The Complete Tail

Burning the old broken end of your muck fork out of the
metal socket by sticking it in the range over night.

Our cold winds and haily, showery weather look ready to make this the coldest, most miserable May anyone can remember. I don't think the temperatures have topped 12 or 13ºC all month and the bee keepers at our meeting last night in Longford were saying that their hives are not getting any 'flow'. This is the word they use to descibe the huge in-pouring of nectar which foraging bees can bring to a hive when the suitable flowers are out - you get a "dandelion honey-flow" or a "horse chestnut flow".

New toys! Sheep shears.

This year, though, everyone is waiting for the hawthorn (they call it 'whitethorn' here) flow to start and they are wryly commenting that it is 19th May and not a whitethorn flower open yet! So little nectar and pollen is coming into the hives that the nutrition in it is going straight into the brood comb for the young larvae. There is little left over for the bees to stash away in the honey-comb for stores. On the plus side, the colonies will be slower to swarm, if they have that in the back of their minds.

New toys - sheep shears and a butcher's bone-cutting saw.

There is also better weather forecast. I'll be happy if the chilly wind just eases off - I'm not too worried about the showers. I am well set up with my raised beds as regards drainage and not having to walk on the seedbeds, so as long as it has not actually been torrential overnight I can work. I get down there with my knee pads and hunker down in the 'trenches' between the raised beds, protected a bit by the hawthorn hedge and the tall stuff like purple sprouting broccoli, artichokes and raspberries and I'm warm enough. Only when I stand up to lug a full weed bucket to the compost do I get reminded of how bloomin' cold it is.

The rather alarming business end of those shears. 

They say you are never too old to learn something new, and yesterday, down in the 'allotment' I took on one more grain of gardening know-how; one of those which is obvious when you think about it but had not occurred. Back in April, with frost forecast, we raced to throw some protection over the newly emerging 'baby' asparagus crowns. I used some hay, being the first thing that came to hand. When the frost was done, I left it there thinking it would do no harm. Yesterday I went to see why the thriving shoots, which I had been so anxious to protect, were not now doing anything and noticed one keeled over with obvious slug/snail tongue-rasp marks. Pulling up the old damp hay, I found, to my horror, Slug-Central - dozens of the little critters hiding under all that nice warm damp hay and presumably feasting on my precious asparagus overnight. Moral: if you use hay to protect plants from frost, take it up again when it warms up.

Mary's face showing her intriguing white eyelashes

New toys for 2015; we have invested in a set of sheep shears and a butcher's bone-cutting saw. I plan to learn to shear this year so that I am not beholden to a neighbouring farmer or sheepy colleague remembering to invite my 2 or 3 girls over to be included in their mass-shearing. People here use traveling contractors who drive from farm to farm with portable pens, shearing 'stages' and shears. They expect to be doing dozens or hundreds of sheep and the economics don't work if you only have three, so small holders like me would normally try to sneak in on shearing day with our few.

Isabelle (nearest camera) and Mary.

This works as long as your host-farm remembers you and as long as you get warning to keep your sheep indoors to make sure they are dry - you cannot shear wet sheep. In the case of Mayo-Liz, we have also been promised that if we turn up on shearing day, the "bloke doesn't mind" showing anyone how it's done and giving them a small master-class training session with plenty sheep to practise on. I am wondering whether to go with that this time for training purposes, or whether to shear mine if I get a dry three days and go for the practise anyway.

The bone saw was a bit of a luxury and quite pricey but anyone who has tried to use a standard carpenter's hack-saw on bone will know that it is very necessary if you want to butcher up your half-carcass in a reasonable time. Hack saw blades quickly clog with bone shards and bits of membrane and sinew. A bone saw blade has teeth of a special size and shape designed to shed this debris and allow the blade to keep working.

A first chick hatches under the broody Buff in the Tígín

We are still very much enjoying the pigs. They are complete charmers. I am intrigued by Mary's face, which has the big white stripe up her snout but also a bright 'spray' of white eyelashes on her right eye. The other side, and all Isabelle's eyelashes are black. Pigs also have a bristly row of hairs above the lashes as a thin 'eyebrow'. I also love their curly tails which are always in motion being unwound and wound up again as they move about and which they wag like a dog to show pleasure. Our Tamworths last year had had their tails either bitten off or docked when they were tiny, so that we only got a few inches of curl, but Mary and Isabelle's are intact.

Thereby hangs a tail.

Finally, 'breaking news' just today, as the first baby chick hatches under the broody Buff Orpington in the Tígín. This is something of a relief, as the girl had cruised past due date (Saturday) and then Sunday and Monday too, looking a bit more agitated but never letting those little cheep-cheep noises out from under her skirts. Today she hopped off the nest to go do her toilet just as I went out for a check, and I spotted the new chick. Unfortunately, there is also one in there who didn't make it - you can see the rather mashed looking egg directly behind the new chick in the pic. This was a fully formed, almost hatched, but dead and stiff chick who never quite escaped the egg for whatever reason. Mum is back on the nest now with the baby but without the dead one, so maybe she will tempt some more out overnight.

That's all (S)he Wrote

Done with the bee exam, a restorative Guinness

Huge relief at this end today as we make another milestone on our chug through these busy months; I survived my big beekeeping exam this morning over in Longford. This was a 'proper' exam like I can remember them from A levels and University; 3 hours of tough fast writing and rapidly compiling all the material you have revised and forced into your skull in the course of our "bee school" study groups, book reading and internet training videos. 5 questions to answer (Answer question 1 and any 4 from the remaining 7 (some of which were two part either/or style). A proper exam 'hall' with the official invigilator seated at one end, the time-set clock running and dead silence.

Those lambs take shelter from the rain.

Well, we all survived and everyone seemed to be writing a good few reams - I covered 13 sides of A4 but we had all agreed that we would do no post-mortems. Our main comment was that we were all 'of a certain age' and had not written anything like that amount on paper with an actual pen for about 30 years or more, so the hand cramps were killing on occasion and I saw everybody putting down pens and flexing and unflexing fingers to try to get some mobility back into the digits.

Who's the cutest? Probably not the one in the middle, anyway!

As I was going to be in Longford for at least 3 hours, Liz had taken the opportunity to  come with me to the town and try out the shopping potential - Longford is an hour's drive, so we have not really explored it much,though I was much impressed by the Christmas lights up the main street. So we parted in the Tesco car park at 09:00 and off Liz went to suss out Birthday presents for brother and Mum and may also have accidentally bought a replacement laptop for our ancient, ex-work, over-heating problem machine.

Replacement brain-food, Hester's of Castlerea do
a most excellent bacon and cabbage. 

She was then outside at 12:30 to gather a rather shell-shocked husband up and take him off for a restorative lunch and a couple of pints of the black stuff. This being a treat for me, I got to choose the place and my current favourite 'pub lunch' is the bacon and cabbage at Hester's "Golden Eagle" in Castlerea and a pint or two of their beautiful Guinness. I will not find out whether I have passed for months if FIBKA's speed on the preliminary exam marking is anything to go by but I find I don't mind that much. I have given it my best shot and the 13 pages, well, that's all he wrote, it's done now and too late to worry about it.

A nose smeared with Mum's milk and decorated with a long strand
of her wool. Perhaps we'll use those to tell them apart?

Although this was a serious exam, nothing hangs on it, I can keep bees anyway and I am not using the qualification to try to get a job in the commercial honey industry, it was just for fun. It is also just one third of the three you must take to achieve full intermediate status. There is another more science and biology based paper (anatomy, development, physiology, pheromone chemistry and the like as compared to this paper which was on bee-keeping and hive management) and then there is a hive session where the examiners visit you at your own apiary and make you jump through hoops to prove you know what you are doing. I am not sure whether the Longford BKA will be volunteering for either of these, which they would presumably do in 2016 and 2017 respectively. We will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Early pollen for the bees. Willow.

For now I can put all the books, mags and printed notes away back in their proper shelves and swap over to reading something easy and light instead of the learnéd tomes by Ted Hooper, David Cramp and Claire and Adrian Waring, enjoyable though they were. My lovely relieved feeling joins the flood already established of relief at the lambing which as well as going amazingly well, managed to avoid the bee exam - I was eye-ing that Polly up a little nervously and pleading with her not to do it to me on exam morning. That might have been too much distraction.

Pulmonaria putting on a good show.

Those two things have been a real focus and we can now mentally move on to this weekend's celebrations in Silverwood of the two family birthdays, then Easter. Then we have a stint of Liz being away again (back in Silverwood) supporting one parent while the other takes a break in the sun, possibly my own birthday if it doesn't get lost in the scrum (!), the arrival soon of pigs and all other spring into summer 'ground-rush' events. Possibly even some first 2015 bee hive inspections (I might know what we're at now). It's all go.

A good use for cold roast lamb and the left over suet - mini pies

Meanwhile the baby lambs are thriving on their mother's ample milk and have had a few visiting admirers - even Bob. They are starting to explore their field now as they follow Polly at her grazing and you see them bouncing around on all four tip-toes (it's called "pronking" in deer, but I'm not sure if that applies to lambs). They seem to retreat to the field shelter at night or to get out of the rain. I have had to start feeding the families a distance apart, or the babies mill around the troughs and the grown-ups feel the need to head-butt them away from the food, even though they are not trying to get any. Onwards and upwards.

Waiting for the Eleven

Change of day-length vs days through year (50N).

We are doing really well for eggs at present, what with it being, I suppose, peak season, Equinox an' all that. We have 11 hens and have had two days in the last week where they have laid, between them, 10 eggs, though the norm is around 7 eggs. We are also getting one every other day from each goose and, we think, a daily Guinea fowl egg since the 18th. Today we thought we might be on for the 'full chicken house', 11 from 11 - we had already collected ten and there was a cackling, clucking racket going on mid afternoon as if someone was proclaiming another arrival, but no, it was a false alarm and the girls are keeping us waiting.

Min (left) and Henry (right)

I love all the physics around Equinoxes and day-length, At the Equinox, most people know, we have equal daylight and night-time hours (well, almost, there is some detail around this to do with latitude and the not-exactly perfect elliptical orbits) but this is also the time of the fastest CHANGE of day length. We are effectively accelerating towards summer at the fastest rate, with days getting longer at around 3 minutes per day, 21 minutes a week (spread across both ends of the day, of course), which is why you can easily see and feel it. This currently affects us more intensely than when we lived in the UK, because chicken 'bed-time' moves with darkness hours, and is currently around 7 pm, earlier on gloomy, cloudy evenings, later on bright sunny ones. Our 'bee school' starts at 8 pm, an hour away in Longford town, so for yesterday's we'd been worried since the previous class that we might have to be late for this one as we chased the last few chooks to bed before we could set out on the journey. It was close, but luckily Monday evening was cloudy, rainy and I could lock everyone up by 6:45 pm. For the next two sessions, it will not matter because the clocks will have changed.

Enjoying the spring sunshine

We also do very well for meals created from left overs; we throw very little food away which, in turn, means we do not have to worry about cooking too much. I have been enjoying a superb parsnip soup born out of big dig of the roots. Tonight was cold roast lamb (leg of Dora) with that lovely, soul-food, winter-warmer "Champ", mashed potatoes cooked back up with left over leeks and sprouts with some runner beans added and, beautifully, including the golden "burnt crispy bits" (BCBs; a food group in their own right!)

The entrance to the turf 'mine'.

Talking of left overs and springtime, the lovely weather has me out in the garden re-starting some jobs abandoned last autumn as it got too wet and cold, one of which is the earth bank which houses the half buried horse-drawn hay-rake. At the hay rake end we were uncovering some old hand 'won' "sausage" turfs and wondered whether we have in fact a 'clamp' left over from the TK-Min or even the TK-Max days. Well, I am now working in from the other end, a good 15 feet away and have come across what may be the other end of the clamp. We suspect that this is not any kind of official clamp, more a pile of turfs which got buried under some bulldozed topsoil, but they are lovely. They are up to around 5 inches diameter and cylindrical, the longest bits up to a foot long. They are buried like the ice-cream in a baked Alaska and it is a simple matter to lift them out from the entrance to the 'mine' as I work my way along the bank - I am getting barrow loads. Free fuel for next winter if I can get them dry.

Finally on the spring theme, we hear from our sheep man, Kenny O'C that he has just started lambing with a first batch of 5 lambs born on a lovely sunny day. We have put our order in for 5 again as last year, including one for the Sparks's and one for the Silverwood tribe. We'll probably get them, all being well, around July time. Their field is currently resting after its horse residence through the winter, and is already starting to look visibly greener. It is also pleasingly free from the rushes which badly infested it when we moved in. That is down to the mowing, strimming and sheep and horse grazing and gives us a little glow of pride at having improved the pasture we took over.

First Day in (Bee) School

Rain or shine, the dogs need walking

It has begun. Last night saw us off into the night of forecast rain and wintry showers, headed for Longford's "Teagasc" (pronounced "Chug-usk"; it is the training rooms and meeting centre laid on in the middle of town by the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority, a big concern here). This was for lesson one in our 'Bee School', actually a lecture on Bee Health given by our new friend Mary H of "The Two Marys". It was a big room and there were 15 or so of us in class, taking this Preliminary Certificate from the Federation Of Irish Bee Keepers' Associations (FIBKA) and the lecture was a Power-point style presentation (mercifully lacking in all the worst Power-point excesses of animations and zoomy graphics) with hand outs to save you having to write too many notes. We now know more about keeping your hive stress-free and healthy, promoting colony health and sorting out those diseases that do arise, than any two people should know who have not yet met their first colony.

I also got from Mary the two hive frame 'runners' we failed to bring away with us when we went to collect the flat packs, so that today I was able to finish my (empty) hive. In the 'any questions' section at the end we were also able to establish that, yes, rabbits are OK as a method of keeping the grass short around hives - the rabbits will not upset the bees and vice versa and also that yes, we can paint the whole thing (outside only) in gloss white. This as long as we check the paint tin first to check that it doesn't say 'harmful to insects'. We have six of these lectures at fortnightly intervals and some practical apiary sessions leading up to our exam in May which is part written and part practical at the hive. We will be experts before we even own a bee but that, I guess, is only right. They are vital livestock with an important role on the 'farm' and also potentially dangerous as well as possibly being involved in the production of food which you might want to sell to the general public.

You can see from these pictures that the advance of Spring took a bit of a back seat today and let winter have another go at painting the scenery white; a little bit Christmas Card. It had frozen overnight (which is always a welcome relief to me in the morning when I am doing my feed and release rounds - I am nipping round on ground as hard as putty and crunching over little ice patches which were formerly shallow puddles instead of slopping through the mud and wet). It started snowing at about 08:30 and then kept on all day doing light but impressive 'blizzards' which then gave way to sunny gaps which cleared up the preceding fall before the next. Bob was round this afternoon predicting a heavy fall tonight which will 'stick' but we'll wait and see on that one. Met Éireann have us getting the next anti-cyclone in the neck overnight, this one called 'Ruby', but they have been famous for their rain rather than snow. I have no idea how we got to 'Ruby'; I am sure the last two were Christine and Brigid.

In the pigs department, I have found and booked myself onto a pig rearing course down in Co. Tipperary in early April. We have also found a possible source of Tamworth piglets down in Co. Kildare. These babies are currently only a glint in their Mums' eyes. The breeder had just finished selling his first batch of Tamworth x Gloucester Old Spots (50 of them!) and was now getting his Tammy gilts back in pig but by a Tamworth boar this time. Pigs gestate for the conveniently easy to remember period of 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days, bringing us round to June, and then would need 6-8 weeks weaning, so we are looking at July. That gives me plenty time to go on the course and to do my fencing and build my ark.

Bramble jelly drips through the bag.

The limping Guinea Fowl, Henry is still limping, no better but no worse. He seems to be getting about OK, still mixes it with the chickens and jealously protects the pecking order slot of his lady, Min as well as getting his own share of any food. We'll just keep an eye on him and hope that he starts to get better soon. We rediscovered our batches of frozen blackberries picked from Bob's hedgerows and decided to turn them into bramble jelly. I seem to have lost my 'jam-setting' mojo and struggled at first to get this slop to set but then Liz suggested chucking in more sugar and suddenly I had it setting in spoons, on test saucers, in the scum-scraping spoon and nearly in the jam pan. I got it into jars in a bit of a hurry and I think it's going to be OK. Pass me that kango hammer, I need to chisel off some jam. In the egg dept I just need to report a 'personal best' / house record: 9 eggs today from 11 hens plus a goose egg. Go the girls!

Lastly I was amazed and flabbergasted by the reaction I got to the picture of washing drying on the line, I posted a few days back. 'What's amazing about washing?' I hear you ask. I had posted the pic as a joke because it was the first time we'd been able to dry anything outdoors since about December, what with all the rain. A friend from college days now living in the USA told me she was amazed and was thinking of doing it that 'old way' which she'd not done since leaving the UK in the 80's. In fact, she said, it was actually illegal to dry your washing out doors and that lately people had been objecting to this ban and there are whole political movements and serious politicians involved. It all came out of some rich folks living in posh 'gated' communities thinking that someone else's undies flapping in the wind was an eye-sore and was presumably latched onto by the white-goods manufacturing industry. Now the move to re-instate it as an activity is coming out of the green, energy-saving factions. I was just gob-smacked and completely thrown by this. Only in America, I would think.... but you never know.