Lit From Within

Polly (centre) and her twins (top right) are back outdoors
24/7 again. 

In our experience, at about the 3 week mark, a ewe who has lambed indoors and then been allowed out with her babies during the day from about a Day 7 suddenly wants to go out full time. Some instinct seems to tell them on around Day 21 to stop co-operating with the evening-ly attempt to shepherd them 'home' to the shed.

In-flight refuelling. Bábóg takes on food
out on the front lawn.

Ours give us a big run-around in the yard, refusing to allow themselves to be either tempted in with the magic food-bucket or cornered and driven in. After a few minutes of this 'messing' we get the message, throw open the gate to the East Field and wish the family well as they sprint for the wide open spaces.

Bottle fed ewe-lamb 'Bábóg' looks in fine form at Day 8

Sometimes, Mum has a re-think and decides, because it's a bit chilly perhaps, that she'd like to go into the shed after all but hey, it's too late by then. If you hadn't 'misbehaved', you'd be in there. Have a good night.........

The annual name-plate for the collection screwed to the front
of the pig ark. 

Obviously we are not completely heartless and we'd not be putting (or letting) these families out into a snowstorm or the teeth of a 'Beast From The East' gale, but the ewes seem to pre-empt this and only 'ask' to be let go on warm evenings. So out went Polly with her ram-twins on Sunday (18th) at their Day 19 and they look very well on it. They are so tall now that when they dive in for a stereo suckle, one either side, they both drop down onto their elbows to get their chins low enough to still be able to latch onto that teat aiming slightly upwards.

3 dogs meet 3 piglets. The pigs were not coming within range
of those dodgy and dangerous looking white beasts.

This move also freed up one of the lambing pens in the Tígín and allowed us to move the bottle fed ewe-lamb, Bábóg, out of the Living Room. She was becoming very happy with the warm evenings by the fire, strolling round with her 'comet-tail' of intrigued Westies, stealing naps in the dog beds or nudging Mum's knee for yet another feed. Unfortunately the laws of physics say that if your lamb is consuming a litre of liquid each day, then unless she inflates or explodes, she is likely to need to unload a litre of liquid too. Enough said.

Settling in well.

She needed to be an out-door lamb, hanging with Mum and her brother. Mum tolerates her near but not actually suckling. Nurse Elizabeth has to nip out to the front lawn several times a day, where the lamb will spot her and home in on that bottle like a cruise missile. We are very pleased with her. She is thriving under this outdoor day, housed at night lifestyle and in another week she will join Polly & Co. on the 24/7 outdoors.

A very shaggy dog. Long overdue for a clip but every time I go
to do them it seems to start snowing. 

We have to confess to a little wobble with her brother, though readers may just think we were being paranoid after losing, 2 years ago, a 3-week old lamb who hunched into a proper "hungry lamb" position (knees and elbows touching) and would not respond to bottle feeding. In the last post you'll have read that this mother (Rosie) went sick and may have 'dried up' (no milk) briefly.

Blue giving something the evil eye?

We got the vet to Rosie and all seemed to be well with her but neither of us had seen the ram-lamb suckling, he looked about a week behind our bottle fed fatty, and he seemed to be starting to 'roach' his back (hunch). However, every time we tried to offer him some of the bottle he was half-hearted at best and his belly seemed to be full to bulging. It was a big relief when this Mum and Son were milling around the yard that day while we tried to chase Polly, when we saw the lamb's response to this confusion was to dive in for a suckle. We have seen him suckle many times since and he seems to have suddenly recovered to maybe only two days behind Bábóg. ....and relax.

The chicks stay close round Silvergirl's feet when there are
other hens about.

The chicks hatched by our grey hen 'Silvergirl' are also doing well. She brings them out every day and shows them the yard and the cattle race. With baby chicks I make sure several times a day, when I spot that Mum and chicks are in a secretive spot not overlooked by any other hens, to sneak them some extra food - either the chopped hard-boiled egg or chick crumb. That way they get full bellies without being out-competed by the 'aunties'. They are a fine looking bunch.

Mid March so the alder catkins are now open.

The pigs are settling in well despite their first few days here being beset by bitterly cold East winds which blow straight in through their ark doorway. They have a good foot of fresh straw in there, so they could get well hunkered down, buried among that but today it turned warm and I could enjoy the sight of 3 sleeping pig-flanks lying in a patch of sunlight streaming in through their doorway. Legs, tails and heads were all 'submerged' so I bet they were warm as toast. They happily came out for a slice of melon, mind you. They are starting to know me, my voice and my hi-low whistle that tells them food is in-coming. I am very happy with them too.

Our last-year hatch gosling has finally decided whether to be a goose or a gander. She laid us an egg yesterday so, we suspect she is the former (!). For the moment we have 3 laying geese and we are doing very well for eggs. Not many move through the Honesty Box, but we have plenty of outlets for them and they are very popular with guests. We also like a goose egg for that dippy-egg breakfast of Champions.

Apple buds starting to expand. They look
as if "lit from within" said our good chum
'Charlie' Moss.

Finally, I loved an expression used by our good friend Charlotte (Charlie) Moss, of 'C. Moss Perennials', grower of perennial plants based in the nearby Curlew Mountains. When describing buds of various thorn bushes which expand with a pink tinge, she said that they "looked lit from within". I loved it for it's up-beat, Spring-like flavour and thought I'd share it with you, old romantic that I am..... maybe.

Equinox Sunset. 

That's about it for this one, except that it is, by some reckoning, Vernal Equinox today, so it was lovely to have a really blue sky, windless day with a lot of heat in the sunshine. I am told that modern Equinox-spotters go with the exact second that the plane of Earth's equator splits the sun's disk in half, which was 16:15 pm today. Fans of the Olde Irish calendar and Druid history prefer to go with which day has its length nearest to 12 hours in your neighbourhood. Nearby town Castlerea achieved this back on the 18th. You pays your money and takes your choice. Happy Equinox, everybody.

Breakfast in Bed

Baking for the next guests - choc, pear and nut dessert

This post brings a nice sense of tidying up on a couple of issues; of "stuff" being sorted out and squared away. No longer an issue. Move on, as they say. First up, Friends of the Blog may recall that I was anxious about these new pigs - that they did not seem to be eating with appropriate gusto and were also very wary of me and shy of approaching.

Square miles of Ballymoe burned off in the recent fires

Well a few more days in that is all changed. They are now sprinting out to meet me and the breakfast or supper bowls and if I sit quietly they will eventually amble over and start chewing on my boots to find out what I taste like. Sprinting, that is, except for on Saturday when the morning brought lashing rain. That day the pigs were on their feet but standing just inside the ark doorway looking at the rain and at me, approaching, dripping in my big yellow hi-viz coat. They had cleared a small area of floor just inside the door, moving just enough bedding for me to land the food bowl INSIDE the ark, out of the rain. Breakfast in Bed for piggies that day. Spoiled!

The cats have pretty much wiped out the local rats. The very
occasional one we get now seems to be brought in from away
across the fields in a neighbour's turf barns.

The poorly tractor belonging to our friend and neighbour down the lane is also fixed and back home. He phoned me on the morning when I knew we had guests arriving so I thought I might be in trouble - his calls for a 'taxi' (Ah. you might just run me into town...) have a habit of suffering "mission creep" and turning into multi-stop mini-epics.

Liz with visitors Angie (left) and Liz (snr). Chicken Savoyard

When I was working in warehouse distribution, the salaried lorry drivers used to always try to get nice clean one-stop missions - load, drive to the supermarket in town X, unload, drive home arriving with not enough 'tacho-hours' to be given a 2nd run. They hated any mission with lots of stops and drops, rudely referring to them as "milk rounds".

Could be the least desirable cheese you ever saw? Espadán
(I think) is a soft-rind, extra mature goat cheese brought back
from Valencia by Mum-in-Law. It mingeth.

That is exactly how I am with these one-stop taxi runs which, once the 'customer' is in the car, gain extra stops at an alarming rate and grow extra miles and hours faster than I can 'deliver' the legs - can we stop at the bank, or the Mart, or the Railway Station? Can we just "stand" (pause) at this cemetery because I need to see can an extra name be added to a gravestone. Ooh, and we better stop for a bit-een to eat too. It's not worth getting to x-point before 2pm as they'll be closed for lunch. And so it goes on. Somehow we managed to check on the man's cattle and do all this rake of jobs, drop him to his tractor repair and get home still before the guests arrived.

The 'Parma' style ham in its posh new stand

The visitors this time were distant cousin Angie (Great great grandpa in common with Liz (jnr), all very complicated.). This lady is a 'find' from the Internet (Facebook, I think). This family have a very rare and unusual surname which most people conclude is Italian but is actually Corsican. In Corsica way back they were Baron-level land owners but backed the wrong king in some fight (Napoleon?) and found themselves dis-possessed. As Liz puts it, "we were Huguenots, thrown out of more European countries than you can shake a stick at" before some ended up in Ireland and, in Angie's case, Bristol (UK). The rare name means that they can nowadays find unknown pockets of family through Google and the Internet.

Fancy new ham cradle. 

Angie was over in Ireland on a round up meeting all the distant rels she has found during these searches and was here for the 2nd time, taxi'd up in this case by Liz Snr. We had the usual fun doing hospitality. Liz arrived fresh back from a break in Valencia and with a 2nd Parma-ham related gift. Last time she brought the proper purpose-designed ham slicing knife. This time, even more generously (Thanks, Mum!) she had bought one of those special wooden support cradles which hold the leg at a jaunty angle while you carve. It was flat-packed but dead easy to assemble.

'Charlie' Moss rummaging around for suitable plants for all
 four of we customers. 

One of the attractions for this visit, enticing the ladies all the way from Co. Laois was that I have finally made contact with a plant nursery specialising in perennial plants. I have been chatting to the owner of this business (Charlotte Moss) on Twitter for a while as part of the normal banter between small holders on that network but it had only recently dawned that her name on Twitter (@CMossPerennials) could well indicate that 'she' was actually a specialist nursery business.

We finally got round to her beautiful, scenically placed, rambling house/walls/buildings/steps place nestling under the Curlew Mountains overlooking Lough Gara today. We loved them all at first sight and 'Charlie' (she asked to be called) is a brilliant, very knowledge-able plantswoman with a superb collection of potted plants which must surely be the result of endless hours of hard and good work. Over the course of a very enjoyable hour or so we filled the car boot to bursting and made no visible dent in her stocks! We were even invited in for tea and then taken on the tour of the lower fields, the fruit trees and the lovely dry-stone, Sligo style walls. It was all gorgeous and thank you so so much, Charlie, for having us and treating us so well. We now have many hours ahead finding the right homes for all these pollinator-friendly goodies.

Never trust an Irishman called...

Ahharrrr me Hearties. 'Ere be a picture of Dad scrambling up the 'ratlines' (pronounced rattlins) on SB Cambria when they were our racing on the Swale the other day. He's gone aloft with the new camera to try to get some pictures down to the deck from up there. Impressive huh?

Meanwhile Mum is running around muttering "Never trust an Irishman named Charlie". She's thinking of C Haughey (ex Taoiseach / Prime Minister) but it may equally apply to our Estate Agent, Charlie McD. Mum and Dad have just lost out in a mini bidding war for the house-of-choice on which they'd put in a bid yesterday morning. The rival bidder is, they know, the bloke who owns the neighbouring property as a holiday home. There is also, according to Charlie, a mystery 3rd bidder who looked round the property on Friday and will let Charlie know either Monday or Tuesday.

Mum and Dad want to know where all this interest has suddenly come from on a property that's been vacant for a year and in which there's been no interest till we suddenly popped our heads over the parapet. Anyway, the rival outbid us by £2500, so we went back with another £2500 but hit our limit at that point. The guy snuck on another £1000 and, as they say, you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. We folded and told Charlie that should anything happen to Mr Rival we'd be interested in coming back in. So that was that. Dad texted Mrs S to get her back on the internet searches and Mum and Dad are looking harder at the Plan B property (the one with the lovely farm outbuildings I Lily posted about a few days back.

Deefs

Taking after Mother

It seems that one of Megan's pups from the first litter, "Lady", may have Cushings, taking after her mother. She is owned by one two Dad's work colleagues (married) and one of them commented today that Lady "may have diabetes" as she is drinking a lot. Getting chatting, as Dad started asking the "and does she...." list of symptoms questions (pot bellied look, incontinence "accidents" indoors, reluctance or inability to jump up onto furniture, lameness for no obvious reason......) it started to look more and more like Meggie 3 years ago.

Dad has recommended testing for Cushings, and googled some websites to print for the lady (Sarah). The vet had apparently listed it as a possibility, but will now look more closely, knowing that Lady's "dam" has it, and started showing symptoms at the same age as Lady is now.

We are back at the Rec and spot, in the distance, Rags being walked by Diamond. Not so much walked as being romped around with in a boisterous manner by a big black shaggy collie and a brown shaggy terrier of similar build to Rags himself. Getting closer we can see that the collie and terrier are old chums Monty (collie) and Charlie (young terrier). What's more the "boisterous" is translated, on closer inspection to be the three boys having a whale of a time chasing, bundling, wrestling and, at times, even getting a bit ...um.... amorous with one another.

This is reciprocated equally between Mont and Rags, with each giving as good as they get, as noisily as each other and in a goodly range of positions (a girl is quite breathless, watching!). We three westies are left looking on in amusement (unless chasing the tennis ball, in my case) while Rags gets back in spades, plenty of what he used to give Haggis (and sometimes gets as loud in protest barking as H used to get).

If you can't take the heat, Rags.... The humans are all amused too, and the general feeling is that it's good to let off steam, and all three hooligans will sleep very well this evening.

Boys will be boys
Deefer

Molly the Rottweiler

There we were, tired out from a good old session of chasing the yellow frisbee tonight and just on our way home, when we came upon my sister, Ellie, whose Mum is just back from Mexico. Exciting enough, but they'd just met up with "Mum's" daughter-in-law and grandson, who were out with 6 month old Rottie, Molly.

What a soppy dog! Only half grown and all soft and gangly, unco-ordinated and clumsy, like all young dogs are when their limbs are growing faster than their sense of how big they are. This called for an all in chase about and "give-as-good-as-you-get" bundle. Dad was delighted. Sometimes, he says, when we sisters get together, Ellie tends to do the submissive and lets me get away with beating the living daylights out of her, and sometimes (he also alleges) I have been bounced at by an unco-ordinated pup and have run off squealing like a stuck pig, doing my "drama queen" bit. It's gonna KILL me!!!!

Not this time. Balance seems to have been suddenly restored (maybe I've been practising on Rags). Ellie, Molly and I (plus Haggis while his tired old-boy strength holds out) run and chase and bark and wrestle as equals, no-one getting the better of any other, and no-one allowing anyone the peace to lie down and rest, racing in big figure-of-eight patterns, barging occasionally into human legs (mainly Molly there!), and carrying on when joined by Dad's allotment chum Stephanie, and her black collie cross Monty, and brown non-descript terrier Charlie. That just seemed to give us a new lease of life.

Tired? We've all collapsed back here after our supper, and we are rather hoping Dad will settle down with the TV and not move all evening.

Deefski

Famous Charlie

Meet Charlie. Fairly famous round here for his pond clearing antics. If he sees a pond he's into it. If he sees a floating stick or log in the pond he has to get it out. If your mission in life was these ecoliogical volunteer stylee pond-clearances, you could do no better than to take him to the pond, then sit and have a picnic.

Charlie would set to work to grab all the floating logs in the water and drag them safely to the shore. No-body knows why, least of all his owners, but that's just what he does.

Here we are all out on the Friends of King's Wood 2nd Bluebell Walk (more bluebells open this time - photo's to follow) but is was also, by co-incidence, Charlie's 8th Birthday. The walk inevitably took us past one of the Friends' ponds, so we let the birthday boy indulge himself.

His owners are quite heavily involved in the Rare Breeds Trust (http://www.rbst.org.uk/) and the pond there gets cleared on a regular basis, but down in the Forest, Charlie is an infrequent visitor, so there was a huge backlog (groan... geddit? backlog?) of debris in the water

Go Charlie - and Happy Birthday

Deefer

Ecologically Sound

For me, as you know, a yellow, much-chewed, nearly-not-a-complete-ring-any-more frisbee is the toy of choice. Tonight, on the Rec, we met brown and white mongrel "Kit" who goes in for a more ecologically sound brand of toy, a wedge of tree trunk. The wedge, about 6 inches in any long dimension fits neatly in his jaws and he carries it everywhere, retrieves it when it is thrown, and puts it down carefully while talking to other dogs.

Takes all sorts, I guess. green anyway, whereas my Chinese-made, brought half way round the world, plastic, product of the petro-chemical industry has a bigger carbon footprint than .... than.... Haggis, or Dad at their most gaseous...

We also meet one of Dad's allotmenteers out with big black shaggy collie-cross Charlie, and brown terrier Monty. Monty charges around rather alarmingly and, when the yellow frisbee is thrown for me, chases me so closely behind I can hear his breath on my neck and I veer off self-conciously, out-psyched by the level of competition.

Having scared me off the frisbee, of course, he veers away too, more interested in playing with us than chasing stupid, non-green toys, and Dad quickly gets the hump having to walk that far to retrieve it because no-one else will!

Deefs

Ordinary Names

Cold and frosty, the Rec is white with rime, and we can do "snow angels" by lying on our backs and thrashing about in the crispy grass. It's a day for meeting dogs with "ordinary" names. There's a big old black greyhound called Dave. He lopes across to us with his face obscured by a huge, grown-up sized proper stitched leather football (which makes me woof a bit in alarm ; never have I seen a football-headed dog before!).

Dad assumes it must be damaged and flat because surely no dog could grab onto a full sized soccer ball? But, No, he has such a massive wide gape he is simply gripping it in his cannines, like we would a tennis ball. Dave puts it down to do that sniffing all round thing that we dogs use for "Good day to you, Sir!", and I try to nick it. Ha! Could barely nip the stitching, certainly couldn't get hold of it.

As we part the man boots the ball a hundred yards or so, Beckham-style, and Dave, barely breaking into a canter, chases off to round it up again. Apparently, that's his way. Half an hour of chasing the ball and meeting other dogs, the walk home, 10 minutes lie down in the yard to cool off, breakfast, then he'll sleep for the rest of the day!

Also "Charlie" the golden lab who comes and says a friendly hello and runs around with us for a while. We looked around for a "John" or an "Andy" but no. Mind you we did find the ever more bouncy and healthy Gigot and his crowd. He's signed off by the vet now - clean bill of health, and a credit to the humans who have rescued him and taken him in.

Enjoy your Sunday

Deefs

Attempted Murder

Attempted Murder! That's what Mum is accusing me of re the incident of the male doggy who fell in the pond in the middle of the night. What a suggestion!

Meanwhile, we all met Ellie yesterday on our way back from a walk in the park, and very beautiful she looks too. Well recovered, after 2 weeks, from her spay.

Today, our first chance to ride in Dad's new car. We are all off to visit the Pud-Lady in Hastings, and we are stopping off at the Firehills in Fairlight en route. See also http://www.wildhastings.org.uk/reserves/hcp.aspx . This is a great place for dogs - and we meet lots of friendy ones who all want to race about with us. Especially little Charlie, the Jack Russell pictured here, with whom I was especially taken. There is a suggestion that I am a tart. How rude!

Now, back home, Mum and Dad have picked all the greengages and jam is being made. Very "Good Life"

Have a great weekend

Deefer