Well the maybe chick turned out to be a girl once dry with curled in feet, splayed legs and yolk sac not absorbed. Two days later and with the help of some plasters cut to size she has perfectly functioning legs and is walking around fine and yolk sac almost gone. She is in the 'hospital wing' at the moment - in a plastic box with non slip drawliner as a floor to help with the legs and an angle poise lamp for heat. Another day or so for the yolk sac to completely absorb/heal/dry up/drop off and she can join the others. A very rewarding experience. The other two eggs that were rocking in a bowl of water on day 23 but didn't hatch did contain fully developed chicks. One with yolk absorbed one not. So final tally 15 hatched - 4 girls 11 boys, 2 failed to hatch, 7 not fertile.

Incubator cleaned and ready for the next eggs.

Well the latest batch of chicks has now hatched, and what a bizarre hatch it was! First chick was a suprise arrival when i woke up one morning which was techically half way through day 19 as they were set at a lunchtime. Then a slow trickle of hatches with the last one being an assited hatch today on day 24! This chick has not absorbed the yolk sac properly and has curled in toes. It is in the incubator drying at the moment. Once were sure what sex it is when its dry we'll decide what action to take. So out of the 24 eggs 15 hatched and how many girls?....3 and a maybe! Grrrr hopefully the odds will swing the other way for us next time!

The ponies were moved to their new field at the weekend with the stables and it has made life easier already! Definitely the right thing to do.

The pigs are booked in with the butchers for the week of the 8th August. Just need to book them in at the abattoir the week before. In the meantime we need to get the right paperwork sorted and attempt slapmarking(!).

Had a think about life since we got back from out holidays and have made some fairly major decisions about where our lives are heading. Still lots of details to sort an planning to be done but overall i'm quite excited about the future now and feel like a bit of a weight has been lifted.

Finally catching up with everything after a fabulous week camping in Cornwall. What a beautiful place it is. Its been a few years since i've been and i'd forgotten just how lovely it is. Grace had a fantastic time playing on the beaches and splashing in the sea. It's got us thinking about whether we would like to relocate down there. It would be a huge move but one full of fantastic opportunities for all of us. Food for thought there. Holiday snaps to follow as soon as i have had chance to upload them.

Back home all is well. It's been a traumatic couple of weeks with the pigs, well one of them anyway. The hernia that turned into an abscess has been a pain to treat. Capturing a pig each day to inject it has been an, erm, 'interesting' experience! We have learnt several new methods and hope never to need to use them again! He's 90% right again now though at last. Theres only another month or so to go now before we get to try our sausages and chops. Ringing the butcher is on the to do list this week to see how much notice they need at the moment. Then we move on to the next challenge...slap marking!

The first batch of chicks are now fully feathered at almost 6 weeks and have moved outside a couple of days ago and seem to be enjoying it, although they haven't got the hang of going to be in the house yet.  Going by comb and wattle development i thik we have 4 boys and 8 girls, if i'm right i'll be very pleased with that! Interesting all of the 5 dark birds look like girls. The crests of the legbar crosses are just starting to appear too.

The next lot are due to hatch on Friday. I haven't candled these ones and they were from an ebay seller so i'm keeping everything crossed at the moment!

The black chickens eggs if she is indeed sat on some would have been due today. We havent seen her since we got back but she was seen by the chicken sitters while we were away so we will wait to see whether she reappears some time son with a brood in tow.

Ponies look good and as we have finally signed for the new field and stables we hpe to move them on there next weekend and give their current pasture a break.

Well over the last week i have been outwitted by both a chicken and a pig!

The missing chicken is alive and well. She tends to appear when i go to feed the ponies and comes to hoover up the bits they drop. Thing is we never see where she comes from! I've tried hanging around to see where she goes back too but she refuses to go until your not looking, she scoots off the second your attention is distracted by something else! So i still have no idea where she's sitting or how many eggs she has!

As for the pigs well what a learning curve this week has been! It started at the beginning of the week with a large swelling appearing in the groin of one of our 3 boars. I was baffled as to what it could be and could only guess at hernia because of its location. A few days later we actually rather unpleasantly discovered that it is in fact an abscess caused by a wound on his buttock. The wound is tiny, it looks like a puncture wound but i can't find anything in the pen that could have caused it so i am suspecting a bite or sting that has got infected. We had help to drain it aw much as we can and the swelling has reduced a lot but there is still a hard lump a bit smaller than a tennis ball and he is still limping. He is on antibiotics but there lies our problem! The AB's are via intramuscular injection. Just how do you persuade a boar to stand still for that?? The answer is i have no idea! He totally outwitted us last night and we had to admit defeat! We have a few different tricks up our sleeve to try later so i shall report back on how we manage it...and we WILL manage it today!

Oh and i failed to keep my hands down at the meeting last week and am now secretary to the Village Hall Committee!!

There are 24 legbar eggs loaded in my incubator due to hatch 8th July :) The current chicks are feathering up well and really need to get out on the grass a bit now. They are off heat altogether as of last night and will be 4 weeks on Thursday.

Right we are going camping next week so i'd best go and start writing the 'instruction manuals' to leave with the various neighbours looking after the different wildlife for us! Oh how i love my lists!!!

We are missing a hen. One of the ones with a tendancy for broodiness. I've searched all of the hedgerows and can't see her anywhere so i guess we have to wait 3 weeks and see whether she turns up with babies in tow. If not she will have been taken by a fox or a buzzard. Time will tell...

The chicks are almost 3 weeks old now and are off heat during the day. I decided to go with a 'chick led weaning' method on the heat and just watched them closely to see when they looked like they needed it back on. This started with an hour here and there and increased to a morning and afternoon block and then mid morning to early evening and now thay are going roughly 7-7 and i will probably increase that to 7-9 ish in the next couple of days.

They are growing well and getting lots of feathers. I must have changed my mind a hundred times about which are girls and which are boys! Again, time will tell!

The next lot of eggs have been ordered and should arrive any day. 24 Cream Legbars this time. I need to make a decision about what i will do with the males when they hatch. Researching the best methods of culling chicks isn't a fun prospect.

The pigs are also growing well and while they are still not huge they are now getting to a size where it's a little intimidating to be in a pen with 3 lively boars hoping for some food! They will be with us until August but i've been starting to give a bit of thought to what happens next. Ulitmately we hope to be able to breed on a very small scale but i think we will have another, larger batch of weaners before we even think about going down that route. I'd really like to have a few Oxford Sandy and Blacks next time, i think they are just lovely to look at and sound like they would be well suited to our set up. I think we will probably wait until next spring before we get the next batch now.

We are still waiting to sign for the extra land we are going to be renting which is holding everything up a bit at the moment. This had been going on since the beginning of May so we are really keen to get it all sorted now. The ponies desperately need the grass and we can get on with marking our the space for the pigs and fencing the new layers run for the chickens to move into.

I've had a bit of interest in the hatching for schools programme now called The Eggciting Eggs Hatching Programme! I have put a leaflet together to go out to schools and nurseries, it just needs a bit of tweaking as soon as i get chance.

I've got a village hall committee meeting this evening. Must resist the temptation to volunteer myself for anything else, i really don't have the time right now!

Must get the camera out and upload some of the recent photos and take some more.

This post is off on a bit of a tangent but something i feel quite strongly about. Grace was emptying the cards out of Nick's wallet at the weekend and as i was trying to retrieve all of the important ones from her she handed me his blood donor card. I have never given blood despite the best of intentions. I have a bit of a needle phobia and was trying to overcome this so that i could but unfortunately i was on medication for quite a while that prevented me from doing so and by the time that was out of my system long enough i was pregnant. If it hadn't been for some other wonderful people out there who did give blood that pregnancy would have ended with me dead and my baby daughter left without her mum.

The birth of my daughter was a string of rare complications. My pelvis is the wrong shape for getting a baby out so my labour failed to progress. The failure to progress lead to a constriction band forming around my uterus and trapping Grace by her shoulders. This was discovered during the emergency c-section. I also have severe endometriosis. One of the results of this is that some of my internal organs are fused together with scar tissue. When they opened me up they had to detach my bladder from my uterus before they could get Grace out. Endometriosis causes the tissues around it to become brittle. When they made the insiscion in my uterus, which had to be extended because she was stuck, it tore most of the way around and detached the main artery to the uterus. I lost 3.5 litres of blood in a very short space of time. My poor husband watched the whole thing while he sat with our new baby girl. I am blood type A-, not the rarest but not the most common either. There was none in the hopsital. It had to be flown in from elsewhere. Nine units of blood products later and i was beginning to feel a bit more alive and with help was able to nurse my baby.

It has taken me quite a while to come to terms with what happened but i can now focus on the positive outcome. Most of all i am incredibly grateful to everyone who gives blood because someone out there saved my life and allowed me to know my beautiful daughter. I can't give blood now because i have had a transfusion but if one person reads my story and is inspired to give blood as a result then at least i have achieved something positive that way.

Please, please if you can, do.

Its been a busy few days hence the lack of blogging! I'm grabbing a few minutes while Grace naps to get upto date.

The weekend was 'birthday weekend' with both mine and Nick's birthdays only a couple of days apart. This year was Nick's 30th so we had a big bbq with friends and family. A magical afternoon and evening drinking the homemade elderflower champagne (a huge success), and homemade lemonade as well as eating mountains of food and ending the evening sat around the bonfire chatting with friends. Lovely.

During that party an idea was born and exciting things may be in the pipeline. Can't really say too much yet but a friend and i are meeting this week to discuss the idea and decide whether it's feasible so hopeflly i shall reveal more very soon.

The chicks are still growing at a phenomenal rate. Due to a delay in finishing the 'shed brooder' they are still in the kitchen but have really outgrown their giant guinea pig cage now and need the extra space. All being well they will move out tonight. The next lot of eggs will be going in the incubator next week and i have had preorders on some of these already!

Priorities for next week is to try and find time to ride the old lady which i haven't done for about a fortnight and she really needs the work and sort a run for the garden to get the chicks out on grass in nice weather

The chicks are growing well and are terrible timewasters! They are still living in the kitchen at the moment while the new brooder in the shed is under construction. They are due to move out there any day now though. They are really funny to watch, dustbathing in their chick crumbs and perching on the edge of the Ecoglow. You can really see their wing feathers starting to develop now.

I took them to the group i take Grace to today. It was lovely to see the childrens reaction to them. They were so popular they have been invited back again next week.

This last week i've been working on the 'business plan'. The plan for the next 12 months is to build the laying and the breeding flocks of 'Eggciting Egg Layers',  build a good reputation for selling quality birds, set up a 'hatching for schools' project and to look into developing a basic chicken keeping course. Then for the pigs, to establish the 'Own a Pig' scheme. On top of that i will try to build up enough stock to have a twice yearly craft stall at a local craft fair.

The sun has been shining all day. Lovely :)

Tiny chick joins the nest!

We had one little late hatch the day after all of the others. Now known as 'Tiny Chick' because he lookes suprisingly small when he was next to all the others! So 12 live chicks in total. We broke the remaining eggs before we discarded them and only 2 contained fully developed chicks that had died before hatching. The next batch will be going in in a couple of weeks hopefully.

It's certainly fascinating to watch them grown and learn and behave like proper chickens at such a tiny age. We are all really enjoying it and learning lots as we go along to put into practice next time.

We are enjoying a breezy Bank Holiday weekend preparing for the birthday barbeque next weekend!

Well that was a little more stressful than i had anticipated. Watching the tiny little chicks fighting to escape from their shells, willing them out. Then when they finally emerge seeing them collapse draped over the next egg, exausted and checking to make sure they are still breathing! 12 of the 24 hatched in the end. The others are still in the incubator in case there are any late hatchers but there are no signs of life. One of the 12 died shortly after hatching. We knew something was wrong immediately. It looked as though some of its internal organs were external. I know it's probably terrible to say but i did feel quite relieved that it died on its own. I know i will have to do it some time but having to cull a tiny new born chick on my first ever hatch filled me with dread.

The 11 remaining are very lively little characters, quite happy to hop on your hand and peck your fingers if you put them in the brooder. They are all huddled together sleeping under the heat as i type. Here are a few pictures of the fluff balls! I really need to practice photographing moving things!

The first one pipping.

First one out.

All fluffed up!

Chicken in a basket!

For the record i had 24 eggs in a R-Com Suro incubator; 12 Maran and 12 Maran x Legbar. 12 hatched; 7 Maran and 5 Maran x Legbar. 1 Maran x Legbar died. The incubator was run 'dry' for the first 18 days but the humidity settled at around 43 and was upped to 60 on day 19. Will have a think about what to tweak for next time.

On a different note there has been some much needed rain today which has been refreshing for plants and people alike! Grace enjoyed splashing in puddles in her Peppa Pig wellies this afternoon.

Fizz, fuzz and feathers

Well as i sit and type i can hear the newly hatched chicks cheeping in the incubator. Six out so far and several others pipping so hopefully by morning there will be lots more. Its already a jumble of eggshell, oversized feet and fuzz in there. Hardly looks room for any more to emerge! One of the six is already in the brooder. It hatched over 12 hours before the others and only one other was piping at that point so we decided to take it out. In hindsite it might have been better to leave it in there. Another lesson learnt for next time. It seems happy enough huddled under the heat for now and will be joined by the others some time tomorrow hopefully.

It's quite humbling to watch the little lives emerge into the world for the first time and amazing to think i was all made possible by that little box!

The elderflower champagne seems to have been a greater success than we had thought, its definitely fizzy! So we'll see what it tastes like in a couple of weeks time.

It's been a couple of days of feeling like the world is against me!!

Elderflower champagne doesn't seem to be the greatest success. It didn't go foamy in the bucket as the recipe said it would so we added a little yeast which seems to have done the trick but it tastes very sweet at the moment. I wonder if that will change as it ferments?? It's all bottled now so time will tell i guess.

Sadly this morning our broody hen who was sat on 6 eggs died. It was as a result of my naivety. She had looked a little pale for a couple of days but i simply put it down to her sitting on the eggs all day every day and presumably not getting the same nutrients she would usually be getting. I haven't been disturbing her as i thought that was the best thing to do. However, when i found her this morning i discovered the spider mites had got to her. Very sad and frustrating that i could have done something about it if i had realised. The eggs are now in the house under the heat in the vague hope that something may hatch but i'm not holding my breath. They've had a traumatic day. A hard lesson has definitely been learnt through this today and i won't be making the same mistakes again.

On a happier note we can hear tapping inside the incubator and one of the maran eggs has the tiniest hole poked in it so it should be getting exciting in there very soon. Of course it's bound to all happen at night so we miss it all!!!

Just made 5 gallons of Elderflower champagne for a bbq we're having for Nicks 30th birthday in 2 weeks. Hope it will turn out ok, i've never made it before. Drove all the way to Ikea at Nottingham to get some bottles for it this evening only to find they no longer stock them. The only other place i know of is Lakeland but apparently they are far more expensive and not as good so will trawl the net for alternatives.

I also ordered the brooder for out first batch of chicks due middle to end of this week. Very excited now!!

Climb every climbing frame

Played at the park this morning with Grace and her friends. It was lovely being outside in the sunshine. Grace and i go to a local PEEP group every Thursday morning. It's a lovely group. Grace gets to learn and explore new things, i get inspiration for new things to do at home with her and there is the added bonus of a lovely supportive group of parents there. We look forward to it every week.

At the moment Grace seems to be testing her climbing abilities. I like to let her learn for herself, within reason, where her limits are so i try not to prevent her from climbing. It is exhausting running round after her though to supervise her expeditions!

Turned out to be a lovely evening so took the old girl out for a short ride. The extra work seems to be making her a bit stiffer at the moment but a lovely long loose canter seemed to really help so i think we can work through it. After all when i work muscles i haven't used for a while i am a bit achey and stiff afterwards so why shouldn't she be. She certainly looks in better condition than she did a month ago so we are definitely moving in the right direction with her.

Picnic fun

A lovely day today! Spent the morning and lunch time with a good friend and her baby daughter at Whisby exploring the play equipment and enjoying a lovely picnic which the rain held off just long enough for. Unfortunately i forgot my camera and so missed some lovely photo opportunities of Grace exploring and making friends with the animal sculptures. A good excuse to go back soon to get those pictures!

We re candled the eggs this evening having done a little more reading and it seems we may have been a little hasty yesterday. Lucky we didn't discard those eggs! However, we have removed 2 of the eggs and having broken them to check we were relieved to find that we were correct to do so. I suspect 2 more may be clear but having very dark shell it's hard to be sure so we are leaving them in there to see what happens.

First diary entry!

Second post of the day but the first 'diary' entry. Its been a fairly quiet day at the Old Barn today. Catching up with some much overdue housework was the plan for the day which i was semi successful with. With Grace around there's always an easy distraction to drag me away from the boring chores! Spent some time this afternoon playing in the field in what little sunshine we saw today. Grooming the ponies and Grace chasing the chickens. Then it was a little messy baking session to make pastry for our quiche for dinner.....which i burnt!

Graces nap time was spent searching for a pattern for a dress i'd like to make. I think i;ve settled on this one http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Monique-Dress-Sewing-Pattern-Serendipity-Studio-/150585491959?pt=UK_Crafts_SewingPatterns_EH&hash=item230f9841f7
So now i just have to choose some fabric.

Managed a ride on Bimble my old arthritic girl tonight. She's really suffered from not being ridden while i was pregnant and while Grace was tiny. I've only really recently started to find the time to ride more regularly so i'm hoping we can build up a bit of muscle and get her in a better state so that she will have a good few more years in her yet.

Finally we had a go at candling the eggs in the incubator. It's the first time we've done it so we're not 100% confident of the results but i think 8 of the eggs are clear and will not hatch. I've marked those ones and put them back in the incubator to see what happens. Being novices to this i'd hate to be removing perfectly viable eggs by mistake. Today is day 13, so watch this space in just over a weeks time and we'll see whether my predictions on which ones will hatch is correct!

Introducing me!

Well as this is my first post i guess i'd better use it to explain a little about who i am and what i do!

I'm Sian. I'm almost 28. I have a wonderful husband, Nick and a beautiful 17 month old daughter, Grace. We share our home with two spaniels and we share our lives with two ponies a flock of chickens and at the moment three little pigs. We have lived at Old Barn Cottage, in the Lincolnshire countryside for around 6 years now. When my maternity leave ended after having Grace we made the decision for me to stay at home and concentrate on raising her rather than returning to work. As a result the idea behind 'Old Barn Pigs and Poultry' was born. This blog will hopefully tell the story of how it, and our lives develop.

We have kept laying hens for several years and enjoyed the yummy eggs ourselves as well as selling the surplus to friends and family. We are now venturing into the world of poultry breeding. We are breeding hens specifically for their ability to lay a good number of 'eggciting eggs'! Our first batch of 24 eggs are currently in the incubator with 6 also under a broody. They will lay dark brown and olive coloured eggs with sky blue and speckledy eggs also in the pipe line. Some of the chicks will be for our own laying flock and some will be for sale.

We are also for the first time raising our own rare breed pigs for meat. We have two (i realise there are three in the photo we are keeping one for someone else!) British Lop boars who are currently 3 1/2 months and due to go to slaughter in August. We have had great fun with them so far and plan to raise more next spring so will have home reared rare breed pork available soon!

As well as this we grow as much of our own fruit and veg as possible, although this is more my husbands area of expertise at the moment but i am learning!

I also dabble in a bit of sewing and knitting. I knit fabric into rugs and am currently making fabric chickens and bunting to sell.

That probably enough ramblings for now. I hope to update this blog regularly with the goings on at the Old Barn, our very own version of 'The Good Life'!