Plague Pit (a Hot Drop)

A "hot drop" for what ails you. Very
welcome when out exercising the dogs.

This is not a happy home the last few days. Both of us have been struck down by the 'lurgy'. It's just the common cold so don't go believing any bunkum you hear from me about man-flu, but it's very disabling and misery inducing. Colds are now, also nicely rare round here. When I was working in the UK my work involved moving between air-con offices and huge cold stores in a space shared by 600+ other fellow sufferers so I "always" seemed to be catching colds. It seemed like 3-4 a year and I can remember the 'weakling' shame of always being asked by our lovely neighbour (The Angel B), "have you got a cold AGAIN?"

No better lip-tingling marinade for the chicken stir fry when
the taste buds are a bit dull, than home made chilli oil.

Even then we would always generously stick the wedding vows... "all I have I share with you" .... and who ever caught the cold first would always try to share it with the other spouse.

When the jar of Hellman's "REAL" Mayonnaise runs out and
Liz is reduced to knocking up a quick bowl full of mayo from our
Free Range eggs. Hellman's is creamy white so our yellow mix
surely can't also be 'real'?

Now enjoying our outdoor lifestyle with no crowd of 600 warehousemen following me about and no air-con or cold stores, I have had a remarkable reduction in the colds per annum scores. We only ever get the one per year and sometimes, if memory serves, none at all. All the more annoying when you do pick one up, maybe.

By rigging some temporary fencing, I let the sheep get at the
grass on the walk BETWEEN their fields. They were more
interested in the ivy on the wall. 

Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining. Yes we have spent a few days dragging boxes of tissues round and dosing ourselves up on "Max Strength" Lemsip or taking ourselves off for extended naps (I took a "sickie" from Archery and Liz has, tonight, from Drama Group). But on the calendar was a note to strain the plum-vodka to separate the fruit from the booze after 3 months steeping. We kept the fruit, obviously, but the hooch proved to be delicious AND to be just too much to all fit in the posh bottle we had saved, so a small overflow ended up in a tiny tonic bottle. The cold sufferers found the idea of a 'hot drop' made with plum vodka instead of whiskey, very welcome when out exercising dogs on the breezy, drizzly front lawn. It was also a chance to break in my new(ish) thermos mug. Thank you Dan and Dan.

Not a brilliant pic but can you just see that the shell of this duck
egg is faintly ridged in a spiral pattern (in direction of the arrow).
The duck's vent must be grooved in spiral ridges like a gun barrel!

What else is new? Off on one of my missions into town, in this case for emergency supplies of (you guessed it) Lemsip and tissues, I spotted in a roadside paddock, 5 new outdoor piglets and immediately worked out that these must belong to some friends of ours, the man of which is a former pork butcher and ace maker of proper pork pies. I fired off a quick text to see if I could blag a cup of tea and an admire of the new piggies. Long story short, they are 13 week old weaners who are thriving and fast learning about electric fences. They are Gloucester Old Spots (crosses), 4 for the freezer and 1 as a keeper who will be joined by another breeding-quality gilt. The 2 ladies will be put to a Berkshire boar if our friends can find one.

The young turkey looking huge against the new chickens.

We also had a nice treat, a visit by the gardening journalist for the local paper who asked to look round the place and interview us about how we garden. Local readers may know this guy as Paul Kirwan, gardening writer for the Roscommon Herald but I must admit I only knew him as "the guy who runs the garden centre attached to the farmers' co-op in Balla-D, "Aurivo". Well, Paul came round yesterday just before it got dark and walked round the garden while we chatted and then enjoyed a cup of tea and a slice of chocolate cake when we adjourned indoors. Lovely bloke - fascinating story. 'We' should appear in the Herald which comes out next Tuesday (28th Nov) if you're interested and we will definitely be grabbing a couple of copies for our own interest and friends and family. Assuming he says nice things about our messy weed patch, of course!

Revolving Doors

The Ivy flowers are now open. Go for it, you bees!

We are thinking about fitting revolving doors to the house. Lately it seems that one or the other of us is out on a trip and it goes almost by return of post, one in, one out. First there was my trip to the UK visiting friends, relatives and the barge, and then while I was gone, Liz's parents finally got their moving date, for the same week. Liz had to pretty much collect me from the airport, we came home for her to enjoy just one lie-in (a break from the livestock she'd been attending in my absence), and then she was packing her own stuff for the trip to Dublin.

This worker bee is foraging Phacelia tanacetifolia, so her pollen
baskets are purple from the pollen.

There she helped pack the family home into the van, blitz-cleaned the place, and then followed the van down to the 'new' house down near the Silverwoods. Here they all tipped the van into the house but then hit a snag; some kind of paperwork issue in the 'chain' which meant they could not unpack, move in or claim the key. They had to fill the house with packed stuff, hand back the key and walk away, all promising to return on Friday-next by which time the issue will (allegedly) be resolved.

Pig 'muesli', pig nuts and blackberries!

Another trip for Liz but meanwhile I took a call from Kent friend Diamond to say that her own house move (in which Liz had also promised to assist) had been moved earlier. The carpet man has given Diamond a cancellation for the 30th Sept, so they are moving over the 2nd and 3rd of Oct, this one a short one across Faversham in Kent from one end of town to the other. That brings us round to the 7th of October when, we think, all this jet-setting and gallivanting will take a break.

Red Kuri Squash

Meanwhile back at the calm, mill-pond that is our smallholding, the ivy flowers have opened in the warm, Indian Summer weather, which is good news for the bees. The bees, though, seem to have finally decided that it is OK to forage inside the home garden and are giving my various clumps of the 'green manure' plant Phacelia tanacetifolia, a good going over. Phacelia is such a good bee plant that I usually let it go all the way to flowering instead of digging it in green. We noticed today that the bees were taking pollen from the long stamens as well as taking nectar and that because this pollen is purple in colour, the bees had purple pollen baskets on their legs instead of the usual orange or yellow. There will presumably be purple cells in the 'honey comb' too.

Good sized fruit.

The hedges all around are still laden with delicious, big, sweet blackberries so although we have picked our fill for the freezers, jams etc, I still collect a load each time I walk the dogs, to bring back for the pigs, to make their lunchtime pig-nuts a bit more interesting and varied. Just out of curiosity, Liz offered blackberries to the dogs and all three seem to have fallen in love with them. When I am walking the dogs and I stop to pick berries for the pigs, I now have three little dog noses pressed into the hedge nibbling off any fruit at westie-height. I have seen pictures of foxes doing this, but did not know that the domestic dog might have the same tastes.

25 kg of mixed daffs.

We have been impressed by the crop we have on our 'Red Kuri Squash' plants. We had never heard of this beast but last year, Mrs Silverwood passed us a couple of the fruit she had bought in a supermarket but had not then got around to cooking, mainly because she did not know what to do with them that the children would actually eat. Well, we knew what we'd like to try, and that was a roast of wedges done with chunks of pepper, onion, tomato, lemon and a splash of olive oil; this is how we treat butternut squash also. The Red Kuri were gorgeous, so we decided to save some seed round to this year and try a few plants. They have done very well and we now have this season's crop to play with.

Pirate. He might never be 'handsome'
but he's a lot cleaner now with no cuts
scabs and missing tufts of fur.

In other news, we spotted that the local farmer's co-op (Aurivo; formerly Connacht Gold) was selling 25 kg nets of mixed daffodil bulbs. Our front at present is just a green verge and the nice tidy (but boring) privet hedge, so we decided that a row of daffs along the front might look nice in spring and some hot-red nasturtiums clambering through the privet in Summer might pep it up a little. Just need to dig a 100 foot trench then.... that's me tired out for the day!