Chivers Marmalade

Love the old beans tin protecting the exhaust on this old
bog-hopper but I can't help thinking that protection is a bit
late in arriving.

One of those days today that seem to be so full of "stuff" that you get to the end and say, "Wow! That was quite a day!" For Liz too, though she managed hers totally out of synch with everybody else by pulling an all-nighter. Brexit of course with its BBC coverage all through the night as the results rolled in and hacked off at least 48% of the nation. The referendum is now done and dusted, of course, and you will know the result unless you have seriously been trying to avoid it. We are not sure what happens now and how it might affect us in Ireland either from the 'Brit living abroad' aspect or from the Northern Ireland border angle - all we really know is that David Cameron is baling out by the October Tory Conference and the replacement (BoJo? Gove?) will be left to lie in the 'bed' they have just made. Good luck with that, lads.

A picture for Liz's boss of one of the
planters currently being built by the
scheme lads, at Lough Glynn church.

Locally it meant that Liz stayed up all night to watch the results coming in and had taken today off work to recover, as is her normal wont at anything election-based (Ireland, UK or USA). This gave myself and Charlotte (of the mini horses) a clear field to put into action a cunning conspiracy which had been a few weeks in the planning. I have not been able to say anything on here yet, obviously, but the plan was to secretly find a new kitten and bring it home to Liz. The conspiracy had involved a number of friends all sworn to secrecy but all putting feelers out to find someone with kittens they were trying to re-home.

Marmalade kitten - "Chivers" of course (pic by Liz)

Our little mission over to Mayo-Liz's place to collect the Marans hatching-eggs bore fruit first as a volunteer-led rescue centre based around a Claremorris vet had suitable youngsters and the timing could not be better with Liz possibly needing cheering up after the Brexit thing. We managed to appear with kitten as she was waking up from her catch-up slumbers

Honeysuckle growing in our hedge - we didn't plant it.

She was as delighted as we were sure she would be so we got all brave and put Phase 2 into action. We had found out in Claremorris that this little marmalade lad was, in fact, one of a pair of 'left over' kittens, all that remained of a litter of 5, and by taking one we were splitting up 2 siblings. We guessed that when we told Liz this she would agree that we should take both, which she did, so a quick (pre-arranged) text to the vet's confirmed us returning to Claremorris tomorrow morning to gather up marmalade #2 and bring him/her back to his/her brother. We suspect these 2 marmalades will get named Chivers and 'Little Chip' (which unbeknownst to me is another brand of the orangey breakfast delight.) More pics in the next post; Chivers is not that keen on us yet or getting his pic taken and we don't want to stress him out.

Guinea Fowl 'Belvedere' shouts from
the top of our road gate.

The cat-wrangling, though, was fitted into a full day. K-Dub is now sporadically back from working in the big smoke, so I am back into the buildering. We are currently filling and sanding (K-Dub) and painting (me) the place. I had also taken my foot-trimming shears over with me so that we could trim the feet of the three goats, Billy, Nanny Óg and 'Henno' the kid (him for the first time). Then after all the cat-based fun I needed to run Charlotte back to Sligo but via nipping into Supervalue for kitten based supplies (kitty litter, food, kitten-milk, bowls) before whizzing home to do long-overdue dog exercising etc

You're a funny colour for a Buff Orpington chick. Are you SURE
you're one of mine?

On the calendar, not only was there written "Brexit Vote" and "Brexit Count" but also "Day 21 for box #4 Broody". This hen had done a marvellously consistent job sitting in her quiet nest box in the proper chicken coop (where they are ALL meant to lay and sit but the word does not seem to have gone round!). All around her hens were trying to sit on fresh air or getting hooshed off nests while other poultry wanted to lay eggs in the nest like a cuckoo, eggs were getting trampled and broken, or thrown out of nests with half-formed embryos in them.

Black babies. Nigel Farage would never approve.

Box #4 broody, once we had dropped in 3 blue eggs from Sue and Rob just to try her out, sat there serene and did the job properly for 21 days and came due on Brexit day. We think she hatched at least 2 of these on the day because those babies were buzzing around, as dry and fluffy as day-olds this afternoon. They look like they will definitely need letting out of the box (it has quite a high lip) tomorrow. They look quite cute in their black (Araucana) fluff next to their huge golden Mum. More pictures of these guys soon along with the kitten pics.

Coldest, Wettest, Slowest, Latest?

Bramble still tiny and hard-green on 21st Sept.

I don't know if this summer will go on record as the worst, but it is certainly our worst since we have been here, admittedly only 4 summers so far. We have seen figures for July which rated it coldest/wettest for 50 years but not so far for August which was also pretty dismal. Everyone is amazed at the lateness of crops and we have certainly had more failures and almost-certain-failures than we would welcome in a season.

This yellow Kniphofia, glorious last year, is barely
showing colour on 21st Sept 2015.

We are managing to keep ourselves fed on some crops - mange tout, black kale, chard, broad beans, spuds, toms and onions but we have managed to get through the whole season (despite some repeat sowings and plantings) without producing a single French bean, spring onion, courgette, squash or 'normal' pea (as opposed to mange tout). No French bean got beyond the 'germinate and the slugs will graze it off' stage. Crops like red beet are so far behind that they sit there in their row like little red pea-sized pellets with a few leaves up to about 9 inches. Red beet is such a large-seeded plant (OK, seed 'clusters' technically) that it never fails.

The bees were still active today in the lovely afternoon sunshine

The slugs left me only one Purple-sprouting plant and that, stressed by having few leaves left, started sprouting when only a few inches tall and gave us one measly sprout to share. In previous posts I have said that apart from a crab apple tree looking promising and a tree load of plums stolen by magpies, the apple and pear harvest will be very poor. I worry that the impressive stands of parsnip and carrot foliage may have nothing hidden under them. The bramble, which would normally be dripping at this time of year with a few over-ripe berries which you missed when you picked them over several times in early September, are still mainly hard green and tiny. They are so backward that I wonder will they miss altogether this year and just abort these unfinished trusses as part of autumn die-back. Do they do that? I have never seen it before.

Starting to load the log-store.

We have come by a couple of wine making kits entitled "Hedgerow Wine" which have all the yeast, food, grape concentrate and other goodies you'd need to get some blackberry wine going as I did many many times in my youth (memories of 26 1-gallon demijohns arrayed on shelving around my bedroom all at various stages of completion. It was quite a hobby). We were hoping to put these to good use with our normal bucket loads of blackberries from nearby fields. I think that boat may have sailed. We may have to use frozen currants from earlier in the year or frozen blackberries from 2014.

Tomato chilli jam labelled with JM's excellent charity labels.
The picture on them shows our house in c1900.

Ah well, swings and round-abouts. I had to nip down to our lamb-butcher and collect our meat from the twin ewe lambs Thelma and Louise. The deal there is that you can watch the lads butcher them up so that you can choose whether you want ribs or racks, gigot chops or full shoulder, legs cut in half and so on. They also bag up, weigh and label all the cuts as if they were going to over-the-counter customers. These two animals were possibly a bit smaller than the (store) lambs we have done in the past, coming in with carcass weights of around 43 lbs but we knew that and we needed that to happen for two reasons.

Lamb to go? Thelma (left) and Louise (right) ready for
delivery to the Silverwoods.

First we could not pile the 'fast crunch' in to them at 1 kg per lamb per day as you would store lambs, as we didn't want the ewes putting on too much weight (it affects fertility). Second, we needed them out of here before we took delivery of the ram, so they went at just over 5 months. Still, they were good looking carcasses and I am sure the recipients will be delighted with them. These two are off to Silverwood's today with Liz on a quick over-night visit. A definite success in our 'harvest' terms to counter all the fails. These were only our 2nd and 3rd ever lambs born and raised here, ear-tag numbers 002 and 003.

Dragonfly wing floating on the pond.

While I was in the butcher's I got talking to some lovely people, fellow small-holders. When I arrived they were actually in front of me in the queue, getting 2 of their own lambs processed and we got chatting about smallholdings, sheep, pigs and so on. When we had dropped our lambs off we had come home via Sue's to collect Rambo and, en route had pulled over to allow a car coming the other way to pass on the narrow road.

Tom the turkey has nearly finished growing his new tail back. 

We spotted that the car was towing a trailer with an eye-catching sheep-cage on it built from pallets tied together; quite a neat job! Liz joked that they were probably also headed for the butcher as there would not be much else they'd be doing on a Monday morning, that early, moving sheep about. Talking to these people and finding that they lived in a similar direction I wondered out loud whether this pallet-cage might have been them. Yep! That was 'us' they said and explained that their neighbour had sorted them out in an emergency with a replacement stock-trailer that morning. Impressive 'recycling' we thought. We chatted on some more about how you 'borrow' rams and about sheep health issues and ended up swapping phone numbers; we all think that you cannot have too many possible helpers and ways to share costs (e.g. for fluke doses which only come in bottles suitable for big flocks and you end up throwing 9/10 of it away when it goes out of date).

Rambo drives Dylan (right) away from Lily (left).

And finally on the good news front we have seen Rambo today for the first time paying some focused attention to one of our ewes, Lily. Liz noticed him getting very close behind her and wondered if he might be about to "start" (this is a family show, we'll leave the graphic stories to the David Cameron followers!). I did see him have a quick try-out but also spend some time driving away ram-lamb Dylan, so I suppose I had better record today's date in the calendar. He should definitely be full-on soon, if not actually tonight. Lily seems to be standing for him too, which is surely a good sign.

Sarpo Mira (Main Crop)

I am taking advantage of a nice few days of dry sunshine and getting into the autumn tasks, specifically, lifting the main crop potatoes. This year, these are the Hungarian variety, Sarpo Mira. We had not heard of these before coming here despite 20 years of successful spud-bashing in Kent, but Mentor Anne recommends them for their blight resistance  and they are very popular in these parts for just that reason.

These went into one of my ridges on 1st April and, from the start, looked like being a do-er. The tops were always huge and a healthy dark green, swamping the ridge and the trenches either side so that I struggled to get access to them for weeding. The first earlies / salad potatoes in the ridge next door (Varieties 'Ratte' and 'Foremost') came and went, their haulms succumbing eventually to drought, exhaustion and a wee bit of blight, but the Mira soldiered on. In fact the Foremost did show a few blighted tubers and the Ratte are a bit disappointing - although the outsides look a bit marked, many of them show dark brown lesions below the skin which may be early-stage blight. We are having to sort through them hard and the rejects may end up getting fed to 'our' pig. More on him/her in a future post.

The haulms were still a very healthy green as I dug them today, prompting some Facebook friends to tell me I should have left them in the ground, but I think they did OK. We got this huge barrow load from the 14 m row and some of them are well up into the 600 g weight range. We cannot compete with Mentor Anne's two-pounder which she has adopted as a pet and named David Cameron, but we can almost do some meals out of a single spud!

Ah well. The crop is now safely gathered into the barn, with wind and heavy rain forecast for tomorrow morning so I am pleased that I have also been able to mulch up the ridge with a good 4 inch layer of John Deere Bob's calf muck (well rotted) and put it to bed. The worms will enjoy pulling all that down into the soil of the ridge through the winter. There were plenty of them. I was turning up some big fat ones while digging the spuds and the accompanying chickens were hoovering them up till, belly-full, they had to go off and have a lie down in the sunshine.

Good gardening! Lovely Harvest.