Mr Fox is Back

Heaviest Hubbard 'roo' carcass this year - 2.873 kg.

Mr Fox has been around a few more times but has not had any more success hunting our birds and beasts (Touch Wood!). The first of these visits, a few nights back set off the big rabbit 'Goldie' in thumping the ground with her back feet to warn all the rest of the bunnies of danger. She probably did better than the hoped, as she was inside one of the run 'bedrooms', with a plywood floor a couple of inches above ground and a box shape with even a 'sound-hole' - the 'BOOM BOOM' was probably audible for miles! It certainly had all the dogs awake and therefore, pretty soon, ourselves, so we were up and shining torches through windows. The fox was in the middle of the lawn, close to the bunnies, but scarpered.

Funky new apiary gate.

The 2nd time we heard but did not see 'him'. He seemed to us to be working his way down the lane from up by Una's, down towards Bobby's place, and shouting that soft-ended yowly bark every few yards as he slowly made his way. In theory we know that a vixen will make a noise called 'the Vixen Scream', and this bark would be a dog fox but we have since explored the sound clips available on You Tube and apparently both sexes sometimes do both noises, as well as various other play, fight, warning and mating call shouts. We're going with 'dog fox' for now but it makes little odds, either way we wish he'd leave us alone. We hope he is only showing up repeatedly following his keet raid success, hoping we'll re-stock the run for him!

Plentiful greens. I am in a strange position having just
sprinted into shot!

If 2013 was 'Year of Beans' here, then this year is promising to be 'Year of Greens' and I am becoming a bit of a bore with my statements of "Look at this! This is definitely the best xxx I have ever grown!" The beans did so well last year - bumper harvests of French, runners and broads (as well as peas) that we are still working our way through the bags in the freezer, so I decided to grow no runners this year, instead I did runner "Borlotti" beans. These whiz up canes like normal runners but you leave the pods on the bines to ripen, the pods turning dry and papery and the beans drying to lovely patchy colour schemes of purple and white. You store them dry as you would lentils. But it is the greens which have taken me by surprise this year and I have huge forests of ball-head and pointed cabbage, red cabbage, purple sprouting broccoli, Brussels sprouts, black (Tuscan) kale, and calabrese. We are going to be very well off for greens this summer and autumn.

Honeycomb 'drawn' out on our new frames and starting
 to be filled with honey. The dark cells to the right are
 pollen stores.

Hard at work too are the bees. Bizarrely they still refuse to forage in our own garden, but they are off 'out there' somewhere gathering plenty of nectar and pollen and are expanding the colony well into our first 'super' (honey store box). We only do weekly inspections (mindful of the Two Marys insisting that we don't fuss them!) but each time we crack open the lid and peer in, a few more areas of the flat, embossed beeswax "foundation" have been drawn up into the hexagonal tubes everyone knows as "honeycomb".

The girls admiring their new, pristine
honeycomb tubes.

Some of the areas have tubes part filled with nectar. You may know that the bees have to convert this into honey before they cap the cells over with wax as stores. Nectar is quite wet, runny and liquid and contains mainly complex (disaccharide) sugars. The bees have to process it in their 'honey stomachs' using enzymes to 'invert' the sugars into simple sugars (glucose, fructose) and to get the water content down to below 20%, aiming for 17% to stop it fermenting. That is a fascinating subject on its own- the way bees will avoid upward pointing flowers after rain because the nectar will be diluted, and will follow the sun round hunting dried out flowers with more concentrated nectar; but it's probably not for here!

Leeks from 2013 in flower - a feeding
frenzy for bumble bees and wasps less
than 20 feet from the hive. Not a single
honey bee on them!

You may have noticed the picture of our lovely new blue and white wooden gate through to the apiary (= Ginny and Padfoot's run, too). It was a neat piece of recycling. Regular readers will know I built a pig ark recently and this involved cutting two 4 foot radius half-circles out of two 8 by 4 sheets of floor ply, leaving me with 4 off-cuts which seemed too good to throw away.... The gate needed to be roughly 4 foot by 4 foot.

Wasps doing the pollinating here.

Sunday saw us off to one of the local garden centres, Horkan's out towards Castlebar. Generally Ireland doesn't 'do' garden centres to the same degree as the UK, and those that do exist are like the most homogenous, commercial UK ones - just a limited range of varieties of plants that "are popular". There do not seem to be any specialist nurseries so we have to do anything a bit different by going on line, Future Forests for the trees, Johnstown (up near Dublin) for unusual plants, etc. We have started to get into growing things which 'do well round here' (lupins, crocosmia, aquilegia and so on)

A bizarre mobile - chunks of belly pork
salted and now drying in muslin bags
as bacon. 

This time though we were more in search of ideas than specific plants, so we found ourselves taken by things which had attracted a good few bees in the display racks (a nice blue Nepeta was covered in bumble bees) but also at our regular comb through the "sad and lonely" (discount) racks. We always feel sorry for the lost souls you find there, looking like they are near death and we like the challenge of getting them well again (plus the fact that they are one or two Euro!) Several of our now thriving huge plants arrived here in this sorry state, rescued from the Sad and Lonely racks.

Anniversary Tourists

By the beach at Louisburgh, Croagh Patrick behind us.

The 3rd of November saw us hitting a major milestone and a happy event, our 20th Wedding Anniversary. We had decided a while back to celebrate this with a nice breakfast, a scenic drive, a picnic and a candle lit steak supper. We knew we were taking a chance with the weather but we just amused ourselves with the possibility of having to that British thing, a picnic in the car by the side of the road with the wipers going occasionally to clear the rain off the windscreen. When the 2nd of November presented us with a vicious Westerly, a gale of wind and driving rain squalls we wondered whether the joke was about to become reality but no, the 3rd dawned bright, blue skies, warm sunshine and not a breath of wind. We were on!

The beach at Old Head

Breakfast was that family favourite, boiled eggs and toast soldiers, always improved by having your own, deep yellow yolked free range eggs. Then we were showering and preparing the picnic, again, family favourite "Hang Sangwidges" and various salads plus some chocolate cake for 'pud'. With the car loaded, dogs an' all, we headed off west to find some scenery. Castlebar we have been to dozens of times, especially while building the house, but we'd never been past Castlebar and on towards Westport and all the lovely mountains and coast of North Mayo.

The shore of Doo Lough. 

As you approach Westport you can soon see the famous, cone-shaped 'Holy Mountain', Croagh Patrick, scene of many a pilgrim hike in the Summer, with an option to do it in bare feet if you are feeling particularly martyr-like. We are determined to do the climb soon, but not in bare feet. It is reckoned to take about 2 and a half hours to the summit, none of these Irish peaks are 'that tall' and "The Reek" is only 764 m. It is a tourist magnet, though, so we will try to avoid the known pilgrimage days.

From Westport we headed on West into ever smaller lanes, determined to reach 'Roonagh', the small port from which you catch the ferry out to Clare Island, famed in one of our favourite 'Sawdoctors' songs. We needed to let the dogs out for a comfort stop, so Liz found Old Head on the map, a small headland with a beach just east of Louisburgh. After Roonagh, we headed back to Louisburgh and then southwards into the mountains aiming for the gorgeous Doo Lough Pass and Doo Lough itself for our picnic.

Not everybody faced with a Lough in November in North County Mayo gets the urge to paddle, but I did and Liz grabbed the camera and took these pictures. The bed of the lough here is a lovely smooth scree of rounded, flat stones, perfect for skimming across the surface of the mirror-smooth water, so I could have gone barefoot, but I had my 'crocks' with me, so I kept those on. The dogs seemed to like the belly-deep (for them) wading, It wasn't that cold.

We swapped drivers at this point and I took over the maps to guide Liz down past the lough and on down to Killary Harbour (a 15 km inlet of the Atlantic), round the head of that to Leenaun and then south some more climbing over the minor road between the 'Devil's Mother' (mountain) and Ben Beg, grinding up the incline and dropping down a beautiful hairpin bend road and over a lovely bridge to Lough Nafooey. On to Lough Mask by which time we were a bit touristed out, so we were happy when Liz got onto some bigger roads, for the drive back eastwards through Ballinrobe, Claremorris picking up the N17 to near Knock airport and the lanes home. It had been a beautiful drive and a lovely, enjoyable day.

With all the livestock sorted we were able to crack the wine open and get our steak supper organised, whereupon the power died on us, so we would have had to eat by candle light even if we'd not planned to. Luckily we have a gas hob, so cooking was not a problem. We had a lovely evening chatting and reminiscing in the romantic ambience and, in fact, when the power was restored at 8 pm we chose to turn all the lights off anyway and carried on with just the candles. Cheers and here's to the next 20 years.

Of Sliabh Bán and floating hens

We have always loved reading local papers and freebies full, as they sometimes are of amusing really LOCAL stories - not quite 'man bites dog' but generally pieces on the local Flower Show, the Post Office window getting broken (and then repaired in next week's edition!), or small children catching a 3 pound fish in the lake or winning a painting competition. There is always a wealth of pictures of who ever the local dignitaries are - in the Faversham Times you could not get away from Bryan Mulhern, Tory Councillor and a manager in local brewery Shepherd Neame. Here it seems to be local TD (equivalent to MP) Ming Flanagan though we wish he'd release a better picture of himself - he looks both anxious and tight lipped in the current 'everywhere' picture.

We have had some lovely stories, lively discussions in the letters pages almost to feud level. Most recently a 'Letters to the Editor' story caught my eye where the protagonists are actually debating heatedly which is the 'front' and which the 'back' of Roscommon's highest peak, Sliabh Bán (pronounced Sleeve Bawn). One side believes that the 'front' must be where the sun rises, the East face, while the other says that, on the contrary it is the West. When you walk towards a person, opines Mike de Jong, you look at their front and then, only when you are past, do you turn and look over your shoulder at their back. The sun rises in the East, he says, and 'walks' past the mountain and is then looking back, as it sinks in the West, past the mountain. The East has become the back. That seemed to be the gist of it. I will await next week's Roscommon People eagerly and report back! Sliabh Bán, incidentally is not much of a 'mountain' being only 262 m but it is the highest 'peak' in the county and does have a significant landmark (a stone cross) on top. It is, inevitably, also site of a planned wind farm, the turbines being 131 m high - half the elevation of the hill itself.

So here are my own 'local, entirely non world-shattering, stories'. First up, Chickens can swim! (Shock Horror!). We know this because on one of the recent hot days we had been sitting out by the pond with the three dogs lashed to our chair legs on their leads while various poultry strolled about, never coming too close. One Sussex Ponte hen coming out of the 'allotment' then made an odd decision making her way back to the house. She turned off her perfectly safe route and tried to nip though between Poppy and the pond. Poppy had been watching her closely and hearing my low warning commands... "Poppy! Nooooo!" but a chick coming that close had her seeing the red mist. She lunged at the chook to the point where her lead snapped tight, but the charge was too much for the hen and she took off almost vertically, clucking in alarm. She fell back to 'earth' but was by then above the pond, so she splashed down into open water. Of course I jumped up to rescue her but she struck out for the bank swimming like a clumsy duck and then flapped another take-off and scrambled up the bank to dry land, shouting all the time. William and the La Bresse rooster reacted to the noise by charging towards her to protect her, so we briefly had 3 chickens going mad with noise till they all realised that the danger had passed, the hen was just a bit wet underneath and nobody was about to die in the jaws of a Westie bitch.

The local Herberts fashionable form of mischief in the joy-riding line, seems to be turning 'doughnuts' on the roads at any junction capable of fitting a spinning, tyre-burning car. You know they have been 'playing' because the junction is covered in the circular 'skid marks' like those pictured. We used to see a lot of this on the main N5 out to Castlebar when we were running out there for building materials. We were told that groups of these lads gather after dark, then post people as look-outs on these long straight roads before doing the doughnuts at the junctions. Well, now in 'local news' we have our own skid marks on the road at the end of the lane, at the crossroads known locally as 'Shannon's Cross'

Meanwhile, the garage has finally received my carburettor service kit from parts supplier '2CV City' in the UK so they have asked me to bring the car back in today. This service kit includes the fine tapered needle valves and jets (as well as gaskets) which should restore my carb to being able to create the correct petrol/air mix in the engine which will get me back inside the tolerances on the NCT's emissions test. I am hopeful that this may, at last, be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Silverwoods Invasion

This year's Family Holiday is a change from the narrow boating of previous years for three very good reasons - 1) we're in a different country now, 2) we are in a different situation money-wise and 3) all the rivers and canals and locks we used for the last few years have been out of use for most of this year with too much water and flooding. Instead, the 6 Silverwoods plus a guest, best friend of Em-J, John the Bass Player (not her real name!) plus their 2 dogs, Maxwell and Lily and the one remaining pup, Goldie descend on us for a week.

The little ones, R (4) and M (6) have been obsessing about the chance to camp and live in a tent for weeks, so Mr and Mrs S bring the tent. We here, having survived months of on/off rain, are not 100% convinced of this as a plan and think they will be pitching it in a swamp, but, amazingly, as they confirm arrangements on Monday 6th the sun comes out and we get a week of scorcher, blue skies and hot hot hot. Talk about bringing the weather with you. We are able to erect the tent in the dry, on a dry bit of grass and R and M plus Mr and Mrs S get to spent at least that night under canvas.

The hot weather brings out the flying ants and a whole gang of them are attracted to the pale blue of the tent awning. Poor M is convinced they will eat him alive in his sleep and takes some persuading that they will be gone by night fall. Thankfully they are and he goes to bed easily enough. The teenage girls (Em-J, J-M and "John") take over the caravan as their den and sleeping pod, plus venue for Midnight Feasts and tuck parties. It's a no-go area for the boys and the little ones except for occasional deliveries of cocoa and, in Mr S's case a chance to creep over there and frighten them into squealing hysterics with torch-under-the-chin and funny voices.

This holiday is brilliant for me because I get to play for a week with my big mates Lily and Maxwell and it's great for Towser who gets to run, romp, fight and wrestle all week with his sister Goldie (pup of the orange collar colour). Lily and Max do not get total free rein because they are not quite trustworthy with the rabbits, hens, kittens and the lane outside, but they are free or supervised on the lead enough to enjoy their stay.

For the humans there are games on the front lawn with badminton set up, occasional volleyball and chasing games that Mrs S recalls from her youth - "What's the Time, Mr Wolf", "Mother, May I?" and "Blind Man's Buff" plus a lot of sitting around on the front terrace recovering in the heat, getting sunburnt.

There are outings so that we dogs actually get a walk, with leads on (!) We all go on a 'Bog Walk' (a Nature Trail through a turf cutting bog) down by Lough O'Flynn, just south of our own village (Lough Glynn). There's a trip to the National Museum of Country Life at Turlough near Castlebar, Co. Mayo where Dad loves being able to see 'live' the stuff described in the book he's just finished reading (FSL Lyons, "Ireland Since the Famine"), he loves the currachs and coracles and he loves the photos of raised bed and 'lazy-bed' agriculture which is what we're now up to out on the allotment.

Finally there is a trip to a petting zoo in Kilimagh, Co. Mayo. Here the kids buy grain to feed to a variety of hens, ducks, sheep, pigmy goats, llamas, pigs, ponies and (via a bucket because they bite) rheas. We find out that horses can have blue eyes and we all enjoy a well stocked reptile house with turtles, lizards, snakes, a skink, chameleon, dragons, and (you couldn't pick this one up) a tarantula. There are even swings and slides for the little ones and a nice hatchery bit where we can see tiny new-hatched chicks and ducklings. There are bunnies and guinea pigs.

All in all a brilliant week in lovely weather. A good holiday, if not quite as satisfying as Narrow Boating. Ah well.