Here come the girls!

This is Arriety and Rosie and Tia and Maria, the new girls.

They arrived a couple of weeks ago and quickly settled in, Tia and Maria, the Black Rocks quickly established themselves as right at the top of the pecking order by temporarily becoming the fowl version of a velocoraptor by taking great chunks out of Rosie and Arriety. But now they have all settled down and at night all cuddle together in the nest box and  seem to be the best of chums.

No eggs yet but it is early days as they are still young. I decided that we would just use the Little Hilton Chicken House and the Old House leaks and so that will soon be consigned to the dump or the bonfire, it will make for a bit more space in the run too. Once the new girls are settled in I will let them out to free range and they can take their chances with Roly and the Fox. Much better to dine on worms and slugs and have some fun, to see a chicken chasing a butterfly is a wondrous sight, they literally run and jump and then usually bump into a fence or a wall as they are too busy looking up to look out!

I found this sign in the garden centre and just loved it, Herb is not so keen!

The weather has turned well and truly summery and today it is yet again almost too hot to be outside, never a happy medium here! (Arriety by the way was the daughter in The Borrowers book and Rosie is  named after my dear friend who bears no resmbalnce apart from her lovely nature and lovely name!)

The veg garden is looking great, the hot weather has caused all the Pak Choi to bolt but everything else is looking grand. Time to go and get some watering done now, no doubt there will be a hosepipe ban soon. The farmer has very kindly planted about ten acres of broccolli all around us so I will not bother this year!

Spring has well and truly sprung!!

Sincere apologies for not blogging for ages but the job really has filled my time but I don't mind as I love it. It is so interesting, I get to meet loads of really different types of  folk, murderers and the like, and the days just whizz by...and they pay me and I get to buy gorgeous stuff.

Just for the girls, just one of the gorgeous stuffs I have bought so far!

And for the boys this is some if the gorgeous stuff Herb has bought too. It is a Mulching, Self Propelled mower and Herb says it makes moaning the lawn a positively enjoyable experience. Actually they were not his exact words but it makes it all so much quicker, for the uninitiated, it clips all the grass into tiny sharp pointy bits and shoots it into back the ground, so you never ever have to collect the grass ever again or so it says on the box, whatever it does, it works!

This is the Beechgrove TV Apple Tree and it is laden with blossom this year, looks like we will have a bumper crop later on. Sadly this year the plums look like they will bear no fruit, we have not got a single blossom on any of the three trees, maybe it was just too cold or mybe they are just too young.

I have planted up the raised beds and devoted one to being an Asparagus Bed for the next twenty years, that should see some of us out!  I also have Pak Choi, Bulb Fennel, red and green frilly lettuce, red and yellow beetroot and Pink Fir Apple Spuds, not to mention onions and radishes. The greenhouse is also bursting to the seams again with the fig which this year has 18 fruit, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. Some interesting herbs including a little known herb called Sweet Woodruffe that I brought back from a recent trip to Germany.

This is the pergola that Herb put up last year and already the roof bit is getting covered with lots of lovely climbers and ramblers, we have roses, honeysuckle and just flowering now, a rampant clematis Nelly Moser. As you can see the sun is shining today, in fact so much so I have been out with just a t shirt on, and some jeans of course. This is not something that is seen very often in Scotland, the sun I mean , not jeans!

The other thing that has taken up our time has been having a new kitchen put in. This is the old kitchen.

 

This is the new kitchen!!

Love the wine cooler! No beer just wine and bubbly!!!!!

And another one. Right now I am going to take a bottle of something cold from the chiller and head up to the summer house for a well earned rets while I contemplate the next week at work. The summer house is looking good too.

The doos continue to be very active on the egg front, so far this year I have removed 27 eggs and replaced them with china eggs. We appear to have lost one doo, possibly to the hawk but as we had two with leg injuries it may just have left to die quietly. On the injury front, one doo has lost a toe and Stumpy has a leg that is about to drop off, but otherwise Stumpy is healthy, flys well and hops about very happily.

Sun is over the yard arm, I'm off!

Doo-sastrous weekend

After having nothing to blog about for weeks last weekend we had a fairly awful time. Not exactly sure what wnet on but it looks like two doos that were on the gutter somehow got their legs trapped under the slates and damaged their legs quite badly. We think it was a combination of the legs becoming trapped and then Randy taking advantage of a trapped doo and bonking them senseless.

The first wee doo we rescued was DooDooRonRon and sadly her leg was so badly broken, her foot was hanging by a thread of tendon and she had lot so much blood, that we had no option but to gently cull her. The second doo was Pixie and I was able to paint her wound with iodine and she is doing OK, she hops about on one leg quite well and is eating and drinking.

The next day we again noticed a commotion and a third doo was in the same predicament, same place on the gutter so once more the ladder came out and Herb recued the doo, this one was DooDoo ( the second Lucian Doo to come a cropper) and she flew off but was having real problems. I was unable to get to her to deal with the le injury. I caught her one day but agin she escaped. She was spending a lot of time in the dove cote and was very quiet, so today I took the chance to have a look at her leg. As soon as I picked her up I smelt a dreadful smell and suspected a very bad infection but in fact on looking at the leg saw she had gangrene in the foot and leg and a fair way up to where the leg joins the body. Sadly she had to be culled as she would not have survived and must have been in terrible pain.

                                          

This is Pixies foot after the application of iodine. She is doing fine now.

The spring warmer weather has got their juices up and today I had to remove 5 more eggs from the nests and replace with china ones. I am hoping that we will have no babies all year but think that the doos may be wising up to me and we think that one doo may have started nest building in a bush.

The garden was looking great until we had some foraging deers pass by and they chewed the red curly kale down to stumps! I had not even tried any. Have prepared the beds for the arrival of the very expensive asparagus crowns any day now, will have to take precautions to make sure the deer do not fancy of this particularly tasty delicacy.

All my gardening is going to have to be done at the weekends now as I have got a job and start at the end of the month, goodbye to lovely long days in the garden in the summer, hello rat race!

After the Great freeze...the Big Thaw

The snow stayed on the ground for 24 days before finally melting, in the process it managed to turn to ice and then deposit great sheets of the stuff through my greenhouse roof shattering six panes of glass and covering the fig and the overwintering geraniums in shards of glass.

The ice on the track still remains in places, at one point the track was like a bob sleigh run with ice three or four inches thick, treacherous underfoot and difficult to  move about on. The chicken run is still a quagmire with icy puddles remaining. However the chickens have moved on and have been adopted by a friend and are now happily living at Earlshall Castle  in an oak wood with three big cockerels and 60 other hens for company. I was finding looking after them just too much due to my incapacity with my ongoing arm problems. I may get some new hens in the summer once we have had a chance to look at the drainage of the run and maybe install some boards for walkng on to keep me out of the slippy zone, having mild panics about slipping since my Lucian banana adventure. Am actively looking into getting a pig to rear on for 20 weeks for some good home grown pork and bacon for the winter, the run is large enough and the stock fencing pretty strong so it would make a good short term home for said pig!

The doos are as prolific as ever and I have had to remove 5 eggs this year alone. Two are now happily sitting on plastic eggs none the wiser. I am going to have a go at selling on any youngsters that we do get and will convert the little Hilton Chicken House into a temporary house for them.  At the last count I had 21 doos, more than enough for a garden like ours. I am having to rethink the feeding strategy as the hopper which was a good idea for holidays now never stays full for long as all and sundry are feeding from it, a new lighter coloured pheasant has joined Percy with the limp and we have also had a weasel and a rat. Herb saw the rat off with a well aimed shot, it leapt a foot into the the air before it succumbed!

The veg garden is still producing stuff and today I picked two lovely cabbages destined for tea tonight, the red curly kale looks healthy enough but has not grown overly large. The sprouts are coming to an end but we still have plenty of gorgeous leeks for cock a leekie soup! If only I culd persuade someone to like Jerusalem Artichokes, just have to store them until the pig arrives!

Today it is like a spring day up here, blue sky and sunshine and we have not put the heating on for the first time since we got back from St Lucia. I will light the fire later as it is bound to get chilly  later. Snow forecast for later in the week, ho hum, life goes on!

Happy New Year from the Menagerie!!

Christmas came and so did the snow. We had a fairly full house for Christmas with Mum, Stu and Sam and Sarah and Fiona and Nicci and Carmen popped in now and again too. All that was missing was our Soldier, out being a Bah Humbug  in Afghanistan. Stu built the Snowman above in his honour it is a Snow Muz!

We all  had a ball, no fights, apart from snowball fights. The boy Cousins decided that the girl cousin should be treated appropriately and everytime she left the house she got snow down her neck! Boys will be boys!

The doos seem to be really enjoying the snow, it makes them slightly less of a target for the hawks although just this morning we saw a very graceful Peregrine swooping low over the garden, it set the doos up but they all seem to have come home. The doos have definitely not read the Dove book as since December 1st we have had five babies with more on the way if the bonking is anything to go by. We are going to remove all the eggs that get laid from now on, a bit of a task for me as I am still unable to fully use my hand despite being out of plaster for two weeks. The doves continue to take daily baths in their drinking water even when they have to break the ice to get in!

The chickens are still laying well and loved being looked after by Fiona over Christmas. They are totally free ranging at the moment as Roly is in Kennels!

Moonzie is looking lovely at the moment although the ice is treacherous, the track is like a bob sleigh run.

                                        

The one thing we have noticed with all this freezing weather is the fact that many more animals and birds are in the garden. The pheasant and hare are regular visitors, as are the hundreds of Fieldfares, a sort of Scandinavian Thrush. We also have a pair of woodpeckers, all the usual suspects and today for the first time spotted a weasel darting about under the doo cotes. We think it was a Weasel and not a Stoat. The difference being a weasel is weasily recognized while a stoat is stoatally different!! There has been a fox  prowling about too but so far he has steered clear of the chickens, we saw 6 deer in the field beyond the orchard the other day too so the cullers never managed to get the lot.

That is about it for today, it is still way below freezing so no chance of me venturing too far and there are masses of left overs yet to be consumed, I just love left over Moet accompanied by left over Quality Street.

                                              

Happy New Year!

Hatches, matches, dispatches, thrill and spills!

Just to get the glamour picture out of the way right at the start!!

Well since I last blogged in October there has been such a lot to tell. The Broody Ronnie got sorted by simply denying her access to the comfy house for a few days and she turned from being Mrs Angry to being nice sweet natured old Ron once more.

At the end of October having left the house, the doos and the chickens in the tender care of Dan and his Mum, Herb and I headed off for a month long break in St Lucia. Break in this case was  very apt as will become clear later. We arrived in St Lucia after a good flight and also a welcome catch up with a very dear old mate from Brize Norton days.

  

 The plan was that after a couple of days with Jan and Jeff we would take over the care and security of the house, the dogs and the care of three lovely boats while they headed back to UK for Fionas Graduation ( she won the Sword at Cranwell!!!!), a haircut and lots of shopping.

                                    

                                          Getting into the swing of things with two arms!

We really enjoyed our first ten days but sadly one day when Herb was despatched to harvest the bananas I came cropper and managed to fracture my wrist rather badly and damage a couple of teeth to boot. This was all sorted in Tapion Hospital, St Lucia, things wired together by a wonderful surgeon by the name of Dr Horatious Jeffers! Thereafter things were not so comfy for me but Jan and Jeff duly came back with Fiona and after a few discussions it was decided that Herb, Jeff and Fi would do the planned sail to Mustique and Bequia whil Jan and I did relaxing stuff at home. We were lucky enough to be able to celebrate Flying Officer Bullens birthday while there and the champagne for breakfast complimented the pain killers admirably!

                         This is the skipper and crew drinking MY cocktail at Basils Bar on Mustique.

Once the sea dogs got home we set about catching up  on socialising and we ate the best Coconut Prawns I have ever had in a strange restaurant perched high on a hill with an assault course to get to the loos, I decided that I would forgo the experience but the others all made it unscathed.  We also met up with an old mate from Herc days, here seen with the whole gang at a lovely bar called Chatea Mygo.

We all had a good time doing our stuff and all too soon it was time to come home, no amount of grovelling would get us an upgrade but we got good seats for the disabled and the flight home was uneventful.

Once home it was great to be met by all the boys especially Murray who was home on mid tour leave. We had great time all together, Morrisons had put Bolly on at half price for the occasion so we bought lots of bottles, drank them all and saved none for Christmas. Since I have nbeen back I have had two new casts, the first a rather bright shade of pink but the latest is up to the minute purple with glitter, all courtesy of the NHS!

The first night back we had a bit of a disaster as VooDoo our Lucian Doo was attacked and scalped by the Bloody Hawk, it removed all the flesh down to the skull bone and also did irrepareable damage to his wing. I decided that with only one arm I would be unable to care properly for Voo Doo  even if he survived infections and stuff and reluctantly we decided to cull him. On a brighter note we have had three new babies since we went away, not quite planned, the china eggs fooled nobody and they had all been unceremoniously dumped out ofthe nesting boxes. The new doos are Voo DooToo,  HoratiousDoo and  Dr Doolittle.


A couple of days ago I amazed myself with my speed and agility as I saw  the hawk grab a doo midflight and tumble it to the ground, I ran out purple plaster waving about madly, brandishing a fishing net and I was able to get the hawk to release the doo on the ground and they both flew off! Hurrah Success!!

We have a had a few additions to the Moonzie Menagerie of late, we are regularly having a pair of Spotted Woodpeckers in the garden, have hundreds of mice in residence and today have discovered that we do not have supermice in tackety boots but we have a grey squirrel living in our study walls! All suggestions gratefully received for his prompt removal.

 This is me and  Jan my lovely sister who gave up her holiday to the Grenadines to look after me, very grateful  for that, she was  a great nurse/companion. When I win the Lottery and get even more doddery she can have a job! The picture below shows a tiny humming  bird that the self same nurse revived and liberated, good with birds, (big and small )dogs and everything!

So all in all quite an eventful time. This has taken ages to type as I am still one handed so if I do not blog before Christmas can I wish you all a very very Merry Christmas anda Happy, Peaceful and Safe New Year.

Ronnie has gone Broody!

No, not Ronnie in Eastenders although those that follow the soap will wonder at how life echoes Eastenders!

Ronnie, of Ronnie, Roxy and Peggy fame, my three little red hens, has overnight turned into a snarling demon as she sits on eggs that get laid and repels all boarders who try to claim said eggs. She has gone broody. It is amazing how a docile gentle hen can turn so quickly into a demented, troubled soul ( just like Eastenders characters actually).

Going Broody is when a hen has had enough of just laying eggs that constantly get taken away and wants to sit on them and hatch out baby chicks. Alas as we have no cockerel this is never going to happen but poor Ronnie does not know that ( again a bit like Ronnie Mitchell not knowing her sperm donor boyfriend Joel had had the snip). Now we have a problem with poor old Ron, we could just let her sit until she comes out of it but that could take weeks. The other option is to get her back to normal by giving her a boot up the backside figuratively speaking. She can be dunked bum first into a bucket of cold water, made to sit on ice packs or put into a cat cage with no comfy straw and left in a draughty place for a few days. However I am going to leave her for a few days more and see if she comes out of it naturally. This could go on for weeks and weeks and meanwhile she will get very little food and become thinner and thinner, not what I want for her with the cold weather coming on.

Meanwhile I have excellent news about Fondoo who is now flying with the rest of the flock and apart from looking a bit lopsided with a droopy wing is holding his own and doing fine.

I have had to remove ten eggs over the past few weeks from the nests as despite my best efforts they are all still bonking like mad. Hopefully once it gets really cold all this canoodling will stop. A flock of 19 is more than enough for anyone. They are ranging far and wide now and love the field of corn stubble on either side of the track, they are a little too obvious for my liking as the bloody peregrine is a common visitor as is the sparrowhawk and also the buzzard. The buzzard has been scooping up the voles who feed on the dove food and last week I caught a sparrowhawk picking up a vole right in front of the lounge window.

I have got the feeding down to a fine art now and have bought a long covered feed hopper that contains enough feed for about 6 days so no more rushing around first thing in the morning to feed them.

Everything else in the garden is rosy!