Connie, Big Red, Beebs and Stumpy makes 19

Beeblebrox with her 7 chicks

We are suddenly tripping over baby chicks everywhere. Awash, we are. Readers of recent blog posts will already know about our first two broodies, the white Sussex, 'Connie' who is now confidently marching around with her three and Big Red who has four. Big Red has taken to hanging about the yard with hers waiting to pounce on either Liz or I hoping for the next hand out of my hard-boiled egg mixture. She does not need to be doing that for too long - the babies only get egg in their commercial crumb for the first week.

When the 'Parma' ham runs out, boil up
the bones for bacon and bean soup. 

Next up we were expecting our chicken-with-a-gammy-foot, 'Stumpy' who was sitting on five eggs in the proper official nest boxes in the main coop. She was coming up to Day 21 today (7th). Before she could get there, though, Connie wandered off with hers one evening intent on bedding down in the mint patch on our kitchen garden. "Oh no you don't", we said, "Mr Fox will get you!"

Not very common... a DUCK double yolker. 

We went to rescue her (and chicks) into a kitten basket and found to our surprise that she had nestled in alongside our black Araucana-cross hen, Beeblebrox. But what was SHE doing there?

Empress and Pride at 4 months

Beebs, incidentally, is named for the two-headed man character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Being part Araucana she has that weird feathery top-knot on her head, looking like a 2nd head, hence the name. Anyway, what she was doing was demonstrating to us very neatly and shamingly that we are not the close, detailed protectors of our flock that we probably should be.

She was sitting on about a dozen eggs and may have been broody out there for days. I had been shutting "all" the birds up each night without spotting that she was absent. No roll call. Just a quick visual check of lots of full perches and rafters. Ooops. But then, we now have a bird sitting on 12 eggs who is "out there" vulnerable to foxes etc. Do we try to move her plus the nest indoors? Do we try to build a fox-proof cage around her? Either would have been OK but may have caused her to get upset and desert the nest. We have moved nests before and the chicken just frets to get back out to where the eggs WERE. It is heartbreaking.

Empress nailing a chunk of yellow melon. 2 for €2 in SuperValu
at present. We can afford that!

Rather recklessly (irresponsibly?) we decided to risk her out there. It is a quiet little corner surrounded by a thicket of mint, tight against the wall of the Tígín deep inside the kitchen garden where I can not imagine a randomly patrolling fox would bother to go. We worried about this decision long and hard. We then stressed about this each night and especially on Wednesday when we were both woken at 03:00 by a vixen screaming very close - possibly in the lane out front. When it started raining we propped 2 long sheets of corrugated over her like a lean-to.

Well, long story short, we have, so far, got away with it. 2 days ago Liz was taking the air out in the kitchen garden when she heard loud cheeping from the mint patch. We had a hatch, only TEN days after we found the nest. The quick-witted among you will spot that this means she had been 'missing' at night and broody for 11 days before we knew anything about it. Embarrassing. She now had 7 little balls of fluff shadowing her about. There was, briefly, an 8th. I found one egg part-open with a struggling wet baby still part inside, but later this poor mite was stiff, cold and still wet. There had actually been 15 eggs and only one proved to be infertile, so Rooster Gandalf is obviously doing a good job even if we aren't!

Then yesterday, right on schedule, our 4th and final broody, 'Stumpy' nailed it with loud cheeping coming from under her skirts. What I always do for these new mums is try them on a bit of chick feed. They lean down to peck it and make that bass-y "Food kids!" clucking and if there are any mobile babies under there, these will generally pop their heads out and start learning to peck. I could see Stumpy was sitting on at least 3.

Back on that digger yesterday. This is that mini-mountain of
good topsoil we needed to barrow away to the new raised beds.

Today she came off the nest, job done and I was delighted to see she had hatched all five eggs. 100%. Go Stumpy! So we have 3+4+7+5=19 babies at the moment, more babies than we had birds a month or so ago!

Focaccia loaf, first knock-back

What else is new? I have been back out to Sligo at the diggering. The pressure is on. 'We' need to move that pile of topsoil to make way for the '804' gravel sub-base which will then need laying and 'whacking' in time for the 3 concrete lorries to arrive, scheduled Saturday week to pour those shed-bases. It's all go over there.

Sourdough loaf.

I have been messing around in the absence of Lizzie (she's down in Laois minding Auntie Mary) with some more sour dough stuff. My 5th attempt at a standard loaf came out quite well - no scorching, no excess flour on top, no 'scars' where I had let the dough stick to the tea-towel.

For relaxation I broke out the 'self sufficiency' book on bread we have (James and Dick Strawbridge) and had a go at their 'focaccia' recipe with sea salt and rosemary. I added 35 g of my sourdough starter to the dried yeast in the recipe and got a really good rise out of it.

Final prove, then bake to a golden brown and brush lightly
with olive oil for a gloss finish. 

You stick a mini-forest of rosemary sprigs into the top of this for aroma and aesthetic reasons. It was a thing of beauty. I will post a pic in the next blog. Was delicious too with a rather 'fusion food' Lancashire Hotpot main course.

Big Boys' Toys?

A digger of distinction!

I've heard it said that little boys don't ever really grow up; their toys just get bigger. It may well be true. I was certainly like a kid in a toy shop this weekend when invited over to the previously mentioned rebuild job in County Sligo to "help move some gravel". I knew they were getting 2 loads of 20 tonnes delivered into heaps near the entrance (the lorry drivers don't trust the ground to hold the weight of the lorry and release them at the end!) but I assumed we would be back on the shovels and barrows. Wrong again - the main man has now had an olde yellow digger he bought shipped over there (well, low-loader'd anyway) and enough drive has been laid to allow that to move about and make life easier for the gravel movers.

Old but pretty servicable back actor on the Massey Ferguson
digger. 

My job was to learn to use the digger to dig buckets of the gravel up with the "back actor" (rear bucket/arm) and decant them accurately into two waiting wheel barrows without spilling too much gravel on the nice drive, damaging the barrows or killing anyone. The main man was then going to keep up with me running these barrows away to the footings we were creating for a 20' square extension out back of the house. Easy! What could possibly go wrong? Well, only that I have never driven a digger before in my life and I had six levers to twiddle in front of me (never mind all the normal dashboard stuff 'behind' me (you sit backwards for this), the throttle, front bucket and so on)

6 levers to co-ordinate. 

Left to right as you sit (right to left in this photo), if you will imagine the back actor as a human arm, we have a lever for that side's stabiliser leg/foot, then upper arm up/down, whole arm swing left/right, 'elbow' extend/flex and 'wrist' extend/flex. Finally the stabiliser leg/foot that side. The legs you can pretty much ignore once you have set yourself up spirit-level flat, back wheels off the ground and front end raised by flooring the front bucket. You just play with the 4 arm levers. All good clean fun. I was at it for 3 hours Saturday morning and 3 more Sunday morning. I started off, as you'd expect on 'Skill Level = Rubbish/Dangerous' but by the end I was getting some begrudging OKs from the training department.

'804' gravel going everywhere. 

Whilst 'rubbish' I managed to drop the whole bucket onto my own wheel barrow (ooops! Had to be bent back straight by hefty builders' boots) and almost brained the boss with a wrong-direction sideways swoop of the arm. I was also dropping gravel everywhere and plenty of it at the handle end of the barrows, rather than over the barrow wheel. "You're breaking my back here!" Never mind we hit all the safety targets (no deaths!) and moved an awful lot of gravel between us and I did not get the sack. As I understand it, modern digger drivers look back on those Massey Ferguson "council" diggers with affection (They were a grand machine in their day - I LEARNED the trade on one of them etc) but now have it a bit more hi-tech with just 2 joysticks to twiddle so that they can make the bucket move in an accurate circle if they need to.

The log store is full. 

When not playing digger-driver, I was hard at work with the chain saw and/or axe cutting up enough logs and wood to finish filling the log store. As you can see from this picture, I even went a bit silly towards the end and tried my hand at log-store art which I had seen done (very well) in some pictures on the internet - people have created owls, trees, axe-wielding foresters and so on using the mosaic effect of different shapes and colours of log-ends.

My 'sun' of spruce and hawthorn.

I must admit that some of them are very intricate and must have taken hours even if only in the planning, choosing and shaping wood and deciding how you'd build it from the bottom up. Mine is a lot simpler. It was inspired by an artist friend who saw a pic of it half-filled where I had commented that the dark grey wood bottom left was actually ash, so was meant to be bright white but had been kicked around in the mud by the pigs like muddy footballs. The triangle of grey and a stripe of dark wood in the back layer (now hidden) reminded the artist of a mountain and a cloud so I wondered if I could chop up a big disk of spruce but keep the bits in the right order to re-assemble the disk at the store as a 'sun'.

To give it more definition I cut some small hawthorn which I knew would cut bright gold/orange when fresh. It was a fairly easy job to create a semi-circle dip in the existing front row, line it with hawthorn and drop on the big spruce disc bits. Then to 'bury' it under more hawthron and wedges and smaller rounds of spruce to complete my 'sky'. So, Philippa, will you give me "Sunshine on the Mountain"?

Are these pork slices or smoked bacon rashers? Thank you
Rob for an epic bacon-sarnie experience!

Our friends Sue and Rob have been getting into the cold-smoking. Rob has created a cold smoker out of recycled bits and pieces. Sue was more amused than angry when he stole the rake and sawed off 2/3 of the handle to make a pole from which to hang meat. She had found the much shortened rake and wondered if this was the one for the Little People to use. I was gifted a lovely chunk of (I think) shoulder and advised to cut rashers off it. They truly were the meatiest, most delicious bacon sandwiches I have had in a long time. It was a very filling breakfast which weighed me down onto the digger seat and kept me going till way past dinner time.

When you've eaten a bacon sarnie like this you KNOW
you've had a breakfast. 

When not working my little socks off, I have got lately quite into the reading. I have long since worked my way through the house 'library' of old favourites (Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Walter Macken, Eudora Welty, Andrea Levy) and sniffed around a few of Liz's treasures, I then grabbed up a history book Liz had been using to prepare lessons for her student. This was no history tome as I would know from school - all dates, Kings, Queens, battles, but a book about what you'd find if you could go 'there', in this case to the 14th Century.

Old wooden turf barrow. There are still plenty about and
some still being used. 

"The Time-Traveller's Guide to Medieval England" by Ian Mortimer (pub Vintage 2009) has me gripped. It has you arriving at various locations and getting involved in local life - crime and punishment, social structure and rank, travelling, pilgrimages, being a guest in peasant houses, Monasteries and big-nob's Halls, describing clothes, jobs and work, health and medical support, fairs and entertainments, reading books and so on. I was facinated by the bits about food and high status dining and amazed to find that for each type of food there was a special way of carving it to serve it to the Lords and Ladies and their guests. Kitchen boys would be expected to know how to 'unbrace' a mallard, 'spoil' a hen, 'dismember' a heron, 'unlace' a coney (rabbit), 'sauce' a capon or, indeed, a plaice, 'break' a deer, 'display' a crane, 'barb' a lobster, 'splat' a pike (I love that!), 'culpon' a trout or 'tranche' a sturgeon. I am quite pleased I just have a bit of bacon to go in a risotto tonight. Think I'll just 'smite that into gobbets'.