Cull a Cock Curry

Skinny light-weights. These roosters we are
culling are not even 21 weeks old yet, so
they are only making weights of 1.5-1.7 kg
in oven-ready form.

A genuinely short post this time as very little is currently happening. Even the one positive 'story' we had planned for today was postponed for 2 weeks. That was the arrival of our two new Guinea hens. The friend who was going to arrive with them was not, for various reasons, able to identify 2 females for us and then isolate them. Sexing Guinea Fowl is notoriously hard and usually based upon the females calling "buckwheat buckwheat" and the males not. If you are looking at a pen full of birds who are not calling, you are a bit stumped, as you can imagine. Better luck in the next fortnight, Billy.

What's in YOUR freezer? Although ours (plural) are well set
up, organized and everything labelled we do sometimes get nice
surprises, like this goodly rack of venison chops.

We have started the process of culling out these spare roosters. I killed 2 last night after lock-up. Going in there in the dark with just the head torch is the quietest way we have found. Nobody panics around flapping. The bird just allows himself to be "grabbed" enfolding his wings and carried out. Our normal system here is for me to rear and then kill the birds, which are then presented to Liz who processes them through the plucking and cleaning out stages. She loves that job and gets herself set up with a Radio 4 "In Our Time" pod or an Agatha Christie play on the laptop.

4 litres of goat's milk for the next cheese.
Thanks Sue and Rob.

The roosters here are being culled out to remove a 'too many men' problem, rather than because they are ready to eat. They are less than 21 weeks old so quite light-weight and, when plucked out look very rangy and skinny. They weigh in, oven-ready, at 1.5 to 1.7 kg which looks and feels very little when you are used to meaty Hubbard carcasses which go 3.5 kg at 80 days.

Ginger Wine (also from S+R). Sweet and
a bit 'viscous', more like a liqueur.

We don't mind that at all though. The Hubbards we always joint up prior to freezing because the two of us cannot manage more than a few bits (a thigh each or maybe 2 drumsticks). These little fellas do not need any of that - we will roast (or curry, or 'au vin', or spatch-cock or whatever) the whole bird and eat half each like you would with a poussin.

Cream cheese under construction. 

We took our fertile (we hope) duck eggs over to Sue and Rob's to go in their incubator, this being our plan to up the number of ducks on site. I took, as well, a load of empty plastic 2 and 3 litre milk bottles, which they use for the goat milking. I also took a small incubator part (con-rod for the egg rocker servo) which I had repaired, plus got a chance to admire their newly borrowed Suffolk ram. This guy has come from a nearby farm and was the lad we were also going to use but we then decided to keep bought-in ram lamb 'Pedro'. He is 4 years old, big and magnificent. He has already been 'at work', Rob told me, so they are hoping for lambs in April.

"Play" Station? Liz is inputting the entire text of the Drama
Group's chosen play into a word document.

When you go to S+R's bearing gifts, you never seem to come away empty handed. I came away with 4 litres of goat's milk, a bottle of ginger wine to try and a stack of old egg boxes, useful for when we next in 'glut' mode. Thanks Sue and Rob. You guys are the salt of the earth.

That's about it. Just a couple more pics because I have them. This one is of me sitting down to enjoy a farming 'pod' and quickly being invaded by dog 'Towser' and cat 'Chivers'. It was taken by Liz but I was very amused by the state of my feet which look about 2" too long and pointy at the ends. My socks must have ridden down when I was last in my wellies and I have not noticed. Ah well.

Then we found in the fridge, in need of using up by Stir-up Sunday, one of last year's Christmas puds - it frees up the silver thru'pences and the basin, you understand. In this house we go with the Hastings tradition of making the recipient of the slice choose whether the server cut to their left or right, so that they cannot see the coinage sticking out and 'cheat'. Here the coin is arrowed in yellow. And , no, I am not going to wish anyone a 'Merry Christmas' just yet - it's still early November.

New Twins for Nanny

Nanny and the new kids, not yet 48 hours old here, under the
IR heat lamp.

A text from our good friend Carolyn tells us that her 'Nanny' goat has just landed twins. The timing of these new babies is correct for full term, going off the dates Carolyn has in her diary for when 'Billy' (they do like original names over there!) was with Nanny but they are tiny. Charlotte, currently working full time in Dublin (missed the birth again, Char'!) , juggles some holiday entitlement and races down to assist. One (curiously the larger of the twins) is struggling a bit, is very sluggish, breathes huskily, needs help getting onto a teat and starts to 'scour' (diarrhoea).

Those 2 kids.

They are put under a heat lamp to keep them warm. The vet is called in a hurry and the kid gets 2 injections, an anti-scour dose and electrolytes. 48 hours on he is much better - a bit 'drunk' but trying to do some clumsy bouncing around. Mum is doing a good attentive job but is (understandably?) very wary of cleaning the poo-ey end of the scouring one.

Charlotte steps in to clean him up a bit but Nanny seems to be thinking of abandoning him; Charlotte guesses that it is the new, cleaned, human smell off him putting her off so she smears a bit of the local Nanny 'flavour' back onto him and Nanny re-adopts him. Phew! It's all go in that Maternity Unit. As I go to 'print' everyone is still with us and it's all looking hopeful.

Sibling bonding. The twins nuzzling each other.

Followers of this blog who were with us a year ago will recall that this 'Nanny' is the same goat who spent last winter with us while C+C were moving house and were temporarily without an adequately fenced field to house the pregnant Nanny and her new beau Billy. Nanny gave birth to the big singleton kid 'Henry Óg' under the trees in our East Field. Billy was not, in that case, the sire. Nanny had been pregnant when purchased and collected by Charlotte and I from over by Kiltimagh (Co. Mayo). During the course of 2016, the humans sorted out some field fencing and we shipped the goats to their new home in the summer. Nanny is a lovely, sweet, animal and we have kept 'in touch' with her since, so we are delighted that she has now kidded successfully again.

Meanwhile a new venture for us, trying to organise a bit of a get together of the members of the Facebook group "West of Ireland Smallholders" of which I am co-admin. Pictures in this section have nothing to do with that event; they were just pretty frost scenes from our recent cold snap. Once a 365-er... always a 365-er? Anyway, there are 250 members in the group but these are spread very thinly right up the western half of the country, all the way from Buncrana (Donegal) down to Baltimore (Cork) - a distance of 600 km, or 8 hours driving. It was never going to be easy to get many of them together; would you drive 4 hours to a pub in the middle for breakfast and a chat, then 4 hours home? Nor would I.

Ewes with frosty backs get a bit of breakfast

In a post/thread on the group which was originally about still-born goat-kids some posters got into discussing how we on the group should meet up properly in 'real life'. This happens a lot on the Internet and can sometimes be easy enough to organise but our lot seemed to be fluffing around in "we should do lunch" style and nothing concrete was being set down. I decided to set up a 'straw-man' with a suggested date, time and venue which people could then either accept or argue with different suggestions. I went with today at 11 for 11:30 at Hester's 'Golden Eagle' (pub) in Castlerea which is easy to find, and sells very good, honest "pub grub" and breakfasts at comfortable prices.

Frosty bog-land view to the North from our East Field

My suggestion met with the expected mild flurry of interest as well as a smattering of counter-suggestions and some apologies for, as expected, distance, lack of transport, prior engagements, livestock issues, busy-ness etc. There were enough positives, though, for us to go ahead - we thought we might get a few takers even if there were last minute blow-outs, which there were - one poor friend had fallen badly and smashed a knee while racing to rescue laundry from a hail storm and another had "emergency dentistry" scheduled for the very time we were getting served our breakfasts.

Our willow tunnel. 

In the event, it all went off rather nicely. Half a dozen of us sat down for a chat at 11 am over tea and coffee before segue-ing gently into ordering breakfasts or sandwiches according to taste while the tea and coffee kept coming. It was lovely to meet the new faces and to put real 'people' to the Facebook versions and the chat meandered in a lively fashion around goats, pasture improvement, Tr*mp, Br*x*t and a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, pension arrangements, newspapers and even music. A very pleasant morning's event. Hester's had done us proud (as expected) with the food and drink.

We are not sure where we go from here. Should we make it monthly and see if the numbers build? Should we start to move it around the patch - let someone from a distant corner of the 'West' organise one and start to get a network going? Should we possibly say that, No, we only attracted 4 people so there is not really a demand for this even though people talk a 'good game' on the net? My instinct is to sit back now and see if there is any ground-swell of support asking for a repeat and promising to come to another one. Watch, as they say, this space.

(Nearly) Seeing it All

A first scrape-the-ice morning this morning.

The days I like best are the ones filled with livestock activities. Friend Charlotte phrased it best when she said that what she misses about having left home and gone off to college and to work in Dublin, is that before she departed and when the place was full of animals and birds, "There was always something to DO, even if it was just mucking out the rabbits". Regular readers will know that when she is back around, down here, she remains our No.1 go-to person to help with stock jobs.

Some '365' pics of a favourite local walk. The Golden Mile

The last 24 hours have been no exception and a real team effort, mainly because the main animal involved was one of hers, the 7 month old kid, originally born here, Henry-Óg (or 'Henno' for short). He had finally come round to his 'finish' - he is getting sexually mature and would have been harassing his Mum and falling foul of his big-horned 'step-father', 'Billy'. Smelling too, as Billy goats can. He needed ear-tagging and then hauling off to the butcher we use for our pigs, in Castlerea.

Stone stile into the old graveyard

He was a bit grown-up to be getting ear-tagged (it would hurt him and he was not going to like it) but when he was at the right (softer) age of 6 weeks, the family were in the process of moving to their new place in a different county, which meant that their herd number and supply of old tags no longer 'worked'. They have since had to apply to the new county and only now can buy tags with the new correct serial numbers. The new tags work with my 'pliers' (applicator) so I nipped across to do the deed while Charlotte held the very tame Henno in a firm grip lest he jump at the unwelcome and un-anaesthetised "ear piercings". He squeaked but was quickly OK. He, of course had no idea what was in store for him and why he needed the tags.

That was yesterday. Today I was back over there to collect him up, now meekly walking alongside Charlotte on dog-collar and lead and not objecting when boosted unceremoniously into the trailer. We drove him gently down and, because he'd be led 'round the back' I simply parked outside the butcher's in the street, no need to do that tricky road-blocking reverse into the tight alleyway up the side of the shop.

Liz was up to Dublin with the local Knitting Club on Sunday
and bought, she said, "ALL the wool"

So Charlotte led the lad in to meet his fate and I took the paperwork into the shop. I heard a short conversation about "doing him now" and I knew that Charlotte likes to get back all the 'gribbly bits' for dog treats, chews and food. Also that K-Dub fancied making knife handles from the horns, so they would be bring the head home too. Unbeknownst to me, C had led the goat into the shed and when the slaughterman suggested she might like to 'leave' and she'd replied that, no, she was 'grand' and happy to help, the guy had lifted the humane killer (captive-bolt gun), steadied Henno's head and popped him between the eyes, and had the sharp 'sticking' knife out practically before the lad hit the floor. A gush of blood and Henno was dead inside, Charlotte said, 5 seconds of being led in. It took her longer, she said, to get the dog-collar off him than it had taken for him to die; no drama, no pain, no awareness of what was happening. Clean, fast, efficient and humane. Surely the best way.

C then came back into the shop to talk offal and collection times and the boss said that if we wanted we could watch his man behead, skin and gut the late Henno there and then and take all the bits way with us, save coming back on an extra trip (I also got the impression that he would be relieved to pass us the head and bits lest they got lost during any intervening days!). It was all grist to the mill for hardy Charlotte but it would be my first time seeing this process but hey, in for a penny, I was sure I'd not let the side down by getting upset or 'gipping' all over the floor.

The sun rises through the trees around our house, as seen
from 2 fields away (to the West, obviously)

It was, I must admit, a bit of a shock to see him lying there with a bright red whoosh of blood coming from a gaping neck wound, his eyes still bright and his body steaming gently on the floor. We stood and chatted to the guy and saw a masterclass in cleaning a dead goat, with Charlotte steadily accumulating a bag of bits - the head, 'trotters' tail, scrotum and 'balls', then stomach (for the tripes), liver, heart, kidneys, lungs. It was like the pig "everything but the squeal" thing - the lad was pretty much left with just the intestines and skin (too goat-smelly). He had a good work out skinning the animal because, as in Henno, goats often have no fat beneath the skin so that the easy "fisting" thing they would do on sheep, pushing a fist between flesh and skin to separate the layers, is very hard on a goat.

All up we were in there less than an hour. Impressive and, as I said, re-assuring to know how humane, stress-free and painless it all is behind the scenes. The carcass now hangs in the cold store till Thursday when they can go down to collect it and see it cut up. For Charlotte and I, 'Phase 2' and the turn of my animals once we'd brought the trailer home and partaken of some nice banana/nut-loaf and a cup of tea (Liz was enjoying having been able to sub the job out to Charlotte and had baked but had also landed a 78 page document to proof read and correct for Mrs Silverwood).

We finally found venison! This from the Wicklow Mountains
but to us via Aldi (supermarket) in Roscommon. Cheap too!

My sheep were the ones in the frame now. I needed to fluke and worm drench all 4, inject new ewe-lamb 'Rosie' for Clostridium and fit her EID (electronic) ear tag to complete her legal identification now that we have decided to keep her as a breeding ewe. The latter went better than for Henno. Her ears must be softer or less sensitive (or I just missed all the nerves). She barely twitched as the 'pliers' closed, pushing the inner and outer halves of the tag together through her flesh. The drenching was 10 ml of each of two 'gloops' for each ewe, one white, one blue. These went OK and all ewes managed to swallow most of their 'shot' adroitly snuck into the side of the mouth while Charlotte held their nose high and sky-ward and their lips closed. No dribbling, ladies! Yes, it probably DOES taste awful but it's for your own good!

Soggy Doggies

At that point Charlotte's work here was done and I could deliver her home with her bags of offal etc and my afternoon "livestock" jobs were just all the feed rounds and taking the dogs for a lovely long walk across the Kiltybranks bog-land including a chance to leap into the stream and get nice and wet and muddy. Bless them. We have also been continuing their training on how to live with and love kittens and not eat them at the first opportunity. This is going a bit variably but so far no-one has been eaten, so I guess it's a success.

Deefer eye-ing up the hunting potential
of 2 kittens in Mum's easy chair.

Finally we remember our great friend Diane (also 'Diamond' on this blog) whose Birthday would have been today. RIP Diane. Still miss you. Never forgotten. Posh Cheese!

Are You Kidding?

Nanny gets her nose into the trough. 

Guest goat, Nanny Óg is still keeping us guessing and waiting. Will she kid? How many babies? When? She seems to us to be continuously growing in girth but her udder should soon start to look full to bursting rather than just big-but-saggy. Owner Carolyn has recently upped her estimate of when things might start to happen. Going by our knowledge of when we collected Nanny from the breeder (and thereby separated her from her men-folk) and of the gestation period, we had mentally had April 14th as the last likely date. If she was not done by then, she must just be fat or very late.

3 of the lambs, nice and stocky now, start to show a healthy
interest in the grown-ups' food. 

Now, though, Carolyn thinks that when we brought Nanny Óg back to meet Billy and she didn't want to know him (so we all surmised that she was 'with child'), that might have just been a 'first impression'. The pair were left together for a couple of weeks(?) before Billy started showing signs of head-butting Nanny in the flank when she tried to eat from either of the food buckets (his or hers). Carolyn became concerned about injury to Nanny or to any unborn children in that abdomen and separated them. If Billy had, in fact, managed to get his wicked way while humans were off watch, then the 'last-likely' date might stretch as far as the end of April. As the song says, "It goes to show you never can tell"

Mum makes a comfortable bed. 

Meanwhile, regular readers will recall an angst-filled post about the issue of dogs worrying pregnant sheep ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/02/exasperated.html ) which described the frustrations we were having with a local collie and its owner's inability to prevent the dog from straying (in our direction). That story ended with me having a bit of a rant at the lady of the house and, fair play to the people, they obviously heard me and strove to keep the offending lad under control. We never saw him again all through lambing and, in fact, right round to a couple of nights ago.

A nicer pic of the front of the house, sans trees

An apologetic Easter Egg from a dog?

When all hell broke loose among our dogs at 03:30 that morning we knew straight away that the dog was back. This time, we found, he was dragging 8 feet or so of chain behind him and I suppose that it was the unusual noise of this chain being dragged across our gravel drive and front lawn that was detected by our dogs. We sorted it in the usual way (all be it struggling to raise the owner in the middle of the night) and the guy could see from the fitting on the end of the dog's chain, how he had broken free. So, a load of apologies and off they went promising, as usual to hold the dog secure again.

No such luck that time, and we left the house the next evening so that I could drop Liz into the village, and who did we meet just outside the front door? Yes, our furry chum. More phone calls and a text message had us struggling to contact the owner, so I loaded the dog into our car and set out to drive him home, but then crossed paths with the guy half way there. He spotted us, turned round and followed us home. Usual apologies and promises but this time a nice sweetener. The dog had apparently been out and bought us a nice Lindor Easter Egg as an apology for all the trouble and inconvenience he is causing. Thoughtful dog.

Nice open view from the bedroom window. 

Back at the ranch our most pressing big (in terms of man hours and graft!) project is to start splitting our enormous pile of tree rounds into sizes that will help them season but will also fit into the solid-fuel range that does the heat and hot-water task round these parts. Local wisdom has it that this species of wood is easier to split up when it is new and green, than when seasoned. That is a bit counter-intuitive, as we expect log rounds to start splitting almost by themselves as they dry out. Black spruce, we are told, sets like rock when dry. We do not want to leave the pile there while we find out so I have had feelers out re log-splitting technology.

This little 'car trailer' sized splitter has a Honda engine and
punches well above its weight, with a 25 tonne blade force. 

I checked with our tree fellers to see would they come and do "some of" the wood - I don't need it all split just yet. They, however, have to come all the way from Strokestown so the 'logistics' (their word) of them doing it do not really pay - half a day's splitting would still cost €250 because of the 'call out' segment. They did say. mind. that they would kill half to 2/3 of our pile in that half day.

An hour's log splitting just to "make sure the machine was
working" generates quite a pile.

Step forward then, my bloke from down the road who came and sliced up the tree which got blown over in my pig-run 2 Novembers ago. He owns, I knew, a small car-trailer sized hydraulic splitter powered by a small Honda petrol engine. This beast proved to be very easy to operate once set up and is man enough to drive its wedge into your slice of tree with a force of up to 25 tonnes. That makes the engine grunt a bit but it soldiers on and to see a 2-3 foot diameter slice of  tree suddenly crack open is quite an impressive experience.

My man brought the machine here, set it up and showed me how to use it over the course of an hour's "checking it worked - it hasn't been used for 2 years". You can see from the picture how much wood we split in that hour. Loads of fun for me over the next few days or more working my way through the pile. All volunteers to help welcome!

87 growth rings on the stumps of one of the three trees. 1929!

On the subject of trees and wood we are still delighted with the new open views up to the house from the lane and from the bedroom window down the drive. The last few nights have been near-full moons so we get good views even at night across the lawn and, from my pillow, I can see sky and even the actual moon. It is quite bright all of a sudden. With all these logs it should be warm for years too.

Why do donkeys always appear to be judging you? This is not our animal, but I thought it would make a good '365' photo. It did, and it is now up on the Lisacul website (www.lisaculinfo.ie)

My Ol' Man Said Foller The Van

'Mad Max' vehicle lurking under a sheet. It does good 'lurking'!

I hinted in the last post that we might be in for a busy time of it this New Year as our friends Carolyn (of the mini horses) and K-Dub had been bounced by a rather rapid house sale and the need to clear out of house, yard, out-buildings and garden by the 5th of January. This coming hot on the heels of a family Christmas and then the need to attend a family wedding up in Dublin just prior to New Year.

Billy is a shaggy, out-doorsy kind of lad, pretty close to the
feral Irish 'wild goat'.

Anyone who has tried to move house after living in a place for ten years will be familiar with the sheer amount of 'stuff' that you can accumulate, especially when you have a small-holding with associated animal-management gear (kennels, hutches, horse-tack, buckets, dustbins of feed etc) and a daughter growing up through the teenage years and then shipping off to college. Add to that, that K-Dub is a professional Master-Carpenter, so his 'stuff' comes in the form of fully tooled workshop with massive table-saw, substantial router-deck, BIG pipe-benders and various drills, nail guns and saws which come in suitcase-sized cases.

Nanny Óg - pronounce the 'O' long as in 'bogus'. It is Irish
for 'young Nanny'.

He is also a bike-nut who goes in for heroic bizarre projects like home-built "trikes". Don't get the wrong idea that a "motor-trike" is not much bigger than a motorbike. This project is based around a Ford Transit Van engine, gearbox, diff and rear axle and will have a front wheel the size of a tractor rear one. Unfortunately this was still a work in progress at removal time, and there was no driving out and whizzing round to the new place. Three of us sweated blood manhandling it onto a trailer and bringing it round to my place where it has been given dry-ish car-port storage.

The daffs down by our gate think it is Spring.

We had a punishing, bone-aching time for 4 days packing the stuff and transporting it, some here, much more to an unoccupied house near the new place, generously offered by a soon-to-be-neighbour and a smaller amount to the caravan they have bought as a temporary home while the real house is made ready. Liz, Carolyn and a couple of other friends packed, stripped rooms and cleaned behind themselves while K-Dub and I plus various helpers down from Dublin loaded and hauled what seemed like dozens of loads in a big hi-cube builder's van and a long car-trailer out to the various destinations, often starting at 8 a.m. and finishing well after we had lost the light. It always seemed faster to unload than load; none of us could work out why.

Last of the Seasonal left-overs. The last slice of pud with
ice cream and cream for my lunch today. 

We may have missed the midday deadline on the 5th (it was more like 6pm) but the buyer was cool with that as they were not ready to move in anyway. As to the livestock, they had unshipped most of that, selling off all but one of #1 Daughter's 40+ rabbits, the one going to a local friend for safe-keeping. We inherited the 2 goats, also temporarily much to the amusement of all my friends who have been hearing me shout 'No Goats' ever since we have been here. These are a shaggy, mountainy-looking miniature male and a sweet, possibly pregnant, short haired lady who are called Billy and Nanny Óg. The Óg is pronounced with a long 'o' (as in bogus) and is the Irish word for young but Terry Pratchett fans may have also noticed a pun on the name of one of his 'Wyrd Sisters'.

June born lamb Dylan (left) with Mum

Although we had applied for Goat Herd number registration way back, this number had lapsed with our non-keeping of the species. I had to contact the Ministry boys today to get goats "active" on my list, so that we can officially transfer these two animals into this holding. Nanny is in with the ewes during the day but gets walked home to her warm, dry shed at night. These short-haired 'domestic' goats are derived from Mediterranean animals and they do not thrive in cold and wet. Billy is much more of a shaggy, mountainy, 'Irish' strain, like a French 'Mouflon' (with horns to match) so he is in the pig enclosure for now and sleeping happily in the pig ark.

The Sligo house rebuild looking good now.

And in case you had forgotten, today is 12th Night and Epiphany but much more important to Irish ladies, it is 'Nollaig na Mban' or 'Ladies Christmas'. a day for the ladies to relax and be pampered by their men-folks as a big Thank You for all the hard work those ladies do over the Festive Season. Where are those frozen pizzas I bought cheap from 'salmonella corner' at Lidl's?

Covering (a small bit of) Sligo in Concrete

Nanny (Óg) arrives home in our trailer. 

I had a nice chance to tease the 'Facebook lot' this week, when I was asked by our friend Charlotte to provide car and trailer to go off to buy a female goat (miniature in the original plan) for them. This goat was to be a companion to their existing goat 'Billy' who was sadly pining for his buddy, the miniature (gelding) horse 'Cody' who will be familiar to regular readers who have been with me for the last year or so. 'Codes' had been put back in his field and Billy was very vocal in his loneliness, bleating all day and all night.

Ain't she cute. Love the beard.

Billy is a miniature, so he really needs a mini-Nanny, but they are tricky to come by (as well as costly), so Charlotte has put herself on a waiting list for the breeder and meanwhile, sourced this Nanny to keep Billy company. She is actually in kid anyway, so Billy took one sniff and then lost interest till she wandered into his house looking every inch like she was taking over now, thank you! I have this running joke going with the Facebook crew that I am always sneaking off to buy new animals, usually with Charlotte as my accomplice, while Liz sits at home trying to rein me in. Something to do with having gone off to "look at" young turkey poults early this year and returned with our full sized adulrs, Tom and Barbara. It's not like that at all really, of (cough) course. I had put up on FB, a 'status report' that I was "NOT off to buy a goat" which, of couse, they all took to mean that I was off to do exactly that.

Cake mix ready for the oven.

Anyway, off we went to Knock village and following superb directions, found the bright pink 2 storey farmhouse we sought and the man showed us to the barn where the goats for our selection were kept. They were lovely clean healthy animals except for the feet and we got the distinct impression that they were housed permanently on deep-litter - a foot or so of old poo and straw over which the guy might have thrown some new straw that morning to fool us. That was OK. We knew we (I) could trim their feet up when we got home. They were all ear-tagged and official goats, so Charlotte chose one, paid up and we all retreated indoors to do paperwork.

Not bad for a first effort. This cake now gets well wrapped and
stashed away till mid December marzipan and icing time.

The goat is home now and we did, indeed, have some fun trimming her feet. She is a very sweet, well behaved animal and was no trouble to hold while I did "farrier" on her, lifting each foot in turn. I have never seen such long toe-nails on a sheep or goat, so it was very satisfying to give her the pedicure. Some of the 'toes' had long 'nails' on both the inside and outside, as well as a big thick horny growth at the 'heel' end, so that she was walking on tippy-toes on basically a tube of horn. No wonder Charlotte could see and commented upon how much more comfortably she was standing and walking when we'd done. Very satisfying job. The girl is officially called just 'Nanny' but we couldn't resist taking her a wee bit into Terry Pratchett territory by calling her 'Nanny Óg' (Young Nanny in Irish).

Pouring concrete at the Sligo house

The big story today, though, is of the major landmark achieved in the house build where I help just inside the Sligo border, that of pouring the concrete floor(s). This was always going to be a serious job and one causing a lot of concern to the 'main man' as he got all his ducks lined up in a row - men, equipment and concrete. This was going to be a new floor all through the existing house and out into the porch out front and across a 22' square extension out back, all tied together with 8 mm reinforcing mesh. It would involve 2 full concrete mixer lorry loads which if memory serves, translates into 17 cubic metres or 24 tonne, which is 320 heavy wheel barrow loads. The lorries would arrive at 1 and a half hour intervals, and there was no stopping once they arrived, so the main man had laid on a gang of 7 of us, mostly big, strong, fit, professional builders, mates of his from the building trade in Dublin. I say 'mostly' - 2 of us were obviously me and a tiny bar-man who they call "20%".

Of course, the weather chose today to totally fall apart and we were quite alarmed in driving out to the site at 08:15 to be driving through heavy sleet, some of which was laying on the tarmac. The day also laid on a few heavy rain bursts and a hail storm. Still, short story is we made it and main man is delighted that he got all the concrete in, spread and tamped, then 'bull-floated' down to a glass-smooth finish. He had 4 of the best lads on barrows running a shuttle service to/from the lorry's chute, and three of us on spreading, leveling and tamping. In the picture (which 'main lady' took at about 1pm) we are at the start of this, with just the first corner filled. I am on the right, main man in the middle and ace-tamper on the left. This was a first for me. I had seen our paths laid round our house but those lads pretty much asked me to get out of the way, so I watched from a distance. This time I was part of it. I am in awe of the work rate of these guys and massively impressed at the team work. I can see now why main-man needed all seven (and also deployed me to leveling; I'd not have lasted 5 minutes on those barrows!)

So, now the job is done and the guys have all adjourned to a local pub to celebrate with a few pints and to watch the Ireland (footie) match. I cried off this bit (though I was, of course invited) on grounds partly of knowing I'd not keep up with a gang of Dublin builders around the pints, but also because we had a special meal planned here tonight (Duck in Guinness) and by the time I was in, livestock done, dogs walked, shower taken and a glass of wine or two to the good, we were both a bit cosy and 'home' here. Good luck lads, and I hope Ireland win the match. Maybe we'll meet again further down the build. It was a blast. I could actually listen to those guys all day - they have worked together for years and the banter is superb.