Rain Dance

Neither of us ever anticipated in all this 'move-to-the-West-of-Ireland' project that we would ever be standing in County Roscommon disappointed at the lack of rain. We are not the kind of people who moan about the wet weather and then straight way transfer all that grumble to the heat after just a single hot day. We have been enjoying the blue skies and taking the close sweatiness and midges that sometimes come with it, on the chin. Stoic to the end, us. But my diary records that this run of 'scorchio' started on 11th May, all be it with a couple of showery days around the 20th, so have a heart, Met Éireann; we are sated. You even sneaked the perfect Bank Holiday weekend in there.

Some nice artichokes for a tapas style meal

We are happy, content, have had all we could ask and more. When the run of hot days appeared to be breaking with an 'orange' warning for thunderstorms and heavy rain on (Bank Holiday) Monday, we got stuck into some good weeding, mowed all the grass and raced several lines of washing through the laundry system. We watched with happy anticipation as the promised massive black cloud banks rolled in mid-afternoon. Back in Kent Liz would have been telling our lovely neighbour, 'Angel' Betty and myself off suspecting that we were doing rain dances because we were fed up with all the watering. Here we listened out for the distant rumbles of thunder on the N, S, E and W horizons, commenting cheerfully... "Yes! It's a-coming!"

Alliums

No such drama for us here, though. Friends in all directions were reporting rain. Sue and Rob talked of "monsoon" conditions. Carolyn in Sligo reported lashing rain and cousin Keith in Dublin spoke of massive downpours, impressively heavy although short lived. We stayed dry as the 'dusht' and missed it all. Our clouds built impressively and dispersed. We stayed oppressively hot and clammy and felt quite miffed. Cheated, even. It didn't rain all evening, then a tiny front doorstep-dampening drip came later on and the night was dry. We know we should be careful what we wish for and I am glad that I got the mowing done - I would have been cursing if the shaggy grass had got wetted and then taken days to dry out again. It has not rained today either. Ah well.

In the local bogs the turf cutters are taking full advantage
of the drought. This turf is "footed" up to get some air through
it and we have seen some being cleared and carted away to
store. This is Kiltybranks.

Meanwhile in archery I am still having a whale of a time, loving my new hobby. When weather permits we are out of doors and the instructor is doing his best to get us ready for an assault on nearby inter-county "Field Archery" competitions. Field Archery is where you go yomping around through the woods and fields trying to find and then hit model animals made of dense foam rubber. The beasts are a bit larger than life (to give us half a chance - the crows are more like ravens and the partridges are as big as chickens, for example).

We have also been introduced to the black arts of scoring so that we can see whether we are improving week on week. The animal models are marked with an oval roughly corresponding to the chest/lungs position and a smaller oval where the heart would be. The scores vary according to size, range and difficulty of the target/shot but might be, for example, 15 for a kill (dead hit on the heart), 10 for a 'wound' (chest area) and 5 for a 'hit' (anywhere else on the animal). There is much banter around how the animal is not officially dead even though you have just banged an arrow through his head, in one eye and out the other. There are also silly scores for some of the more ridiculously tricky shots - a rat on a log THIRTY metres away (!). Hit that one, you get 40, knock him off his log with your arrow stuck in him and you score 60. I have not got within a foot of the blighter.

The pigs this evening.

I should quickly add, just to quiet the fears of people who think I have got a bit blood-thirsty, that it is ILLEGAL everywhere in the British Isles to hunt anything with a bow and arrow, even a cross-bow. If you want to go a-hunting you need a licence , a pretty fierce draw-strength bow and you need to be on mainland Europe - Germany, Italy and some of France, I think. We are definitely just playing at it. It is just more entertaining to go 'hunting' between the trees, than to spend 2 hours lobbing arrows down a Badminton hall.

Pastures new. The sheep are back in the orchard. 

What ever way about it, I was 'on fire' on Sunday and it seemed I could not miss those targets. After my first try out 3 weeks back when I scored just 65 as a combination of 13 'hits', no wounds and no kills, I was suitably humble and knew my place - the beginner/new boy/trainee. On Sunday, for some reason, I found myself transformed into Dead-eye Dick. I got 2 kills in the first group and hit several other 'animals' more than once (you get 3 arrows per target). I had surpassed my 65 one third of the way in! I must admit it did not go as 'deadly' as that all through and I still missed my due portion of targets with all three arrows (of course, I have still not bagged 'log rat') but I ended with a score of 145, over twice my first one. No pressure for next week!

Liz (in orange) gives the sheep strict instructions not to eat
or break off the trees. 

The sheep, meanwhile, Have razed the front lawn to the ground and left only a few grass-flower stalks and some now obvious nettles and thistles. The lack of rain has no doubt contributed and the grass has stopped growing. We do not want to let them back into the East Field yet as that is resting, so we have rather bravely moved the gang into the orchard tonight. This is with some trepidation as we know what damage sheep can do to young trees by browsing and by scratching their itches by rubbing at them. We are hoping our trees are that bit bigger and taller so that they can afford to lose a few lower leaf-clusters (raising their 'skirts' or 'Savannah-ing' we call it here). They are also in some cases still guarded by the tree guards we originally fitted when we used this field before, several years ago. We are hoping that the sheep will focus on the lush grass and buttercups and leave the trees alone. Liz has read them The Riot Act.

Two Fat Ladies

Continuing to enjoy those blue skies and
getting great blocks of pure azure into as
many pictures as we can! 

An hour ago I was sitting on the parapet of our local bridge with the dogs, watching a sparrow hawk soaring in the thermals while being mobbed by 5 house martins (the hawk - not us!). From there back here to lunch and finding superb left overs in the fridge (beef liver cooked in cream with onions and mushrooms) and a tray of very generously gifted eggs, the answer was a liver omelette. Next I wandered round to look in on an elderly lady neighbour with whom we catch up periodically and was fed her home made treacle-bread and 'tay' in her lovely old kitchen. Coming home through her gorgeous garden I noticed that her yard-wide clumps of poached egg plant were a-buzz with 30-40 (of presumably our) honey bees. This truly is a small bit of Heaven which I must have done something really good in a former life to have inherited.

Generous gifts of eggs and a couple of all-spice cookies to
try out. 

Ah well, enough of this indulgence. I will change subject or risk starting to be horribly smug. Too late? Those podgy wenches of my post-title? No. It is not Jennifer Patterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright of whom I speak nor indeed any human females*  but , on this occasion, sheep. Specifically two of our ewes, Lily and Myfanwy.

Myfanwy is now lifted off the ground
when her "baby" lambs try to suck

In the last post you will have read that we were visited by Carolyn and Charlotte of the Mini Horses, here that day to collect the guest-goats whose work here was done. Charlotte is our go-to advisor on all things sheep-health and we are always happy to receive her comment, criticism, advice etc. This especially regarding what sheep folk call "condition" or the fatness of the animal particularly around the spine.

Polly (grey) is a nice 3.5 condition. Lily here is way too fat at
around 4.5

You may have seen judges at sheep shows prodding and poking the back of the sheep, squeezing up into the pelvic girdle and behind the ribs. They are feeling for the 'processes' of the vertebrae which stick up (spinous processes) and out sideways (transverse processes). If they can feel them sticking up and out sideways through the muscle blocks then your sheep is down in the 'under-fed' area (Condition 1+). If you can't feel them at all and there are dimples where they should be, then she is up to condition 5. As you would expect, somewhere in between is about right.

Rosie, our 'keeper' ewe lamb is nice and chunky at 3.5 months

Now that our ewes are sheared you can see a bit of this. An expert would be able to judge them without the prodding but you should prod to confirm your visual assessments. Charlotte could see that where I had continued to feed the sheep plenty of crunch despite the grass now growing and becoming quite plentiful, my two Suffolk-y ewes were getting decidedly porky though Polly, our Jacob cross, being more of a range-y, goat-like mountainy beast looked OK at maybe 3.5.

Poached egg plant - great for the bees.

This wouldn't be a problem now but come November and we would be trying to get the girls back into lamb, the condition has a huge effect on fertility. Your ewe wants to be between conditions 2.5 and 3.5 to be at her best, and preferably rising through that range, not falling. We therefore need to get this weight off them through the Summer and Charlotte and Carolyn have jointly advised some changes to grass regimes (rotating and resting various bits of lawn and field) as well as cutting the crunch right out to 'tit-bit' levels. This is especially so because this Autumn our 'tup' is likely to be Sue and Rob's "Silas", full of hormones and teenage vigour but not necessarily that knowledgeable on how the biology works. He is one of the 'suck lambs' from this Spring and not yet 3 months old. We need our ewes to be cracking out multiple eggs to have the best chance of getting more than one lamb per ewe next year.

More blue skies for these '365' pics.

Small quantities are allowed (and even advised) because they make it easy to see all your sheep every day and quickly let you spot any lameness or other health problems. The 'diet' though, is not so popular with the girls themselves and there was much 'Baa-ing' at times of day formerly know as 'elevenses', 'lunch' and 'supper' (yes, I know - there was NO grass and those ewes were all trying to suckle multiple lambs). In fact I think I heard a Management Meeting going on at one stage and the hot headed young lambs were planning to march on a certain house in Sligo with flaming brands, pitchforks and a signed petition. Oy! We want a WORD with you, Charlotte!

Darina Allen's trad Irish nettle soup. Superb!

Of course, in practise, the front lawn was so shaggy with long, rested grass that the sheep have gorged themselves in the sunshine, laid down in the shade with their tummies all spherical and rotund with grassy largesse, fallen asleep and forgotten all about being hungry for crunch and marching on Sligo. They have settled into the new regime quite happily and the out-of-time baa-ing, when it does happen is all a bit half-hearted and unconvinced. Baa????... maybe?... worth a try?

Our Cuckoo-Marans hen 'Squawk' dust bathing

Meanwhile, you may have heard me speaking of the ambition to evolve our chicken flock over, by natural wastage, to just the variety Buff Orpington. Well, it turns out that we are both in love with the oldest hen in our gang, 10 year old 'Squawk', our Cuckoo Marans girl who is still laying lovely dark brown speckledy eggs. The Marans are an all purpose (Western) French breed from down in the 'Charante-Maritime' area.

Happy Birthday Blue, 4 today.

So we have decided to go with Buffs AND Marans and we have been looking around for possible birds or 'hatching eggs' and, once again, step forward Carolyn who tipped us off that Mayo-Liz (our sheep supplier) has a farrier named Roy, who happens to breed three different colours of Marans - Cuckoos, Coppers and Golden. We have put our name down for a dozen eggs of unknown colour hoping to get some Cuckoo birds out of this or, failing that, Marans of other colours which we will probably fall in love with just the same.

Poppea at 4 years old.

Finally I need to wish Happy Birthday to three of our animals. 4 years ago today (June 3rd) while we were anxiously waiting on news of the whelping of Lily (bitch this time, not ewe) down in Silverwood, unbeknownst to us, just around the corner a rather disreputable she-cat (several handsome strangers had been there and she was "no better than she should be" apparently) was kittening to beat the band. Mrs S joyfully phoned her chum round the corner to tell her "our" good news and could hardly get the story out before chum was bubbling back about kittens.

Towser at 4. Please turn a blind one to the grubby wall.
Towser's decorating I think.  

Anyway, long story short, we ended up with 2 pups and 2 kittens. Blue's brother Rolo sadly 'lost' in a fight with a vehicle in the lane a couple of years back and has since been replaced by Soldier whose birth date we know not. Many Happy Returns, then, you lot. Live long and prosper.

*There may be bit of a health-kick going on here at present - no wine, less booze, cream, butter and rich sauces, more exercise etc but nothing is to be inferred from that re any words in my title.

First there were 2 Goslings....

First time on public view and, here, 'photo-bombed' by one of
the male Guinea Fowl 

As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, we are suddenly goat-less again for the first time since early January. We shipped Nanny Óg and the new kid (Henry Óg) home this morning to their new abode in Sligo in my trailer. K-Dub and I had been hard at work in the blue sky, sweaty heat (OK it's only 21ºC but this IS Roscommon) of Saturday, creating a third paddock at the Sligo rebuild house while being eaten alive by mozzies. Luckily for me, anyway, K-Dub is like Lizzie in being a very attractive target for these bitey b**tards, so he was the one being eaten. They don't seem to find me palatable. But then, it WAS his fence.

Only days old here. 

The holding over there includes a nice big and smooth but slightly sloping 2 acre (?) field. The field, though, has been left to go to ruin dominated by huge tussocks of rushes and thickets of bramble and 'sally' willows. The tussocks trap water and the whole field can get very boggy - way too boggy to risk driving the yellow 'JCB' tractor onto it.

This green stuff is grass, children and we eat it.

Never mind - Carolyn is an experienced and cunning improver of grassland and knows that by using combinations of grazing by the mini horses and goats, brush cutting and loppering, the field will soon be brought back into good heart. Razing the rush tussocks to the ground helps water run off and allows grass to recover faster than the rushes by growing up through and between their clumsy root pads. The horses and goats WILL eat the fresh green rush regrowth. We know this works - we have no more rushes on either our front lawn or the East Field after we 'borrowed' the mini horses and the field in this village where the horses were up till recently was also a rush-bog a few years back, when Carolyn's squad moved in.

Baby pears, or an excuse to photograph those
glorious blue skies?

The secret is to divide the field into paddocks so that you can concentrate all your grazing into one small area at a time preventing anyone from being choosy and just eating the sweetest grasses. When the field has been 'hammered' down to the 'clay', you take all the animals off to rest the paddock and let the grass leap into action. Several cycles of this and you have a good field and continuing to rotate the grazing by this 'mob-grazing' system keeps it that way. Hence K-Dub and I sweating and beating off mozzies in the sun.

That (lovely) straying dog, our most frequent visitor, again

Meanwhile the humans in this saga seem to be pinging about all over the place also. Liz went down to Silverwood-land to see the First Holy Communion (and party etc) for youngest niece 'R'. I must admit I cried off this one on grounds of livestock, newly hatched geese and not being Catholic (OK, maybe not that last one) so Liz went down to spend the night and would return on Monday in Mum-in-Law's car (with M-i-L, obviously) so that she could spend a couple of days here catching up with the farm and the various animals. Last time she was up we had the lamb bottle-feeding incident. We were to remember this yesterday evening. There may be a pattern forming.

Bobby the Dog. His brother, Shep, is just as gorgeous.

During this break Charlotte came home from college for the Summer and hence all the goat-moves. Charlotte is our go-to animal wrangler and we know she can usually help if we are doing anything live-stock. She wanted to gather up the goats to bring them home (where she now is, of course) so that she can try out some goat-milking, and we knew we could 'borrow' her to grab my ewes one by one while I trimmed off the last fuzzy edges of my shearing. Everyone's a winner!

Early Purple (?) Orchid

Ah but the livestock "incident" I mentioned. Sad to say we synchronised a bad event with this visit by Mum-in-Law. I had gone out to lock down the poultry for the evening and found one of the goslings looking like a casualty. He had either taken a bad clout (peck?) from an adult bird or been trampled underfoot. He was lying on his back in the dirt on the coop floor with his legs twitching and his head trying to get upright. He was stuck like that, as if a tortoise had been flipped over. Adult geese are massive strong beasts compared to the few-ounces fragile balls of fluff goslings and they can be very clumsy with their feet set so far back on their bodies. It was not looking good.

Some first fox gloves

We rescued the gosling to the sickbay via a warm-up cuddle down Mum's "front" while the 'electric hen' warm-plate warmed up. The brooder box is in the same room as Mum was to be sleeping but she said she could cope with his little pathetic cheeping so we all retired to bed quite hopeful. The little guy was still alive in the morning but although he could sit upright and squirm back up the right way if he toppled, he could not walk. Gander George was all over him when we tried to re-introduce him but that was no good to us if he couldn't move about with the family. Back into the brooder box then, with the little chap, hoping that maybe he was only bruised and might recover over the next days.

One of our big red showy poppies. 

Sadly no. He went downhill mid morning and died while Charlotte and I were doing our goat-taxi run. Ah well. You don't win them all. The other gosling seems to be thriving and is out and about in the orchard today with anything from 1-4 adults depending on who wants to stay near the remaining eggs. Sorry, Mum - we will try to arrange a visit soon where livestock does not die at you!

High Babies, Low Babies

Our high and low babies - the Buff Poults at 8 weeks meet the
tiny Hubbard chicks at 8 days. 

When Liz was coming up through school and later, when she was babysitting or minding children of friends, the young children who we, in England, called "infants" were always referred to colloquially as the "Low Babies" and the "High Babies". I suppose that they were officially "junior infants" and "senior infants" or some such (It was a long time ago - Liz can't remember that far back!) but I love the expression and it has come to be stuck to our two current groups of chicks - the Hubbard chicks at 8-9 days and the Buff poults at 8-9 weeks. All are thriving. We have passed 6 of the Hubbards across to our friends Sue and Rob to try out - they had not done pure meat-birds up to now and fancied giving them a go.

2 goslings. One just visible as an eye and a bit of face!

Good news at last in the goose dept, with the start of hatching. 2 happy healthy ones so far, starting to peep out from under Mum's (or Aunt's) skirts and sadly I can also see a sorry, flat inert one down under all those heavy webbed feet, presumably one that didn't quite make it out of the egg. That's the way it goes sometimes, especially in our rather chaotic system.

Should be safe enough with all those beaks protecting you!

There are plenty more eggs in there and regular readers will know that these get dropped into the nest by the 'aunts' all through the broody period. We have no way of knowing if they are new or contain part-grown or even ready-to-hatch babies. What generally happens if that the first goslings, when they reach 3 days or so, will be led off the nest and out into the grassy orchard for a first explore but will leave behind an 'aunt' still sitting on the rest of the eggs.

In the past these 'aunts' have hatched a few stragglers who then join the kindergarten in turn (more high babies and low babies?) so we end up with a funny looking straggle of goslings of various ages like "steps and stairs". We are happy either way. We do not really want to be breeding geese anyway so the fewer we have to sell or finish, the happier we are. Cute though, you have to admit and it is nice in welfare terms for the geese to do 'family' stuff, "expressing natural behaviours" and all that.

Turf extruded out ot dry by a turf-hopper in local bog, Kiltybranks. 

After a 3 week break while my 'boss builder' (K-Dub) was up doing some proper paid work in Dublin (a loft extension) it was nice to get a Thursday back on that job this week. The Sligo house project rather missed the deadline - they'd been hoping to move in during April - but K-Dub is a realist and knows he can't turn down good paid jobs like that one. They can use bits of the house - the heating and range work and they can use the shower for example, but the kitchen is still just carcasses and half built units and even the most advanced bedrooms need paint. A few more weeks of living in that (nice and big!) caravan for now, people.

Being a British citizen who has been resident in the UK in the last 15 years, I was eligible to vote in the upcoming 'Brexit' referendum (Britain's exit from the European Union, or not). I have heard so much scary nonsense on this one that I was happy to oblige. It was just a case of logging in to a website and providing various personal info, passport number and the like) to secure my postal vote. All the paperwork for that arrived on Wednesday, so I quickly did my form-filling, placed my 'X' in the appropriate box and posted that back off to Swale Boro' (Kent). I can only pray now that good sense prevails and wait for the results after the actual poll on 23rd June. I've done my bit.

A brace of cakes for the Faversham Friends

We were almost visited by some friends from our 'old' town of Faversham in Kent. They have relatives in Ireland (2 and a half hours away in Thurles) and were over for a wedding which was to happen in Claremorris, which is only half an hour's drive away. Liz baked a couple of nice cakes and there was home made bread and our usual range of jams, pickles and, of course, our version of 'Serrano' ham. Unfortunately a grand child got sick and then a grown-up in the party, so the run across from Thurles to the wedding was called off and they couldn't make it. Ah well, we will catch up with them on a future visit and we can certainly 'tidy up' the cakes.

First yellow flag iris opens in the pond.

Other than that I have been playing 'sheep' (well, in a way) in two different ways this week. Sue and Rob finally received their ear tags from the co-op, so asked me to come across with the pliers to do the job on all 8 of their sheep. Rob is in UK so we roped in grandson Lewis (him of the piglet-bagging) as sheep-wrangler and got them all done in about 15 minutes. The baby suck-lambs were easy, the shearling and the adult ewe took a bit of catching using bucket-of-grub bribery and some nifty rugby-tackling lunges.

Dog foot prints in your turf?

Then I was down in town Sunday to get a haircut and got chatting to my friendly barber (Barbara, yes I know!) about sheep shearing. She had never seen sheep shears close to and was curious when I said that they were much bigger, heavier , noisier and more 'industrial' than the quietly humming "human" clippers she was used to. She asked would I bring them down to show her and she could maybe frighten a few customers by pretending to use them. Well, I advised against that but took them down for her to see, hold and fire them up. What a racket they make (especially with the tension slacked off for storage) - she was quite impressed and agreed that you could do some serious damage to any poor customer in the chair even just joking around. I was happy to put them back away in their case.

Only those Hubbards....

The Hubbard chicks at 1 week get a first chance to feel the
warm Roscommon sun on their backs. It's the hottest day of
the year so far  and they will come to no harm. 

Another week passes and there is still no sign of our AWOL turkey hen, Barbara so, naturally, we are becoming convinced that Brer Fox has had the pleasure. Yes, she MAY still be out there, rearing her chicks in the (now) cattle fields and a miracle may happen and she'll stroll back in with a little 'crocodile' of adolescents. Ah well. It does not matter physically for the moment as we will not be deciding whether or not to replace the turkeys any time soon. Emotionally, of course, we will miss them - they were an intriguing and fascinating couple to have wandering about and liked to home in on us if either of us were out gardening or sitting by the pond.

Misty morning across the bog to our North

No babies either yet for the geese or any of the chickens. For our fix of chicks, then, we only have those Hubbards, 7 days old today. We are always impressed by their speed of growth and development - if you want photo's of that clichéd image of the spherical ball of fluff body with two legs at the bottom and a head at the top, then you really do have to get there in the first 3 days. By day 4 and certainly by day 7 they are already growing taller, with an obvious neck and pin feathers are sprouting to give them definite wings among their side-fluff.

The Captain's table? Our former rooster re-appears coated with
a rough and ready BBQ sauce but even though we slow-cook
him, we'd both admit that he was a tough aul' bird. 

Of course, in commercial terms, they are not fast growing at all. Free range, they take a good 100-120 days to reach good carcass weights. Commercial broiler birds housed indoors and grown on a diet of growth promoters under controlled day-length can be harvested at more like 40 days, still covered in chick-fluff. As I understand it (and I'm no expert), those would not be Hubbards - our Hubbards are bred (designed?) to do well under commercial scale free range or organic conditions. We are actually slowing them down by giving them fully free range conditions, too much exercise and a diet supplemented by worms and grubs scratched from the ground.

Breakfast in the early morning sun. 

Meanwhile in other 'babies', our little gilts continue to charm and delight us. They are almost 4 months old now and suddenly seem to twice as long as the day they arrived. We were delighted recently to be visited by the couple who did my pig-training down in Tipperary 3 years back and with whom we have stayed in touch and would now call firm friends.

I love the light under new beech leaves. This is in the pig run.

They were in the area, by coincidence, to collect a puppy and recognised the name of the village as being one I had mentioned. I was delighted to show them around the place and particularly to show the two pigs to Alfie. He pronounced them fit, well and a credit to us. "I love to see HAPPY pigs" he said as the our pair scampered round our feet deciding whose footwear to chew first.

This lovely foal and mare combo (plus the
other filly behind) have moved in next
door as lawn mowers. 

I should add that it's not all sweet perfection, however and a nasty incident between dogs and pigs soured relations between these species for a while.The 3 westies were enjoying their half hour off-lead exercise and gazing through the fence as the piglets wandered over to sniff the dogs.

This pigmy shrew was only slightly chewed by the cat.
Liz rescued him and I got a quick chance to take his pic
before we released him to the safety of a log stack.

Faster than I could react, a pig had got too close, a dog had thrust his head through the sheep wire and grabbed a chunk of pigs ear. The hullabaloo of squealing and barking had me sprint over adding my own roar to the cacophony. The dog let go the pig and the pigs both ran off to hide in their ark while I reprimanded the dogs. I went in to console the pigs and was relieved to find that the ear was only a bit bitten, not actually torn, though it was bleeding quite impressively. First-aid for piggies, anyone? Luckily, no lasting damage done though I note the pigs stay well clear of the fence now when the dogs are about.

Small white (?) on dandelion. 

The 365 photo project chugs on coming to the end of its 4th month. Last week the 'Tidy Towns' group in the village wanted to take part in the (national) Bio-Diversity week, so the 365 photographers were asked to specialise in wildlife related stuff. I have had some fun trying to give them a good choice of subjects and not just the cute and fluffy - slugs, snails, dead wood and so on have all featured. I am not sure I am 'allowed' to be pleased that Blue the cat caught a timely shrew which Liz rescued and then, while it was still frozen in shock and a-trembling, take its picture before it suddenly came to, realised its good fortune and scampered for cover. Sensible shrew.

The long border at Strokestown, still a bit
'early summer' and green. Pic by Liz. 

In the extra-curricular area, we found out about a plant sale happening in our favourite guest-visit destination, Strokestown House. This was not Strokestown selling stuff from their brilliant walled garden, but merely acting as host to a dozen or so traders. However the traders were excellent and the plants were in gorgeous condition and very reasonably priced and, included in the €5 entry fee to the 'fair', was a chance to walk round the walled garden. Despite showers, that was us sorted for a very enjoyable Sunday morning.

Strokestown House walled garden.

For not too much of a dent in the wallet, we came away with a good haul thanks, mainly, to one of the traders doing a "6 plants for €20" deal. All perennials needed (and longed for for a while - Ireland is not a natural gardeners' country and the Garden Centres are few and far between and not well stocked with unusual stuff) for our big raised bed. Some inspired by the lovely plants growing in big drifts in the walled garden - the blue Centaurea particularly.

Admiring the old equipment in the restored working area.
This a lovely old Allen Scythe

We shipped a couple of tall clump-forming grasses, that blue centaurea, a nepeta (cat mint), a sedum, salvia, Solomon's seal, a hemerocallis (day lily) and a frothy-flowered thalictrum (I think) with granny bonnet leaves (aquilegifolia). With all this haul home we go into designer mode placing them out on the bed in their prospective positions to see if it works.

The gardener - muddy knees to prove it!

We are still enjoying the fact that this is not our overcrowded garden in Faversham. By the time we'd finished there we had no space to plant things we'd buy so they sat in pots for too long, or some other plant was evicted to make room. Here, we have 2.5 acres, so we can still buy 'thugs' that will take over space - mint, the Solomon's seal etc or will happily self-seed. We'll get there.