(A Very Polite) Bollox to Brexit?

Season of open fires in the Sitting Room

Good progress on all fronts for this post.

Progressing especially well, this Help-X 'session', 10 days with Judith and Vicky. I have gone in constant fear that they will use up all the jobs and we will have nothing left for them to do, they are so fast and efficient. Having mowed their way round all the nominal 'lawns' and grassy places, I sent them off yesterday to 'top off' all the old nettle patches in the sheep (East) field. One had the mower set to its highest setting (and no grass-box), the other the brush cutter.

Sheep field mowed in stripes

The brush cutter is quite bad for vibrations into your hands and wrists, so we always advise the volunteers to swap over every hour, to avoid anyone getting coal miner's "Vibration White Finger" (OK maybe not that bad).

A bit lost in the acre field. Our 16" cut mower.

As I said, my intent was for them just to buzz off the old nettle flower-stems, but not only did they run both machines out of fuel, they had started to join up the 'dots' running the mower between clumps of nettles till it was easier to just mow the whole thing like a lawn. We have, I suspect, the only sheep field in Roscommon mowed in neat stripes. They have not, in fact, taken much length off the grass, so we hope they have not damaged our supply of winter grazing.

Towser is in the sink here and has both girls "at" him!

The girls have also fallen more and more in love with the dogs and are now always found with a dog on their lap during 'down time', bathing the three on one occasion and now taking them for their daily walks, either down to the bridge or out across the big local bog, 'Kiltybranks' (a favourite walk of mine before I got sick).

Veg lasagne, Medical Student style! Delicious.

We like our volunteers to cook us a meal from their home-place (if they want to). Vicky and Judith went for a superb veggie lasagne and very delicious it was too. They also expressed an interest in trying our goose eggs but NOT in cooking them as we would for breakfast with toast 'soldiers'. They wanted them 'a bit stiffer' than I had described the 'UK Dippy eggs', so a 12-14 minute boil rather than our ten. They like the yolks to be nearly set.

Goose eggs for breakfast, Cheers!

Then for bread, they had a slice of my good sourdough each on-the-side and in Judith's case buttered and smeared with jam so she could swap between egg spooned out of the shell, and mouthfuls of bread/jam but ne'er the twain shall meet. Each to their own, I guess.

Finally on the Help-X-ers for this one, they took today as a day off going touristing to the coastal town of Westport. I dropped them to the railway station for a 10 am train and collected them again at 20 past 7. Elizabeth and I had an easy, free day.

Brushing the dogs out after their shampoo.

But what of my Brexit reference in the header. When I am not just focusing on this, my own blog, I sometimes wander over to the one being written by the brother, Mark.
  http://caretowers.blogspot.com/
Mark is similar to us in having retired early and now 'living a dream' but his dream (as is only right) is very different to ours. He was never a one for the farming. He and his wife (Susan) spend their days travelling all around the world, cruising or rolling their own holidays, walking nearer to home, seeking out good eateries or interesting shopping in cities. They are an amusing read on occasions, especially knowing Mark well and being able to see how he is seeing things.

His most recent post has them headed to London to see an exhibition of "affordable art" but accidentally clashing with a gazillion other people packed like sardines into the train, headed for the "People's March" for a 2nd Brexit Referendum. The 'madding crowd' had them changing travel plans quite a few times as they tried to get to the art and then later to Fortnum and Mason for some shopping and I was chuckling away at his description of the polite, middle-class, 'protesters' obediently leaving their placards with the Fortnum's door man while they nipped out of the march for a little shopping on the side, presumably to collect them later. Nice one Mark.

A Sunny Day At Last!

Some good size spuds coming from the poly-tunnel. These are
probably just good ol' Roosters. I don't recall buying any fancy
seed potatoes this year. 

A nice short post this time as we have done precious little except hunker down indoors looking out feeling all 'meh' at the drizzle and rain. We have been restricted to indoor jobs except for a bit of digging spuds in the poly-tunnel. They always do well in there despite my worries about lack of moisture. I never water to a degree that I would call 'enough' but these plants must be able to get roots to the sides of the tunnel and catch some of that rain dribbling down the sides. Some of these tubers were 250 kg and more.

Plum Jam

I also got out and picked all the remaining plums off that over-loaded tree, especially when I spotted that the magpies were starting to peck and the fruits and some of the fruit were splitting in the rain. I got 7 kg of good fruit (and the pigs got half a bucket of 'out-takes') and found excellent jam jars at 50 cent each (inc lid) in a shop in town which sells bee-keeping stuff and hence honey jars. I often have a problem getting jam to set and this batch was true to that form. I have created 25 jars of plum 'slop' but, hey, it'll get used up.

The dogs enjoying Kiltybranks. 

Then today, out of no-where, a nicer, sunnier day. I got a chance to walk the dogs while NOT wearing rain wear and took them down to my favourite off-lead walk site, Kiltybranks. The dogs can charge around here, diving into bushes and down ditches with no risk of them getting among livestock. It is so flat and the vegetation so low that you can see any neighbouring horses or cattle for miles, so there is always time to get the dogs rounded up to walk past the stock on leads.

An almost moribund white-tail queen looked OK in the pic
but I don't think was long for this world. 

It is a much more pleasant stroll for the dog-walker, too as three little 10 kg muscled up lunatics are not pulling you in 3 directions at once. Towser may be the strongest forwards-charger for this but Poppea is my Nemesis - the worst walkee EVER. She'd be deadly on the M25 with her random changes of lane, speed and direction, her dead stops for no apparent reason and then her stops-to-poo/pee with no notice what so ever. I swear one day she will trip me right over by slamming on the brakes right in front of me.

On the left the new size 32 gigabyte camera memory card.
On the right the old-size "card" now relegated to adaptor or
"holder". The micro-card slots in at the bottom. 

I am always amazed by new technology but I am in awe of the latest miniaturization move for camera folk. Our lovely "new" digital cameras take a card which is about an inch square which could fit about 8 'Gig' of data (8,000 Megabytes). My camera, on current settings, takes pictures which have a file size of around 5 Kilo-bytes, so the old cards would fit about 1600 pictures. All well and good. That used to last me about 6 months.

That little fluffy gosling is now that huge
guy at the back here.

I would download the pics by copying but keep them on the card out of some old fashioned need to retain a "hard copy" like on photo-albums of old and then more recently write-able CDs / DVDs.

Cider apples wet with rain.

In a recent shout out on FB and Twitter for anyone who knew of a filing system/method for the used cards I received only howls of derisive laughter and people saying I should 100% trust the soft-ware versions - save them to "the cloud" or back them up to memory drives etc. Ah well. I still like the physical object in my hand. Old fashioned, I guess.

Heather at Kiltybranks

Then last week I went to buy the next 1 inch-ish square SDHC card and found that I can now buy (at the same price) 32 GIGABYTES of memory on a tiny micro-card no bigger than a finger-nail. The old card that fits my socket is now relegated to just a carrier/adaptor into which the micro card slots and the tiny flake of genius holds around 4000 pictures which is the same amount of pics as I have taken so far, on the camera, in the 2-3 years I have owned it!

Most of the roses are suffering in the rain ("balling") but
this peachy one survives.

When I think that back in the day we'd get those pics back from TruPrint (who remembers them?) and I'd store about 200 in an A4 size, thick, hard-back photo album. I still have about 20 of those albums taking up window-sill space upstairs. Now I can get more pics than that on a flake of cleverness as small as my little-finger nail.

Scabious at Kiltybranks.

Ah well. This 'short' post seems to have run amok again. Sorry about that.

False Economy

Piglets at 9 days

This is another one of those blog posts where nothing too exciting happens and we bimble along, same old same old, and spring takes place around us. We receive another nice email from our pig breeder, Adrian, with pictures attached showing our piglets at 9 days. I am quite keen that we end up with the 2 very spotty ones in this picture but I probably need to go into negotiations with our good friends Sue and Rob who might also have chosen those two or, indeed, the breeder, who may even has his own ideas on what should go where.

Otto Lenghi's cauliflower cake

Our egg supply increases and starts to push us into 'glut' mode. Even the three female geese hit 100% this week - 3 eggs every other day. We are giving away as many as we can - I took half a dozen goose eggs over to our good friends in Sligo yesterday - and Liz is digging our all our multi-egg recipes to try to use them up. We use Guardian 'celebrity' chef Otto Lenghi for some of this, in particular his "Cauliflower cake" which is very much a Spanish tortilla focused on cauliflower.

530 grammes of cleaned up beeswax

We worked our way through the 'dead hive' recycling and felt like we were doing almost a pig thing - using everything but the squeal. There was an awful lot of ivy honey and debris in there but we managed to extract and clean up a nice disc of 530 grammes of clean beeswax, which Liz will be able to put to good use in her furniture polish (50/50 with coconut oil).

The honey final score was 1.69 kg of rather dark, hazy honey. Friends of the blog may be disappointed that we will not be giving out any of this partly because there are only 3 jars and also because we do not 100% trust it, coming from the failed hive as it did. If you visit, we will happily give you a taster as it is delicious and full of all those flavour ingredients that you do not get with commercial, often heat-treated and finely filtered honey (like pollen, bits of bee, proteins, amino acids, volatiles, free minerals, chemicals from plants; all the kind of stuff that bakers of WHITE bread would tell you, you were better off without!).

Bees from our surviving hive all over the dumped 'cake'.

The stuff we sieved out of the melted comb (mainly lumps of pollen, solid ivy honey, dead 'babies' and other lovely stuff) ended up as a 'cake' which we chucked onto the compost heap thinking that maybe the magpies could use it up. There were bees all over this today, presumably mopping up the honey residues.

Not too far to go. On the right the good hive. On the left my
bag of old frames now being cleaned up by the bees.

The old frames, I decided not to try to re-use in any new hive or colony (assuming we go there) but would leave it out for the bees to clean, then burn them. One stack I put down into the apiary and these were quickly found by the bees who I saw making regular short trips from hive to stash and then cleaning up any honey left on the wood and the fragments of comb. The other stash, I put out onto a scrap-wood pile round by our wheelie bins, a good hundred yards from the hive. But these bees are nothing if not good scouts and they found this too. Grabbing up wood for kindling this afternoon, I had to be careful not to get stung.

Wax-soaked wood makes for interesting kindling.

The final use is of this wood, cleaned by bees, as firewood. The wax and residual honey on this wood can make for some interesting fire-lighting. It burns very well. Reduce, re-use, recycle.

Nice strong buckets

But what of my 'Fasle Economy' title. I was delighted this week to find a source of some decent, strong "Curver' buckets. These big, flexible tubs are the most brilliant, useful items around a small holding. We use them almost daily for mucking out, carrying weeds about and even mixing cement and concrete.

The daffs out front along our lane. 

They were first made by the firm 'Curver' and were used almost ubiquitously by the 'horsey' set. Then, inevitably, the cheap imitations came on sale and here, where the locals love a bargain, the genuine articles were eclipsed and almost forced out of the market. Why pay €12 for the real thing when you can get this pretty pink/yellow one for €5 in the local pound-shop. Yes, even I fell for it.

Plum blossom started today

Why? I will tell you why. I brought one of the €5 ones home and promptly started to muck out the goose house. I loaded the bucket with a goodly pile of wet goose-muck wood shavings and went to lift it to carry it to the compost. Blow me if both handles did not break on that first lift. I had not even used it once and it was already useless. I learned my lesson and have ever since been trying to find the real heavy-duty Curver buckets.

How many is 'too many' animals on the bed?
Nearest to furthest here are Deefer, Poppea,
Kato, Soldier and Chivers (cats) and then
Towser on Liz's pillow.

Well, this week I had that sorted. The local farmers' co-op has both the Curver brand stiff buckets with rope handles AND a tough looking flexible bucket called "Gorilla". I'll let you know how I get on with these.

Slow cooked rolled-rib of pork with roasties, carrots and steamed
green cabbage

I think that's about it. Spring is chugging along nicely, the sun is shining, I have been out to Kiltybranks for my dog walks and the young poults have been successfully moved from their kindergarten (a rabbit run) to 'big school' (the proper out-building chicken coop).

Tulips

The Eagle Has Landed

The 'Send' button brings an end to Lisacul 365 (for me). 

There's a relief! 31st January, so we come to the end of a big and attention demanding project to which I have frequently alluded for the last 14 months or so, 'Lisacul 365'. If you are new to the blog then you may welcome a brief explanation. This was a project started by the local village through our new website (LisaculInfo.IE) as part of the village promotion and heritage recording; we had to take at least one photograph within (of or from) the 18 townlands (sub-parishes) EVERY day from 1st Feb 2016 to 31st Jan 2017.
`

Last check of my final posting before I logged out. Job done.

Liz has been administering the rapidly growing gallery of images as part of her work. I volunteered to be safety net/back stop committing to take at least one pic every day just in case the other photographers failed to and, because I enjoyed it, I determined that this 'one' would actually be at least 3 so that the admin/judging/selection end still had a choice even if I was the only snapper and tried to make my 3 nice and varied (so, for example, a ruin, a cow and a sky-scape rather than 3 goats). In practise we have attracted 30+ different photographers across the year and have, on some days, had dozens of pictures sent in.

For my last days of 365-ing I tried to end on
an up-beat note; signs of spring, newness,
sunrises etc. 

We also went off on a bit of a tangent when the village 'Tidy Towns' group asked us to focus on wildlife and nature for their Bio-Diversity week. With the photographers' work done, the plan is now for Liz to sort all the incoming pics into a format where a judging panel (yet to be decided) can be shown all the possible pics for each day and select their best 366 (leap year, so 366, not just 365). They have given us all till the end of Feb to get those pictures in. You will recall that as well as a very pretty website with, now, galleries off to the side (on Flickr) for each month, for the Bio-Diversity and various other sub-projects, a very fine calendar came out of these photos. Working on a big-town budget, Faversham also produced a glossy 365-page book of all the pictures and had a lovely exhibition of all of them framed. I think we are not in that league, but we are very proud of what we did manage.

The snow drops did not quite make it open
by 31st but these were near enough. 

Everyone at the project will always acknowledge the lady who inspired all this, French-born Nathalie Banaigs who now lives in Faversham, our former home-town. Nathalie started all this in Faversham with the 'Faversham 365' version which then spawned various other 365s in Kent towns. When we suggested doing the first ever one in Ireland in our village, she gave us her blessing and has continued to follow, inspire, support and occasionally advise us. She was delighted when told that we had completed our year. Thank you very, very much, Nathalie. More on this project in this blog when we get all the rest of the pictures in and start judging/selecting

Misty frosty sunrise in the townland of Creevy

Where to now? I am going to miss the discipline of knowing I have to get out there and get some good, original, new pictures every day and not really being able to relax until I have scored - it was always there in the back of my mind. Sometimes I felt I had 'shot' enough ruins, boreens, cute calves and bog-flowers and I was driving round the deserted, misty, country lanes feeling completely un-inspired but something always seemed to turn up; a strikingly marked donkey or the break in a fence where I might sneak into that bit of forestry with the lovely green floor and all those toadstools.

Pussy willow after the rain.

In reality I love my photography and would generally be using the camera every day anyway taking blog-pictures or record shots of the building project(s) or new hatched chicks, so I don't suppose the camera will gather dust for long. Even though the website is through the 365 project, it will still need a supply of fresh pictures to brighten up or illustrate the stories. The camera is generally in the car when I am out and about, or slung round my neck as I walk the dogs.

Long straight grass-track in Kiltybranks bog

Talking of dogs, we managed an adventure worthy of those much-loved children's TV dramas which involved extra-ordinarily clever animals - Lassie Super dog, Flipper (dolphin) or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Although Skippy was a kangaroo he always managed to explain to the kids in the tale by wrinkling his nose and smacking his lips that there was a child fallen down the old empty well and in need of rescuing by the gang in time for a happy ending of that episode and the Director's moral message where someone's Dad reminded all the children that it was dangerous to play near the well. All good stuff.

So, there I was walking my gang down across the Kiltybranks bog-land, square miles of open space criss-crossed by hard paths but riddled with ditches, holes and soggy, sinky bits of sphagnum peat/moss. I'd turned right up a side turn and the dogs had dived down off that path for an explore of an interesting ditch. I whistled them up and strode on - it always works - they do not want to fall behind the 'pack' so they race back out and are soon nudging my calves with their noses, 'asking' me to pull over so they can pass.

Hubbard chicken thighs and stuffed peppers with couscous

Not this time, apparently. A few minutes 'striding' and I was 100 yards further on and noticed the lack of dogs. Looking back I could see the two 'pups' (Towser and Pops) in the distance on the path, but no Deefer. I called and whistled but those pups were not having any of it (which is unusual)  and when I shouted in annoyance and started back they turned and ran away from me (which is unheard of) a few paces and stopped again. I realised that I was being called back and had also still not seen Deefer so I realised that something had gone wrong and all the 'Skippy' stuff came into my head. Were they asking me to rescue Deefer?

Tray-bake haggis with neeps and tatties
for our Burns Night. A wee dram too.

We got our happy ending - the pair showed me where, much further back up the track I could just hear a repeated single whimpering yelp from the ditch to the side and then spotted the white of an ear down among the heather. Deefer had got herself down into a ditch which was empty but had overhanging heather and sides so soft she hadn't been able to clamber out. I had to lean down on my knees to grab a chunk of collar and haul her out, unharmed but very relieved that we'd not left her behind. Lots of praises and fussing for the pups, of course, they were not going to get any from old curmudgeon Deefer! We carried on with the walk and then related all to Liz as we towelled the dogs down from the rain.

Directions into deepest Sligo. 

Our only other mini-adventure had us exploring into deepest Sligo, off to visit some new friends whom we met via Facebook. CT is the guy who came and helpfully shot our fox back in November and his partner, AW is chief admin on the Facebook "West of Ireland Smallholders" group which I co-admin. They have a lovely set-up out there on a slope looking across a valley at an impressive, cloud-capped mountain.

Their big interest is horses and they have built a 40 x 20 m sand-school where they could, in theory, hold proper dressage competitions. They have 5 collie-sized dogs, one (Ivan the Terrible) of which is officially the "guard dog" who doesn't like people and never lets anyone (or any foxes!) in. Well, Ivan amazed and delighted both of them by taking to me like his new bestest chum. He came and laid his chin on my lap and 'asked' to have his hair ruffled and his ears fussed. I obliged, of course and only then did our hosts express amazement - he'd NEVER done that before to ANYONE. Perhaps I smelled of 'Skippy' dogs or curmudgeonly old bog-bitches.

Micro-chipped

Towser is all done and wants just to get off that table

Another bit of red-tape comes our way hot on the heels of Water Charges, Property Tax and Goat Herd Numbers. We hear on the radio that it will become mandatory from 1st April that all dogs must be micro-chipped. We can hear 50% of our neighbours guffaw-ing with the same response they had to finding out that we actually went out and got our dogs licensed when this was mooted. Yeah Right.

Dog Micro-Chip docs.

The locals seem to have a fairly loose, open minded approach to such things - I am not sure how many people have started paying the water rates, but it is still a hot political potato and the take up has only been in the 30-50% area to my knowledge. There are also plenty of folk not yet paying Property Tax, not registering septic tanks and so on. We are probably unusually stupid in this respect and suckers for everything but a) I still feel like a guest in this country, and it would be unreasonable to come here expecting a welcome and acceptance but to straight way start breaking the rules. b) once we had signed up to dog licences, I think it would be quite a risk to not do the micro chip thing - their database might be a bit ropey but I think that at least they'd be able to check whether the licenced dogs were tagged. And c) we know our luck. Get Liz to tell you her TV Licence story one time, and you'll agree.

So, in we booked to the Castlerea vet to an evening clinic and we took the dogs along tonight to get them done. The micro chip is a tiny pellet the size of a grain of rice, which the vet injects just under the skin between the shoulder blades. The needle looked fairly big (like one of my sheep ones) - the bore had to fit the pellet, so I expected some shouting, especially from Poppea, our drama-queen. Fair play to Pops, who we put in last. I got a small squeak from Deefer and Towser but not a whisper from Poppea; just a pained look and a tensing of the face around the eyes.

Happy St Patrick's from the chooks

Next, of course, as this as all about getting owner personal details onto a Government database, came the paperwork. Triplicate forms - dogs names, breeds and dates of birth, owner name address and phone number and a fair amount of vet details. Bar codes everywhere. The authorities claim that this will help them (the dog warden etc) find you if your dog gets lost and will stop them having to euthenase the poor mite but I can't help feeling that it is more about making sure they get the €20 per year dog licence money from all the nation's dogs. Ah well.

Frost on pussy willow.

The chipping was only €25 per dog and there are charity animal welfare organisations who will do it for free if you are hard up. We, at least, are legal. I remain amused that we only knew this was going on because we had heard about it on our radio station of choice, 'Today FM'. We have had no notification from Government nor seen anything in newspapers. You would think that at least the dog licencing boys would be posting out mail shots to their "customers" or the vets, who stand to make that €25 per dog, would have been contacting clients.

Blue sky for my Kiltybranks dog walk today

Meanwhile our run of blue skies continue all be it with frosty mornings. I've been able to get out on some lovely dog walks and today I returned to Kiltybranks where I can let the gang off the leads. Regular readers may recall that I have found down there a bloke (Paul) who does his own turf cutting and has become a bit of a friend. He goes down there with his collie 'Sam' who has befriended our 3 dogs and, while we humans chat, Sam chases around the guy's turf cuttings pursued by 3 mad westies.

Frosty spider web.

Sam is a long legged, fast dog given to 'Lassie Super-dog' leaps from cut to cut across canyons which leave my short leggedy westies miles behind trying to decide whether to try to jump the gap or run down into it and back up. You see Sam flowing across the tops, barely touching the heather followed by three mad, white, bouncing, tongue-lolling shapes trying to sprong through the heather like salmon trying to jump up a fish-ladder. Today, Paul's partner (Sharon) was there too, so the dogs had a new person to schmooze up and her being a goat breeder, I had a new source of advice on how to tell if Nanny Óg might be about to kid. Nan is, of course, playing her cards close to her chest still.

The flowering currants (Ribes) take a frost hit prior to opening

I spent my St Patrick's Day over at the Sligo house helping K-Dub to start the flooring. The floors downstairs are going to be a bit special. None of your B&Q laminates or cheap tiles there. This is going to be a grid of 4' squares made out of the thinner size of old scaffold boards, infilled with huge slabs of Indian limestone. You can probably not see that in your mind's eye but, trust me, with the boards sanded down and sealed and the stone also sealed it is going to look spectacular. Photo's when some of it is complete.

Bacon and cabbage Roscommon style.

Enough for now. I wish you good night and a happy St Patrick's weekend from our dog-legal, micro-chipped Friday Night pizza and red wine heaven.