With the arrival of spring and the mercury heading back into double figures for the first time in months, my husband decided it was time to embark on the smallholders' equivalent of a new wardrobe or in our case, a new set of farm animals to furnish our freezer with in the coming months.. The first Friday of the month is pig market day
around these parts. The monthly gathering of seasoned pig farmers and those
gullible suckers who haven’t a clue but fancy themselves as the archetypal
smallholder. You can almost see the former rubbing their hands in anticipation as they
see the newbies rolling up in their unblemished stock trailers, freshly printed (and totally incomprehensible –
to them) livestock papers in their hands. My husband had pretty much been
counting down the days on his calendar to this momentous day and on the
long-awaited morning assembled my father, somewhat seasoned auction-goer, and a
good friend from the Bar (the law type, rather than the other, although fair to
say they have spent a fair amount of time propping up the other type too) with, quite understandably, zero experience of pig shopping. So
off they all went, only to come back a few hours later with three lovely
looking pink piglets and much laughter and guffawing. Turns out in the heat of
the moment, my husband had misunderstood the pricing system and ended up paying
for each pig what he had intended to pay for all three. Doh. Rookie mistake.
There is some farmer from down the road now sporting a rather expensive new pair of wellies and the very latest in farmer chic overalls this season thanks to us. We’ve named our new collection Prada, Chanel and Gucci, the most expensive
piglets in Christendom. And as if that weren’t bad enough, in our recent mini
heatwave my husband thought that his new pride and joys were getting a little
sunburned so asked me to get out there with my ultra-expensive Vichy Factor
50, to stop their little pink ears from getting any pinker. Seriously?
Meet Prada, Chanel and Gucci... |
Having settled our new
gold-plated pigs into their new sty and checked them approximately every 20
minutes, the following morning brought yet more new additions to the family. After
21 days of massively irritating clicking every 9 seconds, our incubator appears
to have done its job. We came downstairs on Saturday morning to find a small
beak protruding from a shell and pecking its way out. It is little short of
miraculous watching this tiny, bedraggled form wrestle its way out of its shell
and into the world. The kids were captivated, (CBeebies did not get a look in
all weekend, their noses pressed up tight against the incubator instead), but
not quite as enraptured as the grown-ups who couldn’t quite believe this had
actually worked (previous attempts having all ended as duds). And it turns out
watching chicks hatch is a little bit like making popcorn. After the first
kernel pops nothing seems to happen for ages and then all of a sudden it all
kicks off and it’s like Armageddon in there. Same for our chicks. You turn your
back for a few hours and come back and there’s loads more hatched, all
clambering over each other like drunks at the finishing line of the Grand
National. What has had us baffled though is the colour of the chicks in
relation to the shell they emerged from. Where we had been expecting a nice
little yellow ball of fluff from one of our Light Sussex hens, they were coming
out black or stripy. Awkward! Something you’re not telling us you naughty
hens?!
Hot chicks..... a grand total of 14 hatched into the world |
As if all these new arrivals to the place weren’t enough,
our daughters have taken to adopting the many tadpoles swimming in the ponds
around the place to be their ‘pets’, catching as many as they can in jam jars
and making ‘aquariums’ for them with an assortment of stones and leaves. The
whole kitchen looks and sounds like a sodding menagerie. You can’t move for something
hatching, tweeting or wiggling around.
Does my tail look big in this? |
And finally my husband decided to
treat himself to an egg this Easter, a Big Green Egg. For those of you less
familiar with this season's fashions in big brand American barbecues, this thing looks like something from
outer space, an alien pod or cocoon perhaps (why is it that that particular
film seems to become all the more appealing to me the closer I get to forty!). And
it is bloody huge. You could fit all of our aforementioned pets and ourselves
in there and close the lid and live out the next nuclear winter no probs. And not
content with just one supersize barbecue, he came home with TWO! After the
whole pig debacle it was a bloody good job he got a significant discount on
these – when I casually perused the prices on the internet I nearly fell off my
chair. But despite my concerns that in buying this we may have jinxed summer 2017 forever, for once the weather gods have been smiling upon us and we have
actually managed to use the thing for three consecutive nights – we’ve cooked (venison) burgers, steaks (of course, venison), even pizza (yup, you guessed it, venison pastrami) on it, although admittedly last night it was
my husband out there on his tod, shivering into his tongs as the rain hissed
off the grill. Turns out that just because you have the mother of all barbecues
it doesn’t mean you live in the South of France. Enjoy the sun while it lasts folks - and Happy Easter!
This year's Easter egg |
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