The Idler

A Country Diary: 58

THERE’S BEEN more death on the farm. The fox came back and took all the hens, leaving only the young cockerel, who now wanders around lone and forlorn, with only pigs, a rabbit and the cats for company. Often I see him hanging around by the gate to the pigs’ enclosure, as if chatting to the pigs. he has started to practice cock-a-doodle-dooing, and hasn’t yet quite got the hang, but his squawky attempts are touching to hear. We suspect also that one of the rabbits has disappeared, Lizzie Molly Flower Fast Bunny. She’s not been seen for over a week, and I remember seeing a buzzard hanging around about a week ago. It was sitting on the wire but flew off when I approached. I imagine it was deliberately hunting poor Lizzie. This leaves the remaining bunny, Felicity, without company, although yesterday I did see a local wild rabbit sitting in the middle of the yard. Maybe he had come a-wooing? So the back yard, which used to be so lively in the early evenings, when all the animals would come out and sit around with each other, is now bereft. It is a very hard thing to lose all those animals. Not only because you had come slightyl attached to them, but also because somehow the deaths make you feel like you have failed as a smallholder. Certainly, the systematic chicken removal made me want to bring back hunting. What’s wrong with hunting? We need to keep these dastardly foxes away from our food sources. At school in the ukulele class, I asked the kids foradvice. “Get yourself a shotgun licence,” suggested one ten-year-old. Good advice, I thought. I quite fancy a shotgun. Now I have proved to be successful at killing mice with an air rifle (yes, I know they were in a barrel, but still) I feel like an upgrade might be in order.

THE PIGS have presented no real problem. In fact, as animals go, they couldn’t be easier. They just need feeding and watering twice a day. The difficulty is the amount of food to give them. Certainly they have had a varied diet: nettles, the tops of roots, cabbage leaves, pig nuts, rolled barley, maltings from the brewery, all our scraps, plums, acorns, large quantities of apples (there are so many apples around right now, at the homes of friends that it makes me wonder why we ever buy them). But they always seem extremely hungry when we feed then. And do they perhaps look just the teeniest, tiniest bit scrawny? Perhaps that’s just their way. They’ve got about a month to go, so perhaps now is the time to start really piling it on, to get that nice layer of fat.

THE TOMATOES have been a disaster, as usual. I don’t know why I bother. I spent the whole summer watering them, feeding them, training them, tying them to their poles. And now they reward me with a handful of small green tomatoes per plant. I brought them in to ripen, on a piece of string tied in front of the kitchen window, but they seemed instead just to rot. So we gave them to the pigs. Never again. Not unless I have a greenhouse. Or maybe some outdoor ones in the veg patch that will look after themselves.

ELSEWHERE I would say the following: leeks good, very good. Some are ready to eat. The parsnips look healthy and I will start digging them up in a couple of weeks time. I have ten Brussells sprouts plants on the go. They are looking vigorous but perhaps not very tall. But then perhaps they have another couple of months to go. Little sprouts are beginning to form. Strawberries: never again. I’m going to dig them up and plant them wild around the treehouse and just forget about them. They occupy all that space all year and then when they do start producing, they are all stolen or hollowed out by pesky creatures.The French climbing beans were all right and so were the courgettes. In fact, there are still courgettes coming from the plants. Dead easy. I’ve just sowed a load of lettuce so maybe that will work. I put a window frame on legs over the patch as a kind of cloche. The chard, which is dotted around the place, is growing fine and there are patches of rocket here and there. The horseradish looks huge. There are four broccoli plants which look very miserable follwing severe caterpillar attack, but I hope they’ll make it. The nasturtiums are still in flower and producing hundreds of seeds, so I will leave those to self-seed next year. Nasturtiums are a delight: the easiest thing in the world. I’ve been spreading horse manure, chicken manure and straw over the beds. Maybe with another good mulch in spring, this will be enough to maintain the fertility. The apsargus patch looks very miserable indeed: four spindly wisps have survived and there is no sign of the other six crowns I planted earlier in the year. Time now to make a seed order and get those broad beans into the ground. My other plan is to go much bigger on herbs and keep more herbs in the front garden, particularly parsley. You would have thought she’d have been quite pleased with the endless supply of marjoram, mint, fennel, sage, camomile and chives but no, that’s not enough, she wants more, more, more. Women, never happy, eh?