Lakin Farm

Alex Salmond, the First Minister, came to the island today to visit various places including the GP Practice where Ruth is Practice Manager. Ruth organised the visit and it went very well.

The kids from the local school, including John Luke, went along to cheer Alex when he arrived.

He spent quite a long time chatting to the kids and was keen to answer their questions.

John Luke asked him how much he was paid, to which he replied “As First Minister you get paid loads”. Then John Luke asked how much photographers were paid. The two photographers who were there said they did it for the love of the job and not for the money.

John Luke said “I don’t want to be a photographer then!”.

One of the other kids asked how big the First Minister’s bed was. Alex said it was a huge bed. This caused much laughter.

Three of the kids were supposed to be competing in a speaking competition on the mainland, but were unable to go because the ferry had been canceled due to windy weather.

When Alex heard this he asked whether it would be possible to hear the pieces they were going to perform.

So the kids got to do their performances after all. Just not to the audience they were expecting.

This morning Ruth collected four more chickens from a local farm.

The new arrivals are in the process of molting and are therefore not laying eggs. This means we will be feeding them for a couple of weeks before they start laying.

This is no problem for us, as it means we got the birds for just a few pounds each.

John Luke and Abigail went with Ruth to collect the birds. Abigail chose one of the chicken because it had fully molted and looked ‘fluffy and brown’. The problem with this early molter (so Ruth was told) is that it wont be a good egg producer.

Our two existing chickens have not taken to the new birds very well. Our cockerel is a bit of a bully, so John Luke and I have clipped his spurs to stop him doing any damage to the new birds.

I read in a our chicken book that instead of clipping you can stab pieces of raw potato onto the spurs.

After a couple of days the potato (with the sharp bit of the spur inside it) falls off. Plus, with two lumps of potato on his feet, your cockerel is less inclined / able to pick a fight.

To minimise aggro, we should have introduced the new birds at night when the other birds were roosting.

In preparation for the new girls, I spent a day adding an extension to our chicken house.

John Luke helped me with the final touches this morning, and thinks the new bit will be much easier to clean out than the old part of the house.

We have already pulled out most of the insides of the old part of the house to make it easier to clean, but it still a nightmare.

In fact it is such a poorly designed house we were thinking of building a completely new one.

We will see how the birds get on with the house now it has been ‘pimped’. If it works out and we decide to keep it, I will replace the old roof with one that doesn’t have felt on it.

Apparently ticks and mites love to hide under the felt during the day, and come out to eat your chickens at night.

When little kids draw pictures it can be hard to tell what it is they have drawn.

Abby is just the same. Where she sees arms, legs, dinosaurs, flowers etc. all I can see is a lot of squiggly lines.

Then the other day she produced this really good picture of a person / face. The arms and legs are a bit stubby. But the facial features are well defined, and it even has a pretty good hair style.

At first I thought it was a bit of a fluke, but she has since produced other drawings of a similar quality.

Her grandma hopes Abby will grow up to be a famous artist.

Famous and rich.

One of our chickens was killed by this mink yesterday. It happened during the day sometime between 10:30 and midday.

I know this because the bird that was killed had been sitting on eggs, and I was keeping an eye on her, giving her food etc.

At first I thought she was with the other two birds, and I was cursing her for leaving her eggs to go cold. Then after a bit of searching I realised something was wrong.

The last time we had birds taken there was a trail of feathers and bits of chicken which could be followed down to the bottom of our fields.

This time there was nothing. Just a couple of feathers by the chicken house.

It took me ages to find the body, which had been dragged under an old duck hut we have by the chicken hut.

I bought a squirrel trap from our local hardware guy, who advised that I cut a leg off the chicken and use it as bait. You can just just make out the foot in the picture.

It worked a treat and John Luke was very excited this morning to find a (very noisy and unhappy) mink in the trap.

After I had ‘humanely’ dispatched the little swine, Abigail and I walked to the bottom fields to find it “a new place to live”.

Abby still doesn’t properly understand death yet. She asked “Is that the mink that ate our chicken. Did you shoot it in the head and through the brain so that it’s dead?” (which I thought was a very impressive understanding of what had happened), and then a bit later said “If we leave it in the sun the mink will warm up and come alive again”.

I am part way through building a garage next to the house. It’s not for our car, but all the junk we have.

When digging the foundations I took great care no to disturb/damage any of the underground electricity cables that run to all the nearby buildings.

All went well and the base of the garage was laid and, as you can see in this picture, the start of the walls.

Then about four weeks ago the power to our house went off. None of the other houses nearby were affected even though they are on the same supply.

It turned out that, despite my best efforts, the electricity cable feeding our house had been squashed by the garage foundation and it had eventually fried itself to death.

When the chap from the power company came to fix the problem, he explained firstly how stupid I had been putting the garage where I had, and then that the ground around the garage had the potential to be ‘live’ and was therefore very dangerous.

Whilst he was telling me this I touched one of the garage walls and got a tingling sensation up my arm.

I kept a straight face and just said ‘Really?’