Pay by Weight

Pay by Weight advisory letter. 

December already! Doesn't time fly when you're having fun? Tonight the post will mainly be rubbish. (No change there, I hear you heckle) - in this case the recycling and landfill stuff we put in those wheelie bins. We the customers of this service are to be moved, as promised, onto a 'pay by weight' system instead of paying just a standard 6 monthly rate.

Daffs just starting to show their noses.

My Brit readers may not be aware that 'over here' waste disposal is not done on the UK system of being included in the 'Poll Tax', so in Kent, we paid our £120 a month (or so) and trundled the bins out on the necessary day, paid to have them jet-washed if we chose and thought no more about it. Here, the "Local Property Tax" is very new and much smaller - more like €100 per YEAR and does not cover any services (as far as I know). You sign up to the local waste disposal contractor separately - in our case the man from Barna Waste spotted that we had moved in to the house and came up the drive on foot to recruit us.

The mead is still bubbling away.

We pay €175 per 6-months which covers both wheelie bins. In our case this is for recycling (cardboard, paper, tins, hard plastic (bottles and trays but not bags), metal etc, but not glass, plastic bags or crockery) in the blue bin and for landfill (black bun; everything else but not green or veg waste - we compost that - or glass bottles). Glass we take to the bottle bank (the "Drive of Shame" we call it). Wood we burn if possible.

We judge ourselves to be pretty good at this and keen to tread light footprints across the planet and we were fairly sure, when this much-talked-of change to pay by weight came along we'd be on the 'good guys' side of the fence. 'Barna Claus' might be making a list and checking it twice, but we hoped we'd be on 'nice' list. Rumour had it that new tech on the bin-lorries and smart tags on our bins would let the contractor know what weight of the blue and black bins was on each 'lift'. If we sneaked too much weight into the black bin we'd get charged more at the end of the 6 month period with the surcharge added to the next bill. We weren't 100% sure what the trigger point would be but were pretty sure we'd be below it.

Lisacul Players' next production (from the website).

Well. Now we know. A letter arrived today advising us that we will continue to be charged €175 per 6 months but that is buying us an 'allowance' of 450 kg on the black (landfill) bin across the 6 months. If we go over the 450 we will get charged at 22 cents / kg. These are fortnightly pick-ups so the 6 month amounts to 13 visits, but the limit is quite a generous 34.6 kg per bin.

The season for hearty stews with loads of root veg. This one
from one of the culled cockerels - a Roo Stoo?

We can relax. We have never even got close to 34 kg. This is confirmed by the flip side of the advice letter which helpfully tells you what you put out for them in the 6 months April 2017 to Sept 2017, in our case only 110 kg. The blue bins are not limited or surcharged (though I assume they are checked!) but it was good to know that we only put out 78 kg via that route in the test period.

Bobtail's 3 chicks at 11 weeks seem to suddenly be like small
hens, rather than babies. 

Now the quick thinkers among you, at least if they are as cynical as I am, might be thinking that, hold on, if my €175 buys me an allowance of 450 kg of waste and I have only been using a quarter of that, might there not be space in these sums for a discount for the "very good" guys? There was talk of that in the early negotiations, apparently but any whisper of this costing less than the €175 has vanished from the Barna Waste communications. Ah well.

Meanwhile, everything else is chugging along. Bobtail's 'babies' seem to have changed overnight into small hens and left behind all traces of chick-hood. Stumpy's three (9 weeks) are not far behind. The white hen, Connie, is now settled happily in her broody-cage where she can get to food and water but none of her sisters can helpfully drop eggs in and add to her workload.

Stumpy with 2 of her youngsters. 

I need to make sure there are no hen eggs in there because if she hatched one of those at 21 days, she might get off the nest with it and abandon the nearly-'cooked' duck eggs. After a week this is not a problem, because any hen eggs dumped in would hatch after the ducklings which is not ideal but would not harm the ducks.

Connie's broody-cage. She is behind the
'galv' bucket which is on top of the black
tool box. 

I also finally got to pruning the willow hedge/arch, which is now in its 4th year so is producing some pretty big, thick unwanted branches.

Pruning the willow arch.

This is quite a major undertaking and produces a big pile of willow 'sticks'.

Nice and cosy. Connie sitting on 5 duck eggs. 

Enough for this one, anyway. Good night all.

Speaking too Soon

Our own ham and our own green tomato chutney make for
a delicious "left overs" sandwich. 

Sometimes I "go to print" on these blog posts with a funny feeling that I may have spoken too soon - my confidence and complacency; my urge to rush a good story onto these pages will be my undoing. This has been close to the truth no fewer than three times over Christmas as I will now relate. The pictures may not be relevant but you will probably cope.

Still some chocs left when I took this. All gone now!

Three posts ago I was happily relating that we had decorated the Christmas Tree, that the kittens had had a brief play with low-hanging baubles but then got bored and moved on and that we'd sat down with a Gluhwein thinking "Job well done". Not for us the horror stories of trees wrecked by cats. I even included a picture of my old favourite decoration, a plaster lobster dressed as a waiter delivering a tray of 'beignets' (fried buns), a prized souvenir of my one and only trip to New Orleans.

For a party claiming not to have drunk much
we were still well laden for the "drive of shame"

Well, no sooner had I gone to press and my back turned than the kittens managed to upturn the tree with Liz seeing it all in slow motion ("NooooOOOO!!!!) and diving to save it but too late. Very little damage done but my lobster hit the tiled floor and smashed into 3 pieces. We have found his body and his arm holding the tray of beignets but where his tail 'flukes' have gone we have no idea.

A first sign of Spring - the daffs in the
lane emerging.

Next up, my joy at having solved the jackdaw problem with my bloke, accompanied by Soldier the Cat, shinnying up those ladders to demolish the jackdaw nest and fit our jackdaw-cage pots to prevent anyone moving back in. Storm Barbara had other ideas. The next morning saw one of the 'cages' lifted out of the chimney pot and dropped into Liz's rose garden.

Odd disco lighting effects from the sun
reflecting off the fancy candle-cover at the
bottom of this picture. 

The design of these, you may recall, involves a flat cone top like a Chinese 'paddy-field' worker's hat, with a ring of outward-sprung rods which you pull together to fit the ends down inside the bore of the pot. You can imagine that the 'hat' must give a fair amount of lift, like an aircraft wing 'aerofoil' in a cross wind, and I suppose the wagging back and forth in gusts might 'walk' the legs up the chimney bore like a ratchet. Being worried about the lack of draw (caused in the end by the jackdaw nest) I had asked the guy to position the pots high up, well proud of the chimney. My mistake. He is coming back to put the fallen one back - I will get him to set them lower this time.

Our 3 roosters hang in the polytunnel to
await processing in the kitchen

Finally, I told you that we had taken the fox trap back to Sue and Rob's, confident that our fox was shot dead and the problem solved. I was not happy the following morning to find that *someone* had got at the three roosters we had hung in the poly tunnel overnight to await processing in the morning. A head had been pulled off one leaving a bloody, strap-like, skinned neck hanging down and a small puff of torn out feathers on the grass  outside the tunnel. My heart sank. I was convinced it was a fox, though I was surprised the beast had not ripped down a whole bird (or all three). Mum in Law (Steak Lady) has since suggested that it might, in fact, have been a cat. That makes more sense. I had not thought of that.

A litre tub of yogurt and one of those roosters make the basis
of a rather fine curry. 

Other than that, we have just been chugging our way through all those left-overs, recovering and tidying up the place, making the most of the relaxing days between the two main events.

The Ministry post us details of a new grant
scheme but we are too small to be eligible

I have been serving my 2nd ever week (1st was in January) as the "voice of Irish smallholders". Well, the Twitter voice anyway - I am this week the "curator" (= guest twitterer) of the @smallholderIRL Twitter account. If you don't 'do' Twitter or have no  experience of it, it is quite fun. It is a very fast and chatty but very lightweight and ephemeral space where you can look in, chat away to who ever is 'on' and then drop off again. You can only speak in 'soundbites' (140 characters) so it is no place to go for a heavy, wordy discussion, though some people do post links to longer articles. You can click through to them or not according to preference and time available.

The '365' project is about to enter its final month.

Like Facebook, users tend to accumulate like-minded 'friends' and coalesce into groups. The small holder group currently has 2500 'followers' not all small holders. When you log out it 'twitters' away without you with hundreds of snatches of chat a bit like stepping out of the pub for fresh air. When they are said, they are quickly gone, pushed down thread by more recent 'tweets'. As I said, 'ephemeral'. Nobody really goes in and then back-tracks down the old stuff, though there is a way of getting it to 'remember' posts where you were included, replies to your posts and so on. Occasionally posts or links strike a chord with lots of posters and the 're-tweet' them to pass them on and that story spreads far and wide, it "goes viral" in modern parlance. It is basically harmless fun but I love the fact that I can share my experiences with 2000+ other small holders all trying to meet and solve the same problems, enjoying similar weather, admiring the same sunsets and munching on their turkey sandwiches and pickles.

Talk to you again next year.