I hope it has been as sunny there as it has been here in London – it was bitter when G and I arrived, but a few days with the stove going help to take off the evening chill while the spring sunshine warms up the days.

We have had house-sitting problems. We had to leave to come back to London and work at the beginning of November, and left the house in the care of a young man we shall just call BGW. BGW was clearly a troubled young man, and despite instructions, he never managed to master the stove. So, come December, when it started to get really cold, he abandoned ship. For three weeks in January, the house was cared for by a lovely Australian couple, who kept it warm, cut the hedge and mended the burst pipes – but at the end of the month, took up the offer of a house-sit in Lanzarote. Who can blame them.

So for the last few weeks it’s been empty, and we’ve left the hens unattended. We give them food and water, and have a light-operated gadget which opens and closes their door, and they seem to have survived. In fact, not only have they survived, they’ve been laying eggs all through this freezing weather. I go over as often as practical to clean out their run, collect the eggs and top up the feeder, but it’s not at all satisfactory. We are still looking for the right house-sitter(s), and I’m working on better designs for a fully-automatic, free-range poultry system: my summer project being to build it!

But it is, it is.  Instead of getting a bit of lettuce from the bottom of the fridge and washing off the slimy rotten bits, we pick a fresh one from the garden and rinse the earth off the roots. I’m now beginning to wonder whether it would be worthwhile sowing seeds even if I did get round to it.

the lettuce bed- with red oakleaf, green batavia and the odd weed...

an unidentified nest with a ball of unidentified chicks....

I have been trying to figure out how many birds’ nests there are… lying awake in the dawn this morning, listening to the cacophony.  I think there are at least two just outside our bedroom (that’s as well as the bats); and there’s two or three more in parts of the rest of the house. So, half a dozen in or on the fabric of the house itself. Then in the stables block (which contains the bar) I’ve come across at least two more, one of which is the swallows we watch swooping around and in and out of the bar. But that’s only the ones I’ve actually seen; I haven’t been actively searching for them.  And in the trees and bushes in the garden there must be dozens more. The birds live here; we are only interlopers.

Unfortunately, it is not just the birds who live here. We also have mice, moles and rats. The mice would be properly controlled by a good mousing housecat, who would also either eat or scare off most of the birds, so we put poison down a the end of the summer and tolerate, with annoyance, the mess they cause.  The moles are a real pain, mainly for the tunnels they make which, when they collapse, turn once-smooth ground into lumps and furrows. The rats don’t usually come into the house (although a couple of years ago we found a drowned one in a toilet cistern: horrible, but a satisfying explanation for a smell that had  had me very worried about the state of the plumbing), but are a consequence of keeping chickens. I haven’t actually seen them, but there are suspicious holes in the vegetable patch where the chicken run was first positioned.  I don’t know whether we should plan to eliminate them with traps and poison, or work out a peaceful co-existence. My inclination is the latter; but rats generate strong emotions….

Swallows' nest in the bar - with parents perched nearby

The swallows in the bar have hatched; the nest is now too crowded for the adults so they sleep perched
a few inches away on the electrical conduit that serves the light-fitting supporting the nest.  This is, for us, a less stressful time; although the birds do get alarmed when we go into the bar, they’re not going to abandon their chicks, and we can watch them feed. In a week or two they’ll have fledged; and then we’ll see the nest really crowded, four or five little black tails over the side (and a mound of swallow-poo on the floor below). Before we know it,  the family will be off for the winter….

Lunch was superb. We started with an aperitif,  five small dishes accompanied by a selection of home-made drinks, including a delicious rose and rhubarb wine, a caramel wine, and a rum punch. “And”, not “Or”. Then a starter – the only course for which a choice was offered – followed by guinea-fowl, cheese and dessert. This does not do justice to the presentation or the quality of the cooking: predominantly traditional French, but with a creative and apt use of spcies. Cumin seeds in the glazed carrots, coriander in the buttery roast potatoes.

Wine, the aperitifs and coffee were all included in the fixed-price of €28. Even after a walk of the best part of eight miles, none of us much feels like eating supper.

It’s cold, sunny, and windy; ideal walking conditions. The harvest has just started, as barley fields were standing when we went out and rows of straw on our return.

Fingers crossed, though, it looks as though we will get some tomatoes this year! We’ve already got a couple of them ripening. The weather has been great: hot, a lot of the time, but no really long dry spells since April. Yesterday was cold and wet; today it’s bright and breezy, and the dry wind will help keep the blight at bay. There are lots of green fruit, and if they all ripen  before the blight (some hope) it will be a bumper crop.

The broody gaol....

Our Light Sussex pullet has gone broody for the second time this year, barely a week after coming fully back into lay the last time. It rather damages the relationship between us: we go off her because she’s not laying, and she goes off us because we keep turfing her out of the nest box and from the pot egg she is so valiantly trying to hatch.

I’ve heard a number of different tips for getting them to stop being broody. There’s the broody gaol, which is a draughty wire cage with just enough water and food but nowhere comfy. More drastic is the iced water treatment: you dunk her undercarriage into a bucket of iced water a couple of times a day. I can see her really loving that! Someone else suggests that you sit her on an icepack. The theory is to cool her down. Last time we just turfed her out of the nest box once the others had laid.

Anyway, it’s coop-cleaning day today so she’ll be turfed out anyway. I might try putting an icepack into the nest-box in the day-time; she won’t want to sit on that.