Mind the Bike

Dan and Dan sign the Register in a gently rocking
environment. 

Friends of the Blog, frequent visitors and happy couple, Dan and Dan(ielle) were last seen about to take that stroll up The Aisle on board a cruise ship somewhere in the Med. Congratulations you guys; you obviously nailed it and sent us a rake of pictures to prove it. You both look splendid and look to be having a having a whale of a time. The very happiest and brightest of futures to both of you and we hope to see you again soon in your new guises and Mr and Mrs Dan. Thank you for sharing the day with us via social media.

Meanwhile, back in Roscommon, we are all feeling a bit quiet and subdued after the departure of "our Spanish lads", the Help-X pair, Manu and Pedro. They have moved on to a smallholding with horses near Blessington and we hope they are enjoying themselves  (almost) as much as they did here. They tell me there is no broad-band there, though, so they are reduced to text messaging and so on. We have written them a good review on the Help-X website and they may well write one about us. It should all help both parties find work or workers next year.

2 kinds of Spanish ham

We have been enjoying the wonderful 'stuff' the boys left in their wake and not just the 2 kinds of Spanish ham they surprised us with as their final act before getting into the car for their run to the railway station, one a big fat salami sausage, the other finely sliced 'Serrano' type ham.

Totem man carved by the lads

We've also been wandering round with big grins on our faces at the extremely tidy, parkland type look of our place and at the 'Easter Island Man' totem pole fella just inside our gate.

Back to normal for us, then (or what counts for normal round here), tidying, post-visit blitzing (tho' the guys were very tidy and generated very little mess) , a mountain of postponed laundry and ironing, repairing a couple of tools which did not survive the boot-camp, shopping and that sort of thing.

Puff balls

The old redundant, grassed over cow-muck heap behind what is now our goose house, celebrated by yielding half a dozen nice fresh white puff-balls. These have appeared before but we have never bothered with them and left them to go 'puff' with their dark green spores.

Lentils with sliced runner beans and puffball as part of a curry
menu. 

This time, I dived on 3 of them and brought them in to see if we could do a 'Food for Free' forage recipe. Liz quickly rattled up some recipes off the Internet and the puffballs have appeared for a couple of nights now as the 'mushroom' part of various dishes. We agree with the Internet advice that they have a very delicate (absent?) flavour and are best used "as tofu" as a creamy bland base for other flavours.

Beeblebrox's ever bigger chicks. 

I suppose I should quickly add a Health Warning for anyone reading this and trying to follow suit. Wild mushrooms and toadstools can be very poisonous and can be difficult to ID one from another. Small puffballs can look a lot like the scary 'Amanita' toadstool when it is still inside it's 'cowl' so you should always slice your prospective puffball in half down the middle to check that you have an amorphous white lump, not an embryonic mushroom- shaped structure about to burst out of it's ball-shaped cover. Also, make sure you are eating these guys fresh and white. Any discolouration of the flesh and they have gone over and may not be safe.

Honda Gold Wing under cover

Just for a change, we have been minding an enormous motor bike for some friends. It has gone 'home' now, so I am safe to reveal the fact. These are new friends, Les and Jean who are just starting in the Irish Smallholding game. They have bought the place a few km due south of here and have dropped in a couple of times to drop stuff and do a few bits, but they have not yet nailed down the immigration/changing jobs/money side of things. Jean is still working in the UK and Les is only at leisure because his work involves a school, so he is on Summer Hols.

How much dashboard do you need on a bike?

We got the bike to mind while they were both going to be away from their new place. We are not bikers but I had, at least heard of this beast, the Honda Gold Wing (Lead Wing to its detractors because of the weight).

Thunbergia.

It is a huge 'touring' style beast with very comfy leather armchair seats and a cocoon of panniers, boxes and storage baskets. The dashboard is a ridiculously well equipped panel like a plane cockpit with stereo speakers included. The engine, at 1500 cc is 50% bigger than the one in our car and the bike has a reverse gear! Launched in 1979 (Les tells me) these beasts are still for sale new but with an 1800 cc engine and costing around £24,000 (Sterling). So, a lot more than a new Fiat Panda then! No thanks, Bikers, you can keep that one. Les's isn't new, of course but he tells me he sold a classic old convertible Jag to find the money to buy this one.

Liz is producing some lovely clean carcasses and the birds are
making good weights. The last 4 have been 2.2, 2.5, 2.8 and
2.9 kg respectively. Not bad for 72 day old fowl.

Finally, as the Hubbard birds come up to 70 days old, we have started "harvesting" them in earnest. This is rather early compared to the advised age for full free-range ("slow grown") ones but we want to off them all by Liz's Birthday, so we have been sorting 2 a day. By now Liz is skillful enough at the plucking and dressing that the birds come out a lovely clean carcass and the last 4 have made very good weights oven ready; 2.2, 2.5, 2.8 and 2.9 kg.

These Lidl supermarket "cheapie" lilies have been a revelation.
In their tub just outside the front door, Liz tells me she can smell
them 15 feet away while pruning the roses and if we leave the
front door open, their scent fills the house. 

Amazingly, this batch of 12 chicks contained only one rooster. The chances of that would be 1 in 4096 (0.5 times 0.5, 12 times) but it doesn't really matter when you are only growing the birds for 70-80 days. The roosters may go slightly bigger but not much and we are more than happy with our 5-6 lb birds. 5 lb is way more than we two need for a meal, so most of them end up jointed up and the freezer fills up with bags labelled "4 Hubbard thighs" or what ever. It is, as ever, the most delicious, meaty and succulent chicken you are ever likely to eat. If you can, you smallholders, try to get hold of these Hubbard day-olds as your raw material for chicken-meat birds.

That is about it for this one. Catch up with you next time.

En Alabanza de Help-X

Pedro giving the hardcore yard a bit of
punishment. 

(In Praise of Help-X) In which we sadly come to the end of an epic, amazingly superb time, our 16 days of hosting our first ever Help-X volunteers, Manu and Pedro. If those two lads were typical, then the whole Help-X organisation from website to man-hours on the ground is praise-worthy indeed. They were THE BEST kind of guests (happy, friendly, easy going and very appreciative of our hospitality) as well as being brilliant, untiring workers for the "agreed" 4-5 hours a day. They also thoroughly enjoyed all the down time and leisure stuff, exploring, fishing, shopping and wood carving.

'Sparks' would be proud of us - measure
twice; cut once!

We are both delighted and impressed by how it has all gone and the place has never looked so good over all, all at once. Everywhere I look I see baize-short immaculate lawns, fields devoid of tall weeds, new woodwork and concrete scraped clean of invading grass.

New dog pen

It is quite a 'legacy' the lads have left behind, not only for the fancy bamboo pens and the lovely "Easter Island Man" totem pole head which they completed in the nick of time on their final day, yesterday. If I list it the old fashion "bullet point" way beloved of working life meetings, we have....

• A cattle race scraped clear of invasive grass
• The East Field devoid of tall weeds, mainly docks, rushes, nettles and thistles
• 'Back of the Goose House' razed nettle patch
• Huge veg patch back under control and 100 sq yards of it under plastic sheeting
• Hedges and big willow pruned behind same.
• Grass mowed everywhere, even into bits I have never mowed before AND all of it done with the grass-box on the back of the mower and the clippings carted away to composts or pigs (i.e. all better and tidier than I normally manage)
• Orchard scythed and brush-cuttered to within a few inches.
• The yard mowed. 
• 2 lovely anti-chicken cages now protecting 2 strawberry beds
• A lovely new 'picket' fence dog-pen leading off from the old back door.

The lads with their carved man. They think Liz
should knit him a little hat and scarf for the
winter. 

If I have forgotten any achievements, I will come back and edit them into the list. Either way it has been epic and the lads have also thoroughly enjoyed us and Roscommon and being out here in the West of Ireland. They have enjoyed a lot of new 'work' experiences and learned such skills as I could share with them around the livestock, gardening and woodwork. K-Dub will no doubt laugh at the thought of me teaching them scarf-joints and a love of DeWalt tool-ery.

The boys cook us 'cachopo', a recipe from Asturias (northern
Spain)

They enjoyed our good food and some local beers and took on a love of Guinness and, in Manu's case developed an addiction to whole-food style 'Meridian' peanut butter. They cooked for us twice, both excellent, and stretched Liz to the high notes of her cookery and provisioning. To finish with a 'bang', for example, our Last Supper was Hubbard chicken in BBQ sauce with a simple mushroom risotto, roasted toms and red peppers and an avocado-based salad. Pud was a rhubarb Pavlova and properly made Irish coffees to follow - black and white "like a little Guinness" in the words of the hugely impressed lads.

Miss Black with Manu-1 and Manu-2. Manu-3 appeared later.

I have already posted that when we collected the new lambs, we named the ram 'Pedro' after one of the boys. Then, to make sure the other lad didn't feel left out I told him that we had a black hen sitting on eggs, due to hatch on their (then) last day, Thursday 10th. We would name any successful hatches, Manu 1, Manu 2 etc.

Miss Black brings the babies out. They are so tiny; they are like
little bumble bees after we have got used to the previous clutches
of chicks which are now at least 6 weeks old. 

Good girl, Miss Black did the honours right on time, Day 21. Manu was able to see Manu 1 just after breakfast and later that day #2 and #3. The boys actually extended their stay till today, so they have also been able to enjoy the hen bringing the babies off the nest and out into the sunshine. Everyone's a winner.

Aughalustia Bridge, just south of Ballaghaderreen.

The boys also got into the fishing and finally started catching stuff. We had all been joking that this Irish fishing holiday thing was all a big con, the Lough Glynn Fishing Club was just a money-laundering scheme and that, in fact, there were fewer fish than snakes in Ireland. Having spent several fruitless hours at Lough Glynn, they moved to the beautiful Aughalustia Bridge up by Ballaghaderreen. At least there they'd be in easy pedalling range of the town's take-aways for a change of supper venue. The Bridge yielded no fish that time.

Teaching the Roscommon worms to swim.

Almost giving up on the angling thing Manu and Pedro biked down to the little local bridge as a last ditch effort and, Bingo! , started landing some roach. They caught more the 2nd day and then on Weds 9th, all encouraged, went back to Aughalustia Bridge to try again. They hauled out 3 more.

The lads are bottom right in this shot. It is a very scenic place
to fish. 

At that site there is a lovely wooden 'decking' platform with duck-board walkways etc where you are, we guess, "meant" to fish, but the lads found it all so weedy just off shore, they were frequently tangling their hooks in the submerged vegetation, so they moved along the bank to a less official place and we lent them two tripod "shooting seats". Hours of cheap fun for our budget travellers.

So, that was pretty much that. We fed them a breakfast this morning, retrieved all their dry laundry from our Utility Room and I ran them down to Castlerea station for their quarter to eleven train to Dublin. The 2nd fortnight of their tour is staying with a Help-X host farm with horses, somewhere over by Blessington, just outside Dublin, on the shore of the enormous 'Pollaphuca' Reservoir with its hydro-electric scheme and its water supply for the capital. If they can't find fish in there, we told them, then they are not trying hard enough!

We have joked with them that they will always be welcome back here so if they don't like it at Blessington, they will have to re-appear here under cover of darkness, tails between their legs. Please feed us, Lizzie, we want to come ba-ack! We didn't like it in Dublin. They didn't have Meridian peanut butter!

Seriously though, guys. You REALLY WILL be always welcome here, Help-X or not. If you are ever back this way then do get in touch and drop by.

Con the Archery Coach turns out to be a highly skilled exponent
of the mini-digger. 

What else is new? Only that in between all that I was over at archery coach, Con's place recently, when I was probably better off resting my damaged knee (almost better now, by the way), answering a call to come and help lay a land-drain.

Low point in my career. Down in the ditch trying not to lose
 a wellie.

He had hired a mini digger and had to give it back that evening, and they had all got a bit behind. So, out there for me, splodging about in wellies in a muddy ditch, trying not to lose my footwear, shovelling the drain 'fall' smooth, then building protective 'castles' out of salvaged blocks to protect the plumbing while Con back-filled the drain over the new pipe. Nice and restful on the knee, then? Maybe should have taken Pedro and Manu out there.