Wonderful wet walk around feeding the animals this morning, with that old Creedence tune running around my head. The burn is up and raging, over the dam but still following the bypass round the hydro intake, which is now basically complete and ready for an initial testing. Quite the conditions for this - a baptism of fire? It should be fun letting this kind of flow through the sluice, and then slowly turning the wheel to close it up. I will wait for wait for Jonathan the Wwoofer to appear, and we can enjoy putting our work to the test.
The black hen is not proudly leading her new brood around today. They are all tucked into the back of the broody coop, with the older chick from the last brood, 'the teenager' as Polly calls it. Actually I think she is a hen rather than a cockerel as she is already displaying some impressive maternal protective behaviour, seeing off the brown hens three times her size! Of course everyone is enchanted by the five little chicks: two silvery yellow, one black and two ginger. All will be some mix of Light Sussex, Buff Orpington and Marran.
I now have the treadle pump up and running. It needed to be drawing water from higher up the burn (so not raising the water so far), to be fully air tight, and to be generously greased. It now fills a large butt just above the polytunnel, and so into a hose. Water seems such an easy commodity now after months of carrying sloshing buckets up the hill. Although the pump requires treadling, it makes pretty quick and easy work of it.
And as Lou so sagely sang, always back to the rain...
