specsavers opens on a Sunday) so this afternoon we have been in the garden.

DH has been building a wall - he loves anything like this and is really very good. We had some conifers taken down at the side of the house and of course we are left with stumps so he is building a brick raised bed where the stumps are and then we will put in some bushes from the front garden ready to remove the raised flower beds that are there now (they are rotten, they have been there about 7 years) and we will sprinkle some flower seed in to the ground and hopefully have an abundance of flowers!

I have caught up on the washing and then the neighbour called over the fence to tell us she had some veg plants for us! So I popped round and she gave me 2 cucumber plants, a runner bean plant, a dwarf runner bean plant, a pumpkin plant and a pot of aubergine plants (there are about 10 in a pot just coming through so I will seperate them soon). She is such a lovely neighbour!

DH and daughter planted some seeds last Monday and the sunflowers are just starting to poke through so the plants the neighbour gave have gone in the greenhouse.

Then I started to panic about where the pumpkin plant will go - we have a fenced area at the top of the garden that used to have the potatoes in, and at various times it has been the chicken run but we have not done much for a while. DH and I agreed the pumpkin plant can go at the top but of course it all needs digging over. So today I have made a start and done an area 1.5m x 1.5m!! I will try harder in future otherwise it will take me ages! I have tried to post a picture but it comes out upside down - even though I have corrected it in my saved pictures it won't load properly.

I had some other pictures as well but will try again tomorrow.

We have also decided to buy some more chickens - we are going to get 20. I will ring the man tomorrow and hopefully we can get them next Sunday.

We counted out our egg money and we have £99.50 so that can go towards the new chickens.

On Friday we sold hens eggs and goose eggs and made £5.00 and today we sold half a dozen chicken eggs and 9 goose eggs and made £6.50.

Our chicken eggs are in such high demand we can't keep up hence buying some more as we only have 8.