Callum Comes a-Calling

Storm Callum

Named storm 'Callum' arrives heralded by the usual colourful wind maps and weather warnings from Met Éireann and (National broadcaster) RTE. He looks from the first predictions, that he will split up either side of the island's SW corner and will mainly be a coast problem. Co Roscommon is a land-locked county, so we only got a 'yellow' warning (for rain).

Upholstery "stuff" will need an official
storage place.

And so it turned out. We'd taken all the normal precautions (hives strapped down, lumps of concrete on hutch roofs etc) and we have our new chicken house roof, so we felt safe enough but no-one here was complacent and we all saw the sorry pictures of the devastation caused by Hurricane Michael which took out great tracts of Florida. I was woken by heavy rain at about 3 a.m. and then again at 6 a.m. and there were puddles but we got away with no damage.

Rooster Gandalf (right) minds a group of hens sunning them
selves and preening. 

We had even got away with a 2 day "Indian Summer" prior to Callum, with the south winds bringing unseasonably warm air up from Spain. We'd been able to sit outside, in my case with the camera, and take a few pics of the various birds relaxing in what might be their last warm days this year. For 2 days we did not light the range (I have now!). There was plenty of bee activity in both the hive and the swarm box.

Despite appearances, we think this may be a hen.

I noted in a recent post that we did not seem to be able to produce here, a white coloured hen despite having Sussex birds in the flock for all the 6 years we have done chickens here. All our white babies seemed to grow up into roosters, way outside the Law of Averages.

Rooster Gandalf has had enough of being magnificent and full
of breeding season glory. He goes for the moult.

Very recently we 'offed' the last youngster as it started to shout Cock-a-Doodle-Dooooo! and grew an impressive long tail and the big facial features (wattle, comb) of a cockerel. He also started trying to jump/rape women belonging to Gandalf and Herme and was getting a good kicking from those two boys. It was not going to end well.

Now, that lad was one of a small clutch of babies hatched in spring, a 2nd one of which was also white, and we watched anxiously as the two white "boys" both grew up, were seen play-fighting one another and seemed to be heading for similar tall stature. We were sure they were both roosters.

Pretty hen enjoying the sunshine

Then a month or 2 ago, the 2nd bird suddenly stopped growing and never developed the tall tail or big face, never crowed and did not start harassing the 'sisters'. She(?) is a bit rangey and long limbed so she will be a big bird but we think we might just have a hen, there.

Turkey hen, 'Deo' seems quite happy solo.

We have been keeping a close eye on the turkey hen, 'Deo' after we had to cull out the 'tom' ('Excelsis' - there was a bit of a Christmas theme developing there, for a while). Turkeys can form very close pair bonds and can pine away and die at the loss of their partner. Deo seems to be OK and happy enough hanging with the three Guinea Fowl cock-birds. So far so good anyway.

In line for some culling action, these two "spare" Appleyard
drakes.

Also in this inadvertent tale of culling and death we have 2 'spare' drakes quietly getting on with enjoying a bit of a stay of execution. They were due to go on their final journey back at the end of our Help-X visit by Sonja and Asbjörn but that was when the turkey-tom decided to lose the plot and attack me. He stepped into harm's way and the processing department had enough on its plate. Never mind, the Lady of the House will not be that busy for ever and their turn will come.

I can never see how this is comfortable.

Did I say 'busy'. Oh yes, I have not yet mentioned that that other big 'time-suck' that mops up our free time each year, is about to re-start..... The Village Play. The Lisacul Players wake up about now each year and start planning the next Easter's production. The 'wake up' meeting was on Wednesday and involved a big gang of them (13) reading one of the (3) plays short-listed by main man and Producer Tommy C. I went along as the reading started late enough that I had all the birds locked up safe from Mr Fox. I am sorry I did not make a note of the play or writer but it was by a well known and prolific local play-wright.

Plenty of bee activity round the swarm box in the warm days.

The Players have to try to find a play that suits their male/female cast balance and they also prefer plays where there is not just one major spoken part. We prefer well balanced 'ensemble' plays. The one we read was very good and very funny and may end up being "The Play", but the Players are going to read another one next week and another the week after, and then decide. I will keep you posted.

Finally, we came to time for the big 'Parma' ham legs of pork to come out of their dry salt/sugar cure and to move on to the next phase: 4-18 months of air drying hanging up from the ceiling in a nice airy, well ventilated space. This change involves having to scrub off all the encrusted salt using cider vinegar (or the odd splash of hot water which you must quickly pat off once the salt is gone).

Legs scrubbed clean of salt

They get wrapped in a muslin sheath or a pillow case to deter the flies but they should not really need that, being so salty and vinegar-y by now on all the cut surfaces and skin. I could not actually find the muslin when I went to do this but pending a rescue, hung them up naked anyway and I have seen no flies on or around them, so we should be OK. They hang for 4-18 months gently drying out and maturing, and losing around 30% of their weight.

That must be about it for this post so I will wish you Good Luck and hope you all survived 'Callum' as painlessly as we did.

Oh - one last thing. We have had our first goose eggs of this season

A Long Walk

Scorchio! This was Met Éireann's short-range forecast for
4pm today (29th May)

Scorchio! The island is currently enjoying a very nice, mini-heatwave with temperatures soaring up to 26 and 27ºC. All our friends are delightedly taking pictures of the lanes outside their farms and commenting how different they look from when there were 7' snow drifts only a few weeks ago.

A pleasant surprise in the polytunnel. I don't remember
planting this.

My diary tells me that we have not had any rain since about 3rd May except for one wet night on the 21st, between us shearing our sheep and then doing Sue and Rob's. The ground is as dry as dust and those sheep, which must be very relieved to be 'naked' spend most of the day sleeping under trees in the shade.

Of course, our Help-X volunteer, Laura, who hails from the South of France, is a bit disparaging of our 'heat'; she is more used to 40ºC as 'hot' but we let her away with that as she is still a brilliant help, an absolute boon, a very easy to please guest and very pleasant company. Her current jobs-of-choice are anything to do with mowing and keeping the garden bits spick and span.

This much-abused broom is finally doing colour

She will push that mower for 5 hours and only take breaks when you bully her inside for tea and cake or lunch. Today she was on 'edges' with the shears , edges of lawn, sides of raised beds, all round bases of young trees. We are in danger of looking like manicured parkland.

Laura's new admirer - the male turkey
follows her everywhere. Here she is
actually bring tea out to us but it looks
like she is fetching him some!

She is also what they would describe locally as "a mighty one for the walking". If not pushing a mower for all those hours, she likes to do at least 10 km per day. She walked from here to Ballaghaderreen one day (neither of us have ever tried it - it is a 15 minute car ride!), she climbed Holy Mountain 'Croagh Patrick' one day prior to coming here, having done a 10 km walk in the morning and then on Sunday managed a 4 hour, 20 km one.

Sorry poor photo (bad phone) but can you just
see the 3 foot roundel target 450 feet away down
this path? Nor can I. 

Archery has moved out of doors again for the Summer and our shooting field is almost exactly 20 km from here, south of Castlerea. Laura expressed an interest in coming to see what we were about but asked could she then walk home. We explained that it was 20 km up (gentle) hill and down dale and would take her all afternoon but, no, she knew all that and wanted to do it anyway.

Another fun target for the new outdoor season.
You have to shoot this life-size fox at 40 feet but
THROUGH the car tyre. In front of the stand is a
little owl-model at 20 feet if you need a warm-up.

I suggested that after 2 hours of archery, I would be driving past her on the way home, so I could always rescue her if she'd had enough. Well, I did pass her and stopped to offer a lift but she just smiled sweetly and declined, saying she'd see me later. She eventually wandered in home at ten past six, not a bother on her, as un-tired and un-ruffled as when she had set out. Oh to be 22 again.

3 of Shtumpy's new babies. 

Meanwhile we are enjoying a bit of a population explosion among the baby chickens. In the last post I described our 6 successful hatchings from the grey hen 'Cat Basket Lady'. Next up was our ace Mum with the deformed foot, 'Shtumpy' who managed 2 hatches last year and kept all her charges alive despite her 'disability'. She has just hatched 4 babies from 6 eggs and is now starting to bring them off the nest and show them the ropes.

Laura cooked us this superb apple tart.

This will, we hope, be followed by the 14 duck eggs in the incubator, due 'out' Thursday or soon there after. These are a mix of Sue and Rob's Muscovy ducks (the big meaty, bi-colour birds who are half way to being geese) and our last Khaki-Campbell eggs from just before the final female was out-foxed, plus a few KCs from Sue and Rob to make up the numbers. I don't know what % success to expect here - our KCs have been very low and these are the first Muscovies any of us have tried - but if we get all 14 we will be feeling a bit over-run. Fortunately, it is most unlikely. We may be lucky to get any.

Finally, an even sillier hatch story, and not my finest 'management' hour. Out in the goose-field/orchard, we have a 4' x 2' x 2' nest box intended for ducks, which we call, logically, "The Duck House". This was adopted by one of the hens (Donaldina) 12 days ago to go broody in, so I found her 8 eggs to sit on and promised to lock her up each night safe from the fox. As time went by I suspected that another hen (or more) was nipping in there each morning, bullying Donaldina off the nest and laying her own daily egg into the clutch.

When the politics goes the way you want it to....

I did not get an opportunity to check while there were no birds in there, till today. TWENTY eggs!!! The poor hen can barely spread her 'front' out enough to cover them all. The experienced chicken-keepers among you will also have spotted another problem looming. All the eggs are similar colour (so it's probably one hen repeat laying) so I cannot tell which are the original 8.

Montana putting on a good show.

Come June 7th, Donaldina will have brooded those 8 for the full 21 days but the others for fewer days, so the 8 will hatch (if we are lucky) leaving the nest full of part-developed embryos. If we rescued them to the incubator we might then get one hatching on the 8th, one the 9th and so on. That would be a tricky clutch of babies to manage. Ah well. We shall see. We will cross those bridges when we come to them.

Shtumpy's first hatch,.

There is just one tiny fly in the ointment of our warm days - last night we suffered our first theft from the honesty box. It has been there for months and never an egg or a single cent stolen (as far as I know). Last night, though, some toe-rag cleaned out my money tin and left the dozen eggs in there. It was just 20, 10 and 5 cent coins, total value no more than €1.30, so we'd guess kids, but we don't get any passing kids (on foot anyway) so we'll probably never know. Ah well, guys, who ever you are, don't go spending all that at once now.

A Good Sign?

You may be able just to make out 2 sheep shouting for their
breakfast through the snow. Another dire morning.

We may be finally seeing signs of coming out of the long, cold and dark Winter. In the last post, I alluded to some data suggesting that most of Northern Europe had experienced the darkest (least sunshine) winter on record. Today we saw confirmation that Ireland had been soaked by the wettest January since 1885 (yes, I DID say Eighteen Eighty Five!). Come on Met Éireann... enough's enough. We can all take a joke but.... I can hear the faint laughter of all those Kent friends muttering "Well, you DID move to Ireland"

Kato assists with the St Brigid's cross
assembly. 

Ah well, now that we are through the 1st of February, St Brigid's Day, Celtic / pre-Christian first day of Spring (Imbolc which translates as "in the belly" and refers, obviously, to all the new birth and fecundity). I promise you that today, in bright sunshine and no wind, I got a strong feeling that we might be drying out a little. The puddles have all but drained away, the concrete paths are that pale grey of dryness, not the shiny dark of wet or icy concrete. The mud underfoot, where we have mud, is now sticky, rather than sloppy. A good sign? There are people everywhere touching any wood they can lay their hands on and steeling themselves not to speak too soon.

Way more elabourate than mine, this St Brigid Cross was a gift
from our good friends Con and Niamh.

The output of eggs is definitely rising as the 2017 birds realise that there is (as they say here) a "grand old stretch in the evenings". They are now not taking themselves off to roost till half past five.

Last year's cross now all dried out and the new one. There
are various traditions regarding what to do with the old ones.

Today I collected 3 duck eggs (which is a 100% hit rate for them - we only have 3 females) and 13 hen eggs, which is a new site record. This is definitely enough hens for us - we don't want to be over-run with eggs. Still no action from the geese, though. In previous years they have come back in to lay in November but not this winter.

Spring busting out all over, at least in
the tubs dept. 

My good friend Miles (in Kent) says he goes with Valentine's Day but one of his geese started early this year, presenting him with an egg today. Like with all these things, we are in the lap of Mother Nature and we will have to preserve our souls in patience and wait and see.

Snowdrops down by the gate. 

In the plants dept, we have plenty of bulbs pushing up, especially in the pots and tubs. You expect these to be early because the tubs cool down quicker than the ground, so get frost-treated early, and then warm up faster to start the new season's growth. We have a good collection of daffs and tulips looking very promising this week and the snowdrops down by the gate are almost there.

That much heralded Blue Moon. This pic off the Internet.
We saw nothing of it due to cloud cover.

We had to smile ruefully at one 'casualty' of the wet. We alone in all the world seem to have been denied a view of the much talked-about and heralded full moon on 31st Jan which was going to be Blue and Super and even Blood in some parts of the globe. I was amused to see respected newspapers putting the 'blood' thing on their websites, possibly unaware that it was only going to be 'bloody' (eclipsed) in other parts of the globe, nowhere in UK or Ireland.

"Our" piglets at 18 days

Social Media was also chock-full of rather daft photo-shopped or double-exposed made up pics of the moon unfeasibly huge - filling half the frame as it rose through a city sky-line straddling several sky-scrapers or the whole width of rivers. What ever the case, we were not to see it at all on the 31st, due to the cloud cover. We saw it 24 hours prior and 24 hours post, though, so we will be happy with that.

The piglets look quite big till you see
them dwarfed by Mum's rump.  

Over in Boyle, half an hour's drive away, "our" piglets continue to thrive and grow on plentiful supplies of Mum's milk. Breeder, Adrian. generously sends me pics every now and then when ever we are in touch confirming quantities required and any friends we might have who also want them. The babies in these pics (which may end up being ours) were born on 15th Jan so, all being well, we can collect them on 12th March. Watch this space.

A pretty risotto under construction. 

I think that is probably about it for this one.

Rolled and tied shoulder cut.

I will talk to you again on Tuesday.

Taken on Liz's phone. I am joined by 3 dogs and
Soldier the cat as I read my book.

Have a good 'Imbolc' one and all.

We've Not Seen Snow Like This in 20 Years

Front lawn Sunday morning

In the previous post you saw pictures of a light dusting of snow which fell on the 8th. In previous years here, we would have had every reason to expect that a dusting was our lot. Winter was now over and we could begin the long climb back up to Spring, Solstice nearly upon us, and all that. One snowy day and that only light was our quota.

The grassy 'boreen' down to Flynn's fields

Everyone will tell you that the West of Ireland has a lovely, moderate "maritime" style climate with the huge Atlantic Ocean keeping us warm in winter and cooling us in Summer. Not for us over this side, the extremes of cold or of heat felt by the "continental" climate areas. 

Front lawn from top window as the sun was going down.

Well, the moderate maritime thing may be true but the "never get decent snow" thing creaked over the weekend and gave us a lovely, picturesque Sunday 10th. I was able to race round as you do first thing, overloading the camera with poorly lit, blue-toned pics (you always think you're going to have to work fast and early, because it won't "stick"), and still able to go round again in the afternoon when my pics might have better light.

Pit props installed to hold up the carport
roof against the possible weight of snow.
A bale of hay for the sheep. 

Of course, these days, we enjoy excellent weather forecasting, at least short-range, from Met Éireann and other websites which use their data, so we had plenty of warning from about the Thursday. I had never seen "Orange Warning for Snow" come up before and this one had the usual very precise county by county risk plus very accurate timings - 23:00 Saturday round to midnight Sun/Mon.

Drifts on the new kitchen roof.

I was able to take 3 sensible precautions. K-Dub long ago advised me that the joists I had put into the carport roof were a bit slender (at 6" deep) to go the 14 foot span and would need to be propped centrally if there was any risk of more than a few inches of snow.

The young Buff Orp' rooster shouts the
dawn.

I bought extra coal in case I couldn't get the car out by Monday and a bale of hay for the sheep for if all their grazing grass was buried. I was quietly confident that we'd be OK even with Liz away the weekend. I went to bed happy well before that 23:00 deadline and slept like a log.

The sheep get extra 'crunch' and some hay.

It was like being a kid again (even better - no chance of Mum saying we had to go to school!) to wake up and see that blue-white light flooding the windows and the gentle movement of big flakes of snow still falling and to know that I didn't have to go anywhere, no struggling to work up the M2, I could just sit back, take my photo's and trudge about in the 'deep and crisp and even'.

Towser at speed. The snow is deeper than his legs are long!

Turned out we were luckier still. We got more than most. Facebook friends were posting pics of dustings , an inch, or none. Liz, down in Silverwood-land got about 2 inches. Here we got 4-6". deeper in the drifts. Unusual snow for Roscommon. When I asked the locals whether this happened often, one old boy said "We've not seen snow like this in 20 years". That was also the view in the Post Office.

Deefer (left) and Poppea play in the snow.

I guess I must guard against boring you guys with too many snow scenes, but I couldn't resist these few. I hope you enjoy them. Of course it is now Tuesday, 2 days later and that maritime climate has come back as days warming to 4ºC and all this picturesque whiteness melting away. This morning saw great gobs of snow dripping from the trees, the paths and roads turning to slush and the exposed soil and grass a sloppy wet mess again. It's always a relief mid winter to get a freeze making the mud stiff or hard, however inconvenient are the frozen drinkers and hose pipe for the livestock.

This is one of the most iconic pics of our recent past - pulling
into the driveway for the first time on Dec 12th 2011 after our
overnight 500 mile convoy in the Fiat and 2CV

My only other 'story' for this post is one 'invented' by Facebook. Both of us had missed this one and there was a risk of the significance of today sailing by unmarked. FB though, have a little algorithm running which digs up pics you posted exactly x number of years ago and asks you if you want to re-post them. This morning they hit me with the picture shown here of the red Fiat and the 2CV and trailer in front of the house from exactly 6 years ago.

Obviously, I did. This is one of the most iconic pics we have from here - it shows the cars pulled into the driveway for the first time at the end of our overnight, 500 mile, emigration journey (well, emi- for me, re-immigration, I suppose, for Liz!). This pic appeared first on this blog at

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2011/12/they-made-it.html

Snowy Sycamore

My diary from that day tells us that we called in briefly to mooch around but then to stash the 2CV in the cattle race (invisible from the road - we were less trusting then) before heading to Castlerea to drop some champagne to the Estate Agent's place (we must have been richer, too) and then head to Silverwood's for our first proper overnight together as Irish residents.

Global warming? 2 big new icebergs 'calve' off the well
known Roscommon Glacier.

The next day we apparently drove all the way back intent on starting work, at least achieving that the chimneys were swept clear of jackdaw nests and fires lit in both ends of the house. We both felt the need to make the house aware of us and to welcome us - we needed to bring warmth. I like to think we've done a lot more of exactly that in the intervening 6 years.

Just because there was no-one here to tell
me I shouldn't be building snowmen at
my age. The dogs liked it.

If you are interested in that rebuild phase, from about Dec 2011 to May 2012, then there are plenty more posts on this blog. Enjoy the read.