Ready for the Membrane

Sure sign of Autumn - the porridge!

As I type this it is still quite early (7 a.m.) and I am the only one awake. Don't worry - it is not another of those 'woken-up-by-coughing' nights - I slept like a baby and I am 'sleeped' out and well rested. As the Autumn starts to bite, these mornings are increasingly dark and gloomy, so I need to crank the livestock release/feed round back from 8 o'clock, or the fox will still be about when the birds come bursting from their houses all full of the joys.

Asbjörn and Sonja supervise the incinerator watched by the
ever present turkey, 'Tom' 

Sheer hard work by many people over the last few months has finally brought our big raised flower bed to a state of well dug over-ness and levelled out-ness where Elizabeth has declared it fit to have its weed proof membrane cover fitted. This is her baby, her decision and she very much wants to be there for this job, but today is Day 5 (of 5) of her hard land-scaping course which will go on to at least lunchtime. We therefore decided to give everyone a late start and lie in and we will do the Help-X hours in the afternoon, so that everyone can play.

Pruning and re-weaving the arbour over the 'Darby and Joan'
chairs

It has been a marathon job to get this far. The bed is about 16 m long by 10 m at its widest  and is quite clay-ey, being the spoil from the big pond with subsequent compost mulch layers added over the years. It can be heavy work to dig if it gets wet. We were going to do all this digging in Summer when the soil is more manageable. We used Help-X-ers Emma and Flora to clear it but then I got sick and our August Help-X blew us out, so the dig over was down to Elizabeth helped by 'Sparks'.

More Help-X product. 6 huge bags of
kindling.

As the wet season started we looked on in increasing despair thinking we'd missed the boat and would have to wait till Spring. But then, as Asbjörn and Sonja rocked up and proved very capable, it also stopped raining and the ground started to dry out. I asked them to give it a go at just an hour a day. On this basis, skimming lumps off with a shovel, moving soil with wheel barrows from peaks to troughs, and with much cloddy raking, they have prevailed and we are delighted to be able to get the membrane down THIS year. Even if we do not plant anything through it, that is a huge landmark and consolidation.Well done A and S.

A lovely full moon and a bit of mackerel-sky for the equinox.

The week, though, has not been all about the raised bed (Thank Heavens!). Asbjörn and Sonja have been everywhere and doing every kind of job all with the same keenness, enthusiasm and application. In the last post, they were just off to their weekend trip to Sligo to find their friends and the Celtic arts festival. I collected them back on the Saturday afternoon, we fed them pork chops, and that was the only time they wanted off.

From the UK arrives a new pig-sign, OSB for 'Oxford Sandy
and Black', of course.

A popular job was burning all the prunings from the raised bed shrubs, plus the brambles from the East Field plus some more recent rose bits (The Rambling Rector had been getting a bit up close and personal with the poly tunnel canopy!), in our dustbin style incinerator. I like this job and can get quite 'Zen' tipping away, cutting the prunings into short lengths and dropping them in, trying to keep a good fire going, and Asbjörn is obviously the same. Sonja had done her 4 hours or so of helping, but A went out again after lunch and stuck at it, even through light rain, till 6 pm - 8 hours of lonely Zenning (well, lonely except for the ever-present Turkey-Tom). Between them they cleared the whole pile - very useful.

Cheese and Dillisk Biscuits.

While Asbjörn worked away, the catering department had gone into full swing and the night's feast was to be a Madhur Jaffrey inspired feast of creamy turkey 'curry' with side dishes of potato and cauliflower and of "dry okra" plus a good range of yogurt-with-cucumber and tomato salsa style coolants for those who found the spuds a bit fiery.

Black Spring's Nan's pork hock under construction.

Dessert was a trad sticky toffee pudding (with extra sauce in a jug!), to the delight of Sonja. The following days saw some cheese and dillisk biscuits (dillisk (dulce) is an edible seaweed) and the family favourite recipe "Black Spring's Nan's pork hock", a gorgeous Chinese slow-simmer. The meat from the hock gets served with steamed shredded cabbage (or pak choi if you can get it) and noodles. The left over sauce sets like a jelly and can be eaten that way as a "cold soup".

New neighbours - this suckler herd. Sometimes the calves even
stay on THEIR side of the fence!

Other jobs done by the Help-X-ers have included pruning and re-weaving the living willow 'arbour' over our 'Darby and Joan' chairs on the far side of he pond plus moving some of our kitchen extension rubble down to fill gaps under the fence at the north end of the East Field.

Daily job. Re-salting the 'Parma' ham legs

Here the sheep wire is nice and tight between the posts and stapled to the very bottom of each post, but in places the ground dips between the posts and foxes (and little white dogs) can slip under. We have a pile of rubble that needs a 'home', so 2 fit wheel-barrowers are just the ticket. They have also gathered up the dog-end of a stack of split firewood from the far corner of the yard, and barrowed it all up to the wood store just outside the kitchen door.

In other news, I am taking another turn as curator of the UK version of the small holders' Twitter account (@smallholdersUK). I am the voice of Brit smallholding from last Sunday evening round till this one coming. These accounts work on the basis of the followers hearing from a different smallholder each week, which keeps it nice and varied. Our Irish one is currently parked up for lack of volunteers - it ran out of steam after a couple of years, but the UK has a bigger catchment and is still going strong. It is not restricted to people who do their small holding in the UK.

Towser rolled in goose-poo and attracted some unwelcome
attention from Sonja.

That is about it, I guess. I will post again on Friday which will be the last working day for these Help-X volunteers. They are back off to Dublin on Saturday, ready for their flights home on Tuesday. We will miss them. They have been great.

Luck ran out for the 'lucky' rooster. Ah well.

A Help-X No Show

A superb cheese souffle cooked by the girls on their last night.
They also did profiteroles. 

Regular readers will know that up till now we have had nothing but success, co-operation, hard work and pleasure from our involvement with the Help-X (Help Exchange) volunteer system. As at the last post, we were about to bid farewell to our latest pair, Emma and Flora and then collect our 'August booking', a 17 year old French lad called Rafael.

Borage

This weekend was a Bank Holiday,so the girls had an issue with their next posting. They requested the extra night (Saturday night) which we were happy to give them and, out of gratitude, they cooked that night's supper for us, a rather superb cheese soufflé followed by profiteroles filled, unusually, with ice cream. Nom nommetty nom! This move also landed them trying to reach Sligo town on a B/H timetable - no trains or buses except for one via Dublin. Elizabeth generously offered to taxi them. After all the hospital runs, she said the car practically knows its own way by now.

The finest cauli we have yet grown in Ireland

So that was that for the girls, but through these closing stages I had been expecting some contact from the next lad, Rafael. His silence and lack of responses to our emails etc had me worried he might have blown us out. Back in May he'd been asking for "the whole summer", had taken a 2 weeker and then enthusiastically added a 3rd week as that became available, but now he was gone all quiet. The girls had suggested that maybe he had no broadband and might show up anyway, but he would have had no full address or phone numbers yet.

This enormous fennel attracts hundreds of bumble bees despite
being in the poly-tunnel. They all seem to get out OK.

Ah well, we waited expectantly through the whole weekend and through today but still no contact, so we now assume that he has just let us down without word. This is a real pain. He was going to be key to our plan to re-roof the chicken house, helping K-Dub with the lifting which is currently outside my range, plus in digging over that big raised flower bed cleared by the girls. He is also needed for jobs like mowing which is now coming due (and will again), and some log-splitting.

We do still have all 4 goslings. One must be hiding in this pic
behind a grown up bird.

There is little we can do to 'get back' at the inconsiderate, unhelpful behaviour except mark him as a no-show in the bit of the Help-X website reserved for volunteer references. If anyone reads that, they will at least know not to book him and get let down as were we. I have also changed our host 'advert' to read "Help Urgently Needed for August". We may just get a replacement volunteer in time but most people seem to only go in in Spring, when they are planning their Summer's work.

Splitting the ram lamb. Sorry poor pic due to
taken on the phone.

Meanwhile the other main job this week was to get those lambs back from the butcher and into the freezer. Forgetting that Monday was the B/Hol, I shot down to Castlerea in the morning, also intending to order my woodwork for the new Chicken House roof (ker-ching €360). Of course. all the roads were lined with no parking cones for the Castlerea Agricultural Show, all the shops (looked) closed, lights off and nobody about. I turned round and came home again. My butcher lads had said "next Monday" but I guessed they'd just forgotten the B/hol. Apparently not. They were in the shop, out back, feeding some horses, fully expecting me to turn up. When I went down today they were asking why I failed to keep "our date". Easy mistake to make, we all agreed. They were happy to 'do' me today.

Half a ram lamb carcass

They were also very impressed by the lamb carcasses which they described as "just right". The big ram lamb made a carcass weight of 24 kg (50 lbs), the ewe-lamb a lighter 19 kg (40 lbs). These guys do the butchering on lambs for us (we do our own pigs as you know). We just have to specify the cuts (individual chops or racks? whole shoulder or gigot chops? legs as half-legs? etc).

Bagged, labelled and ready for the freezer. 2 lamb carcasses

They are a pleasure to watch at work. They even bag the individual joints and label them as if the shop was selling them (with name of cut, date, cost per kg, weight and price). This saves us a lot of messing about, reassembling the animal back home so that we can correctly bag and label it here. They are, as the saying goes "a great bunch of lads".

Lamb labelling

Which about sums it up for this one. I am still clinging to a faint hope that French Help-X-er Rafael is out there somewhere, lost, looking at closed railway stations, bus depots and Internet cafés. trying in his 17-year old inexperienced traveller way, to make contact, but that hope is fading. Maybe by the next post someone will have turned up and I will be able to report progress on some of these jobs.

Good luck now.

Ahhhhhh...Middlin'

Ireland missed the 'blood moon' lunar eclipse due
to cloud/rain but I've been waking early lately and seen some
lovely sunrises. A bit misty, this one.

SPOILER ALERT: Self pitying aul' git on a minor rant. Fans of the healthy, happy blogger might like to skip the first few paragraphs.

The heatwave officially ended when
the 'Mighty Coat' came back out of the
cupboard.

Health update: Readers of the posts about the hospital stay might like a progress on the recovery. A few days ago, when I was planning this post, this section was going to be  a right old 'woe is me' whinge. I was not happy and the recovery seemed to be going all to Hell. Now I find myself in a much better frame of mind and waxing pragmatic and realistic.

The mountain ashes think it's Autumn already.

You'll know that I am in a 4 week 'stabilising' phase now, taking great care on the fluid intake, taking the tapered end of the steroids course (3 more days till I'm off them), weighing myself every day and watching anxiously for weight gains of 1-2 kg per day, taking it easy, letting my lungs recover. I came out of hospital thinking that'd be easy, buoyed up by my famous recovery in there, clearing my lungs and losing 14 kg of fluid in 14 days, surrounded by cheering nurses, delighted, enthusiastic medics and a blizzard of well wishers.

Our lovely current Help-X volunteers,
Emma (l) and Flora.

I am now back home and down with a bump into a more realistic rate of recovery. The limited fluids began as a real pain; I was craving water, wet food and juicy fruit, eking out my ration, scoring every sip I took with pills on my sheet and enviously watching Elizabeth and the guests sloshing generous slugs of supper time water into their glasses of elderflower cordial. Despite all that "hardship" I was still putting on weight at about half a kilo a day. A worrying trend which had me looking down the barrel of more congestion, re-swollen ankles, no breathing and a return to hospital.

That lost raised bed which the girls have been clearing.

Anyone else putting on lots of weight (what would you even eat if you WANTED to put on half a kilo a day?) might be thinking "Who ate all the pies?" but in my current state it is a water retention and 'water-works' control issue. Obviously I am back in touch with the doctors (well, trying to be. They not that easy to reach!) and keeping a careful eye on the figures. We even started putting a tape measure round my ankles to spot swelling.

Self seeded mullein (Verbascum) at last.

A couple of frustrated, scared, upset, wobbly days then but we have now put the water thing on a much more manageable method. I am allowed a (250 ml) coffee with each of he three main meals and the remaining 750 ml I take as a 750 ml bottle of water which I keep in the fridge (out of sight and.....) and sip away at. I have got used to this and find myself not only not craving water all day, but actually being left with some, un-drunk.

"Kuku", Iranian spinach tortilla. Beautifully light and
fresh-tasting after the spud-based Spanish one.

If ever I fancy something else (a tiny beer, for example), I decant the equivalent amount of water into the sink. There may also have been an alleged problem with me 'horsing' the carbs on my return to civvie street (Hey, I was ill, weak, needing to build my strength up!) but the catering dept is on that one and carefully watching my portion control!

The girls helped make the meringue for this black currant
Pavlova. They also picked the currants.

In these parts they have a lovely expression for if you are not good but not bad. In that superbly understated Irish way, where you'd not want to 'put yourself forward' by claiming to be either very healthy or very ill, they reply to 'How are you?', with "Ahhh middlin' ". I am going to adopt this now and give that reply to anyone who asks. I am streets ahead of where I was 3 weeks ago, but not quite yet fixed, so 'middling' nails it.

Falafels and banana bread.

But enough of this  medical malarkey. How about the rest of the place? I am now back in the groove here (all be it on light duties, no heavy lifting) assisted by our lovely current Help X volunteers, Emma and Flora. I have had them doing all manner of gardening and tidying jobs including mowing and brush cutter-ing, cleaning out a duck house, clearing the big raised bed and rescuing all the plants.

Emma scratching some piggy backs.

One of them, Flora, turned out to be a closet vegetarian. She'd not told us in advance (we told her off for that, silly girl!) and had been trying not to give the game away to Liz in that first week, taking the plates of food but quietly pushing the meat bits to one side. Once she was 'out', Elizabeth was able to adjust the menu to suit and happy to join her in 3 weeks of exploring the vegetarian repertoire and we have all enjoyed some real delights and revelations. It has become an evening job for the Woman of the House, pulling out the little used cook-books and choosing what to cook for tomorrow.

We have had a delightful range of baking (cheese and onion pie, anyone?), some lovely soups (butternut and coconut?), an Iranian spinach tortilla (kuku), desserts like pavlova and, yesterday, a gorgeous Mexican spread of wraps, nachos, tomato and pepper hot-stuff, sweetcorn salad, salsas, cheeses and so on. The girls are also keen students in the kitchen and we have had them learning and helping in the baking and food prep. Most recently this was a banana bread and the falafels for lunch.

All aboard! Familiarising the pigs with
the trailer-of-doom.

We have also "harvested" 2 lambs and the biggest pig. The sheep we can round up ourselves at this stage but it was good to have some help from the Help X lasses on my campaign to train the pigs to go into the trailer. This, you may recall, we do by showing them the trailer with tempting food inside for a couple of days before the 'off' so that, on the morning, they will scurry up the ramp quite innocent of our betrayal. This time pushing the trailer around on my own is a bit outside my "light duties" remit, so the girls have been a real God-send. The pigs flew up the ramp at the first try, and we ended up having fun trying to ensure that only the pig we needed (Daisy) was in there (not all three) so that we could close the gate on her.

Soapwort.

Off to the butchers then on Monday morning with the two lambs (including the big ram lamb) and on Tuesday morning with that pig. We will now get all that meat back for the freezer. The lamb offal we collected yesterday. The half-pigs will be collected on Thursday. We will butcher those ourselves, The lamb we will collect next Monday.

Buff-tip moth caterpillar.

A little entomological mini-drama this week when Flora spotted a caterpillar on my '60th Birthday present' white-barked birch tree. When I went back to the tree with the camera I saw that there were actually dozens of them and that they nearly had the tree defoliated. Still, we are following organic principles here, so caterpillars are grist to the mill, Elizabeth posted a few pics up on Facebook to see if we could get an ID.

Clockwise from top left, lamb hearts, livers and kidneys
(still in their suet "jackets")

A UK friend was on to us saying we might have a problem. It might be buff-tip moth but it MIGHT be something called the "Oak processional moth". The latter is a frightening invasive species, notifiable to the Ministry, able to devastate broad leaved forests. It has not made Ireland yet, but the Ministry ask us all to keep a careful eye. Elizabeth fired off pics and an email just in case. Don't panic, came back the Ministry, 'That is just a buff tip moth, but thank you for the notification". There's a relief.

That is enough for this one. When I next post we will be nearing the last days of the girls' stay with us and we will have the pork back from Webb's. I will also, I hope, have had the car re-tested and passed its NCT. Myself, I will almost certainly still be middlin'.

Home! (...but Deefer's in the Dog House)

Home in time for the pea harvest

Back home then to a rapturous welcome from the three dogs. I just fall to my knees and let them all have at me at once, sniffing and nuzzling, rather than stand, bent over while all three try to jump up for a fuss at once. They were delighted to have me back but Elizabeth had tipped me off that #1 daughter (Deefer) was in SERIOUS TROUBLE having killed our last turkey poult. Silly girl. The Woman of the House was hopping mad (she did it in front of Elizabeth despite a warning shout) and is now still "doing time" for it. If Deefer was in the Military, she'd be doing "jankers", scrubbing the toilet floor with a toothbrush or something. I know better than to undermine that by trying to do "Good Cop", so she stayed on punishment detail till late that night.

Opening up this year's "Parma" ham.

I don't know what it is about turkeys specifically - Deefer does not have a problem any more with tiny hen-chicks, ducks or goslings. Maybe it is the high pitched whistle-cheep triggering some kind of 'vermin' response rather than a 'valuable baby bird' one. She immediately goes all tense and twitchy with prey-focus, like a good sheep dog. There is no talking to her. A quick snap and bye bye poult. She has now killed all three leaving the (chicken) hen that we put them under to brood and who had since been rearing them, totally distraught. We will never trust her with turkey poults again, that's for sure.

However, I promised you a livestock round-up in this post, and quite a story it is. At Elizabeth's visits to the hospital, I must have been focusing a bit too much on the fox-attack stories. I was worried that I'd have to get home a bit quick while we still had some hens. No need to worry. We have plenty of hens and plenty of young 'followers' coming on behind. I think it was only the one we lost while I was away. When Elizabeth made the feed rounds that evening, which she does by broadcasting the grain in the yard, surrounded by chickens of all ages, turkeys, ducks, Guinea fowl, and geese and goslings, she seems to be knee-deep in birds. It is a pleasure to watch! I will try to find the photo.

In no particular order then.......

The pigs have come on well. The big female (left) is ready.

Bees: The main colony is still going strong and the swarm which I spotted had invaded the lure box is still active. Regular readers will probably know that Summer bees in Ireland, only live about 6 weeks each, dying worn out by all that hard foraging. If you get a swarm and it lasts beyond 6 weeks, then you have hit the Jackpot and snatched a viable, queen-right one. She will have been laying eggs from days of arrival (as soon as the wax-loaded workers drew her out some comb) and these new bees will be able to take over after the 6 weeks to keep the colony going. I will have to check my dates, to see if our 6 weeks are up.

Elizabeth doing 'shepherd'. She has no fear. She knows the
sheep will follow so she strides off with her bucket and, of course,
all the flock trot along behind.

Pigs: The pigs have come on leaps and bounds under the new management and the female, who was always a bit bigger than the boys, is now ready to go on that final journey. The boys we will hold back another month or so, if mainly due to lack of freezer space. We have booked her in on the Tuesday, so we now need to do all that trailer-familiarisation training thing that we do, over the weekend. It will be fun. We only want her in the trailer, but all three are likely to get enthusiastic at once. Watch this space. The freezers are completely devoid of pork now except for a small tray of (3?) trotters, so it will be nice to get some meat back in there.

The big ram lamb is on the left here. 

Sheep: Here too, two of the lambs are now good and ready and one of these, the ram lamb is also starting to mature and to 'jump' anything that moves. We dare not risk him getting the ladies pregnant, so he and one other lamb are also booked in, this time on Monday. We have decided, in the light of the uncertain health of the staff(?) to ease things a bit this winter and to try something new. The remaining 2 lambs (both ewes) will stay with us round till next Summer and then be killed as "hogget" rather than lamb. Hogget, the half-way stage from lamb to mutton, is supposed to be very tasty. We will not bring a ram in this winter, so we will not be 'doing' lambs next Spring. The girls can have a year's rest.

Young poults roosting where ever you look.

Birds: Plenty birds about, as I said, though not many eggs forthcoming. Too many birds are sitting eggs, or rearing babies, or they are babies themselves. There are 2 currently AWOL, the female Guinea fowl, and a white Sussex hen, 'Connie', we hope well hidden up from the fox, brooding eggs. We have no idea where. We see Connie occasionally, so we know she is still alive. We are knee deep in young poults, most of whom I lost track of which 'Mum' they came with while I was away.

Not ducklings any more. Silver Appleyards

I am very taken with the 'new' ducks. These, you may recall, were just a rag-bag purchase in a hurry when we needed ducks to replace the females killed by the fox. Mike the Cows had a family of Mum and 5 half grown ducklings of the "Silver Appleyard" variety. These youngsters have done really well and almost caught up with Mum in size, making it quite tricky to tell which actually is Mum. They have bonded well with our original drake, a Khaki Campbell, and now move round as a tight group of 7.

They have also taken over the pond, which they head for the centre of, as soon as danger or an intruder looms, or a dog gets too close. This good news may well be the reason why (touch wood) we have not lost any to the fox yet. I am delighted and amazed. They spend their time between the pond and the safety of the yard, sprinting between the two in a waddling 'crocodile'. They never stray out to the perimeter where Mr Fox might lurk in the long stuff. Long may it continue.

Emma and Flora start on the jungle formerly known as
"raised flower bed"

Humans: I finally got to meet the two latest Help-X lasses, Emma and Flora. I was worried I might miss them all together if the hospital stay continued into a 3rd week. They are pure delight, full of youthful vigour, happy, relaxed, and keen to work. Elizabeth had been 'minding' them and setting them their tasks, but she handed me that job as soon as I was back.

Trying out the 'chimenea' - could be quite
handy as the evenings start to cool. A lovely
gift from Steak Lady.

I have had them out cutting briars in the East Field, cleaning out the duck house and now, clearing the valuable plants from the weed-bed formerly known as "raised flower bed". This space had become so weedy that it really was simpler to dig out the good plants and start again. The plan is to dig it all clean over, then cover in weed-proof membrane and gravel, planting the (cleaned) good plants back through this, like we did to the front rose bed.

Crocosmia (Lucifer) giving us great colour
at this time of year.

That is surely enough for this one. Anything I missed, I will try to rope in for the next post.