Winter Solstice

Never before in my life has solstice been so relevant.  First shot is at 9:05 this morning:

We had a few hours of sunlight, and I was going to take a photo at midday to show how low the sun was in the sky at its "highest" but the cloud had already come in by then, so...  This photo is 3:11 this afternoon -- sunset -- or what little smidgen of it you can see through the clouds...

I didn't start to really feel the effects of the lack of sun until about two weeks ago, so hopefully this means in another two weeks time I will start to notice that it's coming back...

In chicken news, poorly chicken of indeterminate gender is not really getting better despite antibiotics and eye bathing.  Also, now that it's on its own isolated from the other chickens, its apparent to us how much its beak deformity is preventing it from eating properly, so this chicken sadly is going to become soup shortly..

Also, still no video of this, but I have now seen with my own eyes that the cockerel I heard crowing back in response to Big Boy was indeed the white one that we had previously thought was a hen.  So after indeterminate sex chicken gets culled, we will have three boys and one girl.  Time to get some more hens...

And in Other News, the site of the future garden is complete for now -- nice layer of horse muck topped with nice layer of rotting seaweed...  Fingers crossed by springtime I will have some nice tillable material for planting in...

So now it's on to clearing this, which is the site of the future polytunnel.  There is a LOT more rubbish than you can see here lurking half hidden in that grass just waiting for you to trip over it...

Chickenpalooza...

The day began with me, out in the yard, hearing Big Boy crowing, and then, after a bit of a pause, hearing a very croaky crow in response, from, I assumed at the time, Little Boy, who hadn't yet crowed.  I made a mental note to go visit the chickens later and see if I could get this call and response on video.

Then various bits of doing other things, and then Danny came to ask me to come have a look at the chickens as he thought one of the hens was poorly.

As you can see, there's clearly something up with her eyes.  She kept knocking the drinker over because couldn't get her head in properly due to how much her eyes were swollen.  Various panic ensues and I Google all sorts of horrible diseases.  And then, through the magic of Facebook, I get directed to a veterinary nurse on the island who says she'll pop by and have a look.

We lanced one of the swellings, and what came out was much more watery than expected, leading us to think that it is a blocked tear duct rather than a nasty horrible infectious endemic bacterial disease.  Also, you'll note she has a deformity to her beak, so possibly the entire inside of her head is somehow deformed and causing this?  I've had a look at some pictures we took the first week they were here and it's not this bad but you can see there's something around her eye.  

In any case, she's had an antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory, I'm bathing her eyes with saline solution, and we've separated her from the rest of the flock for the time being, so we'll see what happens.

So throughout this exchange, I kept referring to her as "her", because we have always thought that we started with three hens...  But lovely vet nurse lady thought that she was a he...  So then I said, here, come have a look at the rest of the flock...

And she also thinks that another one of the hens, who we had noticed lately was getting rather large, is also a he...  So possibly we have four boys and one girl, which might explain the lack of eggs...

Left to right in photo above is Big Boy, Little Girl, White Hen (who might be a boy), and Little Boy.  So now I'm not sure who I heard crowing in response this morning!  Time to find some more hens...

Here's Black Hen (now possibly male) after a day of poking and prodding.  Fingers crossed she is feeling/looking a bit better tomorrow.  But also, if this is all correct and we do in fact have four boys, at least two of them are going to end up in the pot, so that makes the decision about whether to cull this one or not a bit easier...

 

Storm Barra

Here we go again:  Red sky at night, shepherds' delight.  Red sky in the morning, flood alert warning.

I took this picture at about 8:30 this morning, just before the sun properly came up.  I'll try to take another one later but most of the storm is going to be after sunset and, also, it's amazingly hard to photograph "storm" in the absence of trees...  :)

 

"No-dig" Gardening...

Today was a nice day (about 2C, and 15mph winds -- but except for a brief hailstorm while we were eating lunch, it stayed dry -- how quickly one's perspective on what qualifies as a nice day changes...) so we got a bit done outside.

Back when we were at Bwlchyrhyd, I remember reading about no-dig gardening and thinking, as we were busy double-digging the beds, that it would be a lovely idea and involve much less work...  I was so wrong...!  One may not be digging over the bed, but the amount of digging involved in moving around all the compost is just as much!

I've now nearly got a 9m x 9m square covered in manure...

And Jean's muck heap is nearly all gone!  (Must remember to start taking "before" photos of things...)

We've got the doors back on the rear end of the big barn that had blown off in a storm last winter:

And Danny has spent a fair amount of time up on roofs today patching holes and leaks ready for the next storm.  My job is to stand on the bottom of the ladder and hold it still so this is mainly my view:

Here's a video Danny shot from the top of one of the roofs:

And little Freya kitty is still sleeping in the weirdest positions imaginable...  :)

 

Interior Decorating for Chickens

Very sadly, under the terms of the Avian Influenza Prevention Zone (including housing): November 2021, which came into force at 00:01 on Monday morning, our lovely happy little flock now have to live indoors until further notice.

We are trying to create a stimulating environment for them -- we have given them a pile of dirt with worms in and we have given them various perching objects -- but they are sad and they are missing being outside -- and we are missing seeing them around as we go about our tasks...

I'm afraid that this will become the norm and be something we have to do every winter now...

 

Happy Belated Pumpkin Pie Day!

So many things to be thankful for this year. Most importantly, that Danny and I are now here...

But also, on Thursday, the library came!  

(I know, horrible photo, but on a rainy day, it's dark enough at 3pm that my camera decides to use its flash...)

The library comes to Sanday every other month, and the last time it came was the DAY BEFORE WE MOVED IN, so I have been waiting for this for a while.  So nice to stock up on fresh reading material again!

This year's pie began with the world's biggest butternut squash (egg for scale).

This squash is from the Community Shop, but next year's will be one that we grew ourselves...

The pie itself was inspired by this recipe.

The gooey layer underneath the squash is basically chopped walnuts, brown sugar, and butter.  The overall effect is pumpkin pie baklava.  I went to all the effort of doing all the stuff with the crust that I normally am too impatient to be bothered with -- chilling the crust after rolling it out and putting it in the pie plate, blind baking it, and thoroughly cooling it before filling -- and it really is worth the effort -- possibly the best crust I have ever done if I do say so myself...

In other news, there was still one more chimney that needed topping, but this one is in the middle of the house and thus harder to get to so Danny the monkey did this one.  He says the views from the top of the chimney are lovely...

And Storm Arwen, though fierce, seems to have hit a lot of other places in the UK much harder than us.  This was all we had in the garden this morning...  For a snow lover, I really do have a talent for moving to places that don't get much...

Fog vs Mist

I don't often photograph the weather/scenery as either:

1.  By the time I've gone and got the camera, the thing I wanted to shoot is gone.

2.  A lot of weather is really hard to capture -- how do you photograph wind in the absence of trees?

3.  I don't want this blog to look like an inspirational Instagram account!

That said, this morning there was some truly spectacular mist -- this is the sort of thing we used to see in Wales all the time but this is the first time I've seen it since we've been here.

This shot is just before sunrise:

And this one is a few hours later:

And now the sun is shining brightly and it is pretty much all gone...

Obligatory chicken photos:  The hens follow Danny around like they are his dogs -- one of these days they will watch the cat and figure out how the cat flap works and then we will have chickens in the house!

Killing two birds with one stone...

More fun and exciting tasks -- mucking out the barn...

...and spreading the muck on the site of the future vegetable garden.  This will then get covered with a layer of seaweed which will rot down ready for us to plant in the spring and full of nutrients and fertility...

And speaking of birds, Danny foraged us a pigeon, so for lunch today we had wild Orcadian pigeon breast with fried onions on homemade bread!  Yum!

 

Presenting... THE OVEN!

At last!  We finally have a working oven!  How on earth Jean lived here without one is beyond me.  The last six weeks has really taxed my figuring out what to have for dinner abilities -- I totally didn't realise how much I use the oven...

Installing it was a bit of a palaver...  Danny said if we were starting in a completely empty room from scratch we could have done it in a few hours, but working with the existing kitchen cupboards, which are a total mishmash and have been amended multiple times over the years, took us the better part of two days and lots of swearing on my part...

 

But we got there in the end, and we even managed to preserve and use the original vintage cooker point, which I am guessing dates to when electricity was first installed in this house sometime in the 60s or 70s...

Now I have to run the oven through its initial heating cycle to burn off whatever residue is on it from manufacture, but TOMORROW I CAN BAKE!!!!!

 

Chinese takeaway... NOT!

No Chinese takeaway on the island?  Not a problem, here's one I made earlier...  :)

Dan y Berllan honey & garlic fried Eday pork chops, Orkney Tatties cabbage stir fry, Y Pantri Glas basmati rice.  Yummy!

 

Heights

I am NOT a fan of heights, but needs must.

Fitted a clay terminal on this chimney pot which is the disused chimney in our bedroom.  This will stop the water getting in and making the wall damp and will also stop any rats or other wildlife getting in to the loft.

There's one more to do on the middle chimney which is the one for the fireplace in the living room -- that will have a stainless steel cowl -- but my legs are still trembling, so that is enough being on the roof for one day...

On the chicken front, Danny has got the girls literally eating out of his hand!  The boys are not particularly interested...

 

The Value of Things

One of the most bizzare pieces of junk mail I have ever received arrived the other day:

Now, we have here on our property a disused quarry -- as you can see in the photo, full of old scrap metal of various sorts:

When we first came here, we foolishly thought that we could sell this metal for scrap and get a bit of money.  Anywhere else, this would be at least a few hundred pounds worth.  Scrap metal prices are actually going up at the moment.  But no.  We have since discovered that the cost of getting the metal off the island means that it effectively has no value.  So we will have a quarry full of scrap metal forever.

You see this all over the island.  Piles of scrap metal.  Cars that have reached the end of their useful lives, just parked up and left to rot.  When my last car spectacularly failed its MOT, I was offered £85 by the scrappie.  Not here.

Don't get me wrong, I like a glass of whisky as much as anybody else, but what does it say about this world that I can get my whisky collected for free to sell, but not the metal -- which seems to me in the long run to be a more inherently useful and practical substance?

 

Cocks...

No, not that kind...  :)  

We went to Mainland on Wednesday and picked up some new additions to the flock!

They are settling in nicely and getting to know each other...

And this we spotted from the ferry -- in case you are thinking that where we live now is remote, can you imagine living on THIS island???!  :)

 

Not all fun and games...

Lest you think that life out here is an endless round of going for walks on the beach and playing with chickens, I hereby give you today's tasks/accomplishments:

And, just so they don't feel left out, the chickens -- who are still refusing to be photographed together -- every time I see them together I run for the camera, but by the time I get back, one of them has wandered off!