Waning, Weaning and a Good First Night

A bit swampy round the gate in the East
Field but at least the sheep can stand in
the dry to eat the rescue hay. Many sheep
keepers are suffering way worse.

I'm not sure how you, at the reading end of this blog, are doing for weather, but here in Ireland, our appetite for this rain and wet is waning fast. I was off collecting straw today for a beef farmer friend who asked me last time to just get half a dozen because he was sure he'd have his animals back out onto the grass "soon" and he'd not need the full load of 15 bales in my small trailer. Now he is more "they'll not be out to May Day at the soonest now". Another guy at the straw dealer was bemoaning that we'd need a good 2 weeks to dry it out even if it stopped raining today.

At least the sheep can have dry(ish) feet while they eat their
hay. I have spread a lot of gravel into this bit to stop the ground
chopping up so much in winter.

As a whole, Ireland is looking down the barrel of another Fodder Crisis like the one in our first year here (2011) as saved hay and straw start to run out. For luck, I slung a couple of hay bales onto my load - there is precious little grass yet in my sheep field. There is a little movement but the sheep are very pleased to get their crunch and hay each day so they can at least have that full belly feeling.

It's not all rain. I managed to get this complete line of post-visit
table linen through the system.

Which brings me to a related matter - weaning the bottle fed lamb. Little Bábóg is three weeks old now and starting to look very burly. We noticed that all the other lambs have started sneaking their noses in between the adult sheep to snatch a bit of the 'crunch' (like muesli with molasses) or the hay that we are feeding to the ewes. They are weaning themselves off the milk as Mum's milk starts to peak-flow and their ruminant guts start to work as proper grass-fermenting chambers. I have even seen Polly's two lambs (5 weeks) sitting in the shelter cudding.

Our flowering cherry, just starting.

It was back to the books then, for us, and the label on the 'Lamlac' packaging, plus a discussion topic opened up on Twitter to see how you go about this on bottle fed lambs. The consensus seems to be to wait till Day 35 at least and then, if you think (or know) that your lamb is taking at least 250g of solid food per day, you just do a "hard wean" taking the bottle away in one go. No messing about with watered down milk or small measures; the lamb's gut cannot happily do both food types at once unless they are coming little and often.

You are being watched. The ever-hopeful pigs keep an eye.

Readers may know that the sheep liver fluke is a complicated parasite which spends only part of its life cycle inside the sheep, chewing away at its liver and creating a good range of 'unwell' symptoms. The rest of the life cycle is spent in a mud-snail which loves the wet Irish bog-land soil. In normal years it seems to stay away from our, higher ground and we get no fluke problems in our sheep. Every time we send a lamb to slaughter, we get the butchers to slice through the livers and check for any damage. They are always 'clean'.

Silvergirl's thriving and surviving 5 chicks, 3 weeks old here.

This year though, you will know, that one of (ewe) Rosie's post-natal problems was early stage fluke damage. Vet, Aoife, told us that it is such a bad year that pretty much "everyone" has the problem. I can imagine. I look out across those sheep foot-print sized puddles in our field and I can just see the little flukey snail bas***ds thriving and doing a population explosion across the acre.

Sporting their new ear tags. Three of the lambs with one of
the mums.

We got all the flock into the cattle-race on a rare dry day yesterday, fluke-drenched all the ewes and took the opportunity to ear-tag all the lambs. The drench is 5.25 ml of chalky bluish gloop given by mouth using a syringe (with no needle obviously). Legal and healthy all on the same day. There's shepherding!

Meanwhile a minor miracle happened in the never-ending fox saga. The hens won a point back for their score board. The Guinea fowl alarm went up at 11 a.m. and we jumped to, and let the dogs out. They shot off with their "it was a fox" focus and speed. When there is no fox they amble about looking for a scent-trail and soon lose interest and return. We declare it a false alarm and move on. While they were gone on this one, I was able to walk round the far side of the poly-tunnel and spotted the sad slew of grey feathers. I was sure the fox had nabbed a hen.

Young love? The turkeys displaying to one another.

Ten minutes later and still no dogs, so I walked down to by the bee hive to look for distant white shapes meandering back to me between the rushes (that field, which is not ours, is more rush than grass!) and was amazed to see a grey hen walking back towards me from 50 yards out. She was very much alive, chuntering in an upset kind of voice and looking a bit shaken and ruffled. I can only think that the dogs caught up with the fox for some reason and the fox was forced to drop the hen in his flight. The hen rejoined the main rooster (Gandalf). What he said to her is not on record, but they spent the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. Go the grey hen.

Turkey egg.

Of course, you will know that the main story at the moment is nothing to do with rain, weaning lambs or the fox's antics. It is THE PLAY. You'll be pleased to know that the Lisacul Players nailed it on their first night, delighting a capacity crowd with a superb, very funny, enjoyable performance. Everyone is relieved and delighted. There are now two more performances, tonight and on Saturday, so I will give you a more thorough account in the next post, when it is all over and debut Producer (The Lady of This House) has had a chance to recover. If you are going then do as the printed programme says and "sit back and enjoy the mayhem". It is great.

Keeping us Waiting

Twin lambs tonight for Polly, both boys.

More good news and relief in the sheep department after the curing of Lily by vet Aoife. This time it is Polly's turn to supply the story and she had us sweating on it a bit. I knew she was 'on' when she refused breakfast and spent the day displaying 3 other good clues of imminent lamb-exit; going off on her own for a lie down away from the 'flock', 'pawing' at the ground with a front hoof and looking very uncomfortable so that she restlessly sat down, stood up, moved around and sat down again.

I had agreed to head out for Sligo to help K-Dub to tip a van load (64 panels) of plaster board sheets and walk them all indoors, plus some bags of bonding, beading and other bits. I judged (correctly, I am pleased to say) that Polly would easily go 2 hours without needing help so I flew over there at 9 and headed back at 11 when the unloading was done. When I got back I found that there had been no progress and Polly was still sitting out in the far corner of the field but had been worryingly joined by the 3rd ewe (Myfanwy) who was sitting in a copy-cat stance and, to my mind, seemed very pink about the vulva. Were to have two lambings today?

A close inspection of Myf's back end told me that this was a false alarm and she was not yet bagged up at all, so maybe she was enjoying the wind-up potential. Polly then, kept me on tenter-hooks all day and only started to 'move' (passing a mucus plug and some amniotic sac) at around 5pm. This was so long after breakfast that Charlotte (who we keep standing-by on these occasions) advised an extra careful watch as she may have been in labour "all day". I contacted the vet, Aoife, to confirm that she would be available if needed and she was a bit more relaxed about the 'all day'; happy to think of "things" starting only at 5 pm.

Wetting the babies' heads. One dark and one light. It seemed
only fair.

Well, I am happy to report that "things" did indeed crack on a-pace from that point and Polly whooshed out both twins while we had nipped in for supper at 18:30. Both were out, up and suckling by 19:00 and I decided to leave them where they were for washing and bonding for half an hour before we gathered the family indoors. It was pitch dark but I could keep an eye using my rather dim head-torch and my presence would stop any sneaky foxes creeping up on Polly to steal the newborns. At one point Soldier the cat wandered over all curious and got himself charged and nearly stomped on for his pains by the ewe, so I suspect even a fox might have thought twice. Ah well, they are safe in the Tígín now, warm and dry on new straw and it has all gone quiet so I hope that signifies bellies nicely full of colostrum (and some 'crunch' and a welcome drink of water for Mum).

Rosie - one of Lily's lambs. These ladies are nearly 2 weeks old
now.

A new experience today for me, that of voting properly in an Irish General Election using the 'single transferable vote' system. My British readers may not know that here we do not use the 'put an X in the box', winner-takes-all, one MP per constituency method. Instead the constituencies can put more than one 'TD' into the parliament (up to 5, I think) so our voting sheets can have dozens of candidates on them and you vote by stating 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc preferences by putting numbers in the boxes; all the boxes if you like.

I will not try to explain the counting system here (though I do sort of understand it) but suffice to say that the winners get enough '1st preference' votes to make a quota, or hope to make quota by having themself as people's 2nd preference, or 3rd or whatever. Yes, I know. It actually works very well and is quite user friendly. I voted as far as my 6th preference. I am wary of trying to pretend to be expert in this and I usually avoid politics in this blog but here goes.

My problem is not the complexity of it all, but trying to work out who stands for what. In the UK you 'knew' that Labour stood for the working classes, the Tories for the management and affluent farmers, and the Libs were somewhere in between. Nothing so clear cut here. The two BIG parties, Fine Gael (FG) and Fianna Fáil (FF) are almost identical and the local wisdom is that you choose between them depending on how you stood in the Irish Civil War in the 20's. Were you 'pro-treaty' (i.e. were you in favour of accepting independence but with the 6 Northern Ireland counties partitioned off and left as British) or were you anti (i.e. you wanted the whole island to be independent).

A 'boreen'. One of this week's Lisacul 365 pics.

This was hugely contentious and split the country, communities, villages and even households, with father 'fighting' son and brother battling brother. A lot of that emnity and tension simmers on so it is a tricky subject to discuss but results in people voting for FF because "my Father did before me and my Grandfather before that" etc. I have asked many people and none of them can tell me, an incomer, why I should favour FG or possibly FF. One tongue-in-cheek view has it that they are all corrupt anyway but we like them that way and we ask them how they can help US specifically before we decide. More recently people seem to vote more on who last messed up the economy or depending upon who was 'on watch' when that hospital got closed.

Ash Bark

Throw into this mix the many and various minor parties and a wealth of independent (non-party) candidates to blur the lines even more and you have a confusing situation for a newcomer. There was one saving grace this time - a new website (MatchCandidate.IE) which asked you 30+ questions about all manner of contentious issues (the new water charges, legalising abortion, healthcare and so on) but then also asked all the candidates the same questions. The site compares your answers with the answers of the potential TDs and finds a best match (and next best etc). You can then drill down to find out WHERE you matched and decide from that whether to assign your 1,2,3 etc.

Anyway, suffice to say, I went armed with a list of 6 likely choices and only adjusted my list a bit at the crucial stage, pen in hand, in the booth. By now (22:12 pm) it is all over bar the counting (and then the negotiations between the parties which 'nearly won' to form a coalition (we rarely get anyone with an overall majority)). The count starts tomorrow at 09:00. History will tell you the rest. I am going back to being a non-political shepherd and off for a last check on Polly and the new babies

The Sun Doesn't Always Shine

I was delighted with this shot of a 'buff-tail' - scruffy
gear and a huge dose of luck!

Not a good day today. The abridged summary will read "Hive disaster, vet called to lame lamb" but you'll probably expect more detail than that, so read on. I'll get to those two stories eventually. First, though, I was delighted with this picture of a buff tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) on flowering currant (Ribes sanguinum); probably the best bee picture I have ever taken. The bee was amazingly co-operative and the camera gear had a huge dose of luck thrown in.

Flowering cherry buds opening.

This is my trusty digital Canon EOS but I could never actually afford the digital extension-rings at the change-over, so I had to buy, 2nd hand, a pre-digital 50 mm 'prime' lens (the digital lenses do not fit the bayonet front fitting of the old rings). This came cheap because the auto focus drive on it is almost dead. Sorry story? As long as everything stays still while I manually focus, it does OK as a 'macro' set up but I struggle with busy bees, who are always on the move. The flowers are usually also blowing about in the breeze, so in 99 pics out of a hundred you do not get a crisp sharp focus. My bumble bee must have been the 100th one, she stopped for a good drink at that nectar and the breeze just eased for the few seconds while I tried not to get too excited and actually press the shutter-release.

Just showing off now. Primrose with early morning dew.

Our little amazing run of hot sunny days brought out the Ribes on which the lucky bee sat, and Ribes is one of the signals we bee keepers locally use to tell us that it is now OK to open hives and do the first Spring-time inspection. Over the winter we have come to know and get friendly with another local bee keeper (we'll call him T-McC for the sake of argument) and as we are all beginners we set up a reciprocal arrangement where we go and help each other, advise, give moral support and generally blunder through these early experiences trying not to do much damage and keep our bees alive.

Lupin leaves

The sunshine had T-McC on the phone suggesting that we should be doing our Spring-time inspections NOW and inviting us over (yesterday) ; we would do his yesterday and then ours today. So far so good. Bee suits and wellies were loaded into the car and off we went. In short, that part all went really well. The colony at T's was buzzing with health and we were delighted to be able to see healthy brood frames with eggs, young larvae, older (sealed over) larvae/pupae and a million bees coming and going with pollen. We even found his queen, who had been helpfully marked by his supplier with a dop of white paint on her thorax. Job done, we re-assembled his hive and sat down in the sun on his patio for a cold drink. A raven soaring in the thermals over his 'drumlin' put the icing on the day, and Liz seeing the first swallow of the year on the way home added the cherry.

T-McC cracks open his healthy hive.

At this stage, you might guess from my opening remarks, it all went a bit downhill. T was due back here at 2:30 pm. I had an inkling from the sheer numbers of bees around his hive yesterday, that all might not be so good here, where if I see 12-15 milling about, I'm lucky. On the way in, we showed him our 2 new lambs and even we could see that all was not well with the smaller, darker one (Thelma) who seemed to us to be a bit 'lame', struggling to put any weight on her front feet which she teetered around on, in high tip-toe mode. We were thinking 'lame' so foot issues, but T, who grew up on a farm in Cork, spotted that the lamb was arching her back and raising her tail, looking generally uncomfortable, so diagnosed possible constipation and advised us to get the vet.

Our own hive is not a pretty sight - dead mouldy bees (top left)
and empty brood (dark brown) with mouldy cells (bottom right).

Liz went to summon Aoife (Rhymes with Deefer) while we moved on to smokers, hive tools and bee suits. With the vet called, we adjourned to our hive and promptly set about our main disaster. Our hive is, unfortunately, 95% dead. The queen has died, so there is no new brood, no eggs, no larvae, no sealed up cells of larvae, no new emerging workers. There is a ton of unused honey (the crinkly white cells in the pics) but all the brood-nest (dark brown) is empty and cleaned out ready for egg laying. There are a few clumps of dead bees all mouldering and one or two cells of mouldy (?) pollen. We have well under a thousand bees and though some of these are bringing back pollen. All in all a depressing sight and a disaster for the hive. The new bees will live out their little 6 week lives and then fade away.

A lovely neat "brood pattern" surrounded by honey
but unfortunately no brood! 

These things happen. Where ever you have livestock, they say, you have dead stock. Bee keeping is not meant to be easy. We are lucky to have the Longford Bee Keepers Association (LBKA) at our backs to help us out with advice and, rather beautifully today, someone willing to pass us some replacement stock - a queen and some living brood to get us started again. The answers to our calls for advice and help have so far mainly centred around the queen and brood nest falling victim to cold and wet, possibly because we gave them too much space by adding that 'super box' before it was needed. and even adding the first one back in August before the brood box was bursting at the seams. We have inadvertantly created a drafty "chimney" with colony all up the middle but empty 'edges' so that the smallish, new colony was unable to keep all the space warm in that recent cold snap. You live and learn.

Lovely heavy frames of honey - we guess the girls won't
need it now!

So we were sitting out front on OUR 'terrace' discussing the disaster and the day (T was feeling a bit of 'survivor guilt' he said) when with beautiful timing, Charlotte (our much esteemed sheep and lamb expert) and Carolyn blew in. We were quickly able to round up Polly and her twins and to stash them in the 'shed' to await the arrival of the vet. Charlotte had a good check on the problem lamb (Thelma) and could see no real cause for lameness (no dodgy feet or stiffness or heat at joints, no swollen or tender places). We also needed to check she had a bum-hole (sometimes this does not open properly) and was not 'scouring' (diarrhoea). All clear, we just had to wait for the vet.

These frames should be covered in bees - there are a hundred
here if you are lucky. It's not a happy story. 

Well, to cut that story short, Aoife has now been and done her finger-tip stuff. The lamb's bum opening is not properly formed, so is tight with stray tissue inside and she is struggling to pass 'matter'. If T had not spotted this, she would have gone downhill fast over the next couple of days, said Aoife (so many many thanks, T!). She is now on frequent liquid paraffin and jabs of pain killer and anti-biotics (to 'cover her' as she had a high temperature), the plan being to "soften her up" as well as relax her so that she can start unloading and be a lot more comfortable. Poor little mite.

Not a queen to be seen

So all in all, it has not been a good day but, hey, these things happen. The sun did actually shine and we worked our way through the bad stuff. Thank you very much to all those who were there for us or on the phone, on the Facebook group and elsewhere. Special thanks to a lovely lady who might just be able to re-stock our hive with a new queen and some willing workers. More on that later. They say these things always come in threes. I went to check on the hens last thing and found that the broody Sussex had abandoned the nest, presumably as a result of our rather rude impostion of a 'yow' and 2 lambs, then a vet, on her solitude. Ah well, now off into the Western 9 pm 'half light' to catch Thelma again (who we'd let back into the field on the vet's advice) for her last-thing dose of liquid paraffin. It's not going to be easy now that mum (Polly) has sussed that sometimes when you get bribed into the shelter, it is not just for ewe and lamb nuts! Good luck you amateur sheherds.

Extreme Weeding?

Weeding a bit close to the hive for comfort (yellow arrows)

I felt like I was taking my life in my hands today, weeding on the raised bed veg plot but having now got all the way down to the bottom of the ridges and very close to the loud-buzzing beehive. It was a warm day and there were bees pinging everywhere, a good couple of dozen out at the front of the hive, taking off, landing, flying 'circuits' or 'taxi-ing' at any one time. I needed to get down that last 'path', round the end just under the hive's launch ramp and then back up at the left side of this picture.

'Extreme weeding' it may have been but you would have smiled at the lack of bravery of this hands-and-knees weeder. I had my wide brim straw hat well down on my head and my head down so that the bees might not recognise me as human (!) I pretty much slithered over the ridge at the bottom, arms bent, chest nearly in the dirt - I must have looked like either a Commando-crawl or (more likely), Gollum out of Lord of the Rings! I was not raising my profile more than about 18 inches that close to the colony. Then I was round the corner and racing back up to the left of this picture ripping at the lank grass, white clover, nettles and plantains like a madman, anxious to get back to about ten feet from the hive. The bees, of course, were just calmly going about their business - a hive will buzz gently on a warm day when they are happy and contented and we all read and re-read the 'fact' that bees will not attack you unless they are convinced you are about to attack them but when you are that close to the hum, your faith can wear a bit thin.

A 2013 Hubbard goes broody.

Back in the comparative safety of chicken-land we have had 2 nice coincidences happen, which may well add up to a happy third. We have long been thinking that we like the Buff Orpington as a breed and may well shift, by what they used to call 'natural wastage', from our current motley crew of hens centred round the original Sussex Ponte 'Lovely Girls', over to Buff Orps just by replacing all our deaths and culls with that breed. As it happens we have among our troops a breed-able pair of Orps which came as eggs last year from Mentor Anne, and the rooster is our only roo' at present, so if 'Mrs Buff' is laying fertile eggs, then they will be Buff Orp pure-breds.

17 Buff Orpington eggs 'set' in the incubator

No good though when she was laying any old where in among all the other hens, but recently she started laying in a secret place among the nettles where only she was laying. What is more she was reliably laying every day, more than you could say for the other reprobates. And then one of last year's Hubbards decided to go broody. This bird would be a new Mum, so you'd not trust her with valuable eggs but we came up with a plan to collect the Orp eggs and re-borrow the incubator from Charlotte (Thanks, Ch), we could then stick half a dozen mixed eggs under the Hubbard and she'd be hatching them just as the incubator set hatched - an opportunity to sneak the new hatchlings under a real Mum for some 'proper' rearing. This plan got even better when we asked Anne and Simon whether they might have a few Buff Orp eggs to throw into the mix, and we were delighted when they were able to lay their hands on nine to go with our eight. So today I was able to 'set' (as we say) seventeen eggs in the 'Incy'. Wish us luck. We hope we are not guilty of too much chicken-counting with all this might and if forward planning.

Purring away like crazy with his eyes closed in ecstasy,
Pirate is a very happy affectionate lad.

As well as the weeding and messing with eggs today, we have been round to Una's for a 2nd pick at her black currant bushes and we have stripped our own for black currants and goose berries. The main off-site task today, though, was to finally get the disreputable feline, 'Pirate' off to his date with vet Aoife. We'd had to catch him Sunday to make sure of having him today and the lad had lived, apparently calm and happy, in a dog-crate in our caravan for 48 hours. This morning we just had to persuade him into the cat basket and drive him the short distance to Lough Glynn village and Aoife's surgery.

Ongoing 'meds' for Pirate

We were relieved and delighted when instead of throwing up her hands in despair and horror, Aoife took a good look and then calmly took him from us, assuring us that he looked OK and that she'd sort him out and phone us this afternoon. As good as her word, she texted us to come and get him at 3:30 p.m. (it was already 10:30 a.m. when we dropped him off). There he was, still a bit droopy from the sedative but she had cleaned him up a bit, sewn up his empty right eye-socket with dissolvable stitches, spayed him, treated him for worms and fleas and given him a whacking dose of antibiotics for anything else that ailed him.

We are to keep him in the caravan for 4-5 days while we work him through the rest of the dose of antibiotics (Kesium/amoxicillin) and try to get some eye ointment (Maxitrol) onto his left eye twice a day and so that he can also get over the soreness of his neutering op and the stitches in his bad eye. He does not seem to have any problems with this and is very soppy and affectionate when ever we go near him, racing up to us, nuzzling and rubbing himself against our hands and legs in ecstatic purring, rolling over to get his tummy tickled and so on. He is, we think, going to prove to be a very loving little lad but, of course, once he is released from the caravan the whole lane and all his old haunts are once again his oyster. It is not a prison, just a haven.

Mussels, wild from the Irish Atlantic shoreline

Thank you very much, Anne and Simon, too for a generous gift of some wild mussels from the Sligo shore-line. They had been to the Strandhill / Lissadel area to show the Irish Atlantic beauty off to their current student/helper and had gathered a good haul  from the beach. They were very flavoursome, gorgeously fresh and smelling beautifully of the clean sea-side. (I say 'clean' here because coming from Hastings, "smelling of the sea side" would not be anything you would aspire to, and the reader would have worrying images of human sewage, stinking tourist debris and rotting dogfish carcasses discarded by the beach-landed local fishing fleet. No. This is clean Atlantic surf crashing onto a beautiful Sligo shore, a very different kettle of 'fish' altogether).

Mussels cooked 'naked', the sauce was on the side. 

Liz purged them with a couple of changes of water and cooked them in just fresh water so that we could enjoy the pure mussel flavour. There was a sauce of cream, mustard, red onion and brandy, but that was kept on the side as an option. They were delicious. It was actually Bastille Day and we would normally do something French but that had slipped our attention, so we were glad we'd had 'moules' even if they were 'sans frites' and definitely 'Irlandais' rather than French. There was a French dressing on the salad but I don't suppose that really counts.

Of Cookery (and Other) Failures

The best laid plans, so they say.....

Here is a picture of our very disreputable and grubby looking 'project cat', Pirate, the starving stray who has been hanging around and seems to want to be fed by us and possibly move in. Since the last post this story has moved on. We had been feeding him for around 3 weeks but he was only showing up for food and then slinking away. Suddenly a week ago he was all over us like a rash, accepting food and strokings, yowling for attention if he heard us talking by the pond or in front of the house.

Pirate the Cat

Suddenly he was here for most of the day and sleeping in the shade on the roof of the 2CV in the car port. The plan is to get him some vet attention (mainly a spay, worming and a look at his poor eyes, one of which is absent (there is just a pink, open empty socket which is a bit spooky to look at), the other looks very misty; we are surprised he can see at all). This would involve catching him and putting him in a cat basket, so I put the basket on the car roof with a bit of 'Vet-Bed' blanket in it and the boy adopted it immediately. He slept there a couple of nights and in the morning, when he heard me feeding breakfast to our two cats, would emerge, stretch luxuriously in the sunshine and stroll across to get his share. I was suddenly able to brush him through to ascertain he had no fleas, which was a relief.

Accepting strokes and even a brush-through for fleas.

We thought we were on for the vet and contacted Aoife. We started to arrange check ups and what meds she could bring to get the ball rolling. Also, by the by, neighbour Una invited us down to pick her black currants and in the tea and scones chat afterwards, when the subject of cats came up she said that she had been seeing a dirty white cat with bad eyes for a while - it had been calling on her for food but had recently stopped coming. Pirate is obviously one of these fellas who keeps a lot of options open. But now it seems to be all over for the moment. As quickly and as decisively as he decided to 'adopt' us, he seems to have dropped us again like a hot potato. He has gone back to showing up very late (10 pm+) and quickly eating food left down before slinking away. He is not staying the night and not using the cat basket. He did not show for breakfast this morning and we have not seen him all day. Perhaps he heard me planning his treatments with Aoife and has skedaddled.

Bronze fennel

Also in the 'failures' department, we finally got round to trying our pea-pod 'Burgundy' made last August. I must admit I had not been confident. I made an awful lot of wine as a teenager and the best stuff was always made from fairly promising raw materials - sweet fruit or full bodied stuff like root veg, rhubarb stems, grains and, of course grapes. The stuff made with flavoured but 'gutless' materials never seemed to be worth much unless I was going for the strongly scented light wines like rose-petal or elder-flower. I could not see pea pod working but we made it for a laugh mainly because it is mentioned in the 'Good Life' TV series. Ah well, we tried some today prior to bottling it off and it just tasted thin and very pea-pod-ish, so it was glugged unceremoniously over the compost heap.

Gooseberries

And then, we have had John Deere Bob, who is a diabetic, fondly remembering a local confection called 'Brown Cake' but, being Bob, he has no idea what's in it - he thinks maybe ginger and treacle. We asked around the local ladies and Vendor Anna and were able to come up with two local delicacies which he 'might mean', one a gingery treacle-bread, the other a version of soda bread with treacle added. Rather dubiously, Liz had a go at the first one and the complete cake was set aside to await Bob's next visit. It was brown alright and looked OK but a bit un-interesting. 3 days went by and Bob hadn't appeared, so we decided to try a slice with this afternoon's coffee. It was dry and dull and mainly tasted of the burnt/caramelized tones of treacle or dark brown sugar. 'Ooooh no!' we said, sure that this could not be anything Bob (or anyone) would be fondly remembering. We whistled up the chickens and, being way less discerning than we are, they happily polished it off. Ginger and treacle flavoured eggs, anyone?

Lovage - a gift from Steak Lady

But it's not all failures. Liz has made some excellent paté from the less talked about parts of rabbits and culled out chickens and, today, we knocked out 7 jars of delicious black currant jam from Una's fruit. We have also bottled up 14 bottles of elder-flower 'champagne' which tastes very promising so far but now needs a week to fall bright and build up some 'fizz'.

Lettuce. The red leaves are from the heritage variety
'Little leprechaun' from Brown Envelope Seeds.

I have been back onto the DIY projects, creating a nice run for the ever growing guinea fowl keets. Pictures of this when it is finished, but I am delighted to be able to make this for almost zero cost - about a tenner in hinges, bolts and 'big staples', plus €20's worth of fruit-cage netting for the 'roof'. The chicken wire for the 'walls' came as a cast off roll from our fencing contractor, Paul. The posts were pulled out of a bit of redundant fencing inside what is now the pig paddock. Up-cycling.

The Family Gossip

Honey bee, Picture by Katherine Austin

'Tell it to the Bees' they say. Apparently, in times past, the bee hive and the bees were always considered part of the family and therefore had to be included in the gossip and news or they would feel excluded and might take offence. You would visit them each day and talk to them - catch them up on all the hatches, matches and dispatches. Well, be that as it may I do it, but I suspect that has more to do with getting the colony, for whom vibration and transmitted noise are such a huge part of life, used to our voices and our comings and goings so that they do not all pour out of the hive in alarm and in defence mode whenever we pass by or talk near it. The colony, left to its own devices seems very calm, hard working and healthy now. I can creep in on my hands and knees weeding as I go up and down the ridges really close to the hive without the bees even noticing. I am quite glad about this as I did not want the bottom of the veg patch to be effectively out of bounds, or (more ridiculously) have to start weeding wearing the bee keeping suit!

I'm sure these funny looking ginger dogs
were smaller than us when they first
arrived!

Talking of gossip, Liz has been on a mission to Dublin to touch base with all the family and to catch up on the gossip with our good friends, Therese and Owen. She'd not actually seen T+O for a long time, but said that (as is often the way with really good friends) she slotted in immediately as if she'd just nipped out to the shops. They were amused and delighted by Liz's tales of country living and taking up knitting.

Mutual suspicion? Towser eyes up a Tamworth.

Steak Lady (and Mr SL) have lived for as long as I have known them in a big house chopped up into a gazillion B+B rooms and they have always had this well populated with language students. As a result, they never really retired, and have been working hard, continuously and pretty much all round the year for decades. They have now decided that enough is enough, so the house is up for sale and proper retirement to a single-storey place, possibly somewhere down near the Silverwoods, beckons. Liz was able to catch up on the latest on this while she was there for lunch

A huge supper under her belt, Lucia needs a lie-down in the
sunshine

Meanwhile, Sparks has also moved to a new place nearer to his work and Liz nipped up to admire this place and to catch up on brother/sister news. At all three places she was plied with gifts and as well, called in at IKEA on the way home in search of standard-lamps, so she came home with quite a car full. We have some unusual foodstuffs including red caviar and a jar of baked-bean type beans but not in tomato sauce, these are 'au naturel' in the French style, floating in a clear brine.

Haricot (Navy) beans 'au naturel' and red caviar

The red caviar (we looked it up) is actually salt-cured eggs but not of the sturgeon, these are from Pacific river-salmon. Somehow they are still in a small jar which only has (Russian?) Cyrillic script on it and a Moscow address. Liz made a tapas-style meal tonight so that we might taste these delights; it was my first ever taste of any kind of caviar. The caviar was, as you'd expect, very salty and had the texture of tiny 'bags' of jelly (the fish-eggs) - interesting and OK. We toned the salt down a bit with creme fraiche but we were fresh out of ice-cold vodka (!) Good fun but I don't think either of us will be rushing out to buy more.

Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon
The virgin sturgeon is a very fine fish.
The virgin sturgeon needs no urgin'
That's why caviar is my dish! (boom tish!)

Inch long young quinces looking very promising.

Also in the car was a sewing machine, a generous gift from T+O. Liz has been looking for one of these for a while now, and a chance misunderstanding raised the subject. Owen was asking what we had sowed (meaning fruit and veg), Liz heard this as 'sewed' as in needlework. This machine had been gathering dust in a cupboard, so T was delighted to give it to someone who would be likely to use it.

Crab apples coming on nicely

Meanwhile, back here, the 'waif and stray' white cat, Pirate, is now getting well used to us and Liz was able to handle him today (a first). He (for he is definitely a 'he') is now a regular at supper time, yowling around when he sees the dogs walked back indoors from their orchard exercise session and also, for the last 2 mornings, coming over for breakfast when he hears the bowls being filled for our own cats. Yesterday for most of the day he slept curled up on the 2CV roof in the car port, so I put the cat basket up there with a 'vet-bed' blanket folded into it.

The dogs watch the rabbits, the rabbits watch the bee hive?

He didn't use it that day, but I noticed that this morning, he was asleep in there first thing and it was from there that he emerged to come across for breakfast. This is good news - we will need to get him into that to take him to the vet, so if he is already in, then we should be able to just flip the door shut before he realises what's happening. The poor little mite will definitely need to see the vet, he is not at all well. His eyes are bad; his right eye is completely 'gone' and the left seems very cloudy to us. His ears are scabby and dirty looking, and he is eating so much we suspect he may have worms. On the plus side we can see no sign of fleas or other parasites among his white fur and he is a lot less skinny than when we started feeding him 3 weeks ago. We will let vet Aoife advise us, but we think we may be able to get him well again.