Adhara & Pan

Adhara has a ball on a rope. She brought it back to me and pulled it, and the rope detached from the ball.

So now it's two toys and Pan has the other part.

 

Sulcorebutia arenacea

This is one of my favourite plants.

About 25 years ago, I first found seeds of Sulcorebutia arenacea for sale. I bought them and planted them, but without any success. Probably the seeds were old or had been stored in an unsuitable way. Availability of material to make appropriate composts was also terrible back then, which probably didn't help.

Those days were followed a succession of accommodation of varying unsuitabilty for growing cacti in. First I lived in a reasonably modern, well-heated apartment with a west-facing window with a radiator underneath it. Cacti like sun and they like cold, arid conditions in winter, and they never flowered nor grew well there. I developed more of an interest in critically endangered tropical cacti that don't have such a need for a cool winter. The next place was better, with a huge south-facing bay window and the radiator farther back in the room. They fared better here, but the room which functioned as both a sitting-room and a bedroom was miserable to live in during winter when the sun didn't shine.

Then I lived in an impossible to heat, ground-floor, mouldering flat with only north-facing windows whose facing onto the street necessitated having translucent curtains to obscure the view in. The cacti all died, tropical or otherwise.

Following this, I had an improvement in finance and fortune, and bought a house and built a greenhouse in the garden, and started again with new seeds and better compost. Perfect. But then I moved again, to a property that already had an old, heated greenhouse with a lot of old wood and masonry in the frame. The greenhouse, at least on paper, was fantastic. But it soon became apparent there was a problem. The greenhouse had become infested at some point during its previous ownership, and mealy bugs emerged from the cracks and crevices and proceeded to mutilate and destroy the plants I'd carefully nurtured.

Nothing worked. As a last resort, I went to the supermarket and bought up all their stock of tobacco and cheap vodka (I can only speculate upon what exactly the staff there thought I was doing with it, but I got some very funny looks that day). I soaked the former in the latter and doused everything with nicotine death tonic. I dug up all the plants, burned the worst affected, sprayed the plants and the roots with the poison and repotted them all. It worked for a few months, and then they were back. Some of the foul creatures must have survived dormant in deep crevices where they couldn't be reached.

At this point, I gave up and decided to stick with conserving animals instead of plants.

Then I moved somewhere with no greenhouses. Somewhere that was falling to pieces and had poky horrid little windows that didn't retain any heat. What it did have was a lean-to porch with a transparent plastic roof that received a reasonable amount of sun and remained barely above freezing and unpleasant to live in during most of the winter. Two years ago, I decided to start again and buy some more seeds, not tropical this time because I had no facilities for them, and lo and behold, S. arenacea and a number of other Sulcorebutia species caught my attention in the catalogue of a merchant abroad. This time, they germinated like mustard and cress, and this summer just passed, they flowered for the first time. It's been a long time coming, but it has been a satisfying conclusion.

Not the rarest species, but a plant close to my heart. There is some debate amongst people whose interest in plants probably oversteps healthy boundaries, about whether it should be called Sulcorebutia arenacea or Rebutia arenacea. I don't particularly care about this, but Rebutia are very different beasts in their growing habits. Sulcorebutia all have huge tap roots and will split the pots they grow in, whereas Rebutia doesn't have that root structure. Rebutia also flower like mad when only a year old and they're great beginners' plants. Just make sure you buy seed from a good supplier, and if you have an established collection and someone else gives you a cactus, no matter how much you care about and respect the person, you should probably burn it in case it is harbouring parasites.

 

Rebutia

Bonfire Night Pups

Happy Birthday to Tiffin Pup and her siblings, the 'Bonfire Night' litter, one year old today!

 

Chillies

 

Growing chillies at home is not only more sustainable than buying them from a shop, but enables you to find a variety of chilli at the right point on the Scoville scale for your individual pain threshold. These are 'Peruvian Purple' and for me they fall in the Goldilocks Zone. Chillies are too mild if you use three of them in a meal and still can't taste them; they are too hot if you have to dissect them individually into portions to stop them ruining your meal, and then 4 hours later and after washing your hands three times you absently stick your finger up your nose... I digress.

The hottest chilli in the world is contested between the breeders of 'Dragon's Breath' and 'Pepper X', both reputed to be in excess of two million Scovilles, which has led to some experts voicing concerns that eating such chillies could cause anaphylactic shock in addition to already documented side-effects. Why anyone would want to eat these is beyond me, but breeding exceedingly hot chillies has scientific and commercial value as the yield of the active component capsaicin is increased.

Most chilli varieties are genuine breeds, so by retaining seeds you can grow more chillies with exactly the same culinary attributes as the parent plants.

Pavement Pastel Poult

To get this colour on a turkey requires cracking a genetic combination lock of four different loci. It's a yellow-shoulder with a single dilution gene (homozygous blackwing base, homozygous grey, and the absence of Narragansett alleles overlaid with heterozygous slate). I don't know if there's ever been an official name for it, but I'm going with Pavement Pastel Poult.

 

Gallows Humour and a Dead Cria

 I did earlier this year have three lovely crias. The cria in the foreground of this picture was female and I had taken to calling Treacle (young alpacas should not be given names and should at all times be referred to as 'it' until they are at least 6 months old for reasons that should become apparent).

This cria was born perfect, but at 4 weeks old, developed aspiration pneumonia. Off we went to the vets to get antibiotics, and for a few days it was touch and go and the cria slept on the floor in the porch, and then she rallied and was once again doing well. But then at 6 weeks old the cria developed ataxia which progressively developed into a paralysis of the base of the neck which can be seen in the above picture. We tried many things with the vets: blood tests to check for deficiencies, which there were none, painkillers and steroids, and finally I found a research paper that discovered discospondylitis in an alpaca (an abscess between the vertebrae of the spinal column) and we started antibiotics in case it was this.

Unfortunately this was too late and the symptoms progressed further into paralysis of the front limbs and scoliosis. The vets and I were in agreement that the cria did not have the quality of life to justify keeping her alive. Normally, when this has to happen, I would bring the animal concerned to a quiet place about the farm and have it humanely and instantly killed with a rifle shot to the head by a person with a firearms certificate. However, it was necessary to have a necropsy to try to find out what had happened, and as we couldn't rule out a brain problem, we decided to euthanise the cria in the vet's car park. Unfortunately alpacas have cardiopulmonary systems adapted to high altitude, and they do not go gently into that good night. After a few seconds the cria was unconscious and undoubtedly out of her misery; two bottles of pentobarbital later, the cria was finally dead.

I put the dead cria into the car and set off for Bristol University. As I was driving through Bristol city centre, the car suddenly lost all power. I managed to get it into a bus rank and called the RAC.

Now, I don't usually go into cities if I can avoid it. As I sat in a stuffy car on a torrid September Saturday, I found myself watching the buses. I wondered if I should just take the dead cria and get a bus to the university. But the people in the city dressed rather oddly and did not seem at all like people in the countryside, and it occurred to me that they might take great offence at me being on a bus with a dead alpaca slung over my shoulder or taking up a seat that should be given to someone pregnant or disabled.

The RAC man arrived, and he asked if I had been dropping someone off in the bus rank.

Well, I said, I can guarantee you won't have heard this story before, but I've a dead alpaca in my boot and I'm taking it to Bristol university to be studied in the name of science and closure.

Turns out, I was right and he had never heard that story before. He found out what was wrong with the car, but could not obtain the part to fix it. So my dead cria had to be towed back home in the car.

Fortunately, after much pesterment and badgering, Mr Brock-o-Dale Rare Breeds agreed to drive to Bristol, and my dead cria at last went to university (universities let in anyone these days), and the necropsy went ahead. We found out the cria did have a spinal abscess as we had suspected too late to effectively treat. I do feel it is important to do these things and to learn from them. Bacteria must have migrated following the initial infection to cause this, so any cria that gets aspiration pneumonia in future or has ataxia will be going on a longer course of antibiotics as a precaution, and I'm leaving this here in the hope it might help another alpaca breeder with a sick cria.

RIP cria 22/7/21-18/9/21

Some Plants My Animals Love -- and I do too!

Lucerne, King of the Forage Legumes

Lucerne is called alfalfa in the USA and Canada, and sometimes in the UK products made from it are marketed under this name or 'lucie', particularly when aimed at the horse and pony market. Lucerne has been used to feed livestock since ancient times and is one of the most productive and highest protein forages that can be grown. It has an advanced deep-delving root structure and of course, as do all legumes, it fixes nitrogen as well as carbon.

If lucerne is king, it's a bit of a tyrannous monarch. For a start, it's autotoxic. 'Toxic' is one of those abused words that has a specific scientific meaning that has been corrupted by entering the common vernacular, and all this really means is that mature lucerne plants leach hormones into the soil that impede the germination and establishment of more lucerne close to the parent plants, which means new lucerne plants can't seed and get going in established stands. This has no effect on anything other than lucerne, and probably evolved to reduce the impact of the very large root systems of the plants competing with each other for space. It does mean that if you have a pasture in which lucerne is a component and you need to destroy it and reseed it for whatever reason, lucerne won't re-establish in it unless you use it for something else for several years.

Secondly, lucerne has rather an antisocial reproductive habit. Its pollen is deficient in some amino acids important to the diet of pollinating insects. This generally isn't a problem unless you plant acres and acres of lucerne with no other flowering plants, since bees can always make up for it by foraging other flowers. However, the flowers have an odd mechanism that hits the bees on the head to deposit pollen on them when they access the flowers. Bees don't like being banged on the bonce, same as everything else, and learn to either avoid the lucerne or eat through the side of the flowers to bypass its bee-bashing machinery.

Lastly, lucerne as grazing can be hazardous to some ruminants, in particular cows, as it ferments aggressively in them and can cause a buildup of foam that can blow up the animal's digestive tract and potentially kill it. This is less of a problem when lucerne is included in a diverse sward rather than used as a pure stand, and seems to be less of a problem in sheep and even less so in alpacas.

Like any king, lucerne has a crown. In this case it's a sort of woody knobbly thing visible at the soil surface from which the plant sprouts following its winter dormancy and after it's been eaten. The crown is the only visible part of the plant's enormous root structure which in mature plants is apparently anywhere from 2 m to a massive 15 m deep.

Sainfoin... Queen of the Forage Legumes...?

The sainfoin plants around here are not very big as they were only planted this year. At maturity they are impressive plants with lupin-like pink flowers. There is one growing wild by a roundabout nearby, which I haven't taken a picture of because I'm always driving when I see it. More and more I am noticing that roadsides and waste ground is being maintained in the same way as meadows these days, which is great for biodiversity and for motorists to enjoy.

Back when countries were ruled by kings, the king was determined arbitrarily by birth order, which meant the populace were stuck with whatever king they got, which could put the country in a dire situation if the king had serious flaws. To compensate for this, the king could marry someone who made up for his deficiencies, and would often pick a queen who was diplomatic or had other characteristics that appealed to the masses. While sainfoin isn't as well-known as lucerne, they complement each other in this way, and sainfoin can ameliorate the bee-bashing, cow-inflating tyranny of lucerne.

Sainfoin is not as rich in protein nor as high-yielding as lucerne, but it has some superpowers. It contains condensed tannins which when ingested by livestock have several remarkable benefits. First of all, they work to break down the foam that can develop in ruminants as a result of rapid fermentation, preventing gas bloating. Secondly, they bind to proteins in the rumen so they pass into the intestines without being broken down and make the animal digest them more efficiently, and the third effect is that as a direct result of this more efficient digestion, the animals produce less methane. It is also an antihelminthic, which means it can actually help to reduce and prevent intestinal worms in animals grazing on it.

Of all the legumes, sainfoin produces the highest quantity and quality of nectar. It is rocket fuel for bees and other pollinators. Like lucerne, it is deep-rooting and drought resistant. Despite being grown since ancient times and despite all its qualities, sainfoin has fallen from favour since the World Wars. Considering all its qualities, it is perplexing why anyone with livestock would not want to grow it.

 

A video of a huge area of sainfoin, probably for making hay, by Patrick Funk

Burnet and Chicory

Burnet and chicory are two herbs that seem to do rather well for themselves even in quite aggressive grazing conditions. I deliberately let a paddock get hammered this spring because I wanted to overseed it to make it more diverse. The animals ate everything to almost ground level. When I inspected the field to see if seedlings were growing, there was a burnet plant and a few chicories doing very well that clearly were not seedlings and must have arrived earlier by being carried in by animals. They are both deep-rooting plants and chicory also has antihelminthic properties for animals grazing on it. I almost feel bad writing this as so much snake oil is peddled claiming to 'reduce worms naturally' but there is real research on this that shows it is effective. Chicory has attractive blue flowers on it in late summer, this one not quite yet.

Ribgrass is another deep-rooting plant purported to have anthelminthic properties. It thrives anywhere, including on building sites in solid clay.

The Wildflowers

I must admit I get as much enjoyment from my wildflower meadow as I do my actual garden, and the wildflower meadow involves much less work.

Pyramidal orchid

Musk mallow

Various wildflowers: campions, oxeye daisy, and bedstraw

Birdsfoot trefoil and red clover, both legumes

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Bath Asparagus

Hogweed. Alpacas like eating it. Also good on a pizza.