Au Revoir to AB

AB rocking the mesh visor. 

Farewell then, Augustin (AB), our Help-X volunteer of the last 4 weeks, who I dropped to the railway station this morning for his journey onward to Dublin. It nearly didn't work; as is commonly the case, Castlerea station was all locked up and gone away, unmanned and the ticket machine out on the platform was crashed and inoperable.

Nailing the docks (Rumex)

He and 2 other passengers decided to get on the train anyway and throw money at the first railway official they saw. A text later told me that they had all arrived safely in Dublin and had not been arrested for 'hobo-ing'. AB had done a month in Belfast prior to his month here and is now planning a month in the capital and one in Galway before, apparently, heading for Sweden. Yes. Sweden. It's a French thing, he tells me. They all want to see Ireland and Sweden. Works for me.

The pig paddock has never been so clear

Regular readers will know we've had a great time with the lad and we have done LOADS of work, mainly around Autumn-tidying, clearing nettle patches and pulling out of them, big heaps of old prunings and tree branches (incl. the Christmas tree from 2016!). If this was me doing the volunteer side, my mission would be to leave every place in a far better state than when I arrived. If that is also theirs, then AB should be very proud of himself. We are transformed.

Heavy rain stops play on what was to be
our last task.

His last working day was going to be yesterday and we were going to strip away all the grass growing from cracks in the concrete on the back "terrace" and then mix some cement and fill the cracks. Well, lashing rain in advance of the next named storm (Brian) put a stop to that and we both took a day off after having got up at the crack of dawn to nip down and help a friend move some cattle. AB's last job was on Wednesday, then, when he had a good session at bashing docks with the brush-cutter. We'd translated the stinging nettles as "ortie" but could find no such common name for French docks, so we called them 'Rumex' which amused AB ("It sounds like it should be an insurance company!").

My current favourite evening snack. Goat's cheese and strips of
our bullace-plum "fruit-cheese". 

All good things must come to an end, though, and although we loved having AB, we are home birds, a bit set in our ways and enjoying of our own company, so we were both looking forward to un-shipping the 'help' and getting our house and our routines back. No offence, we hope, in either direction.

One of the cats supervises the wine racking.
(pic by Liz)

One amusing side-line to this is that although AB was the easiest bloke in the world to feed (he ate everything we cooked for him and came back for seconds every time. Liz jokes that her worries were only about whether she'd "manage to fill him". He has a bullet-proof appetite) there were 2 minor mis-matches to his preferences. He does not like fish (he's OK with shellfish and prawns) or cooked cheese, so out of solidarity we avoided fish and cheese for 4 weeks. No pizza, then, and certainly no cheesy fish-pie. We are so going to make up for this, now that AB has gone!

I'll leave the last word to our friend and Archery Coach, 'Con'. We were over to his on Wednesday to help whacking in some tree stakes, to clear the shooting field of its 3D target "animals" (into dry store) and to fold Con's 2 enormous cone-shaped tent canvases. Con obviously likes AB and loved teaching him to shoot for those 4 weeks so in my little 'farewell' to AB on Facebook, Con replied,

"(He is) a big man with a big smile and willing hands - may he enjoy every step of his Path."

A dog on your lap is no protection
when this cat wants to come aboard.
Not NOW Kato!

Meanwhile, as we wait through the gap between Ex-Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Brian (how can you take those two names seriously in the same sentence?), our only other entertainment seems to have been racking off the wine. This was meant to be a 3 week kit but has taken us more like 2 months, possibly because we'd let the kit get old and maybe the temperature. yeast or the stabilizer were not up to much. We thought it had nearly done so we "killed" it with the stabilizer and it just took on a new lease of life, fermenting madly for 5-6 weeks before it finally calmed down enough to be 'racked' (bottled). It is surprisingly good and we find we prefer it to the shop-bought Ozzie Shiraz we had been drinking on the non-gin and non-beer evenings. Bottoms up!

They Also Serve, Who Only Stand and Wait

There were some impressively colourful wind maps.

Friends of the Blog will know by now that the feared 'Hurricane' Ophelia has now been and gone, leaving us relieved, delighted and grateful to have largely got away with it. The feeling among my small-holdering friends is that up here in Roscommon we "dodged the bullet". Nationally the storm killed 3 people, felled a gazillion trees, left 360,000 without power and caused all manner of damage along the south, west and southeast coasts.

About as bad as it got for Roscommon (lined in blue). The red areas
are Force 8+. We stayed in the green (Force 6) and yellow (7). This
my favoured source, being Met Éireann's short-range forecast.

There were pictures and video all over Twitter and Facebook including, notably 2 bits showing the roof of a school gymnasium going airborne for several hundred yards before landing neatly between some houses without killing anyone. I also saw some road-side trees rocking away from the camera with their roots lifting bits of tarmac and road-base up like cartoon mouths opening and closing.

For us, though, mercifully a scary day and some exhausting watching, especially between about 2 pm  and 8 pm but the only damage was a few small branches broken down from trees and scattered across the lawn, and my big house-sign tumbled over. I must say, in fairness, how exactly spot on and correct (almost to the hour) were the forecasts considering this was an "unprecedented" event - Hurricanes never come over this side of the Atlantic - so they can't have had much practice.

A perfect spiral, uninterrupted by fronts. 

Ophelia was a perfect spiral so we knew as she passed up the west coast, hopping over a few headlands (like County Clare for example!) that we'd get winds which nearly went round the compass. We woke up to Nor'easterlies which get right into our yard. These veered round to the East and then the South; passing through the worrying trajectory of our remaining trees tall enough to hit the house. They carried on swinging through SE, where we are OK-ish and into full West where, again we are vulnerable for the poly tunnel and the barn which Doris took the roof off. It was not an easy day.

The Black Spruces got a good buffeting but
stayed put

There was (as forecast) a nice lull mid morning when the sun even came out and then one at bedtime but Ophelia had a possible sting in her tail with those Westerlies strengthening from midnight to about 04:00 Tuesday (today). The spiral had a diameter roughly 3 times as wide as the country, so as the eye cruised up 'our' side of the Island, the strongest winds were the Southerlies hitting the south coast and then sliding up past Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow up to Dublin.

The willow hedge gets turned inside out with each gust.

All we could do was stay indoors and sit it out. The only driving we did that day was to nip out to feed some bullocks for a friend. Our Help-X volunteer got introduced to the concept of "They also serve, who only stand and wait". Yes AB. You really CAN retreat to your room and sleep or play video games. We will shout if we need you. Your job today is to "stand by". You may physically achieve precisely nothing but we will still value you immensely. Honest.

A fine pair of legs

That, though, is surely enough on the Fair Ophelia. The only other news is that the 'Parma' style ham legs have progressed on from dry salt-cure to the air-drying stage. These big ol' lumps of carcass get 16 days in the mix of sugar, salt and spices being patted down each day with new cure and drained of any brine which the dry salt sucks out of the meat. They darken and become quite firm to the touch as they dry out. In this part of the world, the wise man does this stage in the fridge to give the salt a good head-start against the risk of flies and food-poisoning nasties.

Prior to scrubbing off the salt. 

After 16 days they are lifted out of the dry salt and the spare salt is scrubbed off using a stiff brush dipped in cider vinegar. They are then wrapped in rather nifty Muslin bags created by Lizzie, to deter the flies and hung somewhere fairly dry but with air movement for between 4 and 18 months.

Hung in the air for 4-18 months

During this time the meat continues to dry out and the flavour sweetens and matures. You are aiming for a 30% weight loss; too much and your ham will be as hard as wood; too little and the ham will not cure sufficiently (so may not be safe to eat). The 4-18 month thing is personal choice - how firm/dry do you like your Parma? We do 2 legs. One for eating in Summer (so about 11 months) and one for Christmas (15 months). Like us, the reader will just have to preserve their souls in patience and see how we get on come next August. It is not a fast food.

Enjoy the calm days after the storm. We certainly are.

Soft you now, the fair Ophelia...

Hurricane Ophelia's predicted track. 

Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, this post finds us sitting here wondering whether the next few days will bring us brutal weather and the tree-toppling, airborne chicken house roof dramas of our former 'girlfriend', Storm Doris. If you believe the more dramatic and alarmist weather forecasters, we are looking down the barrel of Hurricane Ophelia.

Ophelia's southward track so far.

This angry young lady has already shown herself to be a bit weird, having formed up off the coast of Newfoundland and tracked SW down the US east coast before doing a small loop-the-loop and hanging a left out to sea off Florida. Not for her the usual targets of Haiti, Houston,Texas or Puerto Rico; she's steering well clear of Trump's Twitter storms.

The beech in the pig run starts to turn
colour.

I am, naturally, quite nervous despite this jokey bravado. We do not need any bad storms this winter. Friends of the Blog will recall that Storm Doris ripped a good bit of the roof off our main chicken house and this building spent the summer shored up with a nice new tarpaulin.

Hops

The plan was for K-Dub and I to replace the roof this year with corrugated iron salvaged from his house in Sligo, but the need to do the kitchen extension kind of got in the way. You can only do so many buildering projects a year. Re-roofing weather is probably done now till next spring, so our chicken house must go through this winter and Hurricane Ophelia (and friends) on a wing, a prayer and a hopefully strong tarpaulin. What could POSSibly go wrong? Soft you now, the fair Ophelia - be gentle with us.

Bank behind the poly tunnel now cleared of nettles and brambles
and over-hanging elder branches.

That said, we have had reasonably good weather so far and rain and wind have not yet interfered too much with the Autumn clear-ups I have been doing, working with my Help-X volunteer, AB. This is still mainly the wilder areas of perimeter including various neglected banks behind the poly tunnel. As well as nettles and weeds, these often have dumped piles of tree prunings and hedge cuttings which I could not burn on the day I cut them.

The bank also known as "The Turf Mine". Every home should
have one?

On one of these, regular readers may recall, we came across a buried stash of turf-fuel. The previous owner had obviously had a clamp of turf there which had at some stage been sheeted over with old (used) silage wrap and then piled up with good top-soil scraped from some other part of the farm. It has been, for us, the gift that keeps on giving - every time I need turf for fuel, I just clear some more weeds, burrow into the bank, pull out a few barrow loads to dry in the poly tunnel. Bingo.

Poly tunnel becomes turf-dryer for a few months. 

As part of the Autumn thing and part of battening down the hatches for the storm, we also decided to take down the Honeybee swarm 'lure box'. This, readers will recall, gets hung optimistically from the big ash tree down by the bee hive in the hope of tempting any emerging swarm to take up residence and not vanish over the horizon.

Brace comb created in the swarm-box.

Well, apart from a little flurry of comings and goings by scout bees from the hive when I first hoisted it into the tree (when you deploy it you load it with 'bait' of old comb, old honey and lemon-smelling plants like lemon balm or lemon grass), I had seen no activity.

Goat's cheese. Delicious. 

Bit of a surprise then, on getting it down and opening it, to find 4 nice chunks of "brace comb" in there. All dead and redundant now but there were some dead bees in there and some of the comb cells had obviously contained honey or pollen at one stage. No signs of any egg-laying or a brood nest, though.

I have perhaps been over-critical of the veg garden, suggesting
it was a disaster this year. It is giving us plenty of kale and chard
at this back end.

We are not experts, but we imagine that at some point during the year, while we were not watching, there was a swarm or a proper swarm followed by a 2nd "cast" swarm, probably with either no queen or a problem, infertile queen. These bees would have come out of the main hive, decided to set up in the swarm box and started to create wax comb where the new colony would be able to start storing honey and pollen. When no queen showed up or started successfully to lay eggs, this colony would have faded and died along with its new (start-up) workers, each bee only living about 6 weeks in summer here. Nice to know and Liz, at least, got the few ounces of beeswax from this.

Finally a bit of fun and a new experience for me. I have sheared sheep and clipped dogs but I had never done any human hair cuts. Today our Help-X lad decided that he was fed up with his flowing locks and that they were getting in the way of his 'farmering'. I joked that I could take him to the local barber's shop (lady rather nicely named "Barbara"!) or I could run the Wahl dog-clippers over him. He rather warily inspected the clippers (I think he thought they'd be as big and industrial as my shears!) and then decided that, hey, at least it'd save him the €10.

AB takes one for the team. Pics by Liz.

So, much to Liz's amusement we set up shop out front on the terrace furniture, I looked him in the eye one last time to check it was REALLY what he wanted and then went for it. No going back now, AB. 5 minutes later he was a "Number 5 all over" and delighted. For some reason Liz didn't choose to have the same and, when we went back indoors it was to find Towser, worried by the clipper noise, hunkered down in the tiny gap below the oven.

Young Scots pine all set up for next year. 

That's a bout it for this one.

Venison pie.

Keep your fingers crossed for us over the weekend and I hope to be able to post a safe, intact 'All Clear' post on Tuesday.

Mullein still in flower.