And Here Are Some I Hatched Earlier...

The last three months have been a blur of activity. Those tiny fluffy chicks in my last post? Practically at point of lay now, a day over 16 weeks old! Though, recalling their respective parents' record on the POL issue, we could be waiting for another ten weeks yet before we see any eggs. That's the trouble with Rare and Minority Breeds - the trade-off against all that cute fluffiness/ginormous size/weird feather coloration is that (a) they often take much longer to mature than utility breeds, and (b) when their eggs do finally arrive, you can't expect one a day, every day, as you would from the more extravagantly-blessed utility hybrids like Amber Links or Black Rocks.
Having said that, we've been pleasantly surprised by the almost hybrid-like laying regularity of our two Araucana girls, Sooty and her daughter Nimbus. And our Orpington girls lay one most days, unless (as in the last 3 months) they can't make their minds up whether to go broody or not, and instead opt for the grumpy-and-noisy-but-not-laying-OR-sitting-on-eggs route.
Tufty Duck is back in the Funny Farm along with her brood. Lord Bailey literally raced to her side when I put her down in the pen, then, as the soppy smile was still forming on my lips and I was thinking 'Ahhh, he missed her,' he grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and leapt aboard. The old romantic. Nimbus tends to be too fast for him to catch, and Mrs Pepperpot is so big he'd need a ladder, so I guess he'd been feeling somewhat deprived in the marital department!
Which reminds me of one of THE comedy moments of 2010... alas, all enacted within ten seconds and me without a camera to record it. I was up one lunchtime to feed the nags and potter round a few stable-y jobs, and as I emerged from Mags' box, heard a huge squawking commotion in the Funny Farm pen, and looked over. There was Mrs P, a huge flapping ball of humbug-striped feathers, pounding up the length of the pen like an ostrich on steroids, and - impossibly - there was Lord Bailey on top of her, hanging on for dear life. As I watched, Mrs P put on a last burst of speed, and Bailey toppled off backwards, head over heels, like a feathery casualty in some 70's road safety campaign. (Think Once, Think Twice, Think Yikes!) I can only guess that he surprised her while she was sunbathing in one of their hollowed-out dustbaths,  walked aboard thinking 'what luck!', then found himself seeing things briefly from a previously unknown height!
The two Silkie chicks, Velveteen and Honey, are the same size as she is now, but her two Orpington foster-chicks, Little Dorrit and Hattie, loom over her like gormless giants. Think they can go in with their own kind very shortly.

Muppet Babies!

It was only a matter of time before the chickens came to be featured here. We have 13 at the moment, all kept up at my friend's smallholding in a share-the-work, share-the-eggs arrangement. We didn't mean to end up with quite so many, but let me tell you, chickens are addictive!

You think you can just keep three, then you see a card on the big board at Farmways advertising a breed you really love, and you go to have a look because the place is quite close, and you're being very firm with yourself that you're only buying one chicken - two at the absolute outside - and you arrive home clutching four cardboard boxes, because you fell in love with the mad, fluffy white thing that looks like a Muppet, your smallest daughter had her heart set on a Black Rock, then there were the two utility (read less decorative) birds you originally went for, and the breeder just had to go and show you the blue-egg layer with little wacky cheek tufts.

This is called Chicken Madness, and leads to further insanities such as Breeding Your Own Chickens. The white Muppet chicken pictured at the top of this post, a bantam Silkie who got christened Tufty Duck because of her endearing habit of quacking rather than clucking, went broody a few weeks ago. This means she had a sudden surge of girlie hormones, and got grumpy and mumsy and wanted to lay eggs and sit on them and not move, thank you very much. So we moved her into a little broody run by herself (but still inside the main run so she could see her mates), and let her sit on a batch of her own eggs, plus three fertile eggs from our Buff Orpingtons. This is a Buffy:

They are basically a large, orange, feathery football with beak and feet. Utterly dim, utterly charming, very therapeutic to cuddle as they'll sit on your knee and let you stroke them like a cat. You can see why we'd want more!

So Tufty Duck sat on her eggs for 21 days, and on the 21st day, they hatched! One poor little Silkie didn't make it much further than getting out of the egg, but the rest seemed fine - then I noticed one of the Buffy chicks had one eye glued shut the next morning, so I had to take it away and neck it. If that seems heartless to you, consider this: last year we reared a batch of five chicks in an incubator. One got the gluey eye thing. Next day it was two, and they were bubbly-eyed and sneezing. We separated them off from the others, treated them with eye drops, antibiotics in the food, nursed them devotedly for months - and in the end still had to neck them because the vet said that even if their eyes and airways eventually cleared up, they'd probably be carriers and when we put them back in with the rest of the flock they would all get it, whatever it is. I hate killing things, but sometimes it's the only right thing to do.

The next day, we found another Silkie chick dead. We're not sure, but we think Tufty might have accidentally trodden on the poor little squeaker in the dash to get inside the nestbox door.

So now we're down to four surviving chicks, all looking healthy - two Silkies, two Buffies - and in the last few days their wing feathers have grown exponentially! Now they're flapping and hopping about their run like fluffy Golden Snitches. So sweet. Here's the proud mum with her kids and foster-kids:

One of the Buffies has been christened Little Dorrit, the pale-coloured Silkie is Honey, and the black Silkie is Velveteen (like the Rabbit). I will no doubt drivel on at length in future posts about them. You have been warned.

Sunroof Gardening... It Works

For the last year, I have allowed my back hedge to run riot, so that I would have plenty of raw materials to create something that my heart has greatly longed for: an archway in the hedge through which to drive my car. Not a metal or wood arch, but one of those chunky, part-of-the-hedge archways. Something a little less exuberant than this, possibly:

Not sure the giant crown motif would really fit, specially after people got a glimpse of the mess within. So, maybe something a little more restrained, like this: 

...and if I did it on a bigger scale, I coud drive my car right between the elephant's legs!

Oh, alright, alright. But you get the idea. Chunky arch in large dense hedge. I quickly realised, after remembering the swan-dive my landscape-gardening neighbour Alan took into a hedge a year or two back, that I was in trouble vis-a-vis getting up to the correct height to tackle the thing. All very well letting it grow, but the base of the arch was going to be at eight feet - the gently waving tops of the monster hedge were now hitting fifteen feet, and my tallest stepladder only stands elbow-high.Even my sooper-dooper extendy loppers can't bridge that gap.

Listen, I have tried leaning a normal ladder against a hedge. All I can say: not a good idea. You think the hedge looks pretty solid, and it does, until you lean an unyielding metal object against it and add 12 stone of human being at the top, clutching wildly-whirring electric hedge trimmers and leaning perilously to left and right. Then, my friends, you remember that actually, a hedge is pretty much a loose collection of twiggy bushy stuff that you have merely clipped into a solid-looking shape, and you climb down again PDQ and thank your lucky stars you came to your senses before you came to in A and E.


Repeat after me: there are no handholds on a hedge. None.


Attempted similar feat on a windy day: I held on extremely tight to my oscillating ladder, surrounded by the sound of rushing wind and the creaks and groans of wood against wood. It really doesn't help that we get terns and gulls flying around this place. With your eyes closed, honest to God you could believe you were clinging to the rigging, up the mast of a sailing ship in the Roaring Forties or something (think I may have watched 'Pirates of the Caribbean' a few too many times lately).

So... major laddery problem for the construction of the arch. Then, driving beneath the spot one sunny day with the sunroof open, I had a brainwave: if I stopped the car in the right place, and stood on the console between the front seats with most of me sticking out of the sunroof, I would be pretty nearly at the right height. Eureka!

So yesterday, arriving home in bright sunlight at about 8.15am after my usual morning jaunt to the Shire to feed the horses and chickens and acquire more muscle mass on my upper torso (about which much, much more later), I drove under my towering, drooping bastions of privet and suddenly decided that today was the day. Opened sunroof, fetched cable ties, placed feed sacks on the console to save the leather, and after a bit of grunting and struggling, emerged triumphant from the sunroof brandishing my secaturs. And so early arrivals for the Saturday market will have seen me, stuck Pooh-Bear-like in the sunroof, wrestling with great swathes of privet in my mission to cable-tie them together overhead. The car is full of bits of leaf and twig, and I almost, in one incautious moment, put a great dent in the roof, but it's done - I have the beginnings of my arch! Now feeling all pumped-up and proudly gardenery.

Hooked On Classics?

"ARE YOU SURE THIS IS SPARTA....?"

I keep coming across Home Ed blogs and sites dedicated to Classical Education. And all I can say is ...what? I mean... what? Ancient Mediterranean history and culture? Latin and Greek? Truly, I feel deeply sceptical about the value of this kind of stuff (there I go, showing off my impressive vocabulary again). OK, I understand that Ancient Greek and Latin contain the roots of many languages, but, honestly, is it really that important at a sub-undergrad level of education to be studying languages that nobody speaks any more?

This whole thing seems to me to be a throwback to the Georgian/Victorian era of Empire, when all well-bred young things did their Gap Year (back then they called it The Grand Tour) travelling the Classical sites of Europe with some Alpine interludes thrown in for the good of their health (and the potential for making jolly nice watercolour sketches and meeting jolly nice suitable chaps of the opposite persuasion).

Hmm. Just.... hmm. Unsure of the value of all that Greco-Roman jazz as a steady diet. 

Meh. Unsatisfying ramble. I'm off the carpe my diem before it disappears on me.

...Why?

...is a question that's been launched in my direction quite a lot over the last month, referring to my decision to remove Tigger from school at the end of the Spring Term and take responsibility for her continuing education myself. I have to say, I have asked it a few times myself, usually at the fag-end of day and energy.

But, well. And hey. And um. I mean to say... why NOT?

Most people (by which I mean, to my shame, me up until about a month ago) remain ignorant of the law as it applies to what they now call Elective Home Education (as opposed to Accidental Home Education, I suppose, which is that unedifying process whereby the little darlings pick up and commit to memory every naughty word you utter). Did you know that it is not compulsory for a child of any age to attend school, ever? I certainly didn't. Know, that is. I just assumed that what I'd heard, vaguely, somewhere - to wit, that it was illegal for any child of school age to not be enrolled in a school - was correct, but as any Navy SEAL will tell you, assumption is the mother of all screw-ups (or some pithy words to that effect). Under UK law, children do not have to go to school.

The crucial point (to quote the relevant legislation) is that the child is provided with an education suitable to their age and aptitude - nothing more, nothing less. What that education should include is really up to you and your child. No National Curriculum, no SATs; you can do Circus Skills before breakfast, collect tadpoles from the stream while your child's friends troop to school; walk the dog in the woods; catch a nap if you or your child needs it, then, refreshed, launch into some of the BBC Bitesize Maths pages after lunch, before collaborating with your child on making lasagne for tea. Everybody learns things every day, structured and unstructured, abstract and concrete, useful and trivial. A big part of Home Edding is realising that this is not just OK, but really one of the major points of the exercise.

I can see why it wouldn't suit everyone. There are a lot of decisions to be made. Whichever parent majors on the Educational Thing (and still, even now, that usually means the mother) will probably not be able to earn at the same time. An organised type might manage a part-time job, but then there's child-care... Single parents - and I speak as a Sole Child-Rearer of almost four years' standing - will struggle to manage unless they get a decent amount of benefits or don't mind (as here) working from home amid the chaos. I can say, paw on heart, that I have learned things about time management recently that I hoped never to have to know. God knows I didn't want to, but unless you choose to forge the Radical Unschooling path - something I'm not equipped for, personally - you have to acknowledge that time flits on and if you don't do certain things at certain times, it's quite possible to reach the end of another week and see an educational desert of DVDs, Facebook, Toontown and Playstation games involving snowboards, unicorns and training in anti-social behaviour. You peer back into the mists of Monday, and mutter, "Well, we went swimming... that must count as PE, surely...? And you figured out how to fix your bike brakes when they siezed up on Wednesday... Cycle Maintenance? Engineering? Garden Shed Tech?"

"Woteverrr," drawls Tigger, engrossed in Media Studies (aka Watching Daytime TV) and Social Sciences (aka Watching 'Wife Swap USA' on Daytime TV).

Grind teeth, remind her for the gazillionth time that the W word is banned in our house now, and instead amuse myself by recalling her recent advancement in English Language:

It was the stroppy end of a stroppy day, and Tigger was in full-on Attack Mode with added springs. No casual remark went unchallenged or un-snorted-at. After a final command from me to go and tidy her room, Tigger tossed her head and shouted, "I can't be arsed!"

With great dignity, I informed her that 'arsed', whilst not technically a swear word, was unladylike, and that if one wished to utter anything with a similar sentiment, one should say something like, "I can't be bothered!"
Short pause.

"Fine!" Tigger yelled, with a glint in her eye. "I don't give a rat's BOTHERED!!"

The stuff of which family legends are made. And now, here I am, sitting on my bothered, writing about it.

Hacking Through the 100 Aker Wood

Yes, it's Thoughts From a Secret Garden... secret because it doesn't look so much like a garden at the moment as a combination wildlife meadow and rubbish dump. Or possibly an art installation featuring a large Ikea sink unit (yes, we really do have everything including the kitchen sink in our garden!), a washing whirligig that looks as if it was designed to go on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, heaps of dead Garden Stuff waiting vainly to be taken to the tip, and now, arrestingly, several teetering stacks of old tyres, all sizes from tractor down to quad bike, awaiting their transformation into raised beds. 
Oh, and three puzzled but philosophical guinea-pigs and their moveable, posable ark-and-run combo with purple extendy-tunnel, who watch the chaos happening all around them with interest, and provide an encouraging chorus of whistles and squeaks every time someone walks past. That is, I know what they really want is for me to stop and pick dandelions for them, or shower them with food, or top up their water bottle, but hey - we need all the encouragement we can imagine here!

We're a bit further along with the Grand Plan now, clearing weeds and rubble. Everything has taken off from a standing start since the weather warmed up. I spent a week catching glimpses of bindweed shoots growing vertically up out of the rockery garden and each time telling myself, "...must make half an hour later on to pull that up before it gets any bigger..." and now it's two feet long and trying to strangle my potted honeysuckle before I can even plant it. Agh.

Talking of Grand Plans, my Freedom Cats scheme, designed to provide our pampered but imprisoned moggies with a taste of the great outdoors by bolting a sturdy fruit cage to the outside of the house and having, in effect, a feline aviary (a feliary?) outside the kitchen window where they can run up and down branches and sun themselves and froth over the sparrows flying past their noses, is still, alas only a scheme. It's nesting time, and the cats are not amused. Rabbit leaves her 2nd-floor window open at the bottom, and they line up to watch the birds fly past, like spectators at an air-show.

Here's Sping, being Royally Unamused in the grip of Rabbit.

Meanwhile, outside, the gardening zigzags haphazardly onwards... Tigger has sunk a bucket of tadpoles into the ground as a pond, and claimed a tractor tyre (which I personally rolled across from Tyre and Battery... stopped the traffic, that did!) to use as her own raised bed. I'll have to fetch another one now for my Tyre Garden project. Sheesh.

Agh, frost... and in the second week of May. It's such a frost pocket here. The cold air just rolls down the hill from the Planning offices (thanks again, guys) and flops over our gardens here like a big, deep-frozen duvet. I have just bought a wee zip-up vaguely pagoda-shaped greenhousey thing from Down To Earth (local garden centre), just big enough to grow some tomatoes because I simply cannot resist that tropical, peppery smell from the foliage, and am currently, nervously, trying to figure out if the plants I bought will be safer being plonked in the shed every night, or whether the Plastic Pagoda will protect them. Hmm.

Tigger is resisting all attempts at blandishment vis-a-vis growing veg.  "I just want pansies," she reiterates firmly every time I try. "Pansies and frogs." Sounds like a specialist dating service. Oh well. I still have my secret weapon... Grow Your Own Sweetcorn; that being her favourite veg of all time. I grew it myself when I was her ageish, but back in the 70s, Mum had never encountered such culinary exotica before, and boiled my single cob gingerly for a few minutes. It was practically raw, still trailing whiskers of silk, unseasoned, unbuttered... not a good introduction. The Jolly Green Giant would have fainted dead away.