Farewell to the Help-X

Teamwork. Sonja and Asbjörn help Elizabeth laying weed proof
membrane across the big flower bed.

This post brings us to the end of the current fortnight of Help-X and our hosting of Sonja and Asbjörn. They are up. packed and breakfasted, and Elizabeth has just now set off with them and their huge hiker back-packs for Castlerea station. They are off up to Dublin to spend a few days relaxing and touristing before heading for the airport on Tuesday for their flights home (Berlin and Frankfurt). They have been great and we will miss them a lot, but more on that story later.

Jean with Molly and the new pup.

I am sorry to bring sad news, but we heard this week that our UK friend Jean had to say goodbye to our own #1 bitch Deefer's birth Mother, Molly, who would have been 14 years or so old, a good age for a Westie. Jean is widow of my very good friend and closest colleague, Steve, who is also no longer with us and much missed. Steve and Jean bred 3 pups, Deefer, Ellie-Bez (still with us) and Archie (RIP).

Deefer's birth Mum, Molly.

All their dogs were named after characters in the Scottish TV series "Monarch of the Glen" (remember "Och, Don't be silly, Molly, 'Tis only Golly the Ghillie!" ???). I still love to hear from Jean occasionally with news of the dogs. She is carrying on the Westie tradition with a new pup recently purchased. Her dogs always look pristine, clean and white compared to our poo-encrusted farm mutts! Good luck, Jean.

Lucifer planted down the fence.

So the Help-X-ers served out their time and have now departed. They were good hard workers and got stuff done way and above the call of duty, often working well into the afternoon. The unwritten "contract" such as it is, says you feed and house them for about 24 hours work a week.

A small mountain of thistles.

In the last few days of the stay they helped lay the membrane across that flower bed, they divided a huge clump of Crocosmia 'Lucifer' and planted chunks all down the driveway fence and pulled/dug a gazillion thistles out of the East Field. They cleared a pile of fallen, rotting wood (optimistically called the "Habitat Pile") from the woods and piled it on an ever growing bonfire heap. They mowed the orchard and down the pig 'race' and created a dog-proof "kerb" from concrete blocks under the pig gate. There was no stopping them - they hated to leave a job unfinished. On their last day (Friday) we give them free choice of the jobs on the "to do" list, but they still chose mowing and thistling. The Lady of the House had to nip out for more petrol for the mower.

German style apple cake with a nutty base layer and the set-but
-creamy custard 'roof'

They have proved very useful in the kitchen, they took over the table laying task and were quick to clear away and fill/empty the dish washer as soon as a meal finished. They also did more cooking. Sonja is a dab hand at the sweets, and created a superb German style apple cake. We have also been enjoying Elizabeth's more impressive end of the repertoire. The 'unlucky'*** rooster became a delicious pot roast (and then a pasta sauce) and the 'Last Supper' for these guests show-cased traditional "Dublin Coddle" and an Elizabeth David choc-mousse (just eggs and chocolate!).

*** That rooster. He was the white one who featured as 'lucky' in my 4th Sept post; he'd been saved from the usual fate of spare roosters by archery friends Con and Niamh needing a replacement bird after a fox strike. However, the month of pig-harvest and other busy-ness went by and C+N did not get round to building their bigger, stronger, more fox proof chicken run, so they decided not to take him after all.

In the pot he went then and deliciously tender he was. He was this year hatch, so would only have been 6 months old. He was, anyway, another in that fine Feigh tradition of our never being able to breed FEMALE white birds. 6 years we have been at the 'Sussex' chickens and the law of averages has still not delivered any hens. Every white chick we have ever hatched turns into a rooster. We have three little (white) half-grown newly feathered chicks out there at the moment and even they have been seen squaring up to one another in that baby-rooster, play-fighting way they have  so all our money is on them being roo's too!

Tom hanging in the shed.

'(Un)Lucky' was joined this morning on the chopping block by the Turkey-Tom. I have posted before about him starting to attack me and getting himself a verbal warning. Yesterday I went out to check on progress by the mowing Help-X crew and he started doing the karate kicks in the orchard. I'm a bit breathless at the minute, and Sonja had to fend him off with a broken rake handle while I made good my escape. He was definitely playing a dangerous game. The next part of this story is also ME playing a dangerous game and for the first stupid time, pushing my luck well outside of the Doctor's "Take it Easy" advice. Silly, reckless me. (I have been properly told off). Read on.

So I was letting all the birds out this morning, on my own, with everyone else still in bed, when the turkey put in his most determined attack yet and chased me, fending him off with the feed bucket, into the Tígín. I was safe enough but cornered, so I decided if I was going to off him, then it might as well be now. I grabbed a big plastic dog bed and dropped it over him upside down, pinning him down. I reached in and grabbed his legs, swung him out, grabbed the wood axe with my other hand and brought the edge of it down on his neck. Bye bye turkey BUT he is about 8 kg and the axe is a good weight so I was way outside 'light duties' and was suddenly coughing enough to nearly be sick. I was in real trouble for a while there and had to sit down a bit smart-ish to get my breath back. There was no way I could lift the bird up to tie twine round his legs and hang him up to bleed out, but at that point Sonja heard me struggling for breath and came down to see if I needed help. Lesson well learned, Readers. Apologies. It will not happen again.

Once the guests are gone, it does not take long
for the dogs and cats to take back over "their"
room.

Enough drama for this post, I guess. It's all nice and quiet here now (except for the "weeping") female turkey who is wondering where her boyfriend went. The females make a repeated 'Pew-pew-pew' noise which we are, of course, now blaming on her grief. We hope she will get over it. Turkeys form a very close pair-bond and we have experience in the past of a 'tom' pining away when he lost his hen to a fox. I'll keep you posted.

A Lucky Rooster

Puff balls

"At last!", I hear you cry, "A post devoid of Doctors, health, hospitals and medical stuff...... well except for here in this first sentence, anyway". September now, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and all thoughts turn to small-holder-ing, harvests and preparing for the Winter. Here that means a variety of meats - duck, chicken and pigs at the moment, plenty of fruit (mainly plums and apples), veg obviously and then. always taking us a bit by surprise, the puffball "pop-up-crop" out on the old muck heap behind the goose house.

Lamb shoulder cooked over a bed of veg which included
our puff balls. 

I spotted 2 nice new puff balls this time around and their delicious mushroominess has enhanced a number of dishes. Elizabeth included them in a lovely mushroom tortilla. I had a try at just cutting one into chips, and frying-pan frying them as part of breakfast, which was delicious, but the Main Chef used them as part of the bed of veg's under a roast lamb shoulder. This made for some delicious 'veg' to accompany the meat first time round, but then enhanced a superb shepherd's pie made with the left overs. Obviously you need to catch them young - don't wait till they are just a thin-skinned bag of dark green 'puffy' spores!

Plum jam. Needs another boil to improve the 'set'.

It has been a very good year for plums. All the heat wave weather ensured a good blossom and fruit set and the plums seemed to all survive the drought, unlike the cherries, quinces and pears which suffered a serious "June Drop". We picked a good 6 kg yesterday and I made 3 kg into plum jam.

Only a few figs this year but it is a very small and young tree.

This morning, though, I am not impressed by the set. I am never very good at setting jam; I never seem to boil it long or hard enough. This batch will go back into the big saucepan when I get the chance, for another good hour of rolling boil and reduction. It has also been a good year for apples but we are not so mad keen for apples in this house, so the pigs have been enjoying the lion's share of our Katy and Red Windsor bounty. Other varieties are more interesting but, this year, a lot lower cropping - 'Irish Peach', Egremont Russet, Braeburn, James Grieves and Bramley, plus cider apples Camelot, Dunkerton Early and Dabinet.

The 'bonhams' enjoying a water melon treat. There is nothing like
water melon for  shlurpy, juice-flying-everywhere, pig-saliva,
lip-smacking show of deliciousness. Happy pigs.

In the Meat Department we have now declared the two boy-pigs (bonhams) "ready". They have caught up well on the late Sister. I have booked them in to the butcher in town for Weds week (12th). That means we just have to do all that trailer-familiarisation malarkey on the Monday and Tuesday, but these guys already know the trailer from when we were doing it with their 'big sister' (Daisy - see earlier post). We will collect the carcasses on the following Monday (19th) to give them a chance to 'set' in Webb's cold store.

A nice clean drake carcass.

Meanwhile, our new ducks have now made their decisions on whether to be ducks or drakes and, unfortunately for them, the 5 babies proved to be 3 drakes and 2 females. This gave us a way out of balance ratio in the 'flock' (do ducks have 'flocks'?) of 4 males to 3 females. We need to 'off' all three of the new drakes to restore the balance, especially as any matings would almost certainly be brother x sister in-breedings. We will then be left with the Khaki Campbell as our drake. He is definitely NOT related to the ladies - he is a different variety.

Let a wet dog on your lap and they will autograph your knee.

The original Mum and 2 daughters will be our egg layers come next Spring. It's a shame that in Appleyards, as in the original mallards, the boys are the pretty and colourful ones. The females tend to be brown and flecked, well camouflaged, but can have a bit of white on their chests. So it goes.

The chickens, of course, have the same problem. Regular readers will know that we run here with a hen to rooster ratio of between 7:1 and 12:1 which gives us good cover (fertility) in the eggs but avoids any unwelcome harassment and rape. Sadly, like most species, baby chicks hatch as roosters and hens on a 50/50 basis; way too many boys. The day someone develops a chicken variety that yields 1:7 someone will make a lot of money.

This 'spare' rooster got lucky

We are, as you know, over-run with 2018 hatch birds, a lot of which hatched around May, so they will be coming to "point of lay" (or not!) between now and Chri***as. We start to see the signs as young poults start to square up to one another, flaring their little baby 'capes' and bowing their heads. This can be from very young ages - 6 weeks even. There is no market for them as roosters, especially the mongrel cross breeds we produce.

The ducks playing on the pond. Much quacking, zooming about
swimming under water like penguins and splashing. 

Normally these guys get 'offed' before they start to cause a problem, but one here at the moment has got lucky. Our archery friends, Con and Niamh have just had their rooster and a couple of hens taken by the fox. The rooster was taken right outside the kitchen window - Niamh saw him bite through the poor fella's neck and then carry him off, limp, before she could get out there.

Sad slew of feathers. All you get to tell
you Brer Fox has been.

We thought our own fox might be leaving us alone - he'd not been (as far as we knew) for several weeks. But 2 days ago, he came by just before 9 o'clock in the morning to invite a Buff Orpington hen to breakfast. My bad. I was downstairs and had just shut the dogs up for yapping at a magpie, lest they wake up Elizabeth. When they started yapping again I assumed it was just more magpie and did not respond properly. The fox had come onto the front lawn in bright sunshine and snatched a hen from the flock out there. Elizabeth spotted the sad slew of feathers on the lawn and a couple more where Foxy had adjusted his grip on his way out through fences etc.

Leaf fall.

Meanwhile, we are now set up for a few visits. The first, today, was by Mum-in-Law (Steak Lady on here) accompanied by her friend/neighbour/minder/factotum, Michelle. MiL had recently broken her wrist and had had it in plaster, so no driving for her. The plaster cast is now off but this would be a first chance for MiL to show off our place (largely built by her son, 'Sparks', of course!) to Michelle and also for them to check up on my recovery. We would catch up on the chat over tea, enjoy a bit of lunch, and then the ladies were off for an afternoon at the lovely Strokestown House (The house, the National Famine Museum and a lovely old walled garden).

Lovely poster from Michelle.

They came (as they say) bearing gifts including a very thoughtful and generous present from Michelle. She has a friend in the printing business and she had had him make up a couple of posters from the newspaper article which featured our garden back in December 2017. See also my previous post on

https://deefer-dawg.blogspot.com/2017/12/too-much-bio-diversity.html

The poster had the article in the middle, surrounded by some more recent pictures extracted from this blog. We are very grateful and delighted. The ladies even brought a poster-frame for the item. We are spoiled.

Geese and their reflections

Tomorrow, it is the turn of  'The Dans' (Dan and Danielle), long term Friends of the Blog. Cousin Danielle, in particular, was deeply distressed (well... OK) that I had sneakily gone sick without very quickly calling on them to come and help, and they have been meaning to get over and support us ever since. We really have the best and most generous friends.  More of that visit in the next post.

All for now. Good Luck.

Plant More Peas, You Fool!

Pear blossom

Dog owners will know that every now and again dogs get sick. #1 Daughter here, my 12 year old bitch (Westie) is, fortunately, one of those who will tell you in advance that she is feeling sick and needs to be let out to eat some grass and sort herself. Even at 05:00, that's better than her leaving it till she actually 'produces'. Deefer 'tells' me by whimpering miserably every couple of seconds which wakes me up and I can then hear that her belly is squelching and gurgling dangerously. I cannot sleep through that and it wouldn't be fair to.

Apple Blossom

So, at 05:00 on Monday morning, I am out on the front lawn with all three dogs (you can't leave two indoors - they would bark and wake the Woman of the House). You know what? It was beautiful. It was barely light with dawn just starting in the East. It was warm and windless, dry and calm.

For the first time this year, our young greengage tree has blossom

The Dawn Chorus was going at it hammer and tongs and (I think) four cuckoos were calling from the four points of the compass. A cock pheasant was throwing in the odd 'ker-chang!' and a wood pigeon was cooing energetically. In Sussex, they say that the wood pigeon shouts "Plant more peas, you fool!", or so an ancient, weathered, son-of-the-soil farmer (Les) I used to work for told me back in the 70s, anyway. It sounds about right. At one point a large-ish bat flew through in a straight line... possible Liesler's Bat then but I'm no expert.

The beech leaves are coming out. I love that 'acid green' colour
and , yes, that is an out of focus pig in the background. 

We did our quarter of an hour of allowing Deefer to eat the long grass and try to be sick, then we all trooped back indoors. We did it all again at 06:00 and then gave up and woke up and got up properly at about quarter past 7. Deefer declined her breakfast but you'll be relieved to know, she was OK and sorted by lunchtime.

Polly the ewe enjoys the longer grass round the
willow archway.

Meanwhile we have got ourselves firmly into the routine of letting the sheep out twice a day to get at the longer grass outside the field. So far this has held no fears and caused no escapes. We supervise them out for between half and a whole hour. Either the two of us do it or either of us are happy to do this single handed. I say 'supervise' - what we actually do is stand around leaning on fences, chatting, or take a coffee and sit in our 'Darby and Joan' chairs out by the pond in the warm sunshine. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and pleasant "job".

Ewes and lambs round the pond.

The sheep, including all the now weaned or nearly-weaned lambs do a brilliant job mowing the open spaces but even better, nibble in close all around the edges, trees and fence-bases where you'd not get with a mower. They take grass, ground elder, creeping buttercup, selfheal, cow-parsley (Queen Anne's Lace here) and any other herbs they can get.

Tightly curled tail is the sign of a happy pig.

They fill up that rumen in about 45 minutes, at which point you can see they are losing focus and would, given the chance, go for a lie down. You would have to supervise that, too, which might get a bit boring. Luckily, at that stage they are very biddable and more than willing to follow any human carrying a bucket of grub back to the gated field to take their rest. They have a small helping of their 'crunch' as a dessert and we leave them be for a few hours (or over night) to ruminate that lot (cudding) before we do it all again. As a result, they are puttying on some good condition and I have not yet had to fire up the mower.

Plant more peas, you fool!

In other news. and as a nice segue from those Wood Pigeon calls, we have been thoroughly enjoying this proper improvement in the weather and have made a good start on the vegetable gardening. Elizabeth went off today in the car with a wad of cash and returned with trays and trays of seedling plants - caulis, cabbages, carrots, parsnips etc, plus pot-grown herbs and packets of seed - peas of course!

Elizabeth trying to garden 'helped' by chickens. This involved
a lot of shouting at birds and shoo-ing them off with a stick. 

Friends of the Blog will know that with Help-X Carsten's assistance, the three 'empty' railway sleeper beds in the Kitchen Garden got a  thorough weeding and a good mulch of compost. The two strawberry beds have also now been weeded. The empty ones are now well planted with the new plants but with space allowed for succession planting. Inevitably this involved the chickens all trying to get involved so there was plenty of repelling 'boarders' and the new rows are now securely protected by our chicken-wire cages and frames.

Kato trying to work out how to get up to the
starling's nest above that overflow pipe.

I have also been down a couple of times to help archery friends Con and Niamh with various 'many hands' tasks down at their place including today putting the conical canvas 'hats' on the two round-houses they have in their repro fort. It's a bit like putting up a small marquee and involves plenty of wrangling canvas while balanced at the top of a ladder clinging to the central upright pole of the house. All good clean fun.

That is probably enough for this one. Talk again soon.

Mud Pies for Grown Ups

Lime plaster with hemp fibres

We are sopping wet. It has been raining pretty much all day as we 'enjoy' the back end of the skirts and train of Hurricane Gert. A big vigorous frontal system sits just off the NW coast aligned SW to NE and sliding slowly along that line. For most of the day it has been a heavy drizzle but occasionally it gets all inspired to downpours of almost Biblical proportions.

Lime-plastering the wall behind me the 'old' way.

As I was leaving SuperValu in Castlerea this morning I was not so much hopping between the puddles but walking with very flat feet across a sheet of water hoping that nowhere would the depth exceed the vent-hole 'draft' of my Crocs (about 18 mm if you're interested). Don't usually need wellies for Supermarket shopping here but that would not have been a bad choice today.

Smear a 'patty' on with the palm/heel of your hand and try to
level the lumps and bumps of the pointed stonework. This was
just the first "coat". 

I have been feeding the birds indoors today (the layers' pellet in particular turns to mush on contact with water and the birds will not touch it), in the sheds with the lights on. The pigs have long since mushed up the dirt inside the bit of fence over which I was passing food, so we have moved along a bit to dryer ground and moved along again this evening. The half apples would just plop into a foot-print and vanish, tho' I dare say the pigs' powerful noses would soon root them back out again, truffling-style.

Pinned down by the rain and feeling a bit 'meh' a blog post on "mud pies" seemed appropriate. Archery coach, Con and his good lady (Niamh) are doing up an out building like our Tígín and as part of this, they are plastering the inside with a trad old mix of white lime mortar and hemp fibres. They are doing this by encouraging the likes of me along by organising a free 'workshop' where the volunteers get to learn and try out the skills and hear all about the history in exchange for all that fascinating info, the fun of it and an epic salad for lunch.

First coat applied to one wall. The plaster is finished by applying
 a thinner, smoother coat and finally polishing it, when nearly dry,
with the heel of your hand in little circular motions.

I had seen the results of this method and material before (much of Con's place is plastered like this and Anne and Simon have a straw-building lined with at least the lime, if not the hemp fibres), but had never met it as a wet building material and a technique. It arrives as a 350 kg pile of lumps in a plastic-lined bulk builder bag, in this case from Monaghan.

A least the thoughtful cats leave their mice neatly stacked
among the china on a shelf. Thanks Blue!

It looks like very pale grey mud flecked with the (very short) pieces of hemp fibre, like "wholemeal" mud, if you like. It is pre-mixed (as a powder?) by the company, then wetted a bit and left for weeks, months or years to 'make'. Our job was to soften it in the cement mixer to roughly the consistency of sticky sausage meat (no lumps!). This involved a fair amount of stopping the machine and slicing through the bigger lumps with a pointing trowel. (Health Warning for the new builder - NEVER put your hand, arm or tools into a cement mixer when it is going. It will happily twist your arm off).

Does my bum look big in this? Lizzie tries
out the three cat-power insulation for bum and
back of legs while curled up on the sofa.

I was singled out (OK, I volunteered) for cement mixer duty as we also needed standard cement/sand mortar for some of the pointing etc and the machine had to be cleaned spotlessly between each of the 4 mixes as we didn't want nasty grey cement in our lovely white lime, or vice versa.

At 8 and a half weeks, Connie's 3 "chicks" are well grown and
fully feathered. More like half-scale hens than babies now. 

The plaster now at suitable wet consistency (you squish some 'patties' of it in your hands to check for no dry, hard lumps) it is time to stick it to the wall. First the wall gets wetted with a watered down slurry of the mix. The technique for applying the actual stuff is to scoop up a palm-full and smear it onto the wall with the heel of your hand, flattening your palm as you push. You try to leave it thicker over the dents (and squished into any cracks) and thinner over the peaks where stones stick out proud. It needs to be fairly flat, though it will be rough textured. The 2nd coat will sort that and finish with a rather more 'polished' (all be it rough to the touch) outer surface.

Back in the Feta cheese game. These the curds
from 8 litres fresh goat's milk, a gift from Sue
and Rob.

I love all this stuff and the old techniques anyway, but it was a superb day working with my co-volunteers, Ivan and Paul, swapping stories and banter and at one point breaking off completely to hear a 45 minute Master-Class (by Con) on the history of the material(s) and their use including all the history of hemp as a source of fibre ("retting" and the like), later as a chill-out weed (so all the fascinating chemistry of cannabinols and stuff) and most recently as a possible alternative to 'chemo' in cancer treatments - I will let the reader look for those him/her-self if interested enough). An epic salad lunch followed. Thank you very much Con and Niamh for sharing you knowledge, skills and food with us. I can't wait for Lesson 2 (Top Coat).

Rather sponge-y curds. It looked to have 'risen' better than
my bread!

Other than that we have been plodding along with everyday life. We received a nice gift of goat's milk from Sue and Rob which we have tried to turn into Feta cheese. For some reason this formed excellent curds but then stayed a bit sponge-y, like last week's puff-ball fungus. Still, we went with it, did the dry-cure and have now drowned it in 15% brine for 3 months shelf-life. When we use it, we dunk it for a while in clean water to soak off the worst of the saltiness.

TOPP left-overing! Sausage meat, bacon and apple PIE. 

I've been carrying on with the bread making. Liz has been building slowly to her involvement in the 'Ros go Run' half marathon etc (Sept 3rd) which this year will include for the first time a little Treasure Hunt / 'forage' walk for the kiddies; clues tied to gateposts etc. Should be great fun. We are thinking we will do rhyming couplets for the clues. We have also had another promising 'tickle'  on the Help-X website so we may be getting another volunteer but more on that when it is really happening. Good Luck now.

Curlew Fidelma

The redcurrant jelly has a lovely colour this year.

This blog post nearly wasn't! Mid morning, while Liz was indoors and I was out shopping, the Internet died. Liz phoned the fault in (land line as well as the web) and was told that they had no idea what the problem was yet, so it might take up to 3 days to fix. THREE DAYS! How could we survive that? Ah, what did we do with ourselves before the Internet? Got on with real life, I guess.

This lovely pic posted by bro' Mark of (l-r) other bro' Tom, Mum
and Sis-in-Law Sue at Herstmonceux castle. Pronounce it  "Hurst-
mon-zoo" for that correct Sussex effect. 

We also told them that our elderly neighbour needed checking as she has no broadband or a mobile; they were pushing the boundaries a bit when they tried to suggest that both we and she may have suffered a coincidental synchronised equipment failure. All OK in the end - the fixers went out and did their stuff and a phone call told us we were back up by 3 pm.

Curlew - image blagged off the Internet

So, who, I hear you ask, is "Curlew Fidelma" then. She is the latest contact phone number added to my phone. How so? Well, friends of the blog will know that the curlew is a large wading bird which has become increasingly rare in Ireland for the usual reasons - changing farm practices and loss of habitat. It nests on the ground in wild places but is now quite unusual to see and even rarer to find nesting.

From little acorns.....

Step forward, then, our good friends and fellow archers, Con and Niamh who, on their smallholding south of Castlerea, have just had 5000 native, broad-leaved trees planted as a baby-forest, a move for which government grants are available because the Irish Government are obliged to up the % land-use as "forestry" under EEC rules. It had been languishing down in the 4% area. These grants are mainly for commercial forest but they are also available for 'amenity' and 'conservation' projects.

First 2017 chokes

In the conservation ones you get involved with the good folk of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) who are, as expected, interested in the wildlife potential of your new forest, so Niamh has been visited by one of their people, the Fidelma named above. She was particularly interested in curlews and Niamh knew that I might have 'spotted' some in my comings and goings. So we had, a group of 18 seen from a road nearby but no nesting ones. These would just have been a migrating group moving through (it was October) but Fidelma was delighted to have "found some" and asked me to save her number so that I can tell her if we see any more. Happy to help.

Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) flowers.

The forest, incidentally, is quite fiercely controlled - you don't just take delivery of the saplings and dig them in. The work is all done by professional contractors who bring diggers and other gear, they ring the whole site with high deer-proof fencing and an inspector comes along a while later to check that you do have oaks in the mixture here, or that the trees are planted upright there, or that they are all sprouting leaves from the apex across the site. Any wrong planting, sloped trees or those showing die-back and side-sprouting have to be ripped out and re-planted. Only then does the contractor-man get his money.

New 'Jakoti' shears and the new-old "double bow" sprung-steel
type. 

Meanwhile, I promised an end to the sheep shearing stories for this year with a quick mention of my new 'Jakoti' shears and how brilliant they turned out to be for trimming the 'frilly knickers' and other tufts of wool off sheep I did not do very well with the electric shears.

Ewes with tidy nethers.

You may recall that back in May when I was doing my own animals, I was still very nervous of cutting the sheep's Achilles tendons, ears, folds of skin at 'armpits' and so on - anywhere I thought the wide teeth of the stationary 'comb' part of the shear might fit round a narrow edge or corner. I tended to ease off and pull back near these places, so I left tufts of uncut wool around knees and heels, under throats etc.

The last knockings of that first 'Parma'
ham. The bones have gone for soup.

The new 'Jakoti' shears have proved themselves the perfect weapon for tidying up these frills and tufts, so Liz and I penned the sheep into our hurdle-pen in the cattle race and nipped round them all in fairly short order. I am pleased with the results, the now tidy sheep.

Ever bigger, the fast growing turkey youngsters.

Other than that we have just been chugging around here looking after the first two clutches of baby chicks (joined today by a possible third for 'Mint Patch Girl' but more on that in the next post) and releasing the Hubbard poults into their bigger pen.

Very first raspberries. 

All serene here.