Windfall

A bag of windfall apples

One unexpected surprise, an unforeseen fringe benefit of Steak Lady and Mr SL buying their house down by the Silverwoods; this big bag of windfall apples. The garden which came with the house turns out to have some very productive apple trees and, this year anyway, the owners of the house had no interest in picking them, so they were just all windfalls on the ground beneath the trees. Liz picked them all up for 'us'. Initially she was helped by the 'smalls' who were amused by the idea of being able to feed the pigs from long range but one little hand grabbed up a squelchy rotten one and withdrew in horror, and the 2nd found one (he had been warned) with a wasp inside and that was enough for him, so all help evapourated at that point. These kids. We will make ruffty-tuffty farm children of them yet!

The Buff-Orp 'roo' investigates an apple

I was, of course, a bit careful feeding these apples to the pigs - too big a change of diet can upset their digestion, so the whole bag thrown in would not have been good. They did get decent sized portions though with each meal and now all the apples are gone. Diamond was reminding me of a pot-belly pig which was kept near our local farm shop in Kent which was once fed a whole bushel-box of over-the-top strawberries in one go and was later found lying on its back among the fruit, groaning and moaning that it couldn't face a single fruit more, it was soooooo full! The pig survived and was back on its feet next day.

These striped beef toms do not seem to do 'bright' red;
they stop at this mid-pink, but they are juicy and  very tasty.

We have heard from some "experts" (everybody round here claims to "know" about pigs because their Grand-dad kept them or the bloke next door has a couple) that the pork takes up the flavour of whatever you are feeding them most recently. Guinness, for example, is supposed to infuse the pork with a beery, marinaded flavour, though Liz would not let me give ours beer when I asked, saying that maybe they were a bit young for starting the boozing; they were only babies! We wonder whether these windfall apples will give them a pre-apple-sauced twang. However all this talk of marinading could just be a flight of fancy. Carolyn of the mini-horses (and also Gloucester Old Spots last year) tells us you'd have to be giving them so much beer to make any difference, you'd give them liver failure.

Neighbour-bull, Felix (centre) has a lie down with his
wives and children

Well, I am on my own again with Liz away on her third (and planned final) mission to assist with house moves, this time over in Kent where Diamond and husband John are moving from one side of our former town to the other. John has been completely renovating this new house over the last few years, as well as battling with the local planning committees (it's in a 'Conservation Area') and having a hip replacement operation. Now, though, it is ready, the carpet crew were in on 30th Sept and today the removal van and its crew of packers, humpers and shifters were due to turn up at 08:00 a.m. It's all gone very quiet in the Lizzie text dept. so I assume they are all hard at work. Both are not enormous houses (basically 2 storey terraces) but have steep and narrow stairs, so the removal men will not be rushing at either end. Liz believes these guys do best on copious supplies of tea, muffins and bacon butties, so they are probably all quite happy.

It is looking like a good year for sloes.

I am 'over here' holding the fort, mainly doing autumnal tidying jobs. I like the fact that when you prune or cut anything in the garden or the grass at this time of year it is likely to stay cut. If I move the rabbits off a bit of grazed-out lawn, I know it will not have sprung back to the same height within a week. Brambles cut, docks and thistles pulled and any areas cleared of weeds will stay that way going into winter.

The bees are still busy in the October sunshine

We have also been investing in some plants. A local small scale nursery and cut-flower grower divides up her perennials at this time and lets Anne know that now is a good time to descend upon her with a 'shopping list'. We bought some delphiniums and 3 colours of bergamot to add height and more bee-food to our big raised bed. Bergamot is not anything we have grown before but I am told it is loved by bees so it is welcome here. I am also waiting for the 'bare-root' tree season so that I can buy some European Lime trees (Tilia x-cordata) which I am told flower in a useful gap between the early spring flush and the start of the bramble flower. Lime are also beloved of bees.

In terms of tidying, on my dog walk today, I noticed that the Office of Public Works (I think that is what they call themselves here) are clearing the banks of the local river (River Lung) near to our local picturesque bridge (Feigh Bridge). A massive digger is smashing up all the riverside vegetation (mainly willow) and pushing this in a heap, back into the trees further back. Behind the digger a bare (if very efficient looking), twenty foot wide shelf ends at a bare 45 degree slope down to the water's edge.

The start of autumn colour; this creeper on a barn roof ridge

Subtle it is not. The little kingfishers I watch in the summer flashing along this stretch have presumably moved somewhere else. I guess if anyone knows what is needed for efficient land drainage it is the OoPW for this wet old county but I do feel for the wildlife so brutally evicted.

Of Birds; Listed, 'Late' and Laying

When we lived in the UK we took part every year in the British RSPB "Big Garden Bird-Watch" which is a survey of garden birds by members of the public which takes place on a single weekend in January. Tens of thousands of people take part, spending an hour on one of the days bird watching in their garden and then recording what is the highest number of any species seen at any one time during the hour. They either post off their results recorded on a form, or can go on line and enter their data into the web survey. It has been running for many years now and is starting to show some interesting trends up or down in bird populations.


We had a good wildlife garden and used to feed the birds a variety of food all through the year so our scores were generally in ones and twos of all the 'usual suspects' - blue and great tits, blackbirds, greenfinches, dunnocks, a robin or wren if you were lucky and, very reliably, between 30 and 77 house sparrows of which we had a huge mob all the time in our holly bushes, beech hedge and trees and shrubs. If we were lucky our resident female sparrow hawk would nip through while we were on watch. Either way we had a pretty good idea of what our garden population was like.

When we moved here we were delighted by some of the differences in what we could describe as 'usual suspects'. The house sparrows are replaced here by a mob of around 17 chaffinches who gather up any poultry food left by the hens. We have never seen a house sparrow yet. Robins and wrens are ten a penny. Our 'crows' are the grey bodied Hooded Crow; UK-style black Carrion Crows being almost entirely absent from Ireland. We also do well for field fares and jackdaws. Coal tits seem to be more common than blue or great tits.

Also different is the 'peoples' survey'. Not for us the easy life of one hour on one day of a fixed weekend. The Irish version, run by Bird Watch Ireland involves keeping your eyes open for 13 weeks from early December through to the end of February and scoring the biggest number of each species you see at any point during that week. This is good for we out-door types, as I can 'watch' while I'm allotmenting or out round the ground with dogs. Liz and I have conversations where we are basically 'auctioning' the results in a series of bids. Liz saw 17 field fares today, for example, which meant I had to go into the website and up my previous record (4). It has a few minor frustrations mind - we wish we could have recorded the hen harrier who flaps lazily up the valley but never came into our 'airspace', or the kingfisher zipping up the River Lung from Feigh Bridge (again - not actually IN the garden). We get regular mobs of long-tailed tits through, too, but they have stayed away while I have been 'surveying'.

A quick warning for those readers who do not want to know about the 'meat-preparation' side of small holdings; Look Away Now (3 paragraphs). The 'Late' birds? That will be the young roosters hatched 17 weeks ago today by Broody Betty. It's been great to see it all happen and to nurture them up through babyhood and into adolescence but they turned out to be male and were starting to square up to each other, tried their hand at crowing and even tried to mount the hens. William the Conqueror was getting fed up with them and it was all getting a bit feisty. The hens would shrug them off but then turn round and attack them quite viciously. Someone was going to get badly hurt or even, if William got them cornered, killed. William is twice their size. I had offered them to anyone on the poultry forums but those guys are mainly breeders of pure fancy-fowl and a hybrid x hybrid of dubious parentage is of no use to them. The boys' times had come.

Dispatching them is my job, and Liz has volunteered for the role of plucker. I managed to grab one yesterday when it foolishly preceded me into the confined space of the goose house but the other one was having nothing to do with that. The advice in that case is to set the alarm for 'while it's still dark' and pay the hen house a visit while nobody can see to fly off and escape. Rooster 2 was therefore waiting his turn in the pluckery by the time Liz got up. Liz has tried 2 methods now and prefers the 2nd - the first was just to dry-pluck holding the bird half inside a dustbin liner - the 2nd involved dipping the bird in hot water for 5 seconds and then wet-plucking. The feathers come away easier but the wet feathers stick to your hands and to the bird so "at times it was a bit difficult to see where I'd been" said Liz.

Anyway, the two brothers are plucked, cleaned and in the freezer now, awaiting their turn to be made into coq-au-vin. Interestingly for 2 brothers, clutch mates and equal age young "roos", they were hugely different in carcass weights - one was 1193 g cleaned weight, the other 1833 g. They may, of course, have had different mothers - no end of hens were happily contributing to BB's clutch! Their livers, hearts and gizzards, sliced up and briefly fried off have featured in tonight's tapas style supper. Delicious.

And finally, we have found another secret egg stash left by Wandering Wendy when she doesn't feel like laying in the official nest boxes. We had seen her nipping into the goose house looking a bit guilty. The rabbit 'Maternity Unit' is in there, though currently empty and she had discovered that she could sneak in (yellow arrow) through a hole at the right hand end and nip along 5 feet or so, well out of sight (yellow cross). I only found these (7) eggs by squeezing my head round the gap and using a torch. I had to prise off one of the planks to extract the eggs. That was yesterday. Today I blocked up the hole and two (it turned out) hens were very loud in their complaints and hung around the hutches, even jumping up into them through the open doors and marching around inside as if looking for the nest site.

The picture here shows the hutches not yet complete, with no mesh. They now do have proper fronts with a hinged mesh panel. I decided that if I left the mesh door open and put some hay in the 'bedroom' they might use that. At least I'd know where the eggs would be instead of having to hunt under hedges, track WW across the fields or find an egg at random in the yard, outside the front door, on the drive or what ever. To my surprise two hens laid in the hutch (and nobody laid in the nest boxes) today. There is time, I think, for one final bit of egg-laying related tomfoolery. Yesterday Liz and I paused outside the back door to watch the hens pecking at some wheat I had thrown down in the yard, amused, as ever by their antics. Suddenly we both heard a "tick!" and, as the forest of legs parted we could see an egg on the ground right where they were pecking. As far as either of us could see no hen had actually stopped pecking at the seed, so they must be able to multi-task, pecking with one end while the other end pumps out an egg. They come out (we did not know) pointy-end first and we know this because the 'tick' noise we had heard was the shell getting broken slightly at that end where it hit the gravel and concrete of the yard. So now you know.

The Tappin' o' the Feets

Day 6 (Full day 5) and we're heading back up stream towards Sowerby Bridge, alternating canal with River Calder. The river level is low, so the flood locks upstream of each canal stretch are all open and you can glide straight from canal to river unhindered (with a glance over your shoulder at the big but benign and peaceful (at low-river!) weirs (see pic) with their rather worryingly strong and serious looking string of massive boat-catching floats. This pic also has the motorway in the background (M62 I think).

The rain has stopped now and there's a kingfisher to greet Dad and we dogs when we first break surface for a pee. Despite many being spotted from the boat(s) through the years, Mum has never actually been in the right place and right time to see one, so there is now a long-standing joke in the family that she thinks they are mythical creatures.

The Terry Pratchell "Feegles" stuff is now so ingrained in this holiday's culture that at one point J-M (10) shouts down to Dad in the lock chamber to throw up a rope. Dad has not done so because we are coming up as a pair of boats in this one and Dad thinks we are so well wedged we barely need ropes. But when he looks back up at Jorja she is doing the full works 'tapping o' the feets, pursing o' the lips and folding o' the arms'. When he's finished laughing (along with everyone else), he gives in, quailing "Och... waily waily waily!" and chucks up a rope. Nice one J-M!

We drive on by up past the Dewsbury Arm, stop for food at the canal-side LIDL supermarket in Mirfield and spot a heron standing incongruously on top of a lamp post like some kind of vulture, by the Huddersfield Canal entrance. At 5pm ish a huge black cloud rolls in and thunder is heard. Mum suggests a rapid moor up. dad claims not to have realised how time was flying by. They moor and retreat inside the boat just as the heavens open. Everybody makes Mum do her Feegles thing again in a sort of "Previously on Wintersmith" like they do on TV before handing the book on to the next reader (Mr S).

But now, in real-time, it's Friday evening, so have a good weekend

Deefski

Speaks like a Magistrate

Remember that stag's head oak I described on April 17th? At the time I said it was one of Dad's favourites and that it always looked like it was on the verge of death, but somehow struggled on. Well for months afterwards it sat there sulking and leafless, and I wondered whether I should admit that it had finally succumbed. But No; it is in leaf again, as far as that goes.

One exciting thing I neglected to say yesterday was that we saw a kingfisher at the "bottom" pond, just below the "Cloud Chamber" sculpture (see www.StourValleyArts.org.uk). No idea what he/she was doing there. The pond is not natural - it was built a few years back using a grant obtained by Friends of Kingswood and as far as we know there are no fish in it. It is not stream-fed, so there's no obvious way of fish getting there. perhaps kingfishers eat newts too? But it was definitely a kingfisher - that's one bird you cannot mistake for any other!

Meanwhile, Mum is dining out on the fact that she was described by a person we know only briefly, to a mutual friend as "speaking like a magistrate". She is chuffed to bits with this, of course!

And so, on the last night of "Rome" and the last Harry Potter (Mum had read it by 02:24 last night), I'll wish you good night

Deefs