The End of the Year

Last of the cake

Our local lough, Lough Feigh, is full to bursting after recent rain and resounds to the beautiful noise of the 30 to 40 swans who spend their winter there. They are either Whooper or Bewick's Swans (I am not very good on the smaller swans and these two are very similar) and I have not been down to the lough with binoculars for a close look. We just enjoy the musical honking calls which come up on the wind to the lane as I walk the dogs along the top there, and to the front garden. We wonder whether our own geese feel some kind of 'Call of the Wild' yearnings as they hear them.

And so we come to the end of the year. Christmas left overs are starting to run out. The Christmas Day goose has reappeared in a number of guises since, sneaking back as cold meat, then a superb pie and most recently as small jars of 'rilette' (finely shredded meat mixed with apple, garlic and butter, a bit like a paté). The spiced cabbage has brightened up a few meals, served alongside a risotto and the pie. The cake will go a few more slices and the pud will supply a few more portions lubricated with the ice cream.

Chestnuts for the sprouts tonight.

I feel a bit of an urge to sum up the year but I promise to keep it short and sweet; just the one paragraph. In (very) short it's been a really good one for us. The small holding has moved on a-pace in the warm dry weather (the rain is only recent) and we have produced mountains of veg. I am particularly pleased with the onions and spuds and we have a freezer full of beans, peas and calabrese. We have produced a million eggs and plenty of chicken, goose, rabbit and lamb. We fenced the East Field, built the poly-tunnel and completed the pond. We made some new friends and consolidated existing ones. Liz got involved with the local knitting group and has got into knitting and has also expanded her cookery skills into a wealth of cakes and pies. Not everything went 100% to plan, of course. We lost the use of the 2CV. I killed one chain saw but inherited a perfectly good, and superior, replacement. We celebrated with a delicious Christmas. All in all a good 2013. Roll on 2014.

Our surprisingly good, well ripened
and now stored onions

One 'hin' however, will not be seeing 2014. She was one of our old original Sussex Ponte hens which have already given us a brilliant first year of egg laying but have lately gone off the boil. Yesterday this young lady managed to injure herself in a serious and debilitating way we believe, by pecking on sharp piece of wire or broken glass, both of which we have too much of in the soil not yet dug over and cleared. I am not going into any more detail in case you are eating your tea, but suffice to say that we had to cull this girl out and even as I type this, Liz is plucking her in the kitchen. She is going to be a tiny carcass despite being full grown. I doubt if she will be even one kilogram 'oven-ready', way smaller than the hulking Hubbard birds we have been processing most recently. She is a neat shape though, so she is 'petite' in the same way that Guinea Fowl and poussins make small carcasses, rather than scrawny or thin. It will be nice to roast a whole bird between 2 of us, rather than (as with Hubbard birds) having to dismember them first and make 4 separate meals out of them.

Ooops. Despite my care the tractor cuts up
ruts in the soft ground

Not tonight, though, Josephine! Tonight we are on the slow-roasted shoulder of lamb, in this case 'Dora', one of our ewe (they say 'yow' here) lambs.

Finally, I was in this morning to visit our lovely old neighbour, Una, who is still struggling with a finger injured on and infected by a rose thorn in her own garden. I nip round every couple of days to bring turf and logs in to the house from the sheds and today took her round some eggs, leeks, sprouts, parsnip and a beetroot as a mini food parcel. She sits me down in her beautifully old traditional Irish kitchen (range, painted wooden furniture) for 'tay' and home made scones and jam and today she was telling me all about the 'Wren Boys'

Naughty or Nice? Lego from Santa

The Wren Boys is an especially Irish tradition which my UK readers may not have heard of. We had heard of it here but have still not seen it in action and it is now fading fast and may soon pass into memory. It happens on St Stephen's Day (Boxing Day). In times past the 'Wren Boys' would capture a wren and then dress in motley clothing and hats and capes made of straw (like 'Mummers') and parade it round the village knocking on doors and persuading money and goodies out of house owners as a bribe not to harm the bird ("A penny or tuppence would do it no harm...." etc). They would sing special songs, make music and recite appropriate poems.
They would also call round the pubs and 'perform' for the clientele.

More recently no actual wren is used and it is more likely to be the kids going round rather as do Carol Singers in the UK, but at lunchtime in daylight, rather then in the evening. Our friend Charlotte of the mini-horses has done this as a teenager in a group and apparently done quite well out of it. Una tells us she can remember when great gangs of children would go, quite often driven round in cars by parents, but recently the kids have come to enjoy the pub-side of things less. They were, says Una, all quite sweet kiddies and sang and played their penny whistles and other instruments beautifully, but the local 'Herberts' in the pubs of particularly Balla-D, presumably 'with drink taken' would start heckling them and making rude and tasteless comments. The groups Una knows don't go there any more and, in fact, have now dwindled to a few pairs or singles of children being taken to pre-arranged 'friendly' houses to do their thing and get a €5 or so. What ever the story is, none came to see us, so we still have this only at 2nd hand.

Happy New Year! Bliain Nua Sásta Dhaiobh!

Lake View

We are having a bit of a pleasant surprise mini heat-wave to go with our autumn Equinox, blue skies, temperatures up to 25 degrees C (very warm for us here!) and a warm gentle breeze. We sweat real sweat when working and I was even perspiring a bit when just walking the dogs down the lane. Definitely not complaining.

Well, the 'All Ireland' is now come and gone and Liz, Sparks and K-Dub are all happy because Dublin won the famous 'Sam Maguire' trophy by just a point. It wasn't a particularly good game, low scoring but close enough. Of course Tony, in the local Post Office, is not happy but today he was waxing philosophical saying that "for all their crowing, they only bate us by a point!" At the far end of the village (Lough Glynn) is a small group of houses lived in by Dublin-born families and these guys have great fun putting out all the pale/dark blue Dublin flags and bunting like a small blue island in a sea of green and red Mayo flags.

One of the Dads is a really nice, funny bloke and he was straight on the phone to Tony this morning asking if the post office would be open, or closed for mourning. Tony assured him it would, indeed, be open, so the guy nipped along the main street in his normal clothes but with a big bag under his arm. Tony says that when he got to the PO he hid round the corner and changed into a huge array of Dublin gear - silly hats, huge gloves ("He looked like bloomin' Jeronimo!") - so that he could burst in on Tony and tease him for a while. Then he nipped back round the corner, changed back and went home wearing his 'civvies'. Crazy dude!

Goldie the Rabbit has now got a full time job. She is our mower for the path round the pond, so we are thinking of renaming her house 'Lake View'. As she eats each box of grass we pull her round to the next bit. She particularly seems to like the plantains and clovers - these always vanish first. She grazes off the grass when there is nothing else left. Amusingly there is a real house just down the lane called Lake View because, presumably, when it was built it had a good view down to Lough Feigh, our local lake. Like so many other houses here it was built in a corner of one of the fields of the family farm, and Mum moved in. Now the farm has prospered and they have built a huge new cattle shed and feed-silo opposite Mum's house, completely blocking any view of the Lake from her windows or garden. I bet that went down well!

Accidental crop

Picture here is an accidental crop. In 2012 we grew, deliberately, some decorative gourds but then forgot that we had and tried to eat one of the two-colour, light-bulb-shaped "squashes" in a casserole. Luckily for us the chunks of squash in the stew were so bitter that we quickly realised that these were not edible and have since found out that they are actually quite poisonous.

This year I have tried to stick to courgettes, pumpkins and custard squash but I have somehow mixed up some growing plants and planted (or transplanted) another of these lightbulb gourds into one of the kitchen garden beds where it has done very well. We left it be, and have now cut these weird looking gourds, now big enough to have sprouted warty lumps all over, for purely decorative reasons and they are attracting much comment from visitors, drying as they are on the front windowsill.

Liz has bravely gone off and found a very good, new (to us) hair dresser in Balla-D, this one a lady called Noelle in a shop called Halo. Liz had been getting quite shaggy having not had a decent haircut yet in Ireland and was getting fed up with it. She was looking longingly at a photo we have of her from 10-15 years back, framed in the spare room. She took the picture out of its frame and carried it along with her to Halo where they were happy to oblige and Liz is delighted with the restoration of an earlier look. I like it very much. I like it too, especially because there was talk at one stage of me having to have a go with my scissors. I can't think I'd have been able to produce anything as nice as this!

Out in the allotment I am mad into some autumn tidying. I had grown some marigolds and nasturtiums this year intending them as a companion plant to a row of new raspberry canes, to attract in a few insects and help with pollination. In the event they went completely mad burying the poor raspberries under a forest of 2 foot tall marigolds and rampaging nasturtium stems, covering the ridge and flooding sideways and down into the trenches either side. While they were in full flower they were quite a picture, blazing with the hot oranges and yellows or the marigolds and the deeper red of the nasturtium which was a stated variety I have now forgotten.

 Now, though, they are an over blown mess which needs tidying up, so I have been in there yesterday and today clearing the trenches and finally being able to scythe off the shaggy grass of the edge-path and then mow right to the edge. I know it is only mid September and very warm, but I am hoping that the grass will soon start to slow down a bit and this will be nearly the final mow for some of these areas; that they are now tidied and 'put to bed' for autumn. I doubt it somehow. We are pleased with the artichokes pictured. These plants were grown from seed only this spring so we were not really hoping for any crop this year, but these guys have obliged us with a couple of small tennis-ball sized heads which will go nicely with supper tonight.

We took a nice phone call today, from Mentor Anne. She and Simon are, rather excitingly, going to build a straw-bale building as a broody house for their quail. They have done this before using the technology to create a real actual human house in which they lived in one of their previous Irish small holdings. They end up being quite a sophisticated building perfectly habitable for modern families with all the mod cons. For this one, Simon needs a lend of our cement mixer which we bought during our own build. I will  check with Anne whether she is happy for me to provide links to her own blog where the build is described and depicted in pictures, or possibly if I might borrow some images. It will be nice for the mixer to get some use. It did very well for us during our own works but has since sat in the shed gathering dust.

JD Bob's ponds

We know it rains a bit round here but we were still surprised at how quickly the 1010 litre rainwater tank has filled up. You can see here that we are now above the top metal frame bar so we are well up in the 900 litres area. Resurrecting some skool maths I have calculated that given that the 'catchment' is the car port roof at approx 5 m by 6 m, 1.3 inches (in old money) of rain has fallen in the last ten days, since we installed the tank. For those not versed in such matters, the rain in an average year here is about 40 inches, so this would be about a right for the 10 days. Bodes well for us being able to keep the pond topped up when we need to, doesn't it?

The newest Rabbit, Goldie, continues to thrive and is scarfing the good Roscommon grass to the manor born. This is a nice picture to give you some idea of the size of her - we are looking through 2 inch chicken wire here. Not a small animal. We are hoping for plenty of 'kittens' from her in mid June and in particular we hope there is a nice buck for keeping to mate with Ginny and Padfoot in the future. Goldie, if I have not already said so, is a Flemish Giant cross Californian White. These varieties do not stick to their colours too well, so we are told the babies can be pretty much any rabbit colour. There can be up to 15 kittens but the usual rules apply - you are wise not to even LOOK into the nest till they might be 2 weeks old, or the doe may kill and eat the babies under stress. They are born pink, hairless, blind and with their ears sealed up. By 2 weeks they are furry and cute, miniature bunnies. We are hoping for a successful 'kindling' both for her and for Ginny and Padfoot. It will be Ginny's first time.

We have been down to John Deere Bob's bank field for a look at the pond(s) we plan to do the newt surveys on. I knew where the first pond was. We took the dogs down there for a walk and they were pulling around so much, eager to race around the grass around the bigger Lough Feigh, that we risked letting them off the leads so that we could gaze at the first pond in peace. We saw small fish. We did not see any newts but that's OK; in really clear water newts are sometimes nocturnal, so you need to come back at dusk with torches. However, the dogs ran off into some bushes and we got a bit concerned after a while and Liz went a-hunting and discovered to our delight a second and much more promising pond.

This pond is more full of vegetation including many species we might have to blag bits of to start our own pond - marsh marigolds, floating water plantain, amphibious bistort and so on. It has much less open water and we could see no signs of fish. Fish are predators on newts and newt tadpoles so that, in general, you do not get newts if you have fish. (Note to you pond makers out there - if you want to create a wildlife pond, avoid the temptation to go buy goldfish!). We did not see any newts in this one either but we resolved to return without dogs and with plastic sacks to sit on and maybe even a picnic. It really was an idyllic, beautiful, peaceful place. We are going to enjoy newt surveying there.

 We are homing in now on the first possible gosling hatch date. This is the 22nd and it is a tense, nervous time. The baby chicks (who hatched the day the geese went broody) are coming up to 4 weeks old too, of course, and getting well feathered and starting to look too big for the run. Broody Betty is also looking quite keen to get out and show them around. We are still a bit nervous that they are very small and might fall prey to the cats or a magpie, but Gander, bored by his women having been sitting now for 3 and a half weeks is currently hanging around near them and shouts at any passing crows or 'maggies'. He also scares off the cats. It will be interesting to see how this dynamic changes when (Please, God) we get some goslings for him to look after and he gets his ladies back. Our plan (frantically NOT counting chickens here) would be to keep all the geese then in the orchard field during the daytime so that we get that grass a bit grazed and to shepherd them back and forth to the secure house at night. Of course we are aware that this might all go wrong and we get failed clutches and no babies. These are very young and inexperienced mothers and although we've seen them do what we think is a successful incubation, we are by no means out of the woods. Wish us luck and hopefully by next weekend we will be singing (and honking) a happy song.

A Little Drop of Rain

Coo! When it decides to rain round here, there's no messing about. Buckets came down overnight, hammering on the roof and windows, blasted against the front of the house on a strong southerly wind. From no puddles and reasonably dry last night despite a bit of rain on Wednesday morning while we were fencing, I woke up to the biggest puddles I think we have had so far. The local lough, Lough Feigh has trebled in size overnight from a raggedy ribbon of wet between rambling beds of rush and reed, to an impressive expanse of open water. The reed/rush beds are submerged and the 'banks' are now grass fields further out. The local river, the R. Lung has risen from showing a yard of exposed bank, to brim full. A pipe-drain emptying into it under the bridge with a gurgling splashy drop of 4 feet is suddenly half submerged so that the water joins the river on the level like a tributary stream.

My part-dug pond was an almost complete sheet of (muddy) water. I will not be digging any pond today; that's for sure, but it is comforting to know that the pond is pretty level and is also in the right place in terms of catchment area. We are actually on top of a low hill here so nowhere is going to be that 'right' but we do have a small hollow centred around this part of the garden, partly because of the TK Max and TK Min apparent habit of bulldozing all the top soil off the yard and piling it up in heaps against our western boundary hedge. John Deere Bob tells us that many locals see topsoil as an expensive resource worth stock piling, so if an area was to be used for storing bales or farm machinery, then the soil (they say it "sale" here) would be scraped off. The result here is a big dam of soil along our boundary which prevents rain running off so we have a bit of a 'bowl' in which to construct the pond.

There are other dints and hollows which collect nice puddles much to the delight of the gander who splashes about dipping his head and neck under the surface, then rearing his head to shower the water backwards across his back, wings and tail. Suddenly he will honk excitedly and charge across the puddle splashing his feet down like a child playing in his wellies. We guess he wishes his womenfolk were not focused on being broody and might come out to play.

It's comforting to know that at least it drains away almost as quickly as it arrives. Almost, but not quite. Within a few days of no rain these puddles will be gone and even the pond will be dig-able. The house and yard area are the same - one of the main driving forces to our building project was to get rid of the damp and let it stay away - ivy was stripped off the walls, rainwater goods and guttering were all replaced with new, down pipes were linked to gullies (4 inch pipes) under the yard to take water quickly away to the ditches we had had cleared by mini-digger. The septic tank got a huge pebble-filled pit dug just 'downstream' of itself to ensure 'water' cleared fast and efficiently. My veg plot got its ridges and raised beds and these were aligned up/down the slopes to help clear water and our use of mini-horses and sheep on the East Field is mainly about repairing the damage done by heavy cattle squelching up the ground into a non-draining foot print divot mess ("poaching" in grass management parlance). All the overgrown areas of this hectare have been cleared and turned, for now, into short grass to help drying out and run-off when it does stop raining. Our living-hedge wind breaks are nice, thirsty, willow.

Let it rain - we can cope!

Was She Listening?

Perhaps St Brigid was listening yesterday and looked down on our rather beginner-ish making of the crosses and approved. For what ever the reason we finally got a beautiful spring-like day today, on the 2nd Feb. The sun shone and was warm, quickly burning off any frost on the grass and melting the thin ice on the water in the wheel barrows. The sky was clear blue and the birds sang. There was barely a breath of wind. All encouraged, I nipped a load of laundry into the machine and hung it on the line outside to dry. Some of it even dried! That seems like the first time we've been able to do that since early December. My younger brother has just flown off to the Algarve in search of the sun. He could have stayed here. OK, maybe we are not THAT warm, but spring is definitely round the corner.

The lack of wind and rain mean that I can move my goose-house making operation out of doors, which is handy as the finished house will be 3' by 4' by 3' and would not fit through the Tígín doors once built. Yesterday, cowering from the icy blast and lashing rain, I had started off but concentrated on completing single panels to build myself effectively a 'flat pack'. Today I would have a chance to put it all together and so finish the roof, hinged door flap and bolt.

It was so warm that I was able to work in a polo short and sweatshirt, even rolling up the sleeves at one stage. I did, though, put on my garden knee-pads; the concrete was a bit cold and damp for too much kneeling. We have now put this house in the orchard so that the geese can get to know it, get used to it and, who knows, even learn to love it and use it. They are currently over-nighting in the calf house and we have a little routine where I release them in the morning and they waddle off up the cattle race to the 'pond garden' and orchard. Then about 5 p.m. I go out and find them and they happily waddle back into the yard and into their calf house where I shut the door and give them their supper of sprouted wheat (this has proved to be very palatable and the geese love it, hoovering it up).

On the dog walk today, which took me down to Feigh Bridge, I took a camera. Today may be dry and warm, but the recent heavy rain has filled our little local lough, Lough Feigh to what seems to be an unprecedented level, at least in local memory. Lough Feigh seems to spend most of its life as little more than a water filled raggedy ditch surrounded by tall bull-rushes and other reeds, so that what open water there is can not easily be seen from our lane. Suddenly it is a decent sized, expanse of shining water with swans a-swimming and geese honking. When the nieces were up in August we went down through John Deere Bob's fields to look and had to walk miles across wet boggy grass to get to the lake's edge.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to get good photos from our lane as we run along the top of a round-backed ridge. I will have to consult my local maps and see if there is a road or path which runs closer to the edge before all this watery magnificence drains away. Lough Feigh is unusual in having no river draining into it and only a tiny, convoluted ditch draining out. It seems to get its water just from our ridge and the River Lung runs in a neighbouring valley just to its south. The twisty turny 'ditch' joins the two only when the lough is at its fullest. Perhaps this is the start of spring and the lough can return to 'raggedy ditch' once again.

No snow here but..

No snow here but plenty of rain. On this particular piece of ground at the end of this very wet year (last year, actually, I guess) any decent amount of overnight rain means we know we will wake up to some impressive puddles. My two pictures are of the pond garden; only the first is not meant to be actual pond. What we have, though, a-top our 75 m ridge between the valleys (and boggy land) of the Lough Feigh to the south and the River Lung to the north, are a good depth of lovely soil lying over clay. We are not convinced that the clay allows much downward drainage but we know that the soil layer allows good sideways drainage down the slopes either way so that when it stops raining, our puddles are generally gone by 12 hours later, certainly within 24 hours

The problem has been that in the very unusual year of 2012 (all the locals say "We've never known anything like it!") the puddles have barely drained away and the water table is still fairly high, before the next rains come and re-fill the puddles. Even in the summer, and the month of August when we had the Silverwoods up to stay for a week it did not really ever dry out to depth. They were able to camp and there was plenty of dry ground to play badminton on the front lawn etc, but nobody was kicking up any dust.

It can happen. I have seen video of the turf 'harvesting' machines down on the peat bogs in summer kicking up clouds of dust as they move about so we are hopeful that 2013 might give us some proper summer heat. In 2012 I never had to water any plants. Having taken a bit of a ribbing from some quarters for "moving to a bog" we were relieved that the wet also included the UK, where those taking the mick 'enjoyed' conditions as wet as we were. Mercifully the whole winter where we were caravan-based and building the house, was mild and dry enough that we were never prevented from working. The week we chose to do the plastering was exceptionally mild and the guys were all working in polo-shirts and short sleeves. Messing with plaster and cement is not a lot of joy when there's a frost.

As to the pond, when I get a chance to complete the digging of it, the plan is to dig down the 2 spade depths of soil to expose the clay, and then puddle and draw up a clay layer from this to form a bowl. We hope this will save us using a liner. Even if the pond does not become waterproof, if it rains in 2013 like it did this year
we should have no problem keeping it full. I will just divert the car-port run off into it via the sheep drinker. In the next few posts you will learn that we are soon getting some geese. I am hoping that these guys, puddle-ducking in the unfinished pond, might be able to help with the "puddling" of the clay.

The existing animals, of course, will always find somewhere out of the rain, even when, as sometimes happens with the cats, they are outside the house as we lock up to go shopping. The picture is of Blue on his hay bale in the chicken house, keeping an eye on any local rodent incursions.