Mind the Bike

Dan and Dan sign the Register in a gently rocking
environment. 

Friends of the Blog, frequent visitors and happy couple, Dan and Dan(ielle) were last seen about to take that stroll up The Aisle on board a cruise ship somewhere in the Med. Congratulations you guys; you obviously nailed it and sent us a rake of pictures to prove it. You both look splendid and look to be having a having a whale of a time. The very happiest and brightest of futures to both of you and we hope to see you again soon in your new guises and Mr and Mrs Dan. Thank you for sharing the day with us via social media.

Meanwhile, back in Roscommon, we are all feeling a bit quiet and subdued after the departure of "our Spanish lads", the Help-X pair, Manu and Pedro. They have moved on to a smallholding with horses near Blessington and we hope they are enjoying themselves  (almost) as much as they did here. They tell me there is no broad-band there, though, so they are reduced to text messaging and so on. We have written them a good review on the Help-X website and they may well write one about us. It should all help both parties find work or workers next year.

2 kinds of Spanish ham

We have been enjoying the wonderful 'stuff' the boys left in their wake and not just the 2 kinds of Spanish ham they surprised us with as their final act before getting into the car for their run to the railway station, one a big fat salami sausage, the other finely sliced 'Serrano' type ham.

Totem man carved by the lads

We've also been wandering round with big grins on our faces at the extremely tidy, parkland type look of our place and at the 'Easter Island Man' totem pole fella just inside our gate.

Back to normal for us, then (or what counts for normal round here), tidying, post-visit blitzing (tho' the guys were very tidy and generated very little mess) , a mountain of postponed laundry and ironing, repairing a couple of tools which did not survive the boot-camp, shopping and that sort of thing.

Puff balls

The old redundant, grassed over cow-muck heap behind what is now our goose house, celebrated by yielding half a dozen nice fresh white puff-balls. These have appeared before but we have never bothered with them and left them to go 'puff' with their dark green spores.

Lentils with sliced runner beans and puffball as part of a curry
menu. 

This time, I dived on 3 of them and brought them in to see if we could do a 'Food for Free' forage recipe. Liz quickly rattled up some recipes off the Internet and the puffballs have appeared for a couple of nights now as the 'mushroom' part of various dishes. We agree with the Internet advice that they have a very delicate (absent?) flavour and are best used "as tofu" as a creamy bland base for other flavours.

Beeblebrox's ever bigger chicks. 

I suppose I should quickly add a Health Warning for anyone reading this and trying to follow suit. Wild mushrooms and toadstools can be very poisonous and can be difficult to ID one from another. Small puffballs can look a lot like the scary 'Amanita' toadstool when it is still inside it's 'cowl' so you should always slice your prospective puffball in half down the middle to check that you have an amorphous white lump, not an embryonic mushroom- shaped structure about to burst out of it's ball-shaped cover. Also, make sure you are eating these guys fresh and white. Any discolouration of the flesh and they have gone over and may not be safe.

Honda Gold Wing under cover

Just for a change, we have been minding an enormous motor bike for some friends. It has gone 'home' now, so I am safe to reveal the fact. These are new friends, Les and Jean who are just starting in the Irish Smallholding game. They have bought the place a few km due south of here and have dropped in a couple of times to drop stuff and do a few bits, but they have not yet nailed down the immigration/changing jobs/money side of things. Jean is still working in the UK and Les is only at leisure because his work involves a school, so he is on Summer Hols.

How much dashboard do you need on a bike?

We got the bike to mind while they were both going to be away from their new place. We are not bikers but I had, at least heard of this beast, the Honda Gold Wing (Lead Wing to its detractors because of the weight).

Thunbergia.

It is a huge 'touring' style beast with very comfy leather armchair seats and a cocoon of panniers, boxes and storage baskets. The dashboard is a ridiculously well equipped panel like a plane cockpit with stereo speakers included. The engine, at 1500 cc is 50% bigger than the one in our car and the bike has a reverse gear! Launched in 1979 (Les tells me) these beasts are still for sale new but with an 1800 cc engine and costing around £24,000 (Sterling). So, a lot more than a new Fiat Panda then! No thanks, Bikers, you can keep that one. Les's isn't new, of course but he tells me he sold a classic old convertible Jag to find the money to buy this one.

Liz is producing some lovely clean carcasses and the birds are
making good weights. The last 4 have been 2.2, 2.5, 2.8 and
2.9 kg respectively. Not bad for 72 day old fowl.

Finally, as the Hubbard birds come up to 70 days old, we have started "harvesting" them in earnest. This is rather early compared to the advised age for full free-range ("slow grown") ones but we want to off them all by Liz's Birthday, so we have been sorting 2 a day. By now Liz is skillful enough at the plucking and dressing that the birds come out a lovely clean carcass and the last 4 have made very good weights oven ready; 2.2, 2.5, 2.8 and 2.9 kg.

These Lidl supermarket "cheapie" lilies have been a revelation.
In their tub just outside the front door, Liz tells me she can smell
them 15 feet away while pruning the roses and if we leave the
front door open, their scent fills the house. 

Amazingly, this batch of 12 chicks contained only one rooster. The chances of that would be 1 in 4096 (0.5 times 0.5, 12 times) but it doesn't really matter when you are only growing the birds for 70-80 days. The roosters may go slightly bigger but not much and we are more than happy with our 5-6 lb birds. 5 lb is way more than we two need for a meal, so most of them end up jointed up and the freezer fills up with bags labelled "4 Hubbard thighs" or what ever. It is, as ever, the most delicious, meaty and succulent chicken you are ever likely to eat. If you can, you smallholders, try to get hold of these Hubbard day-olds as your raw material for chicken-meat birds.

That is about it for this one. Catch up with you next time.

More on that build up

The observant amongst you will have noticed that we are now starting to publish a few pics of the humans involved in this saga. This with their permission of course, but mainly because all our readers have long since worked out who we were or got bored and moved on. These three pics then are of the sunset as seen from our dining room, out across the 2CV and the Fiat and through our very big mature Scots Pine trees. The second is of Dad relaxing in the caravan with both of us dogs and the third is of Dad enjoying a bit of pitch forking. The fork was among the few things of any use found in the outbuildings, most of the tools and implements having long since succumbed to woodworm so that the metal heads dropped to the ground under their own weight when lifted by the handle. So far we seem to have inherited from TK Min, just an ash tray / saucer, an enamel roasting dish in which, cleaned up, we have managed to roast a duck (see picture on previous post) very successfully in the range, and this hay fork. The handle of the fork is clean and new as if it has been nowhere near the woodworm.

Mum and Dad believe that this out building which has 2 human-sized doors and a chimney may be the original farm-house or single room cottage where the family would have lived until they moved into the 'new' house circa 1900. The chimney was clear but the hearth full of the inevitable jackdaw nest twigs and old debris, so Mum and Dad thought it would be fun to clear the area and light a fire in the hearth. This was just straw and old paper but it sent some smoke up the chimney while Mum and Dad sat back and thought that this was probably the first smoke going up that chimney for 100 years plus!

That was the plan, to do just the one full day and two nights up at Roscommon this week before retreating to Silverwood's for the 4 days of Christmas. We drove down today via the camping shop in Blessington (OK that's a bit of a diversion) where we needed a new mantle for the gas light. Those camping gas lights are very good but the mantle once burned to ash is very brittle and don't like being bashed around, so you need to keep a reserve of spare mantle cloth "tubes" available. We were welcomed 'home' by all the gang and have been fed and lubricated generously. We two westies and Coco the Yorkie have been shampooed to within an inch of our lives (and By God I needed it!).

Clean, fragrant, warm and dry!
Possibly staying clean for at least 4 days
Deefs

Toilets and toiletting

Last night all 5 dogs wind up in the dog house, as it were when we decide to have a pee and poo fest indoors at Silverwoods. It had been raining hard most of the afternoon and evening, so it is thought that the local dogs spent all that time in the kennel, rather than strolling round the yard and attending to doggie business. It is now the routine to let the three of them indoors after the 2 little ones are in bed.

This was 'interesting' at first because of the local three's loony excitement at being allowed in to see us and Dad plus, if you recall, them getting shampoo'd and rubbed dry and because I kept that anti-Rags thing going of growling and shouting from Dad's lap to repel boarders. That side of things has now calmed down a lot and after the first few minutes in all we dogs calm down. I stop shouting and change to following Lily round, trying to play with her and sniffing each others nethers. Coco tries to mount Lily from random directions and Max no longer tries to kill Coco due to having been threatened with the "Mop of Wrath" (Mrs S slapping mop on floor loudly near Max, which tends to stop him attacking Coco immediately!). A variation of this is the Broom of Doom,which is all getting a bit Terry Pratchett and "the folding o' the arms!"

But last night all the dogs came in from the rain and straight way felt, warm, relaxed and moving which must have brought on relaxation down below. The humans spent the next half hour discovering poos and pees with tissues and exasperated shouts "Oh No NOT AGAIN!" There was too much of it to have been just one or even two of the dogs involved - evidence pointed to all three. During the course of this a small hard present of mine was also discovered under one of the beds upstairs. 4 guilty parties and Haggis the only one not yet implicated. Dad joked that he'd wake up soon and feel all left out. "Heh Haggis! How about the hall or the back-room? They've not been anointed yet". Haggis straight away woke up, yawned, smelt the air and presumably thought. 'It must be OK to pee in here now, then', strolled over to the laundry crate and hiked a leg. "NOOOOO!!!! Haggis!" said Dad but Haggis either ignored it or was deaf to it and let go the sluice-gates. Cheers, H, now we're all in the dog house! Everyone's hoping for no repeat today, when there have been sunny intervals between the rain showers, so the outdoor dogs should come in 'prepared'.

While we're on toilets, Dad has been off today hunting for a chemical camping-toilet forr the caravan, but so far to no avail. No problem, the lady at the complete-caravans-only place in Newbridge told us of a place in Blessington, Co. Wicklow.

Unforgiven?

Deefs