Box of frogs

Mad as a box of frogs is a choice description that my neighbour generously contributed to my vocabulary. Box of frogs is now the name for any of the first-timer Torwens who don't realise they are lambing, drop their burden from a standing start and run off, relieved that the tum and bum pains have finally stopped. You have to corner these skippity creatures and herd them into a pen where their wet lamb is waiting to be licked into the world. The bonding is fine once the ewe gets her first sniff and taste; the problem is getting them to realise that the pain and the lamb are in any way connected. Expecting them to appreciate that they are in lamb at all and therefore shouldn't be leaping over feed troughs, straw bales and each other is an unwinnable battle, and the older ewes just look at them with disdain: "keep your strength for later, young'un".

Deadheading the farm

The dogs are desperate to be taken for a decent walk, so today as the unlambed ewes seemed intent on retaining their burdens for some while, I indulged us all and walked the hedgelines with Mopsa and Fenn to check on spring.
Notwithstanding my fears that all the chopping, laying, banking, coppicing, fencing and general mauling about would lay the place to waste, spring has made long bacon at me and burgeoned regardless.
It seems that a farm is not dissimilar to a rose; you hack it back with some care, and it will burst out with new growth, knowing better than I that it will survive and thrive on drastic treatment.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

Rage! Blow! And please be done with it quick smart before any of the lambs succumb to hypothermia.
I haven't yet been carried off across the Cornish border by the determined gales, the menagerie is still intact, and the fires haven't gone out, but it's not nice out there.
It comes in flurries; the trees sway and bend and the wind howls round the buildings, then suddenly everything is quiet, the trees stand straight, before another determined whoosh that rattles branches onto the barn roof, makes the loose straw skip, and parts the fleece on the outside ewes. Worse, a few bits of corrugated tin on barn roofs and walls that were thought to be well secured are being persistently jiggled about and I suspect will be ripped from their moorings before the weather settles; it is far too dangerous to do anything about it in this wind.
The house is in a hollow and naturally well protected, but as soon as you walk away from it to check the sheep, jackets flap, hats sit askew and dead leaves and other detritus eddy across your path. This should be a day for baking, reading the weekend papers or a Jilly Cooper, but instead it's on with the outdoor gear and up the hill every hour or so.
Like the wind, lambing comes in flurries with two lots of doubles in the last twelve hours - a break from the dreaded triplets - and more looking interested in producing some of their own.

An unexpected phone call

The morning round complete, I check emails and start work. The phone rings and an unfamiliar chatty, chilled Totnes voice says she hopes I don't mind, but she's just been googling "cob barns", seen the farm website and wonders if I can help.
She has a friend, a Buddhist monk, who is looking for a cob barn to buy for hosting educational children's workshops. I'm so stunned by this that I don't hear that much of the rest.
Just last week I gave short shrift to a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses who thought they might convert me on my doorstep, but not even I can be rude to a Buddhist monk or their putative friend, even though I was beginning to think "scam". Perhaps I jump to negative conclusions too quickly - actually there is no perhaps about it - but when she mentioned that her monk had charitable funding to buy said barns, the tone was set. Ivana, she said her name was. And yes, the STD she left was indeed a Totnes code.

The lambing quickstep

It's all slow, slow, manic, manic, slow on the farm at the moment. You wait for something to happen, then everything hits in a rush (heaps of triplets, all night vigils, donning the long plastic gloves for an up-the-sheep moment), and then it's all quiet again.
It's as emotionally exhausting as being a young girl at her first disco, hugging the wall for a few records, being whizzed around for ten minutes by some overly hormonal partner, then rejoining the other wallflowers.
The sheep with lambs are now out in the orchard, enjoying the sun on their backs and the fresh grass. I go up with the bottles and top up any triplets that aren't getting enough milk. It's always a relief when the lambs turn back to their mother once they've had their fill, rather than follow me around - I'm not looking to be a full time surrogate mum!
So, I will waltz, slowly, up the hill to see if any ewes are doing the lambada.

Five minutes peace

I can't believe how tired I am, and lambing has only started and there are just a couple of dozen ewes to deal with; how friends with 500 manage, I can't even start to imagine. Either way, you're in and out of the lambing shed like some crazed self-winding clockwork toy, checking behaviour, changes in eating patterns, signs of water bags, general atmosphere, and topping up one set of triplets with bottled milk as their first time mum hasn't really got enough of her own. Neither me nor far more experienced farmers I know have ever come across a first-timer having triplets - what was she thinking? Luckily the lambs are evenly sized and full of energy and survival instinct, so no larger bully is benefiting over the others.
Mini and major dramas are enacting themselves all over the place. The first batch of incubated goose eggs are starting to pip, so I am hoping there may be goslings under the heat lamp in a couple of days. One of the geese is sitting on her own full nest, au naturale, as proud and protective as can be. An Aylesbury duck suffered from a prolapse of the oviduct, so she has been dispatched, plucked and is in the freezer, my clean lambing Dickies boilersuit now covered in white down. A ewe gave up trying to lamb after some sterling effort, and intervention brought out one malformed lamb that had blocked the cervix causing another perfectly good lamb to die, leaving the mum with one good healthy ram (this run of triplets is ridiculous - that's three sets so far). Saddest of all, the matriarch, Mrs Longtail, succumbed to pasteurellosis, something the flock had never suffered from until last year when two ewes were also lost to it in the final stages of pregnancy. They are all vaccinated against this lethal pneumonia, have been well fed and are in a well ventilated barn, but you can't avoid the inevitable stress to the body caused by lambing or stop cold windy weather. I'll have to discuss future planning with the vet.
My old cat is getting scrawnier, but still eating, drinking, purring, strolling, mock-hunting, and as you can see, happy to share a bed with Mopsa on a filthy welly-boot dirt strewn kitchen floor. And I am off to check on the ewes, again.

It's started

...and it's triplets! Not entirely something to celebrate really - a ewe only has two teats after all, and triplets rarely do as well as doubles.
Not the best photo, but at less than 12 hours old they are uncooperatively fixated on breathing, eating and investigating rather than posing. Oh, and they are ALL boys. This is one of the prettiest ewes in the flock, nicely marked and with delicate features.

Easter egg hunt

If you look closely, you will see one of the crème eggs from the handfuls poked into various hidey holes in and around the barns for the builders to find, this last morning before their Easter break.
I used to love treasure hunts, the kiddy sort rather than those beloved of suburban families in cars during the seventies and eighties that I remember from summers in North West London.
I left a note stuck on the window of the converted shipping container the builders use as an office, attached to one egg, that said there were nine more to find. There was a chuckling but plaintive response asking whether there were really ten in total. One egg is still sitting untouched in one of the dovecotes. It's really hard not to look at it and give the game away.

I'm a llama - let me out of here

No, this is not an image of the remaining traces of an escapee llama. If you walk along the fence line there are numerous catches of his hair where he has stretched his extraordinary neck to chew on some succulent shoot in the hedge.
The fence also has rubbings of fleece - black from the Torwens, white from the Torddu. And now I am finding a different kind of black, white and chestnut fur where it shouldn't be.
Fenn, the young Bernese Mountain Dog, has decided that she is in fact a steeple-chaser, and is leaping five bar gates and barbed wire fences with impunity. All physical obstacles put in place to dissuade her from this potentially dangerous feat have failed. The cast iron spike by the preferred "show-jump" has been wrapped so that she doesn't impale herself.

Horology

There I was, minding my own, when from between my wellies was a reminder of fleeting hours, weeks, month, years. And it was already starting to disintegrate. Thanks.
And then I looked at the calendar, and it told me that clocks change in less than a fortnight.
I know I said I wanted lambing to hurry up and start, but now I've changed my mind. Just SLOW DOWN will you?

It's oh so quiet...

It's oh so still in this grey, watery run up to lambing. No tractors are out and about - the fields are too sodden to take the strain, everyone is dealing with indoor tasks, sorting their paperwork and tackling VAT returns. Farming seems on hold apart from those with dark shadows under their eyes from nights in the calving pens and lambing sheds.
I feed the sheep and check their udders and girths. In theory they could start lambing the day before Easter Sunday, and one or two look like they might oblige, with swollen udders and teats becoming more prominent. The lambing shed is all ready, old straw and muck removed, pens set up and fresh straw scattered, water buckets and haynets on hand and gloves, lube and iodine in place.
Lambing has been happening since Christmas round here, so the wait seems particularly extended and I feel the urge to get going on this most exciting and exhausting occupation in my farming year. More than anything I want the rain to stop and the sun to shine, encouraging fresh shoots of grass to welcome the new arrivals.
Even though they are brought in at night and many lamb between dusk and dawn, inevitably, some of the ewes will lamb outside during the day and I don't want them to drop their young into puddles. I'll be going up and down between the house and the orchard where the expectant mums spend their days to make sure nothing untoward happens and my calf muscles will build their April shape. I've been known to take a stool up there and watch a ewe determine her lambing space and go through the whole process, and when the lambs are up and happy, take mum and offspring into the lambing shed to iodine the navels, feed and water the mum, and give them up to 24 hours in there before giving mum her first pedicure in five months and sending them off into the sun.
But for now, it's the quiet before the storm.
Tomorrow I'll try and take a photo of the heavily laden ewes between downpours.

Wishing for otters

From time to time when there are no sheep in Second Lower Moor (no, not an inspirational name, but historically correct), I let the dogs play there by themselves whilst I slip through the gate into the adjacent copse and check out the otter holt. I peek into the entrances and lightly poke about the area looking for trails or spraint.
I get a physical surge of excitement just at the prospect of otters choosing to live on the farm. I have seen very few wild otters ever, the sightings don't yet make a handful, and I have yet to see one in Devon although I have smelled their presence just a short stroll from here. So when I saw the picture of Lotty in this Saturday's Western Morning News, I was to be found stroking the newsprint in a quite pathetically wistful manner.
I now have the cutting pinned on my noticeboard, next to my computer, and I gaze at the seven week old beauty, with her black button nose and her black button eyes with something akin to adoration. I wish she'd come to stay.

The elements

I wondered why the barometer manufacturers had bothered with those extreme gradations so far below the "bloody awful weather" category. Now I know.
I kept waking in the night, hoping that willpower alone would keep the half finished barn roof in place. Having three chimneys in the house, the wind whistles and hoots through its trio of echo chambers just to make sure the inhabitants have plenty to keep them wakeful and worriting.
The blustering is as bad as ever and it's not yet safe to go and check if any trees are down or for any other damage. The sheep are ok and the dogs will have to be content with poking their noses and behinds briefly out of doors; no walks today.

Snipe

It's been raining in short, hard bursts, and the lower fields are soggy and soft. As you sploosh your way through, there is a stirring and a whirring, and a plumpish shape or three or thirty rise noisily and move off for a while. Skewers with wings, these extraordinary birds love the wet rushy pasture, but are incredibly shy and I only ever see them making their getaway. A couple of years ago I saw a parent and a number of young in a field ditch, but they too took to the air as I unwittingly disturbed them. I only wish the snipe would have let me take this photo.

Women in Farming

This evening I was mingling with artists and farmers at the Phoenix Arts Centre for the exhibition resulting from the Women in Farming project put together by Aune Head Arts.
It's a topic close to my heart and in the press too, this week.
The work was beautiful, honourable, moving, familiar and unfamiliar. Framed by mounts of felted fleece and adorned with gold plated copies of their ear tags (made by Louise Evans), Jennie Hayes' photographs of the sheep on Sue Peach's Dartmoor farm made me want to wrench the images off the wall and take them home with me. I was drawn again and again to look at the detail of their heads, their gaze, their ear tags, their carefully shorn necks, every inch as imperious as any senior politician sitting for their portrait.

Swaling

There has been swaling. Because the culm hasn't been grazed by cattle this year and needs the thick thatching cleared to encourage fresh growth, a carefully controlled burn has played gently over about a quarter of the purple moor grass tufts in Moor Wood. The ground is very wet, and so romping flames are unlikely here, although on Dartmoor where the gorse is swaled to keep its spread under control, they have firemen on standby. Now, why didn't I think of that?

Prehistoric mini monsters

And so the clumps of spawn are increasing. I honestly don't ever remember seeing so much of the stuff; it seems that the frogs are in hyperactive mode and as each nucleus grows from a dot to a dash, more eggs are laid just to make sure. And in the warmest spots, there are tadpoles, those strange black spermy wrigglers that headbutt each other in their frenzied acknowledgement of life.
It's incredibly hard taking a decent photo of tadpoles - not just because they are in constant movement - but because the surface of the water reflects the photographer from most angles in preference to the beasts below. But there they hover, in primordial gloop, safe from the jam jar if not from natural predators.

Let there be light

Yesterday the scaffolders came and removed all the internal scaffolding in the barn which was starting to get in the way of the roof works and the patching of the walls. Wow.

Treasure trove

Winter is the season for major farm earthworks. Whilst the grass, trees, and hedgerows sleep there is heavy machinery at work remedying the trauma caused by decades of sheep and cows trampling at will through supposed boundaries and barriers. Devon hedge banks are strange ramparts, topped with hedgerow plants and trees, but unless they are kept steep sided with a thick palisade of thorny and spiny growth, lambs and sheep will bounce all over them, walk through them and create huge gaps that become livestock thoroughfares.
So, as this year's five chosen banks have had their hedges laid and the earth beneath them scooped by the digger magician back into shape, fencing follows swiftly before the sheep are allowed access; it's not only lambs that like to play King of the Castle.
As a consequence of all this work I have become ultra familiar with each bend, slope and growth on these boundaries. I have walked back and forth, back and forth, fencing tools in hand, gazing first at the ground where the slumped earth has been removed and remade into banks, and then at the banks themselves. Once the early spring rains start, the soil will be quickly, naturally covered with grass and wild flowers, so this is the time for revelation.
The largest objects I find are several ancient ploughshares in fields that it was thought had never been ploughed. Covered in soil, something about the shape of that small piece above ground (too straight for a stone perhaps) makes me stop and tap with whatever tool I have to hand; then I tug and yet another large, heavy piece of carefully shaped metal comes into the light. I drop the ploughshares by gateways. I refuse to throw them out and like to look at them as I go in and out of a field, wondering how the place was peopled and worked in the past.
The banks are the places to find misplaced tools. I find a wrench of old design, clogged with soil and rusted solid, no doubt carefully placed on the bank whilst a back was stretched or shoulders rolled, and then forgotten in a moment of distraction. It reminds me to double check that all the fencing tools are brought away as we move from section to section.
And sometimes I find something more intriguing; shards of pottery with the date of George VI's coronation still clear or hand made thick glass from some bottle of liniment or beer. And just occasionally I find whole bottles; my favourite has the legend "Corner's Oils for Sheep and Cattle" moulded along the body.
The bottles stand on the high mantel over the fireplace, and again, make me wonder each time I glance at them, about the people on the farm in the past.

I'm officially wild....

The wood on the farm is now an official County Wildlife Site, "due to the presence of Culm grassland and wet woodland, both rare and declining habitats in Devon; although the areas are relatively small they are of sufficient quality and wildlife interest to meet the CWS criteria." So says Devon Biodiversity Records Centre.
I'm rather excited about this recognition plus having responsibility for managing the wood sympathetically, knowing that there are fabulous and rare species to be enjoyed within the farm itself, developing knowledge about the various species and the ooh aah factor. Especially the ooh aah factor. That happens when you count a dozen more orchids than in the previous season.
Four other sites across the farm that were also surveyed are "not currently of CWS standard, though with time and continued sympathetic management there is clearly the potential for them to improve further in quality and ecological value." So room for improvement then. I like a challenge.
If you want to hunt through the history of this process, click on the culm label at the bottom of this post.

Five hours of high quality culture a week for kids

I have been churning and turning this issue over in my mind for days and just can't get to grips with it. As someone who has spent all her working life in the arts I should be cheering and clapping my hands, imagining the crocodiles of children snaking past exhibits, crying in theatres and snapping eagerly with cameras, but instead I can't help feeling more than a little bewildered.
How, exactly, are children going to get the equivalent of an hour a day, five days a week of high quality cultural activity? Are artists going to be the new teachers? I suspect that the only people who get 5 hours of HQC a week are art critics, and they have to watch/walk past/read through many tens of hours of dross to attain this. And what is it with the government and the target number five?
Now, I'd love to think that I could spend an hour on Monday having a go at throwing a pot with the help of a fabulous local potter, Tuesday bursting my lungs with contemporary song, Wednesday touring the region's best art gallery and museum instead of munching on a lunchtime snack, and on Friday using up my last two hours on a thrilling performance. But I know that this just isn't going to happen. And on a rural note it'd take at least ten hours of my time to get to these things; not everyone lives near city amenities.
Are we also being ridiculous in expecting this "Find your Talent" scheme to produce hundreds of thousands of artists that wouldn't otherwise exist because of some lingering idea that Cool Brittannia was a real concept and accessible to all?
Yes, I want schools to incorporate music and art and literature and new media and drama and every aspect of the arts within the school day. I want arts organisations to enable people of all ages to engage in their work in thrilling ways. I want people, including children to feel proud of their artistic and cultural achievements, and to have opportunities to get hands on with things they couldn't do at home - I always wanted to have a go at sculpting with stone rather than fiddling with potato prints. Professional artists working alongside communities and individuals can and do deliver extraordinary life-enhancing experiences.
But should this activity be circumscribed and headlined by a highly improbable numerical target? I suspect that rather than creating real, new, extraordinary activities that the most routine will be included by this number crunching daftness. Spent Sunday watching the telly and caught a bit of the latest period drama because your Mum insisted on watching it? Tick. Double period drama class on Thursday afternoon? Two ticks. Eng Lit on Friday morning? Tick. Recorder lesson? Tick.
I really don't mean to sound like a killjoy, but if we want a vibrant, culturally aware population it should be for everyone, not just a few pilot geographies in competition with each other (that post-code lottery thing). And all the pressures that stopped teachers taking pupils to the theatre (cost, overburdened curriculum, transport fears, excessive responsibility etc) and strangled peripatetic music services (too expensive, natch) is the stuff needing tackling. Humph.

It's a matrix with its very own jargon

You may recall that I was a little nervous of asking the builders when the first slates would go on the cob barn roof.
The massive oak trusses went up so quickly, and since then a veritable crisscross of timbers with their own precise taxonomy is being added so that by the time the roof is ready for the slates to go up, the rain will have to dodge a great deal of wood before it can splash to the floor.
Across the trusses are the mighty purlins, and today three quarters of the roof is covered in vertical rafters. I worry for the ancient cob walls, but am reassured by the structural surveyor that they will happily take the weight without groaning to a heap of cobby rubble.
In the bonus February sun the builders perch like happy parrots all over the roof, hammers and tools strapped firmly into their belts.
I suspect that by the end of the week the mass of horizontal battens will start to go up, and then it's just a matter of putting the jargon in a place where my brain will retain it for further recall, and it will be slate time.
Oh, and I did ask, and the answer is within the next fortnight.

The boy's so good...

...it's enough to put you into a permanent slump. It isn't that the plot is so magnificent or that the characters are particularly original, it's that the writing is just so damn good.
Andrew O'Hagan had me on page one - truly gripped and completely relaxed in the knowledge that I was in the hands of a master for 278 pages of brilliant prose. Whether it was the "smirr of rain", "the lipstick smile" or the "windows the size of bibles" I groaned with appreciation of the originality yet appropriateness of the phrases.
There are life changing experiences for various characters. When the housekeeper finds an ancient note tucked deep under the mattress by her husband telling her "I DON'T LOVE YOU ANY MORE", I found myself startled on her behalf, not by the fact of the lovelessness but by the bitterness that must have led him to put the note there in the first place. To imagine finding such a note is to wish yourself permanent despair.
The priest tells of his school's tradition of pupils and staff wending their way to the annual picnic at Gormire Lake by any means of transport possible, and how he made his journey by elephant accompanied by cheers, and in so doing realised that imaginative impulses can be made real.
And then there are the comments leisurely chucked into the brew, that speak with painful honesty and admit to singular snobbery, such as the advertising hoardings speaking "of other people's choices" - don't they just?
Even a blogger wants to shape words in a way that creates interest, and Be Near Me is surely a prime example of the good stuff.

Yet more firsts - some good, some most definitely not

Last month I was counting off the various firsts of the year to date. Now there are more to add to the list.
This morning there was a heap of straw in the goose hut, pulled and picked into a comfy doughnut shape by one of the geese. I parted it carefully, and yes, the first goose egg of the year. Traditionally they start laying on Valentine's day, so if it was laid before midnight, she was spot on. I'll wait til there are enough eggs to put in the incubator and then let them do their thing by benefit of electricity, leaving the geese to sit naturally on another clutch.

There was the first flush of blossom in the orchard. It is on the unknown tree - I think it is a plum but don't really know - and the reason as to why it never fruits and reveals its true nature is clear; every year it blossoms far too early and the frost will kill off any premature buds. Looks like it's getting it wrong again.
Then there were the two nuthatches eyeing each other up. One of them, the male I guess, was displaying and trembling his tail feathers for all the world as if he was a bird of paradise; never seen that before.
And then on Wednesday I came in to find my first ever ominous recorded phone message from the animal health department of Defra announcing that the farm is in the newly enlarged Bluetongue surveillance zone. To be honest, the chances of doing anything to prevent my sheep getting this disease is nil, and the temptation to bury my head in activity is strong. I know only too well that some midges and mozzies have survived our warm winter. What a way to welcome the lambing season.

Up she goes

A duck's eye view of the magnificent erection, showing the back end of the barn, still hidden by heaps of mud. But you get the general idea, I hope. By the end of what was a gloriously sunny day all the roof trusses are in place, and a sprig of oak has been attached to the right hand truss for luck. As night falls and the builders feel rightly proud of a good day's work we all celebrate the topping out by downing some fizz - in this case sparkling cider made from the 2006 crop of apples.
Next day and the builders are perched on the apex, fixing the sections that will create the hipped ends. I haven't dared to ask when the first slates will go on.

War Horse

I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon with tears splashing down my face and trickling down my neck. I was with a thousand other people, many of whom were dabbing uselessly at their eyes or struggling to keep juddering shoulders under control; it was practically full house for the penultimate matinée of the current run of War Horse at the National.
I'd come up by train from Devon, travelling for five hours, just to find myself right back there, but now the countryside was animated by extraordinary lifesize puppets of horses, crows and geese. I sat there wishing all my friends had been in the audience so that we could have shared this astonishing experience.
Michael Morpurgo wrote the book on which the play is based, just a few miles from here in Iddesleigh. For me, the Devon roots of the story added further poignancy to this tale of love, family, war, bitterness, violence, humanity and the ties between man and beast. We see the wrangling sale of a young colt and the bond between growing horse and growing boy seasoning. Humanity in its black, white and grey sides is blatantly portrayed, with both the loss of feeling and the fervent hold onto emotion and kindness when faced with the impossibility of war.
The overwhelming horsepower on stage was so strong that I could almost smell their sweat. Utterly horselike, the puppets were completely convincing as proud cavalry mounts and withered broken-mouthed starvelings; the deaths of horses as desperate as that of men.
Critics who have mocked this piece as a bit of flagrant anthropomorphism have missed the point; the puppetry is masterful, amazing, pure theatre at its most magical, but it is the capturing of the emotional journeys through appalling wickedness, and the death and simultaneous survival of the spirit, human and animal, that had us all weeping.

Love is in the air

Cole Porter was on my lips even before I read the Guardian's Saturday Poem. I was composing and humming a lewd farming version to myself, whilst admiring the gander's ability to copulate with three different geese in the space of ten minutes. Putting the ducks to bed later the drake couldn't even go the distance from paddock to hut without a quickie en route with his favourite bird.
The ram, now in sweet seclusion having done his thing during November and December, is still feeling distinctly amorous and I had to remonstrate with him quite firmly that no, constant head-bashing of the gate was not going to lead back to the harem.
The ewes, on the other hand, are heavily in lamb, with just six weeks to go. They spend their time eating and lying down, mating a distant memory.
All of which leads me to this week's bad joke. At some point in the next few days there should be a magnificent erection; the roof trusses are due to go up on the cob barn and a crane is on order. Pictures will be taken.

Fabulous sea creature habitat

Back to the wonderful Northcott Mouth today to get a winter fillip and celebrate the neighbour's dog's birthday (any excuse). It is the most amazing place.
But what is this stuff? It looked like sesame seed snaps, extruded into cylinders and clumped together in massive boulder size lumps. Click on the image to have a really close look at the structure.


Postscript: it's honeycomb worm! Even the name is fabulous.

Putting in the floor

Work stopped on the West Barn temporarily as the builders wait for the oak to be delivered that they will make on site into the roof trusses.
Not leaving hands idle seems to be the order of the day and an immense amount of readymix arrived at 7.30am to be poured over the damp proof membrane in the threshing barn. The conveyor belt was unfurled from the mixer and went in the main doorway, through the full width of the barn and out the other side to fill in the footings for the roundhouse before being retracted to fill the main floor area.
And the oak finally arrived today, courtesy of old wingnut himself.

Self-cleaning dogs?

Last night the ever watchable Kevin McCloud was in architectural heaven over paint that literally shrugs off dirt. He was as gleeful as a six year old boy as he dipped and re-dipped a piece of board coated in this clever stuff, and no matter how many times he submerged it in a vat of liquid mud it came out sparkling whilst the non-coated back was thick with gloop.
Yesterday I was on my hands and knees; that's on HANDS AND KNEES, with damp J-cloth wiping Mopsa's muddy pawprints off the stairs, landing and bedroom floors.
The building work + the weather + the season = unavoidable heaps of mud. Unbelievably copious amounts of the stuff. You open the front door and it pushes into the house unasked and unwanted like an evil relative or a z-list celebrity contrarily selling Daz. Footprints and pawprints are swabbed off the kitchen floor weekly; more often would be pointless - you might as well do it every half hour and die of boredom and drudgery. At least that can be done with a mop, the floor being covered in lino. But the stairs, landing and bedrooms are all ancient floorboarding of varying widths - the mop is not for them. So, hands and knees it is then.
Mopsa watched Grand Designs with me last night. She cast a baleful eye of recognition at the vat of mud.
I sit up in bed this morning and see the trail of huge mucky pawprints polkadotting what had been the beautiful clean wooden floor. I cast Mopsa, who is sleeping on her soft mat by the bed, my own baleful glance, wondering if it would be possible to have her coated in Kevin's miracle paint.

Five minutes to the Himalayas

Driving to Okey today, the Himalayas were spread out in front of me; a panorama of snow capped mountains.
Well, no, it was the tors and hills of Dartmoor that had been dipped in clotted cream and whipped meringue just to remind us it is winter. The banks by the side of the road were crystalline with sparkly icy slush, but the snow was all kept specially for the heights of the moor itself.
I didn't have my camera with me, so this is pinched, and you can bet the snow will have melted by the time I head that way again.

Sharp sight and blurred vision

This morning, leaning into the wind, I called the llama to come and get his feed. Normally he waits for me by the gate but he was sheltering behind the high hedge and although he turned to look at me, wouldn't come. What with the howling weather, I was keeping my head down and my fleecy beanie had slipped partially over my eyes, and not being madly attentive to what was happening around me I was hoping to deliver a quick feed and achieve a swift getaway.
And then a scrawny and not particularly lithe dog fox lolloped across the field, heading away from the llama and the sheep and towards the pig paddock and the ducks. I skidded after him as a frightener, and although he kept away, his less than chubby state makes me think he'll be back.
Later, walking Fenn through the wood we disturbed a red deer stag with soft, velvety antlers, about a foot or so in length, about half their potential size. The stag bounced towards me and then veered off, easily reaching safety whilst Fenn panted by my side in excitement.
Coming out of the wood I noticed that one of the Torwen ewes was in the wrong field. She was quite happy, chomping on the rushes and new shoots of grass. If she had been one of the normal flock she would have been in a state of panic, separated from the others, running back and forth alongside the gate or pushing at the hedge to get back with the rest. But one of the Torwens, although otherwise healthy, is blind, and she seems happy enough although she spends some of her time away from the rest of the flock, usually eating close to the hedgelines out of the wind. As the ewe was so quiet and clearly not bothered it was obviously her. She must have dropped through the small gap in the hedge from the field above as she wandered along; the others wouldn't attempt this jump unless there was no grazing or hay in their field.
She was unhurt, and easily encouraged up to the gate and put back with the others. She might find her way back out tomorrow of course, but the sheep can't be moved elsewhere at the moment as the newly laid or coppiced hedges in their main fields need to be kept untouched by animal until the banks are earthed up and fences erected, all of which will happen in the next few weeks prior to lambing.
Careful watch will need to be taken with this ewe during lambing; she will be brought in early and checked regularly. If she fails to mother her lambs she will need to be culled. Otherwise, all that seems to be required is watching out for her particularly diligently to ensure she doesn't put herself in danger and that she gets plenty to eat.

The blog as book and the book as blog

The phenomenon of the blog being developed as a book is not new; publishers' attention has been drawn to blogdom for a while, and some have created an entire business from this approach. Bloggers in print often include a list of their published peers in their blogroll and the lists get longer and longer; a great way of finding new blogs you might really want to read.
And I may be very slow on the uptake, but I hadn't clocked that there are now books being published that read as if they were, in fact, blogs; a strange twist in the order of things.
I'm currently indulging in Nigel Slater's Eating for England, and it seems to me to be a food blog stuffed between hardcovers. The tiny chapters of 100-500 words are perfectly sized blog posts. There are more potential hyperlinks in it than in Wikipedia; every old fashioned biscuit and sweet, core brands like Bisto, Ribena and a hundred others are begging for realisation in a manufacturers or enthusiasts web window. You want the missing You tube links to bring to life the mock eroticism of the Cadbury's Flake and the boy scout jollity of the Jacob's Club. There are frequent references to farmers' markets, gravy, mock chocolate, toast and a host of other recurring food memories, all waiting not for a footnote but yet another link to where that ingredient was vaunted previously. And then there is the glorious cover illustration; a magic blog header if ever I saw one.
All that is missing is an array of readers comments: "I adore bourbons too", "What's wrong with tripe anyway" and "I dream of faggots every night".

See Nigel talking about his book here. If he's not related to Alan Bennett I'm a jaffa cake.

Lichens and fungi

This weekend I have thrown more weighty logs and chunks of tree trunk onto the trailer than my back appreciates. I did remember to bend my knees, but we are talking the equivalent of heaving the weight of hundreds of smallish persons here. Imagine carting every school child and all their teachers at your local primary school, and you just about have it.
I took lots of standing still and admiring the view breaks, and sat in the tractor cab as I drove from one heap of logs to the next for longer than was really necessary. I also gawked at a couple of extraordinarily beautiful specimens of lichen.
The vibrant purple one was hiding at the bottom of the log pile, really damp and dark. I worried that exposing it to light might mean the end of my aspirations to be the next Alexander Fleming, but as I don't own any petri dishes I took a photo instead.



The one that looks like orange ears is some sort of cup fungus rather than a lichen; my hunt for elucidation suggests it might be scarlet cup fungus.





And then there was this nifty little trio; as poisonous looking bunch of fungi as you would wish, all phallic and starting to develop a gelatinous sheen.

The woman who swears by the tissue

When I was a teenager, my nose was a constantly streaming article. Allergic rhinitis was not a lovely condition for a girl with fresh hormones; the accessorizing of every outfit with a lump of tissue stuffed up the left sleeve was not guaranteed to get the boys interested.
I remember going to girlfriends' houses and gawking disbelievingly at their small cube boxes of peach coloured paper hankies, decorated with swirls and flowers that matched the décor of their rooms. First, I thought anything that girly was truly yuck in the taste stakes (snobbery was always at the fore, although I have no idea why as I'm sure I had nothing to be superior about), and secondly, what were you actually going to do with anything as physically challenged as those tiny squares of stuff? Mansize was the only thing that did it for me.
As a child we had cotton hankies. My mother would get out the Burco Boiler and boil those babies for an age, swirling them through the snot infested water with a wooden paddle. The dry hankies would be folded and put in the airing cupboard from where you could help yourself. In Goldilocks fashion I avoided the huge ones that were my father's domain, and the lacey jobs that my mother favoured, and the recollection of peeling the freshly laundered hankies apart where some lump of mucous had maintained its grip is horribly real even now.
Life eventually became too short for the Burco boiler, and at the same time as I was sent off to the launderette, pulling the overstuffed shopping trolley of dirty clothes behind me and desperate not to bump into anyone I knew, my mother started to buy paper tissues. Being a family of snufflers with a serious bronchitis sufferer in the mix, there was a box in practically every room in the house.
These days there is always a tissue in reach, if not jammed up my sleeve. I have wads in my handbag, a box in the car, my suitcase is kept well supplied and so on.
In my house there is a theory that if there was a nuclear explosion, I would reach for a tissue to wipe up the spillage. That might be a step too far (or perhaps not), but I regularly dust with one. No, reword that. On the very few occasions that I dust, I'm more likely to be found waving a tissue, possibly unused, possibly not, over the item being tackled.
I scoop up cobwebs with them, even though a new crop appears overnight. I swab my desk with them as they are at hand and I have no idea where a duster might be, or even if there is one. I wipe the eye bogies from the dogs and their earwax with said tissue. I'll remove a tapeworm from the cat's tail, mop up spilled liquid (cold) and pick up anything a bit yuckety with one. If I can't find a scrap of paper I'll use a tissue as a bookmark. A tissue gets swiped over the tv and pc screens to remove the woodfire film of dust that collects on every surface, and I have been seen using one to dab at the milk slurp marks on the kitchen window (the cat sits on the windowsill to munch and drink out of dogs reach).
So, although I declined to do the full Lady Thinker tag, I have at least written about my slatternly household ways. My tip? Never be without a 3-ply mansize tissue.

Thou shalt have a fishy

When you rear your own sheep and pigs and have access to neighbour's beef you can overdose on red meat. Lamb on Monday, gammon on Tuesday, pork chops on Wednesday, mutton stew on Thursday, steak on Friday....you get the picture. Free game is plentiful in the winter, and then there is duck, chicken and goose.
But woman wasn't bred to live on meat alone. No matter what mountainous platter of leafy green veg is served alongside, you know that variety should be spicing your life, and as I don't do red wine (and so don't benefit from its antioxidant effects) I need to be conscious of ringing the protein changes.
Tuesday is market day. Dan the fish man is always there with his quips, his flirt mode turned on high, and a grin for all. His traditional multicoloured painted signs are things of beauty and utility. Every last fish, crustacean and mollusc is caught in the South West. Today's crop of lovelies included plaice, sprats, mackerel, lemon sole, grey mullet, conger eel, prawns, mussels and skate wings.
Brain food on Tuesdays then, served with the first of this year's purple sprouting.

A time for firsts

It's been said a million times or more, but as each new year cycles on, the human cannot help acknowledge the various firsts; the frog spawn, the primrose, and now the first duck egg.
I have a faithful troupe of Aylesburys, a fabulous meat breed but not so generous with their eggs, unlike the highly productive Khaki Campbell. Even so, these Jemima Puddleducks have been holding on to their eggs as if I might want to eat them; there has been not one egg for several months.
Having got used to the fabulousness of a duck egg, I really don't enjoy the comparative blandness of a hen's, so it was with glee that I retrieved this from the duck house this morning. And no, ducks don't lay cob nuts or almonds; I was trying to achieve a sense of scale so that you too could enjoy the glory of this king sized special.

And as a wee postscript, and with a mind half on primroses, my Good Things in England book has a recipe for primrose vinegar:
Boil 30 quarts of water with 12lbs of brown sugar for ten minutes. Before it is cold add a peck of primrose petals. Cream an ounce of compressed yeast with a little sugar and let it work for a few days before adding it to the primrose mix. Put the mix in a barrel and keep it close and near the fire. Let it stand for a year.
If anyone knows a good use for this, do let me know. It sounds a bit like the recipe that says boil a cormorant with a stone. When the stone is soft, the cormorant is cooked.

Spawn

After reading Paula's entry, I was a woman on a mission. I hadn't spotted any jelly in the ditches in the last few days, but then I hadn't truly been looking. On the lunchtime dog walk I checked all the slow and no-moving ditches; the ones that merely trickle rather than cascade. And there it was. A first clump of frog spawn; massive, undeniable evidence of amphibian sex, the whole thing one big wet patch. It glistens and winks with promise, each of those black dots a potential tadpole.
So, it's official x 2. The frogs are at it in Devon.

Utterly buttery

Since going on the cheese and butter making course I have been simply itching to have a go at making some at home. My long term plan for sourcing a cream separator happened much quicker than I anticipated, and I've also had the OK from a local dairy farmer to come up and get some milk whenever I want.
I still need to clean and sterilise the separator which hasn't been used for years, and because I have put this off, haven't yet trotted up the extremely steep hill with my 21st century churn (plastic milk cartons) in hand.
But I went shopping today and Waitrose had large cartons of double cream reduced. I bought the last three. Now, this is NOT an economic way to produce butter. Making it from your own surplus milk seems to be the only financially sensible method, and I mean from your own cows, not breast milk, obviously. I will have saved mere pennies in comparison to the cost of top quality butter, but I was impatient to put my new knowledge into practice. In particular I wanted to check if I had taken proper notes or if I had forgotten some key stage.
So. Ancient Kenwood receives 1.5 litres of double cream. It whisks until the cream is scrambled and pale yellow and is chucking sploshes of buttermilk out of the bowl and all over my front. I line a colander with muslin and pour the mix into the colander. The buttermilk flows through and is put in the fridge for scone-making. I wash the scrambled cream with ice cold water until the liquid flows clear. At this point I can't remember if I should be whisking the almost-butter between washes or not, so I give it a further whizz for luck. One more wash and the dough hook goes on the Kenwood and the mix has a final whirl. It looks like butter! I don't have any scotch hands so I measure out 8oz clumps and use wooden spatulas and a clean chopping board to bash nine bells out of each lump. A bit more water leaches out. Then the butter is banged into four reasonable shapes, bagged, dated and frozen. One chunk goes straight into the butter dish. As you can see, it has been photographed for posterity.

Sponge

This morning was apparently a brief respite in the continuing Devon downpours. I take advantage and Fenn and I explore the plashy fields whilst Mopsa wisely decides to stay in the dry.
The ground is sodden, and the clay noisily sucks at my boots making it difficult to walk at any speed. Small patches of turf give under the feet like sponge and ooze air bubbles. The ditches flow fast, washing silt and leaves further downhill and revealing a glistening stony bottom.
We head for the river which is full and fast, the waterfall which I can always hear but never see, hidden as it is by trees and assorted scratchy greenery, gushes and gurgles below our feet.
One of the trees in the big stand of oaks has fallen. It has been dead for some while and now horizontal I can rub some of its fibres apart with my hands. There may be some decent bits for making small pieces of furniture. Salvage operations will have to wait for a dryer day when tractor and trailer can be brought down here without damaging the ground.
Turning into one of the green lanes fenced now from poaching hooves, the primrose leaves that never seem to die in this sheltered spot have been joined by the first pale flowers. Fenn stands impatiently by the gate to be let through to the next field, up to her elbows and belly in mud, and streaks off as I follow, clumping in my boots.

Guess the object...

Back in November I was all excited about learning new things. And then I found myself committing publicly to learning something new, something substantial.
And now, sitting in the kitchen, is one of these. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it roundy and shapely and solid? Isn't is pleasingly old fashioned and homely and almost museum-like in its charm and antiquity? Don't you just yearn to turn on that little Bakelite switch and see if it works (it does) and what noise it might make?
I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have brought this home courtesy of placing a small wanted ad in the local smallholders magazine.
So your task for the day is to either:
1. guess what this actually is, or
2. make some daft suggestions as to what else it might be used for.

Sign up for a free range future

Just the thought of a battery or intensively reared chicken makes me ill. It's time the practice came to a complete stop. Cheap food is not always good food (and never when it comes from an animal). Go and visit Hugh's site to sign up if you feel strongly about this.

Wishing on a star

Le Chip has tagged me so that I am now forced to make public the eight things I would like to have happen in 2008. Just eight? And do I have to be modest in my requests? Can I be outrageously self-pleasing? Why not?

1. I want the farm to thrive and for me to learn how to make it more income generating and less money gobbling
   
2. I want the bevy of arts funding/policy making senior wonks to sort themselves out and discover honour, judgement and openness
3. I want to be able to party at the end of 2008 in fabulously waterproof, structurally sound and beautiful barns, so that post-party they can contribute to the life of the farm
   
4. I'd like to have a happy year please, not too inundated with life's difficulties and woes and
   
5. then I'd make the time to appreciate the good things, of which there are many and be satisfied
6. I want to lose the podge that has slowly crept up on me and get back to my 2005/6 relatively slinky self
7. I'd like to have my faith in politics renewed, but THAT ain't gonna happen any time soon - in the meantime I hope for a democrat president in the US and a positive trickle-down effect
   
8. I'd like to learn something new, something substantial that will engage me in thinking interesting thoughts that have never yet popped into my head.
   

And I must of course pass on the tag, so if they fancy sharing their hopes for this year, I pass the tag to: Swearing Mother, Rilly Super, Locks Park Farm, Field Day and Yorkshire Pudding.

Self sufficiency goes Haute Barnyard

Thanks to Jay Rayner, son of this country's best auntie, (and brought up round the corner from me in NW London), for letting me in somewhat belatedly to this intriguing phrase. So Islington/Notting Hill it's actually New York.
I can sleep soundly knowing that the pheasants I plucked and then cooked last night are absolutely at the cutting edge of eating. If local provenance is all, then I am secure in providing nothing less than ambrosia on my table; my food miles are measured in yards. I take a bow.
But if this, as Jay suggests, has been the age of the pig, then I will cock a snook at his suggestion that the Gloucester Old Spot is king. I have raised and chomped on the GOS and insist that it cannot match the Berkshire for lusciousness. This hairy black prick-eared pig was made for roast pork, crispy pork belly, chops to caress. The gammon and bacon made from this year's bunch is supreme. One of my gammons taken to Lille by friends as Christmas fest food was pronounced amazing. And it is. I have just devoured the proof courtesy of the last chunk of the holiday joint.
I think I will have to go commercial soon so more hairy black pig fans can try it for themselves.
Perhaps Jay could write an article about my pork and Hugh Fearnley Wotnot can look to his much admired laurels.

Keeping up with the Badgers

Keeping up with the Badger faced sheep that is. Toy-boy the tup has had his fill, or at least I have dictated that he has. He is young, this is his first time as sole ram, and he is feisty. In his exuberance he has rammed the side of the field shelter and broken several planks, and has now taken to slamming his head against the hay feeder. In this state of tormented testosterone he needs to be removed before he starts to butt the ewes he has so keenly impregnated in case he triggers an abortion.
He has had his annual couple of months with the girls and will now sulk for the next ten in splendid isolation. His paddock gives him views of all the comings and goings in the yard, the dogs go up to his gate and strut their freedom and visitors stop and admire him.
All the ewes were brought into the barn for a good once-over before being sent back out into the fields. One was hopping on three legs after having been fine the day before. Not able to turn over a pregnant ewe without causing potential harm, I picked up her foot as if she was a horse. It was clean, if slightly warmer than it should be. It seemed fine until I poke my fingers a little higher. A twig the width of a pencil and a good two inches long was wedged high in the claw. I removed the twig, sprayed her foot to deal with any minor infection and there she was, a four legged beast once more.
Lambing doesn't start until the very end of March, but the countdown begins now, with fresh hay every day, the feeding of concentrates starting mid February and generally hanging over the gate to observe for longer periods and being more alert than usual to coughs, sneezes and odd behaviour.