Extreme Weeding?

Weeding a bit close to the hive for comfort (yellow arrows)

I felt like I was taking my life in my hands today, weeding on the raised bed veg plot but having now got all the way down to the bottom of the ridges and very close to the loud-buzzing beehive. It was a warm day and there were bees pinging everywhere, a good couple of dozen out at the front of the hive, taking off, landing, flying 'circuits' or 'taxi-ing' at any one time. I needed to get down that last 'path', round the end just under the hive's launch ramp and then back up at the left side of this picture.

'Extreme weeding' it may have been but you would have smiled at the lack of bravery of this hands-and-knees weeder. I had my wide brim straw hat well down on my head and my head down so that the bees might not recognise me as human (!) I pretty much slithered over the ridge at the bottom, arms bent, chest nearly in the dirt - I must have looked like either a Commando-crawl or (more likely), Gollum out of Lord of the Rings! I was not raising my profile more than about 18 inches that close to the colony. Then I was round the corner and racing back up to the left of this picture ripping at the lank grass, white clover, nettles and plantains like a madman, anxious to get back to about ten feet from the hive. The bees, of course, were just calmly going about their business - a hive will buzz gently on a warm day when they are happy and contented and we all read and re-read the 'fact' that bees will not attack you unless they are convinced you are about to attack them but when you are that close to the hum, your faith can wear a bit thin.

A 2013 Hubbard goes broody.

Back in the comparative safety of chicken-land we have had 2 nice coincidences happen, which may well add up to a happy third. We have long been thinking that we like the Buff Orpington as a breed and may well shift, by what they used to call 'natural wastage', from our current motley crew of hens centred round the original Sussex Ponte 'Lovely Girls', over to Buff Orps just by replacing all our deaths and culls with that breed. As it happens we have among our troops a breed-able pair of Orps which came as eggs last year from Mentor Anne, and the rooster is our only roo' at present, so if 'Mrs Buff' is laying fertile eggs, then they will be Buff Orp pure-breds.

17 Buff Orpington eggs 'set' in the incubator

No good though when she was laying any old where in among all the other hens, but recently she started laying in a secret place among the nettles where only she was laying. What is more she was reliably laying every day, more than you could say for the other reprobates. And then one of last year's Hubbards decided to go broody. This bird would be a new Mum, so you'd not trust her with valuable eggs but we came up with a plan to collect the Orp eggs and re-borrow the incubator from Charlotte (Thanks, Ch), we could then stick half a dozen mixed eggs under the Hubbard and she'd be hatching them just as the incubator set hatched - an opportunity to sneak the new hatchlings under a real Mum for some 'proper' rearing. This plan got even better when we asked Anne and Simon whether they might have a few Buff Orp eggs to throw into the mix, and we were delighted when they were able to lay their hands on nine to go with our eight. So today I was able to 'set' (as we say) seventeen eggs in the 'Incy'. Wish us luck. We hope we are not guilty of too much chicken-counting with all this might and if forward planning.

Purring away like crazy with his eyes closed in ecstasy,
Pirate is a very happy affectionate lad.

As well as the weeding and messing with eggs today, we have been round to Una's for a 2nd pick at her black currant bushes and we have stripped our own for black currants and goose berries. The main off-site task today, though, was to finally get the disreputable feline, 'Pirate' off to his date with vet Aoife. We'd had to catch him Sunday to make sure of having him today and the lad had lived, apparently calm and happy, in a dog-crate in our caravan for 48 hours. This morning we just had to persuade him into the cat basket and drive him the short distance to Lough Glynn village and Aoife's surgery.

Ongoing 'meds' for Pirate

We were relieved and delighted when instead of throwing up her hands in despair and horror, Aoife took a good look and then calmly took him from us, assuring us that he looked OK and that she'd sort him out and phone us this afternoon. As good as her word, she texted us to come and get him at 3:30 p.m. (it was already 10:30 a.m. when we dropped him off). There he was, still a bit droopy from the sedative but she had cleaned him up a bit, sewn up his empty right eye-socket with dissolvable stitches, spayed him, treated him for worms and fleas and given him a whacking dose of antibiotics for anything else that ailed him.

We are to keep him in the caravan for 4-5 days while we work him through the rest of the dose of antibiotics (Kesium/amoxicillin) and try to get some eye ointment (Maxitrol) onto his left eye twice a day and so that he can also get over the soreness of his neutering op and the stitches in his bad eye. He does not seem to have any problems with this and is very soppy and affectionate when ever we go near him, racing up to us, nuzzling and rubbing himself against our hands and legs in ecstatic purring, rolling over to get his tummy tickled and so on. He is, we think, going to prove to be a very loving little lad but, of course, once he is released from the caravan the whole lane and all his old haunts are once again his oyster. It is not a prison, just a haven.

Mussels, wild from the Irish Atlantic shoreline

Thank you very much, Anne and Simon, too for a generous gift of some wild mussels from the Sligo shore-line. They had been to the Strandhill / Lissadel area to show the Irish Atlantic beauty off to their current student/helper and had gathered a good haul  from the beach. They were very flavoursome, gorgeously fresh and smelling beautifully of the clean sea-side. (I say 'clean' here because coming from Hastings, "smelling of the sea side" would not be anything you would aspire to, and the reader would have worrying images of human sewage, stinking tourist debris and rotting dogfish carcasses discarded by the beach-landed local fishing fleet. No. This is clean Atlantic surf crashing onto a beautiful Sligo shore, a very different kettle of 'fish' altogether).

Mussels cooked 'naked', the sauce was on the side. 

Liz purged them with a couple of changes of water and cooked them in just fresh water so that we could enjoy the pure mussel flavour. There was a sauce of cream, mustard, red onion and brandy, but that was kept on the side as an option. They were delicious. It was actually Bastille Day and we would normally do something French but that had slipped our attention, so we were glad we'd had 'moules' even if they were 'sans frites' and definitely 'Irlandais' rather than French. There was a French dressing on the salad but I don't suppose that really counts.

Despite the Best Efforts...

Despite the best efforts of Met Éireann and of lone New Zealand writer and weather-herald, Ken Ring (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2013/07/ok-im-ready-now.html) August has mooped past without delivering any really hot weather and delivered us to the threshold of Autumn. We can't REALLY complain; we had amazingly hot dry spells in June and July and our August has been warm even when breezy and cloudy, so it has not stopped us doing anything and the garden has cropped away and the livestock has all got on with the job.

Hubbard chicks at Day 30 stretch out in a sunny patch catching the rays

We have been fascinated to see the Hubbard chicks develop. These guys were bought as something for Broody Betty to 'mother' when we took the ducklings from her and, rather excitingly, our 8 were only part of a larger batch which ended up in 2 other destinations and would enjoy 2 other feeding and brooding regimes. It has been fun to compare 'notes' with Mentor Anne's batch - indoor brooded under a heat lamp to start with and fed organic (and GM-free) chick-crumb.

Ours were brooded by Betty, of course, and were quickly out free ranging and scratching for worms and grubs, but were fed 'ordinary' mass-produced (i.e. not organic) crumb. By 20 days they were very different. Anne's seemed to be 10 to 20% bigger than ours but still covered only in chick fluff. Ours were smaller but were well feathered up, with wings showing primary,secondary and covert feathers, with well feathered bodies and with tails. It is interesting to think about whether the active outdoor life has them cooler and quickly growing feathers, while the indoor, heat lamp version has them not needing feathers as quickly, so able to put all that protein to body weight. It would be good to know how the third batch are doing and under what regime.

Now, at 30 days, Betty's work seems to be done and she is rarely with them. She has rejoined the 'Lovely Girls' and possibly re-started laying eggs. We have found a couple of new eggs; we have not seen who is laying these yet but BB may well be credited with them. They now find their own way about without her, moving round as a reasonably tight group like the 8-Ball did and take themselves off to 'bed' all piling into one of my new nest boxes rather than perching with their 'Mother'.

Achillea

Time finally ran out for our unfortunate little under-developed gosling, Fotherington Thomas. He lost the use of his right leg and did not look at all like improving despite a week of enhancing his Vitamin B3 and giving him physio-therapy swims on the big pond. We culled him out yesterday and now that he has been put through the kitchen-preparation stage we think we know why. His poor little scrawny, thinly muscled body (he was only 790 g 'oven ready' at 3 months) was built on a frame with what looked like every structural mis-shape of skeleton he could have inherited from his wry-tailed Father. His whole spine and pelvis curved round to his bad side and his neck had a serious 'chicane' double-bend half way down. We are now convinced that our adult geese are a sibling group and not, as advertised, a breeding trio, so we have been guilty of extreme in-breeding, brother to sister(s). At least that is a mistake easily corrected - we will just use the eggs next year and not let anyone go broody. At some point we may swap out the gander for one from a different blood line. The three remaining goslings all look fine, so they may just be the lucky 3 out of the 17 eggs originally 'set', in the DNA lottery of life.

Our orchard, you will recall, is all very new and has only been 'in' a year with planting started in August last year with one or two year old whips and 'feather' trees. We intended only to let it all sit for the first year getting established. We were happy that it blossomed but were not expecting any great fruit crop this year, so we were not disappointed when little fruit set but the Victoria Plum down at the far end of the orchard has quietly been getting on with producing a couple of dozen good sized plums. These are now colouring up well and starting to feel a bit ripe. There will not be enough for jam, but we should get a few desserts out of them and maybe a few for the fruit bowl.

The vegetable garden continues to pump out a lovely selection of vegetables more than enough to keep us and all our guests going and to make a big dent in the freezer space. We will need to invest in a decent size chest freezer this year to cope with the lamb meat. I was out this morning picking a yellow builder bucket full of runner beans and climbing French beans. I have been digging new potatoes of varieties Foremost and Ratte which fortunately escaped the blight. I have not started yet on the double-length row of Sarpo Mira main crop but they have such healthy foliage I cannot believe there will not be a shed load of tubers underground. I am storing them dried a bit but unwashed, in paper sacks in which I buy seed-wheat.

You can see from the pictures that I am still very good for rainbow chard, flat leaved kale and black (Tuscan) kale and calabrese and my small, spring-sown globe artichokes are even producing tiny chokes (which we will probably not actually eat; we will let the plant build up strength and start on that next year). We started into the carrots for the coq-au-vin this week. I have also been making sure to succession-plant to ensure a continuing crop which is not anything I was particularly good at in Kent so that I have more peas and radishes about to start and young beans at the 'first true leaves' stage.

The Jerusalem artichoke plants are huge, towering, 8 foot 'trees' so we are hoping for some good yields there, the French beans keep on coming and the turnips, which we found way too bitter, have kept the rabbits very happy for weeks as a supplementary food and a nice change from grass and herbs. The crunchiness of the turnip roots will also have been good for their teeth.

As crops finish and we move into Autumn proper, I need to be thinking about over-winter crops like onion sets, broad beans and Spring cabbage. It's all go.

Of Fickle Men and Champagne

Our rooster, William the Conqueror has fallen head over heels in love with the new Marans girls and pretty much abandoned his former regular 'girl-fiends', the Sussex Ponte 'Lovely Girls'. He spends all day with the Marans showing them where to scratch, dust-bathing with them and following them or leading them about. He tries to chat them up into going 'back to my place' in the evening but he has not yet cracked that one and by about 7:30 pm he gives up and goes 'indoors' leaving them to their final hour of wandering till they eventually go to roost in their own house (the former goose-box).

We think he must then dream about them all night and can't wait to find them again in the morning. As I open the pop-hole, he's right there inside and shoots out like an Exocet missile, runs up the cattle race and starts strutting about and crowing near the goose box. As I open the goose box pop-hole, and the Marans wander out to greet the day he sprints over and generally 'nails' one of them within feet of the pop hole. He seems very happy and doesn't appear to give a fig at the 'hard-to-get' antics or down-right vamping by the Lovely Girls trying to get him back. We have to admit to a rather shameful sympathy with him there - we are completely impressed by these Marans who lay one egg each EVERY day, so more eggs, in fact. than all the lovely girls between them (who often score zero, or one; all be it, Broody Betty is currently on broody leave).

The LGs are, you will recall, very sporadic at present; they miss too many days, or lay from height (Lucy Long-Drop), or they lay eggs with only part of the shell, or they lay among the nettles in the woods. They are, in short a frustrating pain in the butt and if you asked us now we would describe them as rubbish 'layers'. Mentor Anne tells us that as 'hatchery hybrids' the Sussex Ponte is designed to lay around 300 eggs a year but under indoor hatchery conditions where everything is controlled - day length, light levels, humidity and definitely nutrition. Furthermore they'd be bred to perform for about 18 months at peak lay before being culled out, exhausted in commercial egg-laying terms. Here they are out in all weathers and real day lengths and eating all manner of protein in scratch in the fields, sometimes ignoring the feed we give them, certainly being choosy and picky around the 'layers pellets' even though these are now Pedigree Foods's finest organic. So, realistically, when the 'Young Ones' (the "8-ball" as they are now known) come of age and decide to be females, they may replace some of the Lovely Girls in our laying flock. We will probably not do Sussex Pontes again and I'd do my best to dissuade anyone who suggested they might. If young Pontes in their prime can be out-layed under a free-range system by 5 year old Marans, then pure-bred are the girls for me and we hope that the Jersey Giants and Buff Orpingtons in the 8-ball don't let us down.

As we come into July, the elder trees in our hedges are all coming into full blossom and with the sun shining warmly our thoughts turned to elder-flower cordial and elder-flower champagne. Liz made the cordial last year and we loved it. As well as using it as cordial you can freeze it in plastic milk bottles for later use and/or freeze it in ice cube trays to be dropped into a glass of chilled sparkling water. The champagne we have enjoyed at Anne's place and we know it is also made by Carolyn so while I went and collected a bag full of 'fully open' flower heads Liz surfed up a recipe and dug out the wine making gear to give it a good sloosh out with Milton's fluid.

Both these recipes use just the flowers, water and juice and zest of lemons (Liz threw a lime in too as we had one) as well as sugar. The advice is that the champagne would get going on the naturally occurring yeasts in the flowers but you can supplement with bakers yeast if it is a bit slow to get going. You can either use swing-lid 'Grolsch' style bottles, or even plastic fizzy drink bottles though you are advised to release the pressure a few times during the in-bottle ferment as it can all get a bit lively otherwise.

In the sunshine too, I decided to have a little tinker with hay making. We have grass, sunshine and breeze, and the local merchants are still out of hay following the spring fodder crisis, so I am very low on bedding for baby rabbits and for layers nest boxes. I scythed down a load of grass and spread it thinly over a couple of my chicken-wire rabbit-run panels  which I leant up at 45 degrees on the orchard fence. It was drying quite well but then, wouldn't you know it? lashed down with rain all night. That's great for the water-butts, but not ideal for the hay making. Never mind. If it gets ruined I have plenty more grass and there will be many more sunny days - next week is forecast to be a hot one.

In the rabbit department, Ginny's and Padfoot's little gangs of babies are now a month old and almost permanently out of the boxes and eating the grass in the runs, so we assume they are nearly weaned. We have not seen any nursing lately. This means it is time for a nice job - that of getting the babies used to handling. If we are to sell any of these as pet rabbits then they need to meet the customers as calm, friendly, cuddly bunnies, not wriggling terrified scaredy-cats, so the plan is to go and handle as many of them as you can catch each day.

There are currently 12 babies to do this to, 7 with Ginny and 5 with Padfoot. Goldie has another 7 on line but they are a bit young yet at under 3 weeks and not out on the grass yet. I seem to be over run in Facebook by friends who are volunteering to come here and hug a bunny!

Meanwhile, finally some good news on the red algal bloom in the big pond. It seems to be dropping out at last, the water clearing so that we can now see the planters on the bottom. The algae themselves seem to fall like dust onto the rubber liner and then are rippled up like a miniature version of beach-sand ripples into rice-grain sized ridges, presumably by the wave action in the pond. Fascinating.

New Feed, New Fence, New Freedom!

Our chickens went on strike! Egg laying sputtered to a halt and stopped altogether. We have been messing around with ones twos and threes a day (from 4 'layers') earlier in the year and then 'lost' Betty to a broodying session and now to being an excellent Mum to the 8 chicks, so that we were down to one or two a day. We had a couple of generous donations of a dozen each time from Mentor Anne who is getting glutted out from her 30-odd birds so we've been OK but we were always suspicious that one hen was not pulling her weight at all. We have a slight problem that we cannot tell the Lovely Girls apart so we weren't sure this wasn't two hens laying every other day, but we have one girl spending so much time with William that she is always copping his amorous advances and her feathers are quite worn out across her 'saddle'. This one never seems to be 'missing' (as in off to lay her egg).

Last week this low production took a turn for the worse and one hen started laying very thin-shelled or shell-less eggs which were getting broken in the nest boxes and going to waste. Some days we had no eggs at all. We referred the case to 'Doctor Anne' who asked us all sorts of questions and homed in on diet. I have been feeding the local feed merchant's "standard" grade layers pellets but lately have found that their 25 kg sacks contain a lot of pellets broken down to dust size, so that the feed looks like it might be the sweepings from the end of a production run. At Anne's suggestion we have started the hens on Pedigree Foods' Organic Layers Ration. We have also discontinued the 'mixed poultry corn' which contains maize (and might, these days, be the GMO version of maize) and are going with local feed-wheat. It may take a few days for this new nutrition to work through but today (almost certainly by chance) was a 2-good-egg day. We will tell you how we get on. We are also going to fit the birds' legs with coloured leg-rings so that we can identify the non-layer and, if she doesn't watch it and these baby chicks come up to laying age, she may find herself in the stock pot.

The biggest project recently is our fencing of the 1.5 acre East Field with sheep-proof (and therefore mini-horse proof) fencing. This has been done by our fencing guy Paul M with me helping him as labourer. If you are interested in the detail, sheep fence is high-tensile square mesh about 3 feet high with smaller holes at the bottom (to stop baby lambs) with a strand of high tensile barbed wire at the top. It is all strained to bass-guitar twanginess using a thing called a 'monkey strainer', so it has massive 10" 'strainer' posts at each corner and for the gate posts and narrower (4 inch?) posts in between about every 3-4 yards. The strainer posts can be braced and buttressed with extra diagonal posts. The whole field is, as I said, 1.5 acres or about 127 yards by 44 yards, i.e. about 340 yards total fence which will set you back about €1050 installed. It's one of the bigger investments in the small holdering game, but good fencing should last you 10-20 years.

We started the task last Thursday afternoon, had a quick couple of hours on Friday morning before Paul had to go off and attend a wedding, missed Monday for Bank Holiday, and then got properly stuck in on Tuesday and today (in the rain). We'd done by about 4 pm. Paul joined us for tea and scones and then I had to show him a couple of bits Vendor Anna needs on her bit of land and then he was gone. He's a lovely bloke and great fun to work with, being full of local stories and anecdotes. We would happily use him again and I would recommend him to anyone round here who needs fencing done.

 We are delighted and feel like we have "got our field back". Since last year it has just had the beef fence (3 strands of barbed) between us and the field to stop Mike-the-Cows's cows from straying onto our lawns and garden and was open to the north. It felt like we didn't own it and shouldn't go there. Now we can come and go through the new gate opening by our Utility Room and the fences around the 'outside' stop animals coming and going across our boundaries.

At 5 o'clock then, we were ready to unleash the horses. We had two at that stage, Bob and Cody, who had been tethered on the lunge-reins since Sunday 5th and we had been moving them on to new grass each day. Now we could lead them into the field and take off the head collars and let them run free. And RUN they did, all overcome with excitement at the new space, grass and freedom, not seen since November last year. They took off at a full gallop, racing in great arcs up and down the field full of the joys, like a couple of mad youngsters (they are actually about ten years old). I walked round the field showing Liz the fencing (I know! I know how to show a lady a good time!) as they raced away and back past us again and again. It was lovely to see.

After a while they calmed down and set to eating. I texted Carolyn to say the field was now ready and soon, Charlotte showed up with the other horse, Romeo (he of the cart pulling). We let him go into the field and the others were so delighted to have him back that they went racing around again. It is a brilliant funny sight to see three Thelwell style ponies galloping about as a group as fast as their little legs will carry them.

Happy Horses (and happy roses and rhubarb!).

Logging with Bob

...and a Happy New Year from the Lovely Girls. We gather from friends that hens are meant to slow down their production a bit through the dark depths of winter but it's been so mild and sunny and our hens are ignoring that advice. We are on three a day at present from three 'working' hens. Broody Betty is, we are sure, coming back into lay. She has bright yellow legs and bright red comb and wattles and spends a lot more time with the Lovely Girls rather than separate looking after the young ones. The young ones are now very much part of the normal comings and goings, so we see all 7 birds strolling about together.

This morning I needed hay to bed down the chooks once I'd cleaned them out, and for a hay-mulch on the asparagus bed, so a chance to go for a blat in the 2CV. I love this and the roads round here are just perfect for 2CV. The words "bowling along" seem especially apt for the slightly rolling surfaces, especially in the boggy bits of the County, where a straight road tends to undulate over, I guess, harder and softer bits of the peat substrate. So I took Deefer for a trundle down to our hay/straw merchant and threw a bale of hay into the back seat, giving the car a suitably farm-vehicle sprinkling of hay bits. A bale is €4.25 and lasts us for ever, much cheaper than buying the silly little pillow-packs in pet shops for mad money.

Next job was to go with John Deere Bob down to our little stand of coppiced ash to bring back some of what I'd cut down before Christmas. It's been a bit wet to get the tractor down there but has now dried out through Christmas and Bob reckoned he'd get through if he picked a careful route, sticking to the better drained sloping ground and nipping through a hedge-gap rather than using the much-puddled-up gateways. He has a reasonable sized "box" mounted on the 3-point-link of the tractor.

This is, by the way, Bob's only vehicle, so he uses it for shopping, trips to Mass, going visiting and even trips to his favourite restaurant for lunch once a week. He was happy to lend it to me for this job, but I declined, sure I'd get it bogged down, so I persuaded him to do the driving. I followed on on foot across the fields with Deefer in tow, chasing about and exploring the hedges and cattle foot-prints. We gathered up about 3/4 of what I'd cut and brought it home, coming down in through the cattle race and able to turn round in the yard, so we could back the tractor right in to the back door, almost, making it dead easy to off-stack the logs onto our log store.

This is ash so, when dry, burns with a fierce hot flame, very good in the range. It grows like weeds in all the hedges round here and, even better, you can coppice it. It grows back from the base when you cut the trunks down. Sustainability!

Also on the agenda today was to bottle up the home made wine. It had its finings treatments yesterday and had now done the 24 hours of settling to fall clear. First job was to rack it off (syphon it off the sediment) into the 5 gallon bucket, a job best done all in one smooth 'pour' with no interruptions and no movement of the 'source' bucket. If you stop/start there is a risk of the syphon tube letting wine fall back and stir up the 'lees', where upon you'd have to leave it another 24 hours to settle.

We have been keeping a stock of the Rioja bottles we get from Lidl which come with one of those modern tough, stiff, spongy plastic "corks" which we figured we could re-use. We had also kept a few screw-top bottles and had a back up supply of washed out 2 litre milk containers to house any surplus. This all proved to work perfectly well except that at the last minute I decided I had better try to sterilize the corks and tops with boiling water. I tried one just in case they'd go all soft but it seemed to survive, so I went for it.

Unfortunately while I then went about racking the wine off, these corks took up a small amount of the water and swelled. They were an absolute PIG to get back into the tops of the bottles. I used an old trick I knew, to lay a bit of narrow wire down the inside of the bottle to just pinch the cork away from the glass enough to let air out as you draw out the wire, but this wasn't an air-pressure problem, it was just that the corks were now too big. If you are doing this a lot it's worth buying a cork compressor but we've not got that organised yet. I ended up squidging them in as best I could, and then whacking them gently with my rubber mallet. It almost worked. The corks are 3/4 in with a 'muffin top' like a champagne top. We'll have to check they don't start popping out! We will be doing this again and will gear up with corks, the compressor and other stuff.

The verdict? The wine is nice looking, a lovely red colour and clear as a bell. The taste is maybe a bit 'thin' but is pleasant enough and not offensive in any way, not acid, not tannin-ish, not young/sweet. We could believe it was a merlot and we can believe the oak-aged thing but we'd want to blind-taste it to convince ourselves. The thinness has us thinking it is going to be easy to drink and we hope not inclined to give us sore heads or hang overs. A success. We are very pleased. Thank you very much Mr and Mrs Silverwood for this very thoughtful Christmas Present.