Farm life is always interesting. Even on the days where your intentions are nothing but routine, nature indulges herself. Usually at your expense.
For example, we work hard to find all the eggs the chickens lay. Geese are easy, they can't go broody without being very obvious. White birds the size of a wombat that can't climb have limited options for nests even on a farm. Free range chickens, however, can squeeze into cracks and under things and fly up on top of things. Sometimes finding a nest is a matter of waiting around until you see a chicken acting suspiciously and following it back. Discretely. If they notice you they will lead you around for hours.
This year we've been beaten three times. One by a hen who found a spot under an upturned wheelbarrow. She appeared with 14 chicks. The next by a hen who found a place under a clump of grass in the fallow section of the vege garden, and she turned up with 12 chicks.
The best effort so far, however, has been the hen that laid a clutch over the usual course of two weeks and then sat on them for another three ... Her claim to fame is that she made her nest among the grass growing around the base of a sapling orange tree, inside a wire mesh tree ring three feet from the back gate. We passed within reach of her multiple times every day over that 21 day sit and yet the first we knew of her work was the sound of cheeping. She hatched eight and between them the three have doubled the size of the flock in one go. We will chose the best of the pullets to keep and sell the others to people wanting their own eggs.
Other things on the farm are as sure as death and taxes. One of those is that steers will get fat. Apart from the beef industry being built on this premise, it does provide two things for Highclere Farm. One is the best quality beef for our own freezers and the other is a source of income.
The most recent steer to go in our freezers (below) was a dexter x jersey. We like jersey to be part of the mix because the meat marbles beautifully under the jersey influence and the golden fat carries plenty of the beta carotene that the human body can then convert to vitamin D.
The steer below is one of a pair of murray grey x angus, and are the type wanted more by commercial systems. Bigger and heavier than the steers we choose for our own table, they should still be fat and tender. They have had it easy down here, while the mainland struggled for feed they were deep in grass. These two are already spoken for by an old fashioned butcher locally. Their grass fed, chemical free meat will have almost no food miles attached.
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"the best fertiliser for the field is the farmer's shadow"
What this means is that a farmer needs to be on the farm, getting about and looking and seeing and thinking. The annual Chick Surprise is a regular lesson in how easy it is to look but not see. And today's surprise is a lesson on what beauty can be hidden in the most mundane of places if you look where you wouldn't normally.
The farmer across the road is irrigating potatoes, approaching the end of the season he's finishing them for harvest. As I filled the goose water this afternoon I lifted my eyes briefly beyond my own boundaries and was gifted a glimpse of nature gilding man's constructions.
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