Between Visits

Apple blossom

Snow and hail showers come driving in today on a bitter northerly breeze to remind us that it's not quite summer just yet despite all the blossom and the blue-sky days. We are in "between visits" mode (If the gap between reigns is an interregnum, might this be an "inter-hospes"?) these couple of days having delivered Mum in Law home on Friday and expecting our UK guests (Mazy-Lou and Airy Fox) this afternoon. It is a chance to change all the beds and get a bit of laundry through and to spruce up the house a bit.

Not an easy picture but can you see the 'smoke' of pollen
top left which billows away from these black spruce (Picea
mariana) male flowers at this time of year. 

Meanwhile what counts for 'normal' life round here, goes on. The need to renew car insurance comes round again and this year the process in Ireland is mired in scandal and near-riot outrage as (all) the insurance companies hike rates by amounts that make the national news, fill the radio airwaves on chat shows and cause questions to be asked in "The House".

Car insurance renewal. 

Rates for most people have gone up way above inflation, in some cases by as much as 50% or even more than doubling. Friends with small cars and (touch wood) long clean licences and no-claims history are finding that their renewals cost €1200, up from an already hefty €450 last year. Well-meaning Brits are yelling "shop around!" The hikes are blamed by the industry on a surge in claims including mischievous calls for compensation for 'whip-lash' but we have heard that it is more likely that the industry is in the poo having invested heavily in a planned change to compulsory medical insurance. When that government initiative foundered, the insurance firms lost their shirts and are now having to "gouge" their existing captive market to recover.

Our Brian John Spencer "originals" now
nicely framed and on the landing wall.

What ever the story they have, between them (The industry, Government and news media) neatly accomplished an unprecedented and amazing feat. They have messed with my head so much with all the horror stories and anxiety, that I was actually relieved and delighted when I opened my own envelope and found that my increase was "only" 14% or €66. Yes. I actually did a goal-scorer, closed fist 'Yessssss!' I made a little comment to this effect to the FBD lady when I phoned to renew; I got the distinct impression she had had such 'feedback' before!

Wild Burrow gin available at Lidl eventually.

Also in the 'battling with suppliers' department this week a mildly more amusing and way less fraught scrap around gin. Now I'm not a great gin person but it is currently Liz's nip of choice so we always try to have in the house a bottle of the "house stuff" with fancier brands for special occasions. Lately that means Lidl supermarket's generic "Castlegy gin" for hum-drum and trips further afield for quality.

Sweet woodruff doing well here in a tractor-tyre.

A couple of weeks back Lidl were all over Facebook and Twitter promoting the fact that they we re-launching an older 'quality' brand (used to be "Rabbit Island") as "Wild Burrow". Great, we thought. I will pick some of that up at the next shop. However, while plenty of city folk came on social media having tried it and enjoyed it, our local branches never seemed to get any. We suspected that the much-publicised launch had only gone to the busier branches and that out here in the sticks, we had been left out.

Cherry blossom

Well, guys, if you are going to publicise it out here, then you have to be prepared for some Facebook and Twitter grumbling and bad publicity if you fail to deliver. I pinged off a series of 'tweets' and FB posts tagging @LidlIreland but to no avail until, we were amused to see, our new chum Senator Frank Feighan re-tweeted my comment. Did I now have official Senate backing for my campaign??? OK, I doubt it but hey, as if by magic, Wild Burrow gin suddenly arrived in our local Lidl. I thanked FF of course, but he just joked that he doubted if his R/T did any good but he was happy to support gin drinkers anywhere. Good Man Frankie!

Will our birds be allowed out any time soon after the
Avian Flu shenanigans? In the UK they already have the
all clear. 

And while we are tilting at windmills, we wonder whether the Ministry here in charge of agriculture will declare an 'all clear' on the Avian Flu thing any time soon. We note that in the UK, the Min of Ag have declared theirs. The feeling here is that the Irish are just waiting till their next review date, which would be 30th April.

Meanwhile a couple of bits of catch up. First up, the olde hen 'Enda' named in the last post did not pop her clogs that day and is still with us. She is quiet and sorry looking but she is alive and currently 'rooming' with poor aul' Doris, the hen mentioned in an even earlier post ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2017/03/the-quality-of-mercy.html ), the pair living in a redundant rabbit run with a cosy dark bedroom section.

Shopping for building materials again. Plaster (skim), skim-bead
and scrim tape. 

Last but not least, the play. Our Final Night (Saturday just gone) went brilliantly - maybe the best of the lot. The cast and crew played a blinder and were rowdily supported by a loud and enthusiastic audience. It was hugely well received over all and anyone involved is now riding a wave of kudos around the village. My part was small (moving furniture and opening/closing curtains) but even I got button holed in the pharmacy yesterday.... "It's your wife that did the play, isn't it? It was just BRILLIANT!" Indeed it was and all involved are very proud of what 'we' did.

The Un-Planned Harvest

The remainder of the honey extraction went well as we settled on a workable and non-messy technique. We worked our way through the four, two-sided frames at a couple or three of sides a day and ended up with a very satisfying 22 of our small jars, at 150 g (net). 3.3 kg total. These little jars come from Lidl containing their very reasonable 6-pack paté variety pack and are superbly useful for things like this. We have a lot of people eye-ing up our honey keenly and by potting it up in these 'taster' quantities, we can make plenty of them happy. Oh, and K-Dub... we did try out your method but could not get the honey to leave the honeycomb. K-Dub had suggested that if we un-capped a frame and put this into our tall fermentation bucket at an angle, then whirled it round my head, I might generate enough centrifugal force (I might mean centripetal) to throw the honey out of the comb. Well, I whirled and whirled till my shoulder was nearly dislocated and got no more than a thimble full, hence our change to the warm-gravity method described in my previous post.

Honey on ciabatta for breakfast.

In celebration of our new largesse, Liz decided to knock up a ciabatta bread to eat it on. Neither of us appreciated how sloppy is ciabatta dough and how it spreads out sideways during the rise. The 'knock down' phase prior to the 2nd proving was more a case of trying to pull it all back into one lump but in the end it went into the oven like that and came out as easily the biggest ciabatta either of us had seen. Perhaps we will divide the dough into three or even four 'loaves' next time.

This ciabatta was easily 14 inches square.
That is the oven-tray it is cosily resting in.

No matter, it just got quartered and the 4 portions will get used up via fridges or freezer as appropriate. It was delicious, especially with the honey for breakfast. It has that lovely 'big air-holes' mouth feel, a bit like crumpets.

With the honey all extracted, Liz has rounded up all the 'cakes' of spent wax with a view to washing them clean, melting and re-cooling the whole into an 'ingot' and then trying out some warm jam-jar alchemy involving coconut oil (4 parts to one part of beeswax, we are advised) to make furniture polish. I will let you know how we get on.

Brine cured pork leg joint

Our attempt to brine-cure some bacon did not go quite as well according to plan. Liz cooked it with an old favourite (Delia, I think) recipe in which the joint is slow boiled in Coca-Cola. Sounds horrific but works surprisingly well. Normally, that is. This time, though, it was superbly tender and was very edible but was possibly a tad salty, probably at our salty limit. We think that this is because although the brine cure worked well, I did not have any specific instructions for "3 inch thick round of leg" so I went with ten days in the brine, but then we got all distracted by Liz coming home, then not, then yes, and it did not get rescued till it had been soaking 14 days. Liz soaked it overnight in water but then did not do the boil, water change, boil, water change again thing as she was using the Coca Cola.

A late frost on Saturday night tries
 to catch us out

All is not lost, though. That joint will be converted into bacon'n'bean soup/stew (with no need to add salt!) and the other two joints will be soaked when they come to be used and get cooked through several changes of water. You live and learn. Any future joints will be brined for fewer days, possibly as few as 3-5. We do not need the salt as preservative, after all, as these 'bacon' joints go into the freezer. The brining is more to give us a change to 'bacon/gammon' from straight pork.

Rather white for the end of April.

A rather brutal change in the weather tries to catch us out as we get frosts, cold winds and lashing rain with gritty bits in it; proper wintry showers. It was all forecast accurately by the superb Met Éireann team, of course, which gave us a chance to go and cover up the sensitive stuff, mainly asparagus shoots, and it is too early to hit much in the way of 'set' fruit blossom (only the plum and damson seems to have got that far yet). It did hit some new emerging leaves on my poor 'baby trees' though, some sweet chestnut which has barely topped grass height yet looks badly 'scorched'. I hope it has the reserves to put out some replacement leaves.

This gap will be Goldie and Nugget's new run.

The bad weather rather pins us down for outdoor work but this week I do not mind. I am creating a new run for our giant rabbits, Goldie and Nugget in the 'gap' behind the yard wall and the sheep fence. This needs a 'bedroom' so I am back in carpenter mode building a sleeping house for the ladies which I can do in the (now) turkey house out of the wind. The chosen patch of ground is a nice lumpy-bumpy piece of rough grass into which a variety of mud, old cow poo and stone was tossed 3 years ago when the mini digger cleared our yard. We are hoping that the banks and dips will give Nugget enough to aim her well developed digging instinct at without her needing to tunnel out. She can build a nice safe warren under there away from Mr Fox if she needs to with a 'Mummy annex' for Goldie in her autumn years. There is also a wealth of good grass in there and taller stuff which will benefit from a bit of lagomorphic management. Finally one little minor hiccup in the Hubbard dept, as one of the 12 dies while we are out shopping. We have no idea why, you normally don't. Little birds go from quite happy and healthy looking one minute, to dead and cold next time you look without pausing at 'ill'. The remaining 11 all seem happy enough and are eating plenty and putting on lots of weight. More pics of them soon.

A Taste of Honey

Now, there's taste in Birthday presents,
a straw skep.  

With Liz having been away on the actual date of my Birthday, she proposed that I should have a second "Official" birthday on the next available day so that I could catch up on the missing presents and coffee in bed and the special meal. We decided on Saturday (25th) and I had a lovely day being spoiled. The presents had a decidedly bee-keeping flavour and included the lovely straw 'skep' in the pic. Every home should have one, don't you agree? These were the actual hives back in the days before modern wooden hives were designed but had the disadvantage that you could not remove the honey on portable frames like we can now, so the colony had to be destroyed at harvest time to get the honey out.

Nowadays, we do not willingly destroy our bee colonies,and the skeps are used as swarm-catching baskets; they are much better than cardboard boxes or other containers because the bees can cling to the inside and hang on in there while you move them about. I also think they are beautiful artifacts so I have wanted one since we had bees, even though I am not at all sure I will ever get the chance to use it in anger.

Beef Wellington. Happy Birthday to me!

The meal was a treat, which we served on our best table linen ( a gift from Montenegro via 'Steak Lady'; thanks SL). Liz did a starter of langoustines and the main course was a Beef Wellington of rare scrumptiousness; the 'duxelle' mix round the meat was mushroom, onions and bacon. Dessert was a splendid blackberry Pavlova. For most of my life I have not been a fan of meringue because, as far as I knew, merignue was always impossibly sweet and like spooning crunchy sugar into your mouth. I do not have that kind of a 'sweet tooth'. If we were served lemon meringue pie I would try to sneak the meringue layer across to Liz.

Blackberry Pavlova

I am now converted. Meringue from Liz here is made with our real eggs as well as way less sugar, and is slightly soft and yielding rather than brittle. The fruit, too, is always done nice and naturally, with hardly any sugar added. In this case these were blackberries picked by us from John Deere Bob's field hedgerows and the mild un-enhanced flavour was beautifully evocative of the summer sun on picking day and the taste of the blackberries you always sneak as you walk round with the bucket, picking them. One for the bucket, one for me? No, not quite. We picked 5 kg each that day - we'd have been sick of them.

Fillet steak.

We lubricated the starter and dessert with chilled rosé and had a more meaty Rioja for the main course - a lovely 'Gran Reserva' grade Batturica (Tarragona) 2007 bottle from the amazingly good vintner, Lidl's supermarket (!) yours for just €7.99. The steak, too had been a good find - from our local favourite butcher (who is also our lamb slaughterman/butcher), Ignatius G Victualler. He had cut it out especially for us and kept it for us. Very reasonable in price, too.

Liz slices the cappings off a frame of
honey comb. 

Before I give the 'rescue package' bee hive back to our benefactor in Longford, I have to clean it and re-populate it with new frames and foundation, so we needed to 'dispose' of the used frames and sort out what to keep. You will know from earlier posts that some of these frames were full of honey, so we decided to have a go at extracting this. Bee keepers normally do this during mid/late summer after each 'honey flow' (i.e. at the end of the oilseed rape flowering season, or after the clover, or fruit blossom or heather), and do it with a gentle 'centrifuge' machine. The frames fit into the rotor of the machine and you spin the honey off them after slicing off the crinkly white wax cappings.

The mess of honey and wax sits in the muslin. The potential
for creating sticky mess is awesome. 

We have no such machine so we had to try letting the honey run out down through a muslin sheet, helped by gentle warmth from a double-boiler arrangement sitting on our range. Some of the honey comb was liquid enough (what they call "run honey"), presumably from blackberry blossom or other flowers. Some though was hard crystallized (granulated) so was probably ivy honey and was only going to drip through if it was warmed up. You have to do this very gently (roughly blood heat and a bit). Do not go anywhere near 60ºC or the wax will also start to melt and the honey will lose a lot of its flavour. Much of honey flavour is from bases, salts, amino acids, proteins and volatiles in it, as well as pollen so the more you mess it about, the more the quality goes down. You must also not use steam or damp-heat as honey is hygroscopic and takes up water easily from the surroundings. If it can stay at only 17% moisture it will keep for ever, but if the moisture content rises to 20% it can start to ferment, trying to turn itself into mead and developing bad 'off flavours'.

Double boiler set up on the range. 

Anyway, to cut a long story short this all worked and when we were satisfied that it would bimble gently through the night at not much more than blood heat, we left it to dribble and by morning we had a nice load of honey in the pan under the collander  which we were able to decant into a couple of jars in the morning. The 'dip a finger in' test told us that it was a bit special and certainly tasted a whole lot better than the commercial honey on our kitchen shelf. Liz promptly cooked up some toast and we had toast and honey for breakfast. We don't generally eat a lot of honey here (maybe 3 jars a year?) but we may do now that we have some proper stuff. Anne and Simon, who turned up later in the day also tried it and were impressed.

Generally speaking we are not about a huge production of honey. We like the bees for the 'wildlife gardening' reasons and to help with pollination locally. We never anticipated extracting much crop, preferring to leave the bees with it to help them through the winter. That is why, after all, the bees make and store honey - their survival through winter is at stake. We were going to ensure that the bees had enough (30 to 40 lbs per hive) and only steal a frame or two if these were excess to that. Only our hive failure led us to this happy coincidence and this lovely stash. Every cloud, we suppose, has a silver lining.

There are a few bubbles in it but our first honey is a lovely
pale colour and truly delicious. 

With all the honey extracted from the honey/wax mess, we now have the option of trying to recover the beeswax which Liz fancies turning into furniture polish or 'lotions and potions'. After however many seasons in the hive being trampled over by thousands of dirty, outdoor, bee feet, the wax can come off the 'extractor' dark brown or almost black but now we are not so worried about heat, so the wax is melted in the company of hot water so that it washes as well as going liquid and then you leave the whole to settle and cool. In theory you get a disc of clean. re-solidified wax 'floating' on your cooled down water, which you can then use in the alchemy to follow. I will let you know how this bit goes when we have processed a few more frames. Honey comb is so fine and delicately built that you do not get much wax out for each pound of honey; typically 1/8 as much.

We are having fun and learning all the time. The jars you see in these pics are from our first frame of honey. Since then we have started a bigger batch using 2 more frames. I don't think there is any chance of us going into commercial production but it will be nice to give a few jars away to friends. I was always amused by thoughts of what we would call the brand - honey is famously good to buy locally because there is a firm belief that eating local honey helps guard against allergies to local pollen, hay fever and so on. I wondered if we'd get away with using "Bees@Feigh", Feigh being the local 'townland'. However, the rhyme with 'bee' only works if you are an ignorant Brit, like me, and think it is pronounced 'fee'. It is not. It is another one of those 'Anglicised' Irish words (for deer), translittorated by the British military and map makers when they were 'in charge'. It is actually pronounced  'Fi' like the word 'fit' without the 't'; it is a very difficult word for Brits to say as we expect either a long vowel or a consonant. Bees@Feigh would just confuse everyone and might even put off the locals who you'd be hoping were your customers.

Rhubarb pie with a polenta crust.

The other mildly amusing aspect of this job is the HUGE potential for making a sticky mess. The honey can drip and then get on everything and the wax will happily re-solidify out of your washing up water as soon as it leaves the kitchen and cools down in the waste pipes en route to the sewer. We end up being oh so careful with the honey and keeping a pan JUST for the wax which will never get used for anything else. Well, we do if we want to see another Birthday, anyway!

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.

Trou Normand

Mussels fresh from Howth Harbour that morning.

Let's hear it for the 'Trou Normand', the 'Norman Hole', that deliberate gap between courses in the huge meals of Normandy which give you and your appetite a chance to recover. We discovered this excellent idea while on holiday years ago in our first 2CV doing a run round the WW2 Normandy Landings sites. You over indulge on courses 1,2,3,4 etc and then to avoid you actually bursting, you can retreat from the meal table for a sit in the easy chairs before saying 'Once more unto the breach' to tackle courses 5,6,7 and so on. We don't often eat as much as that but yesterday was an exception; we seem to be guilty of having over catered.

Three by 400 g sirloins.

This was to be our celebration meal with Sparks after 2 years living in the house. Sparks had volunteered to bring the starter, some fresh mussels from Howth Harbour collected that morning and brought down in his in-car electric chiller box. What we didn't account for was that he took a look at the 1 kg net and decided we might need 2. Liz had already been out shopping for steak and had done a similar thing with Lidl's 400 g Sirloins; shall I get 2 or three? Sparks had also been a bit later arriving than intended, so that we had had the lunch (home made bread and home made paté) only 5 hours earlier.

"Flump's Almost Flourless Chocolate Cake" to be
eaten with ice cream and ginger syrup.

The mussels were eaten with a lovely white-wine based sauce with tomatoes, celery, courgette, red onion and thyme. The steaks came with our own chestnut mushrooms from the poly-tunnel, plus oven chips and corn on the cob. None of us actually managed to complete the steak, so we have rather luxurious left overs today Next was the Trou Normand, then a house favourite known as "Flump's Almost Flourless Chocolate Cake" (Flump being the nickname of a chum of Liz's) which was lubricated on its way with ice cream and ginger syrup. We were done. We adjourned to the real fire in the Living Room for a good old sit down, chin-wag, reminisce, remembering all the buildering adventures and happening since and from way back. I don't think you can beat good food, nice wine and excellent company. We have sent Sparks on his way this morning well rested and after a light breakfast of bagel, scrambled eggs and bacon, though he was woken at 06:00 by one of the roosters kicking off. They do that.

Meanwhile, back on the 'farm', Goldie the Rabbit has now kindled, giving birth to her kittens overnight Monday. All we see for now are the puffs of plucked out belly fur on the grass of the run, which clue you in to take a peek into the 'bedroom' and there, sure enough is a bigger nest of the fur in among the hay. If you are lucky you may see the fur move as a result of tiny wriggling within and you will know that there is at least one naked pink blind baby in the nest. You must not touch yet or poke an exploratory finger in, as there is a risk that the mother rabbit, upset by the smell would kill and eat the babies. You must wait a week or preferably two by which time the bunnies are furred and probably visible having trampled enough of the fur nest down that there is no longer a furry 'roof'. During this time the Mum will pretty much leave the babies to it and spend 99% of her time out in the grassy run. She only nips in now again to suckle the youngsters and then quickly comes back out again.

Horse Chestnut from a 'conker' gathered
from by Cambria's Gravesend Moorings in 2012

We have now completed the 'Bee School' with our 6th training session on Monday, basically a session of Exam Revision which also included a visit by the Two Marys who came with a van load of hive bits, smokers, bee-keeper suits and honey frame parts for the members to buy. Liz had prepared for this a complete list of all the questions asked in both the 'Head Office' (Gormanston*) and the 'Provincial' rounds of exams over the last 3 years, so we were able to chug through those and nail down any subjects where any student was uncertain. Although bee keeping can be a complicated craft, ours are only the Preliminary (=Beginners') level exams, so we hope that we can cope with these basics on the day.
*The only difference between these two papers is in the questions which ask what plants the bees are currently foraging "in your area".

Sunniest seat in the house.

The exam is made up of the 25 questions 'written' paper, but also a practical session out at the apiary where the examiner will ask you to name parts of the hive. open the hive, lift out a frame, identify the various types of cells in the 'honey-comb', find the Queen and so on. We hope we will do OK and both receive our certificates. We are, anyway, both really looking forward to finally getting our bees in June (we hope) so we can do it all for real.

Sweet Chestnut from a Christmas 'nut'.

Other than that we are just enjoying the unseasonable burst of weather hot enough to weed in wearing shirtsleeves and to walk the dogs without coat or hat. All the squishy mud and the puddles are history now. The horses kick up dust as they run to the gate to meet us, instead of slithering about in the slop. I can wear crocks again instead of the wellies. We can kneel on the grass to peer into the pond without getting sopping wet knees. Surely summer can not be far away.

Cherry blossom.

6 Cents a Kilo

Basic white icing layer goes onto the cake

€0.06 a kilo! That is the ridiculously low price at which our most-used supermarket, Lidl's is currently selling carrots as a Christmas promo. They are obviously moving a good few too, and the sales 'gondola' is backed up by an 8 foot tall pallet of new trays sitting still on its jack-truck ready to re-stock the position as the stock is snatched up and the empty boxes tossed aside.

Making pastry.

Now, these 'loss-leaders' are nothing new. The technique of putting highly visible, fast moving 'staples' out at prices lower than cost has been in the retailers' armoury since well before anyone had heard of Lidl. It is common knowledge that this attracts in the 'footfall' and there is enough margin on everything else that the supermarket still makes a tidy profit across your whole basket. The marketing boys do occasionally get it wrong; Tesco famously added so many loyalty points to bananas, that people were buying them by the pallet and giving them away in the car park outside

The problem here is that Lidl have chosen to do it with an obvious farm produce line in a rural area. There is already enough flak coming in quite rightly from farmers for the well known squeeze being put onto farm gate prices on produce such as milk and meat which is forcing many farmers out of business. This is wrapped around further with the habit of the supermarkets for moving the goalposts after the contract is signed and the crop is in the field, or the animals half grown; they add 'marketing subsidies' and demands for the grower to help out on promotions by dropping the price still further. Then there is all the stuff around food waste - supermarkets are well known for demanding the correct size and shape of carrot and taking only 2/3 or less of the grown crop (sometimes none of it!).

Now, I am not suggesting that Lidl will have dropped the price to the growers of carrots, sprouts and so on, to 4 cents a kilo but that is the smell it gives off, and there have been howls of anguish from farmers and growers who are a big industry here and the social media networks like Facebook have seen a bit of this. People who know me will probably also know that I have no moral high ground to stand on, here, having been, for 29 years in working life, a part of the super-marketing industry. In my case it was Sainsbury, where I worked in chilled food depots and distribution, so you could certainly accuse me of working hard to promote this kind of behaviour and spending all day trying to make my supermarket ever more successful.

We also shop regularly in supermarkets, so we felt both sad and guilty when our much-loved local Indian cookery ingredients shop, Hidiyat's, went to the wall last month, throwing in the towel having been undercut by their local supermarket, SuperValu. The Balla-D branch of SuperValu has steadily been increasing its range of Indian ingredients and selling all of them cheaper than Hidiyat's. Again, this is nothing new and all over the UK town centres have been stripped of their small business shops as the big boys have swallowed up their customers. We're just a little behind 'over here' and the towns do not have the really big boys (there is no real Tesco presence and no Sainsburys out here). Plenty of small businesses cling on, even through the recession. SuperValu manage to keep it a bit local, maintaining ranges of local produce such as cheeses and bacon rather than having it all in Central Distribution. There is no equivalent in Ireland of the 500,000 square foot 'Fulfillment Factory' Distribution Centres run by Sainsbury's round the M25. Ireland does not have the population to support them.

Anyway, 6 cents a kilo was a silly enough price that we grabbed up 4 bags for the feeding of rabbits over Christmas, and maybe a bit of Christmas dinner for Cody the horse. It is cheaper than any rolled barley, oats or 'meusli' you'd buy for them in a feed merchant. It would be good at that price, to be feeding the pigs on carrots! To be fair we then bought a €2 bag at the next shop of old tired carrots and parsnips past their sell by date in what Liz and Diamond would call the "Salmonella Corner" (the discounted racks) so we have done our bit there to reduce food waste.

Chestnut Mushrooms grow for free in the Polytunnel

You will have noticed that I have been waffling on for 6 paragraphs about carrots, but all my pics today are from today's Christmas Cookery operations, nothing to do with carrots. Liz has been on the mince pies, this time with homemade shortcrust pastry. The 'Jusrol' brand 'puff' which got used last time proved to be too puffy. I have had a first go at marzipan-ing and icing a cake and I am quite pleased with the results.

Sharp eyed readers may note that this is a 'Happy Hogswatch' cake, not actually a Christmas Cake. Hogswatch, for the uninitiated is the spoof version of Christmas which appears in the Terry Pratchett 'Discworld' series of books but if you need to know any more about that, then I'd ask you to go look it up. TP is a writer who both of us and all of the Silverwoods follow, and as it is likely that we, collectively, are the only people likely to see or eat this cake........

The mushrooms are a goody crop of chestnut mushrooms now coming out of the 'spent' mushroom compost in the poly-tunnel. I gave it all a good water and then closed the door on it and in this mild weather, it is keeping good and warm in there. The only problem I have is that the bales of compost we brought back, I found it easiest to invert them onto the ground to tip the contents out and pull off the plastic wrap 'tray', so the wads have gone down upside down. The mushroom fruiting bodies do not seem to be able to cope with this and are growing downwards, so you only see the crop to harvest, when the base of the mushroom pushes up the substrate enough to break it. Finally a nice pair of Panda slippers which Liz spotted while out shopping for presents in Carrick.

That is probably my lot pre Christmas, so I will sign off but first, wish all my readers the best possible time over the break and a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Happy Christmas, or possibly Hogswatch. Look after yourselves.