Hydref

Autumn is possibly the best time on the smallholding. Summer has its charms but it is still largely a time of work with little reward. Autumn on the other hand is the time when the produce arrives. There is even produce from plants which needed no input at all through the year. The rowan-berry, bramble  and crab apple  harvests were good and we now have good stocks of jam, enough to see us through until next year.

This year the potatoes, peas, beans and leeks did well. The squash did poorly, ending up supplying more to the slugs than to us. The tomatoes didn't do too well as there was insufficient sun to ripen them. We can tak a little of the bees' honey before we close them up for the year.

We do not know if our ram has done his work this year. On the few occasions that I witnessed him the ladies did not wish to stand for him. The next months will tell.

We have re-fenced portions of the upper pasture and moved the sheep there. The grass should see them for a further month or two. 

Auger

The fencing went easier than I had anticipated. It was greatly helped by having a good auger to start the fence posts. We bought this on holiday in France and I have noticed that we have changed our holiday souvenier buying. Now we tend to prefer agricultural implements as sharing the values of charm and utility. The dagging shears from Turkey are a good example.


We lost one of the birds this week. A hawk or a buzzard caught the smallest, white, female duck. All the other poultry are doing well. The four most  recent hatchlings are living outside and thriving.

The weather has, however, changed. It has been much colder and the mornings have had a taste of winter about them. Hopefully it will wait a little yet ..

Agricultural archeology

Now that autumn is established and winter is just around the corner I have started to prepare to help the sheep over the cold season. I had noticed an uneven area of ground beside the coach house and wondered if it might be the site of an old sheep pen.

After five hours of ground clearance it is clear that something used to be here. There is a good collection of shaped stone and certainly enough to create a stone sheep pen. Over the next weeks we will have to reclaim the stones and refashion the walls.

As if to confirm the change of season there was snow on top of Calder Idris.

Major changes in the pecking order

I had not realised that the ducks had a very established pecking order. Now that three drakes are in the freezer there is a power vacuum. This has been increased by the introduction of the four new ducklings into the flock.

There was quite a commotion at the duck-house door this evening as the brown drake seemed to make a bid for the throne. Hopefully they will sort this out among themselves over the next few days.

Dw i'n wedi lladd hwyaden cyntaf heddiw.

Well the deed has been done. I killed the first of the ducks today. I created a killing cone out of an old traffic cone and attached it to a large oak tree in the woods near the duck meadow. The hatchet, from France, was sharpened until it was razor sharp and in one thud it was all over. Death seemed to be instantaneous and I feel happy that the duck felt no pain.

Plucked

The plucking was easier than I had anticipated. There are conflicting pieces of advice of whether to go with, or against, the grain. In the end I went with what seemed natural and the fastest.

I found a good site which gave advice on how to prepare the duck for the freezer. This guide from the Girl's Guide to Guns and Butter is an excellent aid to the task of butchering the duck and preparing it for the freezer.

I found an old bagging machine and we used this for the final freezer preparation. In addition to the bird, we have kept the gizzard, liver and giblets (neck and heart). The gizzard is the base for Salad de Gesier and ideal for lunch, I hope to make duck liver parfait as well.

There are four more to go later in the week and the freezer will now start to earn its keep. Overall an unpleasant task, but less distressing than I had anticipated. 

Jam and pigeons

Autumn is early this year and seems to have arrived in September. The  cold and wet weather persists and the trees have started to show their reds and yellows. Two Maples in Dolgellau brighten up the woodscape in town though our own woods remain verdant.

The berry crops have been poor and the volumes of jam and jelly we have had, as a consequence, also poor. We have made Rowan Jelly (Criafol), Bramble Jam (Mwyar Duan) and Plum Jam (Eirinen) this year successfully but in smaller amounts. The Rose-hip syrup (egroesen) was a disappointment with the berries and the syrup lacking colour and taste. The leftover lemons were useful way of using up older eggs as they were transmuted into Lemon curd.

The sheep remain well and have put on a lot of weight. In the very heavy rains it has been odd to watch them standing very still. It looks quite eerie as even the chewing seems to have stopped. The ram seems  to be entering adolescence. He now looks more masculine and is starting to take an interest in the ewes.

We had an unusual visitor this week. Karen had noticed a pigeon walking looking tired and lost. It later became clear that this was a homing pigeon who had become diverted. It had travelled 300miles that morning from Lille but had ended up too far north (as its home was in South Wales). It got a lift from Lisa back to its family.

Mae'r dosbarth Cymraeg wedi dechrau. Dydy ddim wyneb newydd. Does dim wynebau newydd. Dw i'n gobeithio dysgu mwy y flwyddyn hon. Croesi bysedd !

Hay Bales by Hand

Last week we managed to harvest the hay from the top meadow. This was strenuous labour which has left us with a barn half full of hay, in one glorious, unshapely and unmanageable lump. We needed to convert this into bales but wanted to avoid the expense of buying a baler. This was our solution to the problem of making serviceable bales by hand.

First collect your equipment. You will need a sharp knife, some baler twine, and a large plastic bin (but no sticky back plastic at all). The bin needs to be a lot taller than it is wide (by about twice) and should be sturdy. We used a water butt from Wilkinson's for the purpose. On one side we made two small "V" shaped notches to hold the twine's loops and across on the other side two "I" shaped slits to hold the twine.

Run two lengths of baler twine down into the bucket keeping them parallel. Put the looped end over the V notch and jam the other end in the I slit.  Make sure the twine goes to the bottom of the bucket. Also make sure that the two  lines run parallel. They should run about 1/4 in from the edge of the bin on either side.

Now fill the bin with hay. Fill it fully to the top, pressing it down hard by hand as you go. Keep an eye on the twine, watching that it does not get pushed out of place.

Once you have filled to the top and pressed down as hard as you can get in the bin and start using your body weight to compress the hay down further. Try and get the bale to no more than a third of the height of the bin. Pack it as dense as Rhudda's beard

Now slip the free end of the twine through the looped end. Wiggle and pull the twine to take up any slack. Then pull the twine tight and tie it with a good knot. The difficult bit is now over.

Remove your bale and use the remaining lengths off twine (the bits hanging free after the knot) to put a loop of twine around the other side of the bale.

You now have a serviceable bale. It will stack fairly well, it takes up less room and is fairly robust. It is nothing like a real bale in terms of its density or regularity, however,  if you really need that you are going to have  to spend some money.

If you want to see a video of this process then take a look here. The whole process takes about 3 to 5 minutes per bale.

Low Technology Hay Making

We have had the unusual circumstance in North Wales of a run of dry sunny days. Three dry sunny days in a row to be precise. While previously this might haver been a cue for considering having a barbecue, or visiting the beach, or even taking off a jumper this year it meant only one thing; making hay. It has been so wet until now that we feared we would never manage to make hay and I was fearful of what our neighbours would say when they saw our sheep all  bags of bones over the winter with nothing to eat.

The first step was to find our field of grass. The upper 2 acre filed had been earmarked for this. It had not been topped this year and has not been grazed for a few years and it looked like a good meadow to start with.  It shares with our other fields the disadvantage of being very hilly and as the manual labour went on this became increasingly important. Cutting uphill is serious business and develops aches in  muscles that you never know you had.

We used the Goldoni two wheeled tractor with a 53inch finger cutter for the cutting. (It is called a finger blade after the tendency to remove the users fingers and toes). We have no pictures of this in operation as we were to keen to get cracking and get the field cut to take any pictures. The weather sites gave us a maximum of 3 days and we could not loiter.

During the cutting I became very aware of how many creatures call the meadow home. There were voles, frogs, crickets, dragonflies and even small snakes fleeing from my path as I advanced through the grass. The cutting though hard work took about 4 hours and the machine cut well leaving good clear swathes of grass behind it. My assistants followed and arranged the hay for drying.

At the end of the first day the hays was gathered up into windrushes to try and reduce the effect of dew in the morning. The next two days were taken up with turning and tedding the hay. The hay was turned twice each day. Each time taking a minimum of two hours.

During this we learnt the advantage of using the right tools. A pitchfork is much better than any other implement and well worth the money. We now have two, one each, and they might also come in handy if ever there are strange ungodly goings on at the local castle (Though I am not sure we have any flaming torches to go with them).

By the end of the third day we were exhausted and the final turn of the hay was  followed by a gathering of it together into mounds for transfer to the barn. This was the hardest of all the jobs.Each load weighed about 40 kilograms, was dragged on a tarpauline to the end of the field (Up and downhill) then carried to the barn. It was slow going and we didn't finish until after 10p.m. and the latter runs were done by torchlight.

However, it is now done. The barn is full.  It rained through the night and most of today and it did not matter. Our sheep have their winter dinners stored safely away and we have another skill tucked under our belt.