Plague Pit (a Hot Drop)

A "hot drop" for what ails you. Very
welcome when out exercising the dogs.

This is not a happy home the last few days. Both of us have been struck down by the 'lurgy'. It's just the common cold so don't go believing any bunkum you hear from me about man-flu, but it's very disabling and misery inducing. Colds are now, also nicely rare round here. When I was working in the UK my work involved moving between air-con offices and huge cold stores in a space shared by 600+ other fellow sufferers so I "always" seemed to be catching colds. It seemed like 3-4 a year and I can remember the 'weakling' shame of always being asked by our lovely neighbour (The Angel B), "have you got a cold AGAIN?"

No better lip-tingling marinade for the chicken stir fry when
the taste buds are a bit dull, than home made chilli oil.

Even then we would always generously stick the wedding vows... "all I have I share with you" .... and who ever caught the cold first would always try to share it with the other spouse.

When the jar of Hellman's "REAL" Mayonnaise runs out and
Liz is reduced to knocking up a quick bowl full of mayo from our
Free Range eggs. Hellman's is creamy white so our yellow mix
surely can't also be 'real'?

Now enjoying our outdoor lifestyle with no crowd of 600 warehousemen following me about and no air-con or cold stores, I have had a remarkable reduction in the colds per annum scores. We only ever get the one per year and sometimes, if memory serves, none at all. All the more annoying when you do pick one up, maybe.

By rigging some temporary fencing, I let the sheep get at the
grass on the walk BETWEEN their fields. They were more
interested in the ivy on the wall. 

Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining. Yes we have spent a few days dragging boxes of tissues round and dosing ourselves up on "Max Strength" Lemsip or taking ourselves off for extended naps (I took a "sickie" from Archery and Liz has, tonight, from Drama Group). But on the calendar was a note to strain the plum-vodka to separate the fruit from the booze after 3 months steeping. We kept the fruit, obviously, but the hooch proved to be delicious AND to be just too much to all fit in the posh bottle we had saved, so a small overflow ended up in a tiny tonic bottle. The cold sufferers found the idea of a 'hot drop' made with plum vodka instead of whiskey, very welcome when out exercising dogs on the breezy, drizzly front lawn. It was also a chance to break in my new(ish) thermos mug. Thank you Dan and Dan.

Not a brilliant pic but can you just see that the shell of this duck
egg is faintly ridged in a spiral pattern (in direction of the arrow).
The duck's vent must be grooved in spiral ridges like a gun barrel!

What else is new? Off on one of my missions into town, in this case for emergency supplies of (you guessed it) Lemsip and tissues, I spotted in a roadside paddock, 5 new outdoor piglets and immediately worked out that these must belong to some friends of ours, the man of which is a former pork butcher and ace maker of proper pork pies. I fired off a quick text to see if I could blag a cup of tea and an admire of the new piggies. Long story short, they are 13 week old weaners who are thriving and fast learning about electric fences. They are Gloucester Old Spots (crosses), 4 for the freezer and 1 as a keeper who will be joined by another breeding-quality gilt. The 2 ladies will be put to a Berkshire boar if our friends can find one.

The young turkey looking huge against the new chickens.

We also had a nice treat, a visit by the gardening journalist for the local paper who asked to look round the place and interview us about how we garden. Local readers may know this guy as Paul Kirwan, gardening writer for the Roscommon Herald but I must admit I only knew him as "the guy who runs the garden centre attached to the farmers' co-op in Balla-D, "Aurivo". Well, Paul came round yesterday just before it got dark and walked round the garden while we chatted and then enjoyed a cup of tea and a slice of chocolate cake when we adjourned indoors. Lovely bloke - fascinating story. 'We' should appear in the Herald which comes out next Tuesday (28th Nov) if you're interested and we will definitely be grabbing a couple of copies for our own interest and friends and family. Assuming he says nice things about our messy weed patch, of course!

Pork, Pigs, Paul and Pancakes

When I left you at the previous post, we were gearing up for our big invasion, expecting 12 mouths to feed on roast pork on the Sunday. We can not really cater for this many and had to get K-Dub to bring with him three chairs and to resurrect from the poly-tunnel our spare table. The latter was the original kitchen table which came with the house, inherited from TK-Min but has been serving time as potting-bench in the tunnel. Sunday morning saw me hefting it round on my back so that Liz could give it a good scrub out at the front of the house.

Spare table - a TK-Min original.

We made up with stools, folding chairs and a mountain of cutlery which we keep in a crate for spares. The day was a great success, the house a chaotic buzz of noise, children. chattering gossip, full-time Mums getting a chance to chill out as someone else minded their charges, K-Dub, Mr Silverwood and me able to do some male bonding, Charlotte getting on really well with J-M and Em-J hunting escaped rabbits and so on. The pork, you will recall, had been very-slow roasted, a quick burst of 250 degrees, then 90 degrees for 24 hours. It was a 6.2 kg leg of Gloucester Old Spots reared by Carolyn and, cooked like that, barely needed carving. I could have picked it up the bone at one end and given it a quick shake but the crackling was also superb. Dessert was a date and rhubarb crumble with ice cream and there was a gooey-centred chocolate mousse cake for later. It was a happy gang of well fed, gossiped-out good company that we bade farewell to. Thank you all for coming and enjoying our place so well.

Big Sarpo Mira spuds are still coming out clean from the store.

Back to work then and, as is our wont, the making of a LIST. We love, every now and then, to take a stroll together round the site and make sure we have a handle on everything that needs doing, so we walk round in a big double spiral, note book and pen in hand listing tasks, in this case 32 of them. We have everything from long-running needs we have been avoiding (Digging out the bank!) and big projects like pig-fencing, to back-burner jobs which might never happen (Make the yard dog-proof*), to quick and easy ones (paint bee hive or fence round the raised bed). This list then gets transferred to a spreadsheet (you probably guessed that bit!) so that we can prioritise it.

Occasional huge eggs. This one weighed in at 118 g

That process brought into sharp focus the need to get ready for the pigs in two areas, building the pig ark and getting the fencing installed. I nipped down to our builders' providers in Castlerea this morning to order the bits for the ark. By happy coincidence, we suddenly got the phone call from Paul-the-Fence quoting me a very good price and saying that he would like to start both my pig fence and two entrances he is improving for Vendor Anna, this week. We are suddenly all 'go'. I had been dropping a few spindly dead trees in our woods and logging them up and was tired from hefting the chainsaw, when Liz shouted "I think Paul has arrived!"

We love a pancake!

There he was in his huge van loaded with galvanized gates and massive, 10 inch diameter (and smaller) wooden posts, sheep wire and barbed wire. I thought he was just unloading, ready to start tomorrow but, No, this is Paul. He stopped briefly for tea and some of Liz's home made orange biscuits and then decided that if we made a start now we could get the main post and gate to the pig field done this evening before it got dark at 18:30. I'll do pictures of this, and the ark, when we are a bit further on but I think I am going to be busy over the next few days. Lovely tonight, then, to lock up the chickens, walk the dogs and come indoors from the post-bashing to light the range, and look forward to pancakes from my own expert and Queen of the Pancake. It is bitter sweet to enjoy these remembering that 'we' always did pancakes (Liz doing chef) in Kent with our good friends Diamond, John and (the late) Denis. We love it here but we'd be lying if we said we never missed the Kent days and pancakes is one of those foods which bring it all back. Happy Shrove Tuesday, Diamond and John. Lovely memories of 'Den'.

*Sounds easy but we worry that the chickens would still try to fly in to get to their house so we need a dogs-in-chickens-excluded solution which does not spoil the look of the back yard. We'll get there. We are just not sure how yet.