403 Points! Go Jorja!

Niece Jorja at her 'Debs' just before hearing her
'Leaving Cert' results. Looking good J-M!

Yes. Even before I mention our success in finishing "that shed" or the recent change in the weather that made us all delighted that we had, I must congratulate #2 Irish Niece, long term Friend of the Blog, Jorja on nailing the Leaving Cert exams (Brits think "A" Levels). Although the Exam Board tell you the breakdown of your result by subject (As, Bs etc) what everyone is interested in is THE POINTS - that is what gets you into the University, College, onto your course or into job that you seek. Jorja scored 403 which is a) brilliant and b) easily enough for her to proceed on her chosen path, so well done Jorja - formerly known in this blog as J-M.

Rudbeckia

So, all growed up now, a responsible adult, though to me she will always be the little swaddled up bundle that got handed to me in Maidstone Hospital, her tiny arms wrapped around close to her body like a straight-jacket. No-one else could stop the little mite from crying but when I took her she seemed to like the bass-y voice or something and went off to sleep like a light-switch being turned off. Elizabeth and the new Mum (Mrs Silverwood) could sneak off for some 'fresh air' knowing she was in safe hands.

The first new 'tin' going on on the yard-side (front) of the shed.

Meanwhile in Roscommon, we got a brilliant result too, in finishing our chicken house roof. K-Dub rocked up nice and early and we gave it the whole day round to about 4 pm. We had the purlins to fit (horizontal stringers which pick up the screws coming through the tin) and then 30 sheets of the 'tin' (corrugated iron) plus 2 transparent plastic ones recycled from the roof before. The tin itself was recycled anyway, having been carefully lifted from K-Dub's house roof in Sligo, when we did the rebuild/new roof on that a couple of years back (well covered in this blog); a very generous donation.

The back of the building. You can see the new front.

The gifted sheets of tin dictated to us where our middle purlin would go because the sheets already had the central screw-holes in them and it was better to re-use those holes than cut new ones and leave the roof leaking and in need of something to seal the old holes. They were also about a foot too long but we had a nifty solution once they were all on, garden string and a 'Sharpie' marker to create a line, then a thin disk angle grinder to create a neat 'fringe' that lined up with the bottoms of the transparent sheets. It worked well.

With all the sheets on, K-dub went aloft once more, 'riding' the new roof like a horse, while he pressed down and then screwed home our upside down 'V' section ridge pieces. The east end of the roof received two more of these 'ridge' pieces to make a capping wrapped round onto the gable end to stop any 'Beast from the East' winds getting in under the roof. The west end would get its tin tucked in under a re-instatement of the concrete "barge" capping. With those dark-painted ridge bits on, framing the whole thing and the tin trimmed to length it all looked very neat.

Trimmed, end-capped and ridged it all looks very neat

With the outside all complete, time to go inside and re-instate the electrics. I was delighted with the look of the place inside. All the wood is brand new and pale in colour and the underside of the tin is shiny 'galvanised' grey or silver instead of rusty red. Also, with the tarps now off, light streams in through the transparent plastic panels. I will barely need my electric lights!

Lovely new looking interior.

We have just one little de-snag to do. The metal "bent straps" which do a belt'n'braces job holding your wall plates down to the walls (so the whole roof cannot lift off in one piece) need fixing to the stone walls by screws/plugs drilled into the hard stones (some kind of very hard sandstone). K-Dub has a drill for this but had not bought the right kind of bits, so he will come back next week and finish this little job off. There we have it. A new roof. Time to adjourn indoors for a cup of tea and a chat. I am delighted with it. Huge thanks to K-Dub and Elizabeth for the massive effort.

Almost Biblical rain tests the new roof.

Just a quick follow-up on this story and some more thanks to give out. My friends from archery, Niamh and Con plus their current "Wwoof-er" (volunteer labour like our Help-X people, but from the "World-Wide Organization of Organic Farmers" (hence WWOOF)), Stefan. These good folk had planned a day of taking Con to nearby airfield for a Birthday Present light aircraft flight round Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick, or "The Reek". Con and Niamh are mad into the pre-Christian / Druidic history of Ireland and The Reek is positively peppered with ancient sites, cairns and so on.

A friend in the village has a new Grand-child. The Knitter of
this House is joining the baby clothes and layette knitting
effort.

However, pretty much as we finished our roof, the weather took a turn for the worse and we have, we are told, another 'named storm' (Ernesto) coming through this weekend. The wind and rain in front of this storm grounded Con's pilot leaving Niamh and Stefan with a free afternoon. Knowing that my Help-X lad had blown out, Niamh decided to come here with her 'Wwoofer' and do us an hour's work. This was very generous, unnecessary and very welcome - we had the new roof up but the old roof scattered about in various piles of rusty tin, concrete, manky wood, nails, tarpaulins, tyres, string and wire. They all needed tidying off the yard so that was the job I gave N+S, with Elizabeth piling in to help. In a fast-moving hour we had the yard back. Thank you very much, all three.

Erigeron, now finally established in our gravel (we hope)

Which only leaves me with two bits of farm news and a quick 'health' update. Firstly, this back end (of week) was the most likely time for our AWOL Guinea-hen to complete her brooding and hatch out any keets out there in the hedges. We wondered whether she might walk them home all romantically like a little 'crocodile' of school children. No such fairy-tale ending so far. We just have the three 'boys' doing their fox-watch alarms and occasionally obsessing about a patch of East Field where 'she' might be. As time goes by, I guess we will have to accept that maybe Brer Fox intervened and this story did not end well.

Soldier has gone AWOL

New to the AWOL list, our black and white (rescue) cat, Soldier, seems to have gone missing. He has always been an outdoor boy and does not very much enjoy being grumped at by big floofy cat 'Blue', so he may have gone to live somewhere where he is more 'welcome'. We have no reason to think he is dead, he just has not been home for a couple of days. We will keep you posted.

Hen and chicks in the orchard.

So, last but not least, my good self. I am still moseying along in my 'probationary' period, 4 weeks back out of the hospital, sticking to the liquid intake limits and taking the meds, seeing if I can stabilize. This with a review clinic at Sligo hospital set for the 4 weeks when I get reviewed by my 2 consultants, with possible decisions being made about the heart valve replacement surgery. It's going OK but I think I am slowly congesting up again. I am sneaking a bit of that weight back on, my ankles are starting to swell again and most of my nights are interrupted by 'productive' ticklish coughing. We will find out the response to all this on my clinic dates, which have now been advised to me. Wish us luck.

All Growed Up?

We do not claim to be experts in Meteorology but we are reasonably knowledge-able (A level in Geography, Environmental Science as part of the degree, that kind of thing) and we are sure that we had around 3 inches of rain over Saturday night into Sunday morning. This would be quite amazing and I am sure I would think "pull the other one" if it was only being told to me by a "bloke in the pub". I remember that rain guages are all a standard shape and size, with known diameter, knife-sharp horizontal rim, placed out dead-level in an uninterupted air-flow and so on. Well, we don't have that but I did have a vertical-sided bucket which I am 99% sure was empty the day before, and accumulated a good 3 inches of rain overnight. My second witness would be the all night roar and hiss of rain on roofs and windows. My third the huge puddles all around the place on Sunday on what had been only damp ground and I would also draw your attention (M'Lud) to the River Lung under Feigh Bridge being higher than I have even seen it and Lough Feigh being fuller. Under the bridge a large diameter pipe drains water into the river from fields on the west bank and is normally a good 6 feet above the water so that water falls in quite an impressive 'force'. I have seen on previous wet spells, the water half way up this pipe but yesterday (Monday) it was over-topped. Finally in Met Éireann data, Knock Airport had 37 mm on the Saturday, up to midnight and I can easily believe that another 38 mm fell after that (data not yet published - perhaps they are double checking their figures too!)

A first tiny egg from 'OneChick'?

Meanwhile, back with the poultry, all hunkered down in the buildings out of this rain (and me hunkered down playing on t'internet) we think we have had a first egg from 'OneChick'. OneChick was hatched in late May by one of the Buffs in the Tígín, so she is only 3 months old; a bit young to be laying eggs but if not her, then we don't know where this came from. There has only been the one so far, so maybe she is just practicing being a grown up.

OneChick at 3 months.

Actually, we are a little confused by her parentage and as she grows up and starts to look like an adult bird, we are no longer so certain she is purebred Buff Orpington, which had been our first guess. She is losing her Buff-Orp shape and getting a bit longer legged and necked. Also she has a few dark feathers in her wings and one or two dark tail feathers, which I do not think Buffs are "allowed". She also has a dark 'cere'; the flesh where the nostrils come out, above the base of the beak. None of our pure Buffs have that. Her father will definitely be a Buff as these are the only roosters we currently have, but if biological Mum is not a Buff, she might have been either of 2 other red-ish 'breeds' we have. We have the red Hubbard, 'Miss Scarlett' still laying. We also have a couple of hybrids which we call the 'Mini-Buffs'. They were bought as Buff eggs but proved when hatched and grown to be smaller and short-legged like some kind of bantam as well as having dark feathers in the tail and cape, as per Sussex hens. Ah well, she is a delightful little thing and if she proves to be a reliable layer, she is welcome here.

Part of the last joint of the 2014 lamb meat, a leg coated in herby
bread-crumbs and then slow roasted at 100ºC for 6 hours.

Hot on OneChick's heel in the growing up race, come the Two Chicks hatched by the Buff under the elderberry bush. These two are now two months old, fully feathered but not very independent. Up till last night they had all crowded into the little space in the Tígín at night, where OneChick was hatched. Then last night at lock up I found the pair wandering in the yard, cheeping in a confused manner, but with no Mum in attendance. I eventually found her in the grown-ups coop happily settling down to roost with her 'sisters'. She had apparently decided to move house without telling the youngsters or they had not been listening. I had to shepherd them gently into the coop where they continued to cheep on the floor as if seeking permission to sleep in this strange adult world. I checked them a few minutes later and they had worked it out. They were up with the Mums and Aunts on the perching ladder. Poor sweet little mites.

Em-J in the Debs dress

Talking of growing up, another 'Proud Uncle' post - the niece and God-Daughter, Em-J who featured in a recent post as getting good results in her Leaving Cert exams is tonight making that modern Rite of Passage claimed by all young Irish ladies, the 'Debs' (Debutantes' Ball). Best bib and tucker for the lads, glad-rags, hand-bags and the best jewellery for the lasses, with Mums, Grans, Aunts and assorted family friends all converging on the place to help get the Deb ready and to see her off to the posh 'Reception' at 4 pm. Liz has hot-footed it down to Silverwoods to be part of this and to spend the night celebrating at the homestead with the Silverwood parents. She has promised to take some pics and ping them up here via the miracle of the Internet, so I promise in my turn to edit them into this post as soon as I get them.

I am unable to attend (though sure I'd LOVE to spend several hours in female 'getting ready' mode!) because I have 2 other 'growing ups' to worry about - our piggies Mary and Isabelle are now 'ready' and booked off on their final journey Thursday morning. Our experience tells us that the best way to persuade pigs to climb up an unfamiliar wooden ramp into a trailer is to start 3 days earlier, giving them their breakfasts and suppers up there. They soon learn that the trailer is 'safe' and full of food so that, on Thursday morning we can load them quietly and calmly with nobody getting stressed out. That is the intention - in an ideal world the pigs get right up to the slaughter-man's stun-gun (or humane killer) without a Scooby-Doo that they are in danger.

A Pig in a Poke.

An excellent list of As, Bs and Cs
gets Em-J a handsome 425 points.

This blog has now been running for so long that our dear niece, Em-J, who first appears as a lock-gate wrangler on our 2007 narrowboat holiday aged just 9, has now moved all through 'big school' and come out the other end as one of the tens of thousands of students getting their 'Leaving Cert' results this week. For my UK readers, Leaving Cert is equivalent to 'A' Levels although thought to be slightly higher by many UK Universities. The exam takers take up to 9 subjects and the Cs, Bs and As all contribute points to the final score. These points mean you will either get accepted by the colleges and Uni's or not. We are very proud of both the 'victims' we have anything to do with (Em-J and one of Liz's students, Tilly) who both came out with superb results and enough points to get to Uni (all be it Tilly is actually moving back to the UK and had applied to Gloucester Uni.). UK readers may also be interested to know that these courses and exams are standard across the whole country - all the students sit exactly the same exams on the same days and time, papers are marked nationally too and results come out all from one database and website. Anyway, well done Em-J and Tilly. We are very proud of you.

Piglet pyramid. There are 12 here. 

An amusing distraction and adventure came our way on Wednesday this week when we were asked to help "catch 9 piglets". These babies belong to our friends Rob and Sue and had found themselves born into a pig ark in a big grass field instead of a barn where they had been intended to be born. Worse, the nice new grass field the parent pigs had been moved to just before farrowing had become a victim of the heavy rain through July and August and was a quagmire of 4-6 inch deep mud, too squelchy to run through in wellies.

The author releasing one bagged piggy in the barn

Total pig-ignorami may appreciate the following study notes.

• 5 week old piglets squeal and scream like mad if you upset them by trying to lift them up or take them away from Mum. They make a ferocious racket!
• They are the size of a Westie (dog) and weigh about the same, maybe 7-8 kg? 
• The normal method is to grab them by one or both back legs and let them hang head-down, which makes them go quiet. 
• Piglet legs taper fiercely down from ham, through shank-end and hock to trotter and there are no nice knobbly heels or joints to get a grip on so if the pig's leg is muddy it will slip through your hands like a sausage coming out of a hot dog. 
• Fortunately, 5 week old piglets are quite narrow at the pelvis and if you have big hands you can grab a chunk of back end which is cleaner, and lift the piglet like that.
• If you are on your own and dive into the ark to grab a piglet, you may catch one but the remaining piggies will scatter to the 4 winds in panic, out of the ark door and into the field where, trust me, you are not going to catch them. 
• Full grown sows and especially boars are over 100 kg and can easily knock you flying and make a serious mess of your good looks if they attack you. They can also run much faster than a wellie-clad person across a muddy field. 
• Parent pigs, especially sows do not like you interfering with their babies and making them squeal. They will surely come over to investigate even if they decide you are not actually murdering their offspring.
• On the other hand they are also hungry, greedy animals and if they realise that by investigating the squeals, they might be losing out in the food being handed to their colleagues at the other end of the field, they will probably say "Oh... alright then" and trot back to the shouting food-deliverer. 

Safe, warm and dry in the new quarters. 

You may by now have started to get a picture of the fun we had. Rob had tried to catch them on the Tuesday but he was working solo, so he had only managed 2 before his already injured leg cried 'Enough!' running through the mud. Grown up Grandson Lewis had grabbed a third. There were 9 for us to catch, but on Wednesday, we were going at it mob-handed - 5 humans. Rob went off to the top of the field armed with copious amounts of food in a rattly bucket, to distract the grown ups. Liz and Sue were armed with many feed sacks and cable ties plus straw to lay on the mud to make a bit of a path. I had a big mesh frame to use as a gate for the ark and Lewis had the job of going into the ark to catch and bag piglets. I stood outside the ark with the gate wedged against the opening with my foot to stop barrelling piglets from charging out when they realised what Lewis had in store for them. 

Liz's normally clean and precious pink Hunters do not look
quite so pristine now!

In the event, the plan worked and Lewis was able to catch and bag all 9 piglets one by one. Once the piglets were cable-tied into their bags they went quiet and only wriggled, trying to get to their feet when all visual clues had vanished, which was a mercy as the sow then ignored them and just looked baffled. One piggy did escape past my gate but kept circling back to try to be with its siblings inside the ark, so I got a chance to lift him back in. Periodically Lewis would pause to hold the gate while I marched bags across to the ladies, who would then ferry these wriggling bags to the barn and release the captives. One of the sows did get a bit upset by the squealing and come look, but she seemed to relax when she could see the babies through our gate. She made one lunge-attack at Sue's hand but never tried anything with me and never even tried to nudge my legs. We just paused to let the squealing subside and everything to calm down and the sow would trot back over to Rob, till the next set of lifts and squeals. 

Liz took this superb pic of 'our' sparrowhawk.

We had arrived at 11:30 and had a cup of tea before we started, and we had them all rounded up and another tea plus a slice of cake by 1 pm. A good and enjoyable mission, which I know Rob and Sue much appreciated our help in. Great teamwork. 

Wrapped around that job I am now also helping JD Bob with his cattle. The old boy has slipped on the foot-steps trying to get down from his tractor and badly barked and bruised his shin, so he is hobbling around like an 'aul' wan'. Forking silage and throwing 25 kg sacks of cattle feed around are a bit beyond him so we are helping out. I love cattle anyway and until I came here I had only had to do with dairy animals. It is nice to get some experience of these big, beefy, 2 year old Charolais and Limousin bullocks

This female sparrowhawk stands helpless to move her badly
broken left wing. 

Then on Wednesday evening at 7:30 pm an experience which was at once a once-in-a-lifetime thrill AND an upsetting horrible tragedy. The thump on the kitchen window set the dogs barking and told us of another bird-strike but we get a few of these and they are normally chaffinches or sparrows which seem to bounce off OK and you rarely find them injured on the ground. This, though was a magnificent female sparrowhawk. Sadly, we quickly saw that she had smashed one wing, compound fracture with blooded bone ends sticking out through broken skin. She was not defeated, though and would happily have raked my hands with those razor-sharp talons while lying on her back and had a go with the beak. We needed to drop an opaque cloth over her and I put on my chainsaw gloves just to try to pick her up and get a look at the injury. Tom the turkey did not help - he took exception to the bird-of-prey screams and the fact that every chicken in the place was clucking loudly and anxiously, and charged over intent on stomping her to death. Liz fended him off while I rescued the hawk.

As far as we know there is no vet round here who even knows about birds (chickens), never mind a specialist wildlife rescue centre who could help fix this fine-tuned thoroughbred. It can only have been agony for her everytime she 'bated' and flapped in a panic, to have the whole wing grating against her shattered humerus. There was only going to be one outcome to this. Although I hated having to do it to such a beautiful, beautiful bird, the only sparrowhawk I have ever got this close to, we took  few pictures and then ended it for her. I apologise if I have upset anyone with this. 

Baby turkey in the sick bay.

This morning we woke up to a sick young turkey, a patient for the sick bay. When she did not emerge from the shed pleading for breakfast, I went in a found her standing on the floor looking pathetic and with a badly swollen and blooded side to the head just behind her eye. The swelling was almost closing the eye. We have no idea how she got injured (kicked aside by Tom in his heroics last night? It might even have been the sparrowhawk having a go before it hit the window) but all you can really do in these circumstances is give them quiet, warmth, food and water (plus cod liver oil if you choose) and pray that they might recover. Some do. Some just mope around for a while and then you find them stiff and dead. This little one has hung in there all day and is still alive at the time I write. We have put the 'electric hen' (warming plate) in her crate as a substitute 'cuddle' with her gang.

...And then there were the Perseid meteors. Unusually we had lovely clear skies last night so we could already see a gazillion stars including the broad sweep of the Milky Way overhead. We had gone out to gaze upwards at around 11 pm and were quickly able to see the streaks of the meteors running through from roughly NE to the East. I tried to take a few pics with my 'posh' camera but although I took over 2 dozen long-exposure pics, I never managed to have the camera open when a meteor whizzed through. They either just beat my shutter release, or they waited till the shutter clicked closed. Never mind, we SAW them, which was the main thing. Most of our UK contacts were complaining of cloud cover and a no-show. I will not bore you with a pic, which would surely just be a black square - blown up on screen you can see the myriad stars but not, I think, on a postcard sized print. The Perseids are going great guns till about the 15th, so maybe you will get some clear-sky luck tonight? Good hunting.  

Lily Tidied Up.

On a gorgeous sunny day we bring the baby turkeys down
for a brief look at some Roscommon sky. 8 days old here.

With Lizzie missing again, I find myself of a mind to catch up on jobs and sort out things that have been hovering in the background. When Liz is around we seem to favour the bigger projects; we seem to be aware of the manhours available working as a pair; weeding the big bed, brush cutting and mowing, cleaning up that cattle race and so on. Liz is off to Silverwood-land again to help out with house-sitting while Mr and Mrs S head for the UK again on a family matter. 'Grandma' (Steak Lady) had been lined up to cover, but it's a complicated week which includes not only the eldest's 17th Birthday, but also her last 'Leaving Cert' exam - good luck with both of those, Em-J! Any parent will tell you that this is one big round of taxi-ing to activities - swimming, scouts, school runs etc, but Liz most recently reported that she was sitting there being fed chowder and steak. Times are hard and it's a tough job this niece-wrangling. I should quickly add that the Silverwood grown-ups have not abandoned their eldest daughter at this crucial time - they will be back for the Birthday and the post-exam.

Lily nicely tidied up.

My first 'tidy up' job was to re-shear the sheep Lily, of whom I had made such a dog's breakfast last time, my first ever go at shearing. She was a shaggy, sorry looking animal and Carolyn down the road had re-named her 'Polly Patch'. I was wary of letting her on the front lawn, in public view in case neighbours crashed their cars laughing. I had been trying to halter train her and had even made a rope halter and then bought to proper ones from the internet. The idea was that if I could get her to stand, calmly, tethered to the gate I could tidy her up upright, still on her feet, where she might feel more secure.

Halter training is, though, a slow old process on adult sheep. Lily has had 3 years of never feeling restrained in ropes around the head and neck, as she is big, heavy and strong enough to try to, should she feel the need, to buck, kick, pull and stampede to freedom. Gently, gently, over the days and weeks using short sessions of only a few minutes, I was getting her used to having the halter on her face, but I was not getting anywhere with restraining her and could see this tidy-up being so far away the rest of the wool on her body would have caught up.

She's not really two-tone. She'd just been rolling in the dust
on her right side. 

She needed to be shorn or risk the dreaded fly-strike (maggots burrowing into the flesh under daggy, thick, sweaty wool around sensitive areas). To cut a long story short, I decided to get stuck back in using as much 'upright' as I could (me straddling the sheep between my legs or leaning my knee into her shoulder against the gate while I worked on the rump) but then having to sit her down to finish the neck. We were all done in about 15 minutes, neither of us too traumatised (!) and she looks a whole lot more presentable, plus I have another bag of cleaner 'inner' wool for Carolyn. A daft part of my brain reminded me that I do indeed have a 'black sheep' and did produce '3 bags full' of wool. The sheep are on the front lawn today - I am proud of them again.

A row of the green-manure plant Phacelia
coming into flower conveniently close
to the hive

I've been needing to get a look into the hive to make sure that we were not bursting at the seams and in need of another honey-super (top box). If you let them run out of space they are more likely to swarm. On with the bee suit good and early this morning; it was about 07:30; the dogs and baby turkeys conspired to get me up at silly o'clock. I just needed to lift the hive lid and a cover board called the 'crown board' to see that, no, they were nowhere near filling the previous 'super'. They had drawn out the honey comb wax on a couple of frames, but there were still 8 frames of 'foundation' sheet available.

Lupins. Like sky-scrapers of colour for
the bees - mainly bumble bees. 

I am actually convincing myself here that the swarming season has come and gone without us - everyone we know round here had swarms a-plenty a couple of weeks back but our bees stayed put. This may be because having been moved here from Longford in April and given some new space then, they 'think' they have done the job already. Never say never, though. While I write this indoors on a Friday afternoon, all sorts might be going on out at the apiary.

This is my favourite of all our 'Granny's Bonnets'.
Most are reds and purples and this yellow makes a
nice change. 

On a lovely hot day recently, we let the baby turkeys out into an empty rabbit run in the yard so they could enjoy the sights and sounds (I thought), while I took the opportunity to swap out their baby-crate and the IR bulb, for a bigger brood box made out of two huge potato crisp boxes and using the new 'electric hen' heater plate. I had carried the birds down in a cat basket and left them in the run, still in the basket, with the basket door open. In fact, they are nervous little things and did not emerge from the basket all day even with food as temptation. However, they do like their new heater plate and we prefer that system to the IR bulbs which are lit 24/7 so the birds must never know when to sleep. They can now huddle down under 'Mum' as it gets dark and wake up with renewed vigour (and noisy demands for breakfast) as soon as it's light, which is about 05:30 round here at present. I wonder do they make electric hens with thick, blackout curtains.

Double flowered Granny's Bonnet

Our 'Hen with One Chick' is still doing a good job on the little one, who is now 4 and a half weeks old and well feathered. This morning I saw the pair of them in the grown-ups chicken house with Mum showing the baby how high are the top perches on the perching 'ladder'. The chick was a good 5 feet off the ground and must have got there by 3 hops up the ladder. It presumably got down safely as the pair were soon out in the garden again. You see it doing all the chicken behaviours in miniature - scratching, pecking, dust-bathing, nipping into the feeding melée to grab a treat, stretching up to flap its wings on tip-toe. Unfortunately this good news, new life story is balanced by a sad one. One of our old original Sussex Ponte hens who had been helping me garden and snatching worms not 15 minutes earlier, I found stood stock still looking very very sick - hunched over and with her back end sagged right down to the ground. Her eyes were shut. A quick inspection revealed that she'd had some kind of massive prolapse of either egg-duct or gut and had bled badly. There was no coming back from that so the kindest thing was to cull her quickly out. Then there were 2.

Enough mowing for today? The giants snooze under the
newest (empty) hive

Finally, I had been getting on with digging across the front of the house for our new flower bed. This bit was cut out from the lawn by the new sheep fence and is a strip 2.4m by 15m. It is due to be 'membrane'd, covered with pea-shingle and planted with (mainly) white flowers and spot-planted with roses. I'd been attacking it at an hour a day, which was enough to dig you from one fence post to the next. I put in an hour and a bit today to finish the job off. We have the membrane. Now we need to order the gravel - we need to get the terminology right in this "foreign" land. What I know as "pea shingle" from the UK is amber and goldie coloured, rounded stuff like small beach pebbles. I have seen that described here as 'drainage stone' and anything carrying the name "decorative stone" here is likely to get you green or blue glass 'beads' like you get round the graveyard. We are hoping that the contact name we have been given might let us come to his yard and choose from his stockpiles. It'll be grand.... it'll be fine... what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Too Early !

I had a bit of a surprise this morning on the early morning 'ward round' when I found Padfoot's 4 babies all out of the 'bedroom' and on the dew-soaked grass. At only a week old they are fully furred up but they are still blind and are still wriggling along like tiny pups rather than hopping like baby bunnies. They made their way along the front of the 'bedroom' bit and huddled together in a corner of the run. We are having a heat wave here so there was no danger of them chilling but they should not have been out and 'Mum' was not doing anything about it. I cut a shallow tray out of the bottom of a box and risked handling the babies to move them into the box which I put in the 'bedroom' to contain them. Padfoot never batted an eyelid, wandered in to 'count' them and wandered out again.

No such problems with Ginny, whose babies are at the 'far end' of the bedroom bit and don't even look like trying to escape. It is possible than in the heat the nest chamber is a bit hot, so we have moved everything about to give them some shade. I was also asking Charlotte what to do about Goldie's imminent kindling as the design of the ex-Silverwood hutch is such that there is only one small 'bedroom, that being in the upper storey of the hutch and which Goldie uses as her toilet! I had been thinking of a 'basement flat' underneath but Charlotte suggested blanking off the mesh on half the downstairs, providing a lip to stop babies crawling out too soon and filling with hay.

Every now and then the chooks crank out an enormous egg but today's just about took the biscuit. The big egg on the left in this picture weighed in at 130 g, almost twice the size ( at 68 g ) of one of our normal, X-Large eggs. We think these are laid by the 'hin' formerly known as Broody Betty. Fair play to her and possibly another piece of evidence that the new (Pedigree Foods, Organic Layers Pellets) diet is streets ahead of the old cheapo one.

There is a standing joke or myth in Ireland that the sun comes out and a heat wave starts as soon as the poor aul' school children have to sit their exams. In the UK exams around the country vary according to which examining board the school subscribes to - Oxford, Cambridge, London and so on (or it did when I was doing them!). In Ireland no such variety.

Every school in the Republic of Ireland has to go with the National format - the same syllabus and the same exams, questions, scheduled dates and times etc from Cork to Donegal and from Dublin to Kerry. So we know that every child of the relevant ages has started their 'Junior Cert' exams or their 'Leaving Cert' exams on the first Wednesday after the early June Bank Holiday. This includes, this year, our chum, 18 year old rabbit-and-mini-horse-collector, Charlotte from down the road. She was sweating a bit on her MacBeth and poetry for the 2nd English paper, yesterday (6th June) so Liz, who is a bit of a 'girly swot' when it comes to such subjects, offered to give her an hour or two of 'cramming' in the sunshine of the front terrace. We await the results of how she thinks she got on with eager anticipation but the whole nation has now moved onto Maths, so I expect the focus has moved on too and English is in the 'been there, done that' pile. Good luck Charlotte. Knock 'em dead!