Mrs Downs Diary June 17 2009

Tend a fifty acre field. No problem. Tend a vegetable patch or help weed the flower bed. You must be joking. However, my dear husband has a great fondness for one vegetable. And one alone.

Potatoes. And this year her has decided in the spirit of combating the recession to grow his own.

It has been a revelation to him to go down to the garden and see the greenhouse in use. He thought I was just disappearing for a quiet kip in there. It is stuffed with tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

Outside there is not a lot. I have great expectations for my courgettes but the runner beans are once more a dead loss because of ravenous bunny rabbits; so with no persuasion, I handed over the main plot to John.

Once given the run of the veg patch John brought in proper tackle to garden. Down came the fence, the tractor reversed in and power harrowed out. Made digging the ground over look oh so easy.

I nagged for weeks and got nowhere. John gets offered a bag of seed potatoes and his whole outlook changes. I shall no doubt be endlessly grateful when the first tender young new potatoes are presented in all their earthy, sluggy glory for me to wash and scrape.

Top news however is that our guinea fowl are parents. I am just so pleased.

After weeks of wondering if they had any clue as to whether they knew what a sex life consisted of, or even if they knew what sex they were, we have chicks. Not sat by them of course. So far, despite laying loads of eggs they have shown no inclination to sit any of them, and they have been "surrogated" by an incubator and a broody bantam.

And not a moment too soon. Mr Fox has nabbed two of the guinea fowl over the last couple of nights, and of the trio which are left, we still do not know which sex is which.

They all do the calls which are supposed to differentiate between hen and cock and they all have wattles. Ditto.

A month or two ago we clipped their wings so that they would be forced to go into the hen house at night, but, over the course of weeks, their flight feathers have grown again.

Now all the guinea fowl perch on the top of the hen run, but somehow they were either caught during the day by Mr Fox, or charmed off their perches by the same wily creature. The fox has done nothing to conceal his tracks, littering the paddock with feathers after his guinea fowl dinner.

We have a problem now to catch the guinea fowl as they are so wary of us after having been caught once before.

They have an inbuilt distance sensor. Get anywhere within what they consider is a dangerous area and they are off. Straight up into the air and heading for the grain store roof, house roof, shed roof, cottage roof, foldyard roof.

We have a lot of roofs. There they sit cackling down at us in a series of unearthly shrieks. A neighbour even said they must contravene every known environmental noise regulation. Dare not let them know there could soon be a flock.