Manu and Pedro

Manu takes a turn at the shovel.

Welcome aboard, then, Manu and Pedro, our first ever 'Help-X' volunteers. These are a lovely couple of lads, both 24 and currently students at one of the Madrid Universities. One is studying Agricultural Engineering and the other my own subject from Uni days, Environmental Science. They are both city-boys with no experience of farms or livestock and neither have been to Ireland before although one hails from Galicia in Northern Spain, where the scenery and green-ness are similar to Roscommon (he says).

Pedro shows off his brush cutter skills to the pigs.

They are both young and fit and willing to work hard for hours, so we are impressed already. They seem happy, too with our place, our accommodation and the food and drink so this one could be a winner all round. It is their first go at being Help-X volunteers as it is our at being hosts, so we are enjoying learning together. They are doing 2 weeks with us as part of a longer (1 month?) stay in Ireland; they want to go somewhere with better access to city life maybe near to Galway.

An interesting burst on yesterday's sour dough loaf. The
flavour was not impaired and this loaf has since gone the way
of all the others!

So we collected them from the train in Castlerea yesterday afternoon and had the afternoon and evening just for installing them, showing them round the place and getting to know one another. Their English is (as they'd say here) "middlin' good"; certainly better than my Spanish! We struggle on with the 2 lads occasionally running out of words, a quick discussion where one tries to rescue the other, and then with Liz and Manu whipping out their smart-phones and Googling up "Google Translate"

 I now know, for example that Pedro's Mum also makes sourdough bread and has a 'mara madre' (starter culture. Literally "original mother") in her fridge and we all know more words than we should around Guinea Fowl, black currants and fruit cordials! We are also both trying to say 'Madrid' with the soft Spanish 'the' sound instead of hard English 'D's. They are keen anglers and have brought some gear with them, so we have had to do a quick bit of local research to get them access to any likely fishing points. One is a keen photographer (Canon gear - good taste!). They also asked about hiring bikes, so we have come up with my old mountain bike, gathering dust in the caravan and K-Dub's little used pushbike, which he generously agreed to lend us for the duration.

I finally find an under-cabinet strip light
(LED) for the "office". Yay! I can
see the keyboard!

The guys were wiped out last night having only got 2 hours sleep on Wednesday night and then had a long day travelling so they crashed at 20:30, fairly quickly after a bit of a late supper and trying out some 'artisan' stout beers. They slept like logs, apparently but came bouncing down the stairs at 8 a.m. already in some overalls and work boots, keen and willing to get cracking. I got some quick breakfast into them, but then we were straight in.

I showed them the brush-cutter and explained 2-stroke fuel and so on; bit of a safety 'lecture' there. Well, it is Farm Safety Week this week. The fuel tank on that does you about 45 minutes of continuous fast running, so they alternated goes at that, whacking the tall stuff in the orchard, with scraping and sweeping the grass in the cattle race which was fast evolving from "the grass growing in the cracks in the concrete" to a "lawn".

Ouch! Taking chunks out of myself on the barbed wire. Nurse
Lizzie stepped forward with some nice sting-y TCP. 

I persuaded them (it was impressively difficult!) to stop for coffee mid-way but then we worked on through till 1 pm when Liz insisted we all stop for soup. I was very happy and so were they. You can, as they say, see where they've been! The cattle race is pristine and the little gosling can stride around the orchard in full view of his grown-up minders.

We decided to work mornings and they have their down-time afternoons. So, well fed on soup and bread, they have now disappeared on the bikes with their fishing gear in back-packs promising that if they would like some roast lamb with us tonight they will be back by 19:30 or they can eat later, plus they will bring back anything edible they catch. I'm not sure how 'allowed' this is; you may have to put every fish back into the lake but I expect they'll find out that soon enough.

The only fly in this ointment was my left knee. I fell over back on Tuesday, on some mud while trying to hop over some barbed wire. This was as I was while feeding some bullocks. I managed to bang the inside of my left knee as well as twisting it and, to add a cherry to this cake, scraped an 8" long surface cut down my calf. Ouch. I am hobbling around like an aul' wan, Nurse Liz has been at me with some very sting-y TCP so the cut is OK but the knee remains very stiff and sore. This is frustrating - I wanted to be fully fit to work alongside the Help-X lads, all be it I am 60 and they are 24. I am determined not to just sit there in the Director's Chair barking instructions through the 'bull horn' so I am limping about between locations and trying to keep at it, but at the stuff which is easier on the knee - pulling thistles rather than digging, for example.

The beautiful new Memorial Stone at Shannon's Cross prior
to the unveiling ceremony. 

And finally an end to the suspense that I expect you have not even noticed I have been trying to rack up; a promise of a 'reveal' on the story of the fancy stonework down at the crossroads. Spoiler Alert! The big unveiling happened today to big crowds, flags flying, the police brass-band and a series of politicians doing speeches from a real imported wooden pulpit/lectern. This the new memorial stone and garden to 2 Gardai (Policemen) tragically shot and killed in a bank robbery and car-chase back in 1980. Easily our biggest, most important local story. The full version of this in the next post.

Outdoor Paddling Pool

With the geese now wing clipped I can construct them an outside run today without risk of them taking off into the wide blue yonder (in this case rather overcast and with light snow falling). I build a circular corral outside their door using an off-cut of sheep wire generously donated by our fencing guy, Paul M after the last job for use as tree guards against sheep.

The geese immediately come out to explore the new space and spend the afternoon coming in and out and splashing about in the crate of water, I have surrounded the crate (which I must stress is only a temporary pool pending them getting moved to their proper 'home', the sheep field / orchard) with logs and rocks to allow them to scramble up to the rim and climb in if they wish for a quick 'swim', all be it a rather space-restricted one.

So far they have only messed around on the edges but they love ducking their heads and necks and then throwing the water down their backs. In this way they are cleaning themselves really well and starting to look bright and white, rescued from their Rahara mud-farm 'Somme'. They can not get at any mud here (yet). They are also settling down well and do not run about in alarm as much when we appear or come near. We are delighted with them and we are sure we will enjoy their company as well as their eggs.

We also took the opportunity to introduce them to the dogs and vice versa. This had to be on the leads at first as the dogs would charge the fence and panic the birds. The geese do not yet know they are safe behind the wire. That gave me a nice chance to take a catch-up pic of the two pups at nearly 8 months, looking very shaggy and woolly bear here. Towser with his floppy ears is on the left. He will stay this way now - if he didn't prick his ears up in the first few weeks, then it's not going to happen, but we find him cute anyway and it certainly makes it easy to tell them apart even at a distance.

Meanwhile I was out with Bob today across his land with the tractor doing some more logging. He'd asked for my help, I thought to log up a tree already felled by our neighbours, the McG's, but in the event "that" was another tree and I had to fell 'ours' before we started. We did OK and spent a couple of hours at it, but my chain saw had started playing up and was refusing to idle. You could still cut the wood at high revs but stand back and 'lift off' and the saw sputtered to a halt. I was getting worn out with the number of times I had to re-start the thing by pulling on the starter cord.

About 11:30, Bob called a halt "for today" and suggested we go to see a man he knows 'out beyond Moyne' (a nearby village) who was good with chainsaws and would sort my machine out. We broke for tea and then piled into the 2CV (much to the delight and amusement of Bob, who'd never been in such a car) and headed out into the back woods. This man turned out to be an amazing 'find'. He is a real back-woods looking bloke with a bushy beard and a pony tail. He is chubby and speaks with a foreign (Dutch?) accent. Bob did find out his name once ("it's an unusual name") but has forgotten it.

His workshop and, indeed, his house are old and wooden and are in the middle of a grass-less wood running with chickens and ducks. His workshop is an Aladdin's cave of broken quad bikes and other equipment but his passion and knowledge on his subject was amazing. He immediately spotted that my saw was ex Lidl and knew that it had been €120 but said that they were a qood quality saw. He was interested in how I was getting on with it and delighted that I had been able to obtain extra chains and a sharpener. He gave every impression of being delighted and welcoming of this new bloke who loved his saw and tried to look after it. He gathered up my saw and had me write down my name and phone number. He is going to phone me back when it's done.

(Again) Meanwhile I have sneaked in a couple of pictures, one of the pathetic snow we woke up to this morning, more like a hard frost really, but we are being careful what we wish for! 2nd is a shot of the 'baby' chicks at 13 weeks, now looking very leggy and 'velociraptor'- ish. Their long thighs and high 'keel' have us convinced that these are both boys, so the coq-au-vin pot looms for them in March or April.

We are working our way steadily through the home made wine, in this case some bottled into a recycled Greek Brandy (Metaxa) bottle. It is so light and quaff-able that we are sometimes tempted to pile into the 2nd bottle when perhaps we shouldn't. In our defence, though, we are planning to take a break from the booze for the '40 Days and Nights' of Lent. This not for any religious reasons - it is just a nicely placed and sensibly long 'fast' which reassures us in the years when we do it, that we are not desperate alcoholics! The last drink we will take (all being well) is on Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day on February 12th, and we will then try to stay off it till Good Friday. That's our 'Lent' although it might not be recognised by any theologists. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we are not so virtuous.

The Orchard and the Cattle Fence

With a good start from the apple and pear trees from Steak Lady, we get all inspired to carry on with the orchard. We have space in the western field (and therefore space inside the as-yet-only-imaginary sheep paddock), for 4 rows of 5 trees each at 5 metre spacings, i.e. 20 trees. This is an amount of space our trees in the so called 'orchard' at Faversham could only dream of. We had crammed them in as whips and could barely give them 5 feet between trunks so that the fast growing quince and greengage quickly dominated the space and the poor cherry and damson felt very left out. Not this time. The trees here can go 2 and a half metres (8 feet or so) radius out from the trunk before the branch tips touch, so we are hoping for some good shaped big  productive trees.

So we nipped off on the Tuesday to seek out cherry, greengage and plum. We scored the GG and a 'Morel' (sour, cooking) cherry at the garden centre in Balla-D and later a sweet cherry and a Victoria plum at the one in Castlerea. They just about fit in Mum's little car if she sits in the back behind Dad and the pots go in the front passenger footwell, the top branches just inside the rear hatchback window (which we know from buying wood for building, is just over 8 feet away!)

The main issue here, says local advice (and we'd know from Dad's many failures of allotment crops this year) is water logging and drainage. Plums and "stone fruit" in particular do not like their roots to sit in the wet. Dad therefore adapted/created a special planting method which he calls the Volcanic Cone Method. You cut out a circle of turf as you would anywhere but so that this does not create a sump or pit for the rain to collect in, you dig within this effectively a raised bed for each tree. This leaves you a cone of soil with a circular moat for drainage, and the tree hole is dug into the top of the cone so that the whole thing looks like a flattened volcano cone. Dad then staked the trees against the prevailing SW winds (Atlantic Gales!) and covered the cone in black plastic sheet to both stop any weeds and also to further shed any water. So far they seem to have worked and they should (as we say talismanically about everything we plant) "get away nicely". Mum usually adds "Grow you bugger!" for good luck. Dad's comes from Geoff Hamilton's TV show Gardeners' World and Mum's from the magazine of the same show but much later when Alan Titchmarsh was in charge and writing pieces for the back pages each week.

Meanwhile our fencing guy, Paul, shows up to erect the cattle proof fence to run down the west side of our east field just outside the trees. This will stop the cattle that will rent the grazing out there from coming into the garden, onto our 'primrose lane', and out the front gate onto the road, so it was vital that we do it before Mike the Cows would entertain letting his cows in. They will come and go from our Vendor Anna L's land 'round the back' of us (to the North) through a gap which is currently fenced off. Readers will know we have already had 2 batches of cattle from the lane 'escape' into our ground and smash up the soft, soggy lawns (see picture) so that we are anxiously waiting for local forge Tully's to create our entrance gates. I will probably have to bark at them as they loom ever closer over the yard wall!

Paul turned up with posts and wire and then came back with a post whacker attached to the back of the tractor. This is a brutal and dangerous weapon, capable of whacking an 8 foot long, 10 inch diameter pointy-ended post down 4 feet into the Roscommon clay in minutes, thumping it from above. Paul tells us he has heard many stories of people losing fingers or hands, mainly those who only hire the kit once in a blue moon. Our Irish friend in Kent, Rona D tells Dad they are known locally as the 'Widow Maker'. Anyway, Paul used it and came out unscathed and we have a lovely taut fence running 83 yards down the field and into the ditch, secured by three strands of green-coated barbed wire. That should keep Felix and his ladies and the children out.