Bro Radio Interview and Pod

Elizabeth doing the stock duties morning and evening.

Update from the sick-bay. We are doing OK and definitely on the mend. This is Day 4 (of 7) on the amoxicillin course and I can now sleep though the night. This morning, for the first time, I was NOT sent back to bed by that fierce 'Nurse Elizabeth' at 0800 with the words "You look half dead!" ringing in my ears as a reason. I actually got dressed today and even did some easy out-door laundry jobs and strolled down to the gate to restock the egg honesty box.

I hope that this recovery continues and I can sign off on a new pair of healthy lungs, both capable of transferring oxygen from air to blood by Monday or Tuesday next week. I am, of course, taking the almost universal advice to take it easy and not rush straight back into heavy lifting till I'm good and ready. I hope you can cope with the temporary dearth of photo's in these posts.

That settlement cheque for the old 2CV arrives from Kent.

We are both delighted to report a solid up-side to the timing on this. If we were going to suddenly need to NOT do any jobs outdoors then we could not have chosen a better week, or better conditions. The whole site still glows with manicured parkland tidiness after our 3 weeks of French Help-X lass, Laura and the weather has been both benign (so no new damage to clear up) and dry, so the grass is growing really slowly and the sheep can keep up with the growth on it, plus way less mud/wet walked indoors than we might have had.

I do, though, seriously want to thank my Good Lady who has stepped so magnificently and heroically into the breach, mainly of the livestock rounds morning and evening. This despite not only having to keep up with her 'school' work (Horti-training course on Thursday) and also her volunteer day admin-ing at the Village Centre on Friday but also, this week, 3 days of a "Hard Landscaping" module which is  part of the course. Oh, and she also did a couple of shopping runs which I'd normally have done, including collecting 4 x 25 kg feed sacks plus my drugs and of course the 'offal' part of the lamb I had taken to slaughter just before my week went pear-shaped. So, massive, happy 'Thank You', Mrs C. This week would not be now where it is, without you.

Meanwhile, with some trepidation due to mistrust of my breathing ability and my chances of  not having a coughing fit live on air, I decided to go ahead with a pre-agreed, hour long radio interview. This was on a radio station called 'Bro Radio' based near Cardiff in the Vale of Glamorgan. Bro radio has nothing to do with  any 'gangsta' greetings between brothers (Yo Bro!), bro are the first three letters of the Welsh name for the Vale.

This interview was to be by good friend and Welsh smallholder, Helen Joy who I mainly know through the S/H Twitter group(s). I first 'met' her on a week years ago when I was having a first go at curating the Irish SH account (@smallholderIRL) and she a first go at the UK one (@smallholdersUK). We got chatting and got on really well and we have been good Internet friends since. We finally got to talk properly a couple of weeks back so that we could check we were compatible for a live interview, and we then booked up for Weds night, not knowing, of course that I might not have a voice by then.

In the event it went really well and we were both delighted with it as were plenty of our mutual friends despite a tech gremlin which lost us to loud music and sponsors chat for the first 7 minutes, so I did not actually get introduced. If you want to give it an air, then it is on

http://broradio.fm/bro-radio/country-view-06-20-2018

I did not have a coughing fit and we nattered happily for the whole hour about the joys of pigs, Guinea fowl, chickens and sheep. Great fun. I would definitely do it again.

Summer Solstice sunset

I think that is about enough for this one. I will report back, I hope from a much more healthy place, at the next one.

Pods and Pump Out

A size-able machine for manouvring on your precious
mown grass. 

Friends of the Blog will know that I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a man to do the pump-out on our septic tank. Probably not the best subject for a blog-post (I hope you've had your dinner!)  but a vital part of servicing a small-holding in the West of Ireland, where no mains sewage system comes within tens of miles of us. Also a service not met by some dinky 'Council' contractor with a small truck and garden-friendly equipment.

The huge tank and massive pipe make the "tiny" septic tank
 look really silly!

Here it is some local Agricultural Contractor who will turn up with a huge 4WD tractor and a slurry tank capable of taking massive doses of cattle slurry from the underground tanks below the big "slatted floor" of a winter cattle-shed. These rigs look to be 30-40 feet long (must admit, didn't actually measure it!) and need BIG spaces to manouvre in and to turn around.

For the first time in 5 years we can see the tank empty. The guy
also advises us to fit a 'T' and an up-pipe to the end of that exit
pipe you can see in the pic. 

When you book one and start to worry about this, you realise the lack of wisdom in all your decisions to put a rinky-dink gateway here which is OK for your Fiat Panda and a 6' by 4' 2-pig trailer, and a fence to contain your geese, or a few new trees planted just so. There is also the issue of the guy turning the rig round on your precious grass just so close to your pond. I ended up ripping out some fences and gateways just to get the guy to the tank.

Ah well, he came, he saw, he managed to turn the 'rig' with only one tractor tyre dipped into the pond (!)  and he sucked us all up. His huge tank/pump did such a good job on the 'water' that we might have been left with all the floating solids sitting on the sediment, but the guy turned the pump the other way and whooshed a great dollop of the 'water' back down into our tank to stir it all up and then sucked up the loosened up mixture.

Ooops.
Just the one tyre dipped into the pond.

The tank, we can now see, is a good solidly built sound affair, about 6 feet by 4 and 5'9" deep. Our man advised us to enhance the outflow with a vertical up-pipe and a 'T' - that way apparently the floating solids cannot block the outflow because the outflow draws 'water' from half way up the tank. We live and learn.

The other interesting aspect of this to us was that you are expected (most people.....) to have a place for the guy to empty the tank - a handy chunk of bog for example. They do not normally get asked to take it away and will charge you more for that add-on. Well, we have no such handy bog-field and I did not want 4000 litres of human "waste" spread all over the veg patch or the sheep grazing (even assuming the rig could get access). I happily paid the extra and watched the half-full tanker trundle off down the road. The guy was actually from nearby village Gortaganny and was off to a wedding after my job. He'd already met his friends for Breakfast in Balla-D where they'd joked with him that he better wash the tanker down before he arrived at the Ceremony. A nice lad. We will definitely use him again if we need someone, but we hope the tank with it's newly enhanced outflow will go another 6 years first!

In some lights this gnarly old bit of hawthorn reminds me of a
spooky dog. 

Meanwhile, while I'm on the entertainment value of Septic Tank emptying, I thought you might appreciate a list of our newest version of 'entertainment' out here where we have chosen to eschew TV, where we've watched all the 'old TV' we felt like buying as boxed sets, where we can't reliably get Radio 4 and we cannot get anything 'big' through the rubbish broad-band. That is the relatively new medium of Pod-Casts, or "pods".

We still follow, to a degree, the American politics pods from outlets such as Crooked Media, 538 and NPR (National Public Radio) but after the initial excitement of Trump's coming to power, these have waned a bit because nothing much is happening.

https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-america/
https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-the-world/
http://www.npr.org/podcasts/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/politics-podcast/

Baby Horse Chestnut doing its Autumn thing

We are glued, currently, to the Guardian's Brexit one, "Brexit Means" which seems to be standing aghast and watching with increasing horror as the Brexit process stutters and stalls and comes unravelled. The most recent, which covered farming, was truly scary.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/audio/2017/oct/25/what-will-become-of-food-and-farming-brexit-means-podcast

Misty Autumn Morning

We also enjoy a series of pods from a pair of friends who cover modern Irish culture and direction by also describing the history of these aspects and how Ireland arrived at its current position. The most recent covered the very controversial abortion issue and the planned Referendum next year to "Repeal the 8th" (Amendment to the Constitution).

https://theirishpassport.com/podcast/episode-11-abortion/

I am glued to a farming one by a guy (Will Penri Evans) who farms in Wales and who is on a mission to 'sell' farming to the wider public as a good thing. He gets a different guest on each week for an hour long interview, the guests being the great/good/influential from UK (and overseas) agriculture, particularly when they have a Twitter presence, most recently Tom Edwards who has, over the last few years, set up a company making a 'craft' gin (Warner and Edwards Rhubarb Gin)

http://rockandrollfarming.libsyn.com/website/028-united-in-spirit

Finally, there is a nice one I have only recently locked on to, done via Radio Cardiff by a friend I have 'met' through the Irish Smallholders' Twitter account. She is either Helen Joy or Valerie Chicken (according to taste) and the pods are called "World of Joy". The most recent one covered attempts to re-vitalise the rural economy in the Vale of Glamorgan.

https://www.mixcloud.com/RadioCardiffPodcasts/

If you fancy any of those, be our guests.