The Final 9... and a half

Colin has a bit of a sort out of the sheared ewes

In the last post, I promised an end soon to talk of sheep shearing. This is definitely the last word on that subject or at least the penultimate one. Friends of the blog will know that on Saturday I was booked over to Co. Sligo again to nail the final 9 Texel ewes plus, it turned out, a little grey mountainy animal who had nearly sheared herself by losing her winter coat except for some shaggy pantaloons and a fluffy (un-docked) tail. Some sheep breeds do this, the Wiltshire Horn for example, so this girl, Molly, may have some of that DNA in her mix. She was our "and a half" sheep.

For this session our French student assistant was absent, given a lie-in by the family as she'd been working her socks off all week and was exhausted. It was just Colin and I but that was OK. The 3rd hand is useful but not vital. Anne joined us late morning when we were just 2 sheep from the end of the task, a nice "bringing on a fresh sub" move.  We took it fairly steady and got through all ten animals between 9 a.m. and 11:30 even with a break for coffee mid way and a bit of a pause to sort and treat a fly-strike victim.

Fly strike lesion on right side of ewe. Cleaned up in this pic.

You'll recall that one of the main reasons for shearing early-ish in the year (May?) is to avoid the over-heated sheep getting blow flies lay their eggs down among the fleece. These eggs hatch and the maggots crawl down to the skin and start eating that, causing, as you can imagine, all manner of discomfort to the sheep and eventually worse ills.

Letting them all go back out to pasture.

Fly strike is messy, smelly and not nice. We only found the one case, a ewe with maggots down in her groin area. These sheep-keepers though, know their stuff and had what felt like 4 different lotions and potions on hand to wipe on, sponge on, massage in and then (a very bright yellow cream) smear around the outside of the place. Once we had got rid of all the maggots all you can do is prevent more and let the wound, which was not very deep in this case, dry and heal.

So that was me, sheared out for the year. I could clean the shears, de-tension them and send the blades away to be sharpened. Luckily I mentioned this to Alayne, who sends her horse-trimmers off like this and when I told her of the 'brilliant place' on Achill Island I have used before she was able to advise me that that one is closed following the tragic death of the business owner. She gave me an alternative place to get them sharpened.

Had to try these new "Jakoti" hand shears

The reason for my "penultimate" possibility is that I have been tempted by all the @smallholderIRL Twitterer sheep-folk into buying a new toy.

Connie takes her 3 babies to visit 'Big Red' in the Utility Room,
who has just hatched 4 for herself. She does not receive an
enthusiastic welcome. 

This is a pair of Jakoti hand shears looking like an extended pair of Felco secateurs. All the sheep people swear by them now and have been abandoning the olde fashion sprung-steel "double bow" type. I have now received these just after having finished shearing proper but I have one tidy up job I can try them out on - those frilly knickers and woolly dewlaps I left on my own sheep before I had all this practise on Southdowns and Texels.

The Hubbards at 3 weeks are fast out-growing "baby chick"
status

Meanwhile, back home we are awash with baby chicks and more on the way. You'll know we got the 13 (now dozen) Hubbards hatched on 5th June. In the last post I spoke of 3 chicks hatched under our #1 broody, Sussex 'Connie', with Utility Room broody coming up to Day 21 yesterday. Well, right on schedule, UR-Broody (we'll call her Big Red) hatched hers, 4 chicks in her case. Hot on her heels should come 'Stumpy', Due 7th July and now we have found a 4th 'clocker', the part-Araucana we call 'Beeblebrox' whom we THINK will be due on the 15th. We are furiously trying NOT to count our chickens.....

Foaming porridge? A sour dough starter. 

Tipped off by our visitors from Dorset, Mazy Lou and Airy Fox and then encouraged by the 'curator' of that Twitter account (@MagsMorrisey) who did a week of bread making Tweets, I have decided to try my hand at the sour-dough bread. Both of us have tried plenty of yeast bread since we have been here (and before) but never sour-dough. I will not go into detail as this 'muck and magic' has been covered intensively else where but in brief, the bread rises due to the activity of a 'starter' which you keep active, instead of dried or fresh yeast.

Bread makers love and cherish their starter cultures, feed them and tend them like any other livestock. They even give them names. Mine came over from Mazy in Liz's hand luggage and I named it Reginald after the ram I had just sheared. Ooops - sorry, that slipped out.

Anyway, long story short, we have fed Reg for the required week and, finding him foaming like a swamp, I made the first loaf today. Even though I failed to artistically score the top of the lump of dough and scorched it a little by forgetting how fierce our oven can be, it came out very well and is delicious.

Hard to beat. Your own pork. The bread-crumb crust covers
shredded courgette in creamy garlic sauce

Other than that, a nice bit of progress on the kitchen project. We'd been looking for a suitable worktop for in there against the bare stone wall plus wondering how to mount it given the lack of cupboards, then sitting down at our Dining Table to scratch our heads and drink coffee. This is what we need, we agreed, something like the top of the table. Solid wood, 4 cms thick, honey-coloured oak (or similar?), 6 foot long, stripped of varnish and cherished for years with something like our beeswax polish.

New kitchen gets an up-cycled dining table work top. 

BING! Light-bulb moment. Why don't we either find another table and cut it up (well, get K-Dub, our ace carpenter, to do it) or find one to replace this one and cut this one up? So we did. I was out in Boyle last Friday and spotted a "Pre-Loved Furniture" shop (yoiks) and there, right in the front window was the very table. We nipped out to collect it yesterday and texted K-Dub, and he came round today. Bingo! Liz has a perfect-height, solid wood worktop which even has a 'splash-back' with twin double sockets for the various kitchen gadgets. Marvellous.

Big Boys' Toys?

A digger of distinction!

I've heard it said that little boys don't ever really grow up; their toys just get bigger. It may well be true. I was certainly like a kid in a toy shop this weekend when invited over to the previously mentioned rebuild job in County Sligo to "help move some gravel". I knew they were getting 2 loads of 20 tonnes delivered into heaps near the entrance (the lorry drivers don't trust the ground to hold the weight of the lorry and release them at the end!) but I assumed we would be back on the shovels and barrows. Wrong again - the main man has now had an olde yellow digger he bought shipped over there (well, low-loader'd anyway) and enough drive has been laid to allow that to move about and make life easier for the gravel movers.

Old but pretty servicable back actor on the Massey Ferguson
digger. 

My job was to learn to use the digger to dig buckets of the gravel up with the "back actor" (rear bucket/arm) and decant them accurately into two waiting wheel barrows without spilling too much gravel on the nice drive, damaging the barrows or killing anyone. The main man was then going to keep up with me running these barrows away to the footings we were creating for a 20' square extension out back of the house. Easy! What could possibly go wrong? Well, only that I have never driven a digger before in my life and I had six levers to twiddle in front of me (never mind all the normal dashboard stuff 'behind' me (you sit backwards for this), the throttle, front bucket and so on)

6 levers to co-ordinate. 

Left to right as you sit (right to left in this photo), if you will imagine the back actor as a human arm, we have a lever for that side's stabiliser leg/foot, then upper arm up/down, whole arm swing left/right, 'elbow' extend/flex and 'wrist' extend/flex. Finally the stabiliser leg/foot that side. The legs you can pretty much ignore once you have set yourself up spirit-level flat, back wheels off the ground and front end raised by flooring the front bucket. You just play with the 4 arm levers. All good clean fun. I was at it for 3 hours Saturday morning and 3 more Sunday morning. I started off, as you'd expect on 'Skill Level = Rubbish/Dangerous' but by the end I was getting some begrudging OKs from the training department.

'804' gravel going everywhere. 

Whilst 'rubbish' I managed to drop the whole bucket onto my own wheel barrow (ooops! Had to be bent back straight by hefty builders' boots) and almost brained the boss with a wrong-direction sideways swoop of the arm. I was also dropping gravel everywhere and plenty of it at the handle end of the barrows, rather than over the barrow wheel. "You're breaking my back here!" Never mind we hit all the safety targets (no deaths!) and moved an awful lot of gravel between us and I did not get the sack. As I understand it, modern digger drivers look back on those Massey Ferguson "council" diggers with affection (They were a grand machine in their day - I LEARNED the trade on one of them etc) but now have it a bit more hi-tech with just 2 joysticks to twiddle so that they can make the bucket move in an accurate circle if they need to.

The log store is full. 

When not playing digger-driver, I was hard at work with the chain saw and/or axe cutting up enough logs and wood to finish filling the log store. As you can see from this picture, I even went a bit silly towards the end and tried my hand at log-store art which I had seen done (very well) in some pictures on the internet - people have created owls, trees, axe-wielding foresters and so on using the mosaic effect of different shapes and colours of log-ends.

My 'sun' of spruce and hawthorn.

I must admit that some of them are very intricate and must have taken hours even if only in the planning, choosing and shaping wood and deciding how you'd build it from the bottom up. Mine is a lot simpler. It was inspired by an artist friend who saw a pic of it half-filled where I had commented that the dark grey wood bottom left was actually ash, so was meant to be bright white but had been kicked around in the mud by the pigs like muddy footballs. The triangle of grey and a stripe of dark wood in the back layer (now hidden) reminded the artist of a mountain and a cloud so I wondered if I could chop up a big disk of spruce but keep the bits in the right order to re-assemble the disk at the store as a 'sun'.

To give it more definition I cut some small hawthorn which I knew would cut bright gold/orange when fresh. It was a fairly easy job to create a semi-circle dip in the existing front row, line it with hawthorn and drop on the big spruce disc bits. Then to 'bury' it under more hawthron and wedges and smaller rounds of spruce to complete my 'sky'. So, Philippa, will you give me "Sunshine on the Mountain"?

Are these pork slices or smoked bacon rashers? Thank you
Rob for an epic bacon-sarnie experience!

Our friends Sue and Rob have been getting into the cold-smoking. Rob has created a cold smoker out of recycled bits and pieces. Sue was more amused than angry when he stole the rake and sawed off 2/3 of the handle to make a pole from which to hang meat. She had found the much shortened rake and wondered if this was the one for the Little People to use. I was gifted a lovely chunk of (I think) shoulder and advised to cut rashers off it. They truly were the meatiest, most delicious bacon sandwiches I have had in a long time. It was a very filling breakfast which weighed me down onto the digger seat and kept me going till way past dinner time.

When you've eaten a bacon sarnie like this you KNOW
you've had a breakfast. 

When not working my little socks off, I have got lately quite into the reading. I have long since worked my way through the house 'library' of old favourites (Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Walter Macken, Eudora Welty, Andrea Levy) and sniffed around a few of Liz's treasures, I then grabbed up a history book Liz had been using to prepare lessons for her student. This was no history tome as I would know from school - all dates, Kings, Queens, battles, but a book about what you'd find if you could go 'there', in this case to the 14th Century.

Old wooden turf barrow. There are still plenty about and
some still being used. 

"The Time-Traveller's Guide to Medieval England" by Ian Mortimer (pub Vintage 2009) has me gripped. It has you arriving at various locations and getting involved in local life - crime and punishment, social structure and rank, travelling, pilgrimages, being a guest in peasant houses, Monasteries and big-nob's Halls, describing clothes, jobs and work, health and medical support, fairs and entertainments, reading books and so on. I was facinated by the bits about food and high status dining and amazed to find that for each type of food there was a special way of carving it to serve it to the Lords and Ladies and their guests. Kitchen boys would be expected to know how to 'unbrace' a mallard, 'spoil' a hen, 'dismember' a heron, 'unlace' a coney (rabbit), 'sauce' a capon or, indeed, a plaice, 'break' a deer, 'display' a crane, 'barb' a lobster, 'splat' a pike (I love that!), 'culpon' a trout or 'tranche' a sturgeon. I am quite pleased I just have a bit of bacon to go in a risotto tonight. Think I'll just 'smite that into gobbets'.