Sheep Shearing

Definitely not of marketable quality, a pile of white fleece from
our ewes Lily and Myfanwy. Polly's slatey grey fleece is out of shot.

Nothing if not a bit of variety in this post - shearing sheep, snatching a beehive under cover of darkness and a bit of a barney in the roosters dept. Read on.

Not bad - our 3 ewes all looking tidier and a lot cooler

The sheep shearing is the 'biggest' story from my point of view. It is an important job and one I am trying to learn to do myself but I am finding it hard and difficult work. Last year I tried to do my ewes the 'proper' (professional) way - all that upside down wrestling and sheep on its rump between your legs that you may have seen at Agricultural Shows. It is wearing on the back and, while you are not very good yet, tends to take too long - up to an hour per sheep - for all of which time the poor ewe is under a lot of stress. I finished last year helping friends Sue and Rob by shearing their ewe, 'Pink', who is trained to a head collar and stands upright, on her own feet, reasonably calmly and lets you shear her without any fuss and wrestling. Blow trying to do it the pro way, I decided. I was determined in 2016 to do all ours upright. But head collars for sheep?

The ewes sheared with a bunch of this year's lambs. Goat and
kid in the background.

Anybody that knows sheep will know that you should really collar-train them from lamb-hood. They are big, strong, heavy animals and do not take kindly to suddenly having a collar round the neck or a halter about the face. They will buck and jump and fight and thrash about, especially if they can see a way out. We were not at all sure that our plan to corral everyone into a tight space while we collared the ewe and then have Liz whispering sweet nothings in the front end while we got a collar on and tied the sheep to some solid cattle-race ironwork, would keep the ewe calm enough when I fired up the noisy, rattling shearer and plunged it into the wool at the back end.

We followed up our own sheep success
by shearing Sue and Rob's ewe, Pink
(here) and Pink's 2015 lamb, the shearling
 'Rosie' today. 

Well, in a triumph of calmness, it all went OK. Liz undoubtedly had the harder physical job, hanging onto the rope after she'd "put a turn around" the bars (as we narrow-boaters say!) and steering the sheep's body with a spare knee or hand. I started with a long 'blow' up the spine to open up the fleece and then zizzed out and down in long stripes like mowing a lawn, with the fleece falling away like a cardigan put on backwards. I finished by nipping around legs, under the belly and up the brisket and neck, and finally by shifting the collar down and doing the face.

A Guinea Fowl hurls abuse at everyone
and anyone from our "Howth Head" rock.

We took around 45 minutes for the first ewe (already much faster than 2015), and then sped up with 35 for the 2nd and 25 for the 3rd. We were covered in lanolin and sweat (plus a bit of poo!) but happy and delighted that the job was over here. I just needed to get over to Sue and Rob's today to tackle Pink again and their shearling ewe (2015 lamb from Pink), Rosie. Now I can clean the machine and put it away for another year. I am quite proud of myself and feel like I am doing OK at this shearing lark.

A second hive collected at night - still needs the straps tidying
away and the roof settling properly. 

I spoke in the last post of our friend and near-neighbour T McC coming out of bees after a sting reaction and dispersing his numerous hives. We had agreed to take one of these so we were back into the joys of trying to safely move a hive containing 20,000+ stinging beasties. Readers who were with me on 13th April 2015 (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2015/04/reinforcements.html) will know that you have to do this at night because otherwise all the workers are out foraging and they get left behind. You need to wait till around 22:30 and they have all gone to bed.

We got 1.764 kg of lovely lean 'parma' ham off our leg. 

The hive is made up of a stack of square boxes which sit on top of each other with no lugs or fixings, so to secure the stack we use gaffer tape all around the joints (to stop the boxes hopping out of line as the car goes over bumps), then ratchet straps over the stack in both directions. The final move is to block the entrance hole with foam and secure with tape, then heft the stack gently onto a wheelbarrow and slowly trundle it to the car. It gets the softest seat in the car (passenger seat) and is lashed to the seat back. You align the hive's internal frames north-south to minimise the slapping if the car brakes - you take all the corners veeeeery gently. You arrive at your destination apiary in pitch darkness and set the hive down on its stand. You gently peel back the foam and tape from the entrance and leg it back indoors. The hive then sits for a few days to settle before you worry about tidying up the remaining tape and straps. In our case it all went well and the ladies were all out doing orientation flights next morning and then normal missions and returns by afternoon. Good luck Hive 2; we hope you will be very happy and content here. Thank you very much T McC.

The Colonel has been in the wars. His face, here, is
spattered with dried blood.

A while back we had a lovely visit from cousins Dan and Danielle during which Danielle happened to comment on the amusingly creaky 'crow' noise of one of the roosters. We wonder now whether this next story had really started way back then. We have recently kept 2 Buff Orpington roosters. One, The Colonel, we have had for three years; he is our 'alpha'. As back up we allowed one of his children to stay but explained to this lad (The Captain) that as long as he was happy to stay at 2nd-in-Command and did not fight our main man (well, at least as long as he didn't win!) he was a keeper.

The 365 Project is focusing on bio-diversity this week. Our
local crows are all of the 'hooded' variety. 

Well, possibly as a result of the Colonel's loss of manly voice, or maybe the shortage of available hens (several gone broody), the #2 rooster has broken that agreement this week and started attacking The Colonel. This culminated in Liz having to race to his rescue yesterday when The Captain had him down on the ground and was beating the bangers out of him, pecking and kicking. Bad move, Captain.

You cannot leave this kind of thing to run - these are big powerful birds and can do each other serious damage - so we took the not very nice but necessary decision to cull out the young pretender. He is now variously in the freezer as meat, in the bin as feathers and gribbly bits, in the cats as scraps from the stock pot and in a big bottle of stock. RIP Captain. The Colonel is recovering his dignity and pride and looked decidely disconbobulated for the next 24 hours, presumably wondering why his adversary was no longer pouncing on him.

Red Rag...

Red 'rag' to a 'Stag' Turkey? Liz's scarlet pyjamas

Liz got a nasty surprise recently when normally placid, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly, male turkey, 'Tom' decided to attack her. He did the proper rearing up, both feet off the ground, flying kick thing and caught her a couple of quite nasty bruises and abrasions one on each thigh. We'd seen him do plenty of displaying at both of us but only actually seen him square up to our 2nd-in-command rooster, 'Captain', so Liz, who had stepped out into the yard still in her PJs to enjoy the morning sun,  saw him stalk over and thought no more of it. She was taken by surprise when he launched himself and then she nipped indoors a bit quick to slam the door on the rude lad.

Is this the biggest single geranium plant you ever did see?
The variety is 'Orion'. 

We wondered if perhaps the bright red PJs had anything to do with it, and we are now sure that's what was riling him. Turkeys do very red facial displays, with all their fancy excrescences going from dull blue-grey, through bright blue to bright red, so it would be logical for red to be an unwise response. Liz has since tried the same move in all the other colours she wears, to no effect. She then tried the red PJs one more time, out at the front of the house just to test the theory with Tom way away over by the pond. He spotted her and made a bee-line charge across the drive and car port, so that she had to grab a Curver-bucket and plonk it over his head while she retreated backwards indoors. Mad bird (Tom, not Lizzie!). Generally, like most poultry keepers, we would not tolerate an aggressive cock-bird, but we are forgiving Tom for now as we can manage the behaviour by just not wearing bright red PJs out of doors during the breeding season.

In the 'craft' department, Liz has a new weapon in the armoury, a good second hand sewing machine found for her by local expert Carolyn (of the mini horses). Carolyn used to service and demonstrate machines to customers and now runs evening classes for the likes of Liz who is experienced but rusty and would be unfamiliar with these new machines with their fancy electronics and broad choice of stitch-types. Liz has one such class tonight and takes her own machine along to be shown new stuff on.

Carding Lily's first-cut wool

Meanwhile, Carolyn herself has been restoring and exploring an olde spinning wheel, using the fleece we sheared from our ewes, Polly and Lily. This is mainly Lily at the moment (just because she got that first and has put it through the washing stages and has now carded some of it). This turned out to be a bit of a problem because where I had made such a 'Horlicks' of shearing Lily in two halves (outer and inner wool), the wool strands are only half as long as they should be (2 inches instead of about 4) which makes carding easier but spinning is tricky. You have to tease lots of fibres out of the carded mass of wool and feed them onto the spinning wheel without the not-yet-spun strand of wool breaking.

Lily's wool on the spinning wheel. 

The spinning wheel is an old one from (Carloyn thinks) around the 40s and they have had to get it going again with no instructions, just from working out engineering "first principles" with only some explanatory videos on the web (and a helpful expert at the end of an e-mail). They are getting there but suffering from the machine over-spinning the wool so that it knots up and struggling to create knit-able, even wool strands. Nothing if not determined though, this wool is going to get spun and a garment or test square knitted from it "even if (she) then puts the machine away in a cupboard and never touches it again!" It is fascinating to watch the process but we think that maybe Liz has the easier task, mastering the modern electronics of the sewing machine. We all believe that there are no evening classes for this spinning skill for miles around.

Gorgeous lamb's liver paté

In the cookery department, several nice recent successes including 2 new recipes which will become 'keepers' and get filed on our repertoire. Both the new ones are from internet friends, one of whom has made a move a bit like ours, out of a long-term career (Accounting in her case) into a brand new life (professional cook/caterer). She had posted a version of cous-cous salad which sounded interesting mainly because it had no cous-sous in it (!). We like cous cous, but were intrigued by this alternative - cauliflower florets 'whizzed' up raw into tiny crumbs the size of cous-cous bits which you then steam only enough to cook them but so that they keep the nutty, lots-of-bits, mouth-feel of cooked cous-cous. You don't want them turning to veg-mush like overcooked courgette, Yuck. Then of course, you make up your salad with the usual fried/roasted peppers, toms, onions, garlic or what ever you'd normally use in a cous-cous. We were delighted.

We always say soufflé is easier and nicer with your own
good, very fresh, free range eggs. 

The other new-comer was a version of lamb-liver paté using allspice. It was suggested that if you were not an over-keen liver nut, and lamb's liver can be VERY liver-tasting, then this recipe reduced the 'livery-ness' a bit. What ever the truth, this paté was gorgeous, one of the best I have ever tasted. I like my paté a tad 'coarse' (bitty) in texture, so this was only 'blitzed' to a degree, but if you like a smooth paté then there would be no reason why you couldn't do all the fine sieving rigmarole to get the bits out. It would taste just as good. The third notable success was a cracking set of cheese soufflés, always easier and nicer with your own good, very fresh, free range eggs.

Not one to be proud of - probably should get the brake linings
checked before they are stripped bare and down to the metal!

In other news we are getting the car ready for sale (actually part-exchange) and we may have found a replacement but more on this in the next post. We do not want to tempt fate by describing a car and then it all going "Pete Tong" on us. Suffice to say that we could not look a salesman in the eye knowing that the front end of the car was making those metal-on-metal grinding noises (aside from the risk of driving around with rubbish front stopping-power), so the car was off this morning to get shiny new front discs and pads. Yesterday we had to play take off the tow hitch games. We may just buy a car for which the hitch was compatible and the said salesman had already said he'd be perfectly happy for us to excude it from any deal. No-one wants a tow hitch, he assured us.

The baby turkeys at three weeks old - they get to go outside
on warm dry days but get rescued back indoors at night. 

And finally a nice surprise greeted me under the elderberry bush. Regular readers may recall that we had what we thought was a rather hopeless mother Buff Orpington hen go broody under the bush and gave us some hand-wringing times with her fierce determination to stay right there, rather than get moved to somewhere safe and fox-proof. In the end we gave in and created a fox-barrier round her but she seemed to be too bored to be a successful broody. She first evicted one egg and left it, all lonely, outside the nest, never pulling it back under her skirts, and she spent more than an hour off the nest, sometimes two times a day just wandering around. We were sure the eggs would be chilled and lost but today (while she was off again) I checked the eggs and could see one was well into 'pipping', with the little chick's beak clearly visible moving about inside the hole it was making through the shell. Now, we have been in this game too long (even the short time we HAVE been!) to start counting babies when they are only half way out and Mum was quickly back on today. Only she will know what's going on under her skirts but Liz is joking that if she hatches more than "Hen with One Chick" she will be unbearable. We are suitably chastened and humbled by our lack of faith. The 'hopeless broody' has at least brought one to full term.