Big Trees

Well, we're at 29,910 page views, so this could well be my last post. It's time to hand over the keyboard to Dad.

The 21st comes and goes and the broody hen still sits on the eggs and the baby chicks still sit inside their egg shells (we hope). To keep from everyone getting bored, I decided to do a post about trees; specifically some of the huge trees we have growing on the property. The biggest is pictured in the first three pics on this blog-post, with the first showing Dad's 6 foot 1 inch frame (in yellow circle) for comparison. For fun we did that triangulation thing to estimate the height, where you hold an inch-marked pencil out half a yard from your eye and measure the tree height against the pencil, then factor up by how far away from the tree you are standing. In Dad's case he was 35 yards away and the tree a foot tall against the measuring stick, so this, the biggest tree on the plot is, we reckon 70 feet tall. The girth of this giant at 4 feet from the ground is 94 inches (7 feet 10 inches) or 238 cm.

The second picture shows these trees as seen from down in the allotment; the big fella is the one on the right of shot. Locally these tree are known by the tree surgeons etc as "Dale Trees" and many people try to tell you they are sitka spruces but we've looked them up in the book and run their features through an identification key and we think they are Black Spruce (Picea mariana). They grow all around here and all over Roscommon, Lietrim and other counties and they all seem to have been planted at roughly the same time, starting maybe in the the 30's and 40's so perhaps some local forestry concern got hold of a job lot and they became a fashion.

Our 4th picture is of the trees along the 'Secret Garden' which we have mentioned before but not properly depicted. This was originally the veg garden and we know from talking to Vendor Anna that these were planted rather foolishly by her Dad (TK Max) as wind break saplings in about 1961. The Secret Garden has these up the inner west side with a nice row of beeches (showing Autumn colour in this shot) on the outside west, and some nice ash on the east, which may be coppiced for logs in a future Winter. These are the trees we'd like to have down but were going to be charged €1000 for the privilege by local tree surgeon and log splitter guy 'Oliver Splits'.

There you go.
We'll go back to excitedly watching over the broody hen for signs of eggs 'pipping'
Deefs

Tension Building

Coo! It's all happening! Dad thinks this retirement lark is meant to be all peace and quiet, a chance to relax, a time free from stress and anxiety. Not a bit of it round here at the moment as we have 3 separate pressure points coming up and as well as looking forward to the imminent visit from Niece 'Mads' who is over for a couple of days next week. Our three dramas are as follows.

1) Will there be any baby rabbits and a still-active nest in the compost heap when we go to rummage and look on Saturday? We have posted before that the black and white lop eared rabbit, Padfoot, started a nest back on the 6th of this month and that because rabbits are notorious for destroying the nest if it is disturbed, we pretty much made it a rain proof roof of corrugated but then backed off to leave it well alone for the early, vulnerable days. Baby rabbits are born pink, naked, blind and with their ears 'glued' down. After a week (says our learnéd tome, 'Practical Rabbit Keeping' by Katie Thear (Pub Ward Lock, 1981, ISBN 0 7063 5931 3)) fur begins to appear and at ten days the eyes open. The ears open and come upright at 8 days and at 2 weeks they are completely furred and quite alert. At this point they may start coming out of the nest to explore and therefore become vulnerable to cats, magpies and other predators, so it is at the 2 week point we are advised to 'rescue' them from the compost heap and transfer them to one of the Maternity Unit hutches (along with their Mother, of course). Mum and Dad finally get to see do we actually have baby rabbits, or have we been pussy-footing around a nest which is long gone and feeding extra rations just to make them fat for the winter? That's tomorrow!

2) Next up is our Broody Hen saga which may or may not result in the 'pipping' of up to ten baby chicks; the first possible day being Sunday 21st. Despite her breeding (which has been designed to breed out the tendency to go broody), her general dim-wit intelligence (getting on the wrong nest, which has caused Dad to rescue and move her back to the correct box half a dozen times) and the frequent disturbances from kittens, puppies etc, she has hung in there diligently for the 21 days. In an ideal world (those learnéd tomes again) you immediately move a broody and clutch to private quarters, safe from disturbance even from her sisters and from rats etc. But every time we've done that in the past the broody has immediately abandoned the nest and gone back to the sisters, so this time we left her be right there in the main coop with everyone else coming and going past her to feed, roost, lay their own eggs and so on. So on Sunday she might start to feel the stirrings of 'pipping' eggs under her and hear the cheep of emerging babies. If not maybe soon after. We then need to find out is she going to continue to be a good Mum. Our 'mentors', Anne and Simon advise us to 'rescue' her to the Maternity Unit also because the chicks, anyway, need special food (called "Chick Crumb") and a small 'drinker' (they have quite a tendency to commit suicide in their water bowls) and also need protecting from those rats, magpies, kittens and other bullies. This picture is, as you can see, not of the broody, but of the father, William the Conqueror, strutting his stuff along the front wall.

Then there's 3), will the 2CV pass it's NCT (= MOT) on Thursday at 08:30 in the Castlerea test centre? She is as ready as we feel she can be. The philosophy seems to be to get her nearly ready, submit her and then fix what she fails on (if anything) rather than to try to 2nd-guess the testers and pre-fix everything possible, which would be expensive. The garage says that sometimes you can get lucky with an old 'not-every-day' car and they might be a bit lenient. We shall see. These are nervous times.

Then, as I said, there is the excitement of the imminent 'Mads' visit. Mads may already be in Ireland as she was coming over first to visit her old chums at Dunboyne Castle (Near Dublin), where she did her 'work placement' year as part of her University course in Hotel and Business Management. On Monday she takes a train to Roscommon Station and we collect her from there. She stays with us a couple of days before we drop her to Knock Airport and the flight home. We are looking forward to it and we hope she is too.

And finally, there's the small minor excitement as the page views on this blog nears 30,000 and the planned hand over of this keyboard from me (Deefer) to Dad. We are currently on 29,770. Watch this space.

Deefs