On a Chicken Mission

Liz plucks the final bird. 3 finished birds
are in the background.

This post sees us finally through the harvest of the Hubbard variety chickens. Regular readers will know that the Hubbard is a commercial breed used widely in Ireland by farmers supplying the supermarkets with, specifically, Free Range and Organic chickens. We get them as day-olds and grow them through to around day 90 by which time they have reached 2-4 kg oven-ready weights and are just the most succulent, tender, meaty and flavoursome chicken you will ever put on the table.

The final 3 hens and a cock await jointing and/or vac-packing

These are normally only available in industrial scale batches (10,000 for example) but our friends Mentor Anne and Simon who were once in that business, are still 'in' with a guy who manages one of the big hatcheries and is happy to make up mini-orders to suit we few smallholders. We get a dozen and A+S add those to their own 'few dozen' order. If you like, go back a few months on this blog for some pics of a previous lot newly arrived  (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/05/hubbard-chick-at-2-days-little-list-of.html ).

Vac packed and ready for the freezer

Those regular readers will also know that the latest batch have now 'cooked' and we have been processing them at a two a day for the last week. That brought us to Saturday with 4 birds remaining. Normally we'd share the load but that day Liz decided she was "in the Zen" for a solid 2-3 hours of plucking and gutting.

Fringe benefit of a Hubbard kill. Lovely fresh paté

She took the laptop into the kitchen, put on an Oz murder-mystery series on download which she is currently "binge-watching", shut the door to keep out the kittens (they are devils for climbing up your back without warning, leaping from the floor to about waist height, then digging their claws in for a scrabble to shoulder height. Poor Liz is lacerated about the nape and fed up with the pain, and was going to be working in the warm kitchen with her shoulders protected only by a tee shirt and apron) and went for it.

Boiled chicken feet? Not your cup of tea?
The dogs LOVE them

My part in this is to bring in the killed birds on demand, supply tea in regular and copious amounts (plus the occasional G+T if the job is running past 'yard-arm') and then, at the end, jointing, vac-packing, finding homes for all this largesse in the freezer(s) and disappearing the bags of feathers, guts, heads and any other unmentionables. I can pluck but I am nothing like as careful or patient as Liz and my birds end up looking a bit like road-kill with torn skin, etc. Liz picks away carefully and gently, busily and efficiently producing lovely looking oven-ready birds. She is very good at it and has found, to her own amazement (Dublin city-girl!) that she thoroughly enjoys it and finds it very therapeutic. I, of course, am not arguing. My job is to hatch (if necessary), rear and 'grow' the birds and then kill them and bring them to the kitchen door and take away any bags of waste. It is a neat and easily worked team effort. We both, of course, thoroughly enjoy eating them!

Sunday morning dawned Hubbard-less but also with a good frost. During my first livestock rounds (which now includes getting 'wet', liquid water out to the birds - the ducks and geese do love to wash their faces and they are unimpressed by that rock-hard crust that comes on the drinkers these mornings. The outside tap is, of course, frozen up, so this involves bringing out buckets of water from the kitchen) I had heard what I thought were a few more Whooper swans flying N-S past us to the West and being called down by more birds on Lough Feigh. I headed down there again with my long lens, hoping to improve on my '365' pics of last week.

No luck on the swans by then (10 am). The Lough is quite low at present and was completely frozen over except among the reed beds, so there was not a swan to be seen, not even the ubiquitous Mute Swans. I had to satisfy myself with a couple of picturesque frosty scenes and a small flock of wigeon zig-zagging about. I'd given up and headed home when I got my best surprise of that day - I put up a snipe. I don't think I have ever seen one before but I know that, in theory, they do live here.

This tiny 'dot' cropped out of the middle of a huge blank
sky is my snipe. First one I'd ever seen, never mind photo'd.

Of course, once it had exploded into flight it was quickly up to a gazillion mph and headed away from me as fast as its little blurring wings could go. I whipped up the 400 mm and fired off a couple pics and thank Heaven for modern "image stabilization" on these fancy lenses. He was outta there. I was relieved to be able to crop this silhouette from the resulting huge, featureless picture of grey sky.

Thawed patch and neat pile of poo tells
the tale of where one sheep slept last night

Finally I have had some fun today helping to clear away the outdoor archery equipment for our Coach, Con who is currently laid up in his bed, too sick to do any hefting and carrying but fretting because all the gear was still 'out there' getting rained on and frozen.

We all laughed at this superb pic of archery
boss-lady, Niamh who had finally nailed that
coffee cup with a superb tight pattern of 3
arrows. Ace shooting Niamh!

Our archery field 'out there', south of Castlerea town is a square with earth banks thrown up all round it like ditches and walls, a copy of an Irish fort (or 'Rath'). In one corner is an access gap for Con's tired old ride-on mower which comes with a handy little trailer.

From shortage to glut. We probably have
'enough' eggs now.

My job, helped by our archery 'boss-lady' Niamh (Brits may need to know this is pronounced "Neave") was to scurry back and forth collecting up all the 3D foam-rubber targets (life-size animals like wild boar, ibex and deer, fox etc), logs, tarpaulins, metal 'tent-peg' pins and pallets, bring them all to dry storage. On Sunday a gang of us will return to demolish the big marquee and then Con will be able to get some healing sleep. Get well soon, Con!

Of Swarm Lures, Turkeys and Kangaroos

A post of three thirds. I wonder how many bloggers started with a title like that tonight? I like to keep my subject headers a bit 'noticable' so if you are entrigued, read on and enjoy it. Two of these stories are triggered by tip-offs from Anne, but the first is a tribute to ace carpenter K-Dub, who we have met before (16th June and 6th July 2013)

A swarm-lure or 'bait box'. 

Bee keepers seem to spend a good part of their time worrying about their colonies swarming. Swarming is that event in (roughly) May/June when your old established Queen bee ups sticks to set up a new colony with half your workers leaving behind (you hope) a queen cell or two containing pupating replacement (virgin) queens who will take over. It is the honey bee's way of doing that Darwinian thing of increasing in numbers and taking over the world. It has worked very well for them for 30 million years, well before man started 'helping' them. The individual bees breed by normal insect-ish means  but if they did not swarm, then they'd stay in the same hollow tree for ever, so swarming is the way that the colony, hive or 'super-organism' increases in numbers.

I've never had much time for Smithwick's beers, but this 'Blonde'
was OK. Impressively quaffable. 

Bee keepers can try to stop this by a variety of methods but it is a forlorn hope - the urge to breed is hard-wired in and they might as well try to stop their teenage daughters from fancying the local boys, or their dog from chasing that she-dog down the road who is on heat. All they can really do is hope to influence the timing and then work to contain the swarm within their apiary and thereby not lose half the honey-gathering workforce.

Ooops. We seem to have acquired a couple of turkeys.

One such way is to build a 'swarm-lure' or 'bait box'. The idea here is that the swarm 'swarms' out of the hive but then gathers on a handy bush or tree (or bank ATM machine, fence post, car engine bay, sky-scraper) to regroup (around the queen). The swarm then sends off scout bees to look for a more sensible home (hollow tree, chimney etc) and, within a few hours, has a committee meeting, decides on the best location found and zooms off to go and invade it. The beekeeper tries to pre-empt this by providing, in a handy tree, a more attractive new home than any available in nature.

The theory goes that this should be a box of roughly 40 litres capacity (a 15 inch cube or so) about 12 feet off the ground, containing some old hive frames which will smell familiar to the scout bees augmented, some say, with lemon balm scent (which apparently smells nice to bees). People build them out of all manner of scrap wood, planks and boards, rough aul' wood with splits, knots and cracks. Nobody spends any money on them as the hope is, as I said, rather forlorn. The bees have to swarm, and find your box and decide that that is the best accommodation around. Good luck with that.

Charlotte de-crates the hen bird.

I decided to give it a try and knew that the nearest carpenter around who might have a supply of scrap wood, was old chum K-Dub. I made contact and punted my 'scrounge'. K-Dub was happy to oblige. Come down, he said and raid my scrap pile. I scrapped into a notebook a quick drawing of what I'd need based on the required internal dimensions which would suit the bee hive frames.  Well, K-Dub being who he is got all intrigued by the idea and, instead of leaving me to find scrap wood, started offering to cut 'this bit of board' to size on his huge, powerful, bench-saw, then started to assemble it and quickly (less than an hour) built me a superb, luxurious box which knocks anything I have seen into a cocked hat.

The swarm bees (if they happen) will be dazzled! It is glued and screwed, It has a landing ramp outside the entrance hole and handles to lift it by. K-Dub even gave me a tin of old varnish which he'd had on his shelf "for 4 years", that I might paint the box and return the rest of the varnish. That guy is just THE BEST kind of neighbour, friend and carpenter. If I'd taken the wood and done it myself, I'd still be doing it now and there'd be splinters, gaps, jaunty angles and Heaven knows what. The bees may well have used it but this box will feel like the penthouse suite!

The male ('stag' or 'Tom') is not sure whether to come out of his
crate.

And so to turkeys. You may have spotted some pics higher up the post. I have been hankering for turkeys as my next species in 2015 for a while and had mentioned this to Anne. She tipped me off that there was a poultry 'Bring and Buy' at Kiltimagh (in Mayo, our neighbouring county) today. I fancied a couple of young females of the old fashioned 'Bronze' (single breasted) variety and an unrelated male (they are called 'stags' or 'Toms') to use as our parent generation. These guys would not be eaten for Christmas, but any progeny would be fair game (next year). So, with Liz still away, I rounded up Charlotte (who also needed some turkeys for a friend) and we 'went equipped' - money, pet-carriers, early start.

Crates in the car.

Well, Kiltimagh turns out ot be a rather small event with only half a dozen sellers including the petting zoo owner but among these was a lady with a crate in her van containing an immense and impressive 2014 breedable pair of turkeys. The hen was apparently in lay (so Charlotte bought half a dozen fertile eggs for her friend) and the stag/tom/male was strutting his proud stuff with tail up, wings lowered and all his facial extravagance on display. This is all retractable bright blue and red skin and we now know is known as the 'caruncle, snood and wattle'. He was also 'gobble gobble'-ing loudly to protect his woman. He stole my heart. To cut a long story short, we bought the pair and they are now at home in the middle part of the goose house, settling in prior to being allowed out free range (in stages). More pics of these guys in future posts.

Kangaroo steaks.

Finally, our local branch of supermarket Lidl has gone a bit crazy with frozen meats of all sorts of different species - wild boar, ostrich and even kangaroo. Anne had commented that Simon was quite taken with the latter as it was lean and of fine texture without being as gamey as venison. You should always try these things, so I was in Lidl yesterday and picked up some kangaroo. Well, I was impressed. The only serving suggestion on the box seemed to be a rather basic two-side fry, 7 minutes a side which gave it a 'well done' finish, to which I added a 5 minute rest. On reflection you could easily do a rare version. The pic on the box looks quite pink, so I think that must be what they have done for the advert.

I served mine with new potatoes and a mix of roasted veg with Cajun seasoning (courgette, peppers, red onion, tomato, garlic) and washed it down with an Australian Shiraz (homage to the Ozzie-ness of the kangaroo?). I had deliberately not flavoured the meat, except for a bit of salt, because I wanted to taste the base flavour. It worked well though it would be quite pricey at €5.99 for the pack, though possibly intended for two and my only other (piffling) criticism was that the meat was already chopped into 5 small bits, rather than  two decent steaks. Worth a try, then, if your Lidl's are doing it. Thanks for the tip-offs Anne on both Turkeys and Kangaroos.

Enough Foxes, Already!

I promised you a few pics of us scrubbed up for the wedding.
Here are a couple taken by other guests and posted on
Facebook, l-r Liz, Mr and Mrs S and the author.

I am thinking I may have been obsessing on our fox issue lately and the blog has become "all about the fox". Vulpes vulpes and his/her kin have rather taken over to the detriment of stories on all the other many aspects of this story of a small holding. Our foxy adventures may also have taken over the village with even wife of Mike-the-Cows reporting to us a fox she saw "by the bridge near the crossroads".

Liz and I with J-M (left) and Em-J (right)

John Deere Bob was down at his kesh (a concrete bridge over a drainage stream), half a mile downstream from ours, this morning and reported "so many fox tracks in the snow" as well as rabbit tracks, hare prints and pheasants. "There must have been half a dozen foxes", he declared, "there were so many I'm amazed they'd not 'swept up' all the rabbits!" Even Mentor Anne is riffing in the comment section of my last post that the place is "teeming" with foxes. The word must have gone out that we are running a "Fox MacDonalds" Enough, I say! I will make no more comment on the fox story unless something amazing happens, at least not for a while.

I quite liked this rather bizarre one.

You, the reader, will know there is all sorts going on behind the scenes (sightings, hunts, killing, insults and mild effronts and even (gasp) the blackening of names) but I will , from now, only post up the body count as a post-script.... Fox #2..... Bridget Jones style, when/if it changes. I will leave you with just one of JD Bob's tongue in cheek pearls of foxy wisdom. Chickens, pheasants and any other bird, he tells us, are safe as houses at night from Brer Fox because they perch in trees. Not so (allegedly) the turkey. Bob, in one of those stories he has told us several times as he sometimes forgets he has already shared it, says that the fox knows to walk round and round the turkey's tree so that the turkey, looking down and trying to keep his eye on the fox, twists his neck round and round. The turkey then gets dizzy and falls off the perch into the waiting jaws of the fox. "Did you ever hear that?" says Bob as his cheeks and eyes crinkle up and he rubs his hands together, chuckling his breathy giggle. That's it. No more fox-bore.

I like a good drive on snow - always have since I was a young fan of Motor Rallying. I enjoy the (rather tame) risky feel of barely having grip and feeling the starts of mild slides on corners, quickly corrected of course (this is the family car on standard tyres, after all!) and knowing that you need to drive with extra anticipation and alertness. I love the headlights peircing the gloom and the optical illusion of the 'star-field' of blizzard flakes parting in front of the car to whizz by all around your 'trajectory'. I had some fun, then, last night, heading for 'Bee School' in Longford in the dark. There was a good covering of snow on the minor roads all up through Moyne and Fairymount to French Park, though the main roads from French Park were clear on the outward journey. On the way back I met a blizzard between Termonbarry and Strokestown and there was laid snow on some of those bends from Strokestown back through Ballinagare. All good fun.

Our first goose egg of 2015. The 'use first'
egg is a first from a chicken with a soft
shell one end.

This 'Bee School' is my studies towards the Intermediate "Written Practical" exam at the end of March. Written in that it is a written paper, 'Practical' because questions will be on practical hive/apiary tasks and management, honey extraction etc, as opposed to the 'scientific' paper which is on bee biology, anatomy, diseases, honey chemistry and all that jazz. This is a whole different ball game to last year's 'Preliminary' paper which was an easy, entry level, half hour, 20 questions, single (or few). word answers. Name 3 major parts of the bee's body (head, thorax, abdomen). Name 4 substances bees bring back to the hive (nectar, pollen, propolis and water). What is the main problem with honey from oilseed rape and heather? (It sets hard quickly in the comb).

The kitchen gets knocked about a bit.

This paper is 3 hours long, 5 questions of at least half an hour of writing asking for lots of detail on (for example) aspects of a main disease (hive signs, symptoms, effects, risks, legal side (i.e. is it reportable), remedies, apiary recovery). It's going to be fun - the pressure is on. Liz has opted out of this one; she is happy to own just the Preliminary Certificate and slowly build up her knowledge and experience hands-on in our own hive(s)

Our other news is two simple bits. The plumber has come and installed the new dish washer, which involved also swinging the sink round by 90º to 'look' out of the kitchen window at the setting sun. We have just about managed to get the fridge back in, which looked likely to need a new home in the corner of the Dining Room for a while. Liz ran the washer for the first time last night and is delighted with it. She won't mind me admitting that I have always been a bit jaundiced about these machines and my default setting would be to do the washing up by hand; in my head I see them using more water and energy than you need and pumping out more waste chemicals but Liz has long dreamed of this day and she's just handed me a drink, so I will keep quiet on this one! Meanwhile, I had a nice surprise  this afternoon when I spotted a goose egg in the nest compartment, our first of 2015. We may have 4 females this year (one is a bit 50/50 at present and may prove to be a gander) so we should do OK for eggs. We are not allowing any broodiness in geese this year as we don't want any more goslings.

50% Success

Anne and Simon's pigs ready to go. 

An early start this morning has me nipping round our own livestock doing 'breakfasts' and releases so that I can couple up the trailer and hit the road by 07:45. I am headed for Mentor Anne's (and Simon's). Their 2 cross (traditional) breed pigs are ready to go on their final journey and we are providing the haulage vehicle, our little Fiat and trailer.

See also Anne's blog if you like, on http://anirishalternative.blogspot.ie/2014/08/whoops.html?showComment=1408039916196#c4573968651786064362 .

Temporary pig 'race' through the hedge

The pigs' paddock is in the corner between their drive and the lane on which they live, but has been, up to now 'behind' a hedge. Coming in, small and in their crate, the pigs could be hauled up the 100 yards of driveway, round the end of the hedge and back down the garden to their paddock. It was not really feasible to walk them back all that way, so Simon had hatched a plan to cut a hole through the hedge, lining it with pallets to make a mini 'race' leading to the trailer parked at the drive/lane junction. We both knew that the pigs might not want to go where the electric fence had been even though it was now turned off, and that they might not want to cross Simon's wooden 'clippetty clop' bridge over a ditch made of pallets.

50% success - one loaded. 

In fact neither of these hazards fazed the piggies at all, and we quickly got one loaded using the bribery of a bucket of meal and boiled spuds. However as a professional display of good pig wrangling, it was at that point it stopped being our finest hour. The 2nd pig hated the idea of getting cornered in the confined narrow space of the 'race' and was having none of it. Three quarters of an hour of trying included some near misses where Simon's feed bucket almost almost almost coaxed her in but then she'd spook and bolt, and 120+ kg of pig is not anything you can stop of it decides to barge you out of the way at a squealing gallop. I was tied up keeping pig #1 in the trailer, so Simon was just working up a good sweat on his own and the pig leading him a merry dance.

Narrow delivery lane. Topp reversing skills needed.

Time was running out - we needed to be at the butcher's for ten and anyway, Simon had a 'date' for 10 a.m. We decided to go with just the one pig, block the hole in the fence and head for town. After that decision what remained of the 'mission' went back to being plain sailing, an easy drive into town, a successful reverse into the narrow delivery lane and a problem free release of pig #1 to trot happily down the concrete into the butcher's lairage. A 50% success then and Anne will re-book pig #2 for a later date at which we may well enroll some extra man (or woman) power, but Anne tells me that pig #2 will now ONLY be fed from a bucket and will be coaxed down the race a few times as practice for her own big day, possibly next Thursday.

Left to right, Steak Lady, Mr SL and Liz.

For me, then, a whizz back home where we were to receive a visit from Steak Lady, Mr SL and 'Auntie Mary' (sister of Mr SL), down to have a look round the place and see all the new 'lines' (bees, pigs, goslings, this year's sheep) as well as to give Liz her Birthday presents (a little early!). We also fed them of course with many of the ingredients being home grown and the bread home made; they were delighted with that. They had arrived bearing various other gifts too, including some empty jam jars, so when they left we packed them off with their own vegetable crate.

Auntie Mary gets some 'tay' down her. 

They are currently in mid move, from Portmarnock down to near to the Silverwoods, with all the B+B students now 'evicted' to other homes and quite a lot of the furniture and 'stuff' already moved down to County Laois. The place they are buying has, allegedly, a rather fine and luxurious shed in the garden with heating, lighting and fancy worktops, so all the 'children' are full of curiosity as to the fate of that. Even more notable was that there was a fancy 'rabbitry' - a building also with heat and light, lined with rabbit hutches, but apparently the vendor is taking that one with him/her.

One of our honey bees on a leek flower

Meanwhile, no sooner had I posted bemoaning the lack of our bees using the flowers in our garden, than they suddenly are all over some leeks we left to go to seed over the winter. We have also seen them on hollyhocks and around the Kitchen Garden, so maybe the dearth of wild flowers is forcing them to look more locally.

That is it for this one. Catch up with you again soon.

21 Days Later

Mr and Mrs Buff, suppliers of DNA and 8 of the eggs

Regular readers will recall my post of 15th July, where we had just set in the incubator, 17 Buff Orpington eggs, 8 from our own 'Mrs Buff' hen, plus 9 from Mentor Anne's Buffs. Well, time flies and 20 and a half days later we were delighted to see the dogs suddenly taking a keen interest in the incubator; they could presumably hear the first, almost inaudible cheepings of baby chicks starting to 'pip'. Obviously the poor dogs get evicted at this stage except under supervision. The incubator is in the Living Room, so we can sit in there in the evenings keeping an eye on dogs, reading books and listening to the ever louder commotion in there as eggs break open and chicks start moving about, steeling ourselves not to peek too often in case we let out the heat and humidity. We are still new enough chicken 'breeders' to be as excited as kids at Christmas watching the tiny cracks appear and the first tiny flakes of shell to be thrown off.

Just hatched this second - still wet and unable to stand.

Well, it's going extremely well. Over that night just 2 chicks hatched (one of Anne's eggs first and then one of ours) but several more started pipping. We are amazed by the speed that these babies burst out once they are pipping; the membrane around the blunt end of the egg seems to tear rapidly right round the egg starting at the pipping 'hole', as compared to the Guinea Fowl eggs where the babies seem to have to laboriously chip their way all round the circumference. 6 more babies 'fell' out in quick succession so that we had 8 hatchlings by mid afternoon of day 21.

First 8 are out and drying. 

The plan is to rescue them to the brooder box (but see also more on this later on) when they have dried out and got up walking about after 24 - 48 hours - they hatch with enough reserves of yolk in their fat little abdomens to go that long without food or water. I was going to leave them till tonight (Day 21 evening) but this morning we had our only failure (so far), one failed to make it all the way out and died half-emerged. I noticed the chicks pecking at the broken shell, and when I put my hand in to rescue this baby, they also tried a few tentative pecks at me - they looked hungry! I decided to rescue the 8 dry ones into the brooder where I could feed them and give them water, leaving a wet, just emerged, noisy one to encourage the remaining pippers and non movers.

A lettuce spinner bowl to transport the chicks.

Now it is 8 o'clock at night, Day 21 and we are still going strong. Anne was delighted to know that of the 13 we now have emerged safely, 9 were from her 9 eggs - a 100% fertility and hatch rate which is quite something in the chicken rearing world; we are both enormously impressed too by this little, reasonably priced (€190 several years ago), unsophisticated incubator for the loan of which many many thanks to Charlotte of the Mini Horses. Last time I looked there were numbers 9 through 13 drying and cheeping noisily in the incubator and at least one more of the remaining 3 eggs maybe starting to pip.

Buff Orpington chicks only hours old.

We will leave all this running through the night after which we may candle any remaining eggs and if they are fails, we will call it a day. What ever happens it has been a very successful incubation and hatch. Not so successful, the other half of this cunning plan. You will recall that 2 days before we set these eggs our 2013 Hubbard hen, Miss White went broody for her first time. We put half a dozen less vital eggs under her and dreamed that she might go full term, hatch them and then adopt, in addition to her real clutch, any Buff chicks we might be able to hatch in the 'incy'. Well she went full term and is actually still sitting there on her day 24, but in the process she managed to lose or break 5 of her real eggs, so she has been sitting for the last week on just one real egg plus 2 dummy (rubber) eggs. We toyed briefly with the idea of swapping the 2 dummies with a couple of pipping Buff eggs so that she might 'hatch' them, but there is a risk she will freak out and kill the intruders, especially if they smell or look different. So, No, we'll 'hand rear' these babies and leave Miss White be, sitting on that last egg for a few more days.

Feta cheese and courgette cake

Meanwhile, not satisfied with being able to cook other people's recipes really well, Liz had a go at inventing a new recipe for using up some of the current mini-glut of yellow courgettes. She took our standard recipe for Dorset Apple Cake, subtracted apples and sugar and substituted in equal weights of feta cheese and grated courgette. She baked it as you would the apple cake and it became our 'carbs' in a meal which included lamb's liver in creamy onion sauce and broccoli. It was gorgeous and will now go into the home 'cookbook' for further uses. We also think you could do any number of versions of it, maybe fishy ones, different cheeses, a bacon/lardon one and so on.

Bee hive 'smoker'

Tonight I am self-catering as Liz is at 'Knit and Natter', and I have used up the left overs (actually that piece I photographed on the plate above) with a thawed out portion of shepherd's pie and some steamed black kale and more yellow courgette. I can vouch for it's deliciousness and texture a second time round.

More news on the Buffs in the next post.

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.