Los Chicos están Despiertos

The boys offer to cook for us on Wednesday.

(The Boys are Awake) Finally a proper day off. The Help-X lads are off today on a train-ride adventure to the lovely town of Westport and I am just back from dropping them to Castlerea railway station to which they are not due to return till 07:15 pm tonight.

Chef and Sous-chef (we'll leave them to
argue over who's who). The food was delicious!

Liz has declared this a "Pyjama Day" and intends not to get out of her PJs till, at earliest, when I get the 'please pick us up' call this evening. I, too, am going to do only daily vital chores (live stock etc) and no big jobs.

It's not all dirty jungle-bashing for the lads.
They like a woodwork project for a change.

Don't be fooled, mind, into thinking that nothing will get done. Liz tends to start off with the good intention of a relaxing day and keeps the PJs on but as often as not slings an apron on over the PJs and gets just as covered in flour, the gentle bloom of oven-steam or the 'dusht' of a distraction into 'just tidying this'. I will have to go feed the bullocks for a friend and I also have a newly arrived smallholder couple to see, to sort out some safe storage for a motorbike.

Robbedy (9) gets to shoot a few arrows with the Roscommon
club, under instruction from our very generous coach, Con. 

Our 'days off' normally go this way. Last weekend I'd not long dropped the guys to the bus-stop (they were off to Galway that time) when Mrs Silverwood advised that they would be passing through here en route from home to Achill Island (Co. Mayo). Achill Island is 2 hours further NW from here and is in the Irish speaking part of the country (Gaelteacht) and older niece J-M was off there for 3 weeks incarceration where students are only allowed to speak Irish.

I can never see how this is comfortable but the stairs are a
favourite sleeping perch for dogs. 

Robyn did not fancy the extra 4 hours in the car so opted to stay here for the 6 hours and do a bit of 'farm' with Uncle Matt and Auntie Liz. Parents and grand-parents will know that a lively, excited 9-year-old, given an nicely unfamiliar environment and space to run about out of doors, is more than capable of turning 6 hours of relaxing day off into an exhausting marathon.

When Pedro told me that Spanish bread is mainly baguette-shaped
I had to have a go. Not as easy as it looks!

I took the lion's share of that, including taking her to 'see' the archery gang (which turned into shooting with them under the generously provided supervision of our coach, Con) while Liz realised the whole family would need feeding as they passed back through, and rattled up a splendid curry and the trimmings for 7 appetites. She'd already assembled a magnificent packed lunch for the Help-X lads, (Yay, it is written. No Irish Lady shall ever send forth their 'children' on an adventure to the foreign without a good pack-up!) so there was not a lot of relaxing going on in that kitchen, that day, either. We saved a bit of the curry for Manu and Pedro, who I had to shoot down and collect from Castlerea just after we un-shipped the Silverwood Five.

Beeblebrox (Beebs) with 6 of her chicks

Meanwhile, back on the 'farm' the various clutches of baby chicks are now reaching the 6-week age where their Mums lose interest in them and they are cast off to a life in the flock generally. Connie's three and Big-Red's 4 are pretty much 'flown' now, though Stumpy's 5 and Beebs's 7 are still hanging with Mumma. It is amusing to see these groups coalesce into bigger groups as they move about. Stumpy is regularly seen with 5+3 or 5+4 babies in tow and last night as I went out with the dogs I could see on the (nicely shaved) front lawn a coincidental Stumpy plus NINETEEN chicks. I wish I'd had my camera. Actually Beebs (Mum of 7) was there but hiding behind a tree stump and Connie's three were only passing through but it looked very sweet for that few seconds.

The new lambs, Pedro and 'Oveja' (Spanish for ewe)

We got word at last from Mayo-Liz that my lambs were now weaned and ready to collect from out by nearby town, Kiltimagh. I had 'ordered' these to meet our meat requirements when I accepted that we would produce none of our own this year and the freezers would be lamb-less. My phone call to Mayo-Liz though, found them still as "babies with their Mums", so I'd have to wait while they weaned. This sounded like an adventure the Help-X lads might enjoy. We hitched up the trailer and headed off to Liz and Ray's farm which sits a-top a mini-mountain jutting out of the Mayo plains.

The new pair (centre) in with the aunts.

The two lambs for us were penned but still needed ear-tagging before we could load which led to a bit of fun. Neither Manu nor Pedro had had any experience of handling sheep and between us we let the ewe-lamb escape with a flying leap past Manu's ear - she raced across a small sand-school to be with her gang. Easy enough to catch again and the boys couldn't quite believe their eyes when having cornered and grabbed the ewe, I flipped her up on to her rump while Ray ear-tagged her and then I lifted her up and carried her back to the pen and trailer. Pro-shepherd? Maybe not. The lads were impressed but I must admit I might have been showing off a little!

Photo-bombed by this Soprano Pipistrelle (circled) on a lovely
sunset. 

The new pair needed names, one girl and one boy. We toyed with Pedro and Emanuel  for a while but then went with Pedro and 'Oveja' which is Spanish for 'ewe'. We have a black hen sitting on eggs currently, due this Thursday, so we have told Manu that if he is feeling left out we will name the chicks Manu1, Manu2 and so on. As soon as I saw these beautiful lambs (Mayo-Liz's lambs are always well bred and gorgeous-looking), I wondered whether they might be a bit high quality for use as "just meat". They are Hampshire x 'mule' (which I guess just means they are 'mongrel' or, at best "half Hampshire") and the boy, especially might get saved his trip to Ignatius G (Victualler) and might bide a while here as possible stud-ram for our existing girls. Have to think about that one..... No such luck for Oveja, I suspect, or Liz's freezers will remain lamb-less and we would have to be looking for a butcher who does boxed, butchered, whole carcass deals.

New neighbours. 

What else is new? We have, at last, some new neighbours in the 5 Acre field to our west. Friends of the Blog will know that these fields around us changed hands last winter, so Mike-the-Cows had to take all his cattle off at the end of his tenancy. No cattle have set foot on this since and we have watched, nosily, as the fields seemed to be left to neglect. Occasionally we'd see the new owner's son exploring, taking soil samples or checking fences but he said that they did not have enough animals yet to sensibly use the land. Well, they have obviously been out shopping because a group of 30-40 mainly black animals were walked in there this week and set up with temporary fences and water bowser, "just to eat all that grass off". Welcome to our townland, guys.

Blue takes it easy in the sunshine.

That will do, I think, for this one. I will finish with a few random pictures just because I've taken them and don't like them to go to waste. Enjoy.

Veg garden looking a lot more under control.

If all these plums change colour and are not stolen by magpies
we are promised a bumper crop

Apple with a confusing variety name - "Irish Peach".

Allowed Out

On the fourth day, Mayo-Liz decrees that the new lamb should be allowed out of the Maternity Unit (we'll give it the proper name of 'bonding pen', where you keep Mum and lamb in close proximity to make sure lamb gets a good dose of colostrum and the pair get well bonded before being released into the bigger field where they might get separated now and again). Saturday morning, then , we were delighted to find that the recent burst of vile wind and rain was done, the warm air-mass shouldered aside by some cold air; we had blue skies, little wind and bright, drying sunshine. We pulled the pallet 'gate' out of the way and carried the lamb at ewe-nose height across the yard, closely followed by both ewes, setting the lamb down in the shelter in the East Field to get his bearings (and snatching a few pictures).

You are advised to keep the indoor time to an absolute minimum. Sheep man Kenny actually does not do it at all - he lambs out of doors with just big round bales dropped into the field for protection from the wind. I assume he is fox proof. Although you are doing everyone a favour in terms of warmth, dryness and safety from the fox, what you are also doing is potentially upsetting the sheep by enclosing them in entirely new and unfamiliar surroundings with a complete change of diet - green grass to hay and 'nuts'. In our case, even the 'nuts' were changed because it coincided with me running out of the old left-over "fast sheep crunch" and moving onto ewe-and-lamb ration. These abuses can upset the sheep's digestion and lead to diarrhoea (sheep-folk call this 'scour(s)' ) and Lily was, indeed, starting to scour in the pen, so needed to be got back out onto grass.

Well, the move all went well and all three sheep seemed to be delighted at the new space. The lamb, we had only seen moving around in the 8 foot square of the pen, so we were delighted at his speed and agility once released into the field; no problem keeping up with his Mum. He looks, to us, a fine, healthy lad and Charlotte (who knows a lot more about sheep than we do) also pronounced him fit and strong. He is 'big' anyway on account of being a singleton (no twin to share the space with) and will now benefit from all that milk to himself and Hampshires are known to be good milkers. He seems to have enormous feet anyway, if that is anything to go by!

The clear, dry skies, though, were not to last the morning and the forecast predicted that we would get bands of snow-squall cloud through the afternoon. I checked with Mayo-Liz that this release, once achieved, did not have to be permanent and it would be alright to round everybody back up at 'bed time'. She thought that a perfect solution (we have all seen enough film of poor Welsh mountain sheep farmers digging their flock out of snow drifts). The gang are on a day-release programme, then, shepherded out in the morning and back at 4 pm, like the geese for a few days. We have put off the brave hour of letting them stay out over night. We may be being ridiculously soft. We had a few flurries of snow but it came to nothing.

Lily motoring down the field with Feste keeping up easily.

The 2nd ewe, Polly seems happy to stay 'Auntie' at present and is keeping her gunpowder dry. We are fairly sure, based on the comment Mayo Liz made that she was immediately very keen to see the (proper) 'tup' (ram) in November that she had not been got at like Lily. There is a good expression locally to describe ladies of loose morals  "Ah, she's no better than she should be!" and that is now how Lily gets described but I say it takes two to tango.

There you have it then for this post - all quiet, the way we like it. Maybe Polly will go the distance to the end of March and it will all break out again but it never does to count your chickens before they hatch. Lily is sorted on the scours.