Sonja and Asbjörn

Happy Birthday Deefer, 12 years old on Monday. She's only 7
in this 'memory' picture dredged up by Facebook. Many more years
old lass.

Welcome aboard, then, our 2 latest Help-X volunteers, a German couple in their early 30s, Sonja and Asbjörn, much travelled back-packers with experience of Help-X-ing in Iceland and New Zealand as well as closer to home. He a trained chef and she a pastry chef. Very welcome, in fact, after we'd thought that Help-X was all done with the August blow-out French lad. These two are excellent, capable, workers as well as happy, friendly and relaxed - easy company and a joy to host.

Sonja clears an old spent strawberry bed.

I collected them at 7 pm from the bus stop in Castlerea. Dead easy to find, of course. Castlerea bus stop does not have that many young back packers getting off buses at 7 o'clock on Saturday and I already knew my man (Asbjörn) sported a magnificent gingery beard from their Help-X website "advert". They had been hiking and back packing around and were looking forward to some days based at a single place, where they did not have to pack everything, tent included, each morning and move on.

Asbjörn bones out a pork leg.

We fed them a soup and cold buffet supper and told them tomorrow (Sunday) was a rest day, so they were not to set any alarms or come down stairs suited and booted at silly o'clock. Monday was also going to be a bit weird but time enough to start proper routine work on the Tuesday. Elizabeth and I were off to Sligo on the Monday for me to have another chest X-ray, then dropping down to the pork butcher (Webb's) in Castlerea to collect our pig carcasses. So I showed Sonja the 'livestock rounds' on the Sunday, so that we could leave at 08:30 with the birds safe from Brer Fox, and the Help-X-ers could get up at their leisure and feed and release the birds.

A car full of pig

These guys are both trained cooks but had not, before, had to deal with a whole pig carcass. Sonja was not keen, and opted to go to work in the kitchen garden, clearing an old strawberry bed and weeding a newer one, but Asbjörn fancied a try at the butchery which is way 'upstream' from his normal experience. Brilliant for me, still on 'light duties', and good for the Lady of the House too, as this freed her up to onward process the heads, hearts, livers, tails, ears and so on into excellent brawns, patés, dog-treats and there was even talk of brains soaking in milk (I avert my eyes at that level of offal).

Splitting a pig head for the brawn.

With me 'training' him and his dexterity with knives and the bone saw, we soon had each half carcass reduced to lumps that he would be familiar with, and then there was no stopping him 'running with it' into areas we have not yet explored here. He was soon boning out the 'H' bones (pelvic bits) at the top of my 'Parma' ham legs, completely boning out other legs, rolling and tying them, extracting good looking boneless pork 'steaks' from the shoulder meat and so on. A master-class in food prep. I was just able to take it easy bagging and labelling the cuts for the freezer. I just need to salt down my 'Parma' ham legs and we are all done, all safely gathered in.

Boned, rolled and tied leg.

As I said, while we all played 'pig' indoors, Sonja was working her way down the 5 big 8 x 4 foot railway sleeper beds to brilliant effect, weeding, clearing old, spent, strawberry plants, cropping where appropriate (carrots, spuds, broad-beans-for-seed), teasing out the few volunteer spuds from among the new asparagus "spiders" - a delicate job because of the shallow, horizontal roots on those bad boys.

Cheek meat

Into work proper on the Tuesday and Sonja and Asbjörn prove to be those kind of workers who get stuck in, don't really want to stop for coffee and then carry on after lunch "just to finish off this....." We are delighted. They clean all the pig-poo out of the trailer, and clean the big 1010 litre water butt (IBC) inside and out. Asbjörn then starts chopping a big heap of fencing pales into kindling, while Sonja starts clearing the poly tunnel of volunteer spuds and an enormous fennel plant. The spuds prove to be quite a significant crop with some enormous ones - 600 grammes plus.

600+ gramme spuds. Volunteers from the tunnel.

Other than the work, the couple have settled in well and are much enjoying our food and hospitality. They are proving to be very helpful about the place. They have also introduced us to a fun, 6-dice counting game belovéd of back packers (because the whole game only weighs six dice!), called 'TenThousand'. The scoring rules are good and complicated and the skill is in 'gambling' whether to 'bank' your points or risk rolling some dice again and losing those points. Entertaining.

So, as I write this it is only 10:30 a.m. and I am hunkered down indoors waiting for the worst teeth of Storm Ali to blast their way through. Not the worst ever storm we have had here but plenty of bluster in the trees and some 'apocalyptic' rain squalls. I had delayed letting the birds all out and even held the dogs in for a while, lest they get soaked.

Brawn

Further down in the 'midlands' the biggest agricultural show in the Universe (The Ploughing Championships 2018) is due to start today but it is, like a lot of these shows, really a massive city of tents, gazebos, marquees and other guy-roped canvas. The organisers have taken advice from Met Éireann and postponed the start while the wind dies down (this morning) lest they garrote or bury anyone under airborne tent-age.

Ah well. Enough for this one. Good luck surviving Storm Ali.

Field of Dreams?

If I play my cards right, this should be one of my most carefully worded blog posts ever.

View from our '2nd' gate, across the lane to
the field opposite

Regular readers will recall that when we bought this place we bought the house and the 1.5 acres around its south, west and north but then put in a (successful) plea for the 1 acre field to our east, thereby getting a nice square chunk of land with the house and buildings at its centre. The total buy was just a tad over the hectare (1.03 hectares or some such). The family kept hold of the rest of the holding (28 more acres) at that stage. Those readers will also recall that we have since dreamed of buying the field opposite (1.5 acres) so that we could keep a Dexter cow and calf having first fenced it properly and put up a shelter for the animals which would also collect rainwater into a couple of those 1000 litre butts (IBCs). So far so good.

That field from its SW corner. You can just see the new gate
centre left. 

All of that is already 'out there' in the public domain. Newly 'out there' comes word that the family have now decided to sell the property via local auctioneer "Callaghan Auctioneering" as 3 options - all of it both sides of the road (28 acres) or, separately, the 1.5 acres opposite us and the 26.5 acres to our west and north. This is crunch time. If we want to buy it, then we need to make up our minds now and get cracking. Once 'our field' is sold it is unlikely to come up available again.

All of which pitches us into the murky waters of "Private Treaty" wherein, if you are wise, you play your cards very close to your chest lest you prejudice your or anyone else's moves. Buyers must bid for the property in a closed-bid auction, sealed envelopes discretely delivered to the auctioneer. You don't know what anyone else has bid or even who has done so for the very good reason that no-one wants anyone else to know their business or their worth. They might share a pint in the local pub, but they are, of course, rival businesses, farmers who might have to try to out-do their neighbour next time they buy or sell animals. It's a cut throat, hard nosed business, farming, especially since the crash. If someone is going under then you don't want it to be you.

Another 'flavour' of livestock feed in bulk;
another silly cartoon on a dustbin lid!

Obviously, in this fog of 'smoke and mirrors' a good few of them are also "experts" with fixed opinions on who has bid and how much. "Ah.... surely he will have bid", " Oooh, about €70 grand, I expect", "Ah yes, but he's just spent a load of money on xxx" and so on. Fevered conjecture with not a fact to base any of it on! A dream for gossip and village politics and mainly harmless fun.

Maybe I'll just buy a tractor instead. Love this local one.

Hence me being so careful about what I know and what I may or may not have done about it. Will we bid? How much should we bid - what price would secure the land (or how little could we get away with!)? When do we bid - smack one in early or bide our time and wait right to the wire. Do we have that kind of money? Can we winkle it out of dusty-laden reserves or should we start doing the lottery? Don't hold your breath waiting for these answers. A guy in the pub told me it'll be at least 2 months....... OK, not really.

Deefer loving the new bed. The old 2nd hand cushions were
well past their sell by date.

Meanwhile, as if all this fevered speculation was not enough Lizzie has been trying to commit suicide by excess committee work and is only now starting to see some light at the end of a very packed tunnel - committees on organising the local Half Marathon/10 k runs (she looks after the publicity and has introduced them to the world of websites and social media), on what play the drama group should do next, on the future use of the Village Hall (actually the "Community Resource Centre", no less) as well as establishing yoga sessions, restarting the pre-school and Active age groups. Then there is knitting (and now crochet lessons), plus we have had visitors and we are due some more.

Half Marathon-ers pull away from the start line. 

It is a real relief to 'finish' some of these projects and lay them to rest for another year and, this weekend just gone, 'we' (the village) landed the 10k and Half Marathon. It went like a dream and, on the day, there was no more publicity to be done, so 'we' (mainly Liz) were able to swan around the start enjoying the well organised chaos and busy-ness, talking to some of the runners (incl. one from Miami!) taking pictures, see the runs set off and then zoom back to our place to set up and run our watering station while we waited for the Half Marathon to power round the first 12 miles.

The front of the pack are the highly trained and motivated runners who tend to decline your offers of water; they stay focused on the steps, the times, their heart rates and so on, but you start to get 'customers' for your water from further down the field. Some grab your water, others even stop for a breather and a chat. "I have nothing left to give" they say before sprinting on over the crest and down to the finish. There's a fair amount of waiting around between runners and Liz filled it this time with a bit of crocheting, working her way round and round an ever increasing square. One lady ran by who we knew and joked that "It's nice that some of us have time to knit!" Quick as a flash, Liz countered with "It's crochet and, anyway, you've only been round once - I've been round this twice!"

Our MEP Luke (Ming) Flanagan does the 10K with a buggy!

As an aside, we also saw local MEP Luke (Ming) Flanagan set off at the back of the 10K course jogging but pushing a push chair with sleeping baby. I photographed him passing and later sent the pic to him via Twitter. He said that the girl in the buggy always seems to beat him over the line. Did she sleep all the way round? All 10K, said Ming. We can see her in a few years in the playground swanking it up... "10K? Call that a distance? I used to do those in my sleep!"

Back on the 'farm' a couple of less happy events. Our two ewe lambs 'for meat' came to the end of their journey and were deemed big enough to go on that car-ride to destiny (well, trailer ride). I was down today to collect the offal and the slaughterman amazed me by  saying that these were the best 2 lambs we had ever given him. He is sometimes a bit of a one for the tease or a curmudgeonly comment (too fat, too big, wrong sex (he 'hates' doing rams, he says), black wool (never as good allegedly)) so I take that as praise indeed. The same day as we took our two down, Sue asked us to take 3 (tiny ram lambs) for her to the 'other' butcher (which she uses) because Rob has allegedly chained their trailer to a concrete block and then gone on a trip to UK without knowing where the key is. Allegedly.

September is here, then.

It's a job you have to do, but it's never easy and it always feels like a bad betrayal of both the trusting lambs, and the Mum (in this case Myfanwy) from whom you have 'stolen' the children. Poor Myf' called for them through the gate for most of the afternoon. Then, as if the bloodthirsty gods had not given me enough angst, the now full-grown gosling who had already lost the use of one leg (see a previous post) and was coping OK, today lost use of the other leaving him/her helplessly stuck in one bit of field. That is the end of the road in these cases, so her end came tonight when she failed to make it home to the goose-house at lock-up. Again, not a fun job but a necessary one.

On a happier note, to finish, I received a gift from a lad in the lane, of a bucket of rather green windfall apples for the pigs. I was doubtful, thinking I might give them belly ache so I started gently (a few apples, rapidly hoovered up) and then dished out a dozen per lunchtime. They looked to be enjoying it. Sobering then to see poor old Somerville stagger out for her supper in a very moopy state and play with her food while Ross guzzled hers with the usual gusto. Poor girl did not look well at all - quite a scare for me as I have never had a pig go sick before. I was fairly sure she'd just got your standard kid's belly ache and the advice on the pig groups was consistent with that. Keep an eye, they said. She will probably recover overnight. Anxious morning rounds this morning, then, till I was delighted and relieved to see that familiar sandy coloured shape sprinting up and down the fence with her sister yelling for breakfast. Anyone would think she'd missed a meal.... oh yes, so she had!

In The White

Plumbing bits.

Learning a whole new skill this week, I have been indulging in a little Farm-Plumbing. The local tradesmen need not fear me taking away their business, there is little skill involved, I will not be bending any copper pipes or blow-torching any solder joints in a professional, leak-free manner. All you need for this kind of plumbing is to be able to saw through a plastic pipe straight and do up a plastic fitting to a sensible degree of "hand-tightness". Oh and if you let the rubber ring seals fall out of the fitting or take out the white plastic "olive", then you need to be able to put them back in the right places and the right way round (hands up if you spotted a fact drawn from personal experience there!).

Step-down fitting from the IBC's
big-bore outlet.

We have had the big 1010 litre pallet-sized water butts (they are properly called IBCs or Intermediate Bulk Containers) on site for years but the one on the east end of the house has never had any of the stored water drawn from it or used, it has just sat there full, waiting for me to buy and plumb in a sheep drinking trough just 10 m away in the East Field. For this mission, I didn't even need to know what fittings I needed - the guys at Connacht Gold down in Castlerea are so used to farmers wandering in and saying "I need to connect a pipe from x to y.... what fittings would I need?" that as long as you are using their standard "half inch bore, heavy" pipe, you're away on a hack. I told them I needed a step-down from the 2 and a quarter inch thread outlet of the IBC and (because I do have a rough clue what I'm doing, thank you!) a T junction to cope with a possible future T-off to a pig drinker, and because I was buying the trough from them, the guy dipped a hand into a few of his drawers and rapidly assembled a small stack of fittings. He even dissembled some and put them back together to show me how they should 'go'. The pipe even comes pre-marked in metres, so the guy just had to read the metre number of his previous end and then add the 12m I asked for and cut there. Simples.

Sheep drinking trough all plumbed in and filling nicely.

Back home, all I had to do was pick-axe up a trench across the 'drive' (only compacted gravel), saw my pipe to length and then assemble it all, test my pipes and back fill the trench. Job done. No great shakes for you seasoned farm-plumbers but this was my first go at it, so I was quite proud of it, all be it it runs quite slowly as the float-valve thingy is designed for mains pressure and ours is just working as a 'syphon' from the IBC, just over a metre of head pressure.

A clearer pic of the lamb's ear tag.

We were smiling, though at the thought that we would now be able to take the Government's "Water Conservation Grant" money with a clear conscience. British readers may not know about the uproar going on 'over here' as the State tries to introduce water charges nationwide. Brits grow up in a land where paying water 'rates' is just what we do. You try to get a job, try to buy a house and there after you just pay all the utility bills that go with it, water and sewage included. Not so here, water has been free, certainly for recent decades though we did have to pay €1900 to get connected 3 years ago and now, under the umbrella of austerity measures borne out of the crashed economy, Ireland is going water-metered and getting charged for its water.

 The Irish, in general, are not happy and in some cases they are 'not happy' enough to be objecting fiercely and even violently - refusals to register as water customers, marches, lots of  'frank and open' discussion, even attacks on meter installing workers and court cases leading to imprisonment. The widely held view is that the Government have not handled this at all well, bungling the consultation, hiring hugely expensive consultants, delaying for ever being able to tell anyone how much they would be charged and then drip feeding out concessions as if forced to by the loss of control of the story. There are now concessions for areas where the tap water is not fit to drink (still under a 'boil-water' notice), there are allowances of so many thousand litres of free water per child under 18 per household and, most recently they have published the charge amounts but said that each house will be able to apply for a "Water Conservation Grant" of  €100 as long as you register. Amusingly for us, the charges for the first year(s) at least might be as low as €80 per annum, so the grant will more than pay for it in year 1. I would (cough) have been very troubled taking this generous hand-out (cough) had I not done my bit of water-saving plumbing. Mmmm.

Line-caught North Atlantic mackerel.

Meanwhile, back in the garden you may recall that we have been hankering after some single snowdrops to pep up our 'bee-food' range in the pollen for February department; that is assuming we ever get weather warm enough in the snow drop season  to attract the bees out on any significant foraging flights. The one snow drop fact I am certain of from reading, listening to GQT and my own experience is that the best way to buy snow drops is 'in the green', i.e. when the bulb has finished flowering but still has green leaves.

Healthy snow drops in Una's garden.

In Kent we had a fine population growing, spreading out from a gnarly old James Grieves apple tree. Every year we'd buy another 25, 50 or even 100 bulbs in the green from special offers we saw advertised in national newspapers (The Telegraph one year, I recall). We wanted to do the same here and we were disappointed that none of these offers 'worked' in the Republic of Ireland; we think there must be a regulation against shipping growing plants across country borders, even root-washed.

What we aspire to; neighbour Una's magnificent drift
of flowers along her drive-side bank.

There is one Irish website which purports to be a snowdrop specialist nursery (with all the weird (and sterile) double and triple flowered varieties, species and variants ( http://www.fieldofblooms.ie/ )) but as far as I can see it is defunct - I have never managed to get a reply out of it, anyway. We were therefore at a bit of a loss. I found a couple of tiny clumps in 'no-man's-land' in a  roadside ditch, so we appropriated them. This year, though, we have had a result as eagle-eyed Anne spotted a local florist selling pots of snowdrops still in flower ("in the white" we guess?). We snatched up 5 of these at €2 per 3 inch pot.

Our starter population, a filched mini-clump
and 5 potted bunches. 

At first sight we thought they were a bit pricey, 2 'yo-yo's for a tiny clump of 4-6 stems, but when we did the sums, five pots of 5 plants, 25 plants for a tenner, was not that different from the special offer prices we'd been paying for in the UK. In addition, we may have found another light at the end of the tunnel. An internet chum who is a professional gardener has heard our plea and reckons he can do us a batch of 'in the green' from his own stocks when they are done flowering (Thank You, Anchs!). We'll get there. These garden jobs are always best done slowly and patiently, we never did go in for the 3-day make-overs of Alan Titchmarsh and his "Ground Force" team.

These few snowdrops have gone into the lump of ground under the trees we jokingly call the 'Shallow Grave' (see 19th Feb 2012 post at http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2012/02/shallow-grave.html ). When we first exposed it by clearing tall nettles we found the heels of 2 farm boots sticking up perfectly placed to suggest that someone had pitched a dead body in to a hole head first, legs spread, and then buried him leaving the heels sticking out. It's actually not so much 'fertile, well drained soil' as a heady mix of soil with broken glass, bottles, jars, plastic and metal bits - a right old rubbish tip which it's not safe to work without tough gloves. Every time I use the handfork to create planting holes I keep a feed-sack with me for the rubbish, but it is a nice, picturesque mound in which we are growing fox gloves, pulmonaria and hellebores as well as, now, snow drops. Watch this space, but patiently?