A 4-Way Birthday and some New Babies

Early Purple Orchid at Kiltybranks

Friends of the blog may recall that Jun 3rd is Birthday for 3 of our main animals (was 4) who are all 5 years old. The pups, Towser and Poppea were getting born on that night down in Mrs Silverwood's house in County Laois while we were also waiting for news of a birth of kittens at Mrs S's friend's house just around the corner. The two joyful news, triumphant phone calls met in the middle at breakfast.

'Twayblade' (orchid) at Kiltybranks

Lily had whelped 7 (I think) pups and the cat had kitted 3 little balls of fluff. Since then we have lost one of the kittens (Rolo) to an RTA but we have gained a rescue cat (Soldier) of whom we do not know a birth date. We have therefore given Soldier the 3rd of June too, so HAPPY  5th BIRTHDAY the 4 of you, Soldier plus Blue, Towser and Poppea.

Getting the painting gear out. 

My main news events since the last post, though concern not these animals, but a coat of paint (or two) on the kitchen and the arrival of yet more livestock. The new kitchen got its paint on Saturday and we decided to carry the colour on throughout the old which has been up to now Brilliant White.

Liz had fallen in love with the colour of the dry, bare plaster (a very pale grey) and could not think of a better colour to sit alongside the new floor tiles, the bare, raked-out-and-repointed stone wall or, in fact, the existing splash-back on the sink in the old kitchen. As anyone who has decorated their house will know, you can now pretty much get paint in any colour you like. The shop stocks white base paint and has a high tech, computerised colour dosing machine that mixes the tin to the shade you have chosen from the swatch cards.

The new paint looks well against the stone
wall. Ignore the dodgy plastic wall socket.
That is only there temporarily. 

We had tried the older method of buying small 'match-pots' and painting little test patches but could not get a pale enough grey - the kitchen risked looking like a WW2 battleship! Wouldn't you know it, the ideal colour was from the (Dulux?) "Colour Trends" range, the most expensive paint in the shop. This was going to be €36 for the 2.5 litres we doubted would go the whole room even once.

Watercress in a bog ditch. I had thought that stiff needed a clear
flowing, pure chalky stream.

To our rescue, the shop guy who is probably well used to penny pinching customers (his shop is in Roscommon!) who said that he quite often makes up the colour in the "standard" Dulux version of the base-paint and it always works. That was now €19 for the tin which was especially nice when it became obvious that we'd run out of paint and need a 5 litre tin to finish the first, and complete the 2nd coat. 5 litres was €29 which was not so bad. I didn't ask what a 5 litre tin of the real 'Colour Trends' version would have been.

The 10 week turkey poults arrive

Today, then, saw delivered both our turkey poults and our day old Hubbard meat-bird chickens. The turkeys come from Sue and Rob who are currently breeding them by the dozen, hoping to sell birds for people to 'grow' for the Christmas market. It is nice to know that her parent birds are, in some cases, raised from the eggs laid by our own (late) Tom and Barbara pair, so the DNA has been working away over there and is now coming 'home' in a sense.

Sue and Rob hatch these either in an incubator or sneaked under any broody hen who has space under her skirts. One such "clocker" (broody hen) got a mention in my recent sheep-shearing post when we discovered a hatched turkey during a pause from the wool clipping. Once hatched they are kept under good heat; an 'electric hen' AND and Infra Red bulb till they are about 9 weeks old. They then get a week off heat before they go to their new homes, acclimatized.

We have 'landed' ours into one of our well used redundant rabbit runs, which have a cosy, draught-free, bedroom at one end. They spend a week or two in there getting used to the sights, sounds and smells of our yard and all the other birds (and cats and us), before we start letting them out free range and try to persuade them to move home to the proper chicken/goose coops. This year we will be more careful around the start of cold weather and the increased braveness of foxes. Last year we lost all three in November and had beef for Christmas dinner. It was lovely but we still hated that fox for stealing our turkey(s)!

Hubbard chick at day 1

Friends of the blog will also know that we have done several batches of the Hubbard chickens as meat over the years, lately one from May-June to August and a 2nd Aug to Oct/Nov. We join in with Anne and Simon who have access to a big commercial hatchery (long term friends of the Manager) and when they drive all the way up there to get their birds, they always ask us would we like some too. Thank you very much, Anne and Simon.

The Hubbard is a popular variety in Ireland among the commercial boys who are supplying supermarkets with Free Range and/or Organic birds. They make a nicely keeled oven-ready carcass and have a phenomenal growth rate, achieving 2-4 kg (oven ready) in 80-120 days. We kill ours at about 100 days on our 'genuine free range' system and it has always been the tastiest, most succulent chicken meat you ever tasted.

Long may it continue. We also enjoy having Anne and Simon in for a chat, a cup of tea and either dillisk, or chilli-cheese-and-bacon biscuits (or both) which Liz rustles up within minutes of us all sitting down at the table.  We got 13 chicks this year (a miscount at the source!) instead of the straight dozen and we have been amazed by the speed with which they have learned to peck up their own food. In previous years I have spent some time pecking at the food with the point of a chopstick to 'show' them what to do and, even, picking up bits of food and carrying it to their little, hopeful, upward pointing beaks. This lot were straight in. Good luck to them.

On a Chicken Mission

Liz plucks the final bird. 3 finished birds
are in the background.

This post sees us finally through the harvest of the Hubbard variety chickens. Regular readers will know that the Hubbard is a commercial breed used widely in Ireland by farmers supplying the supermarkets with, specifically, Free Range and Organic chickens. We get them as day-olds and grow them through to around day 90 by which time they have reached 2-4 kg oven-ready weights and are just the most succulent, tender, meaty and flavoursome chicken you will ever put on the table.

The final 3 hens and a cock await jointing and/or vac-packing

These are normally only available in industrial scale batches (10,000 for example) but our friends Mentor Anne and Simon who were once in that business, are still 'in' with a guy who manages one of the big hatcheries and is happy to make up mini-orders to suit we few smallholders. We get a dozen and A+S add those to their own 'few dozen' order. If you like, go back a few months on this blog for some pics of a previous lot newly arrived  (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/05/hubbard-chick-at-2-days-little-list-of.html ).

Vac packed and ready for the freezer

Those regular readers will also know that the latest batch have now 'cooked' and we have been processing them at a two a day for the last week. That brought us to Saturday with 4 birds remaining. Normally we'd share the load but that day Liz decided she was "in the Zen" for a solid 2-3 hours of plucking and gutting.

Fringe benefit of a Hubbard kill. Lovely fresh paté

She took the laptop into the kitchen, put on an Oz murder-mystery series on download which she is currently "binge-watching", shut the door to keep out the kittens (they are devils for climbing up your back without warning, leaping from the floor to about waist height, then digging their claws in for a scrabble to shoulder height. Poor Liz is lacerated about the nape and fed up with the pain, and was going to be working in the warm kitchen with her shoulders protected only by a tee shirt and apron) and went for it.

Boiled chicken feet? Not your cup of tea?
The dogs LOVE them

My part in this is to bring in the killed birds on demand, supply tea in regular and copious amounts (plus the occasional G+T if the job is running past 'yard-arm') and then, at the end, jointing, vac-packing, finding homes for all this largesse in the freezer(s) and disappearing the bags of feathers, guts, heads and any other unmentionables. I can pluck but I am nothing like as careful or patient as Liz and my birds end up looking a bit like road-kill with torn skin, etc. Liz picks away carefully and gently, busily and efficiently producing lovely looking oven-ready birds. She is very good at it and has found, to her own amazement (Dublin city-girl!) that she thoroughly enjoys it and finds it very therapeutic. I, of course, am not arguing. My job is to hatch (if necessary), rear and 'grow' the birds and then kill them and bring them to the kitchen door and take away any bags of waste. It is a neat and easily worked team effort. We both, of course, thoroughly enjoy eating them!

Sunday morning dawned Hubbard-less but also with a good frost. During my first livestock rounds (which now includes getting 'wet', liquid water out to the birds - the ducks and geese do love to wash their faces and they are unimpressed by that rock-hard crust that comes on the drinkers these mornings. The outside tap is, of course, frozen up, so this involves bringing out buckets of water from the kitchen) I had heard what I thought were a few more Whooper swans flying N-S past us to the West and being called down by more birds on Lough Feigh. I headed down there again with my long lens, hoping to improve on my '365' pics of last week.

No luck on the swans by then (10 am). The Lough is quite low at present and was completely frozen over except among the reed beds, so there was not a swan to be seen, not even the ubiquitous Mute Swans. I had to satisfy myself with a couple of picturesque frosty scenes and a small flock of wigeon zig-zagging about. I'd given up and headed home when I got my best surprise of that day - I put up a snipe. I don't think I have ever seen one before but I know that, in theory, they do live here.

This tiny 'dot' cropped out of the middle of a huge blank
sky is my snipe. First one I'd ever seen, never mind photo'd.

Of course, once it had exploded into flight it was quickly up to a gazillion mph and headed away from me as fast as its little blurring wings could go. I whipped up the 400 mm and fired off a couple pics and thank Heaven for modern "image stabilization" on these fancy lenses. He was outta there. I was relieved to be able to crop this silhouette from the resulting huge, featureless picture of grey sky.

Thawed patch and neat pile of poo tells
the tale of where one sheep slept last night

Finally I have had some fun today helping to clear away the outdoor archery equipment for our Coach, Con who is currently laid up in his bed, too sick to do any hefting and carrying but fretting because all the gear was still 'out there' getting rained on and frozen.

We all laughed at this superb pic of archery
boss-lady, Niamh who had finally nailed that
coffee cup with a superb tight pattern of 3
arrows. Ace shooting Niamh!

Our archery field 'out there', south of Castlerea town is a square with earth banks thrown up all round it like ditches and walls, a copy of an Irish fort (or 'Rath'). In one corner is an access gap for Con's tired old ride-on mower which comes with a handy little trailer.

From shortage to glut. We probably have
'enough' eggs now.

My job, helped by our archery 'boss-lady' Niamh (Brits may need to know this is pronounced "Neave") was to scurry back and forth collecting up all the 3D foam-rubber targets (life-size animals like wild boar, ibex and deer, fox etc), logs, tarpaulins, metal 'tent-peg' pins and pallets, bring them all to dry storage. On Sunday a gang of us will return to demolish the big marquee and then Con will be able to get some healing sleep. Get well soon, Con!

Maternity Chaos

Hubbard chick at 2 days

The little list of birds currently keeping us waiting grows ever longer. There is turkey hen Barbara, of course, possibly still AWOL, out there in the fields sitting on eggs or possibly hatchlings and maybe, just maybe, planning to walk them all back up here to the farmstead at some stage. At the other end of the 'hope' scale, of course, there is no Barbara and the bones of the former Barbara are drying out in the midden heap outside some fox's lair. We can only wait and see but turkeys are famously mainly grass-grazers, so if she is out there somewhere in the lush Roscommon grass, dodging the hooves of clumsy cattle and teaching the young 'uns to eat grass, we could be waiting a while.

The broody geese, sharing the manger 'trough' and swapping eggs between the two nests each day are also devoid of fluffy goslings. Day 28 for the first eggs we knew about, was 16th May, so we are fast running out of 'late hatching' but regular readers will know that our goose 'breeding' is fairly chaotic and the sister birds have been happily dropping new eggs into the trough for the last few months. There will be eggs in there coming due every day from now till Heaven knows when.

Class of 2016. 18 Hubbard chicks.

We have three separate broody chickens on the go at the moment. One is a-top a 4-bale high pile of straw, wedged up into the door lintel. I suspected when she started that she was sitting on nothing and today she hopped off and confirmed this for me. She has sat for 28 days on fresh air and straw. Might be time to move her on and break the habit. I was toying with the idea if she even hatched ONE egg, of sneaking a few 'ringers' in there (of which more soon).

Gone broody in an old dustbin

One is, rather daftly, in an empty feed bin, 2 feet tall and only containing a few bits of rubbish plus any straw that has fallen in. I was using it as the shed dustbin. This nest has also been plagued by all manner of other poultry hopping in there, squeezing the 'clocker' aside and laying 'cuckoo' eggs in there for her to brood. She had 11 including some Guinea Fowl eggs last time I looked. But think it through, hen! Once they hatch, how do you get them out into the world? I can see me having to do some surreptitious tipping over of the bin at some stage. The 3rd broody hen is the only one doing it sensibly in an actual nest box in the actual coop. Yes, it happens occasionally.

Holding up the beekeeping jobs. Blue asleep in a commercial
'super' box. 

The antidote to all this failed Maternity Suite malarkey is, of course, the annual purchase of our day-old 'Hubbard' meat birds. Hubbards are our most delicious and fast growing (free range) meat bird of choice and we are generously included in the run made by friends Anne and Simon up to an industrial scale hatchery up by the N. Ireland border where they know the team and are allowed to buy small quantities of day-olds (as opposed to the 10,000 bird batches the 'factory' would normally supply to commercial growers.) We 'ordered' 18 this year and these arrived on Wednesday. We had the brooder box set up ready and the 'electric hen' heater plate running. The babies quickly settled in while we fed tea, cake and home-cured 'serrano/palma' style ham to Anne and Simon and chatted. as usual, poultry, gardening and small holdering in general.

Neat and tidy now with a 'super' box (dark
green) added to the top of the stack and
the roof straightened out. 

Meanwhile, outside of poultry and broody birds, I have been settling in the new bees - after a few days of just sitting, getting to know the area, we tidied up the new hive removing the straps and gaffer tape that we'd secured it with, adding an empty super to give them more space (trying to discourage swarming) and settling the roof straight. In the dark we'd not lowered it on quite right and it was a bit drunken looking.

Although I know of no proper 'bluebell
 woods' within our 365 patch, once you
get your eye in, there are plenty of small
patches in hedge bases etc. 

This manipulation also gave us a chance to see if any more work was needed to set it up for summer, and we found, as T McC had said, that the upper brood box (painted white in my pic, above the silver gaffer tape) had some dummy blank frames in it. These will need replacing with proper frames and wax foundation for honey comb next time we are delving around in there.

Lough Adreen, in Cloonargid (Silver Field)

I have been out and about some more on the 365 project photography and as this week is 'Bio-Diversity' week I have been asked to go get pics of flora, fauna and 'natural' stuff. I found myself exploring one of the local cutting bogs down south of Lisacul, in 'Cloonargid' (Silver Field) and found this lovely little lough - I'd known it was there from the map; it is called Lough Adreen (there's no real translation unless the "dreen" is one of those transliteration jobs from 'small oak' like for Ballaghadereen (Bealach an Doirín)). I am convinced that even after 366 days of photography, I will still not have seen the whole patch. Which is good.

Old Mother Hubbard's Class of 2015

New piggies, turkeys, the first cuckoo calling from down in the bog, swallows, eggs by the dozen, 'hins' going broody; it's all getting a definite Spring flavour round here and now, the cherry on the cake, the arrival of this year's batch of one day old baby 'Hubbard' chicks. These guys, apart from being impossibly cute at this age are a GOOD THING but readers who are a bit squeamish about the more 'awkward' side of meat production might like to skip a few paragraphs. You just carry on thinking that chicken reaches your shopping basket, created in an expanded polystyrene tray with cling film over it as if by magic.

The new chicks in the brooder. The IR lamp
substitutes for Mum's warm breast. 

This is our third year of 'growing' Hubbard chicks and they really are our favourite meat-bird for their taste and their massive rate of adding weight, which gives you a family-sized oven-ready carcass in as little as 4-5 months even in our relaxed, fully-free range system. Hubbards are a hybrid variety developed by the big commercial hatcheries and are the Republic of Ireland's 'go-to' variety for the big commercial units if they are producing 'Free Range' or 'Organic' oven ready birds for the supermarket.

As you'd expect, this means they are dealing with massive numbers - hatchery rooms good for tens or hundreds of thousands of eggs and young birds and customers turning up with articulated lorries to collect their chicks. These kind of people do not normally entertain tiny customers like us, who would want just a dozen, so Hubbards are not a big thing with the hobby, back yard and small holding type chicken-rearer. Fortunately for us, Mentor Anne and Simon, who used to be in the industry (they produced organic eggs for Supermarkets all round Connacht) still have contacts in this world and still get away with buying birds each year even though they buy on behalf of just 3 customers, themselves and 2 others (one being us).

We are delighted and very grateful each year when the call comes "Do you want some Hubbards this year - we are going up there on Wednesday?" (Thank you, A+S!) We just have to have our brooder-box ready on the day and, when we get the 'we're home' text, nip down and collect our dozen from Anne's place. Oh, and then, of course just feed them, rear them, keep them safe and then, as substitute Mum*, generally look after them for the 4-5 months. Anne and Simon have to drive all the way up to the hatchery in Co Monaghan to collect them, up near the Northern Ireland border; it was a hot sunny day and they were parched and pooped by the time they got home.

Pear blossom in the orchard.

Meanwhile all else is chugging along nicely too. The bees appear to be thriving especially in the gorgeous, blue sky warm days we have been amazed by this week. We do not want to check for that possible missing queen just yet - we are waiting at least the 9 days in which anything she had laid by April 17th (when we had the clumsiness problem) will have hatched (3 days) and been fed as a larva in an open brood-cell (6 more days) before being capped over to pupate till day 16 (worker) or 24 (drone). By Sunday (Day 9) when we might inspect, we only have to find eggs or open larvae to know that the queen survived our abuse and is still laying.

An epic batch of nice garlicky hummus (chick-pea paste)

We do not have to find the queen herself, one tiny bee in a colony of 10,000. She is very mobile, good at running for cover and keen to hide when you pull the roof off her colony and let the light in. But a healthy queen in early summer will be laying, famously, 1000-1500 eggs every day, so a quick sum will tell you that with roughly 23 standard honeycomb sized cells per square inch, she is laying a patch of new brood 43-65 square inches in size each day. I am just looking for any one of about 9 such patches in the hive. Should be able to manage that, even if we can't see Her Majesty! One factor which might delay this even more is a forecast change from the lovely sunshine to more typical rain and chilly winds; I cannot open the hive safely with the temperature below about 15ºC for risk of killing all those square inches of babies by hypothermia.

Free range or solid fuel burning range?

The new turkeys have settled quickly in brilliantly. We find them much more socialised (humanised?) and 'tame' than other new birds so we think they must have been handled frequently or had a lot of contact with people in their former home. On one occasion Liz was sitting out on the front terrace in the sun and the hen, Barbara was mooching all round her feet while the cock-bird (or 'stag'), 'Tom' started displaying at Liz just to make sure she knew he was not having her touch his 'wife'. He got so close her, he was nudging Liz's leg with his puffed up chest. On another occasion, I'd gone out walking the dogs and, it being a warm day, I'd left the front door open. Liz was cooking in the kitchen but came back in to find Barbara strolling round the house, quietly checking out the book cases, leather sofa, chairs and then the range (see picture). Liz let her get on with it and then shuffled her quietly outside as she saw me returning with the dogs.

Fritillaries possibly naturalising in the
grass of the front lawn under the trees.

The piggies too, have settled into our routine well and have been receiving visitors. One neighbour likes to turn up with her little girl after school and sometimes with friends of same. They have been visited and admired by Anne and Simon and even by K-Dub and Carolyn; K-Dub was also curious to see what the turkeys looked like up close because he might (only might, you understand!) buy a pair himself. The pigs happily trot up to the fence to receive gifts of sliced apple and are just now starting to let me touch them and scratch them behind the ears. They're in.

Aran knits. A world of "impossibly complex" patterns on a
sixteen row repeat cycle. Soccer helps, apparently.

Amelanchier canadensis (Snowy
mespilus or  'shadbush')

Meanwhile, indoors, Liz's knitting has taken a dramatic turn as she is trying out Aran patterns. When she was about to head off for her ten days of minding 'Daddy', this seemed like a brilliant idea and I will definitely love the product. Getting into it, though, sitting down with Dad while the TV burbled some Match of the Day soccer game that he was glued to, she realised how "impossibly complex" the patterns are, with their variety of cabling, 'basket weave' and other stuff on a 16-row repeat. She tells me she took 5 hours to get the first 'cycle' sorted and could not change her focus for risk of getting it wrong. Slowly, though, it all settled down and she found that the footie pundits warbling away in the background were very calming even though she has no more than a jot of interest in the game. She tells me that Dad would TRY to explain that this one was an important game because.... blahhh... blahh...relegation zone... away goals.... Burnley........blah blah burble burble zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

In the garden, all sorts of lovely flowering and blossoming is going on. We have fritillaries on the front lawn which we think have come from seed which ripened in the two seed-pods we saw last year. As with the crocus leaves and primroses, we are delighted that both the geese and sheep leave these alone. A nice Amelanchier we have had to protect behind sheep-defences now that the lawn is a sheep field, they would browse off all the new growth and blossom.

Blue being a tart.

*Longer term followers of this blog may recall that in 2013 we got extremely lucky with this and the chicks' arrival coincided with us needing to give back to Anne some ducklings which we had hatched under  our ace broody hen "Broody Betty" (sadly no longer with us). We were able to do a sneaky swap and BB was delighted with the transformation of her 5 waddling, water-loving charges into 8 loud-cheeping, willingly pecking and scratching, water-hating, chicks. You don't get that lucky very often.

Was It Worth It?

Tamworth variety pork shoulder cut.

Was it worth it, then, our first 'go' at keeping pigs? The short answer would definitely be 'Yes' and the proof of the pudding, if you like, is that we will be doing it again next year, possibly with the Berkshire breed. Last night we cooked up our first roasting joint from these 'pilot trial' pair, a shoulder cut, butchered to be around 2 kg. Liz deliberately cooked it in just oil and salt so that we'd get the full, unadulterated flavour. It was a great success - delicious, succulent meat of gorgeous flavour and superb tenderness. The eating experience alone would probably have us trying again in 2015, but I'll give you a bit more waffle around that, if you're interested.

The same cut, resting from the roast.

You can see from the picture that the joint had the expected 'traditional breed' good inch thick layer of fat below the skin. These days we pretty much chuck that, so Liz would 'peel' off the outer skin to quick-roast for the crackling, and I'd be trimming off more at carving time, but that's just modern taste. These breeds were really all about putting on that fat layer to produce fatty meat and bacon , fat is flavour after all, and back in the day, your physically hard-working farmers would have consumed it all hungrily as a way of getting their 3000 calories a day sustenance. Now, with Tamworths, we know that you can reduce the pig's food amount at 16 weeks and put them on a 'maintenance diet' up to slaughter to stop too much fat being laid down, or you can fatten them up us baconers and happily take the 2 inch thick fat layer. We tried for a result closer to the 'slim' end, though I admit I was too much the softie to resist these girls loud squealed appeals that they were STARVING! I was probably over-feeding just to stop them plaguing me.

Carved  result. We did it justice!

Certainly in terms of enjoyment it was worth it. Regular readers will know that I was sure we'd not 'do' pigs because I wasn't sure we could fence them in, or feed them cheaply enough, or learn to love them. A friend (no names no pack drill) had ended up hating their animals and being so scared of being bitten or barged that feeding at the end was by chucking milled barley over a stable door without daring to go into their pen. Another friend, contrarily, thought we might fall so in love with them that we'd not be able to take them to the abattoir and we'd be left with these expensive pets for decades.

The young Buffs enjoy perching on the gate.

Well, I was totally charmed, I must admit, from the moment we set eyes on our two in a crate at the supplier's farm and I did learn to love them and was never scared. I could go into the pen throughout and scratch their backs, measure them with the tape measure, pulled a grass tick off one, rubbed their muddy ear-tags clean with my thumb and so on. I only got one bite and that when I foolishly waved 2 apples at 2 pigs through the fence but then focused only on getting one apple accurately into the one pig's mouth. The 2nd pig got impatient at her apple being waved vaguely in front of her while I wasn't concentrating, and took a snapping lunge at it. She almost ended up with some finger mixed in with her fruit, but she didn't draw blood and it was my fault. The pigs were superbly biddable through-out and easily trained to follow the feed bucket. So I loved them in the sense of respecting them, protecting them and wanting them to have a good, stress free, happy life and stopping anything or anyone doing them any harm, but I always got the impression that they didn't really 'love' me back; they seem to be 100% mercenary - if you had food or a back-scratch on offer, they'd stick to you like glue, but otherwise they'd have no interest in you at all. I was always sufficiently detached that the 'expensive pets' thing was never going to happen.

Warming stuff. A nice gift of flavoured
poitín "to sort my cold out" from the van
owned by a shopkeeper to whom I
got talking! Only in Ireland?

In terms of money, they worked out OK, all be it only in our 'Mickey Mouse' accounts system were proper farm costs like land, fencing and labour are ignored. Putting in the costs for the piglets initially, pig-nuts, fruit, slaughter and butchery, we came up with a cost per kg of finished meat, of €4.84. This is, I know, a lot more than Anne and Simon managed (they got most of their fruit for free and did their own butchery) but is still excellent against the current supermarket prices, even the cheaper 'commercial' (intensively reared, indoor housed) pork and is brilliant against anything high welfare, outdoor reared and traditional breed. We're happy with it, anyway and we have, of course, the added bonuses of knowing what went into our pigs and what a happy, carefree life they lived

Happy Hallowe'en. 

If there are downsides, I can think of a couple of unexpected ones. First there is the sheer amount of meat you get and have to then 'deal with'. I had gone through the process fending off requests for 'half a pig' or a whole carcass. We only had two, I said, and we want to get a good taste out of them, so we could try out the brawn, some bacon-curing, maybe a ham or some salami. I didn't want to sell it all and be left with none to 'play with'. As you know, I ended up with 7 boxes of meat (124 kg!) from the two animals and nearly ran out of space in the freezer(s) and now wish I'd found homes for some in advance. There was also the constant nagging worry that they'd tunnel out or break through the fences. All the advice we'd been given said you NEED electric fences but I was clinging to the paragraph in my Haynes 'bible' (Liz Shankland's Pig Manual) saying that a strand of barbed wire added along the bottom of sheep fence would suffice. I gritted my teeth and prayed that the pigs would not break out and send me running to the electric fence crowd with my tail between my legs. It was a relief to get to abattoir day with no escapes and to now trust the 'Shankland' fences at last. Finally there was that loud, insistent squealing for food. I wound up unable to go visit the geese or bees, or sometimes the yard without one of them spotting me and starting to shout. It's not a good noise and a bit annoying especially if you KNOW they have just been fed. I loved their quiet contented grunting when they were getting their own way, but I was happy to lose the squealing!

Yes, on balance it was definitely worth it and we will be back in 2015 for the 2nd chapter.

Day 84. A Good Day to Die?

Hubbard chickens at Day 83

For our Hubbard variety chickens, tomorrow is Day 84 from hatching. In the cut and thrust, hard nosed world of commercial free-range and/or organic meat production, this would be the target slaughter date; game over. Hubbards are the variety now widely used in Ireland for this type of system produced in commercial hatcheries (in this case one up by the Northern Ireland border) in their hundreds of thousands and sold to growers as day old chicks. They are then kept in conditions which pass (maybe only just) the minimum standards of welfare and feed to earn a 'Free Range' or 'Organic' certification to produce a big breasted, broad chested, heavy looking but still tender, oven-ready carcass. Even a small amount of research will tell you that 'Free Range' here does not quite mean happy chickens scratching in the sunny farmyard; these are still fairly intensive, crowded systems in which feeding is closely controlled and, although chickens must have 'access' to the run outside, they do not necessarily get out much.

Our 'Mini-Buffs'. 2 hens or one of each?

We got our birds on August 1st (as day olds), you will recall, mainly in order to give Broody Betty something to 'mother' when we took away 'her' ducklings. We took 8 of a batch collected by Anne and Simon from the hatchery, Anne kept a further 8 and the remaining birds went to a friend of Anne's. We had, therefore, the potential for a small scale simple comparison between the groups under our three different systems. We do complete free range (they can go where they like around the 2 and a half acres and beyond) and mixed with the other birds but have, as a result, limited control over diet. Anne does organic starting off indoors but then in a large pen, separate from her other birds so they have a lot less freedom to move but she can give them generous amounts of cooked rice and potato etc. At any given date they seemed to be a quarter to a third bigger and heavier than ours and feathered up much more slowly. The third batch are even more confined and we believe would be legally 'Free Range' but not organic and, says Anne, have put on a deal of weight even more than her birds and possibly been slaughtered by now.

Pure bred Buff Orpington cockerel and hen.

You can see from our first picture that ours look decidedly 'adolescent' and lanky rather than fat and wide-chested. Their legs look massive and out of proportion to their slim shape as if they have a lot of growing left to do. Just for the record we weighed some of them and got a weight range (live, obviously) of between 6 lb 3.25 oz (2.81 kg) and 7 lb and a quarter ounce (3.18 kg). We have decided not to slaughter any time soon. We will keep these as a living larder while they put on some more weight. Anne has warned me that because they are 'designed' (yoiks!) only to go the 84 days they may over run their 'tender' spec and become sinewy and tough, only fit for casseroles and coq-au-vin but that is not an issue for us - we LOVE a coq au vin! I know Anne is off weighing hers today or tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see how the little 'trial' went.

My 2nd and 3rd picture here are of the 8-Ball birds, now approaching 25 weeks and well into lay if they are of that persuasion. Our 'mini buffs' (some kind of bantam-y cross) turned out, we are sure, to be both hens. That is to say that we are both sure we have seen both of them being 'trodden' by roosters and I am fairly sure they are both laying eggs and neither has crowed. My uncertainty today is just seeing them both in this picture the bird on the right seems to have pink legs rather than yellow, maybe a bigger comb and wattles and a more upright tail? Doubts are creeping in!

The 2CV saga moves on one step. I managed to get my official form signed and stamped by a nice lady Guard in Castlerea Garda Station. Now I just need that mixture tweaked one last time by the boys in the garage for our real last, final, ultimate, tail-end, conclusive shot at the NCT emissions test. I have promised myself that this will be it. If it fails this time then I will take it off the road officially (on Statutory Off Road Notice (SORN)  and it can become an interesting garden feature till a better offer comes along. I may sell it. I may keep it till it is 30 years old and doesn't need an NCT. I will have run into the buffers, defeated by the system and fed up with having spent more on tests and re-tests than I have on the car.

The ex-Hastings fig cutting

A quick catch up on the gardening. This pic shows the current state of play on the ex-Hastings fig tree cutting. Grown in Faversham for a year or two in a half barrel, we decided to bring it over with us when we moved, so it was coppiced hard and root-washed. The remains lived with me at Pud Lady's in a fertilizer sack in her front garden till we moved. We planted it in the gravelly soil at the top of the front drive here but then it got driven over by a JCB laying drains. We thought we had lost it but Liz did some detective work using early photos and found it. It languished for a while, then just about managed to produce a few leaves where upon last years sheep browsed them all off and it went into winter as a bare, inch thick 'stick'. Again we were sure it was a goner. Spring came and no leaves emerged till way into June but then it suddenly put on a spurt of 3-4 small branches reaching the 18" or so you can see here. We will give it special protection through this winter. We dream of a bright future for this tree. May it do as well as it's parent which now fills most of the gap behind Pud Lady's garage and over-tops the roof gutters (OK it's a bungalow). I want to see it shading our terrace corner on the SE corner of the house, clearly visible as you come up the drive.

And finally, I know it has been a weird late season and I know these raspberries are Autumn Bliss, but I never expected to be starting to pick a decent crop on October the 22nd. They are not the sweetest raspberries, so maybe lacked sun, and they are very juicy (plenty of rain!) but I am hoping they will stay sound on the canes for just the next couple of days till Liz returns and can enjoy them with me.