John Downie

Father-to-be, Pedro?

Friends of the Blog may recall that back in August last year I posted that I had seen signs of affection between new ram-lamb 'Pedro' and our mature ewe 'Lily'.

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2017/08/pedro-ram-is-in-love.html

Onto the calendar for 5 months later (Jan 25th 2018) went my note saying "poss lambing date, Lily" and we all relaxed while nature took its course. She was likely to be our first at the lambing. You cannot hurry these things, after all. Mother Nature knows best.

Apologies for the technically bad and not
very edifying pic but it does show very
clearly the enlargement of Lily's udder,
called "bagging up" in the trade. 

Coming through Christmas I have therefore been keeping half an eye on Lily particularly, but not really expecting any signs for a week or more yet. Yesterday, though, I could see that she was suddenly 'bagging up', her udder which is normally invisible from behind clearly visible. I apologise for the picture which also shows that she is a bit 'dagged' up and needs some tidying.

Larch logs

Bagging up can be several days or even a few weeks prior to lambing so she still might hit the 25th (or even over-shoot) but we will be watching anxiously over the next mornings for our other favourite signs; declining breakfast, lying down in some far flung corner of the field a long way from all other sheep. Our girls never miss a breakfast, so when there is one missing from the feast you know something serious is happening. Wish us luck. This is a tense and anxious time.

New kids on the block, these 2 year old
crab apple whips. 

In other news, I have finally scored a couple of 'John Downie' crab apple trees, these from top Irish fruit tree supplier, Future Forests (www.futureforests.IE). In every garden we make, Liz and I always seem to pull in plants, offspring, cuttings or varieties from other gardens we have been involved in. Like old familiar friends, we seem to gravitate towards those varieties if we are contemplating buying or 'getting' anything from that broader group. John Downie is the variety of crab apple which in my memory has always grown in my Mother's garden in Hastings.

Mum's tree is now quite a landmark, being huge and visible from either end of the street. I am sure we three bothers used to climb it as young boys, and certainly made a load of wine from its fruit (sometimes wind-falls) as teenagers, while Mum, throughout has been making crab-apple jelly, sending us boys out to harvest its red fruits. When we first laid out the orchard here, the only crab I could find was 'Golden Hornet' variety, which has done very well but this year I was determined to fill 2 gaps with John Downie and this I have now done.

More protection than tree for now. They
should get away nicely. 

The tiny whips look more 'protection' than actual tree for now, ringed around with weld-mesh to keep the geese from ring-barking their tender trunks but, as I say hopefully when I plant anything, "They should get away nicely" (Geoff Hamilton!), and will soon out-grow the geese.

One of last year's babies comes up to 'point of lay' and goes for
a sit down. 

In the poultry department, we are happy to report that we are now well through the egg-drought and now starting to get sensible amounts of eggs per day - recent record days have been an 8 and then a 9.

I love the gentle range of colours of our eggs. 

Some of the new hens, hatched in Spring 2017, are now coming on line. They generally start with a few tiny, yolkless eggs, mis-shapes, double yolkers or shell-less soft 'bags' but quickly get into the proper groove and give us a decent egg most days. I love the range of gentle colours we produce, from almost white (actual white for the ducks, of course) to rich dark chocolate brown from the Marans girls.

2nd job for chickens in the morning after a quick scrabble for
breakfast seed - to the 'watering hole' for a drink. In this case
the duckling's paddling pool. 

I think that's about it for tonight. News on the lambing in a post soon, I hope.

Red Sky in the Morning, Shepherd's Warning. I do so hope not!

All the best.

The Orchard and the Cattle Fence

With a good start from the apple and pear trees from Steak Lady, we get all inspired to carry on with the orchard. We have space in the western field (and therefore space inside the as-yet-only-imaginary sheep paddock), for 4 rows of 5 trees each at 5 metre spacings, i.e. 20 trees. This is an amount of space our trees in the so called 'orchard' at Faversham could only dream of. We had crammed them in as whips and could barely give them 5 feet between trunks so that the fast growing quince and greengage quickly dominated the space and the poor cherry and damson felt very left out. Not this time. The trees here can go 2 and a half metres (8 feet or so) radius out from the trunk before the branch tips touch, so we are hoping for some good shaped big  productive trees.

So we nipped off on the Tuesday to seek out cherry, greengage and plum. We scored the GG and a 'Morel' (sour, cooking) cherry at the garden centre in Balla-D and later a sweet cherry and a Victoria plum at the one in Castlerea. They just about fit in Mum's little car if she sits in the back behind Dad and the pots go in the front passenger footwell, the top branches just inside the rear hatchback window (which we know from buying wood for building, is just over 8 feet away!)

The main issue here, says local advice (and we'd know from Dad's many failures of allotment crops this year) is water logging and drainage. Plums and "stone fruit" in particular do not like their roots to sit in the wet. Dad therefore adapted/created a special planting method which he calls the Volcanic Cone Method. You cut out a circle of turf as you would anywhere but so that this does not create a sump or pit for the rain to collect in, you dig within this effectively a raised bed for each tree. This leaves you a cone of soil with a circular moat for drainage, and the tree hole is dug into the top of the cone so that the whole thing looks like a flattened volcano cone. Dad then staked the trees against the prevailing SW winds (Atlantic Gales!) and covered the cone in black plastic sheet to both stop any weeds and also to further shed any water. So far they seem to have worked and they should (as we say talismanically about everything we plant) "get away nicely". Mum usually adds "Grow you bugger!" for good luck. Dad's comes from Geoff Hamilton's TV show Gardeners' World and Mum's from the magazine of the same show but much later when Alan Titchmarsh was in charge and writing pieces for the back pages each week.

Meanwhile our fencing guy, Paul, shows up to erect the cattle proof fence to run down the west side of our east field just outside the trees. This will stop the cattle that will rent the grazing out there from coming into the garden, onto our 'primrose lane', and out the front gate onto the road, so it was vital that we do it before Mike the Cows would entertain letting his cows in. They will come and go from our Vendor Anna L's land 'round the back' of us (to the North) through a gap which is currently fenced off. Readers will know we have already had 2 batches of cattle from the lane 'escape' into our ground and smash up the soft, soggy lawns (see picture) so that we are anxiously waiting for local forge Tully's to create our entrance gates. I will probably have to bark at them as they loom ever closer over the yard wall!

Paul turned up with posts and wire and then came back with a post whacker attached to the back of the tractor. This is a brutal and dangerous weapon, capable of whacking an 8 foot long, 10 inch diameter pointy-ended post down 4 feet into the Roscommon clay in minutes, thumping it from above. Paul tells us he has heard many stories of people losing fingers or hands, mainly those who only hire the kit once in a blue moon. Our Irish friend in Kent, Rona D tells Dad they are known locally as the 'Widow Maker'. Anyway, Paul used it and came out unscathed and we have a lovely taut fence running 83 yards down the field and into the ditch, secured by three strands of green-coated barbed wire. That should keep Felix and his ladies and the children out.