06

Ewok, the baby Scottish Highland heifer, is progressing nicely on her bottle feeding, and came to me this morning in record time - not 30 seconds by my guesstimate! She is so gorgeous, I'm sure Muppet will fall straight for her. She's a bit lighter in colouring than Muppet, but an absolute bargain! Mr Alastair Stewart of Mortlake (Ardvorlich Stud), was selling up most of his breeding stock as he heads into retirement. We went to the Auction, but as we wanted only a very young heifer calf (exigencies of transport space and spare cash) and on offer were only bulls or dams with calves, we had to wait until after the Auction. Mr Stewart very kindly telephoned us to come and view our heifer-to-be. He is such a learned gentleman, and a an absolute pleasure to listen to, I wish we had more time to glean more history and facts. His wife, Davina, is also lovely from the brief time that I spoke with her. A marvellous couple.

Rad, our albino New Zealand rabbit (I always picture the one in Alice in Wonderland) had escaped some days ago, and I had spent many fruitless hours trying to recapture the big fester. Thankfully, when I had finally cornered him, I had my rubber gloves on, as, whilst he was squealing in panic, he raked his claws down my hand. Only a dent in the back of my hand, praise God, but the glove was wrecked. I bunged him in a cardboard box, with a heavy box of lettuce leaves on top, and then repaired one of the other hutches. He is still residing happily there. One of the other males must be getting frisky, he's very aggressive at the moment.

Much hilarity yesterday as the Farmyard Mafia, aka the Geese, very carefully watched for a break in the traffic before attempting to cross the road back to our property. No wonder only one of them has been skittled so far. Smart birds.

I have been battling a very bad head cold that has now travelled to my throat, without, I must state now, my permission. so please forgive me if I only put in a little more and add on Zeke and that's it for this week.

I went to a wonderful 50% off marked prices book sale yesterday, and the 50% was off the discounted stock as well, so I bought Stirling Macoboy's two excellent books What Flower is That? and What Tree is That? and The Australian Guide to Self-Sufficiency by Michael Richardson, which looks really interesting. The Macoboy books I have been wanting for YEARS. They are both Australian, a little dated BUT they have excellent full-colour pictures (gardening is a bit like gemstones, you really need the colour. Try explaining a rainbow to a person who has been blind all his life. I do not understand why gardening books can have black and white photographs) and the indexes are fantastic (that's another bone of contention - why have ANY reference book without an index? It's like having a car without an engine, and I don't believe Fred Flintstone's model would work with the amount of shopping I do!).

The Self-sufficiency book was printed in 1991, but, like the gardening books, much still holds true. A brief look at the Contents page has: Shelter, Commodities, Bushcraft, Heat and Light, Food, Drink, Transport, Health (Doing without Dentists!), Cloth and Clothes, Craftwork, Woodwork and Metals. So I'll be letting you know how it is, as it is aimed at people like me, rank beginners.

But I want to talk about an old favourite of mine. Last week it was an American book. This week it will be British.

John Seymour's classic The Fat of the Land was published first in 1961. I have the 1974 edition, which has an added-on chapter. For whatever my recommendation is worth GET THIS BOOK. He tells in a wonderfully chatty style how he and his wife, incredibly restless characters, came to a five acre plot in the middle of nowhere. Apologies to inhabitants of Suffolk, but I'm on the other side of nowhere down here. He talks about how to get a cheap property, what to do with it, including stages of growth eg get a cow to save going to the shop for milk, get pigs for the surplus milk, grow more food for the cow and pigs, a dry cow means buying another cow, cultivating more ground meant buying a horse, which meant getting the grassland in order, and so it goes on.

Along the way, of course, we learn all sorts of interesting things, from the uselessness of some fuel burning stoves that have an open bit in the middle, to the niceness of having a brick floor in the kitchen, to organising a large house ( I, and Nita, wish!), thatching, roots, planting schedules, it's all there and quite useful. You are reading the ultimate from a layman's point of view. These people had very little advice and mostly went on knowledge I believe they picked up over the years.

Now, tips from the book: "At first the well was in the open; and many is the happy day that I have spent, in a winter blizzard, with frozen oily fingers and snow drifting down the back of my neck, wrestling with engine or pump when everything was frozen solid, the engine wouldn't start anyway, Sally was shouting for water, and the animals were bellowing with thirst.

Then a friend named Philip who came to stay paid for a moment of enthusiasm by building us a fine little oak-framed pump house, with thatched walls and a tiled roof, in which both engine and pump are housed. The oak for the frame cost us ten pounds - the rest nothing: the tiles we got off old outbuildings. If only we had known what we know now we would have used rough oak for the frame, which would have cost far less." p.67

"We had Michael's trailer-load of muck. We dug a big hole for each tree and carried a baby's-bath full of muck or two for each hole (We could not afford to buy a wheelbarrow at first). We planted the trees over the muck. The bracken between the trees we cut with a scythe, but otherwise left the ground.

"Now at the same month a neighbour planted trees, from the same nursery, in exactly the same type of soil. Last year he grubbed his trees up because they had made no growth at all (author's italics). In spite of the fact that he dressed them heavily every year with artificial manures. Our trees (how smug can you get?) have grown remarkably. They have grown as fast as it is possible for fruit trees to grow and not take off.

"The reason? Well - at least one full wheelbarrow load of either pig muck or cow muck or horse muck dumped down around each tree every year. And also bracken. Tons of bracken. When the Forestry Commission cut acres of bracken one year in their pine plantation nearby I went and got several tons of it and piled some of it up hight around the boles of the trees. It had all disappeared in a very few months - rotted away - but the soil is there. If you look at the soil around our apple trees now you won't find coarsesand and red crag rock. You will find a lovely friable loam, full of earthworms, as fertile as the best fenland. We've made that soil." p.38

This week to come: All I have to do is to get rid of this dreaded Lurgii and get my energy back. Alice is on holidays, so I want to get stuck into the down time of the veggie garden and weed it, fertilise it and bung the tyres around it. I also want to organise my book collection so that I have a whole lot of useable reference books where I need them, right here in the Study. I want to clean out the Feather Pen while it is still muddy as a bog, and transfer a lot of that wealth elsewhere, probably on the very outskirts of the fruit trees.

Winter

Frost, like shattered glass

shining on my grass

The day, ice cold

and I, my bed clothes hold

Even in the kitchen now

my breath fogs the air

and we cluster 'round the fire

as close as we dare

I love the winter weather

the quiet of the day

I love to hear the rain

half-dreaming, I lay

All around me I'm cocooned

and nothing now is calling me

I am a winter bloom

So I'll bid you sweet good night

and sup my soup in peace

by the passing moon's bright light

and the racing clouds beneath.

Dominus tecum

Leonie