The Hedgehog

As you know we wage a never-ending war against possums, rats, rabbits, etc. And the humane cage I talked about earlier has been great for catching these destroyers of vegetables and fruit and roses.

But now it has reached into unknown territory. The above photo is of its latest victim – a hedgehog. A hedgehog, moreover, with a taste for roses. The picture below is of my prized coffee-colored rose bush at half its size from the night before. The hedgehog was caught by the trap which had been placed right next to the roots of the rose.

The problem is that I am a product of my times and so is Dan. We were both avid readers of the Mother West Wind series of children’s books when we were children ourselves.  Said books included stories of cuddly, cute little, you guessed it, hedgehogs!

As if that weren’t bad enough. Beatrice Potter took my heart with her hedgehog stories and drawings. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for the trapped hedgehog, I have been reading these stories to my grandchildren.

The upshot is that neither Dan nor I could bear the thought of killing this cuddly little rose destroyer. 

So Dan lugged the cage down to the quarantine paddock which backs on a bit of wood and freed the hedgehog. Was she grateful? Did she sprint gleefully for greener pastures/wood? Nope. She remained stubbornly in the cage refusing to move.Time passed but she didn't. Finally Dan dumped her unceremoniously out on the ground and left her. My little Mother West Wind reader has grown up. I wouldn’t want to be the next hedgehog we catch.

This is a view of the market garden early, early in the morning. I had gone down there to do one of my periodic snail sweeps. Imagine my surprise when I found nary a single shell! I remember the first sweep when I captured (and fed to the chickens) well over 400 of the little devils. I assume the chickens remember it as well.

So I wandered puzzled through the garden and its surrounds until I was startled (I almost had a heart attack) by Harvey the Duck. First off, I had forgotten all about him. Second, I had assumed that after all his traumas he had scampered off to foreign climes. Well, there he was larger than life. I mean that literally. He is huge. I know where all the snails have gone and probably every other living creature in the area. 

He was not pleased to see me but he is so obese that I could have grabbed him before he waddled off into the brush if I had not been so surprised. As it was he made his getaway and I have taken ‘snail hunting’ off my calendar. No need for any more early morning raids.

Just for the fun of it, I have included 2 pictures of tomato plants. The first is planted over the carcass of a possum. The others were possum-deprived. Yet another reason for those possum traps.

Til next time!

Cat Trap

 

There are a lot of feral cats in New Zealand. Our farm has more than its share. As you know, I am a cat lover and I hate to see these scrawny animals slinking around unloved, unfed, and alone.

So when I found a wee gray kitten scarfing down the premium cat food from Smudge’s bowl, I tried – in vain – to make a friend and thereby adopt a second cat. Smudge was not in favor of this and made her obligatory hissing noises while standing at attention as the kitten eyed her nervously.

Well, the kitten hung out with us for a few hours and then disappeared. I saw it again near the barn and tried again to make friends. No deal! So I went to Dan. He knew of an extremely expensive cat trap that would humanely trap the cat thus enabling me to perhaps tame the kitten. At worst it would help us corral the other feral cats and get them off the farm. And, yes, I did have a plan for their removal. I was going to drive them to the SPCA and they could try to find homes for them.

I don’t know if the plan would have worked or not. I never had the chance to find out. As you can see by the picture, the “cat” trap only trapped rats. So far we have gotten 5 rats in 5 days. Can’t do better than that! We are ecstatic here. We’ll trade feral cats for disgusting rats any day.

 

By the way, this picture of Smudge is while she is watching the rat in a trap which is located just underneath the window of my grandson’s bedroom. This window is next to the pipe that leads  up to my rooms. Perhaps now the rat convention in the eaves over my head will stop. I can only hope – and rebait the trap.

Eggs. Eggs. Eggs

 

When I was younger – much, much younger – I thought  all eggs were clear whites and pale yellow yolks. When I got to New Zealand I was thrown by all these bright, bright yellow scrambled eggs. Little did I know that eggs were supposed to look that way.

I present to you one of the 7 or so eggs we get each day from our totally chilled chickens. They scratch happily around the paddocks after their morning feed of horrendously expensive seeds, have a morning tea break of our breakfast scraps (without egg bits; might have been a relative), an afternoon tea of more scraps and then a night feed of more seeds.

This keeps them near home, docile (no pecking or scratching at me) and producing wonderful eggs. And therein lies the problem. They keep on laying; day after day after day. I don’t much like eggs and won’t eat more than 2 a week, add about 4 for baking and I only consume about a day’s worth of production. What do we do with the other 6 days at an average 7 eggs a day? We try to feed them to the kids.

This hasn’t worked out too well. They are up to their eyeballs in eggs and have staged a mass revolt. What do you do when a 1 year old, a 3 year old, and a 5 year old revolt? Not too much. Remember, these ages are not known for their rational interchanges. Pretty much they stick to the basics.

“NO!”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I want something else.”

“NO!”

Yael and Dan try to eat their share and more but we are still left with several dozen a week. We can’t sell them; legal constraints. We can’t eat them. None of us can stomach even the thought of yet another egg salad lunch. So we give them away.  Now these are great eggs from great chickens. Organic feed, no supplements, no hormones, no additives. Just great  eggs. And they are free! So why have our friends started edging away as we come up with yet another carton of eggs? I don’t know. If I can ever catch up with them, I’ll ask them.

Losses

We seem to have been on a losing streak lately. Stone Tree Farm is reeling from its losses. The little lamb in the middle there is still mourning her lost ram twin and I am sure the flock as a whole is grieving as they ponder the disappearance of 5 ram lambs and 1 fat, barren ewe. On the plus side, the lamb chops are delicious.

We ended up having one of our Angus steers converted to meat as well. It was pretty horrific. We had him with our neighbor's freezer bound steers in our holding paddock and those steers were beyond wild. They broke our fence, raced over a mile down the main road, terrorized the owners of a horse farm, and managed to gouge, cut and maim our steer in the process. He was too badly injured for recovery so when the butcher returned, our steer went as well. (I use the word 'return' because the butcher and his assistant had tried to help Dan corral the steers but finally said that the steers were too wild for them and left). Our poor neighbor came back from work to angry horse owners, dazed Dan, and destruction. Loss: 1 steer.

This is one of my deeply-adored roses. See what has happened to it? Birds, that's what. I keep it covered with netting at night and when I'm away from the farm but the birds peck right through. New Zealand is really, really tough on gun ownership but if I show the authorities this picture perhaps I could get a license and hide out in the garage waiting for my marauding birds. Below is a picture of a rose bush they have not yet demolished. Note the difference.

Loss: 2 rose bushes.

And finally, the loss that has hurt me the most. I was pretty torn up by the end to our gentle steer but yesterday one of my egg-laying pals got too adventurous and stuck her neck in the possum trap. Rest in peace, my friend.
Loss: 1 chicken.

Until next time.

The Great Duck Debacle

When I was in grade school we had a positive deluge of "thinking" arithmetic problems that went something like this:

John and Mary had twin boys. They decided to drive with their new twins to visit family. The trip usually took 7 hours. John filled the car with 19 gallons of gasoline. How far did they travel?

I never had a clue about any of them. If you are staring bemusedly at the above problem, you know how I felt. So bear with me as I try to explain our great duck debacle. Hopefully, it will make more sense that the math problems.

We went to a nearby duck farmer who grows duck eggs commercially. For obvious reasons he didn't have much use for male ducks. Most he sold to Chinese restaurants in Auckland but he saved out 10 prime ones for us. We bought them and took them to the market garden. They escaped from the market garden. Well, 9 did. One we had already  dispatched to make us a duck dinner.

So here we have 9. Then 2 drowned!! Now we have 7. Dan and Yael had been very busy and had not had time to kill the others so the ducks had pioneered their way up to the pond and had settled in nicely. Several weeks later, Dan and Yael hike up to the pond to dispatch the remaining 7 ducks. Several hours later, they are soaking wet, irritated, and clutching 6 droopy ducks.

These ducks are killed, plucked, and two are cooked. The other 4 are in the freezer. The ducks on the table smell great with my patented orange juice and honey glaze. Strangely, no one seems very hungry. Dan eats corn flakes, Yael pushes the meat around and leaves it on the plate. I (who had carefully not watched when the ducks were killed) ate well. The kids decided they didn't like duck. They never tried it. So I had 2 ducks that I consumed over the next few ducks.

Now if you have done your math, you know that we still have one duck unaccounted for. Sort of. The last any of us ever saw of him, he was waddling purposefully down our driveway headed toward the duck farmer's place. I hope he made it.

Til next time.

Chaos

There has been so much happening that I don' know where to start. So I guess I'll start with explaining this picture. The sheep are in the shearing yard waiting to be shorn, de-tailed, and castrated. The 2 steers are curious. Our 3rd steer is staying far, far away. I think he knows what's next.

What's next is cutting out the rams, non-producing ewes, fat ewes, etc. and 1 steer (the one that doesn't seem curious at all) and moving them down to the quarantine paddock where they wait for the home kill truck to come and turn them into dinners. Hopefully, a lot of dinners.

The sheep move placidly to their fate. So does our steer. One of our neighbors has decided to piggyback onto our home kill (a common practice; we've done it ourselves) so he wants to move a steer in with ours. Doesn't happen. His steer resents it - mightily - and Dan, the shearer, his dogs, and our neighbor all end up with 2 of the resentful steer's buddies in our paddock with him.

Dan is none too happy. The steer is "wild, very wild" and most of his morning has been spent trying to get him into the paddock. But worse lies ahead. The next morning Dan goes down to oversee the home kill (I never go near it; I want to enjoy my meat without the memories). He doesn't come back for, like forever. When he does, he is shaking he is so upset.

It turns out that the wild steer and his wild buddies broke down the paddock fencing, raced around terrifying our steer and  bolted out the paddock down the driveway, down the gravelled road and a full kilometre away to the main road. In the process they tear up some horse paddocks (Dan says the woman there was semi-hysterical and was not placated by his explanation that these weren't his steers). The home kill guy and his assistant were gamely racing around trying to help.

The neighbor had gone to work all unaware of the drama unfolding behind him. He was mortified when he heard about it but Dan was not into any blame game.  It wasn't his fault; it just happens. A wild steer is a fearsome thing and these had literally charged Dan and the home kill team. They finally got them back into the neighbor's paddock but it was too late for the home kill guy to do his thing. They couldn't manage to separate out our poor steer (Dan and Yael tried several times) and he was left bewildered and bleeding from the other steers' horns and the barbed wire.

Here is where a bit of explanation is needed. Yes, we raise the steers to be killed and eaten. They aren't pets, they're food. But, and it's a big BUT, we want them to have as good a life as possible while they are our responsibility. This means free ranging, never shutting them in dark, dank stalls, real grass to eat and fresh water to drink. We use no hormones, chemicals, etc. on them and generally speaking they are calm, gentle giants who die without any trauma. They literally never know what hit them. And that's the way we like it. So when a steer we raised from a youngster for over a year and half is mauled about like ours was, it is painful for us as well as him.

Dan wanted to take him back into our paddocks and let him recover but he was too beat up and so the home kill guy came back 2 days later and put him out of his misery. For those 2 days we tried vainly to get near him to assess his injuries, etc. but we could tell that it was just adding to his stress so we finally just went down there several times a day to be with him.

All in all, a very miserable week on the farm. And I'm not done yet. Stay tuned!