Manu and Pedro

Manu takes a turn at the shovel.

Welcome aboard, then, Manu and Pedro, our first ever 'Help-X' volunteers. These are a lovely couple of lads, both 24 and currently students at one of the Madrid Universities. One is studying Agricultural Engineering and the other my own subject from Uni days, Environmental Science. They are both city-boys with no experience of farms or livestock and neither have been to Ireland before although one hails from Galicia in Northern Spain, where the scenery and green-ness are similar to Roscommon (he says).

Pedro shows off his brush cutter skills to the pigs.

They are both young and fit and willing to work hard for hours, so we are impressed already. They seem happy, too with our place, our accommodation and the food and drink so this one could be a winner all round. It is their first go at being Help-X volunteers as it is our at being hosts, so we are enjoying learning together. They are doing 2 weeks with us as part of a longer (1 month?) stay in Ireland; they want to go somewhere with better access to city life maybe near to Galway.

An interesting burst on yesterday's sour dough loaf. The
flavour was not impaired and this loaf has since gone the way
of all the others!

So we collected them from the train in Castlerea yesterday afternoon and had the afternoon and evening just for installing them, showing them round the place and getting to know one another. Their English is (as they'd say here) "middlin' good"; certainly better than my Spanish! We struggle on with the 2 lads occasionally running out of words, a quick discussion where one tries to rescue the other, and then with Liz and Manu whipping out their smart-phones and Googling up "Google Translate"

 I now know, for example that Pedro's Mum also makes sourdough bread and has a 'mara madre' (starter culture. Literally "original mother") in her fridge and we all know more words than we should around Guinea Fowl, black currants and fruit cordials! We are also both trying to say 'Madrid' with the soft Spanish 'the' sound instead of hard English 'D's. They are keen anglers and have brought some gear with them, so we have had to do a quick bit of local research to get them access to any likely fishing points. One is a keen photographer (Canon gear - good taste!). They also asked about hiring bikes, so we have come up with my old mountain bike, gathering dust in the caravan and K-Dub's little used pushbike, which he generously agreed to lend us for the duration.

I finally find an under-cabinet strip light
(LED) for the "office". Yay! I can
see the keyboard!

The guys were wiped out last night having only got 2 hours sleep on Wednesday night and then had a long day travelling so they crashed at 20:30, fairly quickly after a bit of a late supper and trying out some 'artisan' stout beers. They slept like logs, apparently but came bouncing down the stairs at 8 a.m. already in some overalls and work boots, keen and willing to get cracking. I got some quick breakfast into them, but then we were straight in.

I showed them the brush-cutter and explained 2-stroke fuel and so on; bit of a safety 'lecture' there. Well, it is Farm Safety Week this week. The fuel tank on that does you about 45 minutes of continuous fast running, so they alternated goes at that, whacking the tall stuff in the orchard, with scraping and sweeping the grass in the cattle race which was fast evolving from "the grass growing in the cracks in the concrete" to a "lawn".

Ouch! Taking chunks out of myself on the barbed wire. Nurse
Lizzie stepped forward with some nice sting-y TCP. 

I persuaded them (it was impressively difficult!) to stop for coffee mid-way but then we worked on through till 1 pm when Liz insisted we all stop for soup. I was very happy and so were they. You can, as they say, see where they've been! The cattle race is pristine and the little gosling can stride around the orchard in full view of his grown-up minders.

We decided to work mornings and they have their down-time afternoons. So, well fed on soup and bread, they have now disappeared on the bikes with their fishing gear in back-packs promising that if they would like some roast lamb with us tonight they will be back by 19:30 or they can eat later, plus they will bring back anything edible they catch. I'm not sure how 'allowed' this is; you may have to put every fish back into the lake but I expect they'll find out that soon enough.

The only fly in this ointment was my left knee. I fell over back on Tuesday, on some mud while trying to hop over some barbed wire. This was as I was while feeding some bullocks. I managed to bang the inside of my left knee as well as twisting it and, to add a cherry to this cake, scraped an 8" long surface cut down my calf. Ouch. I am hobbling around like an aul' wan, Nurse Liz has been at me with some very sting-y TCP so the cut is OK but the knee remains very stiff and sore. This is frustrating - I wanted to be fully fit to work alongside the Help-X lads, all be it I am 60 and they are 24. I am determined not to just sit there in the Director's Chair barking instructions through the 'bull horn' so I am limping about between locations and trying to keep at it, but at the stuff which is easier on the knee - pulling thistles rather than digging, for example.

The beautiful new Memorial Stone at Shannon's Cross prior
to the unveiling ceremony. 

And finally an end to the suspense that I expect you have not even noticed I have been trying to rack up; a promise of a 'reveal' on the story of the fancy stonework down at the crossroads. Spoiler Alert! The big unveiling happened today to big crowds, flags flying, the police brass-band and a series of politicians doing speeches from a real imported wooden pulpit/lectern. This the new memorial stone and garden to 2 Gardai (Policemen) tragically shot and killed in a bank robbery and car-chase back in 1980. Easily our biggest, most important local story. The full version of this in the next post.

A Simple Fencing Job

The 5 geese are allowed on the front lawn now. 

More fencing for us. We decide to run a length of sheep wire along the inside of the new post and rail fence up the drive and around the front lawn. You may recall that this lawn was fenced in with post and rail because neither of us wanted to sit on the 'terrace' out front looking at green high tensile barbed wire, sheep wire and standard de-barked farm-field style fence posts. The post and rail, though, is good for adult sheep which are tall, large-bodied beasties, but would not stop the geese or the baby lambs, who can just dip down on their hunkers and shimmy under the bottom rail.

Rather too much pork belly for we two, but it does lovely
cold left overs. Cous cous salad accompanies.

The answer, in these parts at least is to staple a run of non-high-tensile (i.e. cheaper!) sheep wire along the inside. Not being green (it's just 'galvanised' colour) it dulls down and fades from view but it has the 6 inch square mesh format which can stop lambs, geese and even Westies. The smaller chickens seem to be able to slip through with a bit of a wriggle and a wrestle of the wings. They could also fly over if they only thought about it but one thing we've found with chickens is that if they can see through a fence and then butt up against it and feel it at ground level, then a 3-4 foot fence will stop them. Give them an opaque barrier like a wall or a wooden fence, and they will try the flying thing and find that they can 'hop' over a 6 feet tall barrier with ease. Our Sussex Ponte hens are regularly to be seen on the 6 foot wall of the cattle race and we have pictures of one up on the roof ridge of the goose-house (ten feet up?)

Liz's new baby.

With the post and rail shored up we have been able to mix and match the grazing arrangements a bit. The poor old geese have nearly exhausted the grass in the orchard. "There's not a pick left", as Bob would say, so we have been able to shepherd them round to the lawn for some good, longer stuff to fill their bellies, all be it watching them closely in case they decided to annihilate my precious crocusses. They didn't. The next day we had them in the East Field and the ewes and lamb were let loose into the lawn 'paddock'. The lamb, in particular, seemed to enjoy this.

Bramble-bashing by the veg patch.

Regular readers will know that I have recently savaged the hedge along the east side of this, the hedge which grows from the top of a long-buried stone wall. We now have a steep-sided, 2 foot tall bank with some 2 feet tall, 2 inch diameter, gnarly hawthorn (etc) trunks sticking out of the top. The lamb thinks this is adventure playground stuff - he goes spronging up and over, or weaves along the top like a small boy balancing along the top of a brick wall, while his Mum and Aunt fill their bellies on the lawn grass. We have also seen him challenging his Aunt, 'Little John' style stopping her from coming over the bank by hopping into the way to block her progress. We feel a bit sorry for him as he has no playmates (yet) but his Aunt seems to indulge him and play a bit, limited though she is by her own pregnant bulk. Next year we are determined to get all the lambing, should the lambing gods smile upon us, synchronised, so that the babies can grow up with little chums to play with, and give the Mums a break.

Other than that, we have been trying out the new toy, our brush cutter. We are delighted. It is light enough for Liz to manage it. but powerful enough to do the necessary amount of damage to the brambles, plantains, rushes and nettles (even the young ash and elder suckers). We 'learned it' a bit tentatively in the 'woods' by the drive but got well stuck in by the time we were thrashing along the bramble thicket next to the vegetable patch, tackling the former nettle patch by the muck heap and whacking the rushes at the bottom of the yard leading on to the rain water gulley.

A rooster given to us by a friend to kill
(she can't cope with necking them) gets it.
His name was 'Pineapple'. Are we allowed
to call the curry "Pineapple Chunks"?

We are confident that we will have a much tidier small holding this year and we are looking forward to attacking some new green nettles and Queen Anne's Lace (Cow Parsley) in the woods when they start, docks and rushes and ground elder. I used to enjoy swooping down upon them with the 'Old Father Time' scythe but you could only really use that on tall stuff, patches which were already shouting 'neglect' at any visitors.

We already know that in the bits of woodland where we can get the mower, grass starts to grow, and we love that rather 'Capability Brown' look of the grass and the trees, so we are wondering whether a strimmer used often enough under the trees would lead to a tidy, grassed look (with some planned sweet woodruff, Lady's Mantle, snowdrops, foxgloves, Pulmonaria and cyclamen) rather than the current nettles, ground elder and elder suckers. It might be less 'green' but it should, surely, look more 'deliberate'.

Aches and Pains.

No, not chain-saw injury, but rat damage!

I ache like an aching thing. I must be getting too old for all this physical stuff. (OK, not serious really). I had a good old session mucking out JF Bob's cattle barn again yesterday and then today Liz and I were over at Vendor Anna (and Paul)'s place beyond Carrick on Shannon attacking the overgrown hedge we started on back in November before Christmas, the snow and our hosts' 3 week escape to find some Canary Island sunshine all intervened.

Breakfast of Champions - boiled goose egg and toast
'soldiers'. 7 and a half minutes, boiled to perfection.

The muck-shoveling is quite physical but not a problem. It's the hedge that takes it out of me, as it's full of thick, chain-saw sized trunks which need taking off at "roughly head height", so I spend a good part of the day hefting the saw up and holding it there while I make the cut, or clambering around trying to tie ropes on even higher so that Liz can put some tension on the stem and stop it falling into the telegraph wires and onto the lane. I hope I don't sound like I am complaining - we LOVE all this stuff; one of the things that attracted us to this small-holder life in the first place was the chance to do some serious gardening and spade work.

A first egg from the young Buffs (right)? We now have no
idea what the egg on 13th Jan was, maybe a sputter from the
Guinea Fowl?

And we get fed. of course. Any job which involves getting fed is better than any job that doesn't and Anna knows the way to our hearts with her delicious lasagna and apple crumble. No, not on the same plate! So a good time was had by all and the hosts now have a much improved panorama down across the River Shannon from their front door. There were just two uprights that the 'Health and Safety' Manager (Liz) would not let us touch and these had grown up to form a 'Y' wrapped around all three cables running down the lane. These though, Paul thinks the phone people should be willing to come and sort using a man-up cherry picker, especially as we've done all the hard work for them.

The fire hood gets a second polish.

So, 9 o'clock this morning saw us loading all the gear into the car, but we needed to head for the chainsaw main dealer in Boyle (East Brothers) first as I needed chain and bar oil for the machine, a new 4 mm round-file (for sharpening), a new chain (the existing one was well past its sell-by) and, annoyingly, a new pair of posh, kevlar, safety gloves. My 'old' pair (only 3 years old) had survived all the abuse I've dished out in my inexperience in 3 years of using the most dangerous piece of kit on the 'farm'. They were well used looking and soiled but had no nicks or cuts, tears or even undone stitching. Then at some point between me taking them off last week and stashing them, as usual, in the shelf in the shed in my chainsaw hard-hat, a rat has eaten great holes in the old leather of the palms. Thanks, rat! I hope you were one of the ones Blue has recently 'terminated'. So we needed to buy a new pair; simple enough except that my hands are quite big (XL) and all the XL shelves were empty except, by coincidence, for 'Stihl' gloves.

New brush-cutter / strimmer

While we were in that Alladin's cave of man-toys, we also accidentally bought a brush cutter / strimmer. This is a piece of kit which you need for the margins of your territory, where my little lawn mower dare not go and where you cannot allow sheep or rabbits to keep the herbage down. We've borrowed one in the past, to knock back the rushes in the East Field, but we hadn't bought one for ourselves. Every year Liz glowers at the nettles which grow in our 'woods' and I glower at the brambles along the side of my veg patch, at the rushes which grow in the field and the docks and plantains which erupt from the orchard turf, unchallenged by the geese. The geese would not top off a plantain even if they were down to the clay everywhere else. So we bit the bullet and asked the man if he might have a machine tough enough to tackle briars, docks, plantain and rushes but light enough to be managable by Liz (she insisted on being the main destructive force in this department so did not want a hulking great 'professional' machine that only I could lift). We therefore have, sitting in the living room on the sofa waiting for its first outing, a Stihl FS55, a 2-stroke with the 'handlebars' fitting and a shoulder harness. I think I can probably predict what we are up to tomorrow, more physical stuff!

Deux Cheveaux?

A quick catch up on happenings around the livestock. In the last post you met miniature horse Romeo, he of the cart-pulling. This afternoon we have 'taken delivery' of his two stable mates, Cody and Bob. Both of these guys have posh pedigree names longer than they are; Cody's is "something something Da Vinci Code" (sorry - I wasn't paying attention!). He's the dark brown and white, 'entire' purebred Falabella stallion. His 'oppo' is Bob, the pale brown Miniature Shetland who, like Romeo, is a gelding. I am not explaining 'entire' and gelding' - if you need to know look them up.

We are currently half way through the job of fencing the east field for sheep (which will also make it miniature horse proof) and when we have done that, probably Tuesday or Wednesday evening, all three horses can go in there for the Summer to keep the grass under control and eat off the rushes. These two are fortunately quite happy to live on the end of a tether short term, so they have been brought down early to eat grass round till the field is available. Romeo, sadly can't 'do' tethering, apparently and gets himself all tangled up and then stands pathetically waiting to be rescued, so he has to wait, but he has the big horse for company.

These horses are only a borrow. They are owned by our friends Charlotte, Carolyn and Keiran from down the road. With the current fodder crisis in this part of the country due to late, cool spring and everyone running out of hay and silage, Carolyn had not been able to get agreement on grazing these horses on any land so they were eating bought in food and living in a sand-school since last November. Well, now they have grass under their hooves and bellies full of the stuff.

The theory is that the east field will support these three mini-horses with enough spare for this year's lambs when we get them and between the two species we should be able to improve the grass and get rid of the cattle-damage (poaching) and rushes. I may have to brush-cut the rushes but the soft re-growth will be eaten by the horses and the grass will then out-compete the rush plants.

With both of our female geese now broody and apparently working as an efficient brooding team (much to our amazement) the poor ol' Gander is feeling a bit lost and lonely with no-one to talk to all day. He has taken to hanging around the Broody Betty run and her baby chicks, seeming to have adopted them to protect. Perhaps they bring out some of his father instincts being a bit like goslings, but what ever the reason he shouts and yells his warnings at any hooded crows or magpies which fly over.

When he's not with the chicks, he tends to hang about with the rooster and the Lovely Girls but they are a bit less welcoming of his advances and tend to give him a wide berth. Poor old boy! Still, the geese should sort themselves out one way or another between about the 22nd and 27th of this month. He'll either have real goslings to defend, or presumably we forget procreation stuff, all go back to normal and the three geese can wander about as before.

Finally, the 'always-female' rabbits are back from their 'dirty weekend' at Charlotte's. Padfoot, our black and white lop-eared has been mated to a purebred lop buck, Ginny, the grey and white not-lop sister has been mated to a black and white 'Dutch' pattern buck. Due date for these expectant mothers is June 2nd and they have, for only the 2nd time in their lives, been separated in case of any jealousy fights over nest sites, new born 'kittens', or just territory. They can see each other through the mesh and touch noses, but not get at each other. The 'formerly male but now female' Buck Rogers (now either Ginger Rogers or 'Nibbles' according to preferences) is now also pregnant but is now the property of Charlotte.

That's about it for this one. As I said, Two-horses but not in the 2CV sense! Have a good Bank Holiday.