A Weighty Tome

Event poster for the Spring Day

I am sneaking this post in before the normal 'due day' (Tuesday) because a) I have plenty to say already and b) I am likely to be too busy tomorrow evening what with the arrival of our Help-X volunteer. Reason 'a' has largely to do with Elizabeth playing an absolute blinder and finding me a lovely day's entertainment on Saturday. This took the form of a day of walks and talks "celebrating Spring" based in the 'village hall' buildings of nearby Kilmovee village.

Yomping through the woods

What had caught her eye was the involvement of our main man at the National Biodiversity Database, Liam Lysaght; it turns out that his brother was setting it up. After what feels like 6 months of wet and Winter, the weather came up trumps too and the day took place in lovely warm sunshine. However, there is no point in re-inventing the wheel, so it is easiest if I just reproduce here the text of a review I offered to write for the Kilmovee website. Here it is.

Mammal Atlas (cover)

Many, many thanks today to the team at Kilmovee for organising the excellent ‘walks and talks’ event, “A Celebration of Spring”. This was a brilliantly assembled event full of interest and healthy exercise on a gorgeous Spring day which had arrived hot on the heels of a long, wet March and April – a welcome break.

Mammal Atlas (Fox pages open)

We started in the ‘classroom’, the village’s Thatch Roof Building attached to the Village Centre with fascinating presentations by Liam Lysaght of the National Biodiversity Database on the need for that resource, by Chris Huxley on bird migration and by Lynda Huxley on the conservation of swifts, swallows, house martins and sand martins.

The ever-more-massive lamb, Bábóg. Compare this pic with
the size of her 6 weeks ago.

Our first walk was down to a woodland around 20 minutes south of Kilmovee which was pure joy in the sunshine ‘armed’ with our assembled experts in many ecological areas – bird song, Summer migrant and other birds (we were quickly ‘shown’ willow warblers, swallows, blackcaps,  mistle thrushes and chiffchaffs and even a buzzard came zooming through with a hooded crow in hot pursuit), butterflies and bees, plus botanists to point out wood sorrel, anenomes, greater stitchwort, pig-nut and the not-quite-ready bluebells.

A 4th bag of Lamlac is needed.

There are some impressive ancient beeches in that wood too, which had us hankering for a local historian to tell us some of the past of this site.

We adjourned back to the thatched cottage for a superb lunch of soup, soda bread, sandwiches and biscuits plus, of course, tea and coffee.

Not the tidiest drinker. Bábóg gets sprayed liberally on at least
one side of her face with milk.

Refreshed, we were back into the ‘class room’ for a lovely, relaxing, post-prandial talk by local poet and writer, Terry McDonagh who is also an expert on local, famous, 1700s poet Anthony Raftery, blinded from age 10 by smallpox and the “last travelling bard” famous for his poems about Spring.
The final entertainment was a walk out to the local stone-built and excellently preserved ‘Cashel’ – a ring-wall 2m thick and 2.5m high on private land just outside the village.

Duck eggs in the incubator start 'pipping'

Delightfully, the village is currently host to a stone-mason training course with 8 or so lads all learning the ropes just beside the thatched building. A 1000 year old stone cashel would be right up their street, so they were invited to join us as we got a look round the place and an excellent presentation by University Historian, Dr Yvonne McDermott (GMIT). Dr McDermott had done us a brilliant job but it was nice to receive some input at the Q+A from the lads coming at it from the actual builders’ point of view.

Very recently hatched - still wet.

All together it made for a thoroughly enjoyable day and if anyone was thinking about going and then decided not to, you missed a real treat. There is talk of this possibly becoming an annual event – mark it in your diary. Thank you very, very much to the whole team at Kilmovee and to all the speakers and volunteers who made it all so good.

...and that was that.

3 out and dry, now moved to the brooder box for food, water
and the warmth of an electric 'Mum'

Friends of the Blog will know that my main involvement with Liam is through recording all my flora and fauna sightings onto the Biodiversity Database, which I have been doing now for as long as I've known it existed. They may not know that this data gets used by the team there in a whole host of ways, one of which is to produce periodic books and atlases mapping the distribution of the sightings. They had advertised that a mammal atlas was coming out in 2017 and I'd added it to my 'Dear Santa' list but we had had no luck finding a copy. The chance to actually finally MEET Liam in the flesh seemed like an equally good opportunity to obtain the book - he would surely bring me a copy down and I could pay for it there. He even autographed it for me.

It is a lovely book full of fascinating information and all that data. I get a special wee thrill when looking at the maps knowing that most of those little (10 km) squares around the north end of County Roscommon are my own data/sightings. In the back of the book is a full listing of all the 2500-odd people who contributed data and there are the names of the Woman of the House and myself.

A weighty tome. My new sheep book.

While we are on books, I also came by a new sheep book on the recommendation of a sheep expert who I respect mightily, Tim Tyne who wrote my all time favourite sheep-for-smallholders book. When it arrived I wondered quite what I'd done. A weighty tome indeed - 690 pages hard back and weighing 1.7 kg, it looked worryingly like a medical dictionary. I spend enough time now fighting off people who think sheep are just single track animals looking for new ways to die; was I going to end up like one of those Wikipedia/Google self-diagnosers who show up at the GP claiming to have bovine tripanosomiasis? You'll be pleased to know it is a whole lot better than that and written very well to explain sheep issues to farmers who are not fully trained vets.

All 9 sheep have their noses down. Well rested grass on the
front lawn is filling up their bellies. We'll have them weaned
in no time!

Meanwhile, you will see from the pictures, that the ducklings have started to hatch. We have 3 so far from a set of 16 eggs and they are doing very well. More on them in the next post.

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/).

If the Weather's Middlin'......

"If the weather's middlin'...", says John Deere Bob over the weekend, "I'd like you to cut down a couple of ash trees for me...." meaning on Tuesday (21st); he knew we were doing all the pig transport stuff on the Monday. Well, the weather was nowhere near "middling" as the tail end skirts of Hurricane Gonzalo roared through lashing us with a Sou'westerly gale and massive rain, which then veered to the North West and kept whacking us with squalls. The North West is our least favourite direction for winds, and the one which scares us most with its worrying rippling of our old out-building roofs. It has me racing around trying to think of new ways to shore up the weaknesses and lash down any potential flappy bits with wire and concrete blocks.

SW winds come at us all across Galway and finally come up against our massive black spruce trees in our 'woods' out front. The house itself is (we sincerely hope!) sound and the roof itself looked to us like one of the strong points in the property as purchased. At 2 storeys high it does a good job of shielding the outbuildings from the SW. It is the NW winds, thankfully not that frequent, which roar at us out of Clew Bay and in across Mayo, Kilmovee and the fields on that side of us, that have us having these conniptions. They hit the big concrete and rock gable end of the goose/chicken house and are pushed up and over like the wind on the leading edge of an aircraft wing. This puts all kind of lift on the dodgy corrugated iron and corrugated perspex sheets that make the South-facing roof slope, if not tied down, ripple along like (as Liz described it) like the keys on a cartoon piano.

I have shored them up to a degree but it is real bodgery, and if we ever win the lotto, we will be replacing that roof with new. Failing that I need to buy and install about 12 feet of some nice strong two by one and a half, which I can screw all the panels in that area to as a kind of 'not-fixed-down' top plate. That will replace what is there, in bits, mostly rotted out. You can not, of course insure these out buildings without the man from FBD wants to come and inspect them; I am sure any sensible insurance risk-assessor would take one look at ours and laugh like a drain. I wouldn't blame him! Anyway, Hurricane Gonzalo, as I write this, seems to have largely passed through leaving us with our roof panels shaken but not stirred. We appear to have gotten away with it this time.

Meanwhile, the Longford Bee Keepers group hold another of their monthly meetings, where a speaker will talk to us about swarm control but also about the training and exam for the next stage of our 'Bee School'. Coincidentally, they will also be able to give us our smart certificates for the last stage, our "Preliminary" certs. Most of 'us' got them last month but we missed that meeting, it being the day I flew home from the UK. Apparently there was an official photographer an' all, but we won't be in that one!

Extreme gardening - trimming brambles around the bee hive

Liz has already decided not to proceed on to the intermediate stage, which comprises three exams in a lot more depth than the first step, a written bee-science 'paper', a written method/process paper and a practical exam taken at your own apiary. She is happy, she says to stay on the nursery slopes. I am in two minds. I like the idea of going on, climbing through the official levels of 'expertise' up to the grand sounding "Bee Master" but some of these beekeepers get way more involved in their hives, more interfering, more 'control freak' and more fussing than we like to be with our own hive.

Liz gets to grips with our first
'pork' output.

We listen to our 'Two Marys' advising us to stop fussing, to leave the hive alone and let the bees get on with it. A lot of the fussing, the weekly (or even more frequent) cracking open of the hive to inspect it, is all about trying to squeeze every drop of honey out of the task. We are not that fussed about honey or maximising production, squeezing the assets as it were. We are more focused on the 'green' gardening, ecosystem, healthy population of pollinators aspect. I worry that to pass these exams and certainly to show sufficient experience with hive manipulation to convince the examiners that I am skilled enough to get the ticket, I will be forced to 'fuss' more than I am comfortable with. There's a conundrum for you.

Pig liver and heart. 

We dropped by the butcher today to collect our livers and hearts. The kidneys, apparently, one is still in each the carcass, the other gets cut about extracting samples for the trichinosis tests (which we have apparently 'passed' (i.e. negatives). The meat hangs in his fridge till Friday afternoon. Not having seen this before we were both amazed by how big an entire pig's liver is. They weighed about 1.75 kg each! They have now been cut up and bagged up as 9 sensible portions.

Finally, I am delighted to see that 'our' Whooper Swans are back, the first half a dozen have arrived at our local lough for their winter stay. I can now hear their fluting calls drifting up the ridge as I supervise the dogs in their off-the-lead session in the orchard. They must have flown in last night, so they have presumably had their own fun and games with Hurricane Gonzalo's skirt-train. Unless they were over on the Mayo coast, which would have given them quite a tail-wind, they would have been either skirting or battling into the storm. Autumn is definitely here.

Radio Silence

4 'children' in a car.

Regular readers may have been wondering where we have gone - we have been in 'radio silence' due to having had visitors. It is almost a household policy that the internet is turned off so that we can concentrate on our guests (and them on us), and enjoy the fresh air, peace and countryside away from the glut of modern hi-tech "comms" devices. One visitor in particular, Mr Silverwood, was enjoying the extremely rare chance to go on holiday WITHOUT having to take his works laptop and to be on call. His company (used to be mine also) runs a very lean staffing set up and just expects you to be available 24/7 but had, on this occasion (his daughter's 16th birthday) reluctantly agreed to bring a bloke over from the UK to cover Mr S's role, so he was genuinely free.

2CV as logging tow truck.

So, yes, the Silverwoods descended, coming to us via taking Em-J out for a Birthday lunch; it's a fair old drive - 2 and a half hours from their place to Connemara and then 2 more hours Connemara to here to stay for 3 nights till they could return this (Monday) morning to collect her and take her home. The three nights give Liz the chance (which she LOVES), to be catering and hostessing for 7 and also meant we could include them all, more by luck than judgement, in some nicely geared 'entertainments'. Today, Monday, is the one official day when you can legally have a bonfire, in County Roscommon (it's all based around traditional celebration of the Summer Solstice and St John's Eve (23rd June into the 24th). This gets a bit mangled into "the weekend nearest" and we could see yesterday from the numerous plumes of smoke rising across our view North, that the 22nd was 'near enough'.

We had all around the 'farm' piles of cut branches left over from the logging, we have a perfectly good bonfire site in the middle of our East Field, we have a 2CV which has a roll back roof and seats that children can stand up on to look out of the roof, and we had 3 enthusiastic children keen to play and assorted adults who wanted to do something 'physical but brainless' as the perfect antidote to endless computer 'work'. A powerful combination! With grown ups assembling 'bunches' of branches and lashing them to the car's tow-hook, and more adults ensuring that mini-horses did not sneak out of the field while the 2CV and woodwork sneaked in, in a couple of hours we had all the wood gathered around the fire site. Horses and fire do not mix, we are told, so Charlotte and Carolyn rescued the horses to do a bit of lawn mowing back home while we 'played'.

Bee colony 'nucleus'

Meanwhile, I had received the long awaited email from the Two Marys to say that our 'nuke' of bees was ready for collection. Mrs Silverwood is as fascinated by bees as we are and quickly put in a bid that she and Mr S would drive me out to Drumshanbo to collect the bees. and Liz agreed to stay home and 'mind the smalls'. All we could do that night (Friday) was to bring them gently home and place the 'nuke' in the final hive position. It had to be left for 48 hours to settle down and to allow the bees, waking up on Saturday morning, to re-orientate themselves to the unfamiliar surroundings. We had to collect the 'nuke' at after 21:30 so that the bees would have gone to bed in Drumshanbo (and could be shut down) - we were positioning them in our place at more like half eleven at night, which is dusk here at this time of year!

Re-hiving the nuke frames

The bees then needed moving from the nuke to the proper hive on the Sunday and once again Mrs S volunteered to help, with Liz stepping aside. This went (sort of) OK but in our beginner-ish fumblings and non-use of the smoker we sent angry bees zooming off in all directions and unfortunately managed to get 2 members of our audience stung even though they were standing at quite a distance, Liz and our youngest niece, R. Useful lessons learned there! I am still un-stung, but it can only be a matter of time. Even the experts get stung on a regular basis.

And so to bonfire night. We snuck ours in a bit early because the children had helped us build the fire, and would be gone at 08:00 on the morning of the 'proper day'. We lit the fire at about 7 pm on the Sunday (by which time, as I said, there were plumes of smoke all over our northern horizon and a plume of thick black smoke in our NW, we guess from the 'pub one' which happens at the crossroads in Kilmovee. Mrs S had bought chocolate digestives and marsh mallows (the kids here all grow up on something called 'smores' which are melted marshmallow squished between 2 biscuits. I had never heard of it. Liz thinks it might be a Girl-Guide campfire thing)

The fire here was made up of the long-since-dried out 'sneddings' (side branches) of black spruce and ash, so it burned fierce, hot and fast, driving us back but also keeping the mozzies and gnats at bay. When it calmed down a bit we threw in potatoes covered in tin foil and eventually a saucepan of beans, planning to have ourselves a picnic with coleslaw, but as we gathered the chairs, food and blankets around the dying embers, so too, the little biting horrors gathered in a huge cloud and soon had us gathering up our stuff and retreating indoors. Liz and Mrs S in particular seem to be very tasty to the local brand of midges and gnats - it must be in the family scent, CO2, skin and blood; I get driven crazy by them crawling over my scalp but I do not seem to get bitten.

Mrs S and Pirate the cat.

The cat 'Pirate' gets a stage closer to our being able to handle him/her and to get the poor thing to the vet. Mrs S made it her mission on this 'holiday' to try a bit of 'cat whispering', going out to meet him (I'm going with 'him' till proved wrong), whistling him up, calling him and then tempting him in with plates of food. He came up really close and later was confident enough to stay at his bowl while both niece R, and then I was able to pet him. He is not at all well, poor thing,

His eyes and ears are badly crusty and infected, he is very thin and when you stroke him you can feel lumps and scabs through the fur. His right eye, in particular, seems sunken and may be useless. Still, we are persisting with him. We are determined to get him to the stage where we can capture him into the cat basket and get vet Aoife to have a good look at him to see what he needs. Meanwhile, we may try to get some 'Spot On' anti-flea meds onto him.

Dublin Bay rose doing its thing.

So, now it is Monday morning and the guests are gone. We love them all madly and we love having them but we also love the peace and quiet which descends as they depart. Safe home you Silverwoods, and safe journey to Carraroe to collect Em-J and her friend Mohammed. We enjoyed our day of recovering, stripping beds, moving the futon back to the caravan, washing up, ironing (Liz) and mucking out geese (Me). Sorry this blog has been a bit of a long one, but we'll be back to normal now.