Speaking too Soon

Our own ham and our own green tomato chutney make for
a delicious "left overs" sandwich. 

Sometimes I "go to print" on these blog posts with a funny feeling that I may have spoken too soon - my confidence and complacency; my urge to rush a good story onto these pages will be my undoing. This has been close to the truth no fewer than three times over Christmas as I will now relate. The pictures may not be relevant but you will probably cope.

Still some chocs left when I took this. All gone now!

Three posts ago I was happily relating that we had decorated the Christmas Tree, that the kittens had had a brief play with low-hanging baubles but then got bored and moved on and that we'd sat down with a Gluhwein thinking "Job well done". Not for us the horror stories of trees wrecked by cats. I even included a picture of my old favourite decoration, a plaster lobster dressed as a waiter delivering a tray of 'beignets' (fried buns), a prized souvenir of my one and only trip to New Orleans.

For a party claiming not to have drunk much
we were still well laden for the "drive of shame"

Well, no sooner had I gone to press and my back turned than the kittens managed to upturn the tree with Liz seeing it all in slow motion ("NooooOOOO!!!!) and diving to save it but too late. Very little damage done but my lobster hit the tiled floor and smashed into 3 pieces. We have found his body and his arm holding the tray of beignets but where his tail 'flukes' have gone we have no idea.

A first sign of Spring - the daffs in the
lane emerging.

Next up, my joy at having solved the jackdaw problem with my bloke, accompanied by Soldier the Cat, shinnying up those ladders to demolish the jackdaw nest and fit our jackdaw-cage pots to prevent anyone moving back in. Storm Barbara had other ideas. The next morning saw one of the 'cages' lifted out of the chimney pot and dropped into Liz's rose garden.

Odd disco lighting effects from the sun
reflecting off the fancy candle-cover at the
bottom of this picture. 

The design of these, you may recall, involves a flat cone top like a Chinese 'paddy-field' worker's hat, with a ring of outward-sprung rods which you pull together to fit the ends down inside the bore of the pot. You can imagine that the 'hat' must give a fair amount of lift, like an aircraft wing 'aerofoil' in a cross wind, and I suppose the wagging back and forth in gusts might 'walk' the legs up the chimney bore like a ratchet. Being worried about the lack of draw (caused in the end by the jackdaw nest) I had asked the guy to position the pots high up, well proud of the chimney. My mistake. He is coming back to put the fallen one back - I will get him to set them lower this time.

Our 3 roosters hang in the polytunnel to
await processing in the kitchen

Finally, I told you that we had taken the fox trap back to Sue and Rob's, confident that our fox was shot dead and the problem solved. I was not happy the following morning to find that *someone* had got at the three roosters we had hung in the poly tunnel overnight to await processing in the morning. A head had been pulled off one leaving a bloody, strap-like, skinned neck hanging down and a small puff of torn out feathers on the grass  outside the tunnel. My heart sank. I was convinced it was a fox, though I was surprised the beast had not ripped down a whole bird (or all three). Mum in Law (Steak Lady) has since suggested that it might, in fact, have been a cat. That makes more sense. I had not thought of that.

A litre tub of yogurt and one of those roosters make the basis
of a rather fine curry. 

Other than that, we have just been chugging our way through all those left-overs, recovering and tidying up the place, making the most of the relaxing days between the two main events.

The Ministry post us details of a new grant
scheme but we are too small to be eligible

I have been serving my 2nd ever week (1st was in January) as the "voice of Irish smallholders". Well, the Twitter voice anyway - I am this week the "curator" (= guest twitterer) of the @smallholderIRL Twitter account. If you don't 'do' Twitter or have no  experience of it, it is quite fun. It is a very fast and chatty but very lightweight and ephemeral space where you can look in, chat away to who ever is 'on' and then drop off again. You can only speak in 'soundbites' (140 characters) so it is no place to go for a heavy, wordy discussion, though some people do post links to longer articles. You can click through to them or not according to preference and time available.

The '365' project is about to enter its final month.

Like Facebook, users tend to accumulate like-minded 'friends' and coalesce into groups. The small holder group currently has 2500 'followers' not all small holders. When you log out it 'twitters' away without you with hundreds of snatches of chat a bit like stepping out of the pub for fresh air. When they are said, they are quickly gone, pushed down thread by more recent 'tweets'. As I said, 'ephemeral'. Nobody really goes in and then back-tracks down the old stuff, though there is a way of getting it to 'remember' posts where you were included, replies to your posts and so on. Occasionally posts or links strike a chord with lots of posters and the 're-tweet' them to pass them on and that story spreads far and wide, it "goes viral" in modern parlance. It is basically harmless fun but I love the fact that I can share my experiences with 2000+ other small holders all trying to meet and solve the same problems, enjoying similar weather, admiring the same sunsets and munching on their turkey sandwiches and pickles.

Talk to you again next year.

Fairy Lights and Chimney Smoke

Most of my readers are old enough, I think, to have their own horror stories about Christmas Lights. Getting the lights out and onto the tree was always a major adventure - if they didn't work you had to comb through all those 'dead', screw-in sockets with your known good bulb till you found the failed bulb. There was a 'fuse bulb' too, as I recall which you might have to replace to get any bulbs to light, so you had to keep the box the lights came in, so that you would always have spare bulbs and spare fuses. The happy days of "incandescent" bulbs.

Then some clever soul invented the LED, the 'light emitting diode', a semi-conductor component which could do the same amount of light by "electroluminescence" (now there's a good word) with none of the hot filament problems, brittle glass 'envelope'  or high energy consumption or mad expense. They also had much faster 'switching' ability so they could be used in 'blinking', 'flickering' and 'twinkling' applications. It was inevitable that one of the uses in the "task lighting" group spotted by the makers trying to go commercial would be Christmas 'fairy lights' - they could surely flog gazillions and bring the price right down.

We have never been ones for lighting up the outsides of our houses; all those trees, reindeer, penguins and Santas you see rigged up in front gardens and on roofs. We used to drive round spotting the good ones but our house was always one of the 'boring' ones with no lights. Well, we have finally cracked, just in a small way and gone over to the 'dark side' (or should that be the twinkly lit side?). Liz spotted an advert for our favourite household 'stuff' shop up in Sligo, "HomeStore+More". They were doing 48 metre 'strings' of clear white light LEDs at only €25 each with a handy 10 metre blank 'lead' to get you out from plug socket to garden.

The tree is bought and fitted to its stand
but not indoors yet. Trees are very cheap
compared to the UK. This 2.5 m one was
 €30 in the local SuperValu

By happy coincidence, our front-lawn fence is 10 m  from the plug socket in the sitting room as the electron flies and the fence from there to the front gate is almost exactly 48 m ! A 2nd strand (she bought 2, unable to resist this temptation) was planned for the other side of the drive but could not be worked, so I strung it from one of the Tígín sockets, in a big loop along both gutters and up over both 'barge ends', up to the apex either end and a quick loop round the little stub chimney.

Yesterday's full moon sets into cloud
made pink by a real 'red sky in the morning'
sunrise behind me. 

The little control box on these (part of the plug) has quite sophisticated electronics in it allowing you to toggle between 8 light 'patterns' (always on, all on/off, 50/50 batches alternating etc). We like a soft twinkly pattern so there we are. Not too showy, tastefully lacking in penguins and Santas, no reindeer 'grazing' on the front lawn. (One final point; a 'note to self'. Do not attempt to string 48m of fairy lights along your fence while there are cats and kittens around keen to 'assist' That is all.)

Soldier the Cat assesses the 20' extending ladder for safety
prior to allowing the chimney sweep to climb it. He is up it
no bother and down again forwards a few minutes later. One
cool feline.  

Meanwhile I lit a nice fire in the sitting room a few days back hoping to surprise Liz with a lovely warm room on her return from work, where she could sit in her 'new' settee and relax with a gin. In the past, we have had issues with this fireplace and chimney which get very cold when not in use and provide a freezing down-draught for the range at the other end of the house. We have had to wedge old pillows up it to block it. This time I managed to quickly and very effectively fill the downstairs with smoke.

They sweep chimneys from the top down
in this country. 

Patently all was not well. I had swept it in January and we had had jackdaw pots fitted in Summer so we couldn't work out what the problem might be. Step forward our local roofer/chimney bloke, the guy who had done the jackdaw pots. He was worried that we might have had a masonry collapse - these old chimneys made from stone and cement (originally often lime mortar) can suffer from degradation of the 'cement' by all the hot/cold cycles over 150 years. The mortar turns to dust and trickles out like the sand through an hour glass.

365 project still going strong.

No such drama in the end; our man peered down the flue and spotted a great big jackdaw nest blocking the flue. The birds must have built it between me sweeping the flue and the fitting of our pots and it was far enough down that he didn't spot it (no torch that day) back then. Downstairs then, to masking tape a handy sheet of heavyweight plastic across the hearth to stop any dirt indoors, then up again with his sweeping brush rods and then a big solid lath of timber to bash down the jackdaws' "foundations". They can certainly wedge a stick across a chimney, those nest-builders.

If one of the kittens nicks your box, then
sit on top till it collapses on him. Enlist
the help of his sister to speed up the
process.

While we were at it Soldier the Cat impressed us with a demonstration of his ladder climbing skills, quickly up 16 feet or so to my gutters and then back down under full control at walking pace, front first with his body leaning forward almost vertically. One cool cat. The chimneys are all sorted now with the jackdaw 'cage' pots back in and the flue drawing like a cart-horse and Lizzie warm as toast tonight on her settee.

A new bed goes under the stairs now that the marmalade
kittens can kick the dogs out of 'their' beds.

That's about it for this one - one small bit of 'sad'. We lost another Buff Orpington hen today bringing our fox death-toll to 17. This bird survived the attack but never really recovered from what ever injuries or shock she had received. She never wanted to come back out of the shed and she stood and sulked. She would not take food or water brought to her, at least not while I was watching her, so she just faded across the days and has now given up the ghost. We hope that is it for young Mr Fox, himself now dead 15 days.

Goats Milk Cheese

Excellent curds forming.

With the guests safely returned to their homes we had the house back and quickly moved on to new ways of 'messy-ing' it up. We now have 2 sets of friends who are into the milking of goats and producing more milk than they can handle. Charlotte you will already know about, milking just Nanny Óg and her only on a 50/50 share basis with the kid (Henry Óg, but now shortened to 'Henno'). Well Sue and Rob have recently sold off all their many kids at just 6-8 weeks old, so have inherited, as a result, 3 milking nannies who are going at it like mad things - producing good rich milk and lots of it.

Scooping out the curds

As soon as we heard this we put in a bid for "at least 5 litres" (that is a sensible batch size for cheese making) and Sue and Rob duly turned up with 8 creamy litres, fresh and raw. The only cheese making we had done up to that point was the (supermarket) cow's milk Ricotta and then Mozzarella from the kit which I wrote about in a recent post ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/03/blessed-are-cheese-makers.html )  and then Liz's small rapid batch the other day. Nothing ventured, though, nothing gained. I chose a recipe from our 'Strawbridge' books for "Feta style" cheese and nabbed the first 5 litres. Liz did an Internet hunt for a soft goat cheese "with rind" with the remaining 3 litres. Both these batches are currently mid process.

We were both amazed by the amount of curd you get from this raw, full cream goat's milk. When the cow's milk curded it separated into the curds, floating on the surface as a 2 inch thick mass with almost clear whey under it. From the 5 litres of  cow's milk we actually got back over 4 litres of whey for the pigs (I soak their flaked barley in it, they love it). Because of this, in my ignorance, when I went to cut the curds for this cheese, I only sliced the knife in about 3 inches. When I went to scoop out the curds with the draining spoon, I found that the curds ran right to the bottom - the whole depth of milk had 'set' and the whey was only going to leak out of the cut surfaces of the curd blocks. We both made way more cheese than we had imagined we would.

The drained mass from the sieve and cheesecloth.

The curds, once cut, scooped and set to drain, do actually leak that whey slowly so they need to sit in cheesecloth on a sieve or colander and will sag slowly down to about half the volume as the cheese starts to become more dense (and would be pressed for hard cheeses). For my 'Feta' (not actually allowed to call it that as Feta is one of these protected geographic names) the cheese mass now gets spread out on plates and sprinkled with salt to continue the 'cure' while being drained every day.

Liz filling the moulds.

Liz's rinded one goes into moulds to drain further and then gets tipped out of the moulds and left to start forming that fungal 'rind' that anyone who likes the French 'chevre' cheeses would be familiar with. That is the stage we are now at for each, the 'Feta' is curing and the rinded one is growing its rind. More on these in future posts. We do not actually possess cheese moulds, of course, so the 'moulds' were a makeshift collection of plastic cups and punnets with lots of holes punched into them using the hot meat-skewer method

Makeshift moulds.

All this cheese making put us into 'food processes' mode. We are starting to come into the season for 'harvesting' (nice euphemism) some of the stock so we need freezer space. We generally go through the four freezers doing a bit of an audit deciding what we really need to use up, consolidating the few remaining bits into one or two of the freezers so that we can defrost and clean the empty ones.

Trying to grow rinds. 

All this efficiency threw up some pig's trotters which I have been meaning to slow-boil into pork jelly for use in some Melton Mowbray style pork pies. It also showed that we have way too many chunks of pork belly left and I could salt some down for streaky bacon rashers (which would admittedly probably end up back in the freezer). Thus spurred on I hauled these goodies out and thawed them for onward processing. The jelly is now made and the pork pies will be made this weekend. The bellies are dry-salted and being drained of brine each day (the salt on the surface draws a huge amount of water out of the meat) for 7 days. There will be room for young Ebony and Ivory, our ram lambs, when they come back from the butcher's on the 4th of July.

I am no expert but i *think* this is a lesser
butterfly orchid found in one of the local
bogs. 

All this food prep has left little time for any other entertainments. I had a nice early start on one of the mornings, woken at some ungodly (but dawn-lit) hour by a loud cacophony of magpie and jackdaw screeches and croaks. A Hell of a din. In my barely awake, befuddled state as I came to hearing this my brain was shouting "Mink in the chicken coop!", "Pine Marten eating the gosling!" and "Fox!", not registering that it was the maggies I was hearing. Leaping out of bed, then, in a hurry, I raced outside in wellies, jocks and my fleecy jacket (I know! Quite a look!) and found Blue the cat had one of our newly-fledged baby magpies on the ground in the cattle race and the rest of the magpie family plus half a dozen jackdaws all "mobbing" him. Soldier, our other cat was moving in too.

Blue was not actually touching the bird but sitting a few inches away, the way cats do, tempting it to try to take off so that he could pounce on it again. The baby just sat there in shock. I reached down and picked up the unprotesting bird and moved it to safety on a compost heap where the cats seemed to lose sight of it and I could hustle them indoors. When I went out later at a more sensible getting up time (07:30), to do the stock, it was gone and later that day I saw the maggies feeding 2 babies which is all we think they have this time, so my youngster may have made it. I am not sure I love magpies - they steal too many chicken eggs - so perhaps I should have dinged this one when I had the chance, but it was too early in the morning and my merciful streak got the better of me. Perhaps they will name the lad 'Lucky'.

They do, do they? 

Ah well. Enough for this one. More on those cheeses, slabs of bacon and pork pies next time. Cheers.

Not Draughty Enough!

A cosy fire in the Living Room

Not draughty enough? Now there's a complaint you probably don't hear many times about houses. Back when we were buying this place as a bit of a sorry wreck in need of huge amounts of renovation, it was as draughty as you'd expect from any old 1850's farmhouse, unloved for 15 years - loose windows, badly fitting doors, dodgy air-bricks, damp voids under rotting and gappy floor boards, chimneys unused for years full of jackdaw nests and so on. You could light a fire in either of the fire places (one upstairs, one down) or in the old disintegrating Rayburn range and they would burn a treat, drawing plenty of air and happily exhausting their heat and fumes up the chimneys into the clean Roscommon air.

An old pillow stuffed up the chimney.

When we arrived with our gutting and rebuilding, our concrete floors (no air bricks!), our new double glazing throughout, our dry-lining and our sweeping out the jackdaw debris, our new efficient range and rebuilt fire-places, we changed all that. We now have an almost entirely draught-free house which is dead easy to heat and keep warm, mostly. Mostly? What we quickly discovered on moving in and starting to use the house, was that it is possibly not draughty enough. It is basically a rectangular box with a chimney at either end. The upstairs fireplace (in the main bedroom) was all but boarded up with the dry-lining sheets but we left a small hole as a vent and a way to rescue birds which might fall down the chimney. The hole, about 6 inches square, has a cheap, plastic, slide-closed cover over it mainly for the look of the thing.

Twin exhausts? One fire, two smoking chimneys

If we did not use the Living Room fire for a few days in cold weather, the chimney chilled down and the air in it would tend to sink down into the room. The Range going in the Dining Room was happy to use this air as its main source of draught, so by about day 3, a veritable cascade of frosty air was coming down the Living Room chimney and spreading out across the floor so that anyone sitting in there was getting very cold feet. Not good. Our first answer to this was to light a fire in that fireplace once a week to re-heat the flue and reverse the flow. If we tried to get both ends hot at once , the two fires would pull air from anywhere, including the blanked off bedroom flue. Smoke coming up the Living Room chimney would be sucked back down the bedroom flu and out through the cheap plastic vent to fill the bedroom and landing with smoke - which was rather alarming. I think there may also be some loose masonry and leaks between the flues below pot-height, as (see picture) when you first light the fire, you get smoke from both chimneys.

Yesterday we got a little fed up with this and decided to investigate fully and do something about it. We needed to stop the downward sinking of cold air. We knew that back in the day, people would have (sometimes ornate) screens in the fire place 'hole' to block the flow. We wondered whether a lump of shaped foam wedged up there would have a similar effect. In the end we settled on an old pillow wedged up into the hole and, Bingo, no more foot-chilling draft. Today we have lit a goodly fire in the fireplace (obviously, taking out the pillow first!) to re-warm the hearth and surrounds, and tomorrow when this fire is done, we will re-wedge our pillow and see if we can keep that room warm with no fire until, coming up to Christmas, when we tend to gravitate in there and curl up with books, we will be lighting a fire daily anyway. This is mainly "for the coze" and will make it a nicer place for the Christmas guests.

Blue likes a warm car bonnet.

The first cat, of course, can happily find warmth without all this scientific air-flow malarkey. He is pictured here adopting the car bonnet on our return from shopping. The lad, though is in the dog house. The problem with having a cat who is good at ratting and mousing, is that they also end up good at catching birds and yesterday I found him playing with a female blackbird. He'd plucked most of the feathers off her back and shoulders and he was pouncing on her as soon as she tried to move from her 'splatted' chest-on-the-grass position. Generally, the victim is so damaged at that point that if you try to prise it away from him, Blue he just sinks his teeth in and it is game over. However, I grabbed him by the scruff before he could  do this and rescued the bird which looked quite perky and alert, and was very warm to the touch. I rescued it to the Tígín to rest for the night and recover - it was almost night time by then. Sadly, the little bird did not make it and presumably succumbed to internal injuries.

Anonymous bottle.

If external warmth is not your thing, then do join me in a wee dram of poitín (potcheen). I think I must have the kind of face which says to shop-keepers that a) I might like a drop of 'moonshine' and b) I can be trusted to be offered same. So on a Christmas shopping mission today (no names, no pack drill, no shops and no presents revealed!) I had another conversation which started with chat about the present (shhhh) but ended up with 'What spirit do you use on the plum pud'n?". Suspecting which way this conversation might be going, I said "Well, probably not with poitín, so maybe brandy or whiskey..." "Why would you not use poitín?" "Mainly because we don't have any". Shopkeeper then took for all the purchases but said "Sure, wait there a minute" and vanished out to the back of the shop. He reappeared with a bottle labelled "Paddy (3 times distilled) Whiskey" but containing a clear, colourless liquid, and proceeded to pour a measure into the bottle's screw-top. Very warming. To cut a long story short we bought the bottle and Liz drove home! She smelled my breath when I came out of the shop, and when she had finished giggling and saying "Why does it only happen to you?"

Dogs get to see the place!

Yay! We dogs finally get to see the famous Roscommon house about which we have heard so much. Mum and Dad take us up there for today's first proper day of working. There's been snow this morning just when the kids were being readied for school (couldn't get any sense out of any of them - too excited, but eventually they were all wrangled off to their appropriate schools in time). Dad was wondering whether he'd be able to take scenic "White Christmas" photo's of the house and those lovely pine trees but this was not to be. There was just wet grass and a few slush piles when we got there, and a puddle of wet snow on the trailer cover and the 2CV hood.

We are all impressed by the superb transparent light in these parts. Driving up through the southern part of the county today we had the bright sun and blue skies behind us and in front of us a bank of dark snowy clouds. Between the two were the autumn colours of almost leafless trees including great drifts of scarlet-barked dogwoods. This was lit so brightly and clearly that Dad thought he must have super-cleaned his glasses and the car windscreen. We have heard about this special light in unpolluted areas but have never seen it with the naked eye. Spectacular.

We drive via a big Dunnes Stores in Roscommon for provisions - we have camping equipment on site but we needed coffee, bread, lunch, fire-lighters and peat briquettes (and Dad treated himself to a bag of real authentic dried out turf "sods". It's a genuine 2 hour drive from Silverwood's, more like 2hours 20 with the shopping. We arrive at almost midday and hop out of the car to start exploring. I love the place both inside and out, upstairs and downstairs, house, out buildings, garden and cattle fields (currently unoccupied). There are nooks and crannies, holes and old musty soft furnishings and it's all new and unexplored. I quickly reduce myself from the pristine white brushed show-dog that greeted Mum and Dad when they arrived here yesterday, to the soot and mud encrusted tramp they expected. Everyone's a winner!

Mum and Dad's main task today aside from exploring and a bit of tidying is to clear the three chimneys and light fires. All three are full of old jackdaw nests, probably 15-20 years worth in each, so there's a fair amount of shovelling debris from the grates into rubble sacks before Dad can even start rodding out the chimney. In one case the rodding hits a solid wad of nest and Dad has to take off the brush and just poke the set of rods about up there till the twigs start to fall down. It's a proud moment when they can finally light a small fire in the living room with an old, wood-wormy chair, and nip outside and see smoke coming from the pot - probably the first time in 15-20 years!

With a good draw established Dad lights a bigger fire and shoves on some of the briquettes and soon gets a lovely warm glow. It's a windy day with a hooley being blown up coming from the South (the front of the house) so it's nice to come in from the front garden and feel the warmth and to be out of the wind, bluster and noise from the pine trees.

Ther is a brief hiatus when Dad goes to light the range. He's swept out the chimney and has cleared out the range so he sets a small fire, but has not realised that the 'flue' for this runs across the top of the range under the hot plate and into a metal chimney at the back right. The hole here has a restriction (venturi?) only a couple of inches across and the metal flue has rusted over the 15 years with flakes of rust falling down and blocking it. The main chimney can therefore draw all it likes, but it can't take smoke from the range, and this starts pouring out of the front doors of the range like the house is on fire. We have to rush to open doors and windows to clear the smoke. However, further checks reveal that the rusted-in hot plate can be freed up and a small cover at the bottom of the chimney can also be bopped free with a rubber mallet, so that Dad can get his hand in and clear the rust flakes. Then we're away - proper draw, smoke clearing and a good fire got going in the range. Warm as toast.

I will tell you about the rest of the day and a secret garden in another post. This is enough for now. A dog is tired.

Deefs

Streaming or Screaming?

At this time of year, Dad is glued to Springwatch on BBC2; lots of footage of birds rearing babies in their nests, foxes, badgers, otters, the Island of Islay etc etc. The Beeb also lay on a service where they run webcams on various nests and you can stream the action live, 24/7 into your PC. So Mum decided to have a click around and see what was on offer.

She's been studying, so Haggis and I were crashed out on the put-me-up bed. Mum found a Jackdaw nest, where all was quiet, as 3 replete, sated baby Jackdaws were sleeping silently. Thinking there was something wrong with the sound track, Mum tweaked up the volume. Just then Mum-Jackdaw came back and the chicks awoke and started such a catawauling crescendo of raucous noise, H and I were up, leppin' off the bed and charging down the stairs a-woofing and carrying on, with Mum yelling "Oy! Silly dogs!, It's only me and the PC! It's on here!".

Tonight had us glued to the TV downstairs,as a bit of footage of foxes, making that all-too-familiar noise that usually has us going tearing down the garden , this time has us racing round the living room to find where the foxes are hiding. Today's pics show me glued to Bill Oddie and Kate Humble, with the second pic showing a fox in a garden. In this case it's about to be whacked by a tawny owl on it's rump.

Entertainment.

Deefs