In Case You're Wondering

I'm not dead. I am, however, so over-committed at the moment that simply lying down and going to sleep on the office floor seems like a pretty good idea right now. Wage-slavery has been taking up too many hours for the last few weeks, since I gave up all my existing writing time to a friend who got literally held up on his way back from France - tickets, documents, passports, the lot. Writing has therefore been shifted to patchwork mode, taking up lunch hours and evenings (and early mornings), which is a damned shame but will ease off a bit after Wednesday when I hand my current chapter over to Digiveg.

Family stuff has been moved out of patchwork mode and into doing-what-I-can mode, with apologies to my loving wife. The garden needs lots of time in April also, hence my feeling... stretched. Stretched thin. This makes me tetchy and terse, so I'll apologize and move on - technically I don't have time to write this, and must go. Let's just say that I've been planting-120-potatoes - digging-too-much - holding-transition-initiative-meetings - working-too-hard - putting-up-a-shade-tunnel - cloching-strawberries - writing-about-polytunnels - and - not-getting-enough-sleep.

After Wednesday I'll tell you all about the more interesting bits. But for now, as my apology, let me leave you with a few questions that keep me up at nights.* Answers on a postcard please.

Why do dogs have black lips?

How many farts does it take to fill a biscuit tin?

Why does monosyllable have so many syllables?

Why do the numbers on phones go down while the numbers on calculators go up?

Do daleks have bottoms?

*No, not really. The girls at work made me complete one of those horrid questionnaires in a "ladies' magazine", but when it came to the question After you put your head on the pillow at night, how long does it take you to fall asleep? Is it

• A: 5-10 mins
• B: 10-20 mins
• C: 20-30 mins
• D: longer than 30 mins?

I had to say E: I never remember my head hitting the pillow. Snore....

A Pig in a Lunchtime

"So you grow your own vegetables, then?" asked a colleague just recently, as I was settling down to lunch. I grunted an affirmative, mouth rather too full of salad. "Must be nice," she mused. "I mean beans and that, in the summer. Not much to eat in the winter, though."

Mouth still too full to speak, I opened my sandwich and waved it at her. "What, you've got your own lettuce already?"

Not just lettuce, I mimed; radish, cucumber chutney, lamb's lettuce and a sprig of coriander were all conspiring to make it an extremely interesting sandwich indeed - and I could also have added sorrel, baby chard, carrot, spring onion or chives, egg, mayonnaise or a different chutney to spice things up further. To follow, a pot of stewed rhubarb with a swirl of yoghurt; that's the only fruit we have until the cloched strawberries get going (although the wild strawberries or gooseberries might beat them to it) - but the garden's still a long way from mature. Once our fruit trees are bigger there should still be storage apples to eat in April, along with various dried bits and bobs.

The question is, how far can we go along the microholding route as time goes by? Eggs we have aplenty (the chickens forage under the fruit trees*) and there's a second run for meat birds planned, but one day might we be thinking about (lowers voice lest Witchypoo hear) a pig? The trouble is, I know very little about livestock in general, and nothing at all about pigs. I could visit the library, but what I really want is an overview of small-scale pig keeping written by someone who still remembers what it was like trying to extricate their first weaners from the petunia patch.

Happily, help is at hand courtesy of Rebecca and Dan from Irish Sally Gardens, who have pulled together a lot of the things they wish somebody had told them when they were starting out. After the introduction, their e-booklet Pig Rearing gives some advice about choosing your first piglets before dealing with some common breeds. "It's just like buying puppies responsibly", it says. I do hope not - when I was a kid we bought two spaniel pups, and the cat was never the same after accidentally getting locked in with them that first night. Not to mention the floor...

The Pig Rearing booklet is well-written and concise, and although the legal aspects and supplier lists are specific to Ireland there's more than enough information in there to give you a good idea of what you're letting yourself in for. Dan and Rebecca clearly love their animals, but the advice they give is never less than realistic. I'm so glad I read their e-booklet rather than getting swept away by the enthusiasm of a celebrity-endorsed book from the High Street and finding myself knee-deep in mud and vet's bills, with an unhappy pig to deal with!

There is, it seems, no such thing as keeping a pig; they get miserable and anxious on their own, you see, so you keep at least two (the option of keeping one as a family pet is frankly not on the table, as I know I would never be able to take it to the slaughterhouse). This would mean grubbing up the lawn, and although I know I'll do that some day, my priority will have to be crops and coppice wood rather than piggies. Mind you, if ever I get the chance to lease the field at the end of the Hollow Garden, I shall be down to the local pig breeders in a hurry!

Pig Rearing is available from the Irish Sally Gardens website as a download for €8 for an emailed version, or €10 plus postage for a hard copy.

*Okay, so technically that's between the fruit trees at the moment since none of them top five feet high - but I'm thinking ahead. Work with me here. In two years there'll be a fair bit of shade with interplants of globe artichokes and... other stuff (waves hand vaguely), and in five there'll be a broken canopy of fruit trees and the artichokes will be fighting for their lives. Should be a nice place for chickens!

Daleks, Lava Monsters and the Healing Power of Chickens

One of my earliest memories is of being scolded by my Nan for mining for cybermen in an oversized packet of rice cereal. They were a free gift, you see, hidden in the rice; little cardboard cut-out Dr Who monsters that you could stand up against the diorama printed on the back of the box. There were eight to collect, and I was only missing the cyberman. When Nan found me I had filled all eight cereal bowls and two plant pots with puffed rice, and there was more on the floor than there was in the bowls. I must have been five or six.

So that's my first recollection of the series. Oh, I watched from behind the sofa with the best of them, but it was the marketing hype that made the earliest impression on me. It's been the same with Number Two Son as well; he's been dalek crazy for months now, and when the new season publicity started he was all for being allowed to watch it. But was he big enough? Of course he was, he said in scornful tones. He'd watched the Christmas Special at a friend's house and not got scared once, not even when giant spider lady was on.

Well, I said, we'll see.

So last week all the preparations were made. The programme had been recorded so we could watch it in non-threatening daylight, with a little time left for normality to reassert itself before bedtime. Dinner was served on lap trays in the lounge, breaking our normal rule*, and we were ready to roll VT.

N2S was fine with the earthquakes. He accepted the garish makeup with hardly a quiver. Even the lava monster didn't phase him, although he retreated under a blanket and his little legs ran in the air for a few moments. But when David Tennant spoke to an alien and it responded in a scary computer-processed voice, Number Two Son promptly went into meltdown. The telly went off and there were hugs aplenty, but even Mummy was unable to calm him - so I grabbed him and took him off to see if the chickens had laid any eggs for tomorrow's breakfast (unlikely at six in the evening, but still).

That's the thing about chickens you see, I told him; they may be a bit dim and get overexcited about finding a snail, but they are famously unafraid of any of the monsters in Dr Who. "What, not even daleks?" asked N2S, through approximately a pint of mucus. No, I said, not even daleks. In fact, they chase daleks because they look a bit like chicken feeders, and the daleks run away because they're worried about the chickens pooing on their eye stalks. That got a giggle out of him at last, and within a minute of reaching the chicken run he was walking contentedly up and down with a handful of corn, surrounded by his adoring and ever-hopeful guardians, and not a dalek in sight. Which shows just how good the chickens are at their job.

So there you are; chickens - so much less likely to get you in trouble with your Nan than Dr Who. And by the way, all those years ago it turned out to be another bloody yeti in my cereal box, and not a cyberman, so the whole thing had been for nothing. Sometimes life's like that.

*Eating being the last social ritual** we normally have all our meals together, at a table, with knives and forks and everything. I appreciate this makes us eccentric by today's standards, but I do wonder what's going to happen to people who buy a home with no kitchen, thus condemning themselves to an eternity of microwaved ready meals, when rising oil prices finally make ready meals a thing of the past. I'm thinking toast may still be an option.

**Not counting healings, meditations, sabbats, esbats and cribbage. Obviously.

The Fruit Cage

I’m currently sitting in my car, halfway up a hillside in rural Dorset, in the middle of a heavy hailstorm which is, quite frankly, getting on my tits. It’s cold and noisy. I am incarcerated here for the next ninety minutes, having been asked for a lift by Number One Son (whose laptop this is) to a meeting of his Young Enterprise Group. Now I’m very proud of Aspergers Boy for doing this project, and the group is making their pitch to get into the county finals on Tuesday, so naturally I said “yes, of course I will drive you 30 minutes to the arse end of nowhere, provided you lend me your laptop so that I can get some work done and give me all your chocolate”. I’m still waiting for the choc, without much hope.

The winter before last, you might remember, I busted my baps digging deep manured trenches to plant raspberries - and by last autumn I had the full and undivided attention of a female blackbird. There was no question that it was time to build the planned fruit cage, so I called Rentman, the Hollow’s resident engineer, who very kindly came out to do the welding for me. It was Rentman who had helped me with the initial design (based loosely on the fence surrounding tennis courts), and we diverted surprisingly little from the plan on the day. The structure is made of 1” angle iron. First of all I hammered in the uprights*, then the diagonal supports and the crossbeam went on…

And finally, old electrical cable was passed through the pre-drilled holes to form net supports around the top, half way up the sides, and in a cross over the middle, which is all we had time for that afternoon. Some time later another visiting friend, Fruitbat in Shades, gave Witchypoo and I a hand netting and tensioning the cage, and now all the birds can do is to admire it. Apart from the robin and the bullfinch who found a little gap the other morning and then couldn’t find their way back out again, but nobody’s perfect.

The rationale for making the cage myself was one of cost, since a prefabricated cage was going to cost £450; in the event the ironwork and the netting cost £80 each, and the work of friends was given freely. The cage should easily last a decade, but worryingly Mrs Watch from uphill told me that the netting on their cage fell to squirrels in the first season. Squirrels? I didn’t even know they were interested in soft fruit! Perhaps Mrs Watch’s squirrels are mutants; two heads and a spoon for eating fruit salad. I’m not overly fond of tree rats at the best of times - if they have a go at my cage I might have to Consider Options.

Option 1: repair netting frequently or replace with galvanized triweld mesh.

Option 2: learn to love tinned raspberries.

Option 3: learn to love sautéed squirrel, with a raspberry jus.

* Makes it sound so easy, doesn’t it? And mostly, it was; but given that a 16mm rigid plastic water pipe runs across the garden to supply the temporary irrigation for the edible hedge** it was inevitable what was going to happen. I knew the pipe went across a section of ground four feet wide, so what would be the chance of hitting it with a one inch piece of iron? Thanks to Sod’s Law, the answer is one hundred percent.

**We’re mostly on light sand, so I wanted to irrigate the hedge for the first couple of years until it’s robust enough to stand a few weeks of hot, dry weather. Naturally, in the eyes of the Universe this constitutes a Rain Charm, and thus we haven’t had a dry spell since the pipe went down.

The Chicken Weekend, part 2

You have to understand that this is Dorset. Dorset is the home of skittles, thrown two-handed less ye be branded a tourist; of cream teas with strangely indigestible hard biscuits; of sugar-topped apple cake and Badger Ales. It's also the home of the strange accent sported by fictional pirates since time immemorial, that it be. Oi 'opes you gets the pitcher.

The first poultry auction of the season always draws a crowd up into the valley where it's held, and this year we braved an unseasonal cold snap to visit it for the first time. On my list, four good layers and a broody hen*.

We'd been warned to beware poultry auctions before, so we arrived in good time for a look at the birds before things got started, bouncing up the narrow track to the car park. The birds were outside in cages stacked three deep to form corridors, and I roamed up and down them scribbling down lot numbers and marvelling at how little resemblance the auction programme had to the birds that were actually there. One lot in particular was described as a "Buff Orp Trio", but seeing as the cage actually contained a large and grumpy rabbit I think any puchaser might have waited quite a while for any eggs. N2S was more optimistic. "Wow - it's the Easter Bunny!" So. Chocolate eggs, perhaps. My selection rules were simple. No mucky bottoms (a sign of age or disease); no large pale combs (ditto); bright, alert birds only; glossy feathers and smooth legs.

The auctioneer and his mate inhabited a little roofed booth that, judging from the contortions the pair of them got into when they needed to find a new piece of paper, seemed to be smaller on the inside than it was on the outside - like Doctor Who's tardis, but in reverse. Oh, and instead of hurtling along a blue or red tunnel (signifying passage through time and space) it was half-carried and half-dragged along by the combined efforts of the auctioneer's mate and the scrum of punters around it - a bit like the Flinstones' car except without any wheels. The auctioneer himself stayed wonderfully uninvolved with this communal effort and simply walked slowly in the middle of the whole affair, reminding me of a Roman being carried to the forum in a sedan. Except that there was no way any self-respecting Roman senator would have worn a suit like that. I don't believe hairy green wool suits were ever fashionable in Rome. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Auctioneers' patter is legendary throughout the world. Wherever there are gathered together groups of people competing to buy something of negotiable value, there is a man holding a hammer or a stick who is employed to make a noise that sounds like "HEP-eminay-marshallsay-therapay-HEP-wonwonay-barrabay-bunnyflay", all delivered in the same time it would take anybody normal to say the "HEP", pointing at random people in the crowd until he suddenly fetches the table in front of him a crack with his hitty-thing and pronounces the item SOLD.

This chap was no exception but he had a few additional quirks, such as suddenly and inexplicably turning his back on the crowd and, as his radio microphone wasn't working, continue his banter apparently for the sole benefit of the chickens, who stood silent and bemused. The other was that he sometimes forgot to mention the lot number before getting underway, leaving the crowd asking each other what they were bidding for - until he'd end the lot with a "Can oi sell it? SOLD to the lady with the curly teeth." Some time later I was the proud possessor of four Black Rocks and two Black Marans**, and went to fetch my chicken carriers from the car. Well - chicken boxes. All right, cardboard boxes then.

The boxes suddenly seemed smaller than I remembered. How was I going to fit four armfulls of squawking death into the larger box, being as it was mostly made of sellotape? And even if they did go in, how would my beautiful Marans feel about being inserted into something the size of a shoebox? Thankfully, the auction's chicken wrangler*** was completely unphased by my crappy little boxes and merely grunted something that sounded like "go careful". He reached his hand - his hideously scarred and bleeding hand - into the middle of the Black Rocks and suddenly the whole mess of birds was airborn, limp with surprise, and packed into the box like a jack-in-the-box in reverse. Job done.

When we reached home thirty minutes later we found the birds crouching beak-to-tail and in no particular rush to get out of the box. And in case anyone's wondering, what's the first thing that chickens do when released from a caged environment into a lush, grassy run sheltered from the wind?

Escape, naturally. Happy hunting.

*Aha, but the only bird sold as a "good broody" on the program, a two-year-old Old English Game cross, went for £40 - more than even the fanciest pure-breed pullet. On balance, I think not!

**Or at least I thought that I was. It wasn't until I actually had the birds that I was convinced that I'd been bidding on the right lot.

***Not to be confused with the post of chicken wrangler in the movie business. It being a convention that whenever someone falls into a bale of hay in any context at all two chickens will fly into the air squawking, a Hollywood Chicken Wrangler spends his time crouching behind the hay in question. As soon as the stunt man hits the airbag the wrangler flings his chickens skyward with all his strength, which is a cue for much comedy flapping. The squawking noise is added later by the Chicken Foley Artist.

The Polytunnel Handbook

It's time to 'fess up. It's all gone a bit quiet here at the Hollow, and it's about time I told you all why; it's because I'm busy putting together the text for my first book along with my old mate Digiveg. Yes folks, The Polytunnel Handbook will be published by Green Books in Spring 2009. Excited? I am, but you can't see what I'm doing!

At the moment we're asking people to tell us a little about how they use their tunnels. If you grow artichokes in January, or have a hot-tub in there, we'd like to hear from you. We've prepared a .pdf questionnaire that mails the responses back to us (or if you don't like the sound of that, you can print and post it to our mail handler).

If you have a tunnel and would like to be involved you can download it from Scribd (the download button is just above the image), but if you have trouble you can mail me at cantburp hyphen tunnels at yahoo dot co dot uk and I'll mail you a copy straight back. Oh, and do feel free to spread the word to any other tunnel owners you happen to know - the more the merrier!

The Chicken Weekend, part 1

This last weekend has been all about chickens. As you might remember, back in January I took on four rescue birds from a commercial free-range outfit nearby - and unfortunately things didn't work out as well as I had hoped. One died in the first few days of nothing in particular; one remained sleepy and failed to put on weight at all over several months (called "going light") despite various wormers and tonics; and one had a crooked beak from the off, giving her difficulty feeding. When egg-laying still hadn't picked up by the start of April, I decided to cut my losses and start afresh.

Thus it was that Saturday saw me stride down to the chicken house armed with an axe, a block of wood, two nails, a broom handle, scissors, some string, a hammer, and a determined expression. And no, you don't need all that equipment. It's just that this was the first time I'd killed a bird without using dispatchers, and although I'd picked up some excellent instructions from Rebecca of Irish Sally Gardens I'd also seen a further piece of advice elsewhere that sounded good to me; have a plan B. This particular individual had failed to get a clean kill because she wasn't strong enough, and then realized she had no idea where her axe was. Not recommended.

So, plan A; wring the chickens' necks. Plan B; the broom handle method - also new to me, and therefore - Plan C; block and axe. Just in case, you understand. So before I started, I hammered two nails into the block with a gap between them wide enough for a chicken's neck, but not for a head. This allows you to gently pull the bird's body away from the nails, securing the head and ensuring the bird doesn't move at an unfortunate moment (as happened to Mike the Headless Chicken, for those of a strong stomach).

Right. Capture bird. Grab top of legs firmly in right hand, and bring firmly in to your chest. Capture head in left hand, palm down. Gently extend left arm, turning hand round and tilting chicken's head back (as if they were looking skyward). Pull away with left arm, increasing the force rapidly but smoothly until you feel the neck separate. Let go of head and pinion the wings until the flapping reflex winds down - about a minute. Tie legs with string, hang from handy hook until time to pluck. If you wish to bleed the chicken, then now's the time.

Bird number one - the light one - is no problem at all, in fact the neck breaks so easily it's a wonder she could walk around at all. Bird number two - she of the crossed beak - requires a more serious pull, but is likewise problem-free. Bird number three - the healthiest and heaviest of the trio - is another kettle of fish entirely. Her neck does not break. Thankfully she is clearly stunned, but her eyes are open and blinking. A second pull likewise fails, so it's extremely quickly on to plan B and the broom handle does the job in a heartbeat (rather less fussy, this one; place neck of chicken under broom handle, stand on each end, pull legs until you feel the pop).

Not the most pleasant start to my Saturday, but probably a better start than the birds got! Since they were all for the stock pot I scald-plucked them, and drew them (removed the guts) some hours later. The meat from old layers is still perfectly good to eat, but it's tough and so needs to be moist-cooked long and slow - soups and stews are their natural habitat, and they make excellent stock.

Pluck mode cancel! Pluck mode cancel!

The rest of the day vanished in a blur of weeding and planting, while Witchypoo emptied and scrubbed out the chickenhouse ready for... Sunday's chicken auction!

It's Been A While

Good grief, it's been more than a week since my PC and I had... a little chat. Fear not, the install went fine* and everything is working again. It only took a day, although I spent a further six unsuccessful hours trying to get a mixed-media network up and running. Oh well, one for a rainy day.

Since then I've been spending every hour the gods allow me - and a few that they haven't - in the garden, trying to get on top of things before the weed explosion that the warmer weather will bring. The fruit cage and chicken tractor are finished, and the beds are all ready to go (except the beds for the maincrop potatoes, which can wait). I've also been poking around the research for my book again, prompted by the first tentative "are things coming along all right?" from the publishers. The polytunnel is emptying out of winter vegetables at about the same rate that I'm filling it up with seeds and starts, and it's around this time of the year that I gulp with terror at the prospect of continuing to build infrastructure while the merry-go-round of growth picks up speed.

Deep breath, hand on wallet, and swing onto one of the painted horses as she passes by, and...

...whee!

* Relatively speaking, which is to say that everything now works and no-one died in the process. Windows XP was easy, but Service Pack 2 was a whiny little bitch that needed nursing and a pedicure before she would finally run - and then there were the endless updates. Once those had finally finished, the major apps such as Zone Alarm and AVG went in (taking the computer back out of quarantine) and various Microsoft behemoths, and then I got onto the actual useful stuff, all of which is non-Microsoft. This caused XP to throw seven sorts of fit.

"Warning! This certificate is unsigned and therefore not Microsoft! Do you want to let this software install whatever sleazy porn-peddling piece of shit it cares to dump into your registry (Y/N)?"

Y

"Zone Alarm warning: Microsoft Word is trying to act as a server, presumably to alert Bill Gates about the non-MS software you are attempting to install. Allow your frickin' word processor to tattletale about this attempt to thwart MS world domination (Y/N)?"

N

"Windows XP: Microsoft Word has encountered a serious error and needs to close down. She may never run again and, frankly, I'm not surprised given how you spoke to her. Do you recycle your Valentines Cards too, you cheap bastard (Y)?"

Finally there were the little surprises that always happen at the end of the installation; printers not seen, USB devices no longer supported, .dll files mysteriously Shanghaied with a bag over their heads and a startup sequence so long that two cups of coffee were needed while XP loaded up. Nothing that a packet of caffeine tablets and a book entitled How to Swear in Eighty-Seven Languages couldn't get me through. Coming up next - tweaking XP to get some real speed out of it!