Touch Wood

We spread these tarps out when we took them down from the
shed roof, hoping they'd dry in the sun. It hasn't stopped raining
since. The geese love them - permanent puddles!

This is possibly the shortest and least pictorial post you have seen in a long time. The relentless pace of shed fixing, 'harvesting meat' and trying to get better from the recent illness, has finally eased leaving me with a proper slow-news Friday. I promised myself long ago that I'd never reduce myself to posts which said "I'm bored - nothing happening", so in that spirit, no news is a short post.

One story I do need to catch up on is that fox. He/she has been a regular, but not particularly frequent, daytime raider since January (Yes, I know, seems longer). He has left us alone since the 10th of this month, Touch Wood! There is always hope that someone else, in the neighbourhood, has 'got' him. I decided to go back through the blog, the diary and the social media posts to try to add up exactly how much damage has been done, so here goes, month by month.

January (2018): Failed attack (2nd), spotted by guineas and chased off by me.

Feb: 8th Female duck taken
        17th Goose killed but not taken (fox could not get goose through sheep fencing)
        26th Buff Orpington rooster.

March: 2nd  Buff Orp hen
             24th Female duck
             31st Black hen (Beeblebrox)

April: 5th Grey hen taken but let go to walk home (Walk Home Wendy)
           13th Female duck
           15th Attacks turkey Gloria but only wounds her. She dies 6th May from wounds

May:   13th female Duck

June: 28th Takes final female duck.
          29th Failed attack - repelled by dogs

July: 7th Black hen (our last Marans pure-bred)
         16th Hen ("Shtumpy")
         21st Hen with only one chick. Chick is successfully fostered with "The Bumbles"

August: 4th Failed attack
              9th Half-grown poult taken
              10th Smallest gosling taken

Also, at unknown dates, the following birds have now gone missing, presumed victims of the fox

1. Walk Home Wendy
2. Tail-less buff orp hen 'Floofy'
3. Guinea Hen while sitting on eggs out in the hedges somewhere.

There you have it. In total this year

• 5 female ducks
• 1 turkey
• 1 goose and a tiny gosling
• 1 Guinea fowl
• 1 rooster
• 1 young (chicken) poult
• 7 hens

Total 18 birds so far in 2018. We are no nearer to trapping him or shooting him. He remains unpredictable, wary and very careful.

Dress Rehearsal

The three would-be bank (un)robbers rehearse a scene.

This evening feels like a welcome, if lonely, night off, all on its lonesome in what feels like weeks of play rehearsal nights and hosting visitors. That's me speaking and I've only been to a few of the rehearsals; Elizabeth has been to every single one and to the extra ones slid in on Sunday afternoon. Yesterday was the final Dress Rehearsal, before the 'Players' get tonight off followed by the First Night tomorrow (Wednesday). There are performances on Friday and Saturday too, and then it is all over for this time.

'Badger' gets 'Windy' ready for the action

I have said before that I will not do 'spoilers', so no detail till after Saturday but it is looking really well and promises to be a great success. The players are veering between elation, excitement and total panic as you'd expect. I know from previous years how the (2) debut actors will be lifted but also knocked a bit sideways by the crowd reaction, having to pause while the laughter dies down and getting that instant feedback from the audience. All the players comment that by now, having rehearsed the thing to death, they are numb to the jokes and surprises and they start to doubt whether this is funny at all. It is, of course. They will do fine.

Dan and Sarah about to do justice to a roast and some ratatouille

Meanwhile, as you will know, we have seen our first visit to its end and enjoyed the first half of our other visit; the former being Dan with his thesis writing break and the latter a one night stop over by first time guest Sarah M who is wrapping a week of touring round a midweek wedding way down on the south coast.

Sarah tales her turn at bottle feeding the lamb.

Sarah was with us over Easter Sunday night. She has hired a car at Knock for her touristing but I nipped out to Knock anyway to 'collect' her and guide her home. Simpler than trying to give directions through these lanes. Sarah is a long-term friend of Elizabeth through the Internet and they have met several times.

Elizabeth really is the Yorkshire Pudding Queen of all Ireland.
These may have been the best yet - they were tall, light, fluffy
 and golden and "shook from the tin".

I'd know her from Facebook but had never met, so we were able to enjoy that 'thing' where you finally meet the person you feel like you have known and been friends with for ages, and to find out they are just as delightful as you thought they would be. She was a lovely guest to 'host' and loved everything here, from us and the livestock, to the superb food served up by Mrs C. Very easy to talk to as well and the conversation flowed really well. She is now off on a 5 hour drive to the south and will return next weekend for another stop-over on the way back through to Knock. She is already promising to return for a "proper" stay when she can sort out more time off.

Beef rib roast.

We dropped Dan to the airport this morning in the pouring rain. He'd not quite completed the thesis but assured us the end bit was do-able within the deadline even with taking Mrs Dan to a promised "5th Anniversary" (of being together) Dinner. He has until 8 a.m. Thursday, (he tells us) so he will work all night after the dinner if needs be. What ever the case he made sure we knew how grateful he was at giving him the space to get stuck into it, saying that he'd never have got so near the end without us. Good luck Dan.... get that submitted and knock them dead. I am sure you will get the high marks and Distinction you are striving for. Dan has promised to let us know how he gets on and, like Sarah, has also promised to come back soon, with Mrs Dan, but without the laptop, for a proper holiday.

Meanwhile, little else note-worthy is happening (that's actually a relief!). The pigs, the lambs and the baby chicks are all thriving. The fox has taken only one more bird, unfortunately our ace broody and chick-rearer of the 7-chick family last year, 'Beeblebrox' (see for example post  http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2017/08/los-chicos-estan-despiertos.html ) This was a very quick attack as Beebs must have been right close to the boundary bank and Brer Fox nipped over the bank and ambushed the hen without being spotted (in time). The fox trap has now caught our own cat 'Soldier' but nothing else. Patience is the thing. More on all these stories in the next post.

Connie, Big Red, Beebs and Stumpy makes 19

Beeblebrox with her 7 chicks

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

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

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

Not very common... a DUCK double yolker. 

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

Empress and Pride at 4 months

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focaccia loaf, first knock-back

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

Sourdough loaf.

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

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

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

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

The Final 9... and a half

Colin has a bit of a sort out of the sheared ewes

In the last post, I promised an end soon to talk of sheep shearing. This is definitely the last word on that subject or at least the penultimate one. Friends of the blog will know that on Saturday I was booked over to Co. Sligo again to nail the final 9 Texel ewes plus, it turned out, a little grey mountainy animal who had nearly sheared herself by losing her winter coat except for some shaggy pantaloons and a fluffy (un-docked) tail. Some sheep breeds do this, the Wiltshire Horn for example, so this girl, Molly, may have some of that DNA in her mix. She was our "and a half" sheep.

For this session our French student assistant was absent, given a lie-in by the family as she'd been working her socks off all week and was exhausted. It was just Colin and I but that was OK. The 3rd hand is useful but not vital. Anne joined us late morning when we were just 2 sheep from the end of the task, a nice "bringing on a fresh sub" move.  We took it fairly steady and got through all ten animals between 9 a.m. and 11:30 even with a break for coffee mid way and a bit of a pause to sort and treat a fly-strike victim.

Fly strike lesion on right side of ewe. Cleaned up in this pic.

You'll recall that one of the main reasons for shearing early-ish in the year (May?) is to avoid the over-heated sheep getting blow flies lay their eggs down among the fleece. These eggs hatch and the maggots crawl down to the skin and start eating that, causing, as you can imagine, all manner of discomfort to the sheep and eventually worse ills.

Letting them all go back out to pasture.

Fly strike is messy, smelly and not nice. We only found the one case, a ewe with maggots down in her groin area. These sheep-keepers though, know their stuff and had what felt like 4 different lotions and potions on hand to wipe on, sponge on, massage in and then (a very bright yellow cream) smear around the outside of the place. Once we had got rid of all the maggots all you can do is prevent more and let the wound, which was not very deep in this case, dry and heal.

So that was me, sheared out for the year. I could clean the shears, de-tension them and send the blades away to be sharpened. Luckily I mentioned this to Alayne, who sends her horse-trimmers off like this and when I told her of the 'brilliant place' on Achill Island I have used before she was able to advise me that that one is closed following the tragic death of the business owner. She gave me an alternative place to get them sharpened.

Had to try these new "Jakoti" hand shears

The reason for my "penultimate" possibility is that I have been tempted by all the @smallholderIRL Twitterer sheep-folk into buying a new toy.

Connie takes her 3 babies to visit 'Big Red' in the Utility Room,
who has just hatched 4 for herself. She does not receive an
enthusiastic welcome. 

This is a pair of Jakoti hand shears looking like an extended pair of Felco secateurs. All the sheep people swear by them now and have been abandoning the olde fashion sprung-steel "double bow" type. I have now received these just after having finished shearing proper but I have one tidy up job I can try them out on - those frilly knickers and woolly dewlaps I left on my own sheep before I had all this practise on Southdowns and Texels.

The Hubbards at 3 weeks are fast out-growing "baby chick"
status

Meanwhile, back home we are awash with baby chicks and more on the way. You'll know we got the 13 (now dozen) Hubbards hatched on 5th June. In the last post I spoke of 3 chicks hatched under our #1 broody, Sussex 'Connie', with Utility Room broody coming up to Day 21 yesterday. Well, right on schedule, UR-Broody (we'll call her Big Red) hatched hers, 4 chicks in her case. Hot on her heels should come 'Stumpy', Due 7th July and now we have found a 4th 'clocker', the part-Araucana we call 'Beeblebrox' whom we THINK will be due on the 15th. We are furiously trying NOT to count our chickens.....

Foaming porridge? A sour dough starter. 

Tipped off by our visitors from Dorset, Mazy Lou and Airy Fox and then encouraged by the 'curator' of that Twitter account (@MagsMorrisey) who did a week of bread making Tweets, I have decided to try my hand at the sour-dough bread. Both of us have tried plenty of yeast bread since we have been here (and before) but never sour-dough. I will not go into detail as this 'muck and magic' has been covered intensively else where but in brief, the bread rises due to the activity of a 'starter' which you keep active, instead of dried or fresh yeast.

Bread makers love and cherish their starter cultures, feed them and tend them like any other livestock. They even give them names. Mine came over from Mazy in Liz's hand luggage and I named it Reginald after the ram I had just sheared. Ooops - sorry, that slipped out.

Anyway, long story short, we have fed Reg for the required week and, finding him foaming like a swamp, I made the first loaf today. Even though I failed to artistically score the top of the lump of dough and scorched it a little by forgetting how fierce our oven can be, it came out very well and is delicious.

Hard to beat. Your own pork. The bread-crumb crust covers
shredded courgette in creamy garlic sauce

Other than that, a nice bit of progress on the kitchen project. We'd been looking for a suitable worktop for in there against the bare stone wall plus wondering how to mount it given the lack of cupboards, then sitting down at our Dining Table to scratch our heads and drink coffee. This is what we need, we agreed, something like the top of the table. Solid wood, 4 cms thick, honey-coloured oak (or similar?), 6 foot long, stripped of varnish and cherished for years with something like our beeswax polish.

New kitchen gets an up-cycled dining table work top. 

BING! Light-bulb moment. Why don't we either find another table and cut it up (well, get K-Dub, our ace carpenter, to do it) or find one to replace this one and cut this one up? So we did. I was out in Boyle last Friday and spotted a "Pre-Loved Furniture" shop (yoiks) and there, right in the front window was the very table. We nipped out to collect it yesterday and texted K-Dub, and he came round today. Bingo! Liz has a perfect-height, solid wood worktop which even has a 'splash-back' with twin double sockets for the various kitchen gadgets. Marvellous.