Blogfromthebarn

A Springtime synopsis, colony collapse, cars and cubs, not necessarily in that order

So, my dear readers it is way past time for a bit of a catch up, I've been remiss for many reasons, all, if I could be bothered to explain them to you, would be both valid and understandable so just take my word for it ok?

Anyway, pull up a chair, open a bottle and let's run through the news from the barn.

We've sad news for my bee-keeping followers, it's been a horrible winter and a worse spring for the little honey monsters but they seemed to have coped until the recent false spring which triggered a colony collapse, despite my best efforts to supplement their foraging with sugar syrup and my desperate attempts to deliver 5000 failed attempts at resuscitation.
I've now cleaned the hives and burned all the existing frames, (and many, many tiny corpses) and have built new frames and moved the hives to a new location where they sit awaiting the delivery of two new colonies, one from my local chum Ian and one from a breeder in Gloucestershire. Let's hope for a bee-friendly summer.

Tennyson assured us that springtime triggers a young mans fancy toward love, mine, sadly, tends more to thinking about fixing the Land Rover. I've tried everything to prevent the constant overheating problem, well, everything except the solution prescribed by my friend (and ex-Land Rover project manager) Keith.



He advised replacing the radiator, but I, of course, being very wise, tried everything else, several times in many cases. Finally I bit the bullet, launched myself into the steamy bazaar of Land Rover spare parts one finds on eBay and sourced a "very similar to" from China by way of Dunstable.




The radiator sat in a box for a month as I manfully prevaricated but finally, spurred by the faint glimmers of sunshine through the trees I embarked on a couple of hours of sustained wriggling, spattering, hose coupling, draining, clipping, flushing, binning and bracing and the old girl is now running sweet as a nut and we're roaring about the farm on the first day of summer (official). I've also found that, as you can see in the photo, lowering the windscreen can triple the number of slow-reflexed flies trapped in my welcoming teeth and eyes.

The chickens and I, well, enjoyed isn't the right word but we've built a healthy loathing for our cunning near neighbours over a series of fox-related adventures recently.

We've repelled incursions, thwarted tunnels and as the girls snooze in snug if odiferous safety I've passed many an evening, shotgunned up, and wrapped around a glass or two, waiting for Brer Fox to slink into the designated combat zone.

Fortunate timing and a German-made fox-trap have promoted a couple of predators to vulpine heaven but I suspect that the German fox may be a good bit smaller than his Surrey cousin. Looking at the imagery from the infra-red camera it seems that our enormous UK based Wonder-Füchse are looking at the trap and thinking, "ooh dear, that looks a bit snug."

So the trap has been most effective at delivering square meals to the young cubs who disturb our repose nightly with their merry chorus of yipping and yapping.

Frankly they are too damn cute at the moment for me to do the sensible thing and dispatch them to foxy-purgatory. Six times now I've had to release a snarling but dewy eyed little bundle of grey cuteness. Foolish I admit but what can I do? as they get rangier and mangier I'll rescind my cub-friendly policy.


The mantra of 'build a better mousetrap' seems to be appropriate here so project big-fox-trap was launched last week.

I've been converting a large dog cage (for transporting pooches to vet and show) into a state of the art fox-box. A weekend with angle-grinder, cable-ties, bike gear cables and a 250 piece Meccano set (thanks again eBay) has resulted in the production of a home-made varmint trap which now sits in the wood awaiting its first not-so-lucky visitor.


So that's you all caught up dear reader. I'm penning this on the second day of sunshine this year, really penning it too, sitting in the sun with paper and pen, how terribly retro.

As the unfamiliar yellow orb in the sky beats down on my milky-white extremities and bronzes them to a livid summer pink I wish you all well.


Roll on Summertime...

Labels: barn, beekeeping, bees, blog from the barn, chickens, colony collapse, fox, fox trap, land rover, Oakwood, poultry, radiator, Stuffy

posted by Stuffy @ 5:44 pm 0 comments

Chicken update, an inspirational tale of remorse, retrenchment and rebirth

Sadly our resident vixen chose to celebrate the Jubilee with a daring daytime raid on the chicken run. Within an hour she'd dug into the run, captured and executed our four surviving fowl and carted the corpses off to feed her den of mewling cubs. I was, it's fair to say, pretty grumpy, particularly as I'd spent a week of post prandial evenings lurking around in the rain, full of wine and shotgun primed, ready to dissuade with extreme prejudice the malicious vulpine.
It wasn't to be, the moment the sun came out and we headed off to the pub to toast Good Queen Liz, she (the fox, not the royal) swooped like a swoopy thing and carried off the girls.

So, what to do, well, with an empty run for the first time I took the opportunity to execute a through disinfection and mouse frightening regime, chuck a load of grass seed down, give the land a month of recovery and set about a fox-proofing programme. Step one was trenching, digging a foot-and-a-half-deep,foot-wide trench around the perimeter of the pen, that's about 50 metres of ditch, and the wooded location makes it impractical to get a digger in so that was a very painful afternoon with shovel and spade for myself and our chum Nigel. To be honest Nigel's obsessive attention to detail delivered a very precise trench with vertical sides and neatly finished edges, my half looked considerably less polished but was dug and filled with scalpings before Nigel had finished stage 1 of his earthworm re-settlement programme. In the spirit of teamwork I sat and drank beer until he'd caught up. 

Scalpings are golf-ball-sized lumps of flint and granite, delivered to me as 1 cubic meter bags (4 of them) and then distributed to the trench, with shovel and wheelbarrow, then thumped with a cast-iron weight to compact and compress them. Sadly Nigel never recovered from the emotional trauma of my cavalier approach to ditch digging so this was a solo exercise. Which took about a week.... Well I do have real work to do as well.

Final stage was to lay chicken wire stapled to the base of the fence stretching over the trench and about 1/2 a metre into the surrounding countryside. Back breaking work stapling the stuff and then pegging the edges with 100 aluminium tent pegs around the edges. There's an Ebay camping shop that must think I'm really careless pegging out my tent.

So after a month of trauma, travail, trial and trench I set off to my chicken dealer in leafy Leatherhead. Chicken dealers work like crack cocaine vendors, luring you in but knowing once you're hooked you'll keep coming back, each time, a little poorer, a little more realistic, a bit more resigned to the inevitable, a little better prepared, better informed and sharing new anecdotes about bloody foxes.

Here they are then, three new girls at the Barn, I try maintain my pragmatic objectivity and insist on calling them the grey one, the red one and the white one but even so they're already showing their own characters and attitudes. We've had eggs from the white for a week and the first from the grey yesterday, still half-size eggs but it's a good sign, despite a new life which thus far, (it's been a great summer hasn't it?) has been pretty much completely underwater they do seem to be settling in. 

And fingers crossed, no cunning incursions from Fox force five (pulp fiction reference for the tarantino fans amongst you).

I'll keep you posted...

Labels: chickens, eglu, fox, foxes, oakwood barn, Omlet, poultry, Scalpings, smallholding, Southmead Poultry, Stuffy

posted by Stuffy @ 12:00 pm 2 comments