Joyeux Noël, Wren-girls and Ducklings

Messin' with the guests (1). Left to right here, Liz, Augustin,
Mum/Marion (top) and Clara

Best behaviour for the cameras obviously.

When I left you last time we were on the 'ground-rush' phase of Christmas prep, mixing stuffing, glazing ham, trussing turkey, doing last minute shops and counting down the hours to the arrival of our French guests, only one of whom we had ever met. Augustin, of course, called AB while he was here (September) but whose name I can now confidently pronounce as "August-an". That now seems like a lifetime ago.

We have enjoyed one of our best Christmasses of recent years, we all got on like a house on fire and had the break full of happy, jokey banter and chat, sometimes in full French with Liz working hard to dig up all the old vocab' and grammar of her fluent 'au-pair-in-Toulouse' days and massively impressing the Parisians (I am winging it!), sometimes with me stumbling along in 'schoolboy' mode making them laugh (The English are so charming with their mistakes) and sometimes with the visitors equally keen to practice their English. 'They' were AB, his Mum (Marion) and his younger sister, Clara. 

My most noticeable charming mistake was probably mis-remembering ' (table) knife' as 'canif' This had AB and Clara almost wetting themselves as they dreamed up movie scenes while setting out the 'family silver'. A 'canif' is in fact a gang -criminal weapon - a flick knife or a stiletto. They had visions of no-one having a knife to hand and having to whip deadly daggers out of their socks to stab the turkey.

Oeufs de Noël?

The turned out to be the perfect guests. They were dead easy to keep entertained, they loved the food and were hugely impressed by Liz's cooking and well intrigued by the idea of a Christmas pud and later the cake, neither of which they would have been familiar with. Especially they were entertained by the idea of putting the silver thru'pences in the pud and then having the diners choose left or right at the serving so that they could not cheat, gain a thru'pence and thereby become rich... well OK. Clara found the only coin, so she will be the only rich one.

We know AB, of course, and his dreams of travel. Mum (Marion) turns out to be both a former classical singer, now singing teacher, and to be involved in some way with the medical drug/substance abuse support that was Liz's line in Kent. She was quite taken with my voice and wondered if she could do anything with it as a singing teacher. Everyone is different, she says, and your voice is strong and basso-profundo. Clara has picked up 'Grandma Pierette's' DNA (she of the 'Beouf carrottes' recipe AB fed to us in September - see earlier post).

Cutting the Christmas Cake.

Grandma P worked as a nuclear physics scientist in the Marie Curie Institute (we think) and Clara has a real dream of getting in to astro-physics. It was a clear sky on the night of 25th, so we were able to show her our beautiful, unpolluted sky star-field. the "Night of a Million Stars" as we call it. Being from Paris, hazy skies and light-pollution none of them had ever seen anything like it.

AB is a mad keen Chelsea fan. Liz knitted him this CFC hat. 

Marion also fell in love with the livestock and the idea of 'farming' (she was even, at one stage, talking of selling up in Paris and moving to Ireland) and was particularly taken with the new female Guinea Fowl and their 'Buckwheat buckwheat' repetitive calling. I think that was what woke her up, not the 'Cock-a-doodle-doo' of the roosters. We ended up having quite a laugh combining the language hic-cups, the singing lessons and the 'buckwheat' calls into a tongue-in-cheek song-writing session where we tried to include all the in-jokes in the song lyric. ...there goes Elizabet'.... with a cigarette (buck wheat buck wheat)... and it was very funny (buck wheat)... when Clara found the money (buck wheat etc). Ah well. Maybe you had to be there.

Good French people arrive bearing gifts - this massive array of
good trad, strong cheeses, wine, chocs, tea and coffee

All good things must come to an end, though, and our guests were due to head back to Dublin for an explore of the James Joyce sites this morning, the 26th, a Bank Holiday of course. AB had 'found' a bus from Castlerea leaving at 09:00, the only one of the day, he said. We had a rather early alarm call to get everyone through tea and coffee and into the car by 08:30. Liz had done them a 'picnic' of left overs to save everyone having to cram a breakfast.

Possibly the best 'hang' we have ever done.
Succulent and delicious.

But the bus never arrived; AB had mis-read the Internet and found a train that only runs tomorrow. Liz saved the day, going back in on the end of a phone and found our guests a bus from Balla-D at 10:30, so a quick hurried car-shuttle got them to their transport and we did not have to creep back indoors praying that Liz had not stripped the beds. We have since heard from them that they safely made the bus. 

That ham, sliced. Our own pig, of course

That was us, then, back on our lonesome and it now 'Wren Day' or 'St Stephens's Day'.... Boxing Day in the UK. We were determined to have a relaxing time and not achieve too much. There was a bit of pottering but we were both so full of food, that we have not really looked at any food till now - half past 6 at night! The fridge and many other places are stuffed with food - most of the ham is still with us and over half of that beautiful turkey.

All organised. There are lists on the fridge. 

We did not even broach the gifts of fancy cheese, chocs or wine that the guests arrived with. Neither did we 'open' the 'Parma' style ham. There was a menu list, of course, magnetted to the fridge but we were so well fed by the main meal, that the supper just faded like Scotch mist and never got 'deployed' to the table. We all managed a single slice of cake but then collapsed back into our food coma. There was one more customer - a near neighbour - whom we did a 'Meals on Wheels' dinner for but the 'cupboard' is by no means bare yet.

One job we did have to attend to is to give poor crippled, sick-bay hen 'Doris' a good old clean up round the feet. She was badly beaten up by our November 2016 fox and has not been able to walk well since but we felt sorry for her and did not have the heart to cull her out. She has laid a few eggs and comes out of the 'bedroom' part of her run to talk to her number #1 fan, Herme the rooster or to hoover up proffered food but we daren't let her out as she would not be able for the weighty and enthusiastic attentions of a cockerel.

Duckling visible under our broody on the 26th

The only other story today is a good-news tale of our very late-season broody hen, Connie. Friends of the Blog will know that we slipped 5 duck eggs under her back in late November, 'aiming' to have her hatch them while the French visitors were here. 5 other eggs we set in an incubator scored zero. The broody went all through the 24th and 25th with no action, and off went our visitors this morning, unrewarded. The ducklings (les canetons) were not co-operating. No sooner were the French off the premises though, than Connie ejected 2-3 half shells from the nest, empty, dry and hatched out. We lifted her (grumbling) to check and can see at least one healthy duckling. The guests missed the birth by hours.

Finally a fine Irish tradition of which I have spoken previously - Wren Day, when (on the 26th) gangs of local lads in 'Mummers' costumes would parade a captive wren (or a fake one) around the village, calling at houses and extracting treats or money with 'menaces' or they might kill the wren. This all to pay for their knees-up, of course. It was a tradition which died out in the 50s but which now is being revived like 'Trick or Treat' at Hallowe'en. We were happy to be 'mugged' today by a couple of young lasses leppin' in and out of Dad's VW Golf to go door knocking, armed with penny whistles and quite some skill in playing them.

It has been a cracking Christmas, the guests were superb and would be welcome back at any time.

The Boys are Bereft

Apollo and Belvedere, 2 Guinea Fowl cock-birds suddenly
lacking a focal point in their lives. 

Long term friends of the blog may recall that we first got into Guinea Fowl back on Nov 5th 2013, 3+ years ago. Back then we purchased Henry and Min named after the aul' wans on the Goon Show with dreams of eating their eggs and possibly a few young birds.
( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2013/11/guinea-fowl.html ).
Much later, Henry was killed out on the road while minding Min who was hiding in the hedge opposite laying the next of a clutch of 16 eggs. Min abandoned the eggs when her hubby was lost and we incubated them, hatching 13 youngsters (keets).

Cornflower

If memory serves, we sold some of these to a local lad who wanted to start a 'flock' but then lost the rest to a fox attack. We certainly never ate any - I'd remember. The pining Min then annoyed us for months with her "Buck wheat buck wheat" mate-calling till we blagged a couple of males from our friend Sue. These were Apollo and Belvedere. Min fell in love with Belv' and Apollo had to take a support role, watching in the wings as back-up.

Arum lilies do very well here.

Min (with Belv's help) may have been laying eggs this year but if there was "anything" going on or any eggs being laid then we never saw a sausage. All good so far. However, a week or so back, our Min was suddenly badly injured a across the 'saddle', all the feathers stripped away and a big bright slick of blood on the place, as if she'd been flayed. She was still walking but we really needed to catch her and isolate her, to give her a chance to recover. We had no idea whether the cock bird(s) had suddenly got rough or maybe she'd fallen prey to the chicken-rooster, Gandalf and his spurs. I caught them "just after" the act, I think, with G strutting and crowing and Min flat on the ground in a daze, bleeding.

Well, anyone who has had experience of Guineas will know how hard they are to catch and we never managed it, plus we thought that life in a crate or rabbit-run might be too stressful to actually do her any good. We decided to watch her and, true to form, the next day she seemed very 'repaired', bald but not bleeding. We chugged along for the next week with Min mainly recovering but occasionally getting blooded again.

Buff Orp laying eggs on the diff of K-Dub's
abandoned "Mad Max" trike. We are minding
this beast which has the back end of a Transit
engine, gearbox and final drive and may, in time
get the forks and front wheel of a tractor. 

Then on Weds 31st May night she seemed to go downhill and went 'to bed' OK but roosted down on the floor of the coop (among the ducks) instead of up in the rafters. It wasn't looking good and, indeed, I found her in the morning, as I expected, stiff and cold. We guess she died from her injuries or an infection taken in through that huge wound. Poor thing.

A family favourite blue Geranium, 'Orion'

So now we have two Guinea Fowl cock birds who are bereft. Stripped of their main reason to be, their woman to Marshall and mind, their prize to fight over, their appetite to protect from chickens trying to steal "her" share of the food, they are lost. They are currently hanging with the chickens and not at all sure at bed time whether they should be going to bed without Min.

Peas showing promise in the tunnel.

We are wondering what to do. The boys are real characters despite having brains the size of petit-pois and are excellent Guard-Dogs kicking off a hell of a racket should a fox or intruder come on site. Back when we lost Henry, we bought them because lonely Min was breaking our hearts with her calling. Will we just buy a couple of gals for the boys and carry on? More on this in future posts.

Big boots and tiny plimsolls.

June is with us and the season for Elderflower cordial (and "champagne" if you are of a mind and have the bottles for it). I was out on the front lawn a couple of nights back giving the dogs their off-lead exercise session when I saw my good lady striding out of the woods armed with a bulging carrier bag but walking in a very "clompy" fashion - not her normal gait at all. It took me a while to work out that she'd been out gathering elderflowers and, to protect those calves and knees from the stinging nettles, she'd found that her feet, still in their plimsolls would easily fit in my 'huge' wellies (inches to spare, allegedly).

Elderflower cordial

The elder flower cordial is probably our favourite soft drink. I love it with sparkling water whenever I need to be off the alcohol (zero tolerance driving in this house). It is very popular too with guests and visitors and Liz has taken a bottle of the cordial to work so that colleagues can enjoy it. A real taste of Summer.

Nice bit of resurfacing by the lads from Rosco-Co-Co (the
 County Council) in our lane but the dogs hate every last
sharp stone chip and every little sticky bit of tar from it!

Finally a silly story which made me laugh. I was taking an old boy, friend and neighbour on a run out to a nearby town on an errand. En route we trundled past an anonymous shop - no sign-writing, no logos, no name, no clue telling you what it might be selling. I had barely noticed it but the Old Boy (OB) piped up with "That's really good shop... Sells EVERY thing.... and if he ever doesn't have what you are looking for you only have to ask him and he will get it in for you". "Fine", I said, "but what kind of stuff does he sell?"
OB: "Ahhhh,,,, I wouldn't know that now...." Not a lot you can say to that, really. OB was not volunteering any more information, anyway, so we drove on in silence.

A mystery construction at the local crossroads. More on this
in a future post. 

That's it for this one. I will just leave you, as usual, with a couple more pics. Still no goslings but we do now have a chicken gone broody in an old knackered wicker basket full of hay in the shed. Bye for now.

I am suddenly getting a way higher readership than of yore.
Thank you very much who ever you are. 

Hungry Gap? (Blondie and Broody Buff)

The last knockings, 2013 spud store

Photographed here the very last of our stored Sarpo Mira spuds. They have done brilliantly and way above my expectations. Not only were they almost entirely blight resistant, but they yielded well - good total weights and some fine big tubers amongst them. Having read our grow-in-Ireland books (Klaus Laitenburger) I was also expecting some poor storage performance; it is normally too damp and cold to get spuds (and onions etc) properly 'ripe' and dry for storing. We did get a few tubers go to mush in the bags but as long as you tip them all out a couple of times through the winter to remove damp looking or obviously mushy ones, the rest seem to make it through. Because these are unwashed going in to bags, the bad ones are easy to find in the store as the mud round them never quite dries out, so you just pick put the obviously darker, 'damp' ones. So, here we are on Good Friday and have not quite run out of spuds.

Still a few parsnips in the ground

Not quite so stunning with the onions and garlic but I am equally impressed and delighted because the onions were the veg specifically mentioned by KL as being difficult to ripen. In the UK, everyone knows, you fork them out of the ground when they are ready, and leave them on the soil to dry out with their roots exposed. The hot sun bakes them ripe and you tie them into ropes and hang them in the shed. Here in the West of Ireland, generally, they would just get rained on and start to rot away. Indeed, when we were first here and bought locally grown onions they always seemed very juicy and sappy, as if they had not really been dried out properly for storage.

Leeks still going strong

Well, we got lucky, I guess, in our first season being 2013 with its hot dry spell just as my onions and garlic came ready, so we lifted them and spread them out in a single layer across chicken wire frames in the car port, rain free and ventilated above and below. They dried well and we tied them into ropes which we then hung still in the carport for most of August. All this fuss worked and we have been eating clean, ripe, firm onions and garlic right round to early April. At that point they had started to go soft and to show green shoots, so Liz brought them in to the kitchen, peeled and shredded them all for the freezer, where they lived on for a while till turned into a Greek style rabbit 'stifado' casserole (incidentally, also using up the last rabbit).

Globe artichokes going great guns.

We are presumably in what the old style small-holders would have called their 'Hungry Gap', with the last year's stores running out and the new not yet happening. We may be able to cut a few asparagus shoots (about half a dozen if we are lucky!) in a week but that is not going to give us the calories we need to keep gardening. Luckily we still have plenty of parsnips in the ground (all be it now starting to re-grow greenery and push out those tiny fibrous white roots from the sides of the big tap root) and leeks and, of course, freezers full of different beans. But we had to buy a 1 kg net of onions this week - that was a bit of a shock; first time since last summer.

Meanwhile we have had our Buff Orpington hen go broody on us. We love the way that she spreads out when she sits on eggs; she is almost spherical when standing up but collapses to look like a cushion. She gives the impression she'd be able to cover a dozen or more eggs, but we have just left her on the 7 eggs which were to hand when she got the urge. They will, if successful, be a motley old mixture from our 2 roosters (Sussex Ponte and Buff Orp) mating with any one of our hens (SP, this Buff, the 'mini-buffs, our Jersey Giant, the Hubbards and just possibly our Marans). We'll let her go with these for her first try, but really we are interested in slowly moving the flock over to pure-bred Buff Orps and allowing the Sussex Ponte to fade away by 'natural wastage'. She went broody on the 17th, so all being well her 21 days 'cooking' will be up on the 8th May. Wish her luck.

Blondie - the new Guinea hen.

Finally, we have a new recruit, having taken in a waif and stray, a friend of Liz from Knitting Club had a hen Guinea fowl which was widowed by the cock bird being hit by a car. Guinea hens are very plaintive and strident in their distress and mourning and this poor thing was apparently 'mooping' around rather over-dramatically, perching on an old lady's window sills and shouting her distress in through the windows. Rather than try to find the hen a new mate they decided to off load her and there we were. She is a nice little thing (OK - she IS noisy, calling her buck-wheat, buck-wheat shouts all day long) and very pale in colour compared to our previous Guineas, so we have called her Blondie.

Happy Easter

Today she just gets to settle in, in a rabbit run where she can see and hear the place but no-one can beat her up. Tomorrow at some stage we will release her into the Kitchen Garden (more space but still separated by chicken wire from the gang) and on Sunday, all being well, we hope to unleash her on the place. So far Min and Henry have found her and seen her but not gone anywhere close. When a cat walked by her and made her shout in alarm, Henry shouted back and moved towards her rabbit run, but we've not seen any close buddying up through the wire. More on this story as it develops.

Have a great Easter and Happy Birthday to Mrs Silverwood who is trying to enjoy having her kitchen taken over by 'helpful' kids and husband as they do their best to spoil her rotten.

Sixteen to Sit On

In our 'book', geese are meant to come into egg laying in spring when they start to receive the attentions of the gander. They will then accumulate 12-14 eggs before conveniently going broody and sitting on them. These "facts" are based, of course on what we've read plus picked up from Anne and Simon plus one chaotic breeding season when our gander was probably the girls' brother and the two geese nested so close together that each could rob all the other's eggs while she hopped off the nest to bathe and the other would then rob them back in her turn. In short we never knew WHERE we were and resolved to do it better this year. Anne will tell you, though, that these 'facts' are no such thing and birds will do what birds will do, unpredictably and surprisingly to keep you, the poor human, on your toes.

The purr-fect excuse to not do the ironing today?

One of our geese ( you may recall they were named Goosey and Goocie for a laugh but between Liz and I we never knew which one we were talking about, so they now have new add-on names which refer to distinguishing features, Goocie is 'Smudge' and Goosey is 'Black Feather'), Smudge, stayed in lay all winter, all through Christmas and is still there now, an egg every other day. She became (Gander) George's first love and he started 'loving' her a good month ago. We decided to let her start accumulating a clutch. Black Feather came back into lay on the 8th Feb but she was sleeping in separate quarters. We knew she wasn't getting mated, so we have been collecting her eggs for the kitchen. Since then, George has now accepted both the geese, so we are all happy families and Black Feather is now laying in the same nest as Smudge, so I have just had to know which day it is and let Smudge carry on accumulating (odd day dated; e.g. 5th, 7th, 9th etc) while robbing Black Feather's even-date (4th, 6th, 8th) eggs. So far so good. Smudge, though has now got up to 16 eggs and is showing no sign of going broody. The weather might be the reason.

Making up bee hive frames. This one for a honey 'super'

After a nice dry, spring like week which had us out gardening and even enjoying a rain-less St. Patrick's Day parade, we are back to wind, rain and wintry showers. This morning I got a nasty surprise while out chain sawing up some logs when I felt a rat-a-tat on my hard-hat and the mesh visor started to get less 'see through'. Snowy wet hail was hammering down on my hat, sticking in the visor mesh and going down the back of my neck. A joke's a joke, but that wasn't.

Finished hive frame. This one for the deeper 'brood' box.

While we are on the 'egg laying' subject, we are now convinced that Guinea Fowl hen, 'Min' is laying eggs in the hedge or scrub at the far side of the field opposite our property. For 4 consecutive days she has nipped off secretly for 2-3 hours, returning at about 3:30 pm. She announces her return with her 'Buck wheat buck wheat' call and Henry is ridiculously delighted to see her, like some sloppy love story re-union. Yesterday she called from the gate and Henry flew the full length of the driveway at 5-6 feet above the ground to be back with her. It's quite sweet. We had seen him hovering around the bit of hedge we think she is using, and once she was back we went for a sneaky check of the brambles etc but could see no sign of the eggs or nest. We are a bit lost on what to do about this so we are clinging to the fact that she should be safe enough in that thicket from Mr Fox (who is still keeping, much to our delight but also surprise and confusion, a very low profile; we (touch wood) never seem to see foxes or mink). We hope (barely able to believe that this could happen) that she goes broody out there, successfully sits for the 28 days and then leads the keets home in a picturesque little 'crocodile'. We are not happy about this but short of trying to contain these wanderers in some kind of aviary, that seems to be our only hope.

Meanwhile a prompt email shout from the Two Marys sorted me out a bit of confusion over assembling bee hive frames. I have two sizes to build, the tall, 'thin' sort for the (11 in the) brood box, and 10 less tall, 'thicker' ones for the honey comb in the 'super' (as in 'upper') boxes. I had a random collection of parts not assigned to either type as well as being a pair of side bars short, so I was a bit stumped. Mary McN has now sorted me out and I am 'away on a hack'. Indoor craft for rainy days. Mustn't put the sheets of foundation in yet though. Being wax, if it gets warm it can sag in the frames making them all uneven for the bees to build from. If it gets cold it can be brittle and can shatter in the frames, so we build the frames up to part-complete and store the sheets of foundation flat at room temperature.