Flame of life

Yesterday night we had to put out the flame of life of our wonderful tup, Phoenix. 

He was born here on the Croft on 8th November 2007 the son of a black sheep, Mildred. Black sheep represent good luck here in Catalonia and I was lucky with him. Phoneix was the ram with hay fever, and the father of all the lambs born on the Croft in the last seven years.

Mum, son, and daughter

You learn from animals, and I have learned a lot about sheep from Phoenix. Starting with his birth; I thought that Mildred was just a bit overweight... I went up to the field on that day in November and found a new lamb, and an old sheep (Polly) dead of natural causes. His flame of life ignited as hers went out.

Butt me no buts

And now the cycle has been repeated, although this time with more knowledge - on the part of the humans - about what is going on. For one day before Phoenix' flame was put out a new lamb - we called him Flama - was born.
 

The new flame

The flame of life burns on.

Chickulation Explosion

Cheepie, our errant bantam, has hatched ten, yes, ten chicks.

She's a proud mum. But the evidence from the chicks varied colours is that she has been getting about a bit with the blokes...

Who is/are your parents?

Baking day

I got up early to start the bread oven...

I'm a heavy smoker

...and made all of this...

The busy baker

 


 ...as well as a pizza and a coca de vidre (flat very thin bread with sugar and aniseed, cooked very fast in the hottest oven possible).

The piped biscuits (they look like they've been plopped rather than piped - I'm not a qualified piper) are gluten free. The recipe, adapted from my Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1985 edition, is:

125g butter
50g icing sugar
65g rice flour
65g oatmeal flour
A quarter level teaspoon of baking powder
Nutmeg, grated
1 tablespoon of milk, to soften the dough.

Heat the bread oven. In my case this means starting 3-4 hours earlier, burning oak logs in the oven to get it up to temperature. Aim for 190ºC. Line a large baking tray with baking parchment (greaseproof paper.)

Beat butter until smooth and creamy, sift in sugar and beat lots until pale and airy.

Sift in flour and baking powder, add nutmeg and beat. Add a little milk to soften the mixture. Put into piping bag and, er, make a splodge onto the baking parchment. And then lots more splodges until you've used it up. Bake for 20 mins approx.

Furry new

She's just a few months old, she still does not have a name, and she's just come to live with us.

Here she is, with her mum Margarita, tucking into a load of fresh hay after walking down here from Can Peu Alt. Jordi and his sons brought the two donkeys over here this morning.

Hay, I've arrived

For Arran, our resident teenager, it was a bit of a shock. He said hello...

I nose it's a new donkey...but two?

 

Four by Four

It's still the best form of transport on our steep slopes. Rugged 4x4 all-slopes traction, and totally carbon-free:

Work, work, work. When will he give me a rest?

Arran and I went up the hill to prune the olive trees. I prune a bit, he eats a bit, I prune some more, he eats some more. It's like having a mobile composting machine, managed by a slightly grumpy farmer...

Twins!

Benbecula, the sheep whose life we saved in 2011, when she was a few months old (see http://croftingcatalunya.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/she-lived.html) gave birth yesterday...to our first set of twins.

Hinge and Bracket were helped into the world by the Crofters (I was away). Pep the Wonder-Vet came to help too. Hinge, the male, is a bit staggery - Pep thinks he may have lacked oxygen at birth (Dystocia injury) - but so far he is fine, and is managing to feed. Bracket, the dark-legged female is already the boss.

Hang on, it`s my turn

The Other Place

Our dear old donkey Mimosa died peacefully this afternoon. She slept her last hour away, warm under one of Mum’s blankets, and I am just back from the stable where she died. We let Arran in to the stable; he sniffed around her mouth and ears and looked a little quizzical, sniffed again and then moved very delicately around the body.

Mimosa in the flower of old age

That’s the second animal off in “l’altre barri” (the next-door district, in Catalan.) Blackie, guardian of the Croft and the son of Perla whom we inherited with the house, died a couple of weeks ago. We buried him under a rose bush at a point from which he often looked out, and one of the Crofters built a very fine chestnut bench next to the grave. Blackie was the head animal (including the human animals) here and we all miss his solid, sensible, guardian self. He was a lovely dog - a strong bark, a waggie tail and an addiction to having his tummy scratched.

Blackie the Guardian (old softie)

Another lamb, just

It is only thanks to very careful attention by Crofter's mate, and good advice from the saintly Pep-the-Vet, that we still have little Nosey around.

He was born on the 30th September to Ballachulish, her second lamb. Last time we'd noticed a wee bit of blood on a teat, and this time Ballachulish had full-blown mastitis. One half of her udder hot and lumpy, the other secreting puss. Not a good scenario for the new lamb.

I was away, so Crofter's mate spent hours with the wee one, making up a mixture of milk, egg and honey to get him started, and then feeding him some cow colustrum from our neighbour's farm.

 

Boy on the bottle

Finally we found that the wonderful Dolors down the road had a nanny goat that was milking, so we put him onto a diet of goat milk. Mum's been on a programme of antibiotics (she had a raised temperature and was really under the weather.)

Now, six days later, Mum is recovering and he is beginning to get a little milk from her. He looks skinny, but is growing.

Mastitis is not nice at all. We try to be as clean as possible, clearing the stable and disinfecting with lime, but this is the countryside, and that's bacteria soup.

Limey stable

On Gluttony

The fig trees are in fruit. Not one tree-full, but the whole lot - seven large trees all producing ripe fruit all at once.

Eat me

I can eat a lot of figs - but really, this is gluttony. So we share them out with the birds, the donkeys and sheep (who take those they can reach) and with Papilio machaon, appropriately called the Swallow Tail Butterfly; gluttony comes from gluttire, to swallow.

Papilio machaon - I'd Swallow my Tail

So far, I have bottled them and made jam - in a moment of madness I made five separate jams from the fruit of five separate trees. Next comes chutney. And then really, no more figs thank you, till next year.

Weed eyed

The potatoes are growing nicely...but not as fast as the weeds.

Karol plants tatties, 3rd March 2013

Potatoes with weeds, 30th April 2013

It's been raining hard - 250mm over March and April. Perfect weather for weeds, and for ducks

Muscovy must eat

Cheese, Muck and an Olive

We've been busy on a new Spring cocktail here on the Croft; cheese, muck and an olive. 

We were given 5 litres of goat milk by a friend and so we made curd cheese. It's very, very easy. Just boil the milk, allow it to cool a little from boiling, add the juice of 2 lemons and leave overnight. In the morning you'll find a pan full of thick curd, and yellow, sweet  buttermilk.

Cheesy, easy

Put the curd into a cheese cloth and leave to drip for most of the next day. You can move the curd around in the cloth a bit to encourage it to drip more. Then eat, on fresh brown bread. Yum.

Meanwhile at the other end of the scale I have been Spring cleaning our sheep enclosure. Keeping cuddly, attractive lambs is not all sweetness and light. It's hard work clearing a sheep shed:

Where there's muck, there's more muck

And up at the top of the land, still overgrown with climbers, I found another olive tree, and cut away a pine to give it some breathing space. A hundred years ago the Croft was a producer of olive oil and wine. The pine (I counted the rings) started growing 30 years ago - in 1983, the point at which the olive grove was finally abandoned.

Olive sees the light

Tiddles toddles into the world

He was born at 18:00 yesterday - a blustery day. Geisha, his mum, was distracted with the messy business of getting rid of her placenta, walking round and round the shed dragging the bloody bits behind her.


The new Tiddles didn't pay much attention to anything, so I milked Geisha and gave him a few drops of colostrum, and then a little more from a syringe. I tried to put him onto the nipple, but he was not really interested. I checked him late into the night - and still he was toddling around, not really paying attention.

No, Tiddles, the milk's near the back...

This morning the slightly sleepy, dazed lamb was lying down and I began to get seriously concerned. So I milked Geisha and intubated the lamb with 75ml of her milk. I also took his temperature - 39.5º C and thus pretty normal. Pep the wonderful vet suggested 3ml of multivitamins, so I injected him with that.

...and the result, this evening, is a much more alert bouncy wee lamb who has definitely started to suckle. He's a bit hazy-lazy, and takes a little drink before wandering off, but he's looking much more alert.

Lambing - it's a life-and-death business.

Not crofting, but cycling

Marcus and Nick, friends of Crofter's son, are attempting the British Columbia to District of Columbia (Vancouver to Washington DC) ride this summer, to raise funds for the Haileybury Youth Trust, working with young people in Uganda.

Here's their blog - from BC to DC.

Cristóbal Colon (after whom BC and DC are named, I guess) would be proud of them. Although he'd probably claim he had arrived in Washington, India...

The Enclosures

We're doing a bit of enclosure, with one of the Croft's communards - who has a lifetime of experience in fencing - building the most solid sheep fence I've ever seen, including this clever box brace: 

Crofting and enclosures are uneasy partners - the Crofter Act of 1886 (source: http://www.highlandclearances.co.uk/clearances/postclearances_croftersact.htm) was the result of street protests in the 19th Century by the Highland Land League against the injustices of the Highland Clearances (Fuadach nan Gàidheal, the "expulsion of the Gael", source: Wikipedia.) Land was enclosed by wealthy or hereditary landlords, and people driven from their smallholdings. 

Now, ironically, we're enclosing in order to stay, more efficiently, on the land.

Whether or not to have a Bellwether

Yesterday, I started training the bellwether, Button, using the long rope technique recommended in Tim Tyne's book on sheep keeping "The Sheep Book for Smallholders."

What's this rope thing?

OK. A step closer. Just to keep the old guy happy.

Hmmm. I can see he has some grain in his hand but I'm NEVER going to get to it...

Ça va, savarin

My Christmas surprise was a savarin, made in our wood-fired bread oven (baked in a slightly too hot oven, it was done in 10 minutes):

Syrupy savarin

300g flour
4 tablespoons warm water
15g fresh yeast
4 eggs, beaten
5g salt
25g sugar
150g unsalted butter
Some brandy

For the syrup
250g sugar
600ml water
Peel of one lemon
3cm piece of vanilla pod, or a chunk of root ginger
Juice of half a lemon

Make a dough with the flour. Make a well in the centre of the flour and crumble in the yeast and add the water. Leave until the yeast goes gooey. Then add salt, sugar and eggs (NOT the butter) and stir together. Now start a process of lifting and dropping the dough with your hand (it makes a good slapping noise) to get as much air into it as possible. Keep this going for 5 minutes until the dough is really elastic.

Cover the bowl and stand in a warm place. I allowed mine to rise overnight, and then beat it back in the morning.

Warm the oven to 200ºC (or, in my case, start a fire in the bread oven and leave to burn for about 3-4 hours.)

Warm butter so that it is soft, and beat the butter into the dough. It will go quite shiny.

If you have a circular baking tin - the type with a hole in the middle - then use that. Otherwise aim for a relatively shallow tin so that your cake ends up wider than it is tall.

Butter the tin generously.

Spoon dough into tin, and sit in a warm place for 45 minutes to rise again.

Bake for 20-25 mins, or until the savarin is brown and shrinks away from the sides of the tin.

Remove, cool a little, remove from baking tin.

Meanwhile, prepare the syrup by boiling the water with the sugar, the lemon peel and the vanilla pod for about 5 minutes. Cool a little, and add the lemon juice.

Now place the savarin into the syrup (that's what's happening in the picture) and spoon lots of syrup over it. Keep doing this until the savarin has swollen a lot.

Pour a little brandy over the top and serve to ooooohs and ahhhs of your satisfied audience.

From Birmingham Jail to Palautordera

In his letter of 16 April 1963 to "My dear Fellow Clergymen" from Birmingham Jail (http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html) Martin Luther King Junior said:

"In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? ...More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."

The vocal underground, at Palautordera

We, the good people, sheep-like in our appalling silence.

My heart is in Dindefelo

My daughter is on her way to spend time working with the Jane Goodall Institute in Dindefelo, Senegal. 

She, and my heart, are here:
12.383285 North 12.32735 East

https://maps.google.es/maps/place?ftid=0xefbd27bcff7606d:0xb3ac73943d017a46&q=12.383285,-12.32735&hl=en&ved=0CA4Q-gswAA&sa=X&ei=dzhtUOa-I6bXiAbDnYDwBg

Living, renewed

We had been considering it for a while. With the kids leaving home it seemed like the obvious next step. And then, just a week after we'd agreed that we should do it, our friend Pau put us in touch with a friend, and we've started. It's house-sharing, again, and it is wonderful.

In London and in Bristol we shared houses with friends. It is not only sensible (why have so many bedrooms if you don't fill them?) and economical, and ethical (we have space, and people need room), and communal (to fight the endless dash to individualism.) It's also fun - I love the energy, the new ideas, the debates, the discovery and the different views that people bring into the shared home.

A shared croft makes a happy Crofter.

Pots of Jewels

The potter wasps - Eumenidae - have been having a wonderful year, building their wee clay pots all over the house, then filling them with paralysed spiders, baby food for the grubs. They sing as they build - a high pitched buzz that can wake us in the morning.

We tolerate them, but this time they went too far, building half a city of pots in Crofter's partner's jewellery box.

Jewel residence