The dark days of December (From Smallholder)

The dark days of December

11:10am Friday 3rd December 2010

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It’s that time of the year when the days are too short to get anything done! At the worst there is about six or so hours of daylight which means looking after animals seems to become the main function of the day. It’s even harder if you are working full time away from home as it’s going to be dark when you leave and dark when you return and only those who have coped with livestock on this basis know how frustrating this can be. But we do it. We do it every year and us and our livestock come out the other side, ever more pleased to see the longer days of spring, however cold! Meanwhile we wrap up warm, get organised by using weekends and day light hours to prepare ahead and we become experts on lighting.

Having good lighting is an essential if you are keeping animals in all but a small way and obviously if you are milking dairy animals. But torches have improved a lot and I can now be seen sporting a head torch and feeling rather like an alien from outer space. Where I live we do lose electricity quite often in the winter so we have an array of torches, candles and even access to a generator.

Thank goodness we had no break in our power supply when the day old chicks were needing twenty four hour a day heat lamps. Now they are several weeks old and feathered we have no such worries. My friends and I ordered day old laying hens and Cobbs (meat chickens) from Cyril Bason and they were delivered by a special van in a well designed chick box, cheeping loudly but otherwise none the worse for their experience.

I watched them very carefully for the first forty eight hours, making sure they all drank and ate. I helped a couple of weaker ones to the water and within hours you couldn’t tell which ones they were!

They have an enormous enthusiasm for life despite their diminutive size. For layers we had Blue Rangers, Calder Rangers, Speckeldys and Black Rock and although they were all fit and healthy, the Blue Rangers were particularly resilient. The Cobbs are eating machines and threw up questions in my mind, is it right to breed a bird that is so obsessed with food? The chicks ate and ate until they nearly burst and continue to do so, piling on weight, making them look like meat on legs (which in a way they are I suppose). They certainly do what it says on the tin, become table birds in a very short time and are indeed value for money but their management is more complex as you cannot restrict food as they are programmed to eat but on occasions we did have to slow them down a bit.

I did this by removing the feeders for a few hours each day and sprinkling food around the pen so they had to walk to search for it. At five weeks, although very, very weighty, they are lively, like getting up on things so I have been supplying some logs for play and have mad minutes where they scamper from side to side of the pen. Our next step will be to introduce them to some organised free range for the remainder of their life which is short - only about another five weeks. Meanwhile the little layers are the complete opposite, with no spare flesh on them (layers are light birds), also very keen to eat, sparring up to each other, lots of cheeping and very active. I’ve always enjoyed rearing day olds but am really careful to observe them so that I can see what they need.

The other factor is providing the correct food for them at the correct time (eg chick crumbs, growers and finishers) and this year I am keeping a note of it to see just how much those eggs and the Christmas table bird will cost us!

As regular readers will know I have struggled to begin to call myself a bee keeper, finding the complexities of when and what to feed really quite puzzling. But this year I feel I have made real progress and to complete my satisfaction at feeling I am just beginning to understand how bees function, I won the Novice Honey Cup at our local bee keepers club.

I was really thrilled about this and it has encouraged me to keep trying to improve. Meanwhile I have fed the bees since early Autumn with sugar syrup and am now on fondant. Although pleased with this, I had read that there is a shortage of food in the form of flowers in August and now I am wondering if I should have started earlier. A recent academic report which studied the “waggle dance” – the movements bees make to show other bees where and how far the nectar is situated, conclusively proved that bees have to fly further in August than in September (where there is Ivy in flower).

So we as bee keepers need to consider feeding then (and I know several who do) and in the spring we need to look at planting bee-friendly flowers. The report also concluded there was more foraging in the city than in the countryside where mono-culture crops such as oil seed rape, will flower, be plentiful and then there will be nothing to replace them for months.

So for me, some of this winter (you know, the bit where you finally get to sit exhausted before the fire) will be spent researching the best plants and shrubs for bees and planning where to plant them in the spring.

This issue is full of useful tips and wrinkles for coping with the cold and looking after livestock in winter - we’d love to hear your experiences and see your photos. Please email them to us or visit our website www.smallholder.co.uk Make your winter a warm one!