Hungry Gap? (Blondie and Broody Buff)

The last knockings, 2013 spud store

Photographed here the very last of our stored Sarpo Mira spuds. They have done brilliantly and way above my expectations. Not only were they almost entirely blight resistant, but they yielded well - good total weights and some fine big tubers amongst them. Having read our grow-in-Ireland books (Klaus Laitenburger) I was also expecting some poor storage performance; it is normally too damp and cold to get spuds (and onions etc) properly 'ripe' and dry for storing. We did get a few tubers go to mush in the bags but as long as you tip them all out a couple of times through the winter to remove damp looking or obviously mushy ones, the rest seem to make it through. Because these are unwashed going in to bags, the bad ones are easy to find in the store as the mud round them never quite dries out, so you just pick put the obviously darker, 'damp' ones. So, here we are on Good Friday and have not quite run out of spuds.

Still a few parsnips in the ground

Not quite so stunning with the onions and garlic but I am equally impressed and delighted because the onions were the veg specifically mentioned by KL as being difficult to ripen. In the UK, everyone knows, you fork them out of the ground when they are ready, and leave them on the soil to dry out with their roots exposed. The hot sun bakes them ripe and you tie them into ropes and hang them in the shed. Here in the West of Ireland, generally, they would just get rained on and start to rot away. Indeed, when we were first here and bought locally grown onions they always seemed very juicy and sappy, as if they had not really been dried out properly for storage.

Leeks still going strong

Well, we got lucky, I guess, in our first season being 2013 with its hot dry spell just as my onions and garlic came ready, so we lifted them and spread them out in a single layer across chicken wire frames in the car port, rain free and ventilated above and below. They dried well and we tied them into ropes which we then hung still in the carport for most of August. All this fuss worked and we have been eating clean, ripe, firm onions and garlic right round to early April. At that point they had started to go soft and to show green shoots, so Liz brought them in to the kitchen, peeled and shredded them all for the freezer, where they lived on for a while till turned into a Greek style rabbit 'stifado' casserole (incidentally, also using up the last rabbit).

Globe artichokes going great guns.

We are presumably in what the old style small-holders would have called their 'Hungry Gap', with the last year's stores running out and the new not yet happening. We may be able to cut a few asparagus shoots (about half a dozen if we are lucky!) in a week but that is not going to give us the calories we need to keep gardening. Luckily we still have plenty of parsnips in the ground (all be it now starting to re-grow greenery and push out those tiny fibrous white roots from the sides of the big tap root) and leeks and, of course, freezers full of different beans. But we had to buy a 1 kg net of onions this week - that was a bit of a shock; first time since last summer.

Meanwhile we have had our Buff Orpington hen go broody on us. We love the way that she spreads out when she sits on eggs; she is almost spherical when standing up but collapses to look like a cushion. She gives the impression she'd be able to cover a dozen or more eggs, but we have just left her on the 7 eggs which were to hand when she got the urge. They will, if successful, be a motley old mixture from our 2 roosters (Sussex Ponte and Buff Orp) mating with any one of our hens (SP, this Buff, the 'mini-buffs, our Jersey Giant, the Hubbards and just possibly our Marans). We'll let her go with these for her first try, but really we are interested in slowly moving the flock over to pure-bred Buff Orps and allowing the Sussex Ponte to fade away by 'natural wastage'. She went broody on the 17th, so all being well her 21 days 'cooking' will be up on the 8th May. Wish her luck.

Blondie - the new Guinea hen.

Finally, we have a new recruit, having taken in a waif and stray, a friend of Liz from Knitting Club had a hen Guinea fowl which was widowed by the cock bird being hit by a car. Guinea hens are very plaintive and strident in their distress and mourning and this poor thing was apparently 'mooping' around rather over-dramatically, perching on an old lady's window sills and shouting her distress in through the windows. Rather than try to find the hen a new mate they decided to off load her and there we were. She is a nice little thing (OK - she IS noisy, calling her buck-wheat, buck-wheat shouts all day long) and very pale in colour compared to our previous Guineas, so we have called her Blondie.

Happy Easter

Today she just gets to settle in, in a rabbit run where she can see and hear the place but no-one can beat her up. Tomorrow at some stage we will release her into the Kitchen Garden (more space but still separated by chicken wire from the gang) and on Sunday, all being well, we hope to unleash her on the place. So far Min and Henry have found her and seen her but not gone anywhere close. When a cat walked by her and made her shout in alarm, Henry shouted back and moved towards her rabbit run, but we've not seen any close buddying up through the wire. More on this story as it develops.

Have a great Easter and Happy Birthday to Mrs Silverwood who is trying to enjoy having her kitchen taken over by 'helpful' kids and husband as they do their best to spoil her rotten.

One thing led to another...

Our 4 male bunnies, leant to Charlotte to try to sell them at the Swinford Show have come back to us unsold for the very good and simple reason that there was no Show, well not on that day, anyway. The lady with the stand on which Charlotte was to help out got her dates mixed up, asked Charlotte to help on the Sunday but then went on the Saturday without Charlotte and there was no 2nd day (Sunday). "That's her every time" was the exasperated cry! Charlotte was then looking to hang onto the boys anyway but the bunnies had other ideas and all spent the day trying to dig their way out of their run (interestingly something they do not do 'at home').

We took the opportunity of Charlotte being here with her rabbit-wrangling skills to finally sort out our 'children' into sex groups. We now have a run with all 6 bucks in it (1 from Padfoot, 3 from Ginny and 2 big ones from Goldie) and a run with 9 does (4 Pads, 4 Gin and 1 big albino from Goldie). We took Goldie herself out and put her with the other 2 Mums thinking she'd get on OK in there being too big to be any risk from the Silverwood pair and too docile to trouble them. This bit of the plan did not work and Ginny and Padfoot turned into aggressive bitches, wanting no part of this big docile brown invader, harrying and trying to kick her. By this morning she was hiding squeezed in behind the hutch with some tufts of fur around her, depressed and lethargic, the picture of misery and despondency.

I have rescued her now to the third run which was temporarily the night-roost for Broody Betty and her 8 Hubbard chicks, rendering them homeless. She (Goldie) is fully recovered and enjoying the peace, eating grass and mini-turnips and occasional treats of red clover flowers or stretched out in the sunshine. The 'bitches' are also back to normal and all the groups of bunnies are in happy family picnic mode on new grass on the front lawn. The turnips, incidentally we are a very successful size crop I grew of 'miniature' turnips (white flesh,  white skin, purple tops etc) which, for some reason, are unpleasantly bitter to the taste, so we humans are ignoring them but the rabbits love them.

Betty and the Hubbards will presumably gather in their usual place at around 8 pm waiting to be put to bed in 'their' run. We are going to try to persuade them that the real chicken coop is a perfectly good substitute. I am not sure Betty will wear this!

The Roscommoner's Vegetable Growing Bible, Klaus Laitenburger's "Vegetable For the Irish Garden" advises against trying to ripen your onions the UK way - lift them out of soil to break the roots, and lay them on the ground in the sunshine. They will just stay wet, he says, in the Irish weather and rot. Do it indoors, he advises, or in a greenhouse. That would definitely have been true last year when we all drowned, but this year we seem to be getting enough dry sunny breaks for it to be worth a try, so I have now lifted my spring-set crop and it is spread out across the front terrace table (which has a mesh top) doing a good job of drying out.

Time now for a quick warning to those readers who do not want to know about the messy side of meat production. Pass by these next paragraphs. If you are still with me, then another story of our inexperience and beginnerishness. In my head I had the figure that the goslings should be ready to start 'finishing' at 3 months old so I was psyching myself up for the unpleasant but necessary task. We had also noticed that the parent geese had started to reject the now fully feathered and grown-up looking young ones, bullying them off food and kicking one or two out of the family group.

We were told that they are coming to that stage where in the wild, the parents would evict them and they'd be off to find their own territory and groups of other youngsters. Charlotte even advised that we might need to clip some wings again else the young would be off across the Roscommon bog-lands and heading for Lough Feigh or Lough Glynn. I decided that it was time to start culling them out and to start with the one we could see being bullied by Goosey and Goocie. Not to go into any detail of the day, we did the deed and in so doing learned quite a bit including that 3 months is WAY TOO YOUNG. The one we culled had a live weight of only 2.974 kg (6 lbs or so - all our recipes talk about 5 kg (10 lb) oven-ready birds!), had a very proud sternum (breast bone), very thin breast muscles and was hell to pluck. The outer feathers came away easy enough but the downy layer feathers were mainly still 'in pin' (like little artists brushes in their tubes) and, in many cases only starting to erupt through the skin. The gutted out, 'oven ready' weight was only 1.628 kg.

We now know, of course, that these are all features of birds killed way too early; if we had given him the 5-6 months we know now is advised then his muscles would have filled out and the secondary feathering we were struggling with, would have grown through properly and could have been gripped properly between thumb and finger. We are advised that the norm would have been for a spring hatching but, Mentor Anne adds, goose fairs would normally be in November, with people buying the birds for finishing off by Christmas. We will be leaving the remaining birds for at least another 2 months and giving them plenty of corn to bulk them up.

With our culled bird out of the flock, the gang all seem to have settled down again, happy families and no bullying. Perhaps our bird was a gander or was provoking the bullying and eviction for some other reason. Either way they are all back together and even Fotherington Thomas is in the 'in crowd'. If it stays that way then all well and good. If there are any more outbreaks of friction we may need to think about penning them separately.

Meanwhile please feel free to have one more smile at our expense. The plucking inevitably leaves some fluffy down still on the goose and you are advised to singe this off with a blow torch (or, more bizarrely, strip it off using the hot strips ladies use to wax their legs with!). I do not have a sensible, hand held blow torch but, bought for our house-build, I do have a big flame-thrower torch used to melt torch-down tar felt. Some people use them to burn weeds out of gravel drives. Picture Liz trying to hold the plucked goose as far as possible away from her body while I selected the gentlest 'flame thrower' setting. Trust me. That bird has no more down!

OK, I'm Ready Now....

Our heatwave has been running now since at least the 6th and Liz tells me that we are officially back in drought mode after the required 19 days without any rain. When it started there were the usual round of people complaining about the heat and other people telling them not to complain as it had only just got hot after them moaning about the cold and wet. We went along with this not daring to complain about the sweltering heat, not praying for rain and avoiding any funny walk that might be interpreted as a rain dance just in case we pulled down upon ourselves another rain drenched wash out of a season like 2012.

As you know, many local farmers not only have silage cut and baled away but many have managed to get good cuts of quality, dry hay; the previous post shows that we were out there too, enjoying the chance to get some hay in for the mini horses and our own stock. All over Ireland peat-turf for the winter fuel has been cut, and now dried in stacks and, much to everyone's amazement also now safely gathered into barns. Compare that to last year when our own John Deere Bob could not get his dry enough at all and had to wait round till spring of this year before he dared collect it and bring it home.

All the English vegetable growing expert books tell you that when your onions are ready and the leafy tops have sagged to the ground, lift them out of the soil to break the roots and leave them on the surface in the sun to ripen. Renowned local organic grower (he has a place in Co Leitrim, just next door to Roscommon) and writer, Klaus Laitenburger poo-pooh all that saying, quite truthfully, that this method won't work in Ireland and your onions will just lie there in the rain going rotten. You need to put them in a greenhouse or poly tunnel to ripen. 'Out in the sunshine' is no good. Well, this year we have been able to do just that and I see from a picture on Mentor Anne's blog that Simon is doing the same.

'Flavour of the month' in meteorological circles in Ireland this year is a New Zealand writer, Ken Ring who advocates studying phases of the moon and the 'tides' in the atmospheric air and publishes an Almanac each year giving long term forecasts for NZ and Australia and, this year, Ireland where the local farmers are snapping them up despite the €33 cost of the book and postage from NZ. Well, so far he's right for this year - the dry July which looks like collapsing into rain in the last few days and the prospect of a hot August so he's been all over the Irish papers and radio where he rather rudely tells home-grown meteorologists, Met Éireann to 'stick to what they know and what they've been trained to do, which is the day to day stuff'.

Fair play to him if he has found an answer and I hope he sells plenty of books while he's in fashion but I can't help hearing my old Dad's voice in the back of my head. Dad (Stamp Man) was an old school Geography teacher and he used to say that even with the best Met Office computers in the world, there are so many unpredictable variables in British Isles weather that the forecasts could be 75% correct at 24 hours range, 50% at 2 days, 25% at 3 days and after that you might as well toss coins. Ken Ring would see him as one who should "stick to what they know". We'll wait and see.

Me? I've had enough of the heat and the stultifying inability to get on with jobs now and I am happy to wish for rain out loud. I don't mind if I do bring down a torrent upon myself. The garden needs it badly, the veg need water to fatten up properly (and to stop bolting away in the case of chard, calabrese and even a few of the onions) and the pond could do with a top up. No, I am not using mains water! The East Field, now being rested from the horses, could use a good soak to give us grass for the lambs arriving in a month. I have bought and, yesterday, installed our 2nd 1000 litre bulk water butt. This one is to be the reservoir for the sheep drinker. I'm ready now for some rain - may it come and fill my two tanks and the pond. Ken Ring can go back to being right after we've had a wet week.

The other pictures here are of a supper Liz prepared last night which we were proud to declare included almost entirely our own produce - we supplied the lamb, the French beans, lettuce, chard, calabrese, beetroot and mini-turnips, even the redcurrants. We are not quite there with the new spuds yet but they won't be long. The geese and goslings are by now looking like a group of 8 geese, with the big tall lanky babies now almost fully feathered, and Charlotte warning us that we might need to wing-clip them soon or we'll be watching Christmas dinner rising up into the sky and heading for the watery expanses of Lough Feigh and Lough Glynn. Perhaps if we pack enough milled barley into them they will get too fat to fly, faster than they get fully feathered. Huge leg muscles and puny chests!

Ah well, cloudy today and even Met Éireann saying some chance of rain showers late evening or in the night. Liz has just nipped down to the shops and brought me back a mint and choc Cornetto ice cream. Signing off now!