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.

An Extra Hour in Bed?

1,28 kg of 'Golden Hornet' crab apples. Our best tree this year.

We come to that weekend when we change all the clocks back and out comes that cliché that "we get an extra hour in bed". Indeed we held to that view when we had 'normal' jobs with fixed hours. This is always followed by a spate of Mums protesting, "Extra Hour? Not if you've a three year old child waking up" and now that we are out here doing the small holdering mallarkey, we have moved over to that view. We have no need of curtains in the windows here so the daylight comes streaming in 24 hours after it did yesterday and the westies don't know that it's now "only 7 o'clock" instead of 8 a.m. GMT.

The lovely golden pink of crab apple jelly.

They start bouncing around, wide awake so that you know they'll need a 'comfort stop' soon. The roosters are cock-a-doodling like billy-oh and the sheep start calling for their breakfasts. We are up and at 'em. In my case I was off 'buildering' in Sligo and Liz knew she had a load of crab apples to turn into crab apple jelly and we both knew that we'd have a normal length day with that odd jet-lag evening where all your senses are telling you that it is bed time but the clock says "No, not yet".

Too meaty for dogs? This chunk of beef spine/rib. 

If you are not familiar with UK or Irish TV you may not know of a recent successful advert for which the punchline has now gone into common usage in the same way as "Go to work on an egg" or "For Mash get Smash" did back in the day. That is the ad for the optician and spectacles shop, 'Specsavers' and the quip comes out when ever anyone has done something suggesting they are blind or poorly sighted, "He should have gone to Specsavers". The ad used amusing film of the sheepdog barely escaping the shearing shed where he'd been (badly) shorn along with the sheep.

Beef braised slowly in beer, to an adapted Nigel
Slater recipe. 

Where am I going with this? Nearby there is a butcher specialising in beef but who cuts the joints and ribs to suit the Irish customer. They love to see meat cut well clear of any connective tissue, cartilege, sinew etc and "well boned out" with the result that this butcher's scraps and "bones for the dogs" have so much meat wrapped around them that customers in the know joke delightedly with each other that the guy must have poor eyesight to have "missed" it and (inevitably) should've gone to Specsavers! To us he is now referred to as the 'Specsavers Butcher'.

I remember that my Mum (Pud Lady) had similar luck - she frequented a game shop near Hastings where the 'bones for the dog' were frequently casseroled into a very meaty venison casserole for us humans before the bones went anywhere near the dog. We recently came by a superbly meaty bit of spine/rib (Thank you generous benefactor - you know who you are!) which I converted into a superb braised stew taking a Nigel Slater recipe and swapping out his suggested Rioja (that must almost be a criminal act... Rioja indeed!) for beer and adding more veg. I reckoned that if I slow-cooked it long enough we'd be able to slap one of the big 2-vertebra chunks onto the plate and then forage the meat off that, with the veg and gravy doing a good job of mushing into the mashed potato (not too buttery, advises Nigel... keep it fluffy/floury to better take up the gravy). That was a very successful meal and the left overs, cooked up some more, may become a future pie filling.

Paired off? Belvedere now seems very attached to the widow
bird 'Min', here with inseperable buddy 'Squawk' the Marans

Way back when, our first Guinea Fowl were called Henry and Min after the daft Goon Show aul' folks, because they walked around stooped over like the old folks on the 'Old People Crossing' roadsign. Then, readers may recall, Henry met with an accident out on the road and Min has been driving us mad for 12 months calling her lonely mate-seeking 'Buckwheat Buckwheat' call. We acquired two young birds hoping that at least one would grow up a cock-bird and pair up with her.

Dylan tore his eartag out on a fence but we have found it
so we should be OK handing it in to the butcher with him
when the time comes. 

These 'guys' were named Apollo and Belvedere (it's a long story involving that 'Min' might actually be the Greek Goddess 'Minerva', so she'd need an Apollo for her mate and that there is a famous Renaissance statue called the Apollo Belvedere. We had two possible boys, so we needed 2 names. With me so far?). Well, it now seems that one young bird (Belvedere) has paired off with Min. He abandons his former gang (young turkeys and Guineas) for big chunks of most days and you can find him trotting along or mooching about closely paired off with Min and (inevitably) her inseperable buddy, the Marans hen 'Squawk'. Poor Squawk will be feeling like one of those less pretty  'best friends' who gets left behind when they grow up and her prettier friend starts to discover boys before she does.

The other young Guinea we think is almost certainly a hen but may be a bit confused as to her species. You see her doing a very flirty dance with the young male turkeys, where she runs in circles with her wings splayed, then squats down on the ground in front of the chosen boy. The chosen male turkey gets all excited and also start running in circles calling, but never quite works out (mercifully!) what he is meant to be doing, so the Guinea Hen runs round some more and squats again in front of him. Maybe he looks, to her, like a big Guinea cock-bird. Should've gone to Specsavers?

Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

At last - some Autumn Fruiting Raspberries which are edible

I'm not so sure about the fruitfulness, but the past week has been solidly high-pressure, clear skies, warm and blue sky sunny afternoons. In Roscommon in late September, though, that means chill nights and usually waking up to a good mist, if not actual fog. The fog does not quickly 'burn off' like it used to in Kent, so it has been well into 2 o'clock or 3 before we got the sunshine. Never mind, we will take what bits of Keats's "bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core" we can take at this stage.

'Golden Hornet' crabs light up in the evening sun

This year that has amounted to a few very late raspberries now coming ready and edible and one or two apples, plus a decent show of crab apples. Through August and September the raspberries had been coming so slowly, at about one a day, that the blackbirds were stealing them and looking at me as if to say, "Is that it?" Finally I am getting enough that if the birds are getting them, then they are retiring sated and leaving me some.

Crab apple tree.

Most fruit trees were stripped of their crop by poor weather or magpies, but I am looking to go and pick the tail end of that tomorrow. The one exception is a Golden Hornet crab apple tree which is looking very good now for a young one. I am not familiar with this variety, so I am sneaking a well coloured fruit off every now and then and cutting it in half to look for dark colour on the seed-skin which denotes ripeness. So far the pips remain pale blond, so we are holding off picking the crop just yet. They look lovely in the golden setting sun. 'Mellow' is not really a good attribute of apples, but these will get used for cooking, so a bit of extra sweetness and softness will not hurt.

Festoons of hundreds of spider webs on these gorse.

The mists have given me some lovely sights in the mornings. When I am down about my cattle feeding business on the far side of the village, there is one particular gorse hedge which has picked up hundreds, if not thousands, of swags of spider web giving it an almost 'Christmas Tree' look when the fog and dew get on it in the morning. This morning I was booked to trim a goat's feet (I know... rock and roll lifestyle!) so I'd taken the camera. In fact I took no goat pics - too busy concentrating on those spiralling horns - but was able to snap a couple of gorse pics.

New shoes!

You may be familiar with the brand of footwear 'Crocs', a light, rubbery type of clog or sandal. I 'found' these when we first came over - I think Lidl supermarket had them on 'special offer' and they have become a firm favourite as knock-about small holdering footwear. They are reasonably waterproof and don't get wet like the suede 'desert boots' I used to wear, and you can easily slip then on or off while both hands are full of dog leads, eggs, the post or what ever.

At last - these flowered on 30th Sept!

They have two disadvantages - they are no good as a safety shoe for rough work being full of holes and very soft-soled, so blackthorn thorns and stray nails will happily some up through the sole and into your foot. Second, because they are just rubber with no lining, any wet, mud or (gasp) other agri products that get into them stay there as a film between skin and Croc, never drying out and giving you very dirty feet, so socks are a must. All well and good, you might think. Crocs, though, seem to be like Marmite in the public mindset, you either love them or you hate them and if you are a hater, then you cannot resist long tirades and scornful outbursts on social media like Facebook. "Crocs and SOCKS?!!!!!" They seem to be a sartorial mis-step way too far. I'll leave that one up to you. My other problem with them is more general - the Irish as a nation do not seem to have size 12 feet, so when Crocs appear in shops they are usually only up to size 11, so I have to order these new ones on line where a pair with postage, sets you back €42.

The wood store almost there. The pale wedgy stuff is the
big fallen black-spruce. 

I am on my own again, as Liz has hot-footed it away on another UK run, this time to the wedding of an internet chum on the Isle of Wight. She is joining forces with our good friend Mazy in Kent and they are running down together tonight, the nuptials are tomorrow. My role was to drop her to Knock Airport at lunchtime with case, passport, sandwiches and bag of Tayto crisps without which no flight would be complete. I am now general cook and bottle washer for a few days but I have plenty to do so I will not be mooping around bored and pining.

Spider web festoons on the gorse

Main task at the moment is filling the log store with the chopped up slices of the big fallen black spruce tree. Some of this splits nice and easily but some is quite knotty and is hard work. Also, despite falling in November, it has not dried out and seasoned much. The lower trunk is still quite sappy and tends to flex out of the way of the axe blade rather than split down the grain. Still, I am nearly there on the full store, so any big discs of tree than remain will be brought up to the yard and can carry on drying out stacked lying on their sides till I get some space in the log store. All good clean fun.

Not the Best Orchard Year Ever, Then...

A "Katy" apple - just the one!

22 Trees and nowhere near that many apples, pears, plums and what-not. 2014 has not been a good year at all for our top fruit or stone fruit. We are not unduly concerned about this -there are very young trees in a very new orchard and fruit trees are definitely in the 'long term' category of projects. We had a brilliant year for blossom and I published plenty of very pretty pictures on this blog in the Spring. We then even seemed to set a lot of fruit - prior to the 'June Drop' I could have taken pictures of flower trusses resplendent with tiny potential pears and cherries.

"Golden Hornet" crabs - around a dozen.

Then came the June drop and the heatwave of June followed by some wicked chilly winds through July and the rain in that month and through to August. Each evening, as I exercised the dogs off the leads in the orchard field (dog proof; no vanishing acts!) I could see fewer and fewer fruits - all the cherries and pears seemed to wither 'on the vine' and fall away so that only a few trees have ended up with any fruit at all, and most have just the one or two if they have any. I had great hopes for a single 'Czar' plum turning a nice deep purple but then one day that had gone, stolen by a magpie, maybe.

Buff Orpington chicks at four and a half weeks

So, now it is September and I can probably give you a 'final score' without counting too many chickens. We have 9 apple trees, on which I have one 'Katy' fruit, one 'Red Windsor', 2 'Bramleys' and a 'James Grieves'. I have no fruit on the 'Egremont Russet', none on either 'Braeburn' or the 'Irish Peach'. I have a dozen or so crab apples on a 'Golden Hornet'. I do not have a single cherry despite having 3 trees. From 3 plum/gage trees I had two 'Victoria' plums. I brought those in to Liz, handing her the clean one. I went to cut away the 'wasp damage' at the stalk end of my 50% of the crop and an earwig reversed out of the hole. "Could have been worse;" said Liz, "It might have been half an earwig!"

Goldie's 3 remaining sons. 2 more sold yesterday.

The damson did not even blossom and the mulberry is way too young yet - they grow very slowly and can make very old trees. The quince set 3 fruits but these stalled during the cold winds of July and have not put on any size. A while back I published a picture of an inch long quince. I could take almost the same shot 2 months later. They will presumably just fade and drop off, inch and a half long undeveloped babies. The hazel-nut tree got decapitated by geese within minutes of planting and is now recovering, and the 2 pear trees (a 'Williams' and a 'Conference') I have already described as fruitless.

2 happy pigs snuffle for blackberries dropped among the grass

This little lot is not meant to be a 'moan', just a statement for the record. When someone writes the annals of fruit growing here, 2014 will not be among the good years, but 2015 is yet to come and we hope there will be many more years for these trees.

White cat Pirate camps out on the front doormat
hoping to gain access to the house.

Meanwhile, out in the 'wild' the fruit is looking much more promising, the hedges are laden with a fast-ripening heavy crop of blackberries. We need to get out there with our buckets soon but for now I have been grabbing a few in a small bag from the lanes while walking the dogs and bringing them home to spice up the pigs' lunchtime snack. We are also enjoying a good crop of Autumn fruiting raspberries. And finally, I have some colour break in tomatoes in the poly-tunnel. I feel like I am weeks behind anyone else I talk to.

The kitchen garden has done excellently for salads
and is now starting red beetroot.

I have a huge and heavy crop of plum tomatoes and big beef tomatoes but all of them were hanging onto their chlorophyll and looking like they'd be green tomato chutney at best and a failure at worst. But no, I now have orange and red colours coming on the plum tomato plant at one end of the house and a slight fade towards yellow-green on the beef-tom fruits on other plants. We may yet get some crop and even a glut which I am sure the piggies will enjoy if we cannot cope with it. We currently have a glut of yellow courgettes but the pigs turn their noses up at those. There's no pleasing some folks.

The Ramones on the front lawn.

In other news, Pirate the Cat's adoption of us and our house has moved on a stage; the lad is now staking out the place camped out on the front door mat and trying to nip inside every time we open the front door. He seems oblivious of the bad intentions of the three Westies all being held back on leads whimpering their lust for his blood and intent on his destruction. We are having some fun trying to manage this conflict and coming up with ways where we might be able to let him be the indoor cat he so badly wants to be.

Ginger pigs gleaming in the sunshine.

Liz started to let him come in for a wander while I was 'orcharding' the dogs or walking them down the lane and he likes to wander about but then settle in one of the easy chairs (mine mainly!). He was also allowed a couple of nights over-night in the Living room but we have to lock him in there safe away from the dogs, so he thanked us with a poo on the leather sofa. That was a short lived experiment. He may not even be house trained (why would he be?) but being locked indoors did not help. So now he's allowed in while I'm out with dogs and we are moving his food and bed to the Utility Room; although not really part of the 'indoor' house, it is indoors and has a radiator and a cat-flap. So far so good except that it is still warm, so we leave a window open for Blue (our other cat) and last night Pirate discovered this and was then discovered by Deefer-dog in the wee small hours asleep, once more on my chair. That was a bit exciting for a while, but nobody got injured. It's never boring here, even if it is a bit short on apples and pears.

Stirring It Up

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people etc etc. Yes, a whole year has rolled around since I posted the post at

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2012/11/stir-up-sunday.html

and we are back to "Stir Up Sunday" again. For my Irish readers this is a rather nice little British (and probably Protestant) Calendar Custom when it came time for the cooks of the parish to mix up their ingredients for Christmas Pud and Christmas Cake to give them time to 'meld' (for flavours to merge) and the Vicar would select the above 'collect' from the Book of Common Prayer which would remind the cooks. I have no idea how traditional this really is but it's a nice story and it happens in The Archers, so it MUST be true.

We do it in this house, anyway, and Liz was there today with a table covered in the different packets and tubs of suet, dried fruit, glace cherries, bowls of eggs, the bottle of brandy and the rest. We use an old family recipe which comes to us from Pud Lady and which I believe comes from our family's ancient and venerable, much thumbed and well used recipe book which we know as 'Flo' (It's Florence somebody or other). Pud Lady may correct me if I am wrong. Last year we almost had a two-fold disaster when firstly Pud Lady, relating the recipe over the phone, omitted bread crumbs and also, we were so short of eggs that we were anxiously waiting on one of the hens to lay that day's egg before we could proceed. Luckily the bread crumbs did not seem to matter and the hen laid her egg - the result was a delicious success after all. This year we have a glut of eggs and we have added the bread crumbs to our saved version of the recipe.

Goldie Rabbit gets two visitors.

In their own attempt to stir things up, the Irish Rugby team almost beat the All Blacks, being beaten by only 2 points just 4 minutes from the final whistle. It would have been the first win over the New Zealanders for a hundred years or so. We deny ourselves the permission to follow these matches lest we jinx the team as I used to do to England when ever I watched them but my absence today was not enough. I understand it was a gripping match.

4 trees as delivered.

For me, a very enjoyable job today and another milestone in the November sunshine, once the mist had been burned off. I receive through the mail via Anne and Simon, my fruit trees ordered from "Future Forests". These are my last four for the orchard, filling the final four slots in my 6 by 4 array, a 2nd "Braeburn" apple, a "Sunburst" dark dessert cherry, a crab apple named "Golden Hornet" and a black mulberry.

Each has a small story and a reason to be included. The Braeburn is a potential substitute for my existing tree which is suffering a bit from a canker like lesion which has nearly gone right round the main trunk from a side bud. The cherry is the closest we could get to the Black Wonder we grew in Kent. We'd heard about it from a Bob Flowerdew answer on Gardeners' Question Time and had to have it specially grafted by Brogdale, the famous Fruit Research Station (which was in our town) as a one-off order. The Sunburst looks quite dark in the catalogue picture (though not on the pictorial label) so we will have to wait and see whether we have a "dark dessert cherry" at all.

The Black Mulberry harks back to my University days when the college with which I was associated while doing my research, Wolfson College, Cambridge, had a huge black mulberry tree growing in front of the main doors which used to literally drip the black sweet juicy fruit all over the flagstones but which we students used to happily 'scrump' every time we walked past. The crab apple harks back to our family home in Hastings, where Pud Lady and my Brother, Tom, still live. There is a magnificent crab apple in the front garden which gave us boys no end of pleasure in the climbing and in the harvesting of the crabs for making crab apple jelly and wine.

Well, those four trees are now in place and the orchard, nicely grazed short by the geese, is complete. We hope for great things over the coming years as the trees establish and grow. We have a vision of looking down the rows between the blossom and of picking plenty of fruit as it comes ripe. This year the trees were all very young (the first trees were planted in August 2012) so we got some blossom this year but the only fruit which set was on a plum, which gave us 2 dozen lovely fruit. Next year, who knows? Apples, pears? Quince and greengage?  Plums and dessert or sour cherries? Damsons and Mulberries? Hazelnuts and crab apples? We'll have to wait and see.