Week 9
17th August 2021
Brief trip to put chickens to bed. No egg from the Gingernut Ranger hen for over a week, now. Production in general is down, so it may be a hormonal issue related to it being so cloudy (chickens are stimulated to lay by light), or it may be something else.
5 eggs
Helen reports (somehow unsurprising) the Gingernut Ranger hen is ill – sluggish, uninterested in doing much. I visit twice through the day, and watch her actively seek out water to drink – so I make sure there is apple cider vinegar in our water containers, to help stimulate her immune system. Hard to judge the problems – chickens just have problems sometimes, and they usually die. The cost of healthcare is so disproportionate to the market value of a layer that it’s not viable for a working animal.
4 eggs, 1 large Black Beauty courgette, 1 small Black Beauty
courgette, misc onions, 5.82oz blackberries
Ginger continues to stick around, and if anything by my evening visit is more mobile – I chivvy her out from a corner where she’s sheltering and she almost runs! She probably has an infection of some kind – she is thirsty but not doing much else – and has, perhaps, a 20% chance of survival. We can’t do much more than we can, but I’m rooting for her.
20th August 2021
I start harvesting Main crop potatoes, as some are showing above the surface. Mostly red, only a few of great size. Most of the plants are dead, too. May just need to pull them all before we leave on holiday.
4 eggs, 2 small strawberries, 1lb 2.65oz Main potatoes,
16.8oz blackberries
21st August 2021
Big final harvest before we go, most notably finishing off the Main crop potatoes. The plants are basically all dead above ground, and the issues with shallow and compacted soil mean that erosion will likely expose all that’s left before we’re home, turning it green.
The Main crop is, really, disappointing – about 16 potatoes
went in and about 30-40 decent ones came out, or something like that. I think
they lost their best growth to the poor middle summer, where the Earlies –
despite having the strange spring to cope with – just had more time to get
going.
4 eggs, 3 small strawberries (0.1oz), 2 blackberries
(0.2oz), 6 French Breakfast radishes, 3lb 7.25oz Main potatoes, 2oz Early
potatoes, 1 Golden Zucchini
22nd August 2021
A hurricane of preparation as head off to see family for a fortnight. This is really too long in most circumstances to leave even such a small patch as ours – produce scales, but time does not. The chickens still need daily care, the plants still need watering (at this time of year), and so forth.
With a little difficulty we arrange “farm”-sitting, leaving
the chickens with extra food, watering whatever needs watering now, and so
forth. Then we’re off.
5 eggs
Holiday (Weeks 10
and 11) – 23rd August-4th September 2021
Our farmsitters keep collecting eggs and courgettes whilst we’re gone (all the crops listed below were harvested in August and will go into that set of accounts; eggs will be split between months per day of collection).
The Ginger hen dies. She had rallied a little, and was
initially fine whilst we were away, but a week on she faded and then within a
day had died. This didn’t surprise us, nor – frankly – upset us. It’s a
stressor removed. We were not as ruthless as many smallholders would have been
with a sick, non-laying bird, but ultimately, our chickens are there to produce
for us, not to be pets. We looked after her; it’s a shame she died; but we move
on.
At my in-laws, I am left in charge of harvesting from the
vegetable patch at the end of the garden. There are a few Aquadulce broad beans
left, as well as plenty of Scarlet Emperor runner beans (in fact, they’re only
really hitting their crest at this point). I even salvage discarded, overlarge
runner bean pods from the compost. I shell them, and we blanch and freeze them
alongside the broad beans – they can be cooked together as a bean mix, even
though the pods were past eating.
We get back at dusk on the Saturday, and I check in on the
chickens, who are a little (but not desperately) hungry. Probably they’ve
struggled for food on and off since we’ve been away, due to the vagaries of
visit timing – they have been looked after well, but both greater experience
with them and skin in the game mean you get there more often and judge more
quickly what they need.
46 eggs, 1 large Black Beauty courgette, 2 large Di Nizza
squashes, 1 large Golden Zucchini courgette, ~900g blackberries
17th August 2021
Brief trip to put chickens to bed. No egg from the Gingernut Ranger hen for over a week, now. Production in general is down, so it may be a hormonal issue related to it being so cloudy (chickens are stimulated to lay by light), or it may be something else.
Helen reports (somehow unsurprising) the Gingernut Ranger hen is ill – sluggish, uninterested in doing much. I visit twice through the day, and watch her actively seek out water to drink – so I make sure there is apple cider vinegar in our water containers, to help stimulate her immune system. Hard to judge the problems – chickens just have problems sometimes, and they usually die. The cost of healthcare is so disproportionate to the market value of a layer that it’s not viable for a working animal.
Ginger continues to stick around, and if anything by my evening visit is more mobile – I chivvy her out from a corner where she’s sheltering and she almost runs! She probably has an infection of some kind – she is thirsty but not doing much else – and has, perhaps, a 20% chance of survival. We can’t do much more than we can, but I’m rooting for her.
I start harvesting Main crop potatoes, as some are showing above the surface. Mostly red, only a few of great size. Most of the plants are dead, too. May just need to pull them all before we leave on holiday.
Big final harvest before we go, most notably finishing off the Main crop potatoes. The plants are basically all dead above ground, and the issues with shallow and compacted soil mean that erosion will likely expose all that’s left before we’re home, turning it green.
A hurricane of preparation as head off to see family for a fortnight. This is really too long in most circumstances to leave even such a small patch as ours – produce scales, but time does not. The chickens still need daily care, the plants still need watering (at this time of year), and so forth.
Our farmsitters keep collecting eggs and courgettes whilst we’re gone (all the crops listed below were harvested in August and will go into that set of accounts; eggs will be split between months per day of collection).
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