Pay by Weight

Pay by Weight advisory letter. 

December already! Doesn't time fly when you're having fun? Tonight the post will mainly be rubbish. (No change there, I hear you heckle) - in this case the recycling and landfill stuff we put in those wheelie bins. We the customers of this service are to be moved, as promised, onto a 'pay by weight' system instead of paying just a standard 6 monthly rate.

Daffs just starting to show their noses.

My Brit readers may not be aware that 'over here' waste disposal is not done on the UK system of being included in the 'Poll Tax', so in Kent, we paid our £120 a month (or so) and trundled the bins out on the necessary day, paid to have them jet-washed if we chose and thought no more about it. Here, the "Local Property Tax" is very new and much smaller - more like €100 per YEAR and does not cover any services (as far as I know). You sign up to the local waste disposal contractor separately - in our case the man from Barna Waste spotted that we had moved in to the house and came up the drive on foot to recruit us.

The mead is still bubbling away.

We pay €175 per 6-months which covers both wheelie bins. In our case this is for recycling (cardboard, paper, tins, hard plastic (bottles and trays but not bags), metal etc, but not glass, plastic bags or crockery) in the blue bin and for landfill (black bun; everything else but not green or veg waste - we compost that - or glass bottles). Glass we take to the bottle bank (the "Drive of Shame" we call it). Wood we burn if possible.

We judge ourselves to be pretty good at this and keen to tread light footprints across the planet and we were fairly sure, when this much-talked-of change to pay by weight came along we'd be on the 'good guys' side of the fence. 'Barna Claus' might be making a list and checking it twice, but we hoped we'd be on 'nice' list. Rumour had it that new tech on the bin-lorries and smart tags on our bins would let the contractor know what weight of the blue and black bins was on each 'lift'. If we sneaked too much weight into the black bin we'd get charged more at the end of the 6 month period with the surcharge added to the next bill. We weren't 100% sure what the trigger point would be but were pretty sure we'd be below it.

Lisacul Players' next production (from the website).

Well. Now we know. A letter arrived today advising us that we will continue to be charged €175 per 6 months but that is buying us an 'allowance' of 450 kg on the black (landfill) bin across the 6 months. If we go over the 450 we will get charged at 22 cents / kg. These are fortnightly pick-ups so the 6 month amounts to 13 visits, but the limit is quite a generous 34.6 kg per bin.

The season for hearty stews with loads of root veg. This one
from one of the culled cockerels - a Roo Stoo?

We can relax. We have never even got close to 34 kg. This is confirmed by the flip side of the advice letter which helpfully tells you what you put out for them in the 6 months April 2017 to Sept 2017, in our case only 110 kg. The blue bins are not limited or surcharged (though I assume they are checked!) but it was good to know that we only put out 78 kg via that route in the test period.

Bobtail's 3 chicks at 11 weeks seem to suddenly be like small
hens, rather than babies. 

Now the quick thinkers among you, at least if they are as cynical as I am, might be thinking that, hold on, if my €175 buys me an allowance of 450 kg of waste and I have only been using a quarter of that, might there not be space in these sums for a discount for the "very good" guys? There was talk of that in the early negotiations, apparently but any whisper of this costing less than the €175 has vanished from the Barna Waste communications. Ah well.

Meanwhile, everything else is chugging along. Bobtail's 'babies' seem to have changed overnight into small hens and left behind all traces of chick-hood. Stumpy's three (9 weeks) are not far behind. The white hen, Connie, is now settled happily in her broody-cage where she can get to food and water but none of her sisters can helpfully drop eggs in and add to her workload.

Stumpy with 2 of her youngsters. 

I need to make sure there are no hen eggs in there because if she hatched one of those at 21 days, she might get off the nest with it and abandon the nearly-'cooked' duck eggs. After a week this is not a problem, because any hen eggs dumped in would hatch after the ducklings which is not ideal but would not harm the ducks.

Connie's broody-cage. She is behind the
'galv' bucket which is on top of the black
tool box. 

I also finally got to pruning the willow hedge/arch, which is now in its 4th year so is producing some pretty big, thick unwanted branches.

Pruning the willow arch.

This is quite a major undertaking and produces a big pile of willow 'sticks'.

Nice and cosy. Connie sitting on 5 duck eggs. 

Enough for this one, anyway. Good night all.

The Best Cheese Ever?

Nicest cheese so far, by a long way. 

Here pictured is, we are sure, 'our' nicest cheese ever. All Liz's work, this one and a first try at a new recipe. Both of us had been plugging away last season at the soft cheeses and Feta style semi-soft ones using the very generous gifts of 9 litre batches of goat's milk coming from Sue and Rob. These are all a case of gentle warmth, waiting for curds, slicing curds into dice, lifting with a slotted spoon and straining in a colander with or without gentle pressing to help drive out the whey. This followed by a short wait, and no real 'maturing' time.

More 'Gubbeen' style cheese at the salt-cure stage. 

This year Liz went with a recipe from the Gubbeen book (Gubbeen (The story of a working farm and its foods) by Giana Ferguson, pub Kyle 2014, ISBN 978 0 85783 240 5 page 98+) which added an extra stage. This was "scalding" - reheating the separated cheese/whey to 39ºC and then breaking up the curds into tiny pieces (the size of unburst pop-corn) with your hands, followed by quickly scooping them out and into the final mould, where they will quickly set into one lump; your embryonic round of cheese.

An impressive hail storm turned us white
on Wednesday.

This 'lump' is drained some more, then cured with sprinkled salt all round (including turning to get at top and bottom) and washed now and then with saline while it matures for 10 days and develops a rind. To be honest, we could hardly wait. It looked so promising but today was the day. Patience was key. Well, dear reader, we are delighted. It is, as I said, the best ever - I'm saying "our best ever" though I wasn't involved at all, because it way 'out-cheeses' anything I have done.

It is a firm cheese with a definite rind. The flavour has the lovely delicate level of acidity and salty savouriness that it needs without overpowering the gentle goat-milk tang. It is dry-crumbly without a hint of the 'sweat' or greasiness you'd get in plastic-wrapped, shop Cheddar. We are delighted and Liz is re-living those Greek Island lunches where cheese just like this (She and Diane called them "Not-Feta") came with tomatoes, basil, olive oil and other sun-soaked accompaniments.

Roll up! Roll up! Git yer iggs frum 'appy
'ens 'ere. Fresh laid!

Meanwhile, while we are on 'produce' we are having our first venture into selling eggs at the farm gate via an 'honesty box'. We have no idea how this will go. Various friends and contacts have had some good success with the method.

The 'Manus', hatched when we had the Help-X lads here are
5 weeks old and will soon be leaving Mum. 

Our main contact (no names etc) reports only one problem when a neighbouring farm had some Herberts camping in one of the fields who took to roaming around on mopeds and stopped one day for an egg fight up and down the road. Our friends were out that day and came home to an empty box, no money, obviously, and eggs smashed all over the tarmac. Ah well. We put ours out yesterday and we know it has been spotted and the word will have gone round. Maybe the weekend will see a few first customers

The wine gets racked off and 'stabilized' (= killed)

The batch of 5 gallons of red wine completed its first ferment and comes due for racking off, 'killing' with stabilizer and fining. These are all words which would have tripped off the tongue back in the 70s. My brothers and I had 30 gallons of different wines on the go back then and all that terminology was 2nd nature. Now, I must confess, this is a bit of a rusty re-visit and  the 'fining' etc is just a case of following the instruction sheet from the kit-box and adding, at the right time, the contents of sachet D, E and F. Ah well. It'll surely taste OK.

At least 2 babies for Bobtail. Bottom left. 

Our current 'first' broody hen comes up to the crucial day, #21. This is 'Bobtail', a Buff Orpington with all her tail and bum feathers long since pulled out. "No better than she should be" (as they say here) she used to have a perfectly good tail, but she seems to love the attentions of the Rooster rather too much (!) Never mind, she went broody and thus gets a few weeks break from Gandalf's amorous attentions.

Bits of Cider Press in the paint shop.

We love that you can play a trick on a broody hen on due-day to see whether she has hatched. If you drop some food under her chin inside the nest she will either quietly peck away and eat it, or she will start that low-pitched bass-y clucking hens use to tell babies they have found food for them. If the latter, then if you stand a while and watch, any hatched, dried off and mobile chicks will surely start to appear from under her 'skirts' to see what Mum is talking about. I did this at lunchtime today with Bobtail and was pleased to see at least 3 youngsters emerge. Her colleague, 'Stumpy' 3 boxes along is not due for another 2 weeks. She is sitting on 7 eggs at the moment. More on this when we have progress. I'm off to see if I can blag some more of that cheese.....