Cull a Cock Curry

Skinny light-weights. These roosters we are
culling are not even 21 weeks old yet, so
they are only making weights of 1.5-1.7 kg
in oven-ready form.

A genuinely short post this time as very little is currently happening. Even the one positive 'story' we had planned for today was postponed for 2 weeks. That was the arrival of our two new Guinea hens. The friend who was going to arrive with them was not, for various reasons, able to identify 2 females for us and then isolate them. Sexing Guinea Fowl is notoriously hard and usually based upon the females calling "buckwheat buckwheat" and the males not. If you are looking at a pen full of birds who are not calling, you are a bit stumped, as you can imagine. Better luck in the next fortnight, Billy.

What's in YOUR freezer? Although ours (plural) are well set
up, organized and everything labelled we do sometimes get nice
surprises, like this goodly rack of venison chops.

We have started the process of culling out these spare roosters. I killed 2 last night after lock-up. Going in there in the dark with just the head torch is the quietest way we have found. Nobody panics around flapping. The bird just allows himself to be "grabbed" enfolding his wings and carried out. Our normal system here is for me to rear and then kill the birds, which are then presented to Liz who processes them through the plucking and cleaning out stages. She loves that job and gets herself set up with a Radio 4 "In Our Time" pod or an Agatha Christie play on the laptop.

4 litres of goat's milk for the next cheese.
Thanks Sue and Rob.

The roosters here are being culled out to remove a 'too many men' problem, rather than because they are ready to eat. They are less than 21 weeks old so quite light-weight and, when plucked out look very rangy and skinny. They weigh in, oven-ready, at 1.5 to 1.7 kg which looks and feels very little when you are used to meaty Hubbard carcasses which go 3.5 kg at 80 days.

Ginger Wine (also from S+R). Sweet and
a bit 'viscous', more like a liqueur.

We don't mind that at all though. The Hubbards we always joint up prior to freezing because the two of us cannot manage more than a few bits (a thigh each or maybe 2 drumsticks). These little fellas do not need any of that - we will roast (or curry, or 'au vin', or spatch-cock or whatever) the whole bird and eat half each like you would with a poussin.

Cream cheese under construction. 

We took our fertile (we hope) duck eggs over to Sue and Rob's to go in their incubator, this being our plan to up the number of ducks on site. I took, as well, a load of empty plastic 2 and 3 litre milk bottles, which they use for the goat milking. I also took a small incubator part (con-rod for the egg rocker servo) which I had repaired, plus got a chance to admire their newly borrowed Suffolk ram. This guy has come from a nearby farm and was the lad we were also going to use but we then decided to keep bought-in ram lamb 'Pedro'. He is 4 years old, big and magnificent. He has already been 'at work', Rob told me, so they are hoping for lambs in April.

"Play" Station? Liz is inputting the entire text of the Drama
Group's chosen play into a word document.

When you go to S+R's bearing gifts, you never seem to come away empty handed. I came away with 4 litres of goat's milk, a bottle of ginger wine to try and a stack of old egg boxes, useful for when we next in 'glut' mode. Thanks Sue and Rob. You guys are the salt of the earth.

That's about it. Just a couple more pics because I have them. This one is of me sitting down to enjoy a farming 'pod' and quickly being invaded by dog 'Towser' and cat 'Chivers'. It was taken by Liz but I was very amused by the state of my feet which look about 2" too long and pointy at the ends. My socks must have ridden down when I was last in my wellies and I have not noticed. Ah well.

Then we found in the fridge, in need of using up by Stir-up Sunday, one of last year's Christmas puds - it frees up the silver thru'pences and the basin, you understand. In this house we go with the Hastings tradition of making the recipient of the slice choose whether the server cut to their left or right, so that they cannot see the coinage sticking out and 'cheat'. Here the coin is arrowed in yellow. And , no, I am not going to wish anyone a 'Merry Christmas' just yet - it's still early November.

The Ploughman Homeward Plods.......

I have read that we 'artisan' bakers are meant to sign our work
with a trademark signature. I'm claiming this 'M' if no-one else
wants it.

With the boys from Help-X gone, the place settles back into a more sedate rate of progress, like Gray's 'Elegaic' ploughman (not sure if that is actually a word?). I love that poem and the homeward plodding ploughman image comes into my head often as I make my way back from any particularly wearying job or day.

Is this cat queue-ing up to get plucked next?

Main task this week has been 'plodding' through those Hubbard birds which we do by killing 2 early in the morning so that Liz can pluck and dress in the afternoon when they are completely bled out and the rigor mortis is leaving them. By now she is very good and skilled at this and the carcasses look very genuine, cleanly plucked and with no tears in the breast-skin. I have already given weights for the first half dozen, which made 2.2 to 2.9 kg. The last half dozen which we finished today stayed within that range. These birds are/were still not even 80 days old yet so we continue to be amazed at the growth rates of this strain.

The end of the rainbow is in the Hubbard run. No wonder we
get such good chickens. 

We now have a freezer well stocked with chicken portions and the raw materials for patés etc. It is a relief to get through this - it is quite hard work as well as the fact that I hate killing these birds. In some years we have done a 2nd batch starting about now and killing out just pre-Christmas but this year we will not need to do that. We currently have 22 small chicks/youngsters running around still undecided whether to grow up male or female.

Typical farm yard scene. I can see at least 12 poults here. We
have 22 now.

The Law of Averages tells us that 11 of these are likely to be roosters and will come to their moments of truth around Christmas. 12 Hubbards and 11 random 'coq's would surely be too much of a good thing. As it was Liz found she was wearing grooves in her hands pulling the bigger feathers and invested in some rubber-palm gardening gloves as protection.

Plum glut solutions (1). Plum vodka

As a nice coincidence (which also gave the chicken plucker a nice change of scene) our Victoria plum tree has come ready and is heavily laden with fruit. So laden in one case that a branch broke off under the weight of its bounty. We stripped over 4 kg fruit off that branch alone which had Liz scouring t'Internet for recipes.

Plum glut solutions (2). Preserved in syrup
and Chinese style Plum Sauce for those crispy
duck moments.

She made a plum vodka (like sloe gin), did a 'preserved in syrup' for dessert use and a Chinese style plum sauce for those crispy duck moments. The vodka should be ready, rather neatly, on 16th Dec. The remaining kgs left on the tree will probably become frozen halves or good aul' jam. We are almost out of jars, though, so we are looking for cheap sources of Kilners or honey jars before we dare start boiling.

Ooops. Sparrow-hawk 'snot'/blood and a feather on the kitchen
 window.

In a brief interlude, the well-used new kitchen nearly had a not-so-welcome (or careful) visitor. We were sitting in the Dining Room when a loud thump alerted us to a bird-strike.

Sparrowhawks are jink-between-the-trees ambush predators and this juvenile bird had obviously thought he could zoom in one window, shoot through the 20' kitchen and whistle out the other end into the yard, maybe catch a chaffinch napping. He came a real cropper on the new window and fell, stunned, to the path. We rushed up for leather gauntlets (and camera) ready to rescue him if need be but Liz was with him for only a minute before a curious hen wandered over and he came to, took off vertically and flapped away round the trees of our pig-pen. That was a relief but I would have liked a few pics.

The start of a new clump of Horse Radish.

I was on Twitter recently when I spotted that a friend had posted a pic of some horse-radish which she was digging for kitchen use. That is a plant we do not yet have, so I summoned up the cheek required and asked her if she might post me a root or two. She was happy to oblige and slipped some into the post that same day. It arrived safe and sound (Thank You 'An Post') yesterday and is already planted in a couple of tubs. Thank you Margaret G. She tells me that her plants actually started in Mayo and came to her (in Co. Meath) via a garden in Dublin. She says that she'll be very happy if I share it on in the future, a much travelled horse radish for sure.

Lidl Supermarket "cheapie" Glads

That is about it for this one. I will leave you with a few pics of flowers. The gladioli were from a bag of bulbs on offer in Lidl a few years back. They had long since out-grown their tub so I 'released' them into the edge of our woods where they are thriving.

They are so tall this year that they are getting knocked about a bit by the recent restless wind and rain. Like the rest of us they are probably longing for a snatch of 'proper' Summer but there does not seem to be any hint of that yet. Maybe the bog fires and forest fires of May were our Summer. Ah well. Till next time, then. Good Luck.

Very pale yellow hollyhock

Rudbeckia (Goldsturm)

A Nice Kind of Boss

Kitchen finished but for aluminium detail
strip along step (bottom of pic) and light
fitting (top left)

With the kitchen now all but finished we "builders" can move on to the next job. The little bit of de-snagging (as they say) involves just a fancy metal angle strip on the step and the light fitting in the new bit of kitchen, both of which we have yet to buy. The next job is all about creating, in K-Dub's yard, a series of concrete pads. One will take the planned big new shed/building/workshop/winter-quarters for the mini horses. Others will support dog-pen, dog house, green house and path(s).

That lovely old digger - a Massey Ferguson version of the JCB
mainly used by Councils back in the day.

When the helpful professional digger driver originally did the ground works for the house/extension he carefully sorted the 'waste' into piles of mainly one substance - topsoil for example, or rocks, or subsoil or turf-waste or 'rubbish-soil-with-boulders'. This is unusual, I gather - you normally inherit a great big mountain of general "spoil" and it's up to you to sort it out. In K-Dub's case there are mini-mountains dotted around the restricted space.

The trees out front getting rocked about
by the recent stiff NNW breeze

All this concrete work involves bringing lots of '804' gravel (sub-base) and several 8-wheeler concrete lorries onto the site and needing somewhere for the 804 to 'land'. K-Dub's solution is to move the mountain of top soil and, rather than double-handle it, to create several big, deep raised beds for the future veg garden. We do this by barrowing the stuff over into the beds but to fill the barrows out comes my favourite toy, the "JCB". It is not actually a JCB, but the Massey Ferguson version made in the 70s and very popular with council fleet buyers back in the day.

Plenty red currants up out of rooster-reach

K-Dub, being younger and fitter than me and a nice kind of boss believes that if he is not actually paying the 'help' then they ought to get the easier job (digger-ing) while he does the barrows. Suits me - I get to sit there for the hours twiddling my 6 levers with only the uncomfortable, tired seat and the chilly breeze blowing through the open-backed cab to complain about.

Mullein. Another 'wild' species we are
 trying to self-seed up a sustained population

I am reasonably good at it - I am tidy and I have not killed anyone yet but I have to confess I was delighted when the aforementioned professional digger driver (Jimmy, who lives next door to K-Dub) crept up behind me while I was working, stopped us working for a quick chat and fancied a 'go' on our old rust-bucket. He has long since moved on to the huge multi-ton turf machines but would have learned the ropes on these old MF work-horses back in his (relative) youth. He was a pleasure to watch - such control and deliberate movement. Poetry in motion. I must have been paying attention to this involuntary "master-class" too. K-Dub was amazed at the "improvement" after I'd watched Jimmy - "You are much neater and you're filling the barrows perfectly!" he said.

"Big Red" with her 4 now out and about.

Meanwhile, back at home, after all the excitement of that job I am refraining from talking about in this post (pssst... haircuts for ovines) we are enjoying a bit of a relaxed week bedding in the new chicks. Big Red has now started bringing her 4 chicks out to join white hen 'Connie' and her 3. They have little run-ins with other hens now and again and the ginger cats seem fascinated by them but too scared of the bossy hens to actually have a go.

Hubbards at 25 days get moved to the release-pen. 

They are thriving. I get good chick crumb and my finely-chopped hard boiled egg mix into them by periodically going to find the groups and, if there is no competition about, dropping little piles near them which the mother hen dives on clucking her bass-y "Food here children!" cluck. We thought we'd lost one of her black chicks - he was suddenly all slow, wobbly and woozy but he has recovered.

Release pen. They get a few days and nights to get used to
going to roost in the house, then let out into the 10 m by 10 m
pen itself. 

Maybe it was a chilly, wet day and he'd taken a 'puck' from an adult hen's feet (or beak) and got a bit cold and shocked. He got left behind a couple of times but we rescued him back to Mum and he seemed to improve after a few of their 'nap-time' hunker-downs. Mum-hens do that. They go exploring for a while but then decide it is nap time, gather the babies back under their skirts and settle down for a rest where ever they happen to be.

That first sour-dough loaf.

The Hubbard "babies" who are now as big as a pigeon in body-size despite only being 25 days old have been moved from their 2 square metres rabbit run, to their 'grown-up' 10 m by 10 m pen via a release pen I have built. Previous years I have had difficulty getting them to go to bed safe in the house - they started camping out UNDER the house and I had to rake them out and carry them to bed. So I built them a small training run which excluded them from 'under'. When they've done a few days and nights of going to bed properly, they can come out into the wider pen.

Welsh Cakes

In the new kitchen we are enjoying the sour dough bread making. I have had 2 reasonably good loaves (both been eaten) and I am creeping up on 'perfection' with a 3rd attempt tomorrow. The "sponge" is bubbling away now. Liz got inspired by some Welsh-Cakes brought by one of the guests to their recent AGM in Cardiff. She has had a go at them here. Again, they were OK but she was disappointed by the slightly scorched colour and that they were too thick and a bit sticky to handle. I expect there will be a 2nd prototype along soon.

On a Chicken Mission

Liz plucks the final bird. 3 finished birds
are in the background.

This post sees us finally through the harvest of the Hubbard variety chickens. Regular readers will know that the Hubbard is a commercial breed used widely in Ireland by farmers supplying the supermarkets with, specifically, Free Range and Organic chickens. We get them as day-olds and grow them through to around day 90 by which time they have reached 2-4 kg oven-ready weights and are just the most succulent, tender, meaty and flavoursome chicken you will ever put on the table.

The final 3 hens and a cock await jointing and/or vac-packing

These are normally only available in industrial scale batches (10,000 for example) but our friends Mentor Anne and Simon who were once in that business, are still 'in' with a guy who manages one of the big hatcheries and is happy to make up mini-orders to suit we few smallholders. We get a dozen and A+S add those to their own 'few dozen' order. If you like, go back a few months on this blog for some pics of a previous lot newly arrived  (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/05/hubbard-chick-at-2-days-little-list-of.html ).

Vac packed and ready for the freezer

Those regular readers will also know that the latest batch have now 'cooked' and we have been processing them at a two a day for the last week. That brought us to Saturday with 4 birds remaining. Normally we'd share the load but that day Liz decided she was "in the Zen" for a solid 2-3 hours of plucking and gutting.

Fringe benefit of a Hubbard kill. Lovely fresh paté

She took the laptop into the kitchen, put on an Oz murder-mystery series on download which she is currently "binge-watching", shut the door to keep out the kittens (they are devils for climbing up your back without warning, leaping from the floor to about waist height, then digging their claws in for a scrabble to shoulder height. Poor Liz is lacerated about the nape and fed up with the pain, and was going to be working in the warm kitchen with her shoulders protected only by a tee shirt and apron) and went for it.

Boiled chicken feet? Not your cup of tea?
The dogs LOVE them

My part in this is to bring in the killed birds on demand, supply tea in regular and copious amounts (plus the occasional G+T if the job is running past 'yard-arm') and then, at the end, jointing, vac-packing, finding homes for all this largesse in the freezer(s) and disappearing the bags of feathers, guts, heads and any other unmentionables. I can pluck but I am nothing like as careful or patient as Liz and my birds end up looking a bit like road-kill with torn skin, etc. Liz picks away carefully and gently, busily and efficiently producing lovely looking oven-ready birds. She is very good at it and has found, to her own amazement (Dublin city-girl!) that she thoroughly enjoys it and finds it very therapeutic. I, of course, am not arguing. My job is to hatch (if necessary), rear and 'grow' the birds and then kill them and bring them to the kitchen door and take away any bags of waste. It is a neat and easily worked team effort. We both, of course, thoroughly enjoy eating them!

Sunday morning dawned Hubbard-less but also with a good frost. During my first livestock rounds (which now includes getting 'wet', liquid water out to the birds - the ducks and geese do love to wash their faces and they are unimpressed by that rock-hard crust that comes on the drinkers these mornings. The outside tap is, of course, frozen up, so this involves bringing out buckets of water from the kitchen) I had heard what I thought were a few more Whooper swans flying N-S past us to the West and being called down by more birds on Lough Feigh. I headed down there again with my long lens, hoping to improve on my '365' pics of last week.

No luck on the swans by then (10 am). The Lough is quite low at present and was completely frozen over except among the reed beds, so there was not a swan to be seen, not even the ubiquitous Mute Swans. I had to satisfy myself with a couple of picturesque frosty scenes and a small flock of wigeon zig-zagging about. I'd given up and headed home when I got my best surprise of that day - I put up a snipe. I don't think I have ever seen one before but I know that, in theory, they do live here.

This tiny 'dot' cropped out of the middle of a huge blank
sky is my snipe. First one I'd ever seen, never mind photo'd.

Of course, once it had exploded into flight it was quickly up to a gazillion mph and headed away from me as fast as its little blurring wings could go. I whipped up the 400 mm and fired off a couple pics and thank Heaven for modern "image stabilization" on these fancy lenses. He was outta there. I was relieved to be able to crop this silhouette from the resulting huge, featureless picture of grey sky.

Thawed patch and neat pile of poo tells
the tale of where one sheep slept last night

Finally I have had some fun today helping to clear away the outdoor archery equipment for our Coach, Con who is currently laid up in his bed, too sick to do any hefting and carrying but fretting because all the gear was still 'out there' getting rained on and frozen.

We all laughed at this superb pic of archery
boss-lady, Niamh who had finally nailed that
coffee cup with a superb tight pattern of 3
arrows. Ace shooting Niamh!

Our archery field 'out there', south of Castlerea town is a square with earth banks thrown up all round it like ditches and walls, a copy of an Irish fort (or 'Rath'). In one corner is an access gap for Con's tired old ride-on mower which comes with a handy little trailer.

From shortage to glut. We probably have
'enough' eggs now.

My job, helped by our archery 'boss-lady' Niamh (Brits may need to know this is pronounced "Neave") was to scurry back and forth collecting up all the 3D foam-rubber targets (life-size animals like wild boar, ibex and deer, fox etc), logs, tarpaulins, metal 'tent-peg' pins and pallets, bring them all to dry storage. On Sunday a gang of us will return to demolish the big marquee and then Con will be able to get some healing sleep. Get well soon, Con!

Stirring it Up.... Early

Stir It Up..... Christmas Pudding Mix

Normally we would be looking to make up our Christmas Pudding mixes on the 'proper' day, "Stir Up Sunday" which, as you will probably know falls on the last Sunday before Advent. This year that is the 20th November. However, this year Liz wanted to make extra puds to give away as Christmas presents, one of which will be going to some UK visitors who are here soon; way too soon to have a pud mixed on 20th November.

...because sometimes you need to leave yourself a reminder
for the next morning.

So as I sit here writing this on a Tuesday evening with Liz off at knitting club and then drama group, I am actually supervising three puds 'blupping' away gently in three different places. this just to make sure nobody boils dry. I have to turn off the hob pair at 10 p.m. but the slow-cooker one can keep on a-going till Liz gets home. The house seems to be acknowledging that Christmas is just around the corner (though we are not ones for early decorating or playing any Christmas songs till much nearer the day).

One of the puds simmering gently (lid removed for photo)

This very mild, food-based, Christmas feeling is also spreading to our sense of 'harvest time'. I like to get all the killing done by the Solstice (21st Dec) because then I can go into Christmas in a constructive frame of mind, not a destructive one. I mentally turn a corner on that date and start my getting ready for Spring. We have started to "finish" (that aul' euphemism!) the Hubbard meat-birds who are currently on day 93; you may recall that we try to finish them all between days 80 and 100 so that they a big and meaty but still very young and tender. Superb meat. So tasty and succulent.

Hubbard carcasses. These two were 2.4 and 2.7 kg oven-ready

This year I am mildly concerned that following a good 'harvest' of our pork and our lambs, the freezers are a bit full to be accepting a dozen biggish chickens but Liz is calm and tells me not to fret. "Keep on killing them", she says, "and I will keep on plucking them, dressing them, jointing, packing and freezing them". She shuffles up the smaller items already frozen to make more space and immediately capitalizes on any vacant places gained by us whipping out a joint, a frozen left-overs tub or a bottle of stock.

Rolled Rib Roast of pork

Reading Anne's blog, she found that this batch were unusual in their inconsistent oven-ready weights. "There is a wide range of weights", she writes, "with these latest birds which are supposed to be Hubbards, a slow growing strain. They have ranged in weight from six and a half pounds (2.94 kg) to nine pounds three ounces (4.17 kg). We really  do have our doubts as to whether they were in fact Hubbards. None of our previous batches have weighed so much yet they were reared and fed exactly the same as previous batches". We have killed our biggest 4 roosters here so far, with weights ranging from 2.4 to 2.7 kg - the hen birds all look quite a bit smaller.

With Charlotte now off in Dublin working for a living (good
luck Charlotte!) I had to clip my own dogs. I know! Outrageous!

My other comment on them would be about the dirtiness of them. Regular readers will know that this year, to avoid wading through lazy, over-fed Hubbard poults (and their poo!) as soon as we stepped out of the kitchen into the yard, I confined them to a pen out by the 5-Acre field-gate. They quickly mashed this ground to a muddy desert and, not being ones for perching or roosting up out of the wet, they ended up more brown than white and looking very bedraggled.

Liz enjoying Mum's car. 

I shovelled in no end of shredded wood to try to dry them out and eventually let them out fully free range so they could walk the clean, green grass. Their upper sides and backs were quickly cleaner but the damage was done on their bellies and breasts, their feathers worn and mudded to discoloured "stubble" which was not a lot of fun for Liz to pluck out. I don't know what the answer is to this - it rained so much through August and September. Ah well, they look OK as carcasses with all those soiled feathers gone and in the bin, and they were happy and healthy enough despite the muddy pen.

These 6 youngsters escaped into the lane once too often and
the owner decided to take them 'home'

The local cattle have all been taken 'home', the ones who rent the land surrounding ours. As they ran out of grass in the field, they started trying to push through the fences and hedges to get at the greener grass beyond. This happens and is normal (I am told) and it is usually the youngsters who get out first because they are smaller.

Walking our summer guests home.

Several times last week I'd return from a dog walk or drive and find the lane "filled" with calves all happily grazing the verges (the "Long Acre") and helped by either random passers by or Liz, we'd be rounding them up and shepherding them back into their field. Each time I'd text the owner but then send him another text to say "sorted". The owner had been hanging on as long as possible because these Mums and children run with the bull (young cousin of the original 'Felix') and he did not want the bull mixing it with the ladies he already had nearer home.

Those 'kattens' are due their operations this week. We don't
want any dodgy brother-sister incest. 

Eventually even he got fed up with all the escapes and came down with a small crew of walkers and followers (plus vehicles) to take everybody home. We'll miss them and, with the land now having changed hands, that will be the last time we see them. We got quite good at shepherding the calves about.

That is pretty much it for this one. I was hoping to get some pics of the 'super-moon' - last night's full moon which was meant to be the closest to earth (and therefore biggest and brightest) for 70 odd years. Well, Roscommon did it's usual 10/10 cloud and misty morning so there was no moon to see that night. I did get a glimpse of it on my morning rounds as the sun burned off the mist on the 5-Acre field to our west. That would have been about 07:45 and almost full daylight. I could have probably got a pale photo but, hey, had my hands full of bird food and sheep crunch. Such is life.