Steel Kitten

Going backwards with the gas bill

 

I made a lot of preparations last year for our goal of rebuilding a racing car, all aimed at reducing the household bills and general spending. I purchased a halogen oven back at the beginning of October with the intention of cutting back our gas usage, but until recently I didn't know how much it would actually save.

Now I do :-)

Before I tell you, the Halogen oven cannot claim all the credit for what follows, as we had an unseasonally warm autumn and our heating didn't go on for around three weeks after what we normally would, but I think it has contributed a large amount of the saving.

Between October 15th and January 20th we have used...drumroll please...388 units, a drop of around 200 units over the same period last year. That equates to us using 35% less gas - which is brilliant - and a gas bill of £187 pounds for three months. The electricity bill has also come in and as expected it has increased due to the halogen oven and unexpectedly having to run a fan heater and an oil heater this winter for a couple of days to heat up areas of the house where pipes froze (yes, the water in the washing machine pipes is still freezing in cold weather!). However, it has only increased by around £20, which I'm happy with. Given the recent price rises and the use of expensive fanheaters etc I was expecting a lot more.

Will keep you posted how we get on with this goal for the rest of the year. My hope is that after 12 months our savings will pay us back the original cost of the oven, cover the increase in electricity running it and still leave us with some money to spare afterwards.

Sour crop? Or canker?

The patient being kept warm

Just come back from the vets after Georgia-belle took a turn for the worse and another diagnosis has been offered - it is sort of sour crop, but not caused by impaction. Instead it could possibly be canker.

The similarities between the two are uncanny, but in the case of canker it is caused by an organism - a trichomonad - that is spread between birds through saliva. It can come from pigeons that drink at the same place as your chickens - the organism leaves the mouth of the bird and swims away looking for the beak of another bird to get into.

It then causes lesions to form somewhere between the mouth and the crop, often increasing in size until it blocks the food from getting down. I always assumed that the lesions started in the mouth and have seen some terrible pictures of mouth sores, but it's not always the case. 

My efforts to empty her crop have been fairly dismal since Tuesday when I really thought I had her fixed that morning. There was nothing to massage or break up as far as I could tell - and now I know why - and she just kept on throwing up liquid. Logic says that it could be one of two things; either her crop is in stasis and isn't working at all or she has a blockage. So I had massaged her to stimulate her crop and encourage the contents into her main digestive system but nothing actually going in so it has to be a blockage. Even water wasn't getting through in any quantity.

As wild birds drink from my chickens water bowl,there's a chance that she has a canker nodule which has grown in her crop and blocked off the access to her gizzard.

We cannot be absolutely sure of this of course - it could still be a blockage somewhere else caused by a lump of undigested matter or a small tumour - but the vet could feel nothing in the bottom of her crop or along the entire length of her abdomen, and because trichomonas is contagious it's the best place to start.

So twice a day I have to put a tube down the back of her throat to her stomach and pump in 2mls of Flagyl (metronidazole).

And Saturday morning I've got to give my girls a shock when I open the coop, extract them one by one and throughly check their crops. Because if Georgia-belle has it, it's too big a hope that they've all escaped it. 

Georgia-belle gives us a fright

 Oxo when she was ill with the same thing that Georgiabelle has - sour crop

Sorry it's been so quiet here lately.

Georgia-belle has been one exceptionally sick chicken over the last few days and its taken a lot of my energy to get her to turn a corner and begin to recover.

I found her on Saturday morning looking extremely ill in the corner of the pen. I hadn't even picked her up properly before she had thrown up evil smelling liquid all down the front of me, which made the diagnosis easier. Sour crop. And judging from how frail she feels she's been hiding it for a long time.

She's in our downstairs bathroom at the moment and I'm using the old dependable plant propagator to provide heat underneath her while she recovers. I've spent a while trying to get all the foul smelling liquid out of her and massage her crop, but last night she was so bad I had serious doubt of her making the night and was considering euthanising her.

That's a decision I haven't had to make yet about any of my animals, but I had to admit she was so poorly I couldn't see how she could recover and feared I was making her last moments hell.

The problem wasn't grass as far as I could see, so my immediate actions of oil and crop massage didn't really do a great deal to move anything. She was just full of water and at the base of her stomach foul black sludge. I have no idea what the sludge was, but it seemed that the bacterial/ fungal/ parasitic load from this evil stuff had simply stopped her stomach working or perhaps it had reached such a high level in her stomach food couldn't be digested or get through the opening to her true stomach. Whatever it was it wasn't mixing well with the other stuff in her stomach so had just sat there forming a dense rotten layer.

Anyway, last night she was as sick as I've ever seen an animal. Again and again she just kept throwing up - she threw up down me several times and I couldn't pick her up without this disgusting stinking liquid seeping out of her mouth. She was rasping and heaving for breath. Her wings were hanging limply, tips down, by her side. Her head was lolling forward. Each time she was sick she got weaker and desperately thirsty, so I had to feed her pipette after pipette of water with apple cider vinegar in it. Every hour or so I gave her a half a ml of a special nutrient solution for sick chickens in the hope she could absorb some into her bloodstream through her mouth membranes in the same way we do with some drugs. I started giving her natural yoghurt by pipette. By 9pm she was still alive, very weak and very thirsty but the vomiting seemed to have stopped. I gave her a good few mls of fresh natural yoghurt, so anitbiotic and anifungal medicine and tucked her up warm in a bed of fleeces for the night with a towel draped over her, making sure her head was propped up so it couldn't tip forward.

Then I went upstairs, took off my ruined shirt covered in black and brown vomit stains, and crawled into a very hot bath and got rid of the stinking rotting chicken food that had ended up in my hair, down my chest and all over my arms, hands, legs and feet.

It was in the bath I made the decision. If she hadn't improved at all this morning, if she was still being terribly ill and weak with fluid dribbling out of her mouth, I would euthanise her.

I opened the door to the bathroom this morning at 5am unsure of what I would find. I heard the sound of a little 'peep-peep' first and behind that was a slightly perky chicken. Her crop was finally empty. I mixed her up a combination of oats, grated apple, scrambled egg, mashed potato, honey and yoghurt, which she tucked into, along with her medicine on a couple of pieces of egg which had to be 'helped' into her (she does not like her medicine!). She had a wander round, a little 'peep-peep', drank some water and went back to bed. I put down a few spoons of beed cat food on a saucer and left her there for the day in the warm to rest and sleep.

I wonder if she knew how close she came?

Separating the Dream from Reality

 

Now we've decided when we want to be ready to make a move on to the next chapter of our life, the natural step is to fill in some of those gaps about what we want and what we don't.

This I think is the hardest part, because often none of us really knows exactly what we want in any great detail if we haven't been through quite a comprehensive exercise to work it out. If someone said to me right now: "You want that smallholding in the country? Cool...what are you going to do once you're there? What are your plans?"

Ummmm...don't know. Bees? Goats? Origami?

So I've done a bit of reading up on this over the last few days and have a handle on the process I need to go through to figure it out though. I thought I'd share it with you just in case you find it useful.

Not the first clue - usually the first step

If you really have no clue at all about what you really want, figure out what you don't want.  

Few people know what they want, but they will know what they don't want. Get someone to come up with something, anything, for you and then figure out what aspects of it suck! I guarantee you'll pounce on bits you don't rate. So if someone said: "Well you could keep goats and process the milk into your own cheese and butter and stuff, and you could build stables and offer them to rent to people with horses. You could make jams and sell them at farmer's markets," At which point you go "GOATS!! Bleurch...I wouldn't have a goat - I'd have to milk them everyday...and stables? We're thinking of going to Wales and the market is saturated...etc etc."

A bit of a clue - you're either lucky or have been through the first bit above!

You'll probably do this spread over a few days to let the ideas 'ferment' a bit. A nice glass of homemade sloe gin helps as well ;-)

1. What's the dream and what's the reality?

This is where your likes and dislikes come into it, as well as you fears and prejudices. How do you feel about heat, cold, snow, rain, mud, poor roads, power cuts, long journeys to see family? Be honest.

The dream....is to spend every day immersed in smallholding, making jam, pottering around the garden, bottle feeding orphaned lambs and piglets wearing hunter wellies and a Cath Kidston tea dress...the reality could be you're probably not going to have the time to potter due to a part-time job plus the fact the lamb will stick it's poo-covered trotters on you tea dress the second it sees the bottle and the piglet will bite through your expensive wellies. Ask me how I know ;-)

The dream....is to have an old stone cottage with a aga that heats the whole house...the reality is you hate the cold and all that stone will make for a cold damp house if anything goes wrong with the aga or you have a problem getting it lit. It could be you decide to forgo the idea of a stone cottage for a more modern insulated property, or you might decide there needs to be a secondary heating system installed.

The dream....is having a placid jersey cow and making your own dairy products...the reality is there'll have to be a baby cow about the place for part of the year that you may have to sell or send to slaughter, plus if you have a job you may not be enamoured with the idea of milking that cow every single day for months on end come rain, shine, sleet or snow. Who milks her if you're ill?

Here are some other things to consider in your initial plans.

• How isolated do you want to be?
• How's your health and will it stand up to what you want to do?
• How far from a main town?
• How far from neighbours?
• How much land is enough and how much will be too big an area to maintain?
• You can cope with it now, but what about in 10 years time when your back hurts a lot more?
• Do you consider "privacy," to be the last house on the way out of a village or a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?
• Do you want mains gas, or will you settle for an oil or a wood burning range as your only source of heat?
• Do you want to be able to drive in snow in bad weather or are you happy to be snowed in for a few days with no ill effects?
• At what point would you feel trapped and start to panic?

Now you won't get everything you want, so you will have to compromise. What will you compromise on? Write it all down. You may not want neighbours within five miles of you, but if the reality is that you have a health problem and you could need their help one day, perhaps no more than a mile away would be better.

2. Write down pieces of your dream and join them together.

Now you have a handle on what you don't want, what the realities are and what you could compromise on, you can start to actually write down what the Dream looks like. For example your Dream might look like "...20 acres with a stream running through it. A couple of good fields for horses and stabling. Preferably on flat land with a south facing kitchen garden. England only, no further North than the west midlands to ensure a decent length of growing season without needing a polytunnel. About a mile from any neighbours and within 10 miles of a main town. Would like some woodland to coppice firewood from. Ideally a three bedroom stone house with outbuildings. Concrete or stone pigsties. etc etc..."

4. Gain experience and skill

Now you have the Dream written down, what life experiences do you need to make it a success? Will you need to learn to garden, to can and preserve food, to hunt, fish or forage,to keep animals for meat and other products, to use and maintain a chainsaw, to have first aid training (should go hand in hand with learning to use a chainsaw), to build outbuildings or animal houses, to learn to drive a tractor to help maintain a crop, pasture or meadow land? Will you need a 4x4 if you live somewhere that can’t be accessed well in bad weather or you have to drive over very poor road surfaces to get to your home? If so, how much will that cost you to buy and maintain - could you maintain it yourself if money was tight?

Whatever you think you will need, spend the time until you can implement your dream getting the experience you need. Read books, go on courses, try experience days at farms and smallholdings, have working holidays on farms. Take tiny baby step steps forward, have a go then alter you plans as you get a better idea of how those pieces of your dream match up to reality.

4. What you think you will need

As you start to get some of these skills you may soon realise you're going to need a whole lot of stuff so start a 'Dream box'. You'll probably need three types of 'boxes' - a physical box or space, a digital box and a mental box to collect all the tools, equipment, supplies, safety gear, reference information and knowledge slowly and thoughtfully in advance.

5. Now imagine you're living the Dream; practice with mini challenges.

What do you need? If necessary create the same conditions as you might experience to practice. If you know the area you will be going is off-grid or experiences power cuts in bad weather, try living without your electric for a couple of days and see how you do. Can you live comfortably rather than just survive?Can you stand each other’s company without the distractions of the computer and TV?

Farming experiences are ideal to get more experience of this and many places offer weekend deals that could provide all the challenge you need if you ask the owners for it. Does your Dream start to change after two days getting up at 4am, you're dog tired and the goat bites you?

6. Finally money, moolah, reddies - a few helpful suggestions in the money department.

Whatever you decide to do, money will be vital. I've never met anyone or read anything that advocated starting this life with a large mortgage and debt. It starts you off at a disadvantage immediately and one financial problem could lead you onto a slippery downward slide from which you may never recover. Also, if you plan on setting up a business you'll need every ounce of credit you may have until you are established.

Have no payments for anything debt-related, including mortgage if possible.

Pay off your credit cards then cut most of them up bar one for dire emergencies. Put that one in a block of ice in the freezer.

Pay cash for your house, land, tools and animals.

Get all the dental work done that you need and any nagging health problems addressed. Don't put off having a knee joint replaced that's hurting all the time, otherwise it could seriously impact on the lifestyle you want to have. As mercenary as it sounds if you're employed and get sick pay, now is the time to get it done not when you're struggling to establish income sources and keep a holding going.

Try and get stash of money togther as an emergency fund for after the move. Things always need replacing after a move or an opportunity may come your way shortly after that you want to capitalise on.

Develop your talents into something you can market and set up a few income streams from before you're scratching around for cash. Do your research though.



***

So there you have it. That's what I've managed to glean so far from all of my wandering across the internet.

Is there anything else you think should go in here?

It's all got very real

 

Our cat Georgie when he first saw the chickens

Something odd happened last night (by the way, the photos on this post are just ones I happen to like, rather than specific to the post!). Our retirement dream took a step closer. Nothing physical happened bar a bit internet surfing, but a major shift happened where it needed to happen first: in our minds.

We've batted around ideas before about what we want.

• somewhere with a small detached house to live in
• a few decent outbuildings for Martin to tinker with cars in peace
• probably rural for privacy
• an attempt at smallholding

But that's been it. Batting ideas. Nothing concrete had actually been decided and by when it would happen. So we used to wander round remarking on how lovely it would be to have more outbuildings. How lovely it would be if we were retired. How lovely it would be to grow our own food, including the animals for meat. How lovely it would be to have a smaller cosier house.  Or worked from home.

It was almost like if we said it often enough we would come to believe it might be possible. Because we didn't really you know. Not really. Things like that don't happen to little people like us, they happen to people with money and grand plans and confidence. People like us get a gold carriage clock for 30 years service and sit in front of a one bar fire watching daytime TV as inflation eats into our meagre pensions.

So as well as our minds putting up irrational fear-driven obstacles, we were also wrestling with the real practical obstacles. A rural detached house with outbuildings is expensive everywhere you go. Every time we looked we found more than we were willing to spend. Much more. Somehow we thought Wales would be cheaper, but we weren't even close. Run-down hovels with outside toilets and postage stamp gardens are going for big money. Around £100k more than we would have after the house was sold and that's just plain disheartening. It would mean more mortgage. Which means going backwards, not forwards.

We got three meals-worth out of this onion

And then there's smallholding itself. It's no secret I like the idea of having a smallholding, but I've been changing my mind about it as time goes by and never really admitted it. I've been lurking on forums for years, reading people's posts about how difficult it is, how they live hand to mouth and never break even. Being in cold and draughty houses, not knowing how to pay big vets bills if they came in. A few enjoyed the life but on the whole people seemed to be really struggling.  I don't want to do that, but still I wandered round talking about getting goats and geese and being self-sufficient. 

Anyway, everything shifted yesterday. A chance surfing session before I cooked dinner led to us finding a way to have the small house and the outbuildings in the country for what we would get for this house, if not less. Suddenly the gold watch has disappeared (or in my case a meagre whip round in the office with a speech and some Marks and Spencer vouchers) and a plan appeared before our eyes.

It was like the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz - suddenly there is a very visible path in front of us that would be difficult NOT to follow.

My favourite colour - tomato red

Now, it won't happen for at least three years. We have the car to rebuild which takes us to August this year and then we want to spend a two years paying down the mortgage (so up to midsummer 2014). We also want to test how it might work if I carried on working and Martin retired by him taking a year's sabattical across 2013 and 2014 and learning how to generate income from some of the things he loves doing. So realistically, we won't be go anywhere until mid-2014 to the beginning of 2015, but the point is we have a date when we could start the process.  

And then it clicked that I actually was doing smallholding skills voluntarily and with a lot of enjoyment...like making cider and liquers...cooking from scratch...keeping chickens...growing fruit and veg...well...

...suddenly it's all got very real. And very do-able.