Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (13 page)

The DEFRA vet prescribes a course of Tylan Soluble for the remaining sick chickens, but by the time the virus is under control
we have lost twenty-four birds and twenty-two are on medication. Even though they start laying again before reaching the end
of the antibiotic course, the eggs cannot be eaten as it is against the law to sell an egg laid by a chicken on medication.

The rare breeds are well into their laying season and our smart new incubator arrives just in time to hatch the newly fertile
eggs. It can hold eighty eggs at a time, keeping them at exactly 37.2°C and 45 percent humidity. It takes five days for the
incubator to reach the right temperature, where it will now stay, apparently ad infinitum, provided there isn't a power cut.
There are sixteen eggs - Leghorns, New Hollands and Barn­velders - in the small incubator that are due to hatch on 16 February.
David made a mistake with our last batch because he removed the chicks immediately they had hatched, thus minutely, but crucially,
changing the temperature for those still inside their eggs and, more importantly, altering nature's ordered progress. Chicks
live for their first twenty-four hours on the remaining yolk sac, which provides essential minerals and vitamins to the baby
bird. Once they drink on their own, this process is fatally disrupted.

The first goose lays an egg on 8 February and now they are appearing every day. Goose eggs are big - about three and a half
inches long - white and a more oval shape than a chicken's egg. Mildred lays four eggs: also white, but considerably smaller.
All of these go into the new incubator when it reaches the right temperature, though we will leave some goose eggs out in
the coop for the female geese to hatch.

Eggs are extraordinary things. It takes twenty-five hours for an egg to form inside the chicken's oviduct. The oviduct is
more than two feet long and is lined with glands that secrete the materials for the albumen, shell membranes and shell. Strong
muscles keep the eggs spinning round, making ten to twelve rotations every hour, like a potter's wheel. The spin gives the
tiny embryo its early sense of orientation. As the yolk spins, the cells at the leading edge of the small disc of dividing
cells will become the head. Egg formation is a physiological process that can be triggered by light conditions and production
of yolks in readiness for breeding. The yolks aren't formed after mating - the delay would be too great - so ripe yolks are
released from the ovaries and undergo the process of egg formation even if the male is absent. That's how our domestic chickens
manage to lay their five or six eggs each week. In the wild, though, it works differently. Wild birds synchronise egg formation
and mating to the time of year, giving us the wonder of birds' nests in springtime hedges, filled with colourful speckled
eggs.

When I was a child, our garden in Ludlow would boast at least ten nests in the garden hedges every year. My father was keen
on birds and allowed me to collect two or three eggs a season: bright blue hedge sparrows', speckled thrushes' and the blue
blackbirds' eggs. If there was a tit's nest, it was well out of bounds, which seems ironical now as our garden is full of
tits long-tailed tits, great tits, blue tits and coal tits - but it is rare to see any thrushes, and even the blackbirds,
which I remember as being classed as common birds when I was a child, are infrequent visitors. Using a needle, I'd
make a tiny hole in either end and then gently blowout the yolk and the white, adding the hopefully intact egg to my collection,
stored on cotton wool artfully tricked up with old bits of moss, in a drawer of my bedside cabinet. The question of why eggs
are coloured and speckled has engaged scientists for over a hundred years. Many believed that it was for camouflage, useful
for concealing eggs from predators, but if you think about it, this theory doesn't stack up at all. Why leave a bright blue
egg in a dusty brown nest, signalling its presence to any passing predator? Many eggs, like the white and reddish brown speckled
eggs of the great tit, are so distinctive that a blind weasel could find them in the dark.

Recently a better theory has emerged. Speckling may be a unique solution to the engineering problem of how to strengthen unusually
fragile eggs. The pigment chemicals that create the speckles may act as a kind of glue, supporting thin areas of shell and
protecting them from breakage during incubation in the nest. Ornithologists studied great tits living in woods near Oxford
where the soil is low in calcium. Their eggs are very heavily speckled. Calcium carbonate is the main construction material
for shells and birds get their calcium from eating snails, which in turn extract their calcium from the soil to make their
shells. The speckled areas, which have less calcium, gain reinforcement from strong, flexible compounds called protoporphyrins.
This suggests that speckling, far from being a beauty or camouflage aid, actually has an engineering function. But no one
has yet explained why robins' eggs are blue.

Boris has pneumonia and his coat is ragged due to a fungal infection. He's looking very miserable and is off his food. I know
David is worried that the little pig might not pull through, but I refuse to believe that another one of our herd might die.
Although he is meant to be the breeding boar, he is clearly not up to it so one of the other boys has been moved in with Bramble
in the hope of successful mating. Their initial meeting wasn't promising as they tore into each other, squealing aggressively
and biting each other's ears.

A few hours afterwards, Charlie and I are walking back to the nursery to spend the afternoon planting seeds when we notice
the male pig standing in the middle of the sprouts in the vegetable garden. He's making his way towards an open gate, so while
Charlie goes off to find some pig nuts I stand in the gateway to stop him getting out. But Number One Pig, as I'd
christened this unnamed porker, isn't that serious about making a bid for freedom. He stands quite still in the gateway while
I scratch him behind his ears and rub the wrinkly skin above his snout, which pigs seem to like. He leans against my knee
and moves his weight forward on to his front legs, his back ones stretched out behind so that he looks like he's getting ready
to do press-ups. We stay like this for quite some time as I forgot the key to the feed shed and Charlie has had to go home
to collect it. But Number One's attention snaps back when he hears the rattle of the nuts in the bucket, so I tie my grubby
white pashmina shawl round his neck like a lead and walk him back to his run. As soon as we turn the corner and he sees Bramble,
he breaks into a run, the scarf billowing out behind him. I whip it off his neck just before he scampers through the gate.
I think he looked rather debonair in the scarf, a regular pig about town.

In 1842 Charles Dickens was in New York where he met a boar walking along Broadway who inspired him to write: 'He leads a
roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat answering to that of our club men at home. A free and easy, careless,
indifferent kind of pig, having a very large acquaintance among other pigs of the same character. In this respect a republican
pig, going where he pleases and mingling with the best society.' In the 1980s the
New York Times
reported seeing two adult pigs trotting through Manhattan in the early hours of the morning. They were later spotted strolling
along the shore on Staten Island. William Hedgepeth, author of
The Hog Book,
wondered: 'How in the world did they do that? Hogs can swim well enough, but that would have been stupid. Clearly they got
aboard the Staten Island ferry, but how?' We still have no idea how Number One Pig got out of his run. So far, there's no
record of a pig figuring out how to unlatch a gate and then close it carefully behind him.

Charlie is growing increasingly concerned that, because of the diversions into pigs and birds, we're neglecting the bread-and­butter
of our business, growing vegetables. We started the farm exactly a year ago and its prime purpose was to fulfil all of Dillington
Park's orders for vegetables and eggs and we are failing badly in this respect. Right now, in the middle of January, the polytunnels
are largely empty, most of the walled garden is empty too and there's now the huge five-acre field, stretching away to the
west of the garden, which is still covered in the stubble of last year's wheat. David's energies have been diverted into laying
drainage pipes, building a new chicken shed (which will house all our birds if the threat of bird flu means that all free-range
fowl have to be moved indoors), planting the fruit trees and fencing off the new land.

All through January, we've been spending several hours every weekend sowing seeds for the first Montacute market of the year.
On these cold days, I love being in the potting shed, where it is warm and life springs up all around me. There are heated
shelves covered with gravel along two sides of the room, where the newly planted seeds germinate, warmed from below, watered
from above by the sprinklers. At the far end, there's a big table where plants in various stages of growth stand in rows.
On the remaining wall, another wide bench provides space for planting seeds, potting up seedlings and transferring cuttings
into bigger containers. In the open areas underneath the surfaces, black plastic seed trays, pots of different sizes and bags
of soil are neatly stacked. Trowels, small forks, scissors, Stanley knives, labels, pens, string and wire are assembled on
a shelf above the potting-up bench. Everything you need is within easy reach, including the kettle and the radio. Fat-Boy,
as Dylan is nicknamed, likes it too, as the potting shed connects to the room where the eggs are stored and there's usually
at least one egg that gets broken, or is cracked and therefore can't be sold, which he then gets to eat, slurping up the yolk
and the white, every so often spitting out a bit of shell.

Crumble up the rich, moist potting compost in your hand, pack it into the pots, make a small hole and drop in the seeds. Marjoram,
coriander, green basil, purple basil, flat-leaf parsley, curly parsley, chervil, oregano, peppermint: I have planted ninety
of each this morning. Then cucumbers, peppers and chillis. Then some flowers: phlox, delphinium, carnations and pinks. The
smallest seed is the peppermint, smaller than a grain of salt, practically nothing at all. It is almost impossible to believe
that this will turn into a big, leafy, sweet tasting, powerfully smelling plant in a matter of weeks. Soil is extraordinary
stuff. The more I learn about it the more I realise that it is at the heart of everything on our planet, the substance that
provides us with all life. It is what allows the earth to breathe and to live, to function.

It even has its own association, the Soil Association, whose roots go back to the 1940s, to a group of English eccentrics
led by the magnificent Eve Balfour. On her farm in Suffolk, Lady Eve struggled to grow good vegetables and raise livestock.
In her spare time she wrote detective stories and played in a jazz band and smoked cheroots. You could find her, it was said,
dressed in tweed trousers, leaning on a fork, a cigar clamped between her lips, surveying her crops. She described herself
as a flapper-farmer. In 1940 she'd read a book by the explorer and naturalist Sir Albert Harrison, who had spent the previous
decade studying the lifestyle of the Indian Hunza tribe. The Hunzas lived well into their hundreds and Sir Albert was desperate
to discover their secret of long life. Farmers worldwide had understood the necessity to rotate crops in order not to deplete
the soil of essential nitrogen. They'd understood biological control, the process whereby specific pests can be destroyed
by predators and parasites. Conscious biological control is an ancient concept: the Chinese encouraged ants into citrus groves
to eat caterpillars and boring beetles, even building bamboo runways to aid their progress from tree to tree. Sir Albert,
I'm sure, would have known to grow a row of onions between his carrots, to keep the carrot fly at bay and he would have known
the extraordinary benefit to the soil of regular plantings of clover. The Hunza did all this, but they had an extra secret:
they irrigated their terraces with water from glacial streams, a rich source of minerals released from volcanic dust, which
meant that their food was enriched with high levels of essential trace elements and it was this, he concluded, that gave them
their long life.