Self-Sufficiency in Style
august 2004 diary
|
Self-Sufficiency in Style august 2004 diary |
|
| August started so well, became bizarre and finished with a complete disaster. | |
|
Hay is a critical crop. It feeds the cow and the sheep through the winter. Always tricky in this climate. It depends on luck, judgement and a great deal of hard work. We finished July winning. Despite the machine having its traditional break down and despite an ominous horizon, we got it baled. |
Much more than usual - a good crop and dry. |
|
Our old pick-up is perfect for the job. |
With family help, the bales were picked up from the field and brought up
to the yard and stacked on pallets and made ready for sheeting. That is a fine judgement job too. You must not sheet moisture in as the hay will heat and rot. Neither do you want it wet. |
|
So, at the last moment, the writer panicked - and ordered the bales to be
spread about to get a little dryer before remaking the stack. There were bales everywhere, you could not approach the house, without clambering over bales. |
The Rottweiler was very confused by this performance. |
|
|
Anyway, a couple of days later, we got it all stacked and sheeted, just in
time before darkness and the rain came down. We were quite pleased with ourselves. Little did we know, that later in the month, all our work was to be wasted in the most distressing of circumstances. |
|
We then ran into the most extraordinary weather for many years |
|
|
It has rained, day after day, night after night. Brief interludes of dry
weather followed by more rain... ...and with thunderstorms. Not one or two, but dozens. |
|
|
|
This time of year, this part of England sheds its green covering and it
normally a little yellow and parched. Not this year. The crops lie in the fields, the combines stuck and the grass is growing. England is green and groaning. The walled garden is thick with luxuriant weed. |
|
And the plagues, first of flies... ...then wasps plundering the fruit. |
|
|
|
Crops were still being harvested in the walled garden, but often from very
wet ground. The potatoes yielded a rather large unusually red one.. . I think we can work out who planted it. |
| Fresh figs for breakfast are a seasonal pleasure, providing you can beat the wasps to the fruit. |
|
|
|
It's odd really how we have been eating less of our own food lately. Mrs P has been introducing more fish into our diet. A bit of a health kick for a somewhat reluctant author. Alas, we will be eating rather less of our own food in future. |
|
We have lost all our milk, cheese, butter, cream and ice cream supplies. Eventually, we will lose all our beef. It is a pretty upsetting story, but nobody's fault. |
|
|
Gladys, the Jersey, was acquired as a little calf for ten pounds and
taught to drink from a bucket. She became, not surprisingly, pretty tame and, before FMD restrictions were introduced, would be walked down the lane on a halter to her pasture. This was much to the amusement of passers-by. |
|
|
|
She became a pretty important cow. Indeed, she was the central player in a
story that has reverberated around the world. A missing ear-tag has caused a rumpus that has escalated beyond belief. You can read about it on Stop the World |
|
She was pregnant and doing fine. Playful and as friendly as ever, but
towards the end of her pregnancy, Mrs P started to think she was looking a
little too big. Twins began to be suspected, although they are not that common in these cattle. Normally Gladys produces outdoors, without assistance, and her calf is raised very naturally on fine sheltered paddocks. But as the weather was so odd, we brought her indoors and into her cowshed. |
|
|
Milking in a summer meadow, a sight that gave pleasure to many passing by, alas is no more. It took almost three hard years to raise a calf to a good, friendly and co-operative house-cow producing milk. |
It was a good job that we did. Things started to go wrong. Although the writer is a stern critic of the veterinary profession, our vets have always been most attentive and we enjoy good relations. It became the classic veterinary intervention to extract two calves from a very distressed cow. Two large bull calves were safely delivered and we thought we were going to be OK, but, alas, after ailing for some days and several false hopes, it was clear that Gladys was not going to recover and she was humanely destroyed. So the hay stack was mostly just a waste of time. Alas that is self-sufficiency - things do go wrong and a whole self-sustaining system can collapse in ten minutes, if you are unlucky. |
|
Black days at Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner. |
