Scorchio!

One of those happy garden coincidences, two nice
purples next to one another.

These are stultifyingly hot days. We are reduced, by lunchtime, to pathetic, drippy, exhausted shadows of our former selves, crashed out somewhere in the shade to keep cool. I have taken the mower to bits to rid its airways  and throttle mechanism of dried (and some black scorched) grass, and I have painted undercoat on wooden parts of the trailer and the new gate into the bee-hive area / rabbit run and I have walked the dogs, but that's about my lot; Liz has battled through a load of laundry. At least now there is a tiny breeze. Mad dogs and Englishmen? We are sitting under the terrace furniture parasol sipping cold drinks.

Only the bees continue to show any enthusiasm and it is in their job description; in hot weather you go foraging. The hens are all laid up in the shade of trees at the top of the Secret Garden, the rabbits under their shade sheets on the lawn, or in Ginny and Padfoot's case, the shade of the big ash tree. The pigs are making good use of the rain water ditch as their wallow, as was the plan.

and there let us wallow in glorious mud.

When we were doing the build we connected up all the rain down-pipes to 4 inch underground drains running under the yard and joining up just by the end of the chicken house. These tip out into a deep ditch to the right (East) of the Secret Garden which takes the water away down to the stream at the bottom Anna's land. We had this cleared by mini-digger but inevitably it has since become a glory-hole for stinging nettles, ground elder and over hanging hawthorn and ash. The piggies quickly discovered it almost on Day 1 and reveled in nipping up and down it under cover like taking the subway from top to bottom of their patch, popping up at either end with a quick and impressively nimble gallop up the almost sheer bank. Since then they have enjoyed the wetness of the place after rain, when the rest of their patch can be a bit dry and pine-needly, good for dust bathing but not so useful as a wallow.

Spring onions - "scallions" in these parts.

Mapp in particular seems to like a good wallow and regularly comes to supper in an attractive (?) pie-bald version of herself, ginger above the plimsoll line, black below. Black too from her nose to her eyes, so that you can see she's been rootling down to a good 6 inches but has kept her eyes out of the mud. The pair are still charming me and amuse me regularly with new versions of 'play' especially when they emerge, full bellied from supper to join me and the dogs for a conversation through the orchard fence. The dogs are off the leads for their evening half hour running about and the pigs gambol over, 'talk' to them and then play running up and down the fence, dogs one side, pigs the other.

Guinea fowl Min is still laying eggs, usually hidden so we
never know the dates. This one was in the clump of mint.

Yesterday I put the following in Facebook."The pair are relaxing with full bellies, lying on the grass. Mapp lies on her right side, eyes shut. Lucia comes up and shoves her nose in under Mapp's belly, amidships and hefts upwards. Mapp gets flipped over , rolling across her own spine, her legs flopping over in a great arc till she whacks down on her left side, still apparently asleep with her eyes shut, grunting with joy. Lucia works her way around so she can flop her sister back over. Very funny to watch. Mapp seems to just suck it up, completely un-bothered." Daft as a brush the pair of them.

Finally, our membership card to the Bee Keepers' group

"Gardens, like cities, are store houses of personal myth and memory. A tree, just like that particular chair in that particular courtyard café, has its place in many other stories besides your own. Who knows who planted it, and why; who stole a first kiss under it a hundred years ago; who sat beneath its branches looking up at the sky the evening war was declared, or paced up and down around it while his children were born upstairs? We think of gardens as 'ours', when really, all we are doing is adding our own chapter of experience and memory, along with the plants we plant or the seeds we sow, to a long-existing story" Amen to that Elspeth Thompson, late garden writer for the Sunday Telegraph, whose book I'd forgotten we had and which I grabbed recently off the shelf when looking for something to read. I love it for its descriptions of early fumblings and beginner-ish exploration attempting to do 'organic' in a small city garden and an allotment and I love it for being in small weekly-column bite-sized pieces. It can go a bit weird on you, possibly as she was by then a famous newspaper type and prey to all manner of creative types suggesting ideas for her garden and column (which they could then, presumably sell to the readers). In one article she is visited by a garden feng shui expert who is looking for twisted underground energy (chi) lines and unblocking the energetic log-jam with dowsing rods and hammering in metal 'acupuncture' needles. Each to his own, I guess; I just 'clicked' on through. Rest in Peace, Elspeth. The book is 'Urban Gardener' pub 1999 Orion, ISBN 0-75282-699-9

Sunny snooze for Pirate

Meanwhile Pirate the cat has settled in nicely and, as far as we know, now stays around the caravan and 2CV and is always there for his regular meals, which he no longer feels the need to wolf down, gorging himself. His over all health is improving nicely and we have had only one setback - the empty eye socket, stitched shut with dissolvable stitches has now popped open again once the stitches dissolved. He will need to go back to the vet for another try but this means sedation and Aoife is loath to sedate him too many times a month, so he's waiting till next week.

Enjoy the heat and sunshine. I'm off to find another ice-cooled elder flower cordial.

Selling the Children

Anyone in Ireland will happily tell you what to do if you want to buy or sell baby bunny rabbits - go on (or put an advert on) the advertising website "Donedeal.IE". It's like a massive Classified Ads section on line with a gazillion sellers advertising and another gazillion buying. Bound to work! Cute pictures, sensible prices, what could go wrong? Well in our case, with 12 'pet' rabbits to sell, the progeny of Ginny and Padfoot, it is not working. For the first month or so of the advert we had not a whisper. The website tells me that we had over 100 'views' but they must have all gone in, found us wanting, and gone off to hunt rabbits elsewhere.

On advice we dropped the price. On more advice, this time from Mrs Silverwood, we "bumped" the advert back up to the top of the lists (another €3 for the second 'insertion') and she also changed one of the pictures. I had photographed one of the babies held by Liz when she'd been wearing gardening gloves; Mrs S thought this might look like these were some kind of fierce bunny which was only safe to handle in gloves. Suddenly we had 2 phone calls and an enquiring e-mail. One lady was going to come over on Saturday, another chap would phone me on the Thursday to arrange a visit on the Friday. I was getting hopeful and I should have known better.

Hubbard chick at 17 days, steppin' out.

We know from experience that one of the differences between the Irish culture and the English comes out at this point - the agreeing dates and making arrangements thing. Liz tells me, tongue in cheek, that there is no word in the Irish language for "No" or "Yes", so that they would always hedge around a bit. "Will you have a cup of tea?" you ask. "Ahhh", they will say, "I'm just after having tea". Even their Referendums have to be worded carefully. You do not have a 'No' camp and a 'Yes' camp. The question has to be phrased so that the answer is "I do not agree with this proposition" (or you do agree).

Combine this with the natural politeness of the Irish; they do not want to offend you by saying they do not want your rabbits. They would rather tell you something you want to hear, than an unpalatable truth. We had this so many times with tradesmen during the house build, I should have got used to it. It should have come as no surprise when the email came to nothing, the lady failed to show and the guy failed to either phone or to show. It was not looking good; we still have 12 bunnies eating our grass and slowly getting bigger, coming up on the 3 month stage where males need to be separated from females, with Goldie's babies following on behind.

Luckily we have another string to our bow. Our friend Charlotte, of mini-horses fame, is off to a Show in Swinford (Co Mayo) this weekend with some of her own baby bunnies to sell and has offered to take 4 of ours along too. Her own babies were getting a bit same-y in colour (she'd sold all the more interesting colours). It so happened that we have 4 males and 8 females, so Charlotte has taken our 4 males and thereby also solved the problem of us having to separate the sexes. Good luck selling those tomorrow, Charlotte! When she runs out, she will also pass our phone number on to any customers who show up with un-met demand.

Pumpkin

Maybe we will 'clear' some of these bunnies after all. Liz is rather wickedly joking that any kids who now come to view, she will straight out and tell them that any unsold bunnies are headed for the freezer, so that the children bully their Dad into 'rescuing' them from this evil woman. I'm not sure that is allowed in rabbit selling ethics, but it might just work.

The pics on this blog have just been some I have taken today of the fast growing Hubbard chickens (now 17 days old) and of the garden, some nice hollyhocks imported as seed from Faversham in Kent when we moved, the forest of marigolds which I had only intended as companion plants to the raspberries and a prospective pumpkin for the Silverwoods. Here now is a first white waterlily in the big pond. Its sister plant has also produced a flower, so we hope the flying insects will buzz between the two and fertilize each. The pond is still crystal clear and we are enjoying it immensely.

Finish Holidays!

"Finish Holidays!" is the rather sad cry put up by Diamond's great Poros Islander friend Captain George as yet another of her stays on the Greek Island draws to a close and he is sorry to see her packed and waiting for the ferry back to reality. We are the same today as the miniature horses come to the end of their little stay here, mowing our lawns and the East Field and helping owner Carolyn out of a fodder-shortage crisis.

They were a new and exciting first experience of "owning" horses for both of us. They are great characters, each with their own personalities. Maybe we did 'spoil' them a bit with the Silver-Mints and Carrots but we bonded well with them and loved watching them grazing, rolling on the grass, chasing into full gallops for the pure joy of it. But now we need the grass for the sheep arriving at the end of August so they have gone back 'home' where Carolyn has now got the home field organised (and, in fact, cut for hay).

We will miss them and as the girls took them away we were joking around making sure they "looked after them properly" and would I be allowed to visit them and bring them mints  if I was missing them too badly!

As the 2CV (my own "two horses"?) reaches the expiry date of the old NCT and we try to sort out whether to keep it on the road, I have been out again with the trailer gathering up another water tank which will act as a reservoir for the sheep drinker but I was hoping to use the car for a much more entertaining job - Carolyn's hay is cut and being turned daily as it dries, but is not yet baled. This was suggested for today and we were going to go down and haul it back to the house (about 200 yards, maximum!) on combinations of my 2CV and trailer and an assortment of carts slung behind the various mini-horses. We even had Liz laid on offering to bring the hay-carters out a picnic of sausage pie and salad, but the baler did not show and it's all postponed till tomorrow. I hope to bring you some fun pictures of us all in action. I wonder how many bales I can fit in and on the trailer.

Meanwhile, after a slow start the garden is now starting to crop nicely on all manner of veg, many of which fall into the two categories of "First time I've grown it....." (such as this calabrese) and/or "Best I've ever grown". We are happy , then, to get hints and tips from Mentor Anne and Simon who are not only experienced growers outdoors, having once been in (their own) business of growing organics commercially, but also having used poly tunnels widely.

Anne, for example, told me that if you cut calabrese carefully and high up under the heads, it will keep coming back from side buds á la "purple sprouting", Also to blanch it you plunge very quickly into boiling water (just long enough to make it wet!) and then straight into cold water. You can spin off the excess water in a salad spinner, then freeze on trays before bagging.

 Our garlic is also proving to be a delight - huge bulbs - and the shallots are finished in the poly tunnel and ready to lift. I planted a row of marigolds and nasturtiums alongside the raspberry canes to attract insects to the allotment and they have done so well they have rather swamped the raspberries which were struggling to get established in the dry July. In the picture here (top left) you can also see a very sturdy, healthy looking row of spuds - these are the Hungarian, blight resistant variety Sarpo Mira. If they are anything like as strong under ground as these tops, then we should do OK. My new/salad potato plants are hidden behind them, doing very well but quite dwarfed by the Mira top growth!

As well as collecting their horses, our Rabbit-Mentor Charlotte checked over our batches of baby bunnies and declared that Ginny's and Padfoot's were now old enough to be taken off their Mums. This we did by moving all the babies from one run to the other, and the Mum in the opposite direction. We now have 12 baby bunnies in one run, which is a riot to watch especially as they run and jump about in circles quickly sorting out a dominance order. Charlotte also took the chance to sex them and show me how to sex them. There are 8 does and 4 bucks. My notes are quite funny as we basically have mainly black and white babies, so the descriptions read such as "wide black spine and dots" (a buck, that one) or "2 black dots on nose, black spreads from eyes to ears" (a doe). I am trying to get a photo of all 12 in the run but have so far only managed these 7 in one place long enough to focus on!

Goldie's babies are too young yet to be taken off Mum but she has 3 boys and a girl remaining. We have not done so well with her in terms of survival and have had a few unexplained 'infant deaths'. These things happen, we are told and there are all manner of reasons, but every so often we have checked them in the morning and found another still, sad little corpse lying on the grass. No injuries or obvious problems, but stiff and cold. Ah well, we still have the 4 and we have 12 from the Silverwood Mums, so we can't complain.

Hay cart tomorrow then, all being well.

Runs, Rotovators and Raised Beds.

I have no one big story for this post, so I will treat you to a random scatter-gun load of waffle on a variety of subjects, roughly in time order. I have now finished the third and final (for now!) rabbit run all to the same design as the one photographed in an earlier post. These are for, in order, Rogers (who is already installed in his), Ginny and Padfoot and for the third, our soon-to-be-delivered, pregnant Californian doe, Goldie. In her case, there has been a slight delay as our Mentor Anne suffered a couple of unfortunate fox attacks losing a duck and also their much loved and nicely fertile buck NZ White, Peter. Peter had been intended as the father to our little project. Anne and Simon have been able to obtain a replacement buck, known as Bobby but he is quite young yet and we might be a few weeks waiting for him to be able to do the necessary. Hang in there, Goldie. Good things come to those who wait. Meanwhile some nice drying days gave me a chance to varnish the vulnerable parts of the runs with 'Sadolin', the same varnish / wood preservative I was advised to use on the 2CV trailer - good stuff but pricey at €17 for a fairly small tin.

I finally hear from the plant hire firm who have had my rotovator since last summer, allegedly trying to repair it. They (Domac's) have now, at my chasing, retrieved it from their Ballinasloe branch, an hour's drive away, back to their Roscommon depot half an hour's drive away. I am welcome to collect it, they tell me but, if I like they will try to get hold of a coil and have another go at fixing it if I'm willing to wait a week...... NO! You've had it since July. Now it's MY TURN!

Fair play to the guys at Domac's, though, they were happy and relaxed and not at all offended that I wanted it back now. Even better, they did not charge me anything because they had not fixed it. Gerry, their guy, helped me into the Fiat's boot with it. It just fits with the handles down. I ran it round to Felix-the-Fix, our new found chain-saw genius (of whom more later) who gave it a bit of a wry look and pronounced "Well, it's an OLD rotovator" but took it into his Aladdin's Cave of a workshop. I swear he had the look of love and a "Come to Daddy" air about him as he took it under his wing. He did not believe Domac's story that it just needed a coil but said that he had a number of suitable coils in his shed if that proved to be the bit required.

Meanwhile I am getting on well with the raised 'lazy bed' in my allotment. The whole allotment is 30 m long and about 8 m wide. I have done it in 5 beds up and down the slope, with a couple of cross trenches to use as paths. This will give me 15 beds of different lengths, 5 at 5 m, 5 at 17 m and 5 at 7 m. I have dug the 7's and the 17's and I only have the 5's to finish. Where plastic sheet allows, these get covered up as soon as they are dug to help finish off the weeds. That seems to work better in warm weather, not so well in the cold of winter, but really as soon as you dig these beds you can see the poor old soil start to dry out by natural drainage in a way that it just has NOT been able to do while sitting flat. It seems to me to be breathing a sigh of relief.  The hens like to help with this digging and I am constantly having to watch that I do not wound a hen as I sink the shovel in; they are right in there with me picking up the worms. The geese come round after I have gone, checking for cut ends of left over carrots and other rooty bits.

The wind over recent weeks has caused a decent sized branch of one of the spruces to sag down onto our phone cable. Our old chum from 3rd January 2012, Aerial Keith is called and turns up with his ropes, mountaineering carabiners and harness, impressive tool belt and kevlar (carbon fibre) chain-saw-proof trousers and boots and plays monkey for an hour, swinging about in the branches, quite often upside down with his legs hooked over the branch. He mainly uses a beefy pruning saw but finishes off by chainsaw which he has in reserve dangling on the end of a rope 20 feet up, sometimes sputtering away with its 2-stroke engine idling as it swings like a pendulum. When he needs it he hauls it up  till he can grab it, use it and then let it back down. He clears up our twanging cable and tidies up the tree, does a very professional job and charges us only a modest fee. He declines tea saying he is off to Tubbercurry (town) for a Curry. It had to have a curry house, really, didn't it, with a name like that?

On Saturday 9th we are due delivery of a short under-the-worktop fridge. We have decided to move the 6 foot tall existing one into the Utility room as it restricts food preparation space in what is quite a small kitchen. The new one arrives at lunchtime just when I have given up waiting and gone for a dog walk but the delivery man was happy to fight his way in through the gate, come up the drive to unload it into the dining room. Liz has all the fun then of clearing space for the tall one in the Utility, emptying it so it can be moved, preparing the space for the new one, moving them (I help with that bit!) and reloading both. It's not a 5-minute job.

That afternoon sees me back helping John Deere Bob with the logging up of the big ash tree we felled. This job was interrupted by my saw going on the blink, refusing to idle. I'd had to take it in to Felix-the-Fix, our bearded, German-speaking Swiss backwoodsman. He'd fixed it but I had not actually tried it out till now. Well, the saw sang its song beautifully as I logged up the smaller branches but then, after a half hour, when I started to tackle the big stuff, more than the 14 inches thick that my saw will cut, it all got a bit slow, smokey and sad-sounding. Eventually it stopped and I could not re-start it no matter what. We thought it might just have got a bit over-heated, so we stopped and I was disappointed to admit that Bob might be better off getting Mr McG, with his bigger saw, to finish cutting the big trunk up. It felt like I'd let the side down.

It was, in fact, worse than that. On Monday 11th I took the saw back to Felix and he pulled the start cord, felt a lack of compression and thought I might have fried the piston. In two minutes he had the exhaust and manifold off and could peer down the exhaust port and see the badly scored and crazed side of the piston. "That should be shiny like a mirror" he opined, sadly. So, I have an option to seek piston and barrel on the internet but Felix's opinion is that I have probably had my €110's worth out of it and it owes me nothing, so I'd be better getting a less cheap saw and moving on. The makes they recommend round here are Husqvarna for ground-level work and Stihl for the 'arboreal' (monkeys and ropes) stuff, but realistically you need to spend €350-€450 for a 'decent saw'. The cheap ones are (says Felix) "made to a price" with consequences I have now experienced. Ah well, old chum, Flora-best Saw from Lidl. We did OK together and you definitely earned your corn, as well as being a good 'entry level' saw for a complete beginner. RIP.

And so we moved on to things caravan. Our trusty old caravan in which we lived for the 5 months of the build and which has since served well as 'den' for the nieces in August and kennel for guest-dogs at Christmas, was starting to look a bit shabby in the winter damp, with algae growing outside and damp and mould inside. Liz has blitzed the inside but got to thinking that, should the Silverwoods NOT want to exercise their option to use it for towing / touring (and we have yet to talk to them about this) we might gut out the 'shower' bit (we never used it) and the galley and increase the bed-space to 4 berths, replacing all the soft furnishings. With both our brains in planning mode we actually went on a bit further and started to see the former hay-barn with three bays. The first, our car-port already exists. The second could be a roof over the caravan to stop all the rain, algae and damp and the third, western-most, bay could be a 'greenhouse' of corrugated transparent plastic which would serve instead of a poly-tunnel. Our note-book is suddenly full of 3-D scratched drawings of uprights, horizontal beams, parked cars and caravans, corrugated sheets, doors and verdant greenery.

It's never boring!