"D" day for the chickens

A while ago we inherited seven young cockerels (see Hatching our Dinner).  They were part of a home-hatch by a work colleague who wanted to expand her flock of layers.  Rather than her dispatching the boys as soon as they could be sexed accurately, we moved them to our garden with the aim of raising them for meat. 

We always try to buy local meat that's had a good life and we're very lucky to have a source of beef in the 'Cam Cattle' cows that graze Midsummer common in the centre of Cambridge.  I cycle past these on my way to work and they always seem blissfully content, taking no notice of my bike rattling past and their mini celebrity status with tourists.

Raising our own chickens seemed like a logical step.  We could learn how to kill, pluck and dress the chickens, all important in increasing our awareness of the process from field to plate, while knowing that these particular birds had enjoyed a longer life than would otherwise have been the case.

Recently the chickens, or more specifically dispatching the chickens, has been on both our minds.  How do you take the decision that any particular day will be their last? Particularly if the weather forecast for the following day is glorious and you know how much they enjoy their sunbathing.  We had become quite attached to our magnificent chaps, with their daily displays of neck ruffling, and were unlikely to wake up one day with a burning desire to put someone in the pot.

Luckily, as it turned out the boys made the decision for us via a strangled attempt at crowing at 5am.  This wasn't a full blown 'Cock-A-Doodle-DOO!' more of a trial run, testing out variations on the theme without ever hitting the correct sequence.

I like to think that the other cockerels were gathered around watching and taking notes from the morning's performance:

'COCK-a-COCK- a- DOO!'

Dammit, that's not right.

'A-Doodle-Doodle-DOO!'

No, still not got it.

etc.

Anyway, even a trainee crower is not appreciated in central Cambridge.  Still less now as we experience an intermittent summer and of neighbours have their windows open.

As the advice was to deprive the chicken for food for 24 hours prior to killing, so that the crop and digestive system wasn't full of semi-digested grain, we decided to do the birds in pairs and a three.  This meant that our 5am singer would have company in his penned-off section of the chicken run, something that we felt was important for his welfare.  It was also for welfare reasons that we decided to kill our first chickens at Hempsal's Community farm, because although a drive in the car wasn't necessarily in the chicken welfare handbook it seemed to us that the consequences of trying and failing to kill a chicken, and the associated needless suffering that would entail, tipped the balance firmly in favour of taking them with us.

Over the past weeks as people have learnt that we are raising chickens for meat, we have been on the receiving end of many horror stories.  It seems that everyone knows someone whose neighbour's friend's father tried to kill a chicken and ended up chasing it around the garden with an axe, merely giving it a crick in the neck or pulling the head off. 

This did not inspire confidence in taking a self-taught 'You-Tube' approach. 

At Hempsal's farm we were able to kill the chickens calmly and quickly under the supervision of Ben the head farmer (we used the broom handle technique).  He also taught us how to pluck the birds (when warm), hang them so that all the blood gathers in the head, and prepare the carcass for cooking.  (Ben then confessed his ulterior motive which was to give us the skills to join the goose plucking and dressing team at Christmas! Which of course we will do.)

What better end for our first bird, than a really slow, considered, recipe carried out over a whole of a day (Moroccan chicken pie from The Guardian, here), which included cabbage grown by us at the farm and was served with home-grown broad beans.

 

It was a thoughtful meal, but I'm no vegetarian, and I can honestly say I'm happy to know this chicken had a good life.

 

 

 

 

 

Foraging - lavender and garlic soda bread

Is it 'foraging' when actually you’re walking round the neighbourhood with a pair of scissors and snipping lavender heads from neighbouring front gardens?

Let’s say yes. 

This is Ian’s made-up recipe for garlic and lavender soda bread. 

At some point it started life as a 'real' soda bread recipe, but over time it's been fiddled with and fussy ingredients such as buttermilk have been jettisoned in favour of simplicity and speed.  We've played with lots of additions, but lavender and garlic is the current winner (try also, cumin seeds, toasted sunflower seeds or crumbled goat's cheese)

All amounts are approximate, what you are aiming for is the consistency.  You will need a cast-iron griddle pan and this takes around 5 mins to prepare and 15-20 mins to cook.

Makes a dinner plate-sized flatbread, around 2cm thick, serves 2 hungry hippo's or 4 nibblers.

Approximately 200g flour,
A flat teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
Approximately 200mls milk and 1/2 a lemon's worth of lemon juice (this is important as it acidifies the milk which makes it substitutable for buttermilk - vinegar also works, but use less), or 200ml buttermilk
About 10 heads of lavender with the flowers scraped from the stalk (pick highly scented ones with open flowers).
Three gloves of garlic, finely chopped (this is medium-garlicky, add more, add less, or roast for a totally different taste!).

First mix together the flour with the milk and lemon.  You want to add enough milk/lemon to make a good sticky dough - this will be way stickier than you would expect from a 'proper' leavened bread recipe. 

Add the garlic and lavender.  Once the ingredients are mixed, STOP.  Don't overwork it or it will become stodgy.

Generously pat the mixture with flour so you can handle it and press/roll it out to a thickness of around 1.5 cm. 

Drop in heavy-bottomed griddle pan which has been pre-heated on a medium flame.  Turn after 5-10 mins, depending on thickness.

 

I should point out that no lavender plants were decimated in the making of this bread; we took the 10 or so heads from 5 or 6 plants.  However, if you’ve seen a couple walking around Cambridge making an exaggerated show of sniffing the lavender in your front garden.  Apologies, we stole a bit. 

But it was amazing.

In sickness and in health...

Tiberius has been ill. 

This one fact has dominated my and Ian's lives over recent days to the point where it is simply not possible to write about anything else. 

Tiberius, a goat who is capable of watching the back door for hours just in case Ian comes home, long after Sibelius has been distracted by his own reflection or wandered off to eat a falling leaf, has been bearing his illness in a typically stoic fashion: standing quietly in a corner with his head hanging down. Occasionally he moved his front and back legs closer together, hunching his back in what looked like a heartbreaking attempt to curl up around his poorly stomach.  Even more distressing was when he decided to lie down in the dirt with his head stretched out on the earth in front of him.  I thought we were going to lose him and reacted hysterically.

What happened?  Well, we think that on Sunday he managed to break into the temporary chicken house that's currently holding the smaller chicks and gorge himself on grower pellets.  Tiberius' obsession with chicken food is well known to us and for weeks we have been engaged in an arms race to build better defences as he learns how to break them down. On that particular Sunday we didn't see anything untoward happen, but in retrospect when I checked the small chicks that evening I was surprised by how much food they had apparently eaten.  We should have been more vigilant.

When we let him out on Monday morning Tiberius was clearly ill.  Although he has managed to snaffle pellets before, we have always managed to intervene before he has done anything more than give himself a small bout of diarrhoea.  This time it was spectacular.  A volcanic eruption of poo.  Even worse the rich pellets were now fermenting in his stomachs and producing gas.  Tiberius developed bloat, a painful build up of gas further exacerbated when his rumen bacteria began to die as a consequence of his not eating, and produced more gas.  Bloat can be deadly in ruminants.



A small goat with bloat

Unfortunately this all happened at the worse possible time for Ian, work-wise, and he was hit with the double whammy of guilt about not working when he was tending to Tiberius, and guilt about not being with Tiberius when he was working. 

'Tending to Tiberius' in our case consisted of us trying to administer a 'drench' as taught to us over a year ago on our goat husbandry course.  This was not the full blown stomach-tube technique, but an simpler, easier technique that mainly consisted of pouring the liquid down their throat.  The theory behind this is simple: first you open the goat's mouth, and keep it open, by inserting a finger into the gap between the front teeth and molars at the back of the mouth, then you tilt their chin back and pour in the liquid, shutting and holding the mouth closed to stop them spitting it out.

The practice - for us - most definitely was not.  It turns out that administering a drench to a calm and healthy goat, as we did on the course (with water), was nothing at all like attempting to do the same with a panicked and sick goat, who clearly just wanted to be left alone.  Trying to ignore the plaintive look in Tiberius' wide eyes, Ian enveloped him in a bear hug while I, hands shaking, tried to open his tightly clenched mouth.  It was difficult. In the snatched moments when we were able to pour the liquid into his mouth, he jerked his head and almost immediately dislodged the bottle occasionally letting out a heart-wrenching bleat.

We felt awful.  Mainly that our ineptitude was causing additional trauma to an already-distressed animal.  By the time it was dark, we had managed to pour a 100 mls or so of 'pro-rumen' into Tiberius, and several hundred more had been poured over his face and over our clothes where it dried to a sticky-sweet smelling mush whose smell followed us into the house as a reminder of our guilt. 

That night was sleepless and full of self-recriminations.  I didn't blame Tiberius, how could I expect him to know not to gorge himself on 'bad' food when it's not a character trait I possess myself? Every Christmas finds me lying on the sofa with a chocolate-induced stomach ache, the difference being that I don't have highly-evolved digestive system, including a rumen full of sensitive bacteria which is liable to being thrown out of whack by the occasional binge of rich food.

The following morning Ian was up at 4am and I joined him by the goat shed at 5.  We tried again to pour more medicine into Tiberius and tempt him into drinking some warm water.  However, we were now almost 24 hours into his illness and with no visible improvement overnight it was clear that more expert help was needed.   I called the vets.  They were wonderful.  Calm and professional, they had a stomach tube into Tiberius before he had time to blink. 

As I was leaving the vet commented it would be good to have me bring in a poo sample at some point in case the diarrhoea was being made worse by a heavy worm burden.  I motioned for him to follow me to the car and opened the boot, which, despite the use of a protective sheet, had suffered in the journey.  The vet stared in silence at the poo-plastered interior for a few seconds, taking in the splattered window, backs of the seats and wheel arches, and then visibly pulled himself together saying 'well, I'll just go and get a pot then!'  Luckily the vets were well provisioned with cleaning products, and Tiberius spent the journey home stood knee deep in puppy training pads.

As well as the wonderful vet, we were also supported by work colleagues, albeit somewhat bemusedly, as we both missed time from work to ferry Tiberius back and forth.  My office in particular is located between colleagues who both have children under the age of 1, and I like to think that we have reached a new level of camaraderie as we met each other coming and going from the office at odd times, or on one of our many trips to the kitchen for coffee to stave off the tiredness that comes from being awake since before dawn with our respective 'kids'. One of them also recommended an excellent baby monitoring app as something that could be extended to monitoring goats. 
On the other hand both Sibelius and Charles have reacted badly to our focus being elsewhere over the past few days.  Charles has started misbehaving in the house and I found him sitting on the sofa, something we thought we had trained him out of (whereas I am quite happy to sit amongst the fluff - possibly because I also leave lots of my hair around the place - Ian finally broke after leaving for work with hairy trousers yet again and decided there was only space on the sofa for a moulty human and not a moulty rabbit too).

Charles: part-time patent attorney

Similarly, Sibelius has become even more attention seeking than usual, flitting between trying to guzzle the medicine we were unsuccessfully trying to feed to Tiberius, and repeatedly slamming into him with a 'playful' headbutt.  At one point I was bending down when I heard the clatter of running hooves and suddenly found myself with Sibelius standing on my back like a noisy rucksack.  I didn't want to stand up too quickly and knock him off - a broken leg at this point would have pushed us over the edge- but slowly raising my torso resulted in Sibelius marching up my back to the new highest spot - my shoulders, where he pawed at my head with his front hooves as if to say - lift me to the leaves!  My white T-shirt still has a set of perfect muddy hoof prints.

Now, as we approach the end of day four, Tiberius has started tentatively eating again and the vets have passed the responsibility for his medication over to us.   We have been left with a newfound sense of responsibility for the animals in our care, and a still-raw realisation of the guilt that comes when our errors impact the lives of our herd, who we are very attached to.



Day three, feeling well enough to be a scamp.

Made do and mend

Picture the scene:  It's a beautiful day in early June.  The sun is shining and the only clouds in the sky are the acceptable fluffy white ones as seen in a child's painting (and mine too, to be fair).  The baby bluebirds up in the cherry tree are tentatively sticking their beaks out of the nest box and on the ground the chickens are enjoying a dust bath under the elder. We had spent all morning working on the farm, and now all I fancied doing was sitting in the garden and finishing my book.  I decided it was time to declare the official start of 'summer hammock season', characterised by hours spent in a semi-doze, book open on face and one foot on the floor to rock the hammock like a cradle.  Bliss.

After a sticky 20 minutes spent fighting my way past sawdust, hay bales, bikes and a million almost-empty cans of paint, I finally spotted the edge of the hammock rolled up at the back of the shed. 

Unfortunately for my afternoon plans, when I unrolled the hammock became clear I was not the first to fancy spending a bit of time in it.   Moreover, the unknown critter had enjoyed their hammock experience so much that they had decided to take a large part it back with them to their nest.   It was a sorry sight, with a huge chunk of one corner missing and a hole the size of my head at the other end. I could have worn it as a tabard, but it was no longer any use as a hammock.

The devastation, with Charles for scale, although he's doing a good job of looking guilty.

So, instead of spending my afternoon swinging in the hammock and basking the sun, I spent the rest of the day at the dining table illuminated by the tiny light on my sewing machine.

As far as I could tell the body of the hammock had constructed as follows.  Loops had been made in the fabric at each end of the hammock body.  These were formed by making 3 inch cuts into the material along each end; these flaps were folded in half and stitched to the back of the fabric under a cover strip.  The hanging ropes had been fed through these loops and each rope passed through a hole in a spreader bar  - a strip of wood at each end to hold the fabric open.  It was clear to me that it was going to be difficult to use a completely new piece of fabric for the hammock without undoing the entire structure, ropes, bars and all.  However, as there was an intact strip of hammock fabric adjacent to each of the spreading bars (below), I decided that it would be far easier to just sew a new rectangle of fabric directly to these. 

The down-side of this plan was that I would have to feed a piece of fabric through my sewing machine that was attached to a large strip of wood.  It was for this reason that I spent the remainder of the afternoon in the increasing gloom of our house.  Sewing the new material to the remnants of the old hammock was difficult and slow.  I used a double-thickness of replacement fabric to provide extra strength and managed to shear two sewing machine needles trying to sew this to the thick fabric of the original hammock.

I have added a new hook to the shed so that I can store my lovely 'new' hammock up off the floor, and I'm also planning on rolling it in a bin bag for extra anti-furry-creature security. I may also move the rat poison nearer as a warning.

Unfortunately since repairing the hammock it has rained pretty much constantly while I've been home!

A tale of chickens and poo.

In addition to the five chicks that we successfully hatched ourselves (see hatching our dinner), we were recently offered some six-week old male chickens from a work colleague who had also hatched chickens but was only interested in the ladies.  She was going to dispatch the men, unless we wanted them instead?  Of course we did!  At this point our chicks were still scraps of fluff scuttling around inside a brooder box so we were completely unprepared for dealing with seven ‘teenage’ boys, as were our neighbours! 

That weekend was warm, and even though we drove the chickens home with the air conditioning on full blast, they were showing definite signs of overheating.  When we lifted them out of the cardboard boxes they simply flopped down on the ground looking slightly dazed and panting, or, more alarmingly, lay stretched out on the patio. 

A sweaty chicken

After a few minutes in the cool of the garden, the chickens gradually recovered and started looking more alert.  We had surrounded them with a ring of water containers but the chickens simply huddled together in the centre watching us warily. 

 

Already feeling guilty at this point, we then made a major error.  We knew that these chickens had not really been handled and so assumed that our presence was causing them additional distress in an already confused and unfamiliar period of their lives.  We decided that it would be better for myself and Ian to go inside, leaving the chickens to discover the garden at their leisure.  As we got up leave, followed as usual by Tiberius and Sibelius who had wandered over to be nosey, the chickens panicked, and flapped, and ... flew.  Ah yes, we had forgotten about the whole ‘flying’ thing.  We had previously spent several years living with Indian Runner ducks, some of the least aerodynamic birds in existence, and somehow chickens had been slotted in alongside them as things that could fly in theory but generally won’t.

 

And of course for adult chickens this is generally true.  Adults have large bodies in comparison to their wing span and it takes a lot of effort to become airborne.  They might flap up onto a low branch but sustained flight is rare.  However, adolescent chickens like ours have pretty much adult-sized wings but only one third of their adult body weight.  For them, flying is much easier.

And so it was that we watched the smallest chicken, a little white one, disappear over the fence into next door’s garden. 

Our neighbours have been very tolerant of our growing menagerie, and we’ve always done our best to keep the quacking/chirping/bleating down to acceptable levels (i.e. none), particularly on a Sunday morning.   Back in our runner duck years we often resorted to bringing Sandi Toksvig (the duck not the human) into the kitchen for the night because she developed a habit of quacking loudly whenever it rained; presumably broadcasting the availability of insects.  Unfortunately her delight at finding worms at 4am was not shared by our neighbours and once inside our house, her furious quacking for release meant that we spent the remainder of the night with our heads under pillows. 

More recently, when the ducks were replaced by goats, our garden has become something of a petting zoo, particularly during half-term, and we hope that this goes some way to alleviating the occasional bouts of noise.  Unfortunately our adjacent neighbours do not have children, and therefore we were slightly concerned at their reaction to finding out we had added yet another species to our garden.

We fixed our brightest smiles and knocked on the door.  Hello!  We're really sorry but one of our chickens has just flown into your garden.  The beginnings of an answering smile became a rictus grin.  You have chickens?  Yes we did. We apologised, and explained they would be no trouble at all, apart from the current trouble, in fact we were planning on eating them, so could we come and rescue our chicken from your garden?    You’re going to eat it?  Well not right now obviously.  At this point I felt our neighbour was imagining a scene from a horror film as we chased chickens around the garden with our log splitter.  I  quickly launched into my explanation of our welfare aims.  Really we just wanted to give these cockerels a few additional months of a full and happy life than they would otherwise have had.  Unfortunately as our neighbour helped us chase a panicked chicken around their garden, I felt that we were not being the best advert for our welfare project. However, he seemed satisfied with the knowledge that we were going to dispatch the cockerels as soon as they showed signs of beginning to crow.

We returned our errant chicken to his brood and carefully clipped all their wings.  Actually, here we dispatched our one piece of chicken knowledge and removed the flight feathers from just one wing of each chicken. Clipping both wings means that the chicken can still fly, given sufficient effort and incentive, but clipping just one wing means that the chicken is off-balance and will simply spiral back down to earth (I can’t remember where I read this, but it works).

The next morning we propped open the door of the chicken house (a converted rabbit hutch), so that our newest arrivals could spend the day exploring the garden, and went to work.   

 

I was first to return. 

 

The garden was covered in poo.  Lots and lots of puddles of poo.  Large ones.

 

I was shocked, how could such small chickens be responsible for producing such large volumes of waste?  As I shuffled round the patio with a dustpan, brush and watering can, sweeping up and brushing off as best as I could, I worried about the effect that this would have on the other residents of our garden.  I seemed deeply unfair to let Tiberius, Sibelius and Charles out onto grass that was so liberally covered in drippy muck, yet keeping the chickens inside their house all day did not fit in at all with our welfare aims.  

At this point I noticed two things: the first was that Sibelius had disappeared up the ramp inside the chicken house, and the second was that as Tiberius was following me around he was leaving large drippy pools of diarrhoea.  Ah.  So here was an explanation for the poonami.  It turned out that the goats had spent the day happily eating all of the chicken food and quite a lot of chicken poo, and were now feeling the after effects.

 

We now lock the door of the chicken house as soon as the chickens are out in the morning, much to the disgust of Tiberius and Sibelius, whose sole objective in life is now to gain entry to the chicken house.

 

Spot the chickens...