Meat Birds

Hubbards at week 10, having a lie down to rest from all that
eating and all that growing.

At this time of year we start to feel a bit 'over-run' with chickens. Our Hubbard 'meat birds' are 10 weeks old now and seem HUGE, like good sized white, honest, chicken-shaped chickens; they have left all traces of fluffy chick babyhood behind them. They are also lazy things and their idea of free range is to hang around in the yard and by the back door waiting for the next dole out of food, so they begin to feel a bit as if they are under foot. This is no doubt bad tactics for a meat bird, because we humans find ourselves starting to appraise them in a new, not quite so benign way - look at the legs on that, feel the heft of the bird, feel that breast-meat and so on.

Busy hands for about an hour per bird, but they are fairly
easy to pluck. There is more risk of that tender skin ripping
 than of leaving any feathers in. 

Going on previous years, when we have not 'harvested' (now, there's a euphemism!) them till about week 12 or 16, though we know that the commercial boys will have had them all sorted by weight/size long ago, we would not normally be starting them yet, but we decided to try a couple at this stage. Our process involves me killing them and passing them straight in to Liz while they are still warm. Liz plucks them dry, singes them if they need it and then guts them out and tidies them up for either cooking or the freezer, jointed if appropriate.

Oven-ready at 2.45 and 2.75 kg respectively. 

The Hubbard is an excellent bird for meat - we certainly think it is the meatiest, tastiest and most delicious chicken we have ever had. We enjoy them in all manner of recipes but we rather fancied having our first one of the year just roasted with oil and salt and with just lemon and garlic stuffed up its 'fundament', to get the full flavour un-enhanced by sauces or fancy marinade. It did not disappoint and the bird was so big (at 2.75 kg oven ready) that we actually only had the legs and a wing at that first meal. Like the Christmas turkey it reappeared as risotto the next day and will join me for a solo supper of stuffed pepper tonight, with Liz off on another Silverwood run minding 'Daddy' while Steak Lady whizzes up to Dublin.

"Gribbly bits" - not everyone's taste but we like the  livers, hearts
and gizzards off our birds too.

They say that every part of the pig is used except for its squeal, and we seem to come pretty close with these Hubbards. Liz saves the hearts, livers (for paté) and gizzards. If you have never had gizzard, I recommend you try it. The gizzard is a powerful food-grinding structure like the stomach of a mammal which also contains grit to help with breaking down the corn and therefore has a very tough lining to stop the grit damaging the gizzard (stomach) muscles.

The finest roast chicken you can come by.

That part is inedible, but if you slit the gizzard open you can easily then cut out the sheet of tough lining, leaving you with pure, lean, fine-grained muscle as good and red as the muscle of heart or steak. Cut it up into bite sized pieces and use in stir-fry or toss, fried, into a salad. We tend to use the hearts in the same way; they just need trimming to remove any membrane and tubular bits which you do not fancy. I'll leave the liver to you - everyone has a good liver-paté recipe somewhere.

New potatoes from the poly tunnel. "British Queen", I think.

That meal turned out to be a first for this season of that lovely and satisfying thing, a menu sourced entirely from your own 'farm'. We had gone exploring in the polytunnel and found, to our delight, that the spuds were ready; our first go at new potatoes in the tunnel. These had been planted on 20th March (Solar Eclipse day, if you remember) so were only 15 weeks old and they were streets ahead of any outdoor crop, but I was worried that in the tunnel, where you never seem to be able to get enough water onto things, we'd have no crop. We were wrong, and the goodly bucket load in the picture is from one plant. The soil left behind is so good, that we are now thinking we might do more spuds across the rest of the tunnel in the future or, possibly now for Christmas as crops finishing permit.

That front garden gravel strip gets its first (Rhapsody in Blue)
rose and then, with the encroaching grass of the drive (right)
 close-shaved, it looks even neater. 

Spuds, then, and chicken, but we fleshed the meal out with purple-sprouting (ex-freezer) and a salad of lettuce, radish and chives. Gorgeous. Only the PSB was not killed/harvested on that very day. If we'd not had a bottle of rosé to hand, even the drink could have been ours - that lovely sharp, lemony elderflower cordial.

Shepherding the "flock" home to the East Field of an evening.
It's more like them scampering and me trying to keep up!

What else is new? The baby turkeys have now passed the 4-week stage, so have finished with all that "electric hen" heat-pad pandering and being rescued back to the spare bedroom at night. These nights are lovely and warm, so they are now outdoor birds, all be it in a rabbit run with a lovely warm, dry, draft-free "bedroom" into which to retreat. They are doing really well and have you in mind of Hubbards with their growth rate but, as Liz pointed out, they have a good deal of growing they NEED to do to reach Christmas Dinner weights. The 2nd batch is still in egg-form, with hatch day due in a couple of days. Regular readers will recall that I am a bit worried on behalf of these 5 possibles because of the nasty, long power cut we had in the middle. We were minus power for a good 6 hours and I was putting mugs of boiling water into the incubator and throwing blankets over it to try to keep the temperature up. At about 3 pm I was contemplating sitting with the eggs tucked down my shirt when the power came back on. We'll see, I guess.

Tom is on the right in this pic by younger brother, Mark, which
was actually taken in 2013. I have no more recent picture.

Finally on this one, I need to say a big Happy Birthday to "big brother" Tom, who is 60 today. Tom does not do internet or on line, but he does get to read this in hard copy when Mum gets one through the post, so all the best, Tom. Hope you had a great day. When I spoke to him today and asked was he doing anything special he said, "No, just working". That would be fairly typical for we three brothers, never great ones for 'ripping it up'. I certainly spent my UK time trying to keep mine quiet and my head below the parapet; the fewer people who knew it was my Birthday the happier I was! Good on yer, Tom. Many more.

O Sole Mio?

Yes; I've been making my own entertainment this week, with Lizzie off down in Silverwood-land "minding" Daddy (Mr SL) while Steak Lady steals some time in the sun in Malta off with her gang of former Bridge Club chums from Portmarnock. Not that Mr SL needs much minding, you understand; he's all well again from his Hospital scares so this is not Intensive Care we are talking about. Liz tells me that he instructs her not to get up and start "fussing" before 9 a.m. because he likes to wake up and potter about gently and if she'd be good enough to leave him alone till then he'll bring her a cup of tea.

Some first-year shoots from those English's Nursery crowns
only in the ground a week or so!

When she dives in and tries to start clearing the meal table and do washing up he good naturedly shuts her in the sun-room with a glass of wine and insists that HE will do it because he "knows where everything goes" when it comes out of the dish-washer. Yes, it's a tough old job this "minding" but Liz will survive. She is also getting plenty of opportunities to go visit the Silverwoods and be visited by them.

Let loose in the kitchen, I am trying my hand at a few scones.

And I do NOT want you to get the impression that I am feeling sorry for myself here. I am quite self sufficient, me, so though I miss the wifely presence (it would be impolite not to!), I can chug along happily here on the 'farm'. There is always plenty to do and the dogs, cats and livestock are all good company (if a bit thin on simulating conversation). I do a little bit of this and a little bit of that - gardening, the bees, shopping, photography, blogging, facebook, cooking stuff for myself, entertaining the occasional guest, housework and even some baking. The latter always feels a bit "bold", like interfering where you are not normally allowed to go. Although I can cook perfectly well, we have slotted into a rhythm here where it is Liz who rules in the kitchen and does all the fancy cookery while I am mainly outdoor jobs. So if I stray into the kitchen I always get the impression I am being 'watched', the same way I am sure Liz feels if she were to wander out into my veg plot and start weeding.

Possibly not the brightest place to sit, Blue.

Just for a bit of fun, I also had another go at taking some video footage and uploading it to the internet, one short chunk of the new twin lambs, and one of the new piggies. These are the links if you are that way inclined. Unfortunately, they are facebook based links (I failed to grab the Youtube addresses which appear briefly when they were first put up there and I have no idea how to find these out again)

This is the pig one https://www.facebook.com/matt.care.54/videos/vb.100002645805158/769903719774481/?type=2

and this the lambs one

https://www.facebook.com/matt.care.54/videos/vb.100002645805158/769526129812240/?type=2&theater

Apologies if you can't get at them. Equally, if anyone knows how to find them on Youtube, then please do let on. Perhaps the solution is to upload them again and take notes?

Lots of activity fom the new bees. 

We have also had our very pleasing result (so far anyway) in the bee keeping department. When I last posted I had just done my moonlight flit over to Killashee in County Longford to collect my new colony from the wonderful BO'D and carefully set it up next to the old hive. Any worries I might have had of bees suffering in the car journey were quickly dispelled when the new workers were out and buzzing first thing the next day, even though it was a bit chilly. There were bees pinging everywhere, certainly more than my 'old' hive has done this year. A good few were doing the face-the-hive, fly-backwards and spiral outwards flights which we know are 're-orientation' flights, the bees emerging from the hive to discover an unfamiliar landscape and having to learn the new map.

The twin lambs now thriving again at almost 3 weeks. 

I have set the hives next to each other so that in a few days we can slot all the frames from inside BO'D's boxes, into the old white boxes, which will have been cleaned and sterilized just in case, and then spirit the old brown boxes away. The bees will then (so goes the theory) cope with the fact that their home has suddenly 'turned white' because they will come back and mill about for a while, confused by the visual change, but then smell the familiar smells of home coming from the entrance slot of this funny white box. It is almost beekeeping mantra that you can move a hive less than 3 feet or more than 3 miles, but never anything in between.

Cheeky happy pigs, scarfing more fruit.

Bees find their way about by a remembered map. They will find the hive again if it has only gone 3 feet, but if it has gone further away they will mill about at the old location, lost, till they run out of fuel and then simply die on the ground. If you move the hive less than 3 miles, which is the bees natural forage range, they may accidentally come across an old remembered route to the old location and follow that back to the former home (where they will, again, die of lack of fuel). If you want to move your hive ten feet, then you have to move it 3 miles to an out-station (a friend's ground for example), wait 3 weeks while they re-orientate to that and forget the old map, then move them back to the old apiary but new position. Strange but true.

George the Gander. You lookin' at me?

And I have had that birthday, of course, which was looking to be a non-event, with the celebrations postponed till Liz came home. All my friends and contacts, though, must have had other ideas - I received a veritable blizzard of greetings on Facebook, I got a card and gift from the UK through the post (Thanks Pud Lady and Tom!) and visits from friends who wanted to meet the piggies plus one from Anne and Simon who arrived bearing rhubarb and stayed for a cup of tea, a sit down and a chat. Also some phone calls about the bees and a nice call home. May also have pinged a few texts back and forth to/from the absent Lizzie. It all made for a perfectly good day.

White Rhino.

Lime-washing the outbuildings; a job that Liz had been itching to do since we finished the house build but had been restrained by the weather and the knowledge that this is a job you traditionally do at Easter. Neither of us had any kind of exact idea of what 'lime wash' actually was, or how you bought it, although Liz had childhood memories of 'Daddy' mixing up buckets of water and powder so that they could paint the garden walls. Of course, the internet had as many versions of what to do as there were websites and our first shopping trip in spring to our faithful builders' merchant, Cooney's, gave us only the rather dim holiday-cover guy who had no idea.

Even 'Daddy' (understandably) let the side down by pleading that his memories of garden walls were 40 years old and that they now use a modern masonry paint like Dulux Weathershield. "Why couldn't we use that?" he asked. But we want to do the traditional job and limewash, we knew, as well as being a coat of white, has strong (caustic) cleaning properties against moss, ferns, creepy-crawlies, goes on nicely with the big-bristled slappy whitewash brushes and copes well with walls which are decent stone but very poorly pointed. The cement in the mixture also works as a 'PVA-style' stabilizer for the dusty joints. It is also way way cheaper than the amount of masonry paint you'd need for these buildings. You would do it every or every-other Easter and your buildings would improve with age. In theory.

Anyway, we wanted the fun of mixing, slapping and 'discovering' this old traditional way. Our barns were both bare concrete and stone and didn't look like they had been limed in 30 years.

So, back to Cooney's we went and this time found the useful guy (Kenny) behind the counter. "Ah!" says he knowledgeably, "You need White Rhino (brand) hydrated lime and white cement" and promptly added them to out order for the wooden laths for the poly-tunnel.

White cement is, as the name would suggest, cement powder with a whitening agent for use where you'd not want your mortar to be the normal grey cement colour. Hydrated lime is, chemically, Calcium di-Hydroxide (Ca(OH)2) or "slaked" lime and is made by 'slaking' (adding water to) Calcium Oxide (also known as 'quicklime' or just 'lime'. We were on our own - none of the websites seemed to know anything about cement mixtures, so Liz had a play with bucket-chemistry. We knew we wanted a mixture of a similar consistency to butter-milk and which would paint onto the walls 'fairly thin and milky looking' but would dry in the sun to that well known blinding white of trad Irish cottages.

We also knew that lime is nasty, irritant, corrosive stuff, so you need to wear gloves and, in our case mix your powder in that keen NE wind which would whip away any 'puffs' of dust before anyone had a chance to inhale them (or use a sensible mask if you are mixing in still air or indoors!). Eye protection is also advised, but that's another story. Old clothes or overalls are ideal. Our best mixture in the end was 5 litres of cold water in a yellow builder's bucket to which was added 2 'scoops' of lime and one of cement. The 'scoop' was a 1 kg yogurt tub so we guess about a litre of volume. That was stirred up with a bit of wood, and off we went.

We both worked at it all day and managed to complete all the way round both the Tígín and the 'milking shed' (now chicken house - goose house). It was not that professional a job and we both found the brushes very slappy. That was handy for firing a rain of wash into crevices and un-pointed bits, but did tend to mean plenty of paint splashed onto the ground, corrugated rooves, bits you hadn't meant to paint, window glass etc.

We were delighted overall with the results. It was a gorgeous blue-sky day and the new whiteness transformed the look of the place. White light is now bouncing around in the yard, kitchen garden and 'pottery' (gap between house and the 'Tíg' which will become a place for potted plants) and we look great as seen from the lane too. The white paint sets off the blue sky beautifully in photographs and I have had much admiring comment on Facebook and from passing locals. We particularly like some of the badly-pointed walls where the stones are now white and the gaps look extra-dark by contrast.

Rather usefully, the mixture, once dry, washes easily out of clothing and washed out of the brushes with plain water. It does tend to rub off on you if you brush against it but we guess that will get better as it ages. It still has not rained so we are both interested to see it all (hopefully) NOT washing away in the Roscommon rain. It also wiped easily off the windows where I had splashed it.

So, there you go, a vast improvement achieved in just 2 'person-days' and for a nice cheap total of just €41 including brushes, indeed, less than that for we did not use up all the lime or cement.