Slow News Day

Cowslips in the local verges.

This post might be a bit short but, hey, Elizabeth tells me that the 'voters' tend to like 'same old same old'; it makes them feel comfortable that nothing is going to rock their boat or upset their millpond calm. I will pepper it with a selection of vaguely relevant pictures and maybe you, the reader, will fail to notice that I am not actually saying very much.

Dad-duck is paying a lot of attention to the new ducklings. 

Readers will think from the previous post that we are now letting our sheep out of their secure field to graze the longer grass and herbage around the garden, secure in the knowledge that they are well behaved sheep and will not do a runner into the neighbour's 5-acre cattle pasture.

Another barrow of cut hawthorn for the
log store.

Um. Slight change there - I let them out single handed on a recent day and watched all 9 nip through a gap. I had to stay with them lest they vanish we knew not where but rapidly phone Elizabeth to appear at the gap with a bucket of grub and tempt them home. All safe and sound now but the extra strand of barbed wire I added to the hedge below the one they had dipped under only stopped 3 of the 4 ewes the next day. Our oldest ewe, Polly was shimmying under it like a pro. They are now 'grounded' for the fore-see-able but by now the grass is growing so fast in their field that they will barely notice.

Thus order of a dozen asparagus crowns arrived looking more
28 to me including the scrappy bits. Thank you very much,
English's Fruit Nursery of Co. Wexford. 

The weather has continued mainly mild, so we have been getting on with the serious gardening, even in the absence of any Help-X support. I have gathered up all my wind-felled hawthorn and stacked it into the log store. I love that in May my store is filling up rather than stripped bare.

Asparagus bed with 'marker' row of catch-crop carrots

An order for a dozen asparagus crowns (Connovers Colossal var.) arrived containing my dozen nice fat crowns but also 16 more bits and pieces which English's might have seen as scraps but they look very good to me, so they have all gone into the ground in their lovely clean, weeded, mulched railway sleeper bed. We are looking to crop our first spears this year from crowns planted 2 years ago. Unfortunately the first spear to appear this week was broken off either by me in planting the new plants, or a chicken helper. Never mind. There will be more.

2 cuckoos, each pursued by a starling. 

We are suddenly surrounded by cuckoos. I noted that there were four calling in my 05:00 dawn chorus in the previous post. Since then I have seen 2 chasing about each pursued by a small songbird (possible starling?) and, today, 2 just cruising through our airspace unmolested. I had the camera in my hands for the chased two.

We loved this clever marketing campaign by Lidl Ireland. It's
mainly for the kids, but they give you a free seed pack with every
€20 spent. A tiny peat-pot about an inch cube, a pellet of peat and
a small amount of seeds in a paper strip, plus instructions. Our six
so far are doing very well. 

I have been out and about lately, helping various neighbours. Yesterday this was helping to repair some fencing down by the local main drain/stream and involved me wading about in the stream bed, praying that the water would not be too deep for the wellies (I was close, but OK). The local beef lads use the stream as water for their bullocks, and they cut 'slip-ways' down to the stream using  a digger.

We are re-starting the keyhole bed on the
'sun-deck'

The stream bed is 6' below the grassland at this place, so this lets the cattle down to below the height of the fences. Our job was to scramble down the slipway to fence off the river end of the slipway, so that bullocks coming down to drink could not wander out into the stream and go strolling up- or down-stream, escaping into the neighbour's territory.

A hole in the head. 

Meanwhile, there I was dozing 75% asleep on my pillow one night when a dog (Deefer?) decided to walk across the pillows to another position. As she walked by she just nicked the middle of my forehead with a toenail. I was vaguely aware of the pain and the small trickle of blood but slept on. In the morning I had a superb 'Harry Potter' style Z-shaped streak of dried blood down into and across one eye. It stung and the dried blood made it difficult to open that eye, so I washed it off before thinking to photograph it.

Ox Tail Stew under construction.

Finally, in 'breaking news' we hear tonight that the 'struggling writer in his garret' described in a recent post, Mr Dan, who was writing up a Masters thesis in Economics (actually supply chain resilience) in our spare room has passed his exams. That's all we know for now. He was chasing a 'Distinction' but our source does not say whether he got that. Well done Dan.

A Taste of Success

More weird beers from SuperValu. The
wheat beer on the right was seriously
gassy and 'lager-like'. I am hoping for
better from the 'red' beer on the left.

We are doing the 'separation' thing again here. Liz took off to Silverwoods' on Wednesday to deliver the lamb meat to the troops down there as well as some goodly batches of the pork. She just made a flying visit of it that time, though, because today she was off again, this time to mind the Silverwoods' dogs and the parents (who also now live 'down' there) over the weekend. The Silverwoods are all de-camping to a hotel in Bray (South Dublin) over the weekend to be part of the All Ireland baton twirling competitions. The youngest (R) and the 2nd eldest (J-M) get involved in these and the whole family goes along but it is a bit of a mad-cap affair which goes on and on, with a gazillion clubs, groups and schools taking to the stage one after another to do their stuff and be judged while the 'fans' and any group members who aren't in that particular class whoop and holler like One Direction fans trying to maintain the myth that it's all dead exciting. Those not involved (Em-J, M, and 'Daddy' (Mr S)) or allowed time off from spectating duties will presumably adjourn to the hotel's other facilities (pool, gym, spa and (maybe) bar) to while away the long hours of baton twirling action.

The competition website.

I have been following with interest the progress of friend and pig-mentor, Alfie O, through the stages of the 'Taste of Success' competition run in collaboration between supermarket chain Lidl (Ireland) and National television station RTÉ. This involved various celebrity chefs around the regions but is trying to find a good new line in Irish food for Lidl to stock on the shelves of their 140-odd branches. Our man, Alfie, gave it a serious punt with his pork-burgers which he makes using neck fillets from his own traditional breed, high welfare, outdoor reared, organic and non-GMO pigs. He got selected to enter the round for the Munster province (SW 'quarter' of Ireland) and then shortlisted into the final 4 from Munster to go through to the next round where the four provinces met and the entry whittled down to 2 products from each.

The Old Farm business website

I have to admit that, coming from a super-marketing background and knowing what kind of volumes they deal with, I was a bit uneasy from the outset. There are very few producers in Ireland of such pork and, as far as I know, no commercial ones, just little small-holders like us with our 2 pigs for home consumption (and we don't even do the organic / non-GMO thing). The idea of being able to launch a food based on just the neck fillets on a super market scale worried me but Alfie is no fool and he would have known this. When the main chef/mentor (Paul Flynn) made just that comment as the pork burgers were dished up in the first all-Ireland round and the entrant missed the cut, Alfie was philosophical and very proud to have got as far as he had. He'd met a lot of nice people along the way (especially the organisers and 'crew', he said), tasted some excellent products and had a lot of fun plus, I expect, created a lot of really useful publicity. There are now a load more people in Ireland who know where to go if they want the best pork this small island can offer.

The O's family blog and recipe book!

The low volume and huge demand thing is just the modern super-marketing culture and effect in a microcosm. The small guy with his trad breeds and the trad breeds themselves have all but been sidelined by the big guys who only want cheap-as-chips 'commercial' pork based on the Landrace and white breeds, grown indoors, never sees the daylight, hospital-like pristine, hermetically sealed conditions. Our Tamworths, rootling in the 'dirt', grubbing up worms and dock and ground-elder roots, munching manky wind-fall apples and chatting to the dogs through the fence have no part in this. And they presumably never will while the Lidls of this world have a stranglehold on the market and the average punter has no idea what pork should taste like. Ah well. Their loss. It is reassuring that the likes of Alfie keep fighting the good fight and getting his pork and its story out there, even on national television where the country's cooks might just see the footage and be curious enough to hunt down some 'proper' flavoursome, succulent pig meat. Well done Alfie and Mrs O.