The Butcher's Apprentice

Mary and Isabelle enjoy their last few days, here chatting to
one of the westies

This is another one of those posts you might like to avoid if you do not want to know about the messier side of meat production. The back end of this week saw our two Berkshire gilts 'finished' at just over 6 months and weighing around 60 kg each live-weight. I have posted before that these ladies were way lighter than last year's Tamworths who were fed to demand and laid down what we thought was an excessive amount of fat. Even JD Bob was a little disparaging about their size, but we know he comes from a tradition of pig rearing in Ireland 40+ years ago when very fat baconers were the thing. No, we stuck to our guns and we are delighted with them.

Practise loading - the pigs get fed in the trailer for 2 days prior
to D-Day. That way they load without fuss when you need them to

They were booked into pork butcher Webb's in Castlerea for Thursday morning which puts us into needing to practise-load for the Monday afternoon and for Tuesday and Wednesday. Readers here last year will know that we built a special 'race' from their gate to the top of that slope into which we could 'plug' the trailer with no room for pigs to sneak round the sides. On D-3 we then give them a nice long, leisured explore. It doesn't do to hurry pigs anywhere. You are better off throwing down some fruit and letting them find it at their own speed.

Who needs a fridge-van? 4 half pigs and a bag
of 'bits' fit into the Fiat with the seat down.

Then on D-2 and D-1 we feed them in the trailer and they soon get into the rhythm of sprinting up the race and the trailer ramp, shoulder-barging their sister to one side in order to claim the 'best' bowl of meal. Then on D-Day morning you put the bowls in with only fruit (no nuts) and up they go so that you can quietly close the trailer door behind them. The 'no nuts' thing is just because the butchers prefer you to 'fast' pigs prior to slaughter so that the innards are more manage-able at the cleaning stage (Sorry if you're just enjoying your tea!)

I get to play with the new bone-saw

This year we had decided to have a go at the butchery ourselves. The slaughter (including cleaning the carcass, scalding and scraping and splitting in half down the spine, costs €50 per animal and the butchery costs another €50, so we were saving €100. We had a rough idea what to do and, for a laugh, we watched a You-Tube video on "Cutting up half a 'hog' ", 2 and a half minutes of American 'good aul' boys' complete with bushy beards and baseball caps plus random discussions of last night's drinking session and chicken noises off! However, this unlikely 'training resource' explained perfectly where to make the first cuts, how to pull out the 'leaf-lard' (big sheet of top-quality fat which lines the abdominal cavity) and other useful tips, so don't deride it till you've tried it.

In we went, then with all the big chopping boards mustered on the (bleached and scrubbed!) dining table and the knives and my new bone-saw all razor sharp. We completed the first animal in about an hour with a nice ham selected and readied for brining for Christmas and a whole leg chosen for a dry-cure 'Parma' ham style air-dried long mature. I took a break to walk dogs and for coffee, before we tackled the 2nd animal. We found that we were getting better with each half-carcass - some of the first cuts were a bit 'rookie apprentice' but the 4th was a better, more pro-job. I was particularly pleased with how the proper saw worked having only before experienced a carpenter hack-saw (worse than useless). If anyone reading this is contemplating butchery, then your bone-saw will be €40 or so very well spent. It cuts through bone in a jiffy and never clogs with sinew, bone fragments or myelin sheath. We also like quite thick pork chops and we were delighted to find that by sawing through the 'discs' of the spine and running a knife up between the ribs we got fewer, but thicker chops. If you look at supermarket chops you will find that they are half a vertebra and various sharp-ended part ribs because they are band-sawed through perpendicular to the spine, every half inch or so regardless of where the ribs and vertebrae sit.

The Christmas Day ham.

We weighed one of the halves and found it to be 21.3 kg, so a whole animal is 42.6 kg, which is a very useful 71.6% conversion live/carcass. That is about right for pigs. We had also had the heads, hearts and livers back from Mr Webb and the kidneys were still in the carcass halves. Mr Webb had also very generously offered to split the heads ready for the brawn (head-cheese) making and I only needed to cut them again top from bottom (separating the jaws) for them to fit into Liz's big brawn-pots. As I write this, they are now boiled or boiling gently prior to all the onward processing tomorrow. We love our brawn and Liz has found a smashing recipe which uses plenty of parsley; a herb we have in abundance growing in the polytunnel.

A leg gets well smothered in dry-cure
mix (salt, sugar, star anise,
bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli)

We also decided to try some more salt curing. We picked out a nice cut of ham weighing 6 kg and have brined it in a wet-cure mix of salt, sugar, bay, onion, garlic, lovage, mustard seeds, cloves, chilli, allspice and peppercorns. This will get just 48 hours in brine, then be cleaned, patted dry and frozen till December. Next we chose a full leg intending to do the 'Parma' ham salt cure / air dry on it. This gets a longer cure (21 days) smothered in a dry mix of salt and sugar plus I had some fun with the big pestle and mortar "lightly crushing" a mix of star anise, bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli. I love all that pounding. I think my favourite expression in this area is when you "pound the garlic to snot". 'Nuff said, maybe. The cure recipes have come from our lovely new books from Steak Lady. Thanks, SL!

Liz surveys the wreckage.
How am I going to fit all this into the freezer?

Well, 4 hours or so in we were all done. Mountains of bagged pork cuts and bags of scraps, dog bones and suet have been assigned to their places in the big stand-up freezer(s). The sawn-up heads are being reduced to brawn. The cured joints are sitting in their cure. There was only ever going to be one thing on the menu for supper tonight - those lovely thick pork chops.

Liz served them with slices of Ottolenghi's cauliflower cake and we both decided two small edits of the recipes to suit local conditions. OUR pork chops need nothing like the amount of butter that Nigel Slater uses for dry old supermarket chops and OUR eggs do not need the support of all that yellow turmeric to make the 'cake' look bright. The dogs have also done very well today what with some bits of raw pork rib (their absolute favourite food) during the butchery and some roasted ear and tail later on as a treat.

More dustbin lid art. This time for the turkey 'finisher'

That was that. Pigs and butchery all done for 2015. Next year we are fairly sure we will do this again but try with the Tamworth ginger pig breed again but on our 'maintenance diet' of 1.4 kg meal per animal per day; to see if we can reduce the thickness of that subcutaneous fat layer. Meanwhile the pig patch is in recovery mode, even though it is very poached up and wet. We plan to let it all dry out a bit then slot some spring bulbs into each hoof print, rake it over and sow buckwheat and more phacelia into the bare areas. We feel nicely 'Harvest Festival' ish. All is safely gathered in, freezers are rammed with meat, Autumn is looking like it is here and we are both very well fed tonight and pleasantly mellow on Lidl's very quaffable 'Baturrica 2010' (tarragona) Spanish plonk. Cheers.

The Wild Bunch

The turkeys seem to have melded into an all-age gang. Here
one of the first hatch is far left, then Tom and Barbara, with the
surviving 2nd hatch ('Solo') far right and the other plus the young
Guineas at the back.

First in this post. a quick note to close out the story of our sparrowhawk and, more specifically, whether I could have done any more for her. Anne told us of "Eagles Flying", a falconry centre half an hour's drive away. I e-mailed their office describing our situation to see what they could offer in the way of A&E vets and recuperative care.

One 'Lothar' replied with

"Having an absolutely fresh fracture, it is not a major challenge to reset the bones, as long as the joints are not affected. Ideally the bird will be anaesthetized before the procedure. Of course 9 pm is not the best time to find a working Vet,  but the wound could have been dressed up, the bone ends disinfected and kept moist (saline solution) and the bird kept dark in a box until the next day. A Vet being very good with these things is Dr. Niall Curran, Animal Hospital, Moneen, Castlebar"

Steak Lady (left) and Mr SL (r) bring the sun with them for
a quick visit to look round and catch up. 

Fair play to them for a good, helpful and professional reply. In answer to a follow up question they replied that they would of course be happy to accept the 'fixed' bird to do the recuperation and possible rehabilitation and release back to the wild. If you are ever in our situation then, as they say. "now you know" but for me, reading between the lines from my slightly guilty viewpoint, having destroyed the bird, I could see a couple of issues which still lead me back to having done the right thing. One was that Niall Curran, though no doubt an excellent vet, probably does not work for free and Eagles Flying looked a bit like they were swerving the vet costs in my direction. The second was that I was not 100% sure the hawk could ever be released back to the wild so that I might have just created one more captive 'zoo' bird. So, there it is. Make of it all what you will.

Ear tag number 274. I love this bullock. 

My other continuing saga is of JD Bob and the cattle which you will be delighted to know are now pretty much sorted, all be it with 2 new twists in the plot. Bob himself has now been diagnosed with a possible broken bone in his foot and hence his failure to 'get better' as quickly as he'd like and we therefore have a run to Roscommon's embattled hospital next week for X-rays etc. Then last night quite late we took an anxious call from Bob who had spotted a break out. One of the groups of 7 bullocks had managed to break a fence post and escape into the neighbouring farmer's land, hungry for some female company. We had a bit of running around today, then (another example of Bob failing to rest his injured foot!) to extract the 7 from the girls' territory and repair the broken fence.

The original 'Wild Bunch' (those who were jumping the fences "like hunters") were finally corraled and collected by the meat factory. Everyone was pleased to be finished with them.

Theo, who is a tiny little man, is almost eye to eye
with our enormous turkey, Tom as they warily
check each other out. 

On Tuesday we play host to Liz's Mum and Dad, Steak Lady and Mr SL who come up to give Liz a bit of an early birthday treat and presents, to have a look round and to take a light lunch. With impeccable timing the sun bursts through the cloud and we can all enjoy a beautiful warm sit out front like normal people do in warm sunny August in places other than Roscommon (!).

Those biro-thick feather shafts emerging from Tom's tail.

Tom the turkey comes over to check out the 'strangers' but quickly decides they are harmless and welcome and joins our matey little group at the terrace table. As he grows back his new feathers after his moult which had him very threadbare and woe-begone, he is now starting to look magnificent again. The 'shield' feathers on the lower wing are a beautiful burnished bronze colour and the tail fan is starting to look a bit peacock shaped. We are impressed by the size of the feather shafts for these big feathers, which are as thick as a biro.

This lovely set of books were part of Liz's birthday present.

Finally a bit of sad news to relate as we lost a good friend, Sean R suddenly. He was a lovely, popular man and always so full of life, the father of one of the students Liz teaches and husband to Dawn, who has appeared in these posts. They were the family involved in recent goat-move posts and the people who gave us the cat, 'Soldier' because they were planning to move back home to the UK. Our thoughts are with the family at this sad and difficult time. Rest in Peace, Sean; way too young and taken too soon. We will miss you.

A Pig in a Poke.

An excellent list of As, Bs and Cs
gets Em-J a handsome 425 points.

This blog has now been running for so long that our dear niece, Em-J, who first appears as a lock-gate wrangler on our 2007 narrowboat holiday aged just 9, has now moved all through 'big school' and come out the other end as one of the tens of thousands of students getting their 'Leaving Cert' results this week. For my UK readers, Leaving Cert is equivalent to 'A' Levels although thought to be slightly higher by many UK Universities. The exam takers take up to 9 subjects and the Cs, Bs and As all contribute points to the final score. These points mean you will either get accepted by the colleges and Uni's or not. We are very proud of both the 'victims' we have anything to do with (Em-J and one of Liz's students, Tilly) who both came out with superb results and enough points to get to Uni (all be it Tilly is actually moving back to the UK and had applied to Gloucester Uni.). UK readers may also be interested to know that these courses and exams are standard across the whole country - all the students sit exactly the same exams on the same days and time, papers are marked nationally too and results come out all from one database and website. Anyway, well done Em-J and Tilly. We are very proud of you.

Piglet pyramid. There are 12 here. 

An amusing distraction and adventure came our way on Wednesday this week when we were asked to help "catch 9 piglets". These babies belong to our friends Rob and Sue and had found themselves born into a pig ark in a big grass field instead of a barn where they had been intended to be born. Worse, the nice new grass field the parent pigs had been moved to just before farrowing had become a victim of the heavy rain through July and August and was a quagmire of 4-6 inch deep mud, too squelchy to run through in wellies.

The author releasing one bagged piggy in the barn

Total pig-ignorami may appreciate the following study notes.

• 5 week old piglets squeal and scream like mad if you upset them by trying to lift them up or take them away from Mum. They make a ferocious racket!
• They are the size of a Westie (dog) and weigh about the same, maybe 7-8 kg? 
• The normal method is to grab them by one or both back legs and let them hang head-down, which makes them go quiet. 
• Piglet legs taper fiercely down from ham, through shank-end and hock to trotter and there are no nice knobbly heels or joints to get a grip on so if the pig's leg is muddy it will slip through your hands like a sausage coming out of a hot dog. 
• Fortunately, 5 week old piglets are quite narrow at the pelvis and if you have big hands you can grab a chunk of back end which is cleaner, and lift the piglet like that.
• If you are on your own and dive into the ark to grab a piglet, you may catch one but the remaining piggies will scatter to the 4 winds in panic, out of the ark door and into the field where, trust me, you are not going to catch them. 
• Full grown sows and especially boars are over 100 kg and can easily knock you flying and make a serious mess of your good looks if they attack you. They can also run much faster than a wellie-clad person across a muddy field. 
• Parent pigs, especially sows do not like you interfering with their babies and making them squeal. They will surely come over to investigate even if they decide you are not actually murdering their offspring.
• On the other hand they are also hungry, greedy animals and if they realise that by investigating the squeals, they might be losing out in the food being handed to their colleagues at the other end of the field, they will probably say "Oh... alright then" and trot back to the shouting food-deliverer. 

Safe, warm and dry in the new quarters. 

You may by now have started to get a picture of the fun we had. Rob had tried to catch them on the Tuesday but he was working solo, so he had only managed 2 before his already injured leg cried 'Enough!' running through the mud. Grown up Grandson Lewis had grabbed a third. There were 9 for us to catch, but on Wednesday, we were going at it mob-handed - 5 humans. Rob went off to the top of the field armed with copious amounts of food in a rattly bucket, to distract the grown ups. Liz and Sue were armed with many feed sacks and cable ties plus straw to lay on the mud to make a bit of a path. I had a big mesh frame to use as a gate for the ark and Lewis had the job of going into the ark to catch and bag piglets. I stood outside the ark with the gate wedged against the opening with my foot to stop barrelling piglets from charging out when they realised what Lewis had in store for them. 

Liz's normally clean and precious pink Hunters do not look
quite so pristine now!

In the event, the plan worked and Lewis was able to catch and bag all 9 piglets one by one. Once the piglets were cable-tied into their bags they went quiet and only wriggled, trying to get to their feet when all visual clues had vanished, which was a mercy as the sow then ignored them and just looked baffled. One piggy did escape past my gate but kept circling back to try to be with its siblings inside the ark, so I got a chance to lift him back in. Periodically Lewis would pause to hold the gate while I marched bags across to the ladies, who would then ferry these wriggling bags to the barn and release the captives. One of the sows did get a bit upset by the squealing and come look, but she seemed to relax when she could see the babies through our gate. She made one lunge-attack at Sue's hand but never tried anything with me and never even tried to nudge my legs. We just paused to let the squealing subside and everything to calm down and the sow would trot back over to Rob, till the next set of lifts and squeals. 

Liz took this superb pic of 'our' sparrowhawk.

We had arrived at 11:30 and had a cup of tea before we started, and we had them all rounded up and another tea plus a slice of cake by 1 pm. A good and enjoyable mission, which I know Rob and Sue much appreciated our help in. Great teamwork. 

Wrapped around that job I am now also helping JD Bob with his cattle. The old boy has slipped on the foot-steps trying to get down from his tractor and badly barked and bruised his shin, so he is hobbling around like an 'aul' wan'. Forking silage and throwing 25 kg sacks of cattle feed around are a bit beyond him so we are helping out. I love cattle anyway and until I came here I had only had to do with dairy animals. It is nice to get some experience of these big, beefy, 2 year old Charolais and Limousin bullocks

This female sparrowhawk stands helpless to move her badly
broken left wing. 

Then on Wednesday evening at 7:30 pm an experience which was at once a once-in-a-lifetime thrill AND an upsetting horrible tragedy. The thump on the kitchen window set the dogs barking and told us of another bird-strike but we get a few of these and they are normally chaffinches or sparrows which seem to bounce off OK and you rarely find them injured on the ground. This, though was a magnificent female sparrowhawk. Sadly, we quickly saw that she had smashed one wing, compound fracture with blooded bone ends sticking out through broken skin. She was not defeated, though and would happily have raked my hands with those razor-sharp talons while lying on her back and had a go with the beak. We needed to drop an opaque cloth over her and I put on my chainsaw gloves just to try to pick her up and get a look at the injury. Tom the turkey did not help - he took exception to the bird-of-prey screams and the fact that every chicken in the place was clucking loudly and anxiously, and charged over intent on stomping her to death. Liz fended him off while I rescued the hawk.

As far as we know there is no vet round here who even knows about birds (chickens), never mind a specialist wildlife rescue centre who could help fix this fine-tuned thoroughbred. It can only have been agony for her everytime she 'bated' and flapped in a panic, to have the whole wing grating against her shattered humerus. There was only going to be one outcome to this. Although I hated having to do it to such a beautiful, beautiful bird, the only sparrowhawk I have ever got this close to, we took  few pictures and then ended it for her. I apologise if I have upset anyone with this. 

Baby turkey in the sick bay.

This morning we woke up to a sick young turkey, a patient for the sick bay. When she did not emerge from the shed pleading for breakfast, I went in a found her standing on the floor looking pathetic and with a badly swollen and blooded side to the head just behind her eye. The swelling was almost closing the eye. We have no idea how she got injured (kicked aside by Tom in his heroics last night? It might even have been the sparrowhawk having a go before it hit the window) but all you can really do in these circumstances is give them quiet, warmth, food and water (plus cod liver oil if you choose) and pray that they might recover. Some do. Some just mope around for a while and then you find them stiff and dead. This little one has hung in there all day and is still alive at the time I write. We have put the 'electric hen' (warming plate) in her crate as a substitute 'cuddle' with her gang.

...And then there were the Perseid meteors. Unusually we had lovely clear skies last night so we could already see a gazillion stars including the broad sweep of the Milky Way overhead. We had gone out to gaze upwards at around 11 pm and were quickly able to see the streaks of the meteors running through from roughly NE to the East. I tried to take a few pics with my 'posh' camera but although I took over 2 dozen long-exposure pics, I never managed to have the camera open when a meteor whizzed through. They either just beat my shutter release, or they waited till the shutter clicked closed. Never mind, we SAW them, which was the main thing. Most of our UK contacts were complaining of cloud cover and a no-show. I will not bore you with a pic, which would surely just be a black square - blown up on screen you can see the myriad stars but not, I think, on a postcard sized print. The Perseids are going great guns till about the 15th, so maybe you will get some clear-sky luck tonight? Good hunting.  

Goats and Votes

The white goat loaded.

Let me just set your mind at rest - we have not finished today owning any new species. We remain firmly in the 'No' camp regarding the goat species as a good plan. The billy-goats in these pics we were just moving for friends as we have a trailer. Phew. That was close.

Well, THAT was a big busy day for the trailer and even busier in other ways, too. We had three jobs for the beast today - collect pallets from JD Bob, move goats and then go shopping for hay and straw for our horse-rescuing chum, who we will call, for the purposes of this blog, for now, "Murphy's Mum". You may also know that it is voting day for the Referendum and, just to put some icing on an already rich cake, T McC's main hive decided to swarm so we got involved in that retrieval. It's all go.

Out frightening voters in Ballaghaderreen with
our new chum Tommy R. Canvassing.

For Lizzie, certainly, the vote was the main event and we were down at the Polling Station nice and early. The turn-out is reported to be very high but even then our tiny local Polling Station had been amazed to have had 48 people through by the time we got there. Liz had been out on the mean streets of Ballaghaderreen, canvassing with our new friends Steve F and Tommy R and I'd even joined them on the Tuesday after livestock lock-up. The feeling was that it was all a bit 50/50 on the doorsteps and we had a superb time at one where the household were even 'arguing' at the front door and using Liz as a referee. We don't know if a high turnout is a good thing for 'yes' or 'no' but it is surely a good thing from the point of view of democracy - the answer they come up with will be more representative of the national state of mind.

The geese may also be voting 'yes'.

The pallets were an easy one. These were some boards on which JD Bob's "bag manure" (as they call it here; it's basically pelletized NPK fertilizer) was delivered to his fields and he knows that we can always use an empty pallet. He can too, but he has an outbuilding full of them. We use them intact for fencing/hurdles, or we use the wood for scrap wood for making things, or in the end for kindling. I just needed to nip out to his field to collect them in the trailer.

Next up were the goats. Another family we are friendly with are selling up and moving back to the UK, so they are off loading as much 'livestock' as they can to make the journey home easier, plus the likely move they will have to make, short-term, into rented accommodation, where pets may not be allowed. We have inherited a new cat, Soldier, of whom more later, but today was all about collecting their two billy-goats, Jean-Paul 'Goat'ier and Sebastian Farquahar. These guys were a pair of boys originally rescued by our chums from the local forestry where they'd been abandoned and gone half-feral but then more recently kept tethered on their grazing to keep the rushes down. Being 2 boys they were kept a bit apart, so they'd not fight and each a bit spoiled with a make-shift weather proof shelter.

Safe at Carolyn's the boys catch up on some horn-clashing
head-banging, grudge-match pecking order stuff. 

Charlotte and Carolyn of the mini-horses are taking these guys. They are well equipped in the horn department and allegedly can be a bit spiteful but Charlotte, not willing to put up with any such nonsense, gave us a master-class in goat-wrangling. You don't need any of this tempting them with feed bowls and leading them - they have blooming great "handles" on their heads by which to grab them and yank them in the direction you want them to go. Something about being used to getting a 600 kg horse to do what it's told and not putting up with any argy from a 60 lb goat.

We inherited this very smart, young cat, 'Soldier' and now
need to settle him in to cope with the dogs. 

We quickly and efficiently got them loaded and home where we steered them by the 'handles' into a bit of Charlotte's yard. No sooner were they in there than they decided they needed to settle all those grudges they had built up by being tethered 30 yards apart in their field, so we all watched an impressive head-butt fight which Charlotte assured us would not last long; they would quickly establish who was boss. I'll take her word for it - they seemed fairly evenly matched to me but it was an impressive battle. The boys would rear up on their hind legs then smash together, often bouncing their back legs off the ground at impact. An impressive noise. They must have very hard skulls!

Soldier

From there, the car and trailer came home briefly but then had to head for our horse-rescue lady friend's place to go buying hay and straw for the big, impressive Irish Cob gelding (Murphy) she rescued, who is now in a nearby livery/racing stable. At this point there was a brief hiatus when a phone call from T McC told us that he "thought he had a swarm". This from his biggest hive, which we'd actually cracked open yesterday. We'd found queen-cells but had been unable to locate the queen. At the time of his call he'd been imspecting a different hive and had suddenly noticed that the air was full of flying bees - the swarm was on! Now, 'Murphy's Mum' is quite keen to get into bees, so I wondered would she like to come along, out of curiosity, to watch the action, en route to the hay-shop. We ended up being given bee-veils by T McC (and, in my case the video camera) so we rather nervously (aware of our bare arms etc) watched and video'd as he got to work. By now the swarm had coalesced around the queen in a nearby hawthorn tree so we watched (and filmed) a pretty impressive loppering of bush and gathering up of the swarm in a basket, then T walked across to a hive he had ready and tipped the basket full of bees into the hive. We both may be inept beginners who happily laugh at our clumsy blundering efforts but this time it seems he got the queen and the bees in the basket/hive were straight way "fanning". When the workers have landed and are happy with their location they fan off volatile 'pheromones' (scents and chemical hormones) to call all the other bees 'home'. In this case they fanned both their own smell and some queen pheromone (9-ODA) out into the air and quickly gathered all the flying bees and the ones still left milling in the hawthorn bush to them and in an hour or so, seemed to be settled in the new hive, so that T could make his way happily to Dublin to do his own voting. I am going round tomorrow just to check on the new hive and make sure there are bees coming and going. Job Done.

Hay for Horses? Murphy's Mum is just finished working.
The posh tweed coat and strappy pink sandals may not be
the most sensible attire - open toes that close to Murphy's
great big hooves!

From there, off to the hay-shop with Murphy's Mum and then round to the local livery stables to meet the famous 'Murphy', a huge Irish Cob she rescued. Poor MM was just out of work and still in her posh dress, coat and strappy sandals, so it might have been a bit unfair to take her off swarm-wrangling and then horse attending but Murphy is a calm lad with a quiet power and does not skitter about stomping on people's feet uninvited. We got him out to the sand-school, delivered the hay, changed his bedding and stabled him up again without drama.

Meanwhile we are having some fun bedding in the new cat. The three terriers are still in 'mink' mode and think that any slinky black furry creature is game for a three-dog assault, so we are keeping 'Soldier' in a separate (locked) room for now and doing the rehabilition in a series of controlled sessions with dogs on leads or (singly) with grab-able collars. The cat has been no problem - Blue and he are now the best of friends and play like Blue used to with the late Rolo, but Soldier has not yet learned of the need to get up somewhere high when the dogs get a bit feisty. It will work, but it's not going to be a quick fix.

Getting into some Greek food care of a Lidl promo.
Clockwise from top, Squid, green beans in tomato sauce,
 filo parcels with feta and spinach, 'dolmades' (rice wrapped
in vine leaves) and garlic mushrooms.

The broody Buff Orpington in the Tígín has had her hatch(es). We have seen her off the nest with one chick and suspect that she may have another under her skirts. Unfortunately she hopped off with these (?) two during the night and the remaining eggs were well chilled by the morning, so that might be it. Still, the one we have definitely seen looks like a pure-bred Buff, so it will be quite charming to watch mother and daughter(s).

The count on the Referendum does not start till 10:00 tomorrow and the results are expected by about midday, so at least we can get a good night's sleep after all this drama and Liz only needs to be glued to the internet and TV for the morning.

"A Tint of Whiskey"

Happy Easter. What a clever widdle
bunny wabbit is .Nugget'!

I come reeling home from the dog walk this afternoon. I have been shanghai'd by JD Bob who spotted me going past his house with the three dogs and called out to me to come in for a "cup of tay", dogs and all. This is a frequent occurrence and I love it; the dogs feel the same way because he usually plies them with fruit scone or fig roll despite my (admittedly rather light hearted) objections that he'll spoil them. We get the impression that Bob has not had a lot to do with dogs in his life but he is learning to love and trust our three and now likes to treat them and then to try a very quick and nervous pat on the head for each one.

The flowering cherry just starting.

Today, though, being Easter Sunday is one of those days days which Bob sees as a 'High day and Holiday', so he also reaches for the whiskey bottle hidden in the 'press' and announces, "I'm going to give you a tint of whiskey". He doesn't drink at all himself so this really is a special event and he promptly pours a socking great measure - a good inch deep. I know this will happen so I only ever accept when I have no more driving to do that day, as today. So, we sit and chat while I sip my whiskey and my tea and nibble on a couple of fig rolls. All very pleasant. Bob's actually just cooking his lunch, so I make sure I am good to go when that comes ready and we wish each other "Happy Easter and Good Luck now!" as is the local habit.

The main job today, though, is white washing the outbuildings as postponed from Good Friday. The weather has been as good as promised in the local 'Riabhach Days' lore (see earlier post). Once the 3rd of April was gone by, the nasty wind died away, the sun came out, the temperature shot up into the 14s and 15s and the bees have been out and flying all day and late into the evenings - well into my orchard dog-run sessions which are around 6 to 6:30 pm these days. The improvement happened at roughly dinner time yesterday, so we sat on it for the day knowing that if we waited till today everything would get a good chance to dry out. This morning we were all geared up.

Last time we white-washed these buildings (2013 see post at http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2013/04/white-rhino.html ) we were complete beginners and we were advised by our man at the local builders' providers, to use a mix of White Rhino hydrated lime and white cement. We have since been told we do not need the cement, so today we are trying out a new formula (again off the internet) which advises 9 parts water, 3 parts lime and 1 part salt. The lime is fairly noxious stuff and you need to take care not to breathe in any dust when mixing, and use eye protection all the time in case of splashes. There are plenty of those because this is very definitely a 'wash' not a paint. It is also very different from paint in that it goes on a translucent grey which just makes the wall look wet, and only changes to that bright, dusty, glaring white as it dries in the sun.

Starting to dry out here - you can still see the grey 'wet'
areas low down though.

It is all very traditional and we love doing it but we can see why most people now point up these stone walls and even render them with a smooth concrete finish, and then invest in Dulux's white 'Weathershield' masonry paint. Some of our walls are rendered and take a good coat, but others are very badly pointed and the bare stone sheds the wash badly. I am thinking that I may need to look into proper old-style lime-mortar and have a go at re-pointing these but I'd need a lot of it. The gaps between these rocks are not the neat little half inch slots of modern brickwork; some are more like 3 inches wide and deeper than 3 inches - some are actually holes right through the walls! The old lime mortar is supposed to be superior to modern cement in these situations as it lets the stonework 'breathe' and to move slightly with the frost, so that it is less likely to crack. I am sure friend Simon has had a go at this - I will have to go on a fact finding mission.

We chugged away for a long morning and got round all four walls of both buildings including me up the ladder doing the sloping "barge end gables"* and the vertical gable ends. The whitewash needs a half hour or so of 'setting' after you have mixed it, before you can paint it on (some say leave it overnight but then contradict themselves by saying that they have tried it without and it doesn't seem to make any difference). We work a system of using 5 buckets. When you run out, you mix a fresh bucket but put it at the back of the queue, and take the oldest mix from the front to use. That way all the mixes get a good half hour sitting.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon for some.

We've not done a bad job but we now wait rather anxiously while it dries and we can see any thin patches that might do with a second coat. It is, as I said, splashy stuff, but at least being completely without oil is washes easily out of your overalls and clothing. You apply it with a very 'flappy' ended Y-shaped brush and on the roughest bits of wall you are almost throwing or splatting the wash into the crevices by slapping your laden brush-end against the stone work. Very messy. Don't even think about putting down "dust sheets" to stop the splashes on the paths, they'd be soaked with whitewash in no time.

Having a rest.

Anyway, we were busy and the bees were at it hammer and tongs in the warm sunshine but everyone else seems to have gone for a lie down. I can see all 5 geese plonked down on the front lawn - not even the usual one head up, alert, keeping a look out. The sheep are all stretched out on the grass, the chickens all sleeping or dust bathing on a sunny bank. The rabbits are stretched out with their back legs behind them, presumably feeling the warm grass on their tums. I think I might just join them in their siestas. It is that kind of a day.

* I think that is the proper name - our outbuildings are in the old Irish style where the stonework goes up a bit above the corrugated roof sheeting and the tops of the walls are poured concrete into shuttering covering the thickness of the wall and the start of the sheeting.

"Riabhach" Days

A Rachel Toll watercolour -
hare and full moon. 

"Out like a lamb". Isn't that supposed to be the deal? March. In like a lion and all that. Well, I don't think I've known a less lamb-like 31st March; we've had yellow weather warnings from Met Éireann and a blasting NW gale rattling the outbuilding roofs and stinging our faces with hail stones and driving wintry showers. Then John Deere Bob told us a bit of local folklore which was, I have to admit, completely new to me. The last three days of March and the first three of April are traditionally the last, mean and miserable days of cold and wet, the "Riabhach" Days (pronounce it 'rear-buch' or there-abouts).

I love this superb Rachel Toll fox-face.

Bob was not even sure he was pronouncing it correctly; he has no Gaelic and this is an Irish name for the 6 days, but even in these cases, Wikipedia is your friend and Liz quickly nailed it on the internet. The story goes (says Wiki) that "In the Irish Calendar The Old Cows Days/The Days of the Brindled Cow are the last days of March and the first three days of April; in Irish: Laethanta na Bó Riabhaí.

Rachel Toll owl

The term comes from a folk tale, illustrating the unpredictability of the weather at this time of year in Ireland. The tale relates how the bó riabhach, "the brindled cow", complained at the beginning of April to her companions in the herd of the terrible harshness of the previous month of March. As the grumbling of the cow continued, the at first uninterested March began to take umbrage and decided to teach the speckled cow a lesson she would never forget. So March "borrowed" the first three days of April but made them so bitterly cold and miserable that before they were ended the unlucky bó riabhach had died. These "days of the brindled cow" are still with us, or so the story goes, to remind us that we complain about the harshness of the weather at our peril.

The same story can be found in different versions all over Ireland and Europe in General."

So, now you know.

Rachel Toll fox face. 

My first four pics in this post are a lovely find I was passed on Facebook. The artist is Rachel Toll and she does these superb watercolour pictures. She has, of course, a website where you can see more pictures and buy the prints if you fancy a flutter. She is on.

http://desartsuk.com/2014/03/14/rachel-toll-watercolour-artist/

I particularly like the fox faces; the eyes in particular look very convincing with the well done reflected light from the eye.

Ottolenghi's Guardian recipe for Califlower Cake

Also from the internet, borrowing like crazy for this post, a superb answer to our need to use up lots of eggs but also giving us a chance to use some of the lovely mature cheddar cheese which Liz grabbed while she was recently in the UK. This a recipe, new to us but handed to us by the foodies on Liz's internet chat groups comes from famous (again, new to me) chef Yotam Ottolenghi who writes for the Guardian. It is a very cheesy Cauliflower Cake which uses ten medium eggs (that was the first thing that attracted us!)  but then more cheese (220g) than flour (180g). It was one of those foods that when you taste it you just KNOW you have a 'keeper' for the house repertoire and the recipe gets saved down to the cookery files, printed off and filed. It is on

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/02/cauliflower-cake-recipe-yotam-ottolenghi

should you fancy a dabble. Some of our non-meat-eating friends have already mopped it up as being a welcome addition to the menu.

Well, enjoy your Riabhach Days and maybe we'll get some lamb-like weather from the 4th April.

New Year Trivia

...in which I sweep out the last corners of the 2014 story cupboard, the last anecdotal dust-bunnies and cigarette end memories to give myself a nice clean, clear run at it in 2015. First though, anxious readers may like an update on our fox attack story and sheep debuts of yesterday's post. You'll be relieved to know that everyone survived the night. I still have ten of the young Buff-Orp poults and all the grown up hens, 5 geese, 4 rabbits, Min the (Guinea Fowl) Hin and, of course, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Buffton Tuffton (Sah!) , our splendid Alpha-chicken and rooster. I also have two sheep, which is handy, and they are delightful creatures, hand-tame and sorted on the human=good=feed bucket=grub thing. My 'babies' from Kenny in the past have taken 2 weeks at least before they'd even approach us and 4 weeks to be baa-ing for their food, these more mature (and definitely more frequently handled) ladies are in there from the get go.

While I'm on 'death and destruction' I'll do the slaughter-based stories sooner rather than later (Don't worry, not too traumatic). Sometimes when we are labeling stuff for the freezer, we don't stick rigidly to the rules, so we end up with packs labeled "The best curry sauce EVEH!" or some such lunacy. In 2014, when we went through the process of slaughtering the big Hubbard chickens, I was stretching their necks at 1, 2 or 3 a day depending on the pace at which the plucking and dressing department (Liz) could process them. From the start I'd had my eye on one particularly big, tall, broad, white rooster who I thought might make a good weight, so I'd go out each day to do the deed, intending to grab him, but each day one of the others would wander into reach (they never really sussed that I'd turned from the harmless man who fed them, to a much less benign force!) and I'd despatch that one, leaving my big boy for the next day. It became like Captain Ahab hunting the white whale, an epic saga of many failed 'hunts'. Unbeknownst to me, when I did finally catch up with him, Liz labeled all 'his' freezer bags "Moby". We'd long since forgotten this but it all came back to us yesterday when we went to thaw out one of the bags to eat the chicken pieces there-in.

The house's alpha-cat playing with the mouse.
Liz joins the 'onesie' Sisterhood

While we've been feeling the pain of a fox attack and chicken loss, we have been very aware of how fortunate we are compared to poor Charlotte of the Mini Horses who on the same morning as our bushy-tail visit, woke up to all her 10 ducks killed, badly injured or traumatised by a mink attack. Touch wood, we do not seem to get mink this far from the river; they are vicious and bloodthirsty killers. The fox will snatch a chicken in the open and run off with it leaving you just a few feathers (Yes, I know they will do feeding frenzy if they get into the chicken house or an enclosed space) but the mink will kill all your birds one by one by biting through the neck to get at the blood, sometimes taking the head off altogether and leaving you the bloodied, sickening corpses. The other birds just have to watch helplessly.

Charlotte's visitor killed 5, injured three more and left the other two so traumatised that they could only stand in a corner shivering, especially one poor little call-duck who had seen her life-long buddy executed. Charlotte was understandably upset and didn't relish the task of putting the injured birds out of their misery, so I volunteered. Nobody likes the job but I had no bond to these ducks, so I could do it quickly and cleanly, out of sight of Charlotte. Not nice. She is now, for the moment at least, out of ducks.

On a happier note, the last two days have seen some heavy frosts, with Sunday night getting down to -3ºC and Tuesday night -6ºC. Monday froze our big pond over and Tuesday thickened up the ice impressively. Step forward our big fluffy cat, Blue, who decided that some ice skating would be fun. On my feed and release round that morning I found him strolling around in the middle of the pond and on that first morning the ice was creaking under him; I had visions of him going through it and me having to wade out in the freezing cold water to rescue him. I have no idea where a cat gets the instinct to know that a pond might be a safe place for a stroll.

Torville and Dean, it aint!

On the 2nd morning the ice did not creak and he got quite confident, skittering about and looking like he enjoyed falling down, writhing round to bat the ice, or maybe his reflection, which had just 'got' him. He would not come off the ice to my call, but he must have known what he was at - when I walked off to go in to animal breakfasts, he was at my heel 'asking' to be let in. This morning we have a thaw and while the ice sheet is still there, it is now wet and melting on top, so I expect Blue's ice dancing days are done for now.

JD Bob gets comfy with the dogs, yarning by the fire.

We had a nice visit from our good friend and near-neighbour, John Deere Bob last night. We had the fire going in the Living room and he got sat down on the sofa with the dogs, a nice cup of 'tay' in his hand and settled down for a good aul' yarn. We thought he was going to doze off at one stage. He normally only stays 10-20 minutes but seemed to decide that warm and cosy was a good thing. We love it. He tells us that back in the day 'that' room would have been kept for best and only opened for special high days and holidays, visits from the Priest and so on, so that although he'd been in the house a few times, he'd never been allowed in the Living Room.

Amongst the gifts this Christmas came a very nice cheese knife set. I had not heard of the maker, though by coincidence, it was mentioned in the knife-making section of the Gubbeen book I described in an earlier post. Laguiole is, like Sabatier, a well respected and 'quality' knife maker and rather sweetly, their logo is a honey bee. See picture for details. Thank you, Santa.

Tasting as good as it looked, but nearly all gone now.

That just about does me for 2014 so I will wish all my readers a Happy New Year. We are having the home made haggis and home grown 'neeps' plus, if it is thawed enough for me to get at them, the home grown 'bashit tatties'. The Christmas whiskey seems to have all vanished (thirsty mice!) so we may be out today to do a bit of re-stocking just in the interest of First Footing, you understand.

Happy New Year