A Genuinely Short Post (Honest)

A welcome cold snap

OK, I know I have many times recently started a post with comments along the lines of "not much to say, so this is going to only be a few paragraphs" and then gone on at normal length. Well, this time, I genuinely have little to say, so I might be for real here. Added to that, one major 'thread' of narrative is under that embargo to which I have already alluded; the main characters in those episodes do not like to be spoken of 'on here' and there is no arguing with that.

Frosty East Field

Main event for this post was the 'Little Christmas' or 'Ladies' Christmas', (Nollaig na mBan or, if you prefer, simply Epiphany) when the men take over the reins of the household and try to treat their women-folk to a complete day of rest.

When you can only find 4 ducks it is a sure sign that #5 is off
hidden up somewhere laying a surreptitious late egg. When
she returns it is then a race against the magpies to find the egg
before they do. 

It is nothing that heroic, so does not generate me much Blog text but it is fun to do and much appreciated by Lizzie. I have to do all the kitchen and dish-washer duties, provide tea on demand and cook the main meals. Also, on this occasion, carve a good snack's worth of thin slices off the 'Parma'-style whole leg of ham mid afternoon and pass in the gorgeous chocolates we were gifted by our French visitors at Christmas (Thank you, Marion, Clara and Augustin). It all went very well.

Frosty early morning view from the new kitchen windows

I have also tried to progress from knowing that we have "around 30 chickens" to doing some kind of census to get an exact list. This is mainly so that we can report egg production, health and progress more accurately and to identify whether we have any 'passengers' who are contributing nothing and need weeding out. Tough old, cut-throat world?

We both wish the cats would not catch these cuties and we are
always amazed how tiny they are in the hand. A goldcrest, of
course. 

Obviously, with the birds free-ranging this is not that easy - you walk one way round the site with your notepad and pencil and try to record who is where but by the time you have nearly finished, are you double counting hens who have gone widdershins round the house and come to meet you again? I scratched down a list of 28 hens by name if they have names, and by a rough description if not. I now have a list that says such arcane things as "Stumpy", "Big Red", "Grey / Dark cape" and "Flat black / big crest" and is peppered with codes like 'A-head' and 'A cheeks'.

Poor little mite. At least we have a strong population of goldcrests
here, so this one will not really be missed.

The 'A' thing stands for Araucana, which is a weird 'fancy fowl' beloved of show folk which has tufts of feathers sticking out of the top of its head and sideways from its cheeks. The latter give it a strange hamster-like look from the front. Pure bred A's lay blue eggs which are quite nice, but we only have crosses between A's and other types, so we only get white eggs and we get hens which are mainly hen-shaped but have some bizarre A-tufts on their heads.

I now need to take my list into the coop at lock-up and double check. I better not bore you with a complete list of all the birds as a fancy tabular addendum. You might think I was trying to flesh out a slow news day. As if.

The half moon goes down into that big patch
of new morning sky where Storm Eleanor
decapitated our larch. 

Finally, we are now at Day 9 of the two major New Year's resolutions. First that #DryJanuary - we are both sticking to this as per the agreed rules; one 'day off' allowed. Mine is going to be Burns Night, Liz went for Nollaig na mBan and brother Mark has a gin tasting he has booked in on 15th. So far so good.

Knitting project gets finishing touches.

Second, Liz was determined to get out all the unfinished major knitting projects and finish them. She loves knitting up the pieces of a garment but hates the stage where you sew all the bits together, so as at NYD, I had a lovely Aran pullover which was all there but for the assembly and Liz had a blue cardigan and a green woolly in similar states. Well, true to her resolution, my Aran is finished, the cardy just needs buttons (and even has a neck-warmer / 'snood' in the same wool, to go with it.) and the green thing is very nearly completed.

Publicity shot for the Men's Shed. The lads were doing a 'bucket'
collection at the check outs in local SuperValu, "Duffy's". 

And that, genuinely, is it. Till next time.

Eleanor and Fionn

The top limb of a larch tree blocking the driveway.

Friends of the Blog will recall the fun and games here last February when Storm Doris came raging through ripping the roof off the main chicken building and felling a decent sized spruce across the driveway. They may also recall more recent entertainment provided by Ex-Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Dylan. Those two were equally well advertised and came with Met Éireann 'Orange Alert' warnings for high winds, though we mercifully escaped any significant damage from either.

The topless larch. Lots of new sky!

In the last post I described the latest storm (Eleanor) who came with no such warnings (only 'yellow' status) but which, at the time of writing sounded noisier and more scary than any of the previous crew, certainly for the hour or so around 18:30 pm, when I was typing that post. A real screamer - Hurricane style noises howling through the tree tops. We learned a new meteorological term that night - a "Sting Jet". This is a narrow area of intense wind formed as an eddy inside the storm spiral-system. They never had these when I was at school learning Geography / Meteorology so they may be just a more exciting, 'tabloid-y' expression for what has always been there, or they may have been 'invented' as storm-science moves on and learns more detail. What ever the case, we were impressed and we could certainly believe it.

It was with trepidation then, that I went my rounds of the place looking for damage. Relief too, obviously, that we humans were unscathed and even more so to find that all the buildings and livestock were unhurt. That poor, long-suffering 'Doris' tarpaulin over the main chicken house was still hanging in there. The only damage was that the drive was blocked (again!), this time by a big branch broken off the top of one of our lovely, gnarly larches down by the main gate, a small, weedy spruce had been thinned out of the row at the top of the East Field and a hedge-row hawthorn had been felled across the veg patch.

Horizontal hawthorn

The rest was just the usual wheelie-bins gone walk-about, twigs all over the grass and other light stuff (flower pots etc) in some unlikely places. Nothing we couldn't handle with my little chain-saw and some strong-arm branch-dragging.

Silver lining for the sheep. They get to browse the ivy leaves
off the broken branches we toss in to their field. 

The spruce had fallen across the sheep fence, so needed some nifty cutting up and moving lest the sheep walk out over the now 6" tall barrier. That proved to be one of those you get warned about in the chain-saw training manuals, where the (incomplete) break is still under a lot of 'bend' tension and cannot wait for you to uncouple the weight of the tree's 'top' before it springs back upright taking the saw and arm/chin of any idiot, unwary chain-saw man with it. In my case it pinged up so fast it passed through vertical and whip-lashed itself backwards, completing the original break. I'm still here, obviously, so you'll know I was ready and saw that coming.

Not that many logs once they are all tidied up.

It continued more reasonably windy for that whole day and into the next (Thursday 4th) by which time we were getting a bit fed up with 'windy' as an idea. It turned out that a smaller storm (Fionn) was being pulled along behind 'Mum' but that lad mercifully followed a more southerly track and only really affected the island's SE corner, Wexford mainly.

That spruce that came down across the sheep
fence at the top of out East Field.

So what else is going on for us at the moment, in between the blasts of gale-force wind? Mercifully, no more appearances by our fox - and we have been doing a lot of waiting, watching and listening, believe me. We have sprinted out to check at every alarm call from the Guinea Fowl and every burst of goose-based cacophony.

A neighbour's hay barn was 50% shorter after Eleanor and his
cattle-race a bit fuller of scrap iron.

Naturally, in the absence of real fox scares, I had to give myself a self-inflicted DIY scare-myself-silly. On Thursday, I had a 'thing' in nearby town Balla-D at 5.30 pm, so I was racing about a bit trying to get some bread made and all the birds locked up by 5. That would usually be calm and no problem but one of the young Guineas managed to get 'trapped' in the East Field; happy to fly over the gate one way and then can't work out how to get back. I had shepherded the ducks home and then had to back-track to rescue the Guinea, but then very happily sorted her and closed the door behind her as she sprinted indoors to join her 3 colleagues.

Storm Fionn slides by to the south of the island.

Off I went to my meeting, came back at 8 pm to a late supper and a relaxed evening, then went out to do last minute checks at 10 pm. Ooops. The ducks were 'still' out and now very upset at being in the cold and dark and unable to get home; locked out! They had been vulnerable to fox-attack for 5 hours. They must have strolled back out for a final nibble of grass while I was rounding up that Guinea Fowl and I had missed them in my relief at re-capturing her. Lesson learned and a stricter roll-call introduced for lock-up. How can you miss 5 noisy ducks?

Blue perches on the full but still open crates
of Christmas. What could possibly go wrong?

We also dismantled Christmas and stashed the stuff away back into crates in the Tígín. Tomorrow (6th Jan) is the date for that much-loved Irish tradition, Nollaig na mBan (say it nollag na morn) , Ladies' Christmas or 'Little Christmas'. This is those hard-pressed ladies' 'Day of Rest' where we blokes take the helm of the 'farm kitchen' and they get to relax and be spoiled after 2 weeks of solid hard work giving everyone else a superb Christmas. Liz likes to dismantle Christmas and pack it away on the 5th including wrestling with the drying out Tree or, she says, she would just end up hoovering up needles on Nollaig na mBan. Nobody wants that. More on how that went in the next post.

Stay safe, people.

Nollaig na mBan (Ladies' Christmas)

The tree stripped and Christmas packed away for another year

Say it "Nollag na Mahn" for that authentic Gaelic effect. Readers who were with me in January 2014 will have already heard of this break and 'day-off' for the hardworking ladies of the household. This is a tradition in the West of Ireland which is thought to pre-date those blow-in Christians and their 'Epiphany' malarkey (when the 3 wise men finally rocked up to the crib and Bethlehem). The ladies of the household, having slaved for 2 weeks for their men-folk, finally earned a day off. The men would hold the fort, feed the livestock and do the house work.

One of the marmalade kittens does justice to a bit of left over lamb

In my head, I was proud of the lads! I imagined them feeling sorry for their ladies at last and gallantly (patronisingly? chauvinistically?) granting them the day off, "generously" palming them an amount of spending money and helping them into the buggy to which they had already hitched up the mare. Have a nice time, ladies.

A nice range of egg colours. Top is a duck egg. 

Not a bit of it apparently. Back in the day the law and (even more important) village tradition of what was right said that this was their right, entitlement and due and they did not need any man deciding that they could do this. They'd done their 2 weeks and they were outta here. If Mr Farmer got a slice of cold pie left for him in the meat-safe then fair play to him.

Ash bark.

The tradition has died out a bit and is forgotten in most areas, but out here in the West it still hangs on. Locals will shy away from organising public events (dances, social nights) on 6th Jan because "people like to organise their own family things around Little Christmas" (the other name for it). Mind you, Liz tells me that in the cities , the bar/pub/restaurant trade has started to try to re-introduce it hoping that the gangs of local women, released for the day from the chores of home and the kids and bent on shopping, might finish their free days with a meal of a few drinks with the girl-friends. As a quick aside to this, the lady currently curating that Twitter account (see previous post) tells us that in the Amish (Plain People) areas of up-state New York, they celebrate "Old Christmas" on this date.

We did a reasonable job here, making sure to look after Lizzie. She got a nice lie-in, then taken shopping in Roscommon. There was a lunch, then a relaxing afternoon and then I cooked the supper and she is even now  sipping gently on a glass 'Barefoot' Malbec. A small stash of chocolates sits waiting on the dresser. That, we guess, is it. The 'real' Christmas is done and tidied away, and the Ladies' Christmas has now followed it for this year.

Warm socks.

That's it for this post, too. I am being brief (can't be rattling away in here when I am meant to be looking after the good lady!). I was hoping to bring you pics and news of the 'splatter' of tiny webbed feet but those little ducklings are taking their own sweet time battling their way out of the shells. There were 7 eggs. As I go to print, Rob tells me we have 2 out of their shells so far and more 'pipping' (chipping their way through) but these little mites don't all survive this stage, so I won't do an update till we are sure how many 'survivors' we have.

11ºC today and plenty of bees flying. Plenty returning, too, with
their 'shopping baskets' full of  ivy pollen. Happy Nollaig na
mBan, ladies. Not too many drones around in January to be doing
the house work while you're gone, mind.

The one single thing we found lacking thru Christmas was good old fashioned holly. In all my dog walking and car-mounted exploring, I could find no bush from which to steal a sprig for the Christmas pud, only neat little clipped specimens in gardens. We have every other broad-leaved species, but no holly, so we were off today to the local garden centre. Of course, since then, as is the way of these hunts, we have seen holly bushes everywhere and we know that they can be propagated from semi-ripe cuttings.

An optimistic tree growing in a wall.

Well, we have one now. May it live long an prosper. We paid €5 for ours. We were amused to learn that a local shop was selling prunings for use in wreaths etc at €7.50 PER BIT! No flies on these local guys when it comes to merchandising.

My Ol' Man Said Foller The Van

'Mad Max' vehicle lurking under a sheet. It does good 'lurking'!

I hinted in the last post that we might be in for a busy time of it this New Year as our friends Carolyn (of the mini horses) and K-Dub had been bounced by a rather rapid house sale and the need to clear out of house, yard, out-buildings and garden by the 5th of January. This coming hot on the heels of a family Christmas and then the need to attend a family wedding up in Dublin just prior to New Year.

Billy is a shaggy, out-doorsy kind of lad, pretty close to the
feral Irish 'wild goat'.

Anyone who has tried to move house after living in a place for ten years will be familiar with the sheer amount of 'stuff' that you can accumulate, especially when you have a small-holding with associated animal-management gear (kennels, hutches, horse-tack, buckets, dustbins of feed etc) and a daughter growing up through the teenage years and then shipping off to college. Add to that, that K-Dub is a professional Master-Carpenter, so his 'stuff' comes in the form of fully tooled workshop with massive table-saw, substantial router-deck, BIG pipe-benders and various drills, nail guns and saws which come in suitcase-sized cases.

Nanny Óg - pronounce the 'O' long as in 'bogus'. It is Irish
for 'young Nanny'.

He is also a bike-nut who goes in for heroic bizarre projects like home-built "trikes". Don't get the wrong idea that a "motor-trike" is not much bigger than a motorbike. This project is based around a Ford Transit Van engine, gearbox, diff and rear axle and will have a front wheel the size of a tractor rear one. Unfortunately this was still a work in progress at removal time, and there was no driving out and whizzing round to the new place. Three of us sweated blood manhandling it onto a trailer and bringing it round to my place where it has been given dry-ish car-port storage.

The daffs down by our gate think it is Spring.

We had a punishing, bone-aching time for 4 days packing the stuff and transporting it, some here, much more to an unoccupied house near the new place, generously offered by a soon-to-be-neighbour and a smaller amount to the caravan they have bought as a temporary home while the real house is made ready. Liz, Carolyn and a couple of other friends packed, stripped rooms and cleaned behind themselves while K-Dub and I plus various helpers down from Dublin loaded and hauled what seemed like dozens of loads in a big hi-cube builder's van and a long car-trailer out to the various destinations, often starting at 8 a.m. and finishing well after we had lost the light. It always seemed faster to unload than load; none of us could work out why.

Last of the Seasonal left-overs. The last slice of pud with
ice cream and cream for my lunch today. 

We may have missed the midday deadline on the 5th (it was more like 6pm) but the buyer was cool with that as they were not ready to move in anyway. As to the livestock, they had unshipped most of that, selling off all but one of #1 Daughter's 40+ rabbits, the one going to a local friend for safe-keeping. We inherited the 2 goats, also temporarily much to the amusement of all my friends who have been hearing me shout 'No Goats' ever since we have been here. These are a shaggy, mountainy-looking miniature male and a sweet, possibly pregnant, short haired lady who are called Billy and Nanny Óg. The Óg is pronounced with a long 'o' (as in bogus) and is the Irish word for young but Terry Pratchett fans may have also noticed a pun on the name of one of his 'Wyrd Sisters'.

June born lamb Dylan (left) with Mum

Although we had applied for Goat Herd number registration way back, this number had lapsed with our non-keeping of the species. I had to contact the Ministry boys today to get goats "active" on my list, so that we can officially transfer these two animals into this holding. Nanny is in with the ewes during the day but gets walked home to her warm, dry shed at night. These short-haired 'domestic' goats are derived from Mediterranean animals and they do not thrive in cold and wet. Billy is much more of a shaggy, mountainy, 'Irish' strain, like a French 'Mouflon' (with horns to match) so he is in the pig enclosure for now and sleeping happily in the pig ark.

The Sligo house rebuild looking good now.

And in case you had forgotten, today is 12th Night and Epiphany but much more important to Irish ladies, it is 'Nollaig na Mban' or 'Ladies Christmas'. a day for the ladies to relax and be pampered by their men-folks as a big Thank You for all the hard work those ladies do over the Festive Season. Where are those frozen pizzas I bought cheap from 'salmonella corner' at Lidl's?

George and the Ladies' Christmas

Red Kuri Squash - nice fudgy texture when roasted.

Hot on the heels of my 'Wren Boys' post comes another tradition from these parts which was new to me, that of Ladies' Christmas. Mrs Silverwood's post in Facebook has it thus. “Nollaig na mBan” or “Little Women’s Christmas” is an old custom that’s still celebrated by women all over Ireland. It goes back to the days when large families were the norm. Men never lifted a finger in the house to help, and were never expected to. If a man washed the dishes, he would be called an “auld woman” by other men. No full blooded Irish man was prepared to risk that!

Ominous sky precedes our latest "Category Orange" storm, Christine

But each year, after the Christmas holiday, tired women finally got a break – for one day, at least. On January 6th (the same day as the Epiphany), men would take over of the housework, offering women a chance to go out to relax with each other." Nollaig na mBan would be pronounced 'Nollag na Morn' or there abouts. Now call me a cynic but I think this tradition might be more 'fondly dreamed about' than actually happening. I cannot see those kind of blokes, Irish or otherwise, who'd let their women do all the work and never lift a finger, suddenly bringing their women folk tea and toast in bed on Day 12 and happily volunteering to knock up a delicious curry for when they get back from the pub.

George and the author. Note rainbow.

Readers who have been with me for the past 12 months, will know of our goose in-breeding problem. Our first three geese, Goosey, Goocey and Gander joined us last January advertised as a breed-able trio and we didn't know enough then to spot that Gander had serious wry-tail (or to realise that this might be a problem). We also suspect that they may have been a sibling group possibly even from the same clutch, brother and sisters. They settled in and got nice and clean and healthy; it was when they started breeding that we got some problems - infertile and dead-in-shell goslings, deformed babies with necks twisted round, goslings who went lame after a month or two, completely losing the motor control of their legs or just fading and dying. Out of 17 eggs incubated, we ended up with just 2 full grown young ones.

We decided to cease breeding with these three birds and to either just collect eggs (which one of the geese is still producing every other day all through Christmas and the New Year) or to swap out the gander so that we could out-cross rather than in-breed. Step forward then, our friends Carolyn and Charlotte of the miniature horses who had come out of geese after all sorts of fun and games with mink attacks but had been left with one lonely successful gosling.

This bird, named George even before anyone could sex him was hand reared by Charlotte and is as dotty and tame as anything, loving to have his neck tickled and to be cuddled and handled. As he was on his own, he grew up with Charlotte's motley mixture of call ducks and 'Swedish' ducks and most recently was running with a couple of drakes whom he used to marshall and follow around. We THINK he is a gander. A friend of Charlotte's who keeps a lot of geese thinks he is, from the stance and behaviour but admittedly did not pick him up to check his equipment.

George meets his women (He is closest to camera)

To cut a long story short, we have swapped out 'Gander' with 'George' today and George, after an hour in a holding pen to make sure they'd not fight and to let him see his new surroundings in peace, is now released into the orchard with the girls. They were a bit shouty when their previous fella suddenly disappeared, perhaps anxious to attract him back, but seem to have settled down now with George. I am hoping they have bonded enough to be able to shepherd all three 'home' tonight and shut them up in the relatively confined space of their sleeping quarters. I may have to quarter them apart for this first night. So.... welcome aboard George.

Nearly finished. Raglan sweater.

In other news we are currently surviving the recent wind storms (latest was named Christine; I don't know when Atlantic anti-cyclones started to get names) with, thankfully, no more damage. We experimented with a red kuri squash, a gift from the Silverwoods, and found that roasted it has a lovely delicate flavour and a fudgy texture. We will keep some seeds and try to get it to grow in our calf muck heap. Liz has almost finished my raglan knit sweater, the biggest thing she has attempted in this recent burst of the craft. Meanwhile we are sploshing about in wellies with mud everywhere after the recent, seemingly relentless rain, and wishing spring would come and it would all dry out a bit.