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.

Too Sheepish?

This week's breed of sheep is the 'Texel'. My first ever ram, named
Reginald is that tank of a sheep on the left in this shot.

This blog is in danger of becoming a bit sheep-orientated but bear with me. All these shearing stories are very seasonal; nobody does much shearing after June so normal, sheep-less service will be resumed shortly. The previous post had me just finished with the East Ender's woolly faced Southdowns and looking forward to getting stuck into Alayne and Colin's EIGHTEEN ewes and a ram. Count them. This is more sheep in one job that I had sheared up to that point in my life. It would also include my first ever ram so I was a little nervous.

French student Anne holds Reginald at mid-way point. 

I needn't have worried. With Liz still away at her 'AGM' in the UK, I spotted a free Tuesday morning when it was certain to be dry and suggested we make a start and make a dent in the number left to be sheared this weekend. My own private target was 6 sheep, which would be a third in half a day, which would make 12 in the whole of Saturday manage-able. Yes, I KNOW the pro's would laugh at these work rates as they bash through ewes in 5 minutes ( I think the current world champ takes 40 seconds!) but I'm a 20-30 minute guy myself.

A sheared ewe looking very skinny next to her full-fleece sisters

As I suspected (hoped!) the sheep turned out to be the Texel breed I had remembered, conveniently clean of face and lower limb, so there was to be none of the clippering round eyes and ears. We were also well staffed - Colin and Alayne use the Help-X "agency" to secure student volunteers who will come out and work hard for bed and board just so they can experience life on a smallholding or farm for a week or two in summer.

Looking like a 'pro' but what's he going to do with the toothbrush?

This summer they have French horse-riding instructor and student 'intern', Anne S on site and she was keen to get involved in this unfamiliar sheepishness. She was to be 'holder/steadier' but went on to be much more involved - catcher, shepherder, sprayer of nicks and cuts and even trainee shearer.

Anne tries her hand at the shearing under "expert" (hah!)
instruction from me.

We ended up having a good deal of fun and banter working away there and flew through the animals, starting with big, chunky Reginald who turned out to be the gentlest, calmest, sweetest victim you could ever have hoped for. The nick and cut spray became a particular in-joke and source of banter and heckling. Called 'Terramycin' and meant to stop any infection at the broken-skin wound sites, it is a bright, lurid blue so all your little nicks and cuts show up really obviously.

The Blue Spray of Shame

We named it the Blue Spray of Shame (and even translated that into French; Jet bleu de l'honte?) and Anne was trying to lash great blobs onto every tiny graze, even where the skin was not broken and I was pleading mercy "Ahhh come ON! Not THAT tiny one!" She had dalmation-ambitions for sure. Colin and I got our own back when she wanted a turn at the clippers and (oops) made a bit of a nick in a brisket. All good clean fun.

50% done, the group are run back down to the field.

We cracked on, swept past my 6-sheep target and managed 8 with a short stop for a refreshment smoothie. First time I'd ever had one of them. Thanks Alayne. We were half packed up and ready to run the sheep back to their field when we took pity on a ewe panting hotly even in the shade of the shed, so we buzzed her off too, total 9 - 50% of the flock complete!

Un-fazed by the shearing this sheared
girl lambed twins today. A nice
unexpected surprise

That was Tuesday and with Liz coming back and having to work, we decided to catch up the rest of the job on Saturday. With rain forecast Thursday night we knew we might need to do some judicious shepherding of the full-fleece ones in and out of doors out of the rain. As a nice happy "ending" to this part of the story, one of the ewes we sheared Tuesday dropped two unexpected happy, healthy lambs today.

Nice pick of broad beans from the tunnel

Had we known she was pregnant we should not have sheared her. I take from this encouragement that the "not while pregnant" rule only applies if you are up-ending the sheep to shear them - all that upside down stuff and stretchy manipulation could easily bring on miss-carriage or spontaneous abortion. Shear them standing on their feet and the stress is so little that even a full-term pregnant one could survive it. Obviously you'd not touch her if you knew. Colin is also delighted that by shearing the mum we have cleaned all round her udder and the lambs had no bother finding the teats and were suckling away in minutes.

Not so much a gift from England as Liz
repatriating this lovely whiskey which had
tried to escape the Island. This from Bristol
Airport's Duty-Free shop. Thank you Mrs C.

That was the first half of that then. More Texel-shearing tomorrow before I hang up the clippers for this season..... as far as I know.  Back home in Roscommon, the house has welcomed Liz home from her travels. She has had a whale of a time re-acquainting with a lot of the UK-based and Internet friends. Among the gifts she came home with, my first play with a sour-dough starter for bread making. More on this in a future post.

Our first 2017 broody, Connie the Sussex, nails it hatching
3 of the 5 eggs she was cooking. 

The first in our little collection of broody hens has hatched her chicks. She was sitting on 5 and now has 3 tiny chicks to Marshall around and rear.

She has made life very easy for herself by doing it all in a wicker basket in the Tígín (feed store) where we can close the door an anyone else interfering with her  and she can teach the babies to feed and find water in safety before she feels the need to take them out into the yard proper and meet all the aunties (and Dads). All three broodies so far this year are the young hens from Sue's replacement group which we got to re-stock after our fox. None of our mature old-stagers have shown any inclination.

Trad Irish Stew but made with goat chops.

That's surely enough for now. One more post about sheep, then I promise to leave them alone for a while as long as no-one comes a-knocking pleading with me to "just do" their 3 because their bloke has let them down.

A personal best post, read by almost 400 readers.

Oh, just one more thing - remember how impressed I was that one of my posts had attracted 300 views? The post, entitled "Welcome Strangers" featured Senator Frank Feighan and our visiting artist, Brian John Spencer. I just looked back at it and see that it has now been read by almost 400 folk. Thank you very much whom ever you are.

Deefer's Log 3 Sept 2007

3rd September 2007

Did I mention yesterday that this holiday was not only "us" but also the Silverwood family - Mum's sis' (Mrs Silverwood), and her hubby Em, plus the 2 girls Em-J (9) and J-M (7) plus Baby-M (18 months). That was the need for the 56 foot, 8/10 berth "Northumberland" we chose.

We were in for an early start as Dad wanted to get clean round the M25 and out onto the M11 Northbound before the traffic. 04:00 alarms for all, and all the packing done the night before. Anxious times for Haggis, who is convinced, as soon as he sees packing happening, that he is to be deserted. Never has been, but that's not good enough reason, as far as he's concerned.

A long ol' drive North, but Mum and Dad share the driving and we get let out for a scamper about at a Motorway services / rabbit sanctuary up on the A1(M). We get to Sowerby Bridge in good time - we can't join the boat till 2pm - and the Silverwoods are there before us (they've only come across from Morecambe this morning). So there's plenty of time for a walk round the town, a chip buttie and a pint of Thwaite's (we are in Yorkshire after all!)

Then starts the serious stuff. They don't just stick you in the boat these days and off you go. There was a training book and a DVD to read/see before you arrived, you had to sign loads of stuff allocating jobs etc, and there was a 3 hour training / familiarisation session where the humans were shown round the boat (engine, gas, electrics, safety etc etc) and the talked through and shown steering and locks.

When jobs were being given out, Mum knew you had to allocate a Skipper. I volunteered but Mum said it had to be a human, and everybody else ducked quicker than Dad, so there he was (my Hero!). Em and Em-J became "Lock-wranglers", Mrs S was Bosun and Mum opted for Galley-slave and Baby-M wrangler.

More tomorrow - but my pics today are of.....

1) A rather smart one of me and J-M's stripey tights

2) We three dogs on the first day (still on leads- that wasn't to last!) looking over the edge from the aft deck in fascinated horror at the maelstrom of water filling the lock when the gate paddles are opened!

3) Tuel Tunnel in Sowerby Bridge, leading to the bottom of the Tuel lock, the tallest in England. It was made when the canal was brought back into service for the likes of us - it had been locks 3 and 4 but when the canal fell into dis-use, some perisher built a road over lock 3, so now they have to get all the rise from the original 2 into 1 lock - so it raises you 20 feet!

More tomorrow

Deefs