Coldest, Wettest, Slowest, Latest?

Bramble still tiny and hard-green on 21st Sept.

I don't know if this summer will go on record as the worst, but it is certainly our worst since we have been here, admittedly only 4 summers so far. We have seen figures for July which rated it coldest/wettest for 50 years but not so far for August which was also pretty dismal. Everyone is amazed at the lateness of crops and we have certainly had more failures and almost-certain-failures than we would welcome in a season.

This yellow Kniphofia, glorious last year, is barely
showing colour on 21st Sept 2015.

We are managing to keep ourselves fed on some crops - mange tout, black kale, chard, broad beans, spuds, toms and onions but we have managed to get through the whole season (despite some repeat sowings and plantings) without producing a single French bean, spring onion, courgette, squash or 'normal' pea (as opposed to mange tout). No French bean got beyond the 'germinate and the slugs will graze it off' stage. Crops like red beet are so far behind that they sit there in their row like little red pea-sized pellets with a few leaves up to about 9 inches. Red beet is such a large-seeded plant (OK, seed 'clusters' technically) that it never fails.

The bees were still active today in the lovely afternoon sunshine

The slugs left me only one Purple-sprouting plant and that, stressed by having few leaves left, started sprouting when only a few inches tall and gave us one measly sprout to share. In previous posts I have said that apart from a crab apple tree looking promising and a tree load of plums stolen by magpies, the apple and pear harvest will be very poor. I worry that the impressive stands of parsnip and carrot foliage may have nothing hidden under them. The bramble, which would normally be dripping at this time of year with a few over-ripe berries which you missed when you picked them over several times in early September, are still mainly hard green and tiny. They are so backward that I wonder will they miss altogether this year and just abort these unfinished trusses as part of autumn die-back. Do they do that? I have never seen it before.

Starting to load the log-store.

We have come by a couple of wine making kits entitled "Hedgerow Wine" which have all the yeast, food, grape concentrate and other goodies you'd need to get some blackberry wine going as I did many many times in my youth (memories of 26 1-gallon demijohns arrayed on shelving around my bedroom all at various stages of completion. It was quite a hobby). We were hoping to put these to good use with our normal bucket loads of blackberries from nearby fields. I think that boat may have sailed. We may have to use frozen currants from earlier in the year or frozen blackberries from 2014.

Tomato chilli jam labelled with JM's excellent charity labels.
The picture on them shows our house in c1900.

Ah well, swings and round-abouts. I had to nip down to our lamb-butcher and collect our meat from the twin ewe lambs Thelma and Louise. The deal there is that you can watch the lads butcher them up so that you can choose whether you want ribs or racks, gigot chops or full shoulder, legs cut in half and so on. They also bag up, weigh and label all the cuts as if they were going to over-the-counter customers. These two animals were possibly a bit smaller than the (store) lambs we have done in the past, coming in with carcass weights of around 43 lbs but we knew that and we needed that to happen for two reasons.

Lamb to go? Thelma (left) and Louise (right) ready for
delivery to the Silverwoods.

First we could not pile the 'fast crunch' in to them at 1 kg per lamb per day as you would store lambs, as we didn't want the ewes putting on too much weight (it affects fertility). Second, we needed them out of here before we took delivery of the ram, so they went at just over 5 months. Still, they were good looking carcasses and I am sure the recipients will be delighted with them. These two are off to Silverwood's today with Liz on a quick over-night visit. A definite success in our 'harvest' terms to counter all the fails. These were only our 2nd and 3rd ever lambs born and raised here, ear-tag numbers 002 and 003.

Dragonfly wing floating on the pond.

While I was in the butcher's I got talking to some lovely people, fellow small-holders. When I arrived they were actually in front of me in the queue, getting 2 of their own lambs processed and we got chatting about smallholdings, sheep, pigs and so on. When we had dropped our lambs off we had come home via Sue's to collect Rambo and, en route had pulled over to allow a car coming the other way to pass on the narrow road.

Tom the turkey has nearly finished growing his new tail back. 

We spotted that the car was towing a trailer with an eye-catching sheep-cage on it built from pallets tied together; quite a neat job! Liz joked that they were probably also headed for the butcher as there would not be much else they'd be doing on a Monday morning, that early, moving sheep about. Talking to these people and finding that they lived in a similar direction I wondered out loud whether this pallet-cage might have been them. Yep! That was 'us' they said and explained that their neighbour had sorted them out in an emergency with a replacement stock-trailer that morning. Impressive 'recycling' we thought. We chatted on some more about how you 'borrow' rams and about sheep health issues and ended up swapping phone numbers; we all think that you cannot have too many possible helpers and ways to share costs (e.g. for fluke doses which only come in bottles suitable for big flocks and you end up throwing 9/10 of it away when it goes out of date).

Rambo drives Dylan (right) away from Lily (left).

And finally on the good news front we have seen Rambo today for the first time paying some focused attention to one of our ewes, Lily. Liz noticed him getting very close behind her and wondered if he might be about to "start" (this is a family show, we'll leave the graphic stories to the David Cameron followers!). I did see him have a quick try-out but also spend some time driving away ram-lamb Dylan, so I suppose I had better record today's date in the calendar. He should definitely be full-on soon, if not actually tonight. Lily seems to be standing for him too, which is surely a good sign.

Slugs with Chainsaws?

Bee's Lemon Kniphofia

After many years of gardening and searching, having seen one in a book, we have got hold of a nice example of a 'red hot poker' (Kniphofia) but in the less common colour of pale lemon. We have been searching for the variety 'Bee's Sunset' for ages; well this one is Bee's Lemon so it will do for now. It stands proud in a half barrel full of a goodly mixture of our good loam and some muck from the mini-horses and after spending the summer as a tuft of leaves, has now produced an excellent stand of flower spikes. So far so good!

Slug damage to a Kniphofia stem.

Maddeningly though, the early spikes were being knocked over by something and being full of sap and brittle, they appeared to be almost snapped off. I suspected clumsy chickens but then noticed that at the 'break' there was not an actual break in the stem, but a 'cave' dug out, starting as a small pit in the skin of the stalk but then being hollowed out till there was just the skin at the 'back' of the stalk. The skin on its own was not enough to support the heavy flower head, so my 'vandal' was felling them. Pale brown slugs were quickly found to be the culprit. They were felling a stem and then getting bored (or full up?) and leaving them. They were proceeding through my stand of 'pokers' like a logging gang with chainsaws, felling a stand of forest. We are trying to be a bit organic and wildlife-friendly here, so I could not reach for the slug pellets; I am reduced to sneaking out at night with my head-light on, picking the little devils off and either flinging them as far away as possible or stomping on them on the gravel yard. This battle seems to be working reasonably well and I have, at time of writing, almost a dozen flower stems now starting to open.

These flies are everywhere, confusing me by looking very
like our bees. You are OK once you get your eye in; the
flight and eyes are wrong and only one pair of wings.

On the tenth of this month, the pigs reach 5 months age, so needed measuring again for the 'bust squared' weight estimates. They have now reached 66-70 kg so they are fast approaching 'ready' We are going for pork weight (carcass at 55 kg-ish) rather than baconers (80 kg) so it is looking like our 'bible' (Liz Shankland's (Haynes) Pig Manual) could be spot on with her 6 months estimate. Liz is already eye-ing them up in terms of joints of meat and recipes; she has an evil glint in her eye as she compliments their 'magnificence'. I need to get organised on creating the 'race' up from their field gate to a place I can get to with the trailer so that we can get them used to exploring, finding the trailer and enjoying the treats and straw there-in. That way the final journey will not be too traumatic of difficult for either us, or the pigs. We are not looking forward to that day, but it comes with the territory.

A possible white cornflower from an 'insect friendly' seed mix.

We had a nice treat today. John Deere Bob needed driving to nearby town Ballyhaunis to collect some money from the meat factory where he had sent 5 bullocks. He wanted to thank us for our help and invited the two of us to join him for lunch in a pub in the town. You never know exactly how much money you will get for cattle, he tells us, as it depends on a variable pence per kg figure and on the final, cleaned carcass weights of your beasts, but he was very happy today and proudly showed us the paperwork. He is not 'rich' for long, though, he joked; on Thursday he has to go to Castlerea mart to shell out for ten replacement 'weanlings' he has bought.

Californian poppy (Eschscholzia)

The pub was excellent. Called 'Val's Bar and Deli' it is a lovely pub with excellent service and delicious food. We three all had the fish but with differing choices of veg and salad. The lady saw that we looked like a hungry crowd and threw in a great bowl of chips for us. For me, too, a rare chance to get some Guinness down me with Liz offering to drive home. I love the 'black stuff' but amazingly I have now lived in Ireland for over 2 years and have probably drunk fewer than a dozen pints in that time. It is a pub drink (the cans or bottles are just not the same) and we are rarely in pubs as one of us would have to drive home. It is lucky, I guess, we did not buy a house within walking distance of a Guinness pub!

Finally a picture of Pirate enjoying a bit of sunshine in the yard - we are enjoying a week of 'Indian Summer' which is much appreciated after our rather wet chilly July and August.