Enough Foxes, Already!

I promised you a few pics of us scrubbed up for the wedding.
Here are a couple taken by other guests and posted on
Facebook, l-r Liz, Mr and Mrs S and the author.

I am thinking I may have been obsessing on our fox issue lately and the blog has become "all about the fox". Vulpes vulpes and his/her kin have rather taken over to the detriment of stories on all the other many aspects of this story of a small holding. Our foxy adventures may also have taken over the village with even wife of Mike-the-Cows reporting to us a fox she saw "by the bridge near the crossroads".

Liz and I with J-M (left) and Em-J (right)

John Deere Bob was down at his kesh (a concrete bridge over a drainage stream), half a mile downstream from ours, this morning and reported "so many fox tracks in the snow" as well as rabbit tracks, hare prints and pheasants. "There must have been half a dozen foxes", he declared, "there were so many I'm amazed they'd not 'swept up' all the rabbits!" Even Mentor Anne is riffing in the comment section of my last post that the place is "teeming" with foxes. The word must have gone out that we are running a "Fox MacDonalds" Enough, I say! I will make no more comment on the fox story unless something amazing happens, at least not for a while.

I quite liked this rather bizarre one.

You, the reader, will know there is all sorts going on behind the scenes (sightings, hunts, killing, insults and mild effronts and even (gasp) the blackening of names) but I will , from now, only post up the body count as a post-script.... Fox #2..... Bridget Jones style, when/if it changes. I will leave you with just one of JD Bob's tongue in cheek pearls of foxy wisdom. Chickens, pheasants and any other bird, he tells us, are safe as houses at night from Brer Fox because they perch in trees. Not so (allegedly) the turkey. Bob, in one of those stories he has told us several times as he sometimes forgets he has already shared it, says that the fox knows to walk round and round the turkey's tree so that the turkey, looking down and trying to keep his eye on the fox, twists his neck round and round. The turkey then gets dizzy and falls off the perch into the waiting jaws of the fox. "Did you ever hear that?" says Bob as his cheeks and eyes crinkle up and he rubs his hands together, chuckling his breathy giggle. That's it. No more fox-bore.

I like a good drive on snow - always have since I was a young fan of Motor Rallying. I enjoy the (rather tame) risky feel of barely having grip and feeling the starts of mild slides on corners, quickly corrected of course (this is the family car on standard tyres, after all!) and knowing that you need to drive with extra anticipation and alertness. I love the headlights peircing the gloom and the optical illusion of the 'star-field' of blizzard flakes parting in front of the car to whizz by all around your 'trajectory'. I had some fun, then, last night, heading for 'Bee School' in Longford in the dark. There was a good covering of snow on the minor roads all up through Moyne and Fairymount to French Park, though the main roads from French Park were clear on the outward journey. On the way back I met a blizzard between Termonbarry and Strokestown and there was laid snow on some of those bends from Strokestown back through Ballinagare. All good fun.

Our first goose egg of 2015. The 'use first'
egg is a first from a chicken with a soft
shell one end.

This 'Bee School' is my studies towards the Intermediate "Written Practical" exam at the end of March. Written in that it is a written paper, 'Practical' because questions will be on practical hive/apiary tasks and management, honey extraction etc, as opposed to the 'scientific' paper which is on bee biology, anatomy, diseases, honey chemistry and all that jazz. This is a whole different ball game to last year's 'Preliminary' paper which was an easy, entry level, half hour, 20 questions, single (or few). word answers. Name 3 major parts of the bee's body (head, thorax, abdomen). Name 4 substances bees bring back to the hive (nectar, pollen, propolis and water). What is the main problem with honey from oilseed rape and heather? (It sets hard quickly in the comb).

The kitchen gets knocked about a bit.

This paper is 3 hours long, 5 questions of at least half an hour of writing asking for lots of detail on (for example) aspects of a main disease (hive signs, symptoms, effects, risks, legal side (i.e. is it reportable), remedies, apiary recovery). It's going to be fun - the pressure is on. Liz has opted out of this one; she is happy to own just the Preliminary Certificate and slowly build up her knowledge and experience hands-on in our own hive(s)

Our other news is two simple bits. The plumber has come and installed the new dish washer, which involved also swinging the sink round by 90º to 'look' out of the kitchen window at the setting sun. We have just about managed to get the fridge back in, which looked likely to need a new home in the corner of the Dining Room for a while. Liz ran the washer for the first time last night and is delighted with it. She won't mind me admitting that I have always been a bit jaundiced about these machines and my default setting would be to do the washing up by hand; in my head I see them using more water and energy than you need and pumping out more waste chemicals but Liz has long dreamed of this day and she's just handed me a drink, so I will keep quiet on this one! Meanwhile, I had a nice surprise  this afternoon when I spotted a goose egg in the nest compartment, our first of 2015. We may have 4 females this year (one is a bit 50/50 at present and may prove to be a gander) so we should do OK for eggs. We are not allowing any broodiness in geese this year as we don't want any more goslings.

100,000 Page Views

We made it! Thanks to all my readers, this blog passed the 100,000 page views milestone today. Better keep going then; cracking on.

On these long dark evenings, I find myself reading books as a way to pass the time, and enjoying it more than I thought I would - up to now I have generally read a book once and never touched it since. Compare that to Liz, the real reader in this family, who has hundreds of books filling half a dozen bookcases, many of which she has read dozens of times. This is particularly true of her favourite authors and series - the Lord Peter Wimsey series (Dorothy Sayers), murder mysteries, especially Margery Allingham's 'Campion' stories, PG Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer's stuff and currently various Nora Roberts and a batch of 50 books she inherited to her Kindle which make up the New York Times best seller top 50 (some good, some appallingly bad, apparently). My part in this, historically has been a small section of shelf by Maeve Binchy, a shelf full of books about Thames Barges, some natural history books, a lot on Westies, pigs, bees and small-holdering and the Terry Pratchett (Discworld) collection which we share.

Pirate Cat certainly likes his fish. This is all you get left if you
throw him a big salmon head, boiled up. Just keep your fingers
out of the way, is all!

Having got back into reading, I worked my way back through the Pratchetts but then decided I should spread my net wider and started plaguing Liz for books which "I might like"; I read a wad of  PGW (naturally including the 'Empress of Blandings' pig stories!) but then ran out of reading while Liz was studying a book by Diane Purkiss on the English Civil War. Now my family will know that I am not one for the History. I could not string 2 English kings together in the right order or give you dates to save my life. I hated the subject at school with a passion. It was taught in a dry and dusty way by a bloke who couldn't engage with kids for love nor money, just a series of dates, monarchs and battles which we were asked to learn by rote. One of the things that amazed me about Liz, when I met her, was that someone could actually love history, bubble over with a passion for its detail and could pretty much put every monarch onto a mental timeline, along with all the major events. She is currently coaching 2 young ladies, one on English Literature, one on History, so the books are out while she 'bones up' to get her facts straight before a coaching session.

Marzipan-ing the cake.

There I was, then, with an actual history book in my hand and found I was enjoying it as well as learning a lot. Purkiss's book approaches the Civil War from the angle of ordinary people struggling through it, their lives disrupted, their children off fighting or they off being soldiers and seeing their tiny perspective on things. You got a good idea of the mess and confusion of a war fought in the 1600s The 'big boys' don't get a look in unless written about by these 'lowly' letter writers or diary-keepers, unless Purkiss needs to slot in some detail by way of explanation or context. By the end of the book I felt quite happy that I knew a bit about history, all be it only the score or so years in the 1600s in which the war took place. Since then I have been handed a couple of novels which are from soon after, being Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders" and Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones". I have to admit that the 'Moll' was familiar territory-ish after the TV series with Alex Kingston, at least as to plot, but I was delighted to find that the real book was full of detail and context which I 'knew' from the Civil War book, especially around the way real life was organised, how people lived and ran the communities, law enforcement and so on. I have similarly loved Tom Jones, all 870 close-printed, garrulous pages of it. I am worried that I am becoming interested in history as well as a tiny bit 'well read' (!) I will be annoying Liz with my silly, simplistic questions. Perhaps I need some of this 'coaching'.

Strike is over. We are back in the egg game.

We run gently in towards Christmas. We have negotiated a settlement with the hens and they have started to go back to work on the egg laying. Thanks are due to Mentor Anne for an interim rescue - a quick dozen of her 'proper' organic eggs including one of her lovely dark-brown shelled ones now coming from her new Copper Marans hens. That let Liz go back into Christmas baking without us having to buy any more supermarket eggs. I now have 3 chooks in lay and more soon, I am sure. The 'negotiation' was possibly Liz walking round threatening them with the stock pot. It worked anyway, what ever she said to them.

Home made marzipan.

I have been marzipan-ing the cake. We have done this for this year with home made marzipan. The chef hates the taste of almond essence but has no problem with actual almonds themselves. We end up trying to peel the marzipan off the cake and then the icing off the marzipan. Not this year, we hope. The cake now gets a few days drying before we throw some icing at it. I have a design in my head based around the sheep 'logo' I used on the dustbin, but readers will have to wait and see.

Possibly a bit bigger than we intended.
They always look smaller in the 'shop'.

We have also finally brought the tree indoors. It had been outside, wrapped and sitting in a bucket of water, we believe that this helps with the loss of needles at the '12th night' end of things. We bought the tree on Friday morning but Liz then shot off back to Silverwoods for another quick burst of 'sitting' ('babies', school runs, houses, poorly parent in hospital, that kind of thing). She came back on the Monday and we like to 'do the tree' together, so I got as far as bringing it indoors to 'relax' from being wrapped up with its branches squashed upwards against the trunk.

We decorated it today. It may be a little bigger than we intended (especially width-wise); they always look smaller in the big perspective of acres of tarmac and big supermarket architecture, but it is OK. We don't really do 'tasteful'; the only house rule is that only white fairy lights and silver tinsel can go on the tree, no other colours and that the plain glass baubles are only silver or red. After that it all goes a bit wild with toys, bows, owls and stuff which we have accumulated down the years; we make a point of each buying one new one each year from craft fairs or what ever so our decorating is slowed down by exclamations along the lines "Ahhh look! Here's the crawfish one from New Orleans" and appropriate reminiscences.

I was off to 'bee school' for the last session before Christmas yesterday. This was going to be a very promising lecture by one of the National Committee boys on 'The Honey Harvest'. I was looking forward to it. I had the usual hour's drive out to Longford in the rain. Frustratingly, it all went a bit pear shaped, as the guy did not show and we all sat around wondering what to do. It turned out that the man got his dates wrong and came down on Thursday 11th but then, finding nobody about, went home again without contacting any of our people, which struck me as particularly dim. Our man had e-mailed him to confirm dates but he happily brushed that off with a "Oh, I never read my emails". Thanks, mate. We were left having a general discussion for a half hour or so before we all split up and the speaker has promised to try again in the New Year.

Waiting for the Eleven

Change of day-length vs days through year (50N).

We are doing really well for eggs at present, what with it being, I suppose, peak season, Equinox an' all that. We have 11 hens and have had two days in the last week where they have laid, between them, 10 eggs, though the norm is around 7 eggs. We are also getting one every other day from each goose and, we think, a daily Guinea fowl egg since the 18th. Today we thought we might be on for the 'full chicken house', 11 from 11 - we had already collected ten and there was a cackling, clucking racket going on mid afternoon as if someone was proclaiming another arrival, but no, it was a false alarm and the girls are keeping us waiting.

Min (left) and Henry (right)

I love all the physics around Equinoxes and day-length, At the Equinox, most people know, we have equal daylight and night-time hours (well, almost, there is some detail around this to do with latitude and the not-exactly perfect elliptical orbits) but this is also the time of the fastest CHANGE of day length. We are effectively accelerating towards summer at the fastest rate, with days getting longer at around 3 minutes per day, 21 minutes a week (spread across both ends of the day, of course), which is why you can easily see and feel it. This currently affects us more intensely than when we lived in the UK, because chicken 'bed-time' moves with darkness hours, and is currently around 7 pm, earlier on gloomy, cloudy evenings, later on bright sunny ones. Our 'bee school' starts at 8 pm, an hour away in Longford town, so for yesterday's we'd been worried since the previous class that we might have to be late for this one as we chased the last few chooks to bed before we could set out on the journey. It was close, but luckily Monday evening was cloudy, rainy and I could lock everyone up by 6:45 pm. For the next two sessions, it will not matter because the clocks will have changed.

Enjoying the spring sunshine

We also do very well for meals created from left overs; we throw very little food away which, in turn, means we do not have to worry about cooking too much. I have been enjoying a superb parsnip soup born out of big dig of the roots. Tonight was cold roast lamb (leg of Dora) with that lovely, soul-food, winter-warmer "Champ", mashed potatoes cooked back up with left over leeks and sprouts with some runner beans added and, beautifully, including the golden "burnt crispy bits" (BCBs; a food group in their own right!)

The entrance to the turf 'mine'.

Talking of left overs and springtime, the lovely weather has me out in the garden re-starting some jobs abandoned last autumn as it got too wet and cold, one of which is the earth bank which houses the half buried horse-drawn hay-rake. At the hay rake end we were uncovering some old hand 'won' "sausage" turfs and wondered whether we have in fact a 'clamp' left over from the TK-Min or even the TK-Max days. Well, I am now working in from the other end, a good 15 feet away and have come across what may be the other end of the clamp. We suspect that this is not any kind of official clamp, more a pile of turfs which got buried under some bulldozed topsoil, but they are lovely. They are up to around 5 inches diameter and cylindrical, the longest bits up to a foot long. They are buried like the ice-cream in a baked Alaska and it is a simple matter to lift them out from the entrance to the 'mine' as I work my way along the bank - I am getting barrow loads. Free fuel for next winter if I can get them dry.

Finally on the spring theme, we hear from our sheep man, Kenny O'C that he has just started lambing with a first batch of 5 lambs born on a lovely sunny day. We have put our order in for 5 again as last year, including one for the Sparks's and one for the Silverwood tribe. We'll probably get them, all being well, around July time. Their field is currently resting after its horse residence through the winter, and is already starting to look visibly greener. It is also pleasingly free from the rushes which badly infested it when we moved in. That is down to the mowing, strimming and sheep and horse grazing and gives us a little glow of pride at having improved the pasture we took over.