New Kid on the Block

As I mentioned in a previous post, Henry my cockerel has gone to live with a friend of mine, and in his place we have Bruno the Barnevelder. He's enormous! I trying to see if I can use him as an excuse to invest in yet another Flyte So Fancy creation - I'm thinking Gypsy Caravan ;-) - but he is very handsome:

He's also a total gentleman which is a pleasant surprise after Henry's rampant libido. The hens seem very settled around him which is nice as his presence means the older ones don't pick on the babes.

The ducklings continue to be exquisitely cute and are getting really big. I might get the ducks a paddling pool as they love scudding under the water in their seed tray. We had a fox in the garden again yesterday but luckily Blossom spends her time on red alert and kicked off with the most frantic clucking and I hot-footed it out in to the garden and saw it running off down through the field.

My lupins have put on the most spectacular show and the bees are back in the garden now that the oil seed rape has finished flowering. I've set up a bait hive in case they swarm again when I'm out, but I've now got 3 colonies doing well - the small swarm I collected has laying workers so it won't survive but they are happy enough so I will let them fizzle out on their own. My roses have suffered with aphid attacks but I've been rubbing the little blighters off each evening so hopefully the blooms won't be too affected. My veg table is really productive too and we've enjoyed fresh salad every (well, I've enjoyed it, the children have eaten it) but I found Speckledy Emily devouring the lettuces this morning having learnt it was a simple hop and a flap to get up there. Sigh, it was nice while it lasted...

The girls have been enjoying the sunshine and have spent hours in the garden building tents and playing with sticks. Amber drew and typed some beautiful labels for my plant stall and they seem to have an endless capacity for making up stories. Tristan has been busy with his studies and generally keeping a low profile. I procured some 1970's sun loungers off Freecycle and Amber sits on hers with Hazel the chicken for ages:

Ahh!

Little Bills and Feet

Four ducklings have hatched now, rather than the 5 I had deduced from the number of eggshells I thought I'd counted! They've been out in the run today but haven't eaten anything yet. I'm finding ducks very different to hens and I wasn't sure whether I should take John out in case he picked on the babes but scouring the internet, the consensus seems to be that it should be fine, so I've kept him in with the family. I hope Jean knows what she's doing :-/ ducks seem a bit thick compared to hens. Or perhaps I'm worrying too much....it wouldn't be the first time. They have dabbled around in the mud and been shown the water:

As you can see, they are all different colours ranging from blonde to dark, so I'm not sure what colours they'll end up. Both their parents are mallards which is the dominant colour, but depending on their parentage, who knows! I moved the run yesterday to give them fresh ground, and the local dunnock population have been recycling the downy feathers that Jean plucked out to line her nest to go and line theirs with - I keep seeing them flying round with beakfuls of tiny white feathers.

Hooray, the sun's out! I must check my bees this week to see if all the queens are laying. One of the hives is very small now and the poor weather has not helped, so I need to check they're all ok. The swarm I brought back from Ann's looks good from all the activity at the hive entrance, and they are bringing in pollen which is what they use to feed the baby bees so I'm hopeful that they have started to build up the colony. I did get stung yesterday when I lent on a bee who'd chosen to sit on the broody coop as I was moving it - it's the first time this year and unfortunately it's my knitting hand! Help! I am about a third of the way through the second sock so I need to keep up the momentum. I bought some fabric tape with "Made by Me" embroidered on it so I can put one in the back of my Owl Jumper as I keep having to look for the back decreases to find out which way to put it on!

I've been busy in the garden trying to hold back the couch grass from taking over my borders. I have to do it when the chickens aren't looking though as they come along and scuff up my neatly cut edges and send precious soil all over the lawn. The girls spent yesterday afternoon banging away at wood in the carport and have built a large square structure which appears to need to live in my study. Amber is going to tidy her room today so she can have it in her room, which presumably will happen at the same time as the squadron of pigs fly over, or Hell gets chilly ;-)

Ducklings

Well it's been a long wait but - at last!

Are they not the most adorable little creatures?? There are 3 more eggs so we'll see if they hatch :-)

We visited Arundel WWT yesterday and there were ducklings there too! Lovely.

Today I took Amber and Rose to the Owl and Sewing Cat to get materials for bunting. They have a very good tutorial on their blog - I know it's really straightforward but sometimes, a bit like needing the recipe for a Victoria sponge, it's reassuring to have someone telling you what to do. And, joy of joys, it was probably the most relaxing and un-stressful sewing session I have ever had with the girls, and we now have 4 metres of Jubilee-friendly bunting with some left over to do more. I even christened my new-to-me ironing board to press the flags which was remarkably pleasant after my 4 year break from the hot flat thing.

John is sitting guarding the entrance to the Dinky Duck House and earlier was sitting inside with his wife and children. It made me feel a bit sorry for Blossom, the single teenage mum with her 5 chicks but she is doing really well and the chicks are getting the hunched vulture look as they've got their wing feathers but are still downy everywhere else.

Ducklings! :-)

Owls

I tackled knitting a jumper recently. It was designed by Kate Davies (I follow her blog, Needled) and the instructions were great so it all went swimmingly. Big yarn and needles too so surprisingly quick :-)

Here's a pic of the cabled owl detail:

My dad didn't realise they were owls and thought I'd just sewed decorative buttons on but we'll forgive him ;-)

I've had a busy weekend and last night went out with Kate (not Davies!) who gave me my birthday present - a packet of different coloured garden twines and a gorgeous handmade fabric pin-backed adornment (brooch sounds a bit frumpy). I have fixed it on to my smart brown coat and it's instantly more 'me'! So thanks Kate :-)

I'm feeling rather whacked now so I think I'll put the animals to bed and sit down with my knitting for a bit. The children are back and seem to have had an ok time apart from a minor Ribena-based crisis on Tristan's part, so hopefully it'll be a quiet night...

A Garden Full of Bees

I had a phone call yesterday from the lady whose bees I look after; they'd swarmed. It was a dreary, drizzly, murky day so I hopped in the car with a box and a beesuit and went to collect them. The cluster of bees was beautifully situated on an overhanging branch, about head height, along a path :-) couldn't be better. So although bees are very rarely aggressive when they swarm as they've nothing to defend, Ann's are a feisty lot so I did put on my suit and after a sharp tap on the branch, into the box they went. I wrapped them in a sheet just in case as there were a few stragglers - a couple of whom decided to negotiate their way out of the folds of material and buzz ominously around the car as I was driving home.

There were a lot of bees as I put them in to a hive in my garden, but despite the rain they all flew around orientating themselves to their new home. A good job done.

Or so I thought. I noticed this morning that there were a lot of bees around the other 2 hives: not just at the entrance but also trying to get in to the vents and the floor and buzzing along the joins between the hive boxes looking for gaps. Little whatsits were trying to rob my hives!! So, back on with the beesuit and gloves, and armed with a roll of parcel tape and the tiniest, most useless pair of scissors we own, I set about reducing the size of the entrances to the hives so that the guard bees had a smaller gap to defend from their cheeky upstart new neighbours. Trying to unwrap parcel tape, cut parcel tape with Christmas cracker-quality scissors and stick parcel tape on to wood all whilst wearing rubber gloves and in slightly breezy conditions - well, I'm glad nobody was filming that particular exercise in cack-handedness. Or indeed recording; my language had deteriorated somewhat by this stage. And I couldn't seem to retain in my head that there was no point in trying to sever the tape with my teeth: I was wearing a veil. Anyway, the new bees seem to have calmed down now and left the others alone. The tape's still on the entrances which they don't really mind, although you can almost hear the tutting as the bees return, laden with pollen, and have to queue up at the doorway.

My new run arrived today (yes, another one!) as I thought the ducks needed more room, especially with the prospect of babies. It's really good and I feel much happier about them being in there. Rose helped me build it:

Isn't it great? It's the large freestanding lawn run from Flyte So Fancy - I have been so impressed with their other stuff and this is no exception. John and Jean and any future family will be safe and secure in there, and I can fit their big tub of water in too.

I must go and look for Mary the Adventurous Hen who has been gone for a couple of hours which she does frequently. Off she goes, all on her own in the more-than-chicken-high wheat crop behind the house. I did find myself having a fleeting, subconscious thought that I should text her......

Growing

The chicks have settled in well to their new broody coop, and have enjoyed a few trips around the garden with a ferociously maternal Blossom. She thoroughly resents any interference from me either in the coop or when they're roaming, to the point where I get roundly pecked when I am putting in their food bowls or retrieving a lost and cheeping chick from the wrong side of the herb bed.

She has got 5 chicks (the chipped egg didn't hatch unfortunately) but Blossom is obsessed with dust-bathing despite it being on the wet side of damp. There will be a bit of a change around soon as my cockerel Henry is going to live with a friend of mine who would like to breed from her hens, and I will hopefully have nextdoor's Barnevelder cockerel, Bruno. As Henry is the father of 3 of my flock, I thought it best to take the opportunity to mix up the gene pool a bit. I will get Bruno some hens of the same breed if I see them at any of the shows over the summer, not least because they lay the most beautiful brown eggs.

Still no sign of the ducklings...

Yesterday was typical Mayday Bank Holiday weather, but we braved the Spring Garden Show at Ardingly nonetheless. We bought a number of things, including a baby ginkgo tree. I love ginkgoes for their prehistoric heritage, and after a massive section on palaeobotany  for one of my degree courses, I find their presence (virtually unchanged) in the fossil record from the time of the dinosaurs rather incredible.

I have finished my owl sweater (designed by Kate Davies) and purchased the 34 buttons necessary for the eyes this morning, so I will sew those on once it dries. If it dries! I realise my knitting arm is also my vacuuming arm so I thought I'd better rest it: I've cast on some socks but I won't be hoovering the stairs...

My bees are flying whenever they get the chance and the little swarm seems to be doing ok. I don't know where all the bees have gone from the original hive; they must have continued to send out swarms until virtually all the workers had left. I now need to wait for the new queen in both the original colony and the new swarm to start laying eggs. During this time, the worker bees will gradually die off and if there aren't any newly-hatched bees to replace them, the numbers dwindle and it can be that there are not enough bees to look after the eggs and larva, meaning the colony won't survive. I really hope they make it. There is plenty of honey in there and looking at the varroa board underneath the floor, there are flakes of wax and plenty of frass so the swarm colony are building comb. I always feel like a 17th Century medic scrutinising the "humours" of some poor patient when I peer over the varroa board, but it's a good indicator of activity in the colony, not just to count them pesky mites. I try and observe what they are up to at the hive entrance as much as possible as that is also a good barometer of things in the hive. I don't want to take the lid off and have a look as it is cold and damp, and small colonies need all the warmth they can get. I am disappointed that I've lost the swarm though - it's not exactly what I planned!

Swifts are screeching overhead and I will take out my tea and sit with the livestock for a bit as it seems to have stopped raining.