'Oveja' está en el Congelador

A fine looking carcass

'Oveja' está en el congelador ('Oveja' (The ewe) is in the freezer). One good up-beat story tonight and, I'm sad to relate, a couple of less happy ones. First up, after the mixed feelings of slaughter-day and taking our bought-in ewe lamb (Oveja) on her last journey to town, a week later we get the happy job of seeing the carcass butchered up and bringing home the product.

Ignatius splits the carcass

We have a lot of time for the guys down there in Castlerea (Joe the Slaughterman and Ignatius G (Victualler). It is lovely to watch them work and we chat away. Do we want the legs as halves? Do we want the full shoulder or gigot-chops? Do we want the chops as 'racks' and how many chops to a rack?

Labelled for the freezer after cat inspection

I love the old chopping block in that shop - a massive lump of wood on a robust looking stand of darker wood. The block is actually made as a parquet-floor style bundle of smaller blocks, surrounded by a rim of thick planks and strapped at each corner with thick wrought-iron 90º pieces.

We got one rack back as chops so that we
could give a couple to a neighbour.  We
"tidied up" the rest in house.

By now it is shaped into big sweeping curves where they have chopped out big 'valleys' over time and left ridges, then obviously spun it round 180º at one stage and turned it over to use the other side. (I should have grabbed a photo, shouldn't I?). I asked them how long a block like that would last. Ignatius told me that 'this one' was 35 years old. The lads have had the shop about 40 years at this stage and there is an equally venerable block out 'back' which they got when they first bought the shop and had it 'done up'. Lovely.

A lovely "pie" to go with those chops. Leeks and cream cheese
sauce.

The meat is now home, labelled and stashed in the freezer. This was only one lamb so we both doubt the store will see the year out but all being well the first 2018 babies might be born in January, so by June/July we might be able to restock. That's if Pedro (our new ram) continues to behave himself.

The 'late' Prada from my post on 19th Aug
2016

My first "less happy" story involves the sad loss of our good friends, Sue and Rob's gorgeous St Bernard dog, 'Prada'. Sorry for your loss, S+R, we know how close you were to that lovely, soft old girl and how much she will be missed. Our commiserations.

Red sky in the morning? It rained all day.

These massive dogs do not tend to live very long because (Sue tells me) the heart was never really bred to cope with the size of the dog. S+R have always had St Bernards but have never managed to 'keep' one beyond about 5 years. Prada was 7/8 so the longest lived St-B they had ever had and they were always amazed by her. Rest in Peace, you gentle giant. We will miss you too.

The last of that lovely cream cheese went with bagels
and (properly) smoked salmon.

Finally another loss and this one I need to do on that 'no names no pack drill' basis which I do when I do not have the blessing of the main players. This one is the sad loss of the biological mother of a little girl who is very dear to us. Our deepest sympathies. Those concerned will know who I am talking about here. Sorry for your loss.

Rob took this lovely pic of Prada just
enjoying the company of their Grandson
as he fished. Happy days. 

That is probably enough for this post. Look after yourselves

First-Born Feste Finished

61 lbs of ram lamb carcass

This is another one of those posts you might like to avoid if you are not happy with the butcher's stage of the production of those New Season Lamb cutlets that look so delicious on your plate. Our main event this week was the collection of the carcass of our first-born ram lamb, Feste, taken off on his final journey last Tuesday. My fears were that in having to get him out of the way because of the risk of him tupping his Mum or Auntie, he was killed at 5 months old and I thought he'd be a tiny carcass. No such thing. He was a chunky lad, and had made similar weight to the store lambs we have done before, at 61 lbs.

That old favourite job - portioning, bagging and
labelling the cuts for the freezer.

The butcher's 'mate' Joe was even given to a mutter about him being 'too big' and bigger than the ones they'd handle through the shop, but main butcher Igantius G reassured us that as he was a ram lamb he'd not be fat, just nicely conformed. That was true - we got very little 'suet' off him.

A lamb chop and a salad "of incident"

Due to Feste being born so early and therefore finished early, we actually still have a bit of last year's lamb in the freezers which we will use up before we start on this 'New Season' meat, but we couldn't let this event pass without at least trying the lamb out, so we saved a chop each from the ice and had it for supper with a lovely salad. Very nice he was too. We now need to plan those 2014 lamb shanks, cutlets and the stewing 'breast' meat into menus to clear the decks. As to lamb for those readers who are normally  included in this largesse, do not worry. We only produced three of our own lambs this year, so we are back in contact with our old sheep-supplier, Kenny about store lambs to make up the numbers. Kenny is doing his usual 'Scarlet Pimpernel' routine but we expect he will turn up all of a sudden with his usual request to meet him with a trailer and some cash somewhere.

Meanwhile, Liz has joined me (again) in being a blogger. Again because she has written a private blog for a while, but this one is a bit special. The guy running the website for nearby village 'Kilmovee' put out a shout for anyone living in the area who would like to write a guest-blog, just light hearted stuff about living here, once a month. Liz thought she would give it a try and contacted him, and got accepted/selected. She has just written her 2nd one. Liz called it "Smallholder Life" and you can find it on this link.

 https://kilmovee.info/smallholder-life/

Scraping the floor of the cattle-race clean

We are both very pleased with it  and happy to help out - we both know how hard it can be to keep a website fresh after the initial surge of enthusiasm has worn off. Mind you, Kilmovee seems to have quite a lot going on at the moment in particular with the completion of a new 'astro-turf' (all weather playing surface) sports facility as well as a thatched roof heritage centre both of which they have managed to photo from the air, I suspect with one of those new-fangled pilotless drone camera-platform thingies.

Young European Lime tree finding its feet

What else have we been up to? We have been loving a recent burst of just a few hot days and we've spent most of the daylight hours outside. We have been digging along a new front garden bed, formerly lawn and we have been giving the cattle race a thorough blitz. The concrete of the race is a bit old and pitted and the cracks and dents accumulate pine needles and muck plus, I guess, sheep-poo, daggy bits of wool, spilled feed. It all makes for a great substrate for grass and weeds, so in the few years since we first stripped it clean for the caravan (ahh the nostalgia!) it was getting quite a healthy turf layer; it needed mowing, never mind scraping! Well, that's all done now and we are back to pristine concrete - it even got hosed and brushed down which was a job which took me right back to student days, cleaning up the cattle pens at the end of a milking down in Westfield (Sussex). Moor Farm. Even more nostalgia. See also the haymaking pic below.

Local lad Kevin R gets the vintage gear out for a spot of
haymaking in the field opposite this house. 

Back in 2015 we have now made contact with three more local beekeepers, we are suddenly over-run with them. When I first got into bees I was a bit worried that I was the only bee keeper for miles and that any new virgin queens which went out on mating flights from our hive(s) might not actually find any male bees (drones) with which to mate. We now know of beekeepers at most points of the compass within the required 10 km or so of us, so this should not be a problem.

(Spoiler: Bee facts paragraph(s) - skip on by if bees are not your thing). You may not know that an emerging queen bee must get out and get mated on a mating flight (or more than one) within a few weeks of 'hatching', or she is doomed. Male bees in warm weather go out in numbers from the hive during afternoons and gather in specific patches of 'sky' called Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs) and these have to be found by the virgin queen - she zooms through the DCA chased by a 'comet-tail' of sexed up drones who each try to mate with her. She plans to be mated by 12-20 drones in quick succession (they get about 10 seconds a pop and actually die in the process), each 'successful' drone falling away from Her Majesty, to be shoved aside by the next suitor. In this way, amazingly, she takes in enough sperm from many different Dads to keep her laying fertile eggs at up to 1500 per day for up to about 4 years. It is presumably a short sex-life but a happy one. She returns to the hive to be welcomed home by her workers and never leaves the hive again till swarming time.

New toys for the chicken dept - an 'electric hen' chick-heater
and leg rings. 

No-one really knows why DCAs are where they are, though many have been 'there' consistently for decades. Some research in the German Alps suggests that the position has something to do with 'U' or 'V' shaped horizons, but beyond that it is just something hard-wired into bee DNA all around the world - the males know where to congregate and the females know where they will be. We just trust that somewhere around here, devoid as we are of alps, there will be a piece of sky which suits the boys from Moyne, Kilmovee, Driney, Feigh and is find-able by the ladies. Party on, bees. Bee genetics is a bit complex, partly because your queen is the mother of all the 50,000 bees in your hive, but also that drones are 'haploid' (they only have 50% of the chromosomes, 16 not 32) and are produced from unfertilized eggs (they have no father, only a grand-dad!), but suffice it to say that it is better for the queen to mate with a good mix of bee gene-pool from your area, not just the drones from your own hive(s). Enough, I suspect, on bees for now.

One of our honey bees on Summer Fruiting Raspberries

Anyway, our new friends are a young couple (A and TS) from beyond Lisacul to the west of us. They have a lovely neat place but no livestock as they are given to long tours of Europe in the summer months. The other is an aul' fella called Joe who comes from near the village of Moyne, to the east of us. We all met round at A+T's place just to drink tea and chat but also so that Joe could help them go through their 4 hives to check on general health and queen-right status. All good clean fun. We also met their lunatic female Patterdale Terrier, Patey who would, literally, play retrieving tennis balls all day if you had the strength in your arm to keep throwing it for her. Settle her down for a breather and relax for a few minutes but then, if your hand was low in your lap and palm upwards, you would soon find a ball dropped into the palm as Patey was bored now and needed some more ball throwing fun. Unusual name? Apparently, when she was a puppy her fur was black and velvetty like the cover of a 'Patey' style trad horse riding hat. (http://www.pateyhats.com/).

Smallholder Buys Shop Eggs! Shock!

The shame of it! Shop bought eggs. 

Yes, all the girls seem to be in moult or sulking through the short length days and misty mornings and we are currently down to one or zero eggs from the 9 hens (plus guinea fowl) each day. We are just about supplying John Deere Bob with his half dozen but today, when Liz needed 5 for an extra gloopy chocolate fudge cake for some visitors we had to submit to the inevitable and buy half a dozen like 'normal' people do, in an actual shop. We have not bought eggs since our first batch of Sussex Ponte hens came into lay yonks ago.

The solid clean chap formerly known as skanky emaciated
stray with bits missing, Pirate the cat.  

We are not alone it seems. Anne, I know is also a bit quiet at the moment and friend Dawn was telling me this week that she had also had to buy half a dozen for the first time in years. Ah well. Don't get too excited, though, Lidl. You do not have a new income stream. Your free range eggs were OK but not a patch on our own for freshness or for the rich full yellow colour of the yolks. We will be going back to ours as soon as the girls decide that spring is round the corner.

Sorting the lamb meat out. Roughly 104 kg from the 4 lambs

Monday 17th saw us down at lamb butcher, Ignatius G (Victualler) of Castlerea Main Street, to collect our lambs and watch them being butchered up. They have been hanging in his cold store 'relaxing' for 7 days. We love Ig-G; he is an absolute joy to do business with. A well padded (but huge and strong) traditional looking butcher with a happy, smiley face, he is definitely a 'front of house' type bloke, bantering with the customers in his butcher's apron. His No.2, Joe, is maybe a bit quieter and seems to have his days for the banter but sometimes seems to prefer the quiet of the back room and his vicious-looking band saw.

Bagged for the freezer

That day was an out-front day and we had a great laugh with the two of them as they prepared our order to Liz's specification; we needed one of the lambs split between Mrs Silverwood and Steak Lady but also some parts of the order done as a million chops, while others needed to be in racks of ribs, some big joints but some half-leg or half shoulder. The guys don't mind, you can have it as simple or as complicated as you like. They have even bagged each individual portion for us before now, as they went along, printing labels on the 'till/weigher' for us describing the cuts (lamb chops, gigot chops, half shoulder etc). We get the distinct impression that they appreciate anyone who knows about meat and respects their work and their business.

Local grown!

While we are on meat, we have been delighted to find that sometimes now we can do a Sunday roast or a main meal and see that everything on the plate has come from this holding. On Sunday we had the first leg joint from the pigs and spotted that the meat, potatoes, sprouts, turnip and even the apple sauce was from here. Our apple harvest was a bit of a flop but the few we got we guarded jealously. Liz made the (single) Bramley and one of the James Grieves into apple sauce back in September, freezing it to be kept for the occasion of our first pork Sunday roast. Our only 'oops' of that meal was that Liz, without thinking, 'nicked' one of the rabbits' cheap carrots; we have carrots in the ground but I'd not brought any in that day. All delicious and succulent, laced with that added pride of having grown it ourselves.

Leg roast. Excellent.

We are very pleased, in particular, with the flavour of the Tamworth pigs and this leg cut was even a bit less fatty than the shoulder. Liz was able to make very good crackling with the skin still on the joint; for the shoulder she had stripped the skin off and blasted that separately.

We have sneaked through our little hiatus of freezer space. Sparks was down today to collect his lamb, he took away a bit of pork too and tomorrow Liz is off down to the Silverwoods' with theirs and Steak Lady's plus the pork for those 'customers'. By that time we should be able to freeze the 'overflow' which we have put into the 'fridge' parts of those fridge-freezers for safe keeping and we will not have needed to buy either the 5th freezer or to borrow the generously offered freezer space at Dawn's. A narrow squeak but we got away with it. Next year, as I said, we will be sure to de-synchronise the lamb and pork harvests a bit better.

Pirate.

Finally just a quick update on the stray cat, Pirate. You can see from my top picture that he is now quite a solid (OK fat!) chap but his body is now beautifully cleaned up and cleared of all the scar tissue, scabby stuff between the fur and places where he had been gnawing on itchy skin. Also nicks and cuts inflicted by, we presume, barbed wire, brambles or dogs and cats chasing him off. Only his face is still a bit 'mashed', his nose always seems to be a bit red and scuffed, or dried up and scabby and his eye(s) are generally a bit weepy looking. He is a very affectionate young boy and loves to be picked up and fussed (though not carried about, curiously, he gets very fidgety if he thinks you are "taking him somewhere"). He has pretty much taken over the Utility Room and owns it to the exclusion of our other cat Blue. He has the freezers in there pushing out heat and a radiator. He has an old cat bed lined with one of my old fleecy jackets and he is brought regular food - at least a tin a day plus the odd sliver of ice cream when I go out there to help myself. We see him come out to pee or poo somewhere in the yard before nipping back 'indoors'. He seems as happy as Larry and is definitely improved in health out of all recognition from the poor emaciated, cut about, battered and bruised little mite who first showed up driven to steal our cats' food by hunger, bravely coming in through the open kitchen window braving the wrath of our dogs, cats and, for all he knew, us. Fallen on his feet, has Pirate.

DVO Joe gives us a Green Light

We're very pleased with ourselves this week as we have passed our inspection by the District Veterinary Officer for Roscommon, Joe, fit to keep pigs. We get our Herd Number and paperwork through the post in a couple of weeks. We were reasonably confident we'd be able to "talk a good game" but nervous that the guy might want to see actual fences, the 'ark' and any buildings we would be using for isolating sick animals and so on. That is all in the future and, if we could wing it this way, the investment would depend on our getting the Herd Number in the first place.

Supervising the three westies to make sure they slept enough

In the event we needn't have worried. DVO Joe was a really nice bloke and we could see straight away that he was not going to do a 'jobsworth' on us.  It had been dry for a couple of days and the puddles had drained, so we could walk him round without it looking like a quagmire, and he was impressed by our big well drained mud-less 'Secret Garden' with its down-slope banks helping it to shed water. He was impressed by the amount of space we are assigning to the pigs, and could see our standard of fencing and housing from the existing sheep fence and my woodwork on hutches, runs and coops. We quizzed him on the logic and legality of allowing the wallow (all pigs need a wallow) to be part of our rain gulley and how close their pen might come to our septic-tank soak-away. He was happy to advise and adjust; maybe he was more comfortable with having steered these beginners back onto the straight and narrow at least once.

We got the impression that the inspection is as much about fencing, shade, wallows, concrete, buildings and cattle races as it actually is about checking that we looked competent, sensible and responsible. Joe presumably decided we had an adequate supply of the last three, gave us the green light and then agreed to come in for 'tay' and some of Liz's fresh baked scones. This even though he had another smallholding to visit and inspect before he headed up north to do some export inspections, cattle destined for the UK. Now we are approved we can give some serious thought to all this fencing, ark-building and piglet buying that we had, up to now, been putting off till May and the (pig keeper) training course. The scone-bashing came out again a bit later as we collected Vendor Anna and partner Paul from the airport at Knock. They'd left their car here for 2 weeks while they sunned themselves in Lanzarote, making use of our 'Park and Ride' offer. They were delighted with the scones after meagre Ryan Air victuals.

Lamb Paté. Nothing to do with this story what so ever.

So there we are in 'responsible citizen' mode, making our piggies all official and we've carried that campaign on by investigating the planning implications of a huge new infrastructure project which promises to cut a swathe through here between our holding and the town of Ballaghaderreen. This is a huge electricity grid improvement project running lines of bigger-than-normal pylons across from north County Mayo where they pick up from the wind farms, through Co. Roscommon and through to Carrick on Shannon. Naturally this is all going through the planning stages right now, proposed 'corridors', consultation, displays of maps in public buildings, opportunities to object and so on.

Everyone is mad keen interested to see how close the pylons will come to them and whether there is compensation payable for blight or enforced changes of land use and how much Grid West will be paying in 'sweeteners' as environmental and community grants for projects near the wires. We went along to a display of maps etc and chatted happily to the young lady on stand, who answered all our questions and loaded us down with brochures and print outs as well as giving us the latest 'gen' on recent press statements. There is money to compensate you if you have just bought the property and were hoping to plant forestry, and if you were planning a build and have that through to signed off final planning permission. They will also compensate you if you already have forestry that needs felling in the path of pylons (a corridor as wide as two tree heights either side of the the wires). There is money if you are 'too near' the cable runs, quite generous if you are within 50 m (€30k) but falling away on a sliding scale till you are 200 m away. (Needless to say the pylon lines will not be running close to many houses).

But don't hold your breath if you have already spent your new found riches in your dreams - the latest 'gen' has it all back on the drawing board as the Ministry Man, Pat Rabbitte has now announced that it is all going back for a review of whether to do the cabling up in the pylons or underground. This one could run and run. It is called "Grid 25". I hope they didn't mean 2025. For our own part, all the existing routes pass more than 5 km from our back door, so no cash for us.  

Bee School

'National' standard style hive.

We have decided to get into bees and keeping our own hive on the holding. This has got to be good from the point of view of the environment; reacting to the falling bee populations but would also mean that we had more bees locally to pollinate our fruit trees, veg and other plants. Plus it would be fun and it is something I have wanted to do for many years but never had the chance. We have therefore started to ask around for local bee-keeper contacts and have received a lot of help from friends on the internet (Thank you, Rho!) and locally who have now put us in touch with the Longford Beekeeper Group just over the county border. This (hour's drive) might seem a bit daft as there would surely be a group locally, but these were the group we found first and they are a lovely bunch of friendly people, so we are getting in with them for the moment.

A 'frame' of bees; not mine yet, picture 'borrowed' from the
Longford Group (Hope that's OK Elspeth!)

Off we went then last night to our first meeting in Longford town centre to meet our new friends, Joe, Kevin, Dieter and co. They are quite a big group (26 last night) and lively and friendly AND we were excited to find, they are just about to start a training course for beginners which runs through to May leading to the "Preliminary Bee Keepers' Certificate". We sat through the meeting and listened to the discussions on the agenda and both of us actually piped up with contributions from the complete beginner's perspective.

2 hens pick over our pile of John Deere Bob's calf muck

There was then a short presentation by an experienced bee keeper for the benefit of newbies like us on the parts of a standard "National" style beehive; he, Dieter, had one there with him, empty of course. We stayed on after the meeting to talk some more, to join up with the club and to enroll on the training course. It was a good event all round and we learned bags of 'stuff' about bees and hives. We feel as if we are launched already. We now need to get started properly with our beginner mini-hive (called a 'nucleus colony' or 'Nuke'). This is a box containing only 5-6 'frames' of wax on which a young queen and about 6000 bees are starting a new colony. If you play your cards right this Nuke box starts to quickly fill up with the thriving colony and you then buy a full sized hive (which can cope with 70,000 bees), transfer your frames into that and from there it is onwards and upwards, gaining more experience, becoming obsessed, starting to add more hives and so on. We are, for now, only thinking we'll run one hive, but you never know. More reports on this project to come.

I am always completely impressed by the idea of coppicing, the idea of cutting trees down to near ground level every 15-20 years or so, so that side shoots will sprout from the base/stump ("stool") and grow into poles which you can then harvest at the next cut. In Kent, in Challock Forest we had square miles of sweet chestnut cut this way, the poles having been used over the centuries for fencing and building wood, for charcoal making and for pit-props in the Betteshanger and other Kent coal mines. To me it is the ultimate form of sustainable forestry and therefore in sustainable cropping too.

When I was studying ecology at Uni, it was a given that coppiced tree stools in ancient woodland were the oldest known living things on the planet. They had been cut down at least 80 times, every 20-25 years or so for 2000 years or more. Each time the shoots grew from the outer side of the stool, so increased the diameter of the base, eventually marching out into a 'fairy ring', the centre having long since died off. The ring was now many yards across and interlocking with neighbouring rings like some complex Venn diagram or Spirograph drawing. The scientists could check DNA and estimate the rate of spread of individual plants and could thus estimate the age of each stool.

This big ash pole did not come from that tiny cut top left.
It is from a bigger cut out of shot (arrow)

Well, we don't have ancient woodland and our ash in the Secret Garden may only be a few cuts old but it gives me a real buzz to be taking down these ash stems knowing that it is entirely possible that I may be doing it again, aged 70 or so in the future. Meanwhile, they make great logs. Ash, seasoned, is one of our favourite woods for burning on the range. It is also beautiful to split with the axe when I'm feeling all macho and need to do 'man stuff'.

Irish 'Cooleeney' Camembert

We have been delighted recently to find some very nice cheeses in our travels. I have never been that confident of Irish cheese. Growing up, we loved our mature and vintage Cheddars and you could not be any ruder than to describe a cheese as 'like Irish Cheddar' - the only Irish Cheddar you could find back then was insipid and tasteless, described as 'Mild'. Yuck. Liz growing up was only ever given processed kiddies' cheeses like the famous "Calvita" brand. I am told it is worse than the 'Vache qui Rit' (laughing cow) stuff. So Liz, proudly off on her first French "exchange" as a teenager with the Treil family outside Paris, announced to her new hosts that she 'didn't like cheese'. Outraged by anything so preposterous, Mmle Treil set about introducing the young Liz to the huge variety of French cheeses starting with a creamy Camembert and working their way through to the smelliest Pont l'Eveques, Maroilles, Livarot (Le Colonel) and so on.

Rhubarb Crumble and 'real' custard made with eggs.

Of course, we are both real cheese hounds now and will try anything and enjoy them as long as they have a good flavour. We have even been on a specific holiday to the famous cheese area of Normandy hunting down some of these cheeses. We are happy to tell you that even our local Lidl Supermarket now stocks a nice Irish vintage cheddar (Valley Spire) and sometimes a very presentable Tipperary Camembert (Cooleeney) along with perfectly acceptable Parmesans, goat's cheeses, feta and so on. They feature regularly in our trolley load.

Look Away Now

Another of those meat-based posts where I advise any of my readers who are not comfortable with the more intimate side of producing meat from livestock to 'look away now'.  Today was the day we had to head for the butcher's shop of Ignatius G and see our lamb carcasses cut up for the freezer. We watch, chat and choose cutting styles as appropriate; do you prefer the gigot chops and small shoulder, or the full shoulder? Do you prefer the rack of ribs cut into individual chops or left intact and so on. We love this stage - it has us feeling like 'proper' meat producers, not just someone who keeps a few chickens.

In this case we had done 5 sheep, 2 for our own freezers, one for Carolyn of the mini-horses and more recent half pig, one for the Silverwoods and one for Sparks. Ignatius and his 'oppo', Joe are good enough to cut each carcass up and bag it separately in tough white "bin liners" so that you can get it home assuming you can lift it into the car!

We had in our little flock, lambs all from the same father (sire), a Beltex ram, but we had ram lambs and ewe lambs from three different Mums (dams) and our sheep-man Kenny had asked us to get weights by sex and breed. We'd been expecting heavy weights because the lambs had been ready since October but Kenny had been sidelined by a broken collar bone; these babies had stayed on our nice grass and received their kg a day of Lamb Creep Crunch (a mix of cereals, molasses and minerals).

These guys had indeed gone way way over the weights Ignatius would buy for his shop, but that wasn't a problem for our home use. The 2 ram lambs in particular (both out of Suffolk Down ewes) had got up to 30.7 and 32.2 kg carcass weights (67.5 and 70.9 lbs). Ignatius put a standard leg joint on his scales at the shop price per kg and he would have had to ask €60 for it! Nobody would buy one that big he said. The ewe lambs were not quite that heavy. The two out of Galway mothers weighed 24.6 and 28.3 kg (54.1 and 62.3 lbs) and Dora the Explorer, out of the Texel ewe weighed 25.7 kg (56.6 lbs). Grand total 141 kg of meat or 311 lbs. We have been able to take more weight of meat from this year's two carcasses (for us) at 56 kg, than we got off the three last year (52.9 kg). Respect to Kenny for his choice of the Beltex sire for this year's breeding, rather than the Jacob's 2012 tup.

You will recall that we had already collected the offal (tongues, kidneys, hearts, livers and a lung for the haggis) the day after slaughter. Now we just had the job of sorting and bagging our own meat for the freezer and distributing the rest. Sparks raced down in his car from Dublin to collect his and stayed for a bacon butty, bite of pie and some cold roast pork and salad. We have dropped Carolyn's round to her house tonight and tomorrow we will be delivering the Silverwoods' bag to them. It's all go.

Not much else happening round here but tonight there is a minor hiatus as one of the Guinea Fowl has gone AWOL. At 16:30 tonight he/she managed to get lost between me turfing them out of the goose house where they had decided to roost for the night, and them finding the correct (chicken) house about ten feet away. When I came back having shepherded my geese home, there was only one in the chicken house and, search as we might with torches, looking up in trees etc, we can find no trace and they are, amazingly, not kicking up the usual ruckus at being separated. We've shut everyone down now without the missing Guinea. We are just hoping that as tomorrow dawns, the safe, sound, warm, dry, outdoor roosted, "lost sheep" will creep back into the fold for a happy re-union. I'll let you know.

Ignatius G Victualler

This then is the second and final post which should be avoided by anyone who thinks the detail around slaughter and butchery of the late lambs is "too much information". If you don't want to know about such things, look away now. Normal service and happy animal stories will resume with the next post.

"Ignatius Gannon (Victualler); Beef Mutton and Lamb as in Season. None but the best quality stocked". So says his paperwork and we can vouch for the fact that Ignatius G is an excellent butcher, a small local business in Castlerea thriving and surviving despite being almost opposite the SuperValu Supermarket. He is a tall, strong bloke with brawny arms, grey hair, a white shop-coat well smeared with the expected gore and a ready smile and jokey wit. He was also very good to us 'newbies', helped us a lot through the process and answered all my myriad questions as we went along. His prices also compare very favourably with the Supermarket prices, so that, in this exercise, we have used his as our estimate of the carcass's worth even though it would have looked even better at SuperValu rates.

Readers will know that we have already had back the 'offal' last Monday (hearts, livers and kidneys) but the main carcasses have to hang for a week, so we were back today to collect the main event and 'supervise' the cutting up - we had to choose, for example, whether we wanted shoulder joints or the much more popular (locally) gigot chops. We did. You then have to choose how big to leave the 'shoulders' - how far up the rib cage do you want the 'chopping' (for shoulder chops) to come before you stay stop, and keep the rest of the shoulder intact.

Ignatius and his 'oppo' and slaughterman of 34 years, Joe set to work sawing and cleavering and in this case they agreed to bag it up as they went along as if it was meat for sale, so that we could have all the bits labelled and we could know the price per kilo of the bits (from €9/kilo for breast meat and neck, through €11 for leg, €12 for cutlets, €13.50 for shoulder and up to €17/kilo for loin chops; this comparing to €21/kilo we have seen in Supervalu. The labels also showed the final price of the bag, so for example, a shoulder might be €32.83, 'half legs' up to about €20 and bags of 4 loin chops around €7. The output from one animal was then loaded into a tough white dustbin liner so that we could work out some numbers per animal. They charge, incidentally, €30 per animal for the slaughter and butchery though we gave them a bit of a tip too for being so brilliant.

So, having completed our other shopping we headed home with the little Fiat very well loaded down with meat. We excluded all the animals from the living room and sorted all this booty out on the Dining Room table. We were able to tap all the numbers into a spreadsheet (I can hear anyone who knows me muttering "Typical!" at this point. From this we know that for example....

1) Our three girls had carcass weights of between 17 and 18.2 kg respectively
2) The total weight of meat (excluding offal) was 52.9 kg
3) The carcasses would have cost us €213, €218 and €227 over the counter, a total of €659.24
4) Our most expensive cut is a 2.56 kg shoulder at €34.56
5) A 6 foot tall, €400 freezer will just about fit three carcasses of this size (which was a relief).

In terms of finances and 'did we make a profit' the following figures might be interesting. The sheep originally, back in September, cost €80 each. They cost €44 in supplementary feed (the grass was free as we have not yet had to worry about cultivation or fertilizer!), we paid Kenny €20 diesel for haulage to the butcher and paid €100 for the slaughter and butchery, total inputs €404.

The meat was worth €659.24 as we only used Ignatius's prices (we could have quoted Supermarket prices and we could almost have said they were organic - Heaven KNOWS how much organic lamb is worth - our grass has had no chemicals applied and these ladies had no growth promoters or other unnecessary drugs, only our bought in feed was not organic, and we cannot answer for the first 5 months of their lives. We are estimating €9.75 for the 'offal' so our outputs are €668.99, so effectively we made a profit of €264.99 which makes a nice contribution to the €600 fence we had to erect around the paddock. Mentally we were depreciating this over ten years but at this rate it's more like 3 years!. Our own man hours are not charged as we had so much fun doing this. It's been a blast and a lovely bit of learning to be small holders. Yes, we had to do the sad slaughter bit at the end, but that comes with the territory and we coped OK; we know how much love, respect, care, good food and shelter had gone into these animals and we chose our butcher with care and you can't say that if you buy stuff you've not reared and kept yourself.

Thanks to everyone who had a hand in this, especially our sheep mentor, Kenny O'C (who pronounced our results as "mighty"), to our small-holdering mentors, Anne and Simon (who found us the butcher and reassured us that we were getting good growth rates) and to Ignatius and Joe, the heroes of this particular post.

So, what's for supper then? That'll be chicken and chips because we had some to use up!

Tramp of the Worst Order

"Poor Haggis", says Mum, "Sexually harrassed before 9 o'clock!". We were out (Mum tells Dad) for our morning walk on the Rec and Haggis, mid walk climbed onto Megan for his daily, morning, half way round the Rec, half hearted "loving" (a few pathetic pelvic thrusts and a slide sideways off; Meggie either stands there and wonders why the earth is not moving like it did when they were young (Ahhhhh I reeeememmmberrrr eet welll...), or she gets the 'ump and gruffs at Haggis to speed his dismount. Either way it is not the stuff of steamy hot passion....

Anyway (goes on Mum), I happened to be right there and immediately snuck my snout under H's "bits" and gave him a slurpy lick. H looked horrified and stunned, and backed off, but suddenly I was reversing towards him, tail sideways, and sticking my "Lady garden" in his face. The poor boy was totally non-plussed and ran off to hide behind Mum's legs. I am not on Season (blimey - it is only 3 months since the last one!) so I'm not sure why this happened, but Mum is now calling me a tart and a floozy. When someone explains these terms I will let you know!

Nice walk tonight, though, with Dad, all round the boat yard, up through town (preparations for the weekend's Hop Festival are a-foot), and back across the Rec where we met a lovely Golden long-haired retriever. Dad says this was his dog of choice before he ever had dogs. He always dreamed of owning a Goldie and still thinks they're gorgeous, if only we had a utility room to bring the muddy wet version home to. Our back door opens into the dining room - not good for a dog to shake him/her self dry in just back from a walk.

So, when Mum and Dad were first living here and joined a pub quiz team (Shepherd Neame league!), and got to know a real old Scotsman, salty sea-dog merchant navyman, Joe Cosgrove, they fell in love with his aged Westie "Gertie" (he said it Gerrrrrrtie with a rich rolling Scottish "R") and the rest is history. Sadly, old Joe is no longer with us (and we have lost contact with Gertie, if she is, indeed, still alive), but Mum and Dad often think of him, especially when they meet Goldies and think about the change of direction

Have a great weekend
Deefs