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Due South
By Mark Entwistle
The Southern Reporter
Selkirk, The Borders, Scotland Autumn in Scotland These last few weeks there’s been a real autumnal feel in the air, and the leaves have started to fall around our cottage. What
we’re harvesting in the veggie beds seems to be reflecting this change
in the seasons. We are now on to the broad beans and purple sprouting
broccoli, which feel like back-end crops to me. The
tomatoes in the greenhouse are ripening well thanks to some late summer
sunshine, and we are still eating the chard, which has been a brilliant
crop and has just kept going and going as a cut-and-come-again leaf. The
battle between man and chicken continues. You don’t see her - nicknamed
“The Roadrunner” for reasons of appearance - out of the run for a
couple of days and father-in-law starts to celebrate victory. Just as
he’s beginning to think he’s cracked it and she can’t escape, she
strolls past the conservatory, bold as brass. Our
chickens are all laying well, and egg sales pay for their food, hay and
bedding. As we don’t have many birds, the sales table is hardly
groaning, but every little helps. The four chicks
we bought as six-week-olds are grown up and just coming up to point of
lay. It gives you an immense sense of achievement, so see them grow and
thrive. Flushed with this success, we bought
eight turkey poults a couple of weeks ago — one stag and the rest hens.
We keep repeating the mantra “Don’t give them names because you won’t
be able to eat them,” but my wife, who has named all the chickens, is
finding it hard to resist. So far only the stag has a name — Lurch — as
we’ll keep him, while the rest will be up for the chop come December. We
were almost down to seven recently, when our wee black terrier sneaked
in amongst them and tried to have Christmas dinner early. Not once, but
twice, and the same turkey each time. The first time he got the jump on
father-in-law as he went through the gate with the barrow to clean out
the coop. The second time he shot past me like a four-legged,
turkey-seeking Ninja. The hardest thing was
getting the determined dog to let go, and once we did, we found —
luckily — the skin was only lightly broken and the turkey a little
shaken. This culminated in a trip to the vet and a wee jag against the
inevitable infection. When you see what terriers eat, I would have
thought at least two large shots would have been the order of the day. So
the downside is that’s £10.53 — that’s about $15 to you guys - off the
turkey profits already, but the upside is that as part of his
examination, the vet weighed the turkey, and she came out at 2kg —
amazing to think at that growth rate, every couple of weeks we could
invite someone to join us for Christmas dinner!
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