Thursday 19 May 2011

Cockerel's bad day.

Poor bugger.  Not his fault, but the management has been very poor and he's been rubbing his ladies up the wrong way, so:
RIP Sgt. Hakeswill!  The bowl's a foot across by the way.

He spent 24 hours in a wee (for him) cage, pacing up and down and trying to get back to his ladies, then I went to wring his neck.  Problem was, his neck's as thick as my arm and would not break, so I had to run to the axe block and lop his head off as he was not enjoying his morning at all.  Neither was I.  Poor sod.  Looked like a scene from Brain Dead.  Then I nearly put my back out trying to pull his leg tendons out (I was hanging off the table by his feet!), and was unable to draw him at all without cutting everything out in a gooey mess.  Not by the book, to say the least - which has been the case all along.  Bloody books...  Still, should make a decent coq au vin.

Sgt. Hakeswill "au vin":
Soak for 24 hours in wine and herbs, cook for 4 hours in a cast iron pot (important) in said wine with more herbs, wee onions and sich.  Eat with new spuds after a moments silence with the roughest Bourgogne you can find.

Plan B: rabbits for meat, which I have done before and are easy, and chooks for eggs only.  Might even make a hat.

Pretty piccies time to take yer mind off it all:

 The only use for a monkey puzzle tree: a big sunshade.

 Neat potager with lots of dire dried wee seedlings.

Yum.  Straw's and unpasteurised very yellow cream = a nap after lunch.

Thursday 12 May 2011

A reshuffle

Up at 6:30, in the garden by 7:30am.  Water, sow seeds because nothing has come up again, hunt around for stakes and netting to keep the pigeons and cats off.  Chase cats off the onion seedlings again.  K spends 4 hours just trimming the edges of the veggie beds.  Make lots of wee chicken wire tunnels to keep birds off peas, which the cats like to run down, so chase them off as well.  Wonder why nothing has geminated and work out it's the compost we bought.  Collect 4 barrow loads of horse sh-t from the field.  Oil the gite floor.  Spend forever making a simple shelter for the end of the chicken run because you have to hunt about for nails and screws that are the right size, and lose your gimlet.  I did, however, cut a weird angle perfectly, by hand.  So it's not all doom.  Then water everything, and sit down at 7pm.  Repeat every day for the next 40 years.

We have decided that this is enough to be getting on with and anything else can go and sod itself!  Building, baking, milling, etc, can wait.

Could have done with a photograph but I can't be arsed.