We have peacocks at Cockatrice Farm. They can be noisy, they shit everywhere, and they eat seedlings. But they are glorious to have around.

We have just one pea-hen at the moment, the Marvellous Miss Maud. We’ve had three, but they die very easily. I gather it’s the same for everybody as they are much more expensive than the boys.

Our peahen is locked away at the moment — in case she nests in the fields and is eaten by a fox. Our white peacock, Arthur (named after the king), is in with her at present. He’s not the eldest peacock, and is perhaps too young to breed, but he was hanging around outside Fort Knox (the enclosure shared by the ducks and the peahen) so I let him in.

We’re a bit sympathetic to Arthur. When we had the guineafowl, they bullied Arthur mercilessly. Guineafowl think they are peacocks, but have tail envy. They are now living at Jan’s farm, to the eternal relief of the wwoofers — after you’ve had guineafowl, peacocks seem quiet and unobtrusive by comparison.

We have two other peacock boys wandering around the farm. One of them has appointed himself chief watchkeeper. If there is a car in Barker’s Lane, or a fox in the distance, or anything else he doesn’t like, then Cornelius the Peacock tells us all, at high volume.

This then cues the dogs, Ginger and Cara. Cara is a labrador and not a real dog, so she’s only learnt how to bark recently. This means that she reacts to whatever Cornelius is bothered about, and runs around aimlessly trying to figure it all out. Ginger then runs around because it seems like fun.

We bred some peacocks in the incubator last year, but we had a sudden cold snap and they all died in the days following. We’re hoping for a natural brood this year, or maybe we’ll try the incubator again. My aim is to hold a feast and serve a roast peacock to every table.

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On things poultry, we’ve been having trouble with our rooster, “You Bastard”.   He was given to us a few months ago to replace “Shut Up” who was the noisiest rooster we had ever had.

You Bastard had been attacking us all, and we ran out of patience.

Our friend Sharen has convinced us that on a farm you want to breed for docile stock — her Dad’s been doing that for decades and has the most placid cows.

So You Bastard got the chop on Sunday and was stewed up yesterday.

The weather keeps swapping between gloriously warm days, and miserable ones.  Everything seems to be on a roller coaster, from the world situation down to our little farm.

Two weekends ago, it was great to be alive.  Last weekend, it was unpleasant to go outside.

We’ve been busy, but not a lot to show for it.  Our vegetable gardens are still for the most part wild after winter.  We still don’t have the summer seeds in.

At the time of writing, we have a couple of German girls wwoofing for us, and we’re making a start.  They are good value and we’re enjoying their company.

Allison says she’ll write a full post on all the animals soon.  In the meantime, the rich spring grass is coming in and we’ve had to lock the horses up to stop them foundering.  Our miniature horse, Jasmine, is the most concern and is getting special exercises.

I haven’t been posting because not much has been worth writing up.  I expect that will change soon with the better weather.

Family history

I’ve been putting my some time into my new family history blog, howetfamily.wordpress.com.  At the moment, it’s mostly about Derbyshire in the years 1400-1600, and of most interest to other family historians.  I think I’ve found the missing link between my Howets of Heanor and our supposed ancestors the Hewets of Killamarsh.  Twenty-seven miles, and a lot of work, apart.

But sometime I’ll tell a few colourful stories, and in the meantime you can find them on Google:

* Sir Walter Huwet, a commander of the Black Prince, Warden of the Channel Islands.  Slain by the perfidious French in his pyjamas.

* Sir William Hewet, cloth merchant and the richest man in England; who supported Lady Jane Grey then presided over her execution as Sheriff of London.  Later Lord Mayor of London.

* His only daughter Anne, who fell into the Thames and was rescued by his apprentice, Edward Osborne.  They married and inherited his fortune, established trade routes to Turkey, and their descendents were the Dukes of Leeds.

* The Blessed John Hewet, beatified Catholic martyr, and several protestant martyrs.

* William Hewet, born in Stratford-upon-Avon six months before Shakespeare; perhaps a classmate.

* Dr John Hewyt, a chaplain, who worked to restore the Stuart dynasty even though he conducted the marriage of Cromwell’s daughter.  Hanged.

* Thomas Hewett, precentor of St David’s Cathedral, translator of the Book of Revelations into Welsh (one thinks a challenging task).  He had a son called Rhys!

* “Old Mouldheels”, aka Katherine Hewytte of Colne, one of the witches of Pendle Forest, hanged after the Lancashire Witch Trials.

* William Hewet of Jamaica, hanged for piracy in 1718, and his body buried in the marsh below the low water mark.  On one of Blackbeard’s ships.

* Thomas Howitt, a quaker whose common-place book (diary) survives, and whose house I have visited.

* Dr Godfrey Howitt, who helped established many of the fine institutions of Melbourne Town, arriving in 1839.

On the weekend we ran the Combined Guilds Event.  This is a kingdom-level event, ie for the whole SCA medieval group in Australia and New Zealand.

We used the Old Goulburn Brewery, which was designed by convict architect Francis Greenway.  It still operates as a rather charming if somewhat moth-eaten boutique brewery.

There isn’t a kitchen available, so we had to make do with a pie oven, a frypan and an outdoors campfire.

We’re actually pretty capable with all these, and put on a fine feast including individual venison pies, some stews, tarts and delicacies.  We cheated a bit and outsourced the roasted chickens to Coles, but we did make a savoury orange sauce to go with them.  I’d give us eight out of ten for the feast.

The event was also the annual ball event for the medieval dancers, and I particularly enjoyed that part.

There were a variety of classes, and I ran a session on an “instant herb garden” where we made up soil blocks and participants planted them with seeds of the herbs they didn’t yet have in their gardens.

Nevertheless, the event had some problems.

Mostly, it was that numbers were low (30 people).  It was OK for the dance event, but the crafts bit didn’t really meet critical mass.  The advertising was decent, but not enough people came to generate the sort of energy we wanted.

In our local group, we haven’t yet got over some recent health challenges.  Some people just happened to be out of town that weekend, or had unscheduled personal issues.  You can never suit everybody, and you never get everybody to a particular event.  But the end result was that we only had three locals there apart from Allison and myself.

This event was just one week after another small medieval event in Goulburn.  Our incoming Seneschal (local President) and her partner wanted to run a small tournament and Royal Visit, and didn’t want to run it in conjunction with the Guild Event, to avoid being overshadowed.  And the royals weren’t available for the guild event because of the aforesaid wedding.  In retrospect, I’m sure that having two events in subsequent weeks reduced interest in the second one, so we shouldn’t have done it that way.

In the wider SCA, it clashed with a big wedding in the Canberra medieval community, as well as some other events around the country and a one-off international event that took away the rapier community.  This guild event is particularly hard to co-ordinate, because of the disparate interests of the guilds.  In general, you can’t worry too much about “mundane” conflicts — there is always something.  But his time we were bitten harder than usual.

In anticipation of a loss, we were really frugal with the food costs, shopping for specials and using as much from the farm as we could.  We made our own pastry and were extra careful not to have any waste.  In the end we even made a modest profit on the event.

The other problem we had was simple manpower.  Allison and I worked flat out in the latter stages, kind of like the first days of the local group.  We don’t have any wwoofers at present, which might have helped.  Clair and her sister Karen helped us with some prep work.  Tig did a great job with the timetable.  On the day, we had assistance from Pink, Margaret and Anne (a newcomer).  But we ended up quite worn out.

We have learned some lessons from this event.  In the past, we’ve usually worked at full stretch, hoping madly that nothing goes wrong, and we’re usually OK.  But I think we’ll now work a little more conservatively, with longer breaks between big events.

More co-ordination with all the different groups would have helped, though it’s really time-consuming.  We needed to promote the event in person, at other events, also hard to do.

And we need to acknowledge the vagaries of fortune, and not worry about it too much.

We had our monthly medieval “pot luck” dinner in Goulburn last weekend.

Not everybody was there, but that’s the idea.  It’s intended as a monthly dinner with our friends, which just happens to be in medieval garb.

Ally made some portuguese custard tarts, which she often does when we are knee-deep in duck eggs.  As usual they were delicious.

I had another go at making some individual pies.

My goal is a little pie for one person, which looks medieval and has a rich and tasty venison filling.  This wasn’t it, as I didn’t get organised to pick up some venison, but perhaps it moved the quest a little closer.

A while ago, Ally gave me a 1970s-vintage book on pie-making, that she found while browsing in Bowral.  It had some good recipes for hot-water pastries, particularly in the context of cold pork pies and the like.

Allison and Fiona (a Canadian wwoofer who stayed with us recently) were experimenting recently.  Allison has been trying, with good success, to make large free-standing hot pies made without containers.

In medieval times they made very stiff pastries, with little shortening.  You would model them by hand, and you’d eat then insides then throw away the pastry, or pass it on to the poor.  I’ve made pies like that several times, once in the shape of little owls.  But it does seem a waste.

When we cater for large feasts we have to make some compromises.  And people are disappointed if they can’t eat the pastry.

Allison made me up some of the hot-water pastry, which has lard shortening.  We used one-third wholemeal flour to get a more medieval look.

My innovation was to make up the pies in little ramekin dishes.  The filling was put in, top put on, and the whole lot partly baked.  With practice, you can then wiggle the pies out of the ramekins and onto a tray, ready for glazing and their second stage cooking.  They slump elegantly and do have a visual authenticity.

I was pretty happy with how they worked.  In future I’ll drop the proportion of wholemeal, and our friend Del recommends using beef dripping to get a crisper pastry.  The filling was OK but not fantastic, but that wasn’t my major concern this time.

I hope to report back again later.

Sometimes our place is a madhouse.

This weekend we had grandson D over.  D has a new baby brother, and a visit to the farm gave his mum a chance for a night off and a birthday dinner.

D loves the farm and enjoys patting the various animals.  He particularly likes the quail, who were hand-raised and seem to put up with this more than most animals.

D is now 3 years old, and likes to run off at high speed.  Fortunately we had wwoofers Julia and Fiona there, who were usually a step ahead of him.  We also had my son Owen and his mate Gryff there to take turns with D duty.

D is good fun, and he has good language skills so we can teach him a lot.  This time, he came with a cold, which got worse over the weekend.

All three-year-olds go through the “glazed donut” phase, where the contents of their nasal passages end up evenly distributed over their skin and clothes.  So we had an affectionate but rather sticky little fellow.

On the Friday night, Allison cooked paella (a Spanish seafood and rice dish) at the Goulburn Club, who were having a Blues weekend.  Looked and tasted great.

We caught up with the Goulburn medieval club crew at the Old Goulburn Brewery (we’re having an event  there next month, and then they all came over to dinner.

At the last minute, Allison remembered that I’d promised to man the bar at the Goulburn Club, so I had to race in there.  Actually a fairly easy night with some great music.

On Sunday, we took D back to Sydney, which took most of the day.  When we left, the place looked like a bombsite, but by the time we had come back the magic wwoofer fairies had restored it all to some semblance of sanity.

And so for another week.

We’ve had more than a week of lovely weather, delightful at any time of year.

This has allowed us to bring the horses into work, courtesy of our wonderful equestrian wwoofers Katy and Julia.

Paulie my standardbred has been great; which was the case last time we rode him, too.  Last year we brought him into work *after* all the spring green grass, and he was a bit patchy to start with.

Gawaine my young Clydesdale-cross was perfect at the first attempt, and looks splendid as he races around the field.  Julia says that riding him is like sitting on a couch.

Katy did some work with Doc, a young horse of Jan’s.  I was worried about him because he’s cheeky, and thinks that anything humans do has to be more interesting than being a horse.  He too was exceptionally well-behaved at first go, and is proving a quick learner.  Unfortunately he’s got some sort of infection in his throat and he’s under vet treatment for the next while.

I have ridden just a bit, and have found that my trotting muscles have disappeared.  So I’m sore as I’m writing this.  Will have to keep it up.

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We went to the Canberra SCA’s monthly pot luck dinner.  I made some gingerbread: basically it’s hot honey with breadcrumbs and spices mixed in.  The original recipe for some reason had no ginger — maybe it was an economy measure, or maybe the scribe just forgot it.  I used ginger, mace, cinnamon and plenty of white pepper.  Spicy!  Tasty!

Allison and the wwoofers made some pork pies.  She has a new hotwater pastry that she’s playing with; it’s really good.

There was a splendid range of food on offer, some part-singing and some dancing.  One fellow there has a “pipe and tabor”, a sort of medieval one-man-band comprising a kind of whistle or recorder, and a flat drum.  We wants one, my precious…

When Allison returned from the US, she worked out that we were missing a number of ducks.  It seems that Mr Fox had been jumping over the gate to the orchard behind our house, and removing one duck every couple of days.

Allison was less than pleased with this situation.  She moved the ducks to the bottom chookhouse, once a pen for racing pigeons, to which we have added an outdoor area fenced from (under)ground to an enclosed roof.  She locked the alpacas in the surrounding woods paddock just to be sure — they hate foxes and can kill them.

Alas, on the first night under this arrangement, the fox dug under the outside wire and took several more ducks, wounding a couple more.  So much for the alpacas.

This leaves us with one pair of mallard ducks, including our sentimental favourite Nellie.  The male has a damaged leg, and we hope he’ll recover.

We have three muscovy girls left — including one with a bodgie leg from an earlier attack, which I would have euthanised if it hadn’t been such miserable weather at the time.

For some reason we still have all three indian runner ducks that someone gave us.  Maybe they’re faster, or smarter, or just taste bad to foxes.

We’ve had three years without any problems, and now even careful precautions aren’t working.  Our idyllic rural lifestyle really takes a beating at times like this.

Allison was by this stage apoplectic.  We and the wwoofers spent the weekend building fortifications.

Fort Knox, once the bottom chookhouse, now has galvanised roofing iron buried in a trench, as well as heavy iron bars laid along the edges, and the whole lot covered in field rocks.  There is an internal sliding steel door to provide an extra layer of defence.  I was just able to dissuade her from electrifying everything.

Alcatraz, aka the top shed, already had heavy steel walls and a buffalo-proof external run.  It now has a new door, a gate to cut off half the run, and rocks.

God help the fox should Allison get her hands on it.  Because we’re being organic, we can’t lay poison baits.  Because we front the highway, we’re not meant to shoot on the property, and I might not be safe with a gun.  There’s no way Ally is getting one in her current mood!

We do nevertheless have some plans for Mr Fox, suggested by our neighbours, so we’ll see what comes of them.  Further suggestions most welcome.

We’ve had some nicer weather, and things are looking up.

Our wwoofers Fiona, Katy and Laura are all good fun and easy to have around.  They are helping to get the farm back under control.

We have had the incubator on since the fox visited, and now we have eight chickens.  The wwoofers got hours of entertainment from them as they hatched.

Three of the chickens are silkies; luckily we got some eggs in the false spring just before the weather turned really nasty.  So these are the last remnant of our silkie bloodlines.  They will be well looked after.

The other chickens are Light Sussex and one is half Isa Brown, the modern egg-laying breed.  (We got given some hens from Ally’s sister’s neighbours, and despite being thoroughly unmedieval, they are actually rather sweet chooks having been family pets.)

The Light Sussex are great for meat, but I’ve been underwhelmed at their egg production in cooler weather.  I’m inclined to get some fertilised eggs of some other breed, and grow some of them.  But the chooks are Allison’s domain so it’s up to her.

Speaking of whom, Allison is back from her US trip, amazed at the sheer size of things in Las Vegas.  And now she’s gone again for a few days — her daughter Jess has a new baby son.

After our early spring, winter has returned with a vengeance.

We’ve now had a couple of weeks of really miserable weather. Strong and very cold winds.

We have branches down all over the farm. A tree fell over Barker’s Lane, and we were rescued late one freezing night by Sam, our neighbour’s son, who got the tractor out to clear the way.

The roof of one of the shops in Goulburn blew off. The emergency services people were extremely busy.

Last week we got a couple of German wwoofers, our first for a long time. They stayed for just a day. One I think would have kept going, but the other was adamant that she had come to Australia for sun and this just wasn’t it.

We then got a Canadian wwoofer, Fiona, who said that she knew all about cold. And two more Germans, Laura and Katy, who knew about the others and decided they’d stick it out.

Last weekend was the coldest I remember in this part of the world, minus 5 degrees in a howling wind. We had the wood heaters on in both houses, and electric heaters, and the wind just sucked the warmth away.

I told the wwoofers to do the absolute minimum outside, and they mostly just stayed in bed. And at last the windy weather has passed.

We’re now back to what I consider a normal winter: crisp mornings with a bit of sunshine during the day. Six weeks till spring.

Allison has avoided much of this, being this week in Las Vegas for a work trip. Sunny Las Vegas. No further comment necessary.

We have serious chickens, of the Light Sussex breed, for meat and eggs. And we have some Silkie Bantams for amusement and for brooding eggs.
Silkies look like toys, all fluff. Over several years, we bred them to have a range of lovely colours. Last summer, they hid some nests of eggs and we ended up with a lot of them.
With the recent warm weather, they thought it was spring. We had far too many roosters, and they were loving the hens to exhaustion.
So on Saturday we ‘harvested’ six of the roosters. This left our favourite roosters: Rufio, with gorgeous black feathers; Silvan, russet and gold; and a really beautiful silver-grey one without a name as yet. And a few spares, as we could only manage to do six of them in a plucking session.
We did keep the meat, though it’s hardly worth the effort. They have tiny bodies under all the fluff, and their meat is black. Great in Chinese medicine apparently.
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On Saturday night, we were babysitting Xavier, who belongs to our friends Tony and Claire. Tony came by about 10pm to pick him up, and mentioned that he had just seen a fox in our house paddock. And we realised that we’d forgotten to lock up the chickens.
I raced up to the serious chickens; they were fine. Allison ran to the silkies, and found about 20 corpses, no survivors.
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We are trying to work out what to do about the fox. We had a rabbit plague earlier this year, and the neighbours poisoned them, so the fox may well have been hungry. No need to kill 20 chickens though.
We don’t have a gun, and there are rules limiting shooting so close to the highway. We do have a bow, and Allison’s a good shot — but shooting accurately at night is very difficult.
We’re hoping he shows up on the lane while we’re driving home…
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We visited the Canberra medieval club on Sunday night, for their monthly pot luck night. I made some chicken pies, with silkie meat and vegetables from our garden — and they were generally agreed to be delicious.