Back in Lay

I was out changing the geese's indoor water for fresh and clean, and noticed the top of a white egg part hidden in the little bit of hay which has been in that house since lame-goose Fotherington Thomas ceased to need it. A quick rummage found me two more eggs - we had three and one of the geese is obviously back in lay. I had not seen any mating behaviour and was not aware that geese laid eggs except for the spring time mating season but, no, apparently they can come into lay if the weather suits, pretty much any time from February to September, so says Mentor Anne. Anyway, we had another last night and we are delighted with the extra kitchen supplies. These eggs will be used up as eggs. Regular readers will know that we are no longer breeding geese with the almost certainly brother/sisters combination we currently have, so if she goes broody then we'll just have to discourage her.

As autumn rolls round we are thoroughly enjoying the fact that we are using almost exclusively our own vegetables. The meal of sausages pictured was one of my 'roll your own' specials cooked while Liz was off at Knit and Natter. It has our own onions, peas, yellow French beans, kale and new potatoes. We are also doing very well for herbs like parsley which Liz notes is the best parsley we have ever grown. The magnificent mound of green was started from a supermarket pot which we had taken all the leaf off for cooking but were loath to throw out so I heeled it into the kitchen garden. Tonight we had gammon, spuds, beans and leeks and Liz was able to make a gorgeous 'boat' full of parsley sauce to go with. Irish Heaven.

Yesterday was a day for neighbourliness, visiting and being visited. In the morning I was off to little ol' lady down the lane, Una where I'd volunteered to clear fallen Leylandii 'needles' off her gravel drive, clip a hedge and dig out the ditch to her 'swolly hole'. The needles thing was interesting - she was worried that I'd sweep up a load of gravel with the needles and she wanted that 'back', so I invented a way of dibbling wads of the needles/gravel mixture in a bucket of cold water so that the gravel would sink and the needles would float. "I never would have thought of that!" said she. Ha ha, I thought. That's probably because you were raised as a sweet young lady, and I was down there playing mud pies and puddle ducking! A 'swolly hole' turns out to be where nameless household liquids drain away. We ended up in her lovely rustic farmhouse kitchen drinking 'tay' and eating homemade fruit scones with homemade blackcurrant jam. Heaven.

We were just about to sit down to supper, rice cooked, table laid, plates warmed all ready to go, when neighbour from the other side, John Deere Bob rocks up. We love him. He is completely unfazed by us being about to serve up and plods in in his boots, sits down in his chair and accepts a glass of blackcurrant cordial. He's going to do the standard half hour chatting anyway. We burble away happily about village stuff, the imminent Referendum on getting rid of the Senate (equiv to House of Lords), geese, sheep etc till his mental half hour is up and he stands up with a 'Well, Good Luck now!' (he has a strong local accent, so he says it 'Good Luck No') and he's back off down the drive to his tractor, parked at our entrance. The supper (curried bunny) was no worse for the wait.

I love all this stuff and I always take it as reassurance that I have not fallen into the 'ex-pat' cliché trap of seeking out and only associating with other Brits. Plenty of our friends are actually Brits and I am delighted with that, but that is more by accident than design.

Getting all Autumnal

It's all getting very Autumnal round here now with a definite nip in the air and, this morning, a genuine frost with crisp grass and a bit of ice on the rabbits' water bowl. The nights are clear which means that here, in this unpolluted air with no street lighting to interfere you can see a gazillion stars - too many sometimes to pick out the constellations you "know" from Kent. The Milky Way is clearly visible and the moon has been full (although now waning) and it is all very beautiful. Mornings can be quite beautiful too with the mist visible over the turf bog below us in the valley. This morning was extra special as a bright red "Shepherd's Warning" sunrise came up behind a bank of mist, filling the whole 'farm' with a bizarre soft pink mistiness. Luvverly!

Autumn, then, so no-one should be thinking of Springtime and producing babies? You'd think not. However, we have a chicken gone broody on the 30th Sept and ever since then sitting on her clutch of now TEN eggs in the centre nest box. Sussex Ponte chickens are a 'mass produced' Utility hybrid rather than a fine tuned Pure-bred variety; they are 'designed' to lay 300+ eggs a year and be healthy and to not go broody, so we have had a couple of aborted attempts through the Summer but they usually last only a couple of days before madam gets bored and wanders off, abandoning the eggs to go cold. Not this time, so far. She has gone 7 days so far. Incubation period is 21 days, so we might, just might, have some newly hatched chick babies to show Niece Madeleine when she comes over on the 22nd. Don't count your chickens, though....

Also, the rabbits, whom we were sure had not 'taken' to the attentions of our friends Anne and Simon's buck rabbit Peter and had given up on needing the Maternity Unit this year have produced a surprise. Mum spotted the black and white lop-eared girl, Padfoot hauling dry hay into a burrow they've made in the old compost heap which is currently part of their run so we took a look today, thinking that if we find any signs of nesting we'll move them all indoors. Too late! We found a nest alright, but this one the text book ball of fluff pulsating with new life! That is all you get to see first according to the books and any attempt to rummage among the ball of Mum's belly-fur will result in Mum deserting the nest, so we retreated in a hurry, returning only to bring a sheet of curved corrugated to put above the compost heap as a rain-shelter. We will have to just wait and see. No end of disasters can befall rabbit kittens, not least being eaten by adult rabbits or predated by rats (or cat kittens!) but if we can get to 4 weeks they stand a chance of having been weaned so we can rescue them to the Maternity Unit then. No such excitement for Padders's sister Ginny, by the look of it.

 In other Autumn related news the fields we own and those surrounding (over which we have permission from Vendor Anna L to walk) have many many blackberry bushes in their hedges and these have yielded up 2.5 kg of lovely blackberries which Dad has supplemented with a couple of Bramley apples to make 12 and a half jars of delicious (says Dad) jam.

We have also had a couple of still windless days and 'windless' round here means "it's OK to use the chainsaw as you can tell which way the tree will fall". Dad has had a chance to top up the big log store, which now contains about 2.5 cubic metres of logs. That should keep us going for a few cold nights! It is made up of 2 big ugly, diseased Leylandii, some hay-barn beams (the rectangular bits), some big elder and plenty of the dead black spruce 'weedings' from the woods.

In Autumn food Mum and Dad have been exploring some Indian cookery (don't worry - nothing you'd call 'hot' or too spicy) from the new Madhur Jaffrey cookbook but also plenty of winter-warmer recipes. Today, for example, lunch was homemade leek and potato soup with some smokey bacon in it and tonight "pork bones". We'd never heard of this in the UK but here it comes from proper butchers as short lengths of pig-spine split longways. One 'chunk' is about 6-8 inches long so contains about 5 vertebrae but band-sawed into two halves lengthways, with the spinal column 'canal' exposed. You slow-cooker these as you would ox-tail, shin-of-pork or lamb-shank, till the meat falls away and all the cartilage goes gelatinous. In Mum and Dad's case they did it in a Chinese sauce (star anise, soy, ginger, garlic etc) and served it with noodles and steamed chard. The left over bones have plenty of interest for dogs, pups and kittens.

The only other thing exercising us at present is the 2CV finally getting prepared for her NCT (= MOT). Dad finally got hold of a windscreen so now the car is in the garage for its idling to be sorted and for a pre-NCT check up, prior to booking the test. We hope there are no problems with this but we have heard, rather worryingly that the NCT demands all tyres be no more than 6 years old even if they have new tread. This could be an issue.

Deefs.

Working Dog

On the 28^th, out of nowhere we get a day with some sunny bits in between the rain showers, and it's actually quite warm. For Dad it’s a chance to break in the enormous felling axe, splitting the 'rounds' of the sawn up Leylandii and generating oodles of nice logs for when Summer's over and it's wet and windy again (!)

Local old boy John Deere Bob seems to have adopted Mum and Dad as new residents worth cultivating and is now our most frequent visitor. His only 'car' is the old John Deere tractor which he put-puts around the village on, into the local bigger-village (Lough Glynn) to the Post Office, and into nearby town Ballaghaderreen for his shopping. Mum and Dad are working away mid morning-ish and we hear him chugging up the lane and we pause to see will he turn in or is he off to see near-neighbour Una, one of his other tea-stops. If he slows and turns up the drive, Mum nips to get the kettle on and find the fig rolls. Bob parks the tractor in front of the house and shuffles in in his farmboots and black Thinsulate hat, sitting in 'his chair', settling down for a good aul' chin wag.

He's a real charmer with twinkly eyes, a quiet soft voice and a lovely laugh. He has a deep knowledge of things local, things rural and Irish History. He loves to compare notes on history books with Mum , who is also versed in these things (no good to Dad! Even UK history whizzes over his head like pensions and VAT, barely clipping the ends of his hairs!). They talk of the Civil War and the Uprising, and of T.D.s (= M.P.s) and politics, constituency changes, but also of local stuff like the 1901 and 1911 census data etc. He usually passes comment on whatever jobs Mum and Dad are doing. In Dad’s case today, he gives us some tips on how/when to use the splitting axe and what types of wood to burn in the range and on the fire. He checks our progress on extracting the horse-drawn hay-rake and tells us all about the soil and the 'sausage-turfs' we found there. He tells us of raised beds and vegetable growing techniques. Then he goes away again, checking his watch and deciding to chug gently on, on his rounds on the John Deere. Lovely old bloke!

Mum and Dad head for county town Roscommon to explore, just because they've never been. The town centre has an Easons (good book shop) but not much else to attract them back - rather too many pubs, clothes shops, betting shops and boarded up abandoned lets. It smacks of a place where the landlords did not react quickly enough to the dip and as a result now have nobody paying them rent instead of letting the poor hard pressed shop keepers away with reduced rent. No. We will keep passing through as it's on our way to the In-Laws, but we'll stick to the 'by-pass' and the business park bits.

There is a lovely patch of sunshine in the evening, so we're out on the new (concrete) sun deck to watch the sun sink.

Friday 29^th sees us up early. Mum is urgent, up-and-dressed by crack of sparrow's and saying "I want go to a garden centre NOW!" She'd found a promising one out Boyle way (Co. Rosco still but only just) called Ardcarne, 25 mins away in the car. It turned out to be wonderful and Mum and Dad rattled gently through €80+ in fairly short order taking in some special offers on fruit bushes and the "knackered and half dead" racks (They aren't called that by the shop, but Mum and Dad delight in buying unpromising plants cheap knowing they can rescue them due to being good experienced gardeners. New and properly priced stuff also found its way onto the trolley - a dahlia, more roses, some Iberis sempervirens, a yellow flag iris for the bit we'll leave boggy and various seeds and bulbs. All this retail therapy is a happy result of buying a garden which is part chest high brambles, nettles and weeds, and part former cattle yard but in no part clean cultivated tilth.

Mike the Cows drops by with his young son Fintan to nosey on our progress and talk lumber-jacking and logging, fences, the village, holidays, Dublin Prices, getting his kids to a Westlife concert and all manner of other subjects. Mum, Dad and Mike looked a right aul' group of rustics putting the world to rights; Mike in his farmer boots, torn jeans and big ol' beer belly, Mum in battle-scarred waxed jacket and green wellies and Dad in even more disreputable Barbour 'gillet', painty, buildery tan-coloured jeans and (gasp) sandals and socks (highly illegal but Dad was in a rush to get out there). Mike can talk for Ireland but he's always a good laugh.

And so to Mum's big long meaty ribs and noodly stir-fry. The red wine's called "Working Dog". Last night we were not, for once, working like dogs.