My kindling cutting “helpers”

Posted by louisa on Sunday 2 October 2011 in chickens, wood stuff | 3 comments

I had some company while cutting the kindling this morning.

Lily was taste-testing each stick as it came off the axe.

“Mmm, bit of a woody flavour.”

And a few minutes later, after Lily had gone into a sulk because she’d heard the fake camera click of my phone (she HATES all cameras for some reason), Lime the chicken came to see what was going on too — the first time she, or any of the chickens, have visited the top level of the garden, which is three flights of stairs away from the chicken coop/run.

She watched me chopping some kindling for a bit but she was more interested in John cutting wood in the woodstore though and spent ages stood behind him, head cocked to one side and making the occasional clucking noise, as he sawed up some logs. She seemed to have no interest in any of the many edibles on that level, just wondering what us crazy humans were up to. :)

(Appalling camera phone pics, sorry for the quality.)

A few quick links to elsewhere

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 8 June 2011 in meta | 0 comments

Having a busy (and rainy) day today so no time for a proper post but just time for some links that might interest you a little self-promotion ;)

• After the brief discussion about composting teabags the other week, I did a bit of research about which brands/types contain synthetic fibres (polypropylene) and posted the results on Recycle This. In brief, stapled gusset ones are polypropylene-free but you might have to remove the staple/string. All the rest are heat-sealed and contain polypropylene – the teabags should break down and the synthetic fibres “disappear” into your compost, but it’s up to you whether you want it in there.
• I’ve very much enjoyed Rachel‘s recent tours of her village and garden, and planned to do my own of the awesome woods behind our house (and maybe beyond). But I forgot to take my camera when we’ve gone on long walks around the woods recently and since Lily sprained a leg last week, our recent walks have been shorter. On Friday, we just walked the “lower loop” as we call it, through the horses’ field. I did take pictures of that though so stage 1 of my tour: John & Lily in the horses’ field.
• And those who enjoyed the book pictures a few weeks ago may like my Venn Diagrams of my favourite books.

Camping in Cumbria

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 May 2011 in admin | 3 comments

Apologies for the lack of posts of late – we had four days camping planned for over the weekend and I spent Thursday preparing the garden for four days by itself, so was too tired to post that evening. I’d hoped that I’d come back with lots of post ideas – frugal holidays! ace walks! foraging! exciting stories of catching our dinner flyfishing! – but it didn’t quite work out as planned… We had one fine evening but after the 24 hours of constant rain and strong winds that followed, we decided enough was enough and came home.

We’d been wanting to try camping for a while – neither of us had been camping for more than a decade but it seemed cheap, Lily-dog friendly and could be somewhere pleasantly remote (three things we like in holidays). A couple of weeks ago, back when it was still sunny and warm, I booked us into Low Wray campsite in the Lake District, using Eurocamp. It would have cheaper to have booked directly with the campsite but since it was our first time, we decided to go with Eurocamp — it’s the camping equivalent of renting a fully equipped self-catering cottage and meant we didn’t have to buy a whole load of equipment for an experimental, possibly-one-off trip.

Low Wray is a lovely woodland site – right next to the lake on the Western shore, about four miles south-ish from Ambleside, surrounded by grazing land. It’s owned by the National Trust and aside from the (newly refurbished) toilet blocks & gravel paths for cars, it does feel like you’re camping in a copse in the middle of nowhere. There are some lakeside pitches, some woodland ones (including some pretty remote/hidden ones and the Eurocamp block) and some more meadowland ones (including a tipi field). A really nice place – and I would recommend it if you like camping.

Chickens and dogs & cats

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 27 April 2011 in chickens | 9 comments

A few people have asked me – offline and on – about what our dog and cats think of the chickens – and what the chickens think of them.

The dog

I won’t deny it – their relationship was a little fraught at first. Lily-dog was very excited by the hens – and if let into the airlock (the space between the enclosed run and the rest of the garden), she would grunt & nose the chicken wire looking for a weakness. The chickens would squawk and flutter away, which made her even more excited – she doesn’t tend to chase things unless they run from her, then game on. I took her in to meet them a couple of times: I’d have her on a very short leash and she would be fine with them – sniffing the birds and their poo piles on the floor – for a while, then would bolt at them and I would very quickly eject her from the run. I had to make sure she was firmly behind a locked gate before I let the chickens loose in the garden, even in their portable run because she’d nudge at it with her nose. I suspect she’d wouldn’t have known how to undo the feathery wrapping if she had ever got hold of one but I don’t doubt she’d have given it a good chewing to find out.

Lily is generally a very gentle dog though so I hoped that in time, she’d settle down – and she has. There has been a definite “friends not food” shift over the last few weeks – I’m not sure what caused it (familiarity? boredom? being called a bad girl for bolting?) but she doesn’t seem to have any interest in chasing them any more.

A few months ago, this scene would have scared the heck out of me:

But you know why she’s looking at them like that? it’s because they’re in the way:

She wanted to run down the path to the beck and they were hogging the steps – she ran by as soon as the path was clear.

She’ll sit in the run while I’m cleaning the coop out and hardly even deign to look at the feathered ones – just happy to be next to me (there is nothing like a dog with separation anxiety to make you feel like the most special person in the world). When they’re loose in the garden, she’ll watch them more closely – but as if she’s doing me a favour, being a watchful hen-nanny, rather than a predator (this is typical of her – she tattle-tails on the cats if they’re scratching somewhere they shouldn’t).

And what of the chickens – what do they think of the round hound? They divide into two camps – the brave ISA Browns (Lime, Green & Blue) on one side and the more flighty girls on the other. The brave bunch don’t bat an eyelid around her – as the picture above kinda shows. The other four keep out of her way – stay on the other side of the run while she’s in there, or jump up onto a perch – but they’re not freaked out and squawking, which I think helps Lily stay calm too.

The cats

Almost from day one, the cats have been indifferent towards the chickens when they’re in their run or thereabouts. They can’t easily be food and they aren’t a threat, so who cares? When they’ve seen them loose in the garden, they’re a bit more interested but about three seconds after I took that picture, Boron had a bit of a wash and wandered away – not exactly fixated.

(Boron was once feral but once he no longer had to hunt to survive, he quickly gave up that pursuit. He is about ninety-hundred years old now and had to have his teeth removed because of gum problems so I don’t really worry for the chickens’ safety when he’s around.)

Our neighbours have cats too – and one of the them, a giant fluffy tom cat called Daisy, often sits about 6ft from the run, watching the chickens through the fence. He’s got the youthful vigour and muscle to do more damage than Boron but I think he just likes Chicken TV — a few weeks ago, he and his brother suddenly appeared when two of our chickens were loose in the garden. I saw their eyes widen but, like with ours, they realised it wasn’t worth the effort when there was some already bitesized, feather-free meat pieces in a dish in their house. Meat that can’t do this if cornered:

So in summary, the cats & dog couldn’t really care less about the chickens – I’m not sure I’d leave any of them locked in the run with the chickens for an extended period of time but they’re happy enough pottering around the garden together, and I’m happy enough with that.

Do you have other animals as well as chickens? How do they get along?

Spending in no spend week: week 2

Posted by louisa on Monday 27 December 2010 in anti-consumerism, frugal | 6 comments

I’m having an extended no spend week – starting a fortnight ago, lasting until the end of the year. It was a bit of an impromptu decision to start but I’ve found it very interesting, and these weekly summaries very useful. I’m going to continue tracking spending like this in the new year, but probably off line rather than on here all the time.

Lily-dog has been the cause of most of my expenses one way or another this week – she had a spot of food poisoning. Pets are expensive, there is no doubt about that, but for me, they’re worth it. If I could only have one luxury in life, it would be them.

This week’s spending:

• £6.20 at the laundrette washing and drying our duvet after Lily threw up a lake of vomit onto it one night – hurrah for machine washable duvets! It wouldn’t fit into our washing machine though – and even if it had fitted inside, the water inlet was frozen shut so I had to take all the bedding to the laundrette. It would have £11 for a service wash (which would have had it ready within 48hrs) but it only took an hour so wasn’t worth the extra cash. Like the boiler last week, this one was a not-quite-an-emergency but something that would have to be looked at sooner or later, would be more difficult next week and would make our lives a little more difficult (colder!) in the meantime.
• £56.55 at the vets with Lily. By Tuesday, she was into day four of the poops – much brighter in herself and running around more but still poopy – so we decide it would be best to get her checked for obstructions etc before it got into the Christmas period – when vets would be harder and more expensive to visit. While clearly improving, she was still running a temperature so the vet advised to go for some antibiotics & a sensitive-belly diet. Both helped a lot and she’s fine and dandy again now.
• £12 on a meal out with friends on Friday night. Curry + naan + rice + tarka daal = mmm. Like last week’s spending in the pub, it was a socialising expense – a group of us who usually have curries together including a few people we hadn’t seen in a while.
• I also had fish & chips last Monday lunchtime but John & Strowger bought that for me. ;)

From my exceptions:

• £64.86 on two bags of 15kg dog food (a special type of food, her normal stuff not sensitive stuff though and it’ll last 3 months) – again, if I’d planned to have a no spend period, I’d probably have bought this in advance but I didn’t so didn’t.
• Fresh food top up at the supermarket – mostly meats & cheese to cook with over the long weekend, more than normal as we had guests for two days.

I thought I’d spend money on bus fares but was feeling ill so didn’t go to a rehearsal.

My biggest temptation this week has been all the starting early January sales – lots of “save up to 50%!!!” emails dropping into my inbox. I’m using them as a reminder to unsubscribe from their mailing lists.

I also finished reading a wonderfully delightful book (Good evening Mrs Craven and other war time stories by Mollie Panter-Downes) and wanted to read more of her work – but instead of just buying it, I started a list of books to look out for – to buy new, find used or borrow at some later time.

Just a few days left of my no spend “week” now. I’m trying to decide how to incorporate conscious no spending periods into my life… What do you do? A no spend day each week? Regularly no spend days? Limited budget? Limited transactions?