Manu and Pedro

Manu takes a turn at the shovel.

Welcome aboard, then, Manu and Pedro, our first ever 'Help-X' volunteers. These are a lovely couple of lads, both 24 and currently students at one of the Madrid Universities. One is studying Agricultural Engineering and the other my own subject from Uni days, Environmental Science. They are both city-boys with no experience of farms or livestock and neither have been to Ireland before although one hails from Galicia in Northern Spain, where the scenery and green-ness are similar to Roscommon (he says).

Pedro shows off his brush cutter skills to the pigs.

They are both young and fit and willing to work hard for hours, so we are impressed already. They seem happy, too with our place, our accommodation and the food and drink so this one could be a winner all round. It is their first go at being Help-X volunteers as it is our at being hosts, so we are enjoying learning together. They are doing 2 weeks with us as part of a longer (1 month?) stay in Ireland; they want to go somewhere with better access to city life maybe near to Galway.

An interesting burst on yesterday's sour dough loaf. The
flavour was not impaired and this loaf has since gone the way
of all the others!

So we collected them from the train in Castlerea yesterday afternoon and had the afternoon and evening just for installing them, showing them round the place and getting to know one another. Their English is (as they'd say here) "middlin' good"; certainly better than my Spanish! We struggle on with the 2 lads occasionally running out of words, a quick discussion where one tries to rescue the other, and then with Liz and Manu whipping out their smart-phones and Googling up "Google Translate"

 I now know, for example that Pedro's Mum also makes sourdough bread and has a 'mara madre' (starter culture. Literally "original mother") in her fridge and we all know more words than we should around Guinea Fowl, black currants and fruit cordials! We are also both trying to say 'Madrid' with the soft Spanish 'the' sound instead of hard English 'D's. They are keen anglers and have brought some gear with them, so we have had to do a quick bit of local research to get them access to any likely fishing points. One is a keen photographer (Canon gear - good taste!). They also asked about hiring bikes, so we have come up with my old mountain bike, gathering dust in the caravan and K-Dub's little used pushbike, which he generously agreed to lend us for the duration.

I finally find an under-cabinet strip light
(LED) for the "office". Yay! I can
see the keyboard!

The guys were wiped out last night having only got 2 hours sleep on Wednesday night and then had a long day travelling so they crashed at 20:30, fairly quickly after a bit of a late supper and trying out some 'artisan' stout beers. They slept like logs, apparently but came bouncing down the stairs at 8 a.m. already in some overalls and work boots, keen and willing to get cracking. I got some quick breakfast into them, but then we were straight in.

I showed them the brush-cutter and explained 2-stroke fuel and so on; bit of a safety 'lecture' there. Well, it is Farm Safety Week this week. The fuel tank on that does you about 45 minutes of continuous fast running, so they alternated goes at that, whacking the tall stuff in the orchard, with scraping and sweeping the grass in the cattle race which was fast evolving from "the grass growing in the cracks in the concrete" to a "lawn".

Ouch! Taking chunks out of myself on the barbed wire. Nurse
Lizzie stepped forward with some nice sting-y TCP. 

I persuaded them (it was impressively difficult!) to stop for coffee mid-way but then we worked on through till 1 pm when Liz insisted we all stop for soup. I was very happy and so were they. You can, as they say, see where they've been! The cattle race is pristine and the little gosling can stride around the orchard in full view of his grown-up minders.

We decided to work mornings and they have their down-time afternoons. So, well fed on soup and bread, they have now disappeared on the bikes with their fishing gear in back-packs promising that if they would like some roast lamb with us tonight they will be back by 19:30 or they can eat later, plus they will bring back anything edible they catch. I'm not sure how 'allowed' this is; you may have to put every fish back into the lake but I expect they'll find out that soon enough.

The only fly in this ointment was my left knee. I fell over back on Tuesday, on some mud while trying to hop over some barbed wire. This was as I was while feeding some bullocks. I managed to bang the inside of my left knee as well as twisting it and, to add a cherry to this cake, scraped an 8" long surface cut down my calf. Ouch. I am hobbling around like an aul' wan, Nurse Liz has been at me with some very sting-y TCP so the cut is OK but the knee remains very stiff and sore. This is frustrating - I wanted to be fully fit to work alongside the Help-X lads, all be it I am 60 and they are 24. I am determined not to just sit there in the Director's Chair barking instructions through the 'bull horn' so I am limping about between locations and trying to keep at it, but at the stuff which is easier on the knee - pulling thistles rather than digging, for example.

The beautiful new Memorial Stone at Shannon's Cross prior
to the unveiling ceremony. 

And finally an end to the suspense that I expect you have not even noticed I have been trying to rack up; a promise of a 'reveal' on the story of the fancy stonework down at the crossroads. Spoiler Alert! The big unveiling happened today to big crowds, flags flying, the police brass-band and a series of politicians doing speeches from a real imported wooden pulpit/lectern. This the new memorial stone and garden to 2 Gardai (Policemen) tragically shot and killed in a bank robbery and car-chase back in 1980. Easily our biggest, most important local story. The full version of this in the next post.

Ross's Turn

Down in the rain ditch, one of the pigs
manages to nudge the barbed wire aside
from the hawthorn roots. In this pic I
have wedged a spare sheep hurdle into the
gap and wired it down solid. 

After the dramas of the previous post about kitten suicide missions, the next day one of the pigs (Ross) decided that she, too, needed a bit of a break out. I am a creature of habit and routine and I always do the early morning livestock rounds in the same order; that way I don't miss anybody. I had fed, watered and released the baby chicks and Mums, the young Marans, fed the sheep, then the young Hubbards. All this time I can hear that the pigs are awake and getting all excited about their breakfast - low bassy grunts and some squeals come at me round and over the main chicken house.

Somerville fancies a taste of camera,

I gathered up the pig food and fruit, then walked down through the side-gate of the cattle race, expecting to go across the 5 yards of space to the pig-gate and be met by the pigs. I was a bit surprised then to find Ross wandering about in this gap but my worries about how I would recapture her evapourated when she looked up at me as if to say "Ahhhh, now THERE's a breakfast!" and she happily trotted after me down the 'race' to the gate and in through it to join her sister at the breakfast banquet. This was our first ever pig escape in 3 years and felt a bit like an initiation. I hunted down the escape hole which proved to be at the top of the rain ditch among the hawthorn roots and grabbed a spare sheep hurdle to wedge into it, wiring it firmly in place. When the pigs are gone I will fix this properly (I can't afford to just 'lose' a sheep hurdle into a hole in a fence!).

A 365 pic of a sunlit lane just after a shower

While I am on pigs, a fascinating fact I read in a book today ("Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes", Rosie Boycott, Pub Bloomsbury 2007). I knew, of course, that Truffle Pigs exist and get used down in Perigord (France) for hunting out these 'foodie' treats but I had no idea of the mechanism. It turns out that the truffles grow in symbiosis with the local oak trees where ever there is a shortage of phosphorus. The fungal mycorrhiza (filamentous roots) grow into the oak roots and act as an extra root system to extract the phosphorus from the soil and in return the oak supplies the fungus with carbohydrates. The oak can breed and spread via acorns but the fungus, being wholly underground has no easy way to spread its spores about.

Nicely back-lit teasel head.

Step forward the wild boars of that area which could find these truffles and then spread the spores on their snouts as they went rootling onward. In a rather clever example of co-evolution, the fungus adapted by producing and releasing a synthesised copy of a testosterone chemical called 5-alpha-antrostol which smells, to the female pigs, exactly like a randy boar. They go rooting around convinced that somewhere under those trees is a buried boyfriend. Everyone is a winner, I guess, except for the frustrated sow who never finds the boar. It is to be hoped that a supper of truffle fungus is compensation. Thank you for that gem, Rosie Boycott.

A nice afternoon snack - Autumn-fruiting raspberries and
a slab of ice cream. 

In Yoga, I am now 4 sessions to the good and I am definitely improving and still enjoying it. My Wednesday evenings are enlivened by a series of animals (OK Yoga positions); cobra, eagle, downward-facing dog and other weirdness (Warrior 2, Plank, 'Child' position etc). We blokes get well stretched about and warmed up trying to follow the very bendy instructor at the front but it now feels like good 'pain' and work to me. It's like freeing up a rusty hinge with a drop of 3-in-1 and then pushing/pulling the flaps ever further till you can move the hinge to its fully open/closed positions.

The muscles particularly feel as if they can now extend further when relaxed and tighten up further when retracted than they have had to do for decades. In one move I was whisked right back to childhood; lie on your front, flex a knee and grab your foot, then pull the foot all the way down till your heel is touching your thigh and your knee is bent to 180º. Now, I should rapidly add, I can NOT do that one all the way like I remember we used to do as boys (we could all do it standing up on the other foot and hopping around pretending to be pirates), but 'teach' was quite impressed by how flexible I was after only these 4 sessions. And relax.

Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm'

No progress on the Kitchen since the last post except that we have had our delivery of the timber and building materials and we have secured the fibre glass at a very reasonable price. We love that K-Dub who is used to his friendly Dublin prices where the quantity of stuff he buys from his tame builders' merchants gain him good trade-discounts, hates to re 'ripped' off by the smaller local shops out here in the sticks. He hunts around locally and finds the best price he can but still brands it daylight robbery and gets on the phone to his Dublin colleagues. He doesn't HAVE to do that. We love him for it.

Every Day Country Folk

 Today my post will sing of stable doors and animals bolted, of riverside towns and expansionist chickens, of bunnies and beef. Grab a cup of coffee and a comfy chair. Sit back and enjoy and/or click past muttering "Bl***y Deefer's off on one again...."

 We had decided that what the still door-less Utility Room needed was a stable-style door in two halves, painted red to match the house front door. You can't seem to buy them anywhere except for mad money, a guy we asked to quote a price for us has joined our "choir invisible" of vanishing Irish tradesmen (I'll call you in a couple of days....), and making one from scratch is way beyond Dad’s carpentry skills and tools, with all those mortice and tenon joints etc. But then ace interweb ferretter, Mum came upon a website which advocating buying a suitable one-piece door and cutting it in half. You have to strengthen the door so that the half you cut off doesn't fall apart, of course, and you hang it first on 4 hinges to make sure it does what it's meant to, then you split it, re-hang the halves and finish with weather strips (2) and all the door furniture (bolts, handles etc). More complex than anything Dad had tried before; He’s a rustic arches and dodgy nest-boxes kinda bloke!) but hey... nothing ventured.

 So, orf to Carrick on Shannon went Dad, down the minor roads, dry stone walls, green green fields, leaving Mum with us behind as he had to bring a full sized door back in a Fiat Panda. Nice town, Carrick, all boaty, marinas and riverside pubs etc. Mum got down to some weeding in the gravel of the front terrace.

Before Dad started the carpentry Mum and Dad decided to move rabbit run en bloc down the western field to give bunnies a new bite of longer grass. Not a bother except this seems to unleash in the me, a new enthusiasm for biting through the chicken wire. On this occasion, unknown to Mum and Dad, I must have made a hole too small for a Westie but big enough for an escapist rabbit, but more of that later. They next closed off the gates at either end of the cattle race and open "Chicken-Gate" (which sounds like some dodgy American scandal inquiry) to give the chooks extra territory and a million worms and grubs unwise enough to live in the thin carpet of earth and grass over the concrete of the race. No escape downwards, guys! We expect very proteiny eggs tomorrow, Ladies.

And so to door wrangling, which goes OK and Dad is quite proud of the results. He finishes carpentering and sands off the door halves, passing them to Mum who is our proud, no-runs, gloss painter. She sits out in the yard on a stool in the sunshine with the door halves propped in front of herself on the big terracotta tubs, looking for all the world like a Parisian painter at her easel. Dad thinks “Ahhhhh sigh...Why do I love her at these moments?” Soppy git!

While she's a-painting, Dad grabs the shovel and barrow and moves a bit more soil from round the horse-drawn-hay-rake-in-a-hedge (hdhriah) to fill the two newest raised beds. It's hot. he finishes and grabs a cool Guinness on the front terrace. Coco, joins him. I am pre-occupied elsewhere so I don’t know this is happening. They sit and watch Ginny, the grey and white rabbit lollop past them down the drive towards the road. ARGHHHH! Dad jumps up, shouting to Mum to help and sprints across lawn to road in time to see Ginny crouch and freeze on the grass verge as a tractor/trailer thunders by inches away. She's untouched (thank God she froze) but a bit shocked. Dad manages to grab her but she comes to, screams and kicks out. (Ouch! cheers Ginny). Dad returns her to the run and they've found the hole, fixed it, settled her and returned to the front terrace, when we all hear noises of cattle being moved down the lane towards us. Mum jumps up and races to stand at (lack of) front gate to stop ingress of beef animals and to stop us shouty dogs from scattering the cows. Spoilsport!

The relaxing life of everyday country folk....

Deefs