Wanderlust.

One of our most successful crops in 2013 in terms of yield, productivity and the general beauty and cleanliness of the crop was the Jerusalem Artichokes. Back in February 2013 we planted just half a dozen tubers each of 2 varieties, 'Fuseau' and an old fashioned 'knobbly' type obtained from Mentor Anne, each planted as a short row in a 4 m raised bed. The tubers quickly sprouted and rapidly grew into the expected 8 foot tall 'sunflower' style windbreak which were blown around a bit by the strong winds coming across Vendor Anna's 5-Acre field so that I had to stake them.

One of the 'Mini-Buffs' gets comfy in the nest box

When the greenery was all done, I cut off the stems a foot from the ground and left the crop in the ground; it copes very well with that being, after all, an over wintering organ which seems unaffected by slugs and other pests. When we started digging we realised we were in for an impressive crop - at least 2 kg coming off each plant, and half a wheel barrow from each row. If we were going to be eating or even selling these, we'd have been on to a winner. Unfortunately we have tried the first 'fruits' in small quantities and find that both varieties have that marked effect on us for which 'Fartichokes' are famous.  We tried a variety of cooking methods from roasting to boiling and so on, but all to no avail.

Red Elf Cup fungus, prolific in our hedgerows now.
(Sarcoscypha coccinea)

This is amusing if you are still a school boy but we find it excessive and downright unpleasant to the degree where we have decided not to grow them in 2014 and to 'bin' the crop. But wait! We are currently thinking about 'doing' pigs this year and if we do then they will be kept in the Secret Garden and one thing everyone knows about pigs is that they love rooting around for tubers and underground food. So, just for the 'waste not want not' reason, we decided to dispose of the crop by planting them at random in the area where the pigs may be kept. Liz and I barrowed them round today from allotment to Secret Garden and spent a happy hour with me digging random holes with the pointy ended Irish shovel, and Liz tossing in a couple of tubers into each hole. They may grow, they may not. They are under the trees. They may produce a crop, or not, and the pigs may or may not happen and may or may not dig them up and like them, but it has got to be better than tossing them onto the compost heap.

Fiat Panda goes 'farm vehicle' again with a load of hay

I have had to 'rescue' the Guinea Fowl a couple of times over recent days when they have developed a wanderlust and wandered down beyond the main entrance gate. One of them sneaks through the hedge into the lane and then gets separation anxiety and kicks up a ruckus shouting to the mate, who is either still in the garden or has nipped through the other hedge into the 5-Acre field. They would probably sort themselves out in time and return safe. One of my friends on the poultry discussion forum is a game-keeper and says that his Guineas used to find themselves half a mile from home but always got back safely by night fall. We just worry about the lane and the farm vehicles charging about, and the 'ruckus' that would happen if 'separation anxiety' turned into bereavement does not bear thinking about! So we hear it kicking off and we sprint down to the gate and try to round up the wanderer which, needless to say, nips happily back through the hedge and does a pheasant impression, exploding into the air, clucking and flying 6 feet above the ground all the way back to the poly tunnel followed by the other bird.

Re-Coppiced Ash with 21 tree-rings.

Also AWOL tonight (all be it in full view) are the two ex-Silverwood 'pet' rabbits, Ginny and Padfoot who nipped through a gap in their fence which I inadvertently created when moving them to new grass. These ladies have done this to us before and are the devil to recapture as they are very fast these days and nip down to our Northern boundary where there is a collapsed, ancient corrugated shed (might have been an outside loo) which has sagged down a 5 foot bank. They hide under the sheeting and are safe from getting grabbed by us. They also seem to be safe from foxes and mink as they have played this game before and always seem to be there to greet us in the morning.

Tonight's supper, 3.06 kg hubbard carcass!

We catch them by either rounding them up into the Kitchen Garden where we can corner them against the chicken wire, or in Ginny's case, when she runs into the chicken house for some reason, and can be easily shut in and grabbed. That, though, will have to be tomorrow. It is dark now and there is no way we can catch them at present so they will have to take their chances with our bushy tailed, red furred chum. Good luck Ginny and Padders.

Santa and the Bunny Rabbit

One little girl in the village is going to receive a nice surprise on the 25th; this little daughter of either Ginny or Padfoot. Money has changed hands to secure the deal but 'Santy' (as they call him in these parts) is hanging on to the little bunny for the moment and she will be collected on Christmas Eve once a hutch, a bag of food, some hay, a drinker and a book on how to keep rabbits has also been secured. I sense that these people intend to look after the rabbit properly. A pet is for life, not just for Christmas, as they say. I did not, however, manage to persuade Santa to take the other female bunny on a "Buy Two for the Price of One and a Half" deal even though I pleaded the case for not leaving the poor sister-doe all alone, but maybe Santa will relent on Christmas Eve.

Multi tasking. Plucking while
chatting to Diamond on the phone

Meanwhile there is one job that we will NOT be including in the portfolio of Enjoyable Tasks, Living the Dream and all that. That is Plucking Geese. We have got quite good and fast at the chickens by now - we can pluck and dress a chook in 45 minutes without breaking sweat. Geese turn out to be a whole different species (as you'd expect, I guess!). They have a gazillion feathers, many of which are very well glued in AND under that they have a complete layer of fluffy down which puffs chokingly into the air at every twitch of your feather collecting bag.

Oven ready at 3.8 and 4.0 kg respectively.

Now I can see Mentor Anne leaping for the keyboard at this stage to give out to us for our incompetence and we KNOW there are options around dipping the bird in hot water to loosen the feathers, and even using melted wax in the manner of a ladies' beauty treatment to de-fluff the carcass but we'd gone with cold straight plucking and it took AGES. We were easily into 2 and a half hours per bird including the gutting, our hands were raw and Liz at one stage resorted to gloves and a pair of pliers. If people can do a goose in less time then they are 'better men than us' and we are quite happy with that. So annoyed were we by the job that we both decided that it is not anything we want to get involved in long term, or to any great degree, into the future. If we do breed geese in the future (as opposed to just collecting the eggs) then we will be trying to sell them 'live' for finishing by someone else and most of what we keep will probably be skinned and cooked wrapped in bacon or some such. I went into this thinking the actual killing would be the worst part. We survived that but never dreamed the plucking could actually be worse!

We got through the plucking task in the end and the singe-ing and the gutting out and produced 2 nice looking, oven ready birds which weighed in at (we think) 3.8 and 4.0 kg respectively. The cat managed to knock our nice digital kitchen scales off the worktop and kill them, so I was weighing these by jumping on and off the bathroom scales with and without birds. Good weighty birds anyway, more than enough for our Christmas table, one staying here, the other being delivered to Steak Lady in Portmarnock (Co. Dublin) tomorrow. Other seasonal catering includes a huge batch of braised spicy red cabbage. Liz likes to do these kind of foods in big batches and freeze 4/5 of the product. Today's task is the first batch of mince pies.

Rolo (l) and Blue (r) looking handsome at 18 months

We love a good Olde Fashioned cook book in this house, and Liz finds good ones on the internet, recently also downloading them from 'Project Gutenburg' down to her Kindle e-book. One is old enough to include instructions like "Smite thee the lamb into gobbets" (I love that!) but today's is by one Elizabeth Moxon who in 1764 wrote the snappily titled  "English Housewifery exemplified (in above 450 receipts giving directions for most part of cookery)". From this tome comes the rather breathlessly punctuated "To Make Apricock Pudding:" as follows "Take ten apricocks, pare, stone, and cut them in two, put them into a pan with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, boil them pretty quick whilst they look clear, so let them stand whilst they are cold; then take six eggs, (leave out half of the whites) beat them very well, add to them a pint of cream, mix the cream and eggs well together with a spoon full of rose water, then put in your apricocks, and beat them very well together, with four ounces of clarified butter, then put it into your dish with a thin paste under it; half an hour will bake it". From reading these in the context we know that 'whilst' would be written 'until' nowadays, and the 'paste' is a 'pastry case'.

Big wild mountainy trout. 

In a previous post, I spoke of a high quality fine porcelain table cruet in sheepy form, generously given to us by the Silverwoods. We actually came away well laden with gifts for which we are very grateful. As well as the cruet sheep, we were handed a 2CV badge for my collection of 2CV bits and pieces, two orange tear-drop shaped squashes which we need to identify and find a "receipt" for (Perhaps E Moxon can help?), and three very fine, big wild river trout caught by one of the Silverwoods' neighbours in the nearby mountains. One of these has been used up already and was so big when cooked that we managed only 3/4 of the 'meat' between 2 of us at Dinner.

All Change

It's all go locally as the farmers try to rattle in a first cut of silage in this hot spell, with some rain forecast for tomorrow. They try to mow one day, leave the cut grass to wilt overnight and then bale and wrap the next day. These are big heavy round bales, so the old boys like our own John Deere Bob and their lightweight tractors take a back seat on this one and the young lads with their big contractor kit do the honours. Bob's contractor used a big 4WD, 6 tonne, 110 HP Case IH tractor with a serious baler hitched on and we could hear the roar of the diesel and the bass thump and clang for each completed bale from here. Bob has around 80 bales now but will need to take a 2nd cut in 8 weeks to get his 130 or so together that he needs to see him though this winter.

I am sorry to only have poor pictures so far but today is day 18 for the baby rabbits born to Ginny and Padfoot. They are active enough now to have started to emerge from the 'bedroom' by hopping over the low 'wall' I installed, so it's time to remove the wall and let them start to explore the grass of the run. We think these Mums each have about 5 kittens but until they start to explore properly you cannot really count them - the nest is a ball of hay and belly-fluff with random bunny bottoms, heads, ears and legs protruding, too tangled up to count.

All change in the poultry section. We have been a bit anxious about doing this, but we have wanted to swap the geese from the calf house, with the chickens from the milking shed. This would involve a certain amount of carpentry and fixing up of chicken wire, a lot of 'mucking out' and, we thought, some hassle at bed time where nobody (we predicted) would want to go to their new sleeping accommodation and confusion would reign. The woodwork was mainly about making a pop-hole in the new door of the calf house and constructing a perch-ladder in there. The chooks have been used to flapping up to a perch 7 feet up via a couple of staging posts. Now they would have a 'ladder' at 45 degrees with perches at 21 inch intervals so nice and easy. The nest boxes would also be moved along with the feeder and drinker. The geese are basically getting the floor area of the former chicken house, now cleared of perches and cleaned up. The young chickens will also be persuaded to use the new chicken house and to merge in with the old chickens (including their 'mother'!) but we will do that as a separate change later, planned for tomorrow.

[Horse Chestnut grown from seed]

It all proved to be a whole lot easier than we'd expected. During the 'woodworking' one of the hens had shown up obviously looking for the nest boxes in order to lay an egg. She recognised the boxes but these were currently sitting outside in the cattle race while we cleaned up. I put them in the new quarters, grabbed her and put her in one of them where she settled happily to her egg laying, unperturbed by the fact she was in 'the goose house'. We bribed the 'Young Ones' into their old familiar run and closed them in. We bribed the horses into their field and turned off the electric fence which currently runs close to the new goose house. We were on.

['Million Trees' Mountain ash]

The geese proved to be a doddle to steer into their new quarters. It seemed that it was a familiar looking door into a familiar building so they just went with it once they'd spotted Liz lurking in their normal path. They paddled in onto the clean wood shavings and accepted a supper of wheat and rolled barley. Seemingly quite unconcerned that this was not their normal end.

The chickens, we were sure we'd have some fun with - chooks are far less steerable and tend to panic and scatter as soon as they sense they  are being cornered. But at around half six they happened to have gathered near the new space. We opened the calf house door so that they could see the hen sitting on the nest box and the rooster and 2 hens just wandered in out of curiosity. I went to close the door behind them but 'Baldy' spotted my intention and bolted back out. This might have been a problem, but we sensed that she was still very interested in getting into the building where her 4 chums now were. Liz hovered near the pop hole to stop the captured birds from coming back out but Baldy was then heading for the ramp to the pop hole, so we both stepped back, holding our breaths to see would she use the ramp and go in, the first bird so to do? Bless Her - she did, with barely a hesitation. We now had all the birds where they needed to be for the night, so we shut the pop-hole and retreated to let them settle.

My other two pictures are examples of our tree-planting successes. The horse chestnuts (conkers) were collected from below a tree in Gravesend (Kent) last Autumn while I was staying on the Sailing Barge Cambria moored there. I have three successful seedlings from 4 conkers. The mountain ash is a 'Million Trees' sapling, most of which are doing very well and putting out lots of new leaves. We are pleased to be having tree successes and will look to carry this on, planting more each year.

Doubling in Size Each Week

We were told when we first started with the geese that goslings grow amazingly fast and 'seem to double in size every week'. You'd take that with a pinch of salt, wouldn't you, but we can report that it is very true. Ours are now two weeks old and seem to have suddenly put on a growth spurt in leg and feet size, neck length and body length. Their little wings have not grown yet and now seem to have been left behind in this race for size so that they now look like tiny vestigial stumps such as you'd expect on a flightless bird.

They continue to thrive and we are hoping they are leaving behind the 'vulnerable to hooded crows' stage. One little one continues to worry us a bit. We seem to have 5 big bruisers and one smaller one who seems to be always lagging behind, off on a world of his own, still pecking at grass when everyone else has moved on, or still dawdling round the pond when everyone else is out, dried off and preening. Yesterday at midday-ish when I went out to check I could see only 5 goslings so we feared the worst and went into 'search' mode, both Liz and I combing the grass, ditches and bumps in the ground. We gave up the search and thought him lost, gone for good.

Then at about 3 pm I was out there again and there were six again, so we assume he was off dawdling, got left behind but then, fortunately, the parent birds passed his way again and he heard them and came running.

We have had two small tragedies in the rabbit department, both maybe related to the hot weather and, maybe also to my inexperience and bad husbandry. You will recall that I found 4 of Padfoot's litter outside the nest box and wriggling in the dewy grass. I rounded them up and gave them a shallow 'tray' (the bottom 3 inches cut out of a box) to contain them. It did not occur to me that there might be other babies scattered about the 'bedroom'. On Saturday there were actually 5 in the tray, so either Mum had found one and brought him into the fold, or he'd crawled there. Unfortunately there was a 6th now lying in the gap between the back of the tray and the outside wall and this poor little mite had died of lack of Mum's milk. His little corpse was all slack and loose-skinned. I could kick myself.

Meanwhile I had looked into Ginny's box and her kittens seemed to be safe enough at the far end of the hay from the 'door', so I had not given them the tray and 'Berlin Wall' treatment. One of these little ones had managed to escape the nest and had gone on to escape the mesh run too (small gap underneath where the ground was not 100% flat) just before we, unawares, let the dogs into the orchard for their off-the-leads romp. Towser had found it and had it in his mouth when we rescued it. It managed a few gasps but then expired. I suspect that the sweltering heat is what is making the babies move about, to try to find somewhere cooler, so we have now put 5 inch high 'walls' in each box to stop escapes, moved the runs to more shady spots AND covered the tar-felt roofs with a good layer of cut, tall grass to stop the intense heat. Everybody seems to be sleeping happily and it is much much cooler in those hutches. I should just say that this, on the latest count, leaves Pads with 5 babies and Ginny with 5-6.

Meanwhile, the horses have been moved, by means of electric fences, to the front lawn and primrose path. They seem to prefer this kind of grass - regrown mower-aftermath to the long straggly, not-yet-cut stuff. Suits me - less mowing of lawns for me. It is also quite fun that they can now come right up to us when we are lazing at the terrace table on the front terrace and we think it looks very picturesque from the lane outside to see three horses on the lawn, swishing their tails or rolling luxuriously on their backs in the sunshine.

Too Early !

I had a bit of a surprise this morning on the early morning 'ward round' when I found Padfoot's 4 babies all out of the 'bedroom' and on the dew-soaked grass. At only a week old they are fully furred up but they are still blind and are still wriggling along like tiny pups rather than hopping like baby bunnies. They made their way along the front of the 'bedroom' bit and huddled together in a corner of the run. We are having a heat wave here so there was no danger of them chilling but they should not have been out and 'Mum' was not doing anything about it. I cut a shallow tray out of the bottom of a box and risked handling the babies to move them into the box which I put in the 'bedroom' to contain them. Padfoot never batted an eyelid, wandered in to 'count' them and wandered out again.

No such problems with Ginny, whose babies are at the 'far end' of the bedroom bit and don't even look like trying to escape. It is possible than in the heat the nest chamber is a bit hot, so we have moved everything about to give them some shade. I was also asking Charlotte what to do about Goldie's imminent kindling as the design of the ex-Silverwood hutch is such that there is only one small 'bedroom, that being in the upper storey of the hutch and which Goldie uses as her toilet! I had been thinking of a 'basement flat' underneath but Charlotte suggested blanking off the mesh on half the downstairs, providing a lip to stop babies crawling out too soon and filling with hay.

Every now and then the chooks crank out an enormous egg but today's just about took the biscuit. The big egg on the left in this picture weighed in at 130 g, almost twice the size ( at 68 g ) of one of our normal, X-Large eggs. We think these are laid by the 'hin' formerly known as Broody Betty. Fair play to her and possibly another piece of evidence that the new (Pedigree Foods, Organic Layers Pellets) diet is streets ahead of the old cheapo one.

There is a standing joke or myth in Ireland that the sun comes out and a heat wave starts as soon as the poor aul' school children have to sit their exams. In the UK exams around the country vary according to which examining board the school subscribes to - Oxford, Cambridge, London and so on (or it did when I was doing them!). In Ireland no such variety.

Every school in the Republic of Ireland has to go with the National format - the same syllabus and the same exams, questions, scheduled dates and times etc from Cork to Donegal and from Dublin to Kerry. So we know that every child of the relevant ages has started their 'Junior Cert' exams or their 'Leaving Cert' exams on the first Wednesday after the early June Bank Holiday. This includes, this year, our chum, 18 year old rabbit-and-mini-horse-collector, Charlotte from down the road. She was sweating a bit on her MacBeth and poetry for the 2nd English paper, yesterday (6th June) so Liz, who is a bit of a 'girly swot' when it comes to such subjects, offered to give her an hour or two of 'cramming' in the sunshine of the front terrace. We await the results of how she thinks she got on with eager anticipation but the whole nation has now moved onto Maths, so I expect the focus has moved on too and English is in the 'been there, done that' pile. Good luck Charlotte. Knock 'em dead!

Kindling and Horse Play

June the 2nd - due day for our two 'pet' rabbits, Ginny (pictured here, grey and white) and Padfoot (lop eared black and white, 2nd time around Mum). Both of these girls were taken off to Charlotte's rabbit collection for mating with two different bucks, on the same day that she came to collect our "buck", Buck Rogers. Rogers, you will recall, turned out to be an on-heat female, so we hurriedly changed 'his' name to Ginger Rogers. Charlotte took her anyway and mated her to yet another buck and she has now 'kindled' (given birth).

These two were due today but, as is the way of these things, you see very little and if you are wise you don't go looking. Anxious mother rabbits will quickly eat their young if put under stress, while they are still at the new born, pink, naked, blind stage. You are best off leaving well alone for 2 weeks and waiting for any tiny, fur-covered, baby bunnies with eyes open, to emerge from the nest. All you might see is fur in the grass - the rabbit will pluck some of her own fur to line the nest and we have seen this fur in both the females' runs. Any babies will be detectable from about the 16th by which time our big doe, Goldie, may also have kindled.

Now a part of the post which you might want to miss if you are an experienced horse owner (or even if you own these particular horses, Carolyn and Charlotte). You will either be laughing fit to bust or horrified at our cack-handedness, and especially mine rather than Liz's. I admit I do not know horses and I expected them to be biddable and steerable like sheep. I also do not know electric fencing and I expected it to keep the horses 'in'. Big mistake which resulted in some fun and games but, let me add quickly, no injuries or loss of life!

We have borrowed this electric fence and I had deployed it to give the horses access to the 'Primrose Path'. I tested the fence with the back of my hand, as you do and got a decent jolt off it, so I knew it was working. The horses were let out of their field and grazed happily in the new space for a couple of hours. Then Liz went out to wash some spilt fruit-squash from the front step and spotted Cody calmly grazing in the middle of the front lawn. Not a bother, Liz went for a head collar, got it on him and walked him back to the fence where-upon he happily ducked under the fence-strand as if it wasn't there! Fence too high on the posts? We lowered the fence in the escape zone but judged it to be OK for the rest of its length.

A little later I spotted that Cody was back out again, this time apparently having ducked under again but at the lane end of the lawn. I walked over to him, gently grabbed a hank of mane and steered him gently back to the fence thinking he'd just duck under again. Not this time - he stopped dead, rooted to the ground. At this point I am afraid I become an incompetent idiot. I let go the horse and nipped down to turn off the fence so that I could make a gap to let him back through. Instead of him going back through the other horses trotted up and piled through the gap. I now had 3 horses loose on the lawn, heads up and an excited look in their eyes. I yelled for Liz. Cody and Romeo got into a canter and headed for the woods. They weren't about to be stopped by me calling 'whoa' or doing any of my sheep-steering hand gestures. Our only saving was that the road gates were all closed.

Liz grabbed the Polo mints and got Bob's (The Shetland) attention, so he , at least, wandered over and was amenable to having a head collar and lead fitted, so Liz was able to get him back into the field while we tried to catch the other two. Not a bit of it. They were straight way galloping round the whole place, all fired up at the new freedom. The charged through the woods, scattered the geese and chickens, thundered past very close to our new pond (Argghhhh, No! Visions of ponies galloping through shallow water in cowboy films!) and down into the allotment where they, thankfully, ran down the path-ditches, not across the raised beds and crops. I thought I had them cornered but 2 excited horses are not anything you can corner, and they raced back up the allotment, along the dog-wood path and, luckily into the orchard field where I could at least close the gate on them and contain them in a small area.

Here the galloping turned into play-fighting and then, as far as we could see, to a proper fight. They raced in circles around the orchard doing 2-footed high kicks on each other, biting necks and legs as if to try to make the other guy fall down or sit down. The rabbits in their runs had never seen anything like it and were racing about all over the place trying to take cover. The horses avoided hitting any trees but were careering into fences and at one stage clunked the big goose-house to one side. It was a hot day so we thought it might run out of steam, but Liz suggested fetching a bucket of cold water to throw over them. I got Romeo a direct hit and this did seem to slow him up. Both horses stopped the running-battle and stood, panting hard with nostrils flaring. I was able to get head collars on the pair and Liz and I led one each back to the field where we bolted them in and sat back to draw breath. What a relief!.

In the afternoon we had to go out, but when we came back we thought we'd better lower the fence strand all along the length and let them out again. I noticed that the 'jolt' from the fence was by now very faint, so perhaps the batteries were going flat and Cody had spotted this. Things went OK in the afternoon session. With the fence lowered none of the horses challenged it and when it was time to go back into the field, the carrot-bribe worked as normal. Charlotte is possibly coming round to check the gear out. We might stick to the tethering for now, till we are sorted properly.

We have, sadly, one piece of bad news to report, which is the loss of one of the 7 goslings. We do not know how or why; the most likely reason being a snatch-raid by a hooded crow. When the goslings are as tiny as ours, the crows can swoop down, grab one by the head and nip off even with the parent birds standing guard. Anyway, by what ever method, we know we had 7 goslings this morning till about lunchtime, but by mid-late afternoon we could only count 6. We did a thorough search of the garden in case the little mite had simply been left behind in the various wanderings of the family. Ah well. These things happen.

All 8 chickens are still with us and now at almost 6 weeks of age have formed a nice little tight-knit group who move around together independently of the grown-ups. Broody Betty has little to do with them now and has re-joined the main flock and William.

With the pond now almost full after 2 days of hose-pipery, we have been able to start doing the edges and, in particular, our flat-stone 'beach' and some of the surrounding stone edging. Tomorrow we should be able to play 'bury the rubber edge' under the bits where we want grass edges. It is all starting to look rather good. We are very pleased with it.

Lamb and Rabbit on the Menu

Those who do not like to know about our meat production, please look away now. You will not want to read this post.

We are progressing deliciously through our supply of lamb, with Liz trying out all manner of recipes and cooking methods which we have not, up to now tried. Liz has now developed a superb way with the chops, which get fried fast on the griddle with salt sprinkled into the (minimal) fat. She has also done a slow-roasted shoulder so meltingly tender that it needed no carving - you could honestly have picked up the bones and given them a good shake and you would have had a plateful of meat. What I actually did was lift out the blocks of meat from either side of the 'ridge' which runs down the length of the shoulder blade and that did us for that meal. The rest we dismantled into ribs and other bits for a 'Greek style' finger-food meal a couple of days later. Tonight we are having the cheapest 'breast' cuts (bits from around neck and in front of shoulder cut) done in the slow cooker.

We have also slaughtered our first 'crop' of young rabbits, these being the progeny of the formerly niece's doe rabbit Padfoot and the NZ White buck belonging to mentors Anne and Simon. Our three successfully 'hatched' baby bunnies came up to 3 months old as we came into January and were quickly outpacing our own buck (Rogers) for size and would also have been approaching sexual maturity. We are told that after three months they do not grow fast any more and tend to just get tougher, so we bit the bullet and slaughtered them. It goes without saying that we did this as quickly, quietly, calmly, respectfully and in a manner as stress free as we could manage, though I do appreciate that some of our readers will still think very dimly of us for it. So be it.

The rabbits had reached weights of, in fact 2340 g, and the three carcasses came out at 1144 g, 1074 g and 1206 g, way heavier than we have ever got from shot wild bunnies we used to buy in the UK. Liz has now cooked the first of these, casseroling the jointed meat in a creamy mustard sauce. We both agree that it was easily the most delicious and meaty rabbit we had ever experienced, and definitely something we will do again. Anne, though, advises us that we would be better using a 'proper, meat-breed, doe' instead of the 'pet rabbits', Ginny and Padfoot.

She has such a doe which we will be adopting, already mated to Peter, this spring. We are also only going to do this bunny-rearing in spring and summer so that they can eat mainly grass, rather than having to fatten up on the expensive 'muesli', easily the most expensive animal feed we use at €22 for 25kg. For this reason our buck, Rogers has now been separated from his women and is temporarily housed in the Maternity Unit (now the 'Bachelor Pad') pending me building him a run. Mind you, I am not 100% sure he has, or ever had, any romantic intentions towards Ginny and Padders and , come to think of it, might even be female himself. I will check him out when I next have him in my hands.

A Punt on Sex?

As Liz arrives home from her few days in UK, the baby chicks reach 4 weeks and are starting to get feathered up, the baby bunnies are big enough at 6 weeks to come out of the Maternity Unit and join the main 'warren', and our sheep-mentor and former plasterer, Kenny O'C turns up to assess our sheep performance.

The chicks are starting to develop their facial features - the comb and wattles which may be the first indication of whether they are female (pullets) or male (cockerels). We are in regular contact with other Irish poultry keepers on a website called Fowl.ie  and when we publish pictures of these chicks on there, my friends are starting to take punts on the sex of the babies - several guessing they'll be one of each, but our main mentor, Anne W thinking they look like they may both be boys.

The one-of-each punters are going with the darker one, with the redder comb, who we tentatively named CJ after a character in "West Wing" (American political TV drama), being the cockerel while the blonder one (our "Donna") is the girl. We cling to the hope that they are both girls and can be added to our little group of 'Lovely Girls'. It will be nice to know we bred them (all be it we'd then have to be careful not to try to hatch any of their eggs as they'd be Father x Daughter line-bred progeny, assuming William is still at the helm). If they do turn out to be boys then they will be for the freezer but hopefully Broody Betty will do her thing again next year and we will do it better having learned from the mistakes on this one (October hatch, eggs of varying start dates, candling sooner, not reacting quickly enough when BB got bored and the eggs started to cool).

The bunnies are now HUGE at 6 weeks and starting to out grow the hutch, plus definitely weaned at this stage. We decide to put Mum (Padfoot) and all three back into the run with Ginny and Rogers. In my dreams I have the possibly ill-advised plan to keep these rabbits in a family group in a warren type environment as close as possible to the way they'd live in the wild. This might be nutty and we may end up with all sorts of problems, but I am thinking I'll keep Ginny and Padfoot as the two matriarchs with Rogers (plus visits to see Peter) as the male input, with any other output being culled for the freezer or for sales as pets. Having said that we have not had a breath of interest from our advert on DoneDeal.ie so pet sales might be a non-runner.

The move is done on Sunday 18th and goes well. Ginny and Padfoot have a bit of a chase around and kick at each other but this may just be the excitement of 2 sisters being reunited after their 4 or 5 weeks apart and everyone settles quickly and no-one tries to kill the babies. As I said, I am aiming at a warren type environment with a family group rather than hutches and everybody separate. We are not sure where this will happen but for now we have, by happy coincidence the big run in an excellent position. There is a short wall on the north side of the cattle race, behind which I had stacked our kindling wood (former floorboards) in flat sheets and rows of bits on edge, rather like a book shelf, all raised off the ground on old cavity blocks (concrete building blocks with big holes through them). Next to this I had created a compost heap for which the sides were old panels of wooden picket fence.

We had moved the run to this site as part of a tour of the garden, moving on every time the grass ran out, but it was here that Padfoot came full-term and created her nest (in the compost) so we had to stop moving on. It's still there and the grown up rabbits seem to have adopted it with delight, burrowing around in the compost and now through the cavity blocks to get under and into the 'bookshelf'. I put corrugated iron over the whole while the nest was in there and the bunnies seem to like the new three dimensional nature of their home, happily scrabbling up the book case behind their now abandoned hutch to sit up on top of the corrugated, as if keeping watch. All the new babies and Padfoot have all now settled into this environment, so we may well adopt this as "The Warren". If that is the case I will have to make a permanent run here and use the move-able one in the summer when there's grass to graze AS WELL some how. I may also have to re-think my supply of kindling!

The sheep and Kenny, I will cover in a separate post.

Cuter by the Day?

Padfoot's babies are coming up to a month old by now and are getting cuter by the minute. They are also getting more adventurous and brave as they wean off Mum's milk and start to share in the 'grown'up feed mix (called Meusli) and in greens and carrots which they have to come out of the little 'bedroom' bit of the hutch to eat.

We therefore see them every day and get a chance to photograph them. We are now fairly sure, as the brown and white one looks so much like Rogers, that these babies could be by Rogers rather than the meat-breed (New Zealand White) buck, Peter, which we visited at our Friends and Mentor's (Anne and Simon's) place. Anne's not so sure because Peter has 'thrown' babies in all shades and hues from a wild-rabbit brown to pie-balds and pure whites and we did actually see Padders successfully mate once with Peter but, what ever, we will probably never know. If they are by Peter, they should grow fast and put on meat quickly, where as if they are by Rogers, they will presumably grow at standard bunny rate. Could even be some and some, I guess.

The fate for these guys is probably going to be the freezer and some kind of rabbit stew, but just in case there's a market, we have put them up on the Irish "classified ads" website DoneDeal.ie at €15 a pop. If we are lucky enough to sell them as pets then the €45 will have paid for all the meusli we have had to buy since owning Padfoot, Ginny and Rogers and probably a bit of the chicken wire that's gone into their runs and hutches. A rabbit's not just for Christmas?

Meanwhile, the baby chicks are growing fast and starting to put on real feathers on tail and wings. If anything, baby chicks tend to get a bit less cute as time goes by, changing from the almost spherical cartoon chick shape to more of a chicken shape as they go through the adolescent, part-feathered stage. They show their 'reptile' and 'dinosaur' flavours as they change, particularly around the head and face, before their fully feathered chicken appearance comes with the in-lay fully formed wattles and comb.

We need to check with Anne again, but I think they basically stay with their Mum (in this case in the 'other' hutch or in a run in the calf house) till they are feathered up, which is 6 weeks. They are too vulnerable, when just 'fluffy' to the cold and wet, especially in November, so they can't go outside and, if they are for any reason abandoned by their mother, we have to supply an "electric hen", a hot pad under which they can huddle for warmth. We are hoping our surviving two are both girls so that they can join the flock (all be it we'd have to watch out for any broodiness because any progeny would be father x daughter 'line-bred' birds).

We have named them CJ Cregg and Donna Moss after characters in the West Wing TV series. 'CJ' and Donna may turn out to be boys but if so, so be it
and they may be for the stock pot or a coq-au-vin. You can't have more than one "William" after all. That is possibly the less palatable side of small-holdering. We are not running a retirement home for geriatric farm animals.

Sad to relate that the 6 eggs we rather optimistically rescued into the incubator when Broody Betty got fed up with them just to see if they might survive, didn't. Today we decided they'd gone on long enough so we checked them one last time, then cracked them open by the compost heap and found them all to contain almost fully formed but dead chicks. Either this happened at some point after we'd candled them and the hen knew, and gave up on them or she gave up anyway and the eggs got chilled to death. Either way they are, sadly, no more and Betty can get on with rearing the 2 babies who are now 11 days old.

Wish her luck.

3 Baby Bunnies

29,823 page views and counting....

We have some excellent news on the rabbit front and can report that Padfoot plus 3 two-week old baby bunnies are now rescued to the Maternity Unit where Pads is now standing guard outside the 'bedroom' of her new hutch and the three babies, in a nest made with fur from her belly and new dry hay are hiding within.

That sounds nice and easy and relaxing, doesn't it? It was not that calm to start with. Dad had done the sheep-free-range thing which happens now twice a day; the sheep get let out of the paddock to roam the lawn, the pond garden and the stuff around the allotment where the crops are finishing ( or in the case of the big York cabbages, so slug-riddled that a sheep is hardly going to make visible damage!) and all we dogs were locked up indoors, so Mum and Dad drew a deep breath and went to look.

At first glance it was all a loss, the compost 'heap' looking more and more like a trampled, dank mess of rotting nettles and the 'hay plug' Dad had seen blocked only a collapsed, empty tunnel with a few shreds of fur in it. But Dad climbed over the fence and started to look for other entrances as then found one right at the back against the wall. This proved to be a shallow tunnel about 2 feet long and when the top was broken open there was the nest, obviously still warm, dry and cared for, and now wriggling visibly with new life. Wearing rubber gloves to minimise the human smell put on the babies, Dad lifted nest-ball complete with babies into a Curver bucket held by Mum and Padfoot had helpfully hopped straight into the cat-basket a few seconds earlier, so Padfoot and the nest could be hurriedly transferred to the calf house and the hutch there quickly bedded with new hay, sawdust, water and food.

Now we just need Pads to stay a good mother for 2 more weeks or so, while the babies are weaned. Then she can go back in with Ginny and Rogers and the bunnies will stay indoors as they grow for a month or so while we decide what to do with them; sale as pet rabbits, or the larder.

In other news, we have blitzed the big overgrown hedge to the east of the front lawn, between the lawn and the "Primrose Path" (Our 2nd driveway, if you like). This had been neglected for at least 15 years and was a mess of big blackthorn, elder and hawthorn poles 10 foot high and 6 or 7 foot thick. Not any more. Now it's a neat 4 foot tall and 2 feet or so thick and, hopefully, thinking about coming back as a nice green reviving trimmed garden feature!

Just for fun, here too are a couple of pictures of the chickens up a tree, possibly trying to get a better view of whether their sister is going to hatch those eggs tomorrow or not. There is also a nice Autumn shot of our lane starting to get nice and colourful with the leaves and, finally a shot of Dora's flank showing her beautiful gingery wool. Like the inside of a Crunchie Bar, says Mum and we are not going to argue.

Tension Building

Coo! It's all happening! Dad thinks this retirement lark is meant to be all peace and quiet, a chance to relax, a time free from stress and anxiety. Not a bit of it round here at the moment as we have 3 separate pressure points coming up and as well as looking forward to the imminent visit from Niece 'Mads' who is over for a couple of days next week. Our three dramas are as follows.

1) Will there be any baby rabbits and a still-active nest in the compost heap when we go to rummage and look on Saturday? We have posted before that the black and white lop eared rabbit, Padfoot, started a nest back on the 6th of this month and that because rabbits are notorious for destroying the nest if it is disturbed, we pretty much made it a rain proof roof of corrugated but then backed off to leave it well alone for the early, vulnerable days. Baby rabbits are born pink, naked, blind and with their ears 'glued' down. After a week (says our learnéd tome, 'Practical Rabbit Keeping' by Katie Thear (Pub Ward Lock, 1981, ISBN 0 7063 5931 3)) fur begins to appear and at ten days the eyes open. The ears open and come upright at 8 days and at 2 weeks they are completely furred and quite alert. At this point they may start coming out of the nest to explore and therefore become vulnerable to cats, magpies and other predators, so it is at the 2 week point we are advised to 'rescue' them from the compost heap and transfer them to one of the Maternity Unit hutches (along with their Mother, of course). Mum and Dad finally get to see do we actually have baby rabbits, or have we been pussy-footing around a nest which is long gone and feeding extra rations just to make them fat for the winter? That's tomorrow!

2) Next up is our Broody Hen saga which may or may not result in the 'pipping' of up to ten baby chicks; the first possible day being Sunday 21st. Despite her breeding (which has been designed to breed out the tendency to go broody), her general dim-wit intelligence (getting on the wrong nest, which has caused Dad to rescue and move her back to the correct box half a dozen times) and the frequent disturbances from kittens, puppies etc, she has hung in there diligently for the 21 days. In an ideal world (those learnéd tomes again) you immediately move a broody and clutch to private quarters, safe from disturbance even from her sisters and from rats etc. But every time we've done that in the past the broody has immediately abandoned the nest and gone back to the sisters, so this time we left her be right there in the main coop with everyone else coming and going past her to feed, roost, lay their own eggs and so on. So on Sunday she might start to feel the stirrings of 'pipping' eggs under her and hear the cheep of emerging babies. If not maybe soon after. We then need to find out is she going to continue to be a good Mum. Our 'mentors', Anne and Simon advise us to 'rescue' her to the Maternity Unit also because the chicks, anyway, need special food (called "Chick Crumb") and a small 'drinker' (they have quite a tendency to commit suicide in their water bowls) and also need protecting from those rats, magpies, kittens and other bullies. This picture is, as you can see, not of the broody, but of the father, William the Conqueror, strutting his stuff along the front wall.

Then there's 3), will the 2CV pass it's NCT (= MOT) on Thursday at 08:30 in the Castlerea test centre? She is as ready as we feel she can be. The philosophy seems to be to get her nearly ready, submit her and then fix what she fails on (if anything) rather than to try to 2nd-guess the testers and pre-fix everything possible, which would be expensive. The garage says that sometimes you can get lucky with an old 'not-every-day' car and they might be a bit lenient. We shall see. These are nervous times.

Then, as I said, there is the excitement of the imminent 'Mads' visit. Mads may already be in Ireland as she was coming over first to visit her old chums at Dunboyne Castle (Near Dublin), where she did her 'work placement' year as part of her University course in Hotel and Business Management. On Monday she takes a train to Roscommon Station and we collect her from there. She stays with us a couple of days before we drop her to Knock Airport and the flight home. We are looking forward to it and we hope she is too.

And finally, there's the small minor excitement as the page views on this blog nears 30,000 and the planned hand over of this keyboard from me (Deefer) to Dad. We are currently on 29,770. Watch this space.

Deefs