Fifteen eggs are quietly cooking in my incubator

THE youngest guinea fowl chicks are now in a pen in the big foldyard. Their pen is squeezed in as most of the space is taken up with big bales of hay and straw and an enormous pile of field beans. After their first few weeks in the secure grain shed, it must be quite a frightening experience to suddenly be exposed to nosy dogs, lowing cattle and raucous bigger guinea fowl.

One of our original guinea fowl hens has gone very broody and is sat in a nettle patch bravely trying to hatch out an enormous pile of eggs. As fast as I try to make the pile more manageable, the other guinea fowl hens lay under her.

To add insult to injury, a neighbour who had kindly removed a branch from a tree that had been broken in the high winds and was overhanging the lane, dropped the offending branch virtually smack on top of her.

She clattered off the nest cackling and creating as if all of us were intent on murdering her but she has finally returned to the nest and the branch may actually be doing her a big favour as she is now almost concealed from view, and sheltered from any excesses of the weather.

I have fifteen of the eggs from the nest quietly cooking in my incubator and plan to give her some keets if she fails to hatch any out herself. I would love to see what kind of a Mum a guinea fowl makes. Probably rubbish.

John has finished ploughing out the field we drained last year and that was sown down to first wheat. It yielded very well and the soil is in lovely condition still. Most of our land is heavy clay but this is in a section of real loamy soil. It feels divine to walk on. So crumbly and soft and a lovely rich reddy brown colour.

The seed merchant has let us down today however. He promised the seed corn this morning and so far it has not arrived. Result one grumpy farmer.

John tested out some of our own corn for seed, but the germination was too erratic to risk sowing a whole field. He is still looking at a couple more fields to plough and drill with corn and unless this merchant gets his act together we shall be looking elsewhere for seed corn.

The last and biggest field to sow has been half promised to another farmer to put down for grass for a zero grazing scheme where he will cut the grass and take it to his cows. However he has not made a move yet to sign the contract and in another week John will be in the field himself and drilling it with beans.

In the mood he is in now, and until this corn turns up, just don’t mess him about any more than you have to.

Mrs Down’s Diary