For the Day That's in it....

A relaxing Mother's Day for Liz? We finally got sorted on proper
raised beds in the poly tunnel and here she is forking some well rotted
cow muck into them.

You'll know from my windy winter posts that we are well inland from the full blast of the Westerly Atlantic gales - we are 2 hours drive from the coast heading west. Head north from here, though, and you can be at the seaside in Sligo in just over the hour. This is the tourist-trap of Strandhill and we suppose that knowledgeable people steer well clear on a Bank Holiday, even on St Patrick's Day in March. We wondered whether it might be OK and everyone would be at the parades in all the various towns and, anyway, we'd promised ourselves this jaunt since Mother's Day and knew that the dogs would love a walk on the beach, free from their leads.

On the south side of the Strandhill headland, the beach has this
impressive backdrop

This morning, then, saw us on an early-ish breakfast and fitting the (sand proof) blanket to the rear seat of the car. As we toddled out past the windfarm north of Balla-D we texted some friends (Hello Dawn!) as we drove past their place just to say we were waving at them, headed for the coast. In seconds we (well, 'me', Liz was driving) were in a long phone-chat which saw us getting directions to a good beach-side café/restaurant ("Shells") and to the beach, insisting that we try the calamari salad and other delights.

A huge empty beach for a dog walk.

At Ballysadare we turned left and headed out along the south side of the Strandhill headland, looking to pick up a broad, deserted beach for our dog walk. They love this and they run and run, disappearing into the far distance before looping back. They seem to be very good now at coming when called. At one point a horse and rider popped out of the marram grass in the dunes and was suddenly much closer to the dogs that we were but I whistled and clapped, and we could just make out them turning away from the tempting equestrian target and heading back to us. We grabbed hold of the three collars and waited while the rider trotted towards us and past - he seemed delighted by our three "excellently behaved" (ha!) dogs.

With everybody well blown out by all the running and chasing through sand clumps, bladder-wrack, lugworm casts and the sea itself we rounded ourselves up and headed back to the car, human mouths now watering well at the thought of that calamari, and drove into Strandhill itself. Well, Dawn, we found the "purply pink" pub OK and the big metal cannon on the pavement, and we found 'Shells' which did indeed look promising, but it also looked packed. The car park was full of surfers and families (studiously avoiding their St Patrick's Day parades?), the outdoor bit was chock-a and there was quite a queue standing. Hence my comment earlier about people who go to tourist traps at lunchtime on a Bank Holiday. We will go back on a sunny day soon, but not a weekend or B/Hol; we will try the calamari, but today we turned the car round and headed home, picking a route which we thought would avoid any towns with parades - the N17 and Knock Airport.

The substrate in this grassy bank seemed to be mainly shells.

It nearly worked. We had made just one miscalculation. We were short of wine for own Paddy's Day meal tonight and thought we might be able to sneak into Tubbercurry or Charlestown to a shop open for wine, without getting snarled up in a parade and the closed roads. We 'remembered' that Charlestown is off the beaten track and thought we had to divert into town off our trunk road, but no, it is the E/W road (N5) you leave - you head into town ON the N17. We came over the brow of a hill and found the road blocked by multiple Garda cars, ambulances and people sporting hi-viz jackets.

More of a shell-dump than a beach?

We had to make a U-turn and then knit ourselves a neat little diversion up some tiny roads with grass up the middle all round the 'back' (west side) of Knock Airport, emerging at Kilkelly which, by happy coincidence, had an open off-licence and no parade. Liz also grabbed up some surprisingly good bacon for a bagel-lunch, compensation for the calamari shortage. From there, we were home and dry. It had been a fun adventure. All the dogs are wiped out fast asleep on various chairs and rugs.

The local expression meaning that you are doing something special (a meal, a traditional activity or an event) to mark the a particular day is "..for the day that's in it". Radio DJs will say "I'll play this record for the day that's in it". Well, today we are eating my absolute favourite Irish meal, bacon and cabbage with mashed potatoes and a white (roux) sauce (can be parsley sauce) for the day that's in it. Yum Yum Pig's Bum, Cabbage and Potatoes as we used to say in Sussex.

Goose and chicken eggs for the day that's in it.

What else is new? We finally got sorted on our proper raised beds for the poly tunnel, with some more scaffold boards from our man down near Ballyhaunis so we have cleared up the bodge of stones and chicken-spread dusty soil and turf fragments. We pulled out everything except a rather fine bronze fennel, knocked the boards together and barrowed in a mountain of well rotted, 2013/4 vintage bullock muck (Thank You John Deere Bob) which we chopped into the soil. We then watered the whole lot and mulched with a good layer of well rotted chicken/goose/rabbit muck.

There might be a Bloody Mary in this for someone.

With all that and last year's spent mushroom compost, that must by now be a fairly nutritious substrate. It certainly looks a nice rich 'fruit cake' mixture.

So, I will just leave you with Happy St Patrick's Day greetings. We have had a very pleasant one and we hope you have enjoyed yourselves too.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh!

It's a Long Way (Pig School)

Taxi Driver's Sunrise over our East Field

These taxi runs we've been doing have had me out of bed early enough to see some lovely sunrises coming up across our East Field. My most recent were about getting Charlotte (of the mini horses) away to her Charlestown bus stop for the Sligo bus, off to sit her college exams but Friday's 'Animal Anatomy and Physiology' saw an end to those for the moment. Charlotte is sure she's done OK but good luck, Charlotte, anyway and for the rest of your exams coming up after a 2 week break.

Mum Saddleback shows off four of her children.

Yesterday, though, saw me up early again (OK, not quite so early) for my own education, my Pig Rearing (one day) Course all the way down in Tipperary, almost a 2 hour drive. This proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable and brilliant day in which we all learned a huge amount and, in my case, finally got to get hands-on with live pigs; we'd been feeling a bit like 'book experts' with both pigs and the bees - a wealth of 'book-learning' but zero practical experience!

Mum keeps watch from the doorway.

The course happened at Old Farm, near Portumna in North County Tipperary which is a lovely small holding centred around a beautiful old house and with a goodly rambling collection of outbuildings and 'Pop Larkin' style piles of "stuff" which are all works in progress and projects which will get completed "when there is time". The people were a superb couple, Alfie and Margaret, friendly and welcoming but obviously capable, practical and very knowledgeable, him a stockily built former off-shore commercial diver (North Sea Oil Platforms etc) and later diving instructor all around the world, a natural speaker and presenter with a fascinating style of training which had us all gripped, engaged and amused throughout. Margaret took more of a support role, on this course anyway, and looked after the admin and catering side of things but she is an award winning Blog Writer with a very enjoyable 'voice' (by her own admission sometimes given to rants against officialdom in the food industry). Her 'A Year in Redwood' blog (http://ayearinredwood.com/) has won "Best Blog of an Artisan Producer (Ireland and UK) 2014" and Best Lifestyle Blog 2012. She served up scones and coffee as we arrived and a superb lunch which gave us a choice of pork meatballs in tomato-y sauce or casserole of sausages and chick peas, all their own pork, naturally.

Alfie (with bag) explains the production of real lard

They are both driven advocates of all things organic, welfare, free range, low food-miles, Transition-Town and non GMO and were a big part in establishing a Free Range outdoor pig Quality standard mark (Q-Mark) within the Irish 'Bord Bia' food production quality standards people. Prior to that Bord Bia officials were almost entirely interested in meat for export and pigs by the tens of thousands from "nice clean, healthy" factories, all pink and free from mud, but who never see the daylight or (gasp!) dirt from which they might catch disease. Old Farm had quite a task on their hands trying to get Bord Bia to even come and have a look at their small production set-up, which was interested more in local markets and where pigs went (another gasp!) OUTSIDE and got muddy! Alfie raves against their rules which do not allow him to use brewers grains from the local organic micro-brewery or whey from the local organic cheese maker in his feeds. He despairs that he can sell pork mince but not as meat balls or burgers - for us the lunch had meat balls with (fresh) chopped onion and herbs in and their own eggs to bind them, where commercially he'd have to use sterile, dried onion and herb and some kind of chemical gloop to bind.

Liz's sugar free bread recipe.

The pigs were an obviously happy, healthy collection which he keeps as full families. One enormous Saddleback sow was showing off 4 remaining youngsters in one pen, and we rousted another whole gang out of their siesta during our walk-about - a massive cross-bred boar, 2 huge sows, one pregnant and the other with 8 4-month old piglets 'at foot'. Further round still were a group of market-ready boys and girls who we could scratch, tickle and get to know a bit better; the piglets with sow and the big old boar we had to just admire over the fence. I was amused to find that the 8 piglets were not some kind of blurry mix of all the breeds of pig in their make up, but were all different and all close to one or another of them, so you had recognise-able black and white "nearly Saddlebacks", Gloucester Old Spots, Duroc and so on.

I could see immediately what is meant by pigs being like rotovators, rooting up the ground and clearing any brambles and weeds. The pig pens were finally reasonably dry after a very wet winter and were now a grass-less, dark brown/black crumbly tilth which you could have raked smooth and planted veg straight into. There was not a weed or leaf anywhere. Old Farm keep quite a few pigs and have them all year round, so they rest fields regularly and even have doors both ends of their pig arks so that they can split fields with electric fencing and the pigs get access to the ark from either half.

All in all an excellent, enjoyable day and a superb course. Thank you Alfie and Margaret and the menagerie at Old Farm, and also to my co-students who were all a great bunch, all beginners like us. Good luck with your own pigs; I think we were all going to go ahead with pigs; even those who were a bit undecided to start with and were on the course to see if they still thought it was a good plan. My only 'negative outcome' (as they say) was that Old Farm are firm advocates of electric fencing throughout, and Alfie was a bit doubtful (though politely and nicely so) whether my style of fencing would do the job, but we'll see. If Mapp and Lucia manage a breakout and we find them picking up their own windfall apples, we can always add electric fence strands at a later date.