Poorly Goose

Dublin Bay rose in flower in November,
well soaked with the rain

These are surprisingly mild, unseasonably warm, days. Our bees are still active even early in the morning except for on one frosty morning this week, presumably working the ivy and we have plenty of 'summer colour' left in the garden, roses like the Dublin Bay pictured, purple verbena, a lupin and even a Spiraea (pink shrub) pushing out new flowers. The rain is rather frustrating our gardening efforts but nobody around here is daring to complain because we and they remember far worse Octobers and Novembers. Say nothing and act natural!

Dried 'Borlotti' and 'Gaucho' beans. Not a particularly
clean sample, a few with surface mould to sort out. 

The young Buff Orpingtons finally out grew their tiny 'rabbit hutch' so I have resurrected the former Marans house from the temporary keet run and parked that next to their familiar home, shutting down the rabbit run to deny them access. Completely un-phased, they quickly adopted this bigger house with its bigger pop-hole so, the next day. I 'disappeared' the old house. I am now sneakily moving the house a few feet each day, creeping it down the cattle race and into the yard, where it will end up cosily against the outer wall with its pop hole nice and close to the proper, grown up chicken house. We would like them to start using that one day, but we are happy enough that they use the Marans house. It is fox proof anyway.

Our first Tamworth pork chops - delicious

We woke up to a sick goose, George Junior. He looked all 'moopy' and did not want to join the other 5 in their roamings round the orchard; he just stood on one spot or sat down. He looked to have a badly swollen base-of-neck, crop or 'top-of chest', like he was growing a dewlap. With all these poultry types, there is a limited amount you can do in such circumstances and it is never really worth calling the vet for a bird 'worth' only €10 or so. Birds work to such fast and high energy systems, heart rate, respiration, body temperature etc that when things go wrong they go wrong fast and the birds seem to go from perfectly healthy to dead with little in between. Most poultry keepers just cull the sick ones out. I fully expected to have to do this to GJ or to find him dead on the grass by lunchtime.

New 'Bible', my recommended sheep
reading 'homework'

We were away today, on a rare sunny morning, helping Vendor Anna's partner to subdue a badly overgrown hedge, but when we got back we were delighted to see the goose raise his head - he'd been asleep in the sunshine but was still with us. I was easily able to catch him and then we could get a good feel of his 'swelling'. I was expecting the hard, grain-sack nobbliness of an impacted crop but no, his swelling all seemed to be the feathers fluffed up and then just soft, squidgy flesh, maybe 'trapped wind' or some goose equivalent of foamy-bloat. When I massaged him he showed no distress or pain, just eyes me with his calm blue eyes, curiously. I have no idea. I have, as usual, put it out to the poultry discussion websites and the Facebook group to see if anyone has come across this before. Meanwhile George Junior has received our standard treatment of a gloop of cod liver oil and isolation out of the weather. He can see and hear all his mates but he can't get to them and, more importantly, they can not bully him.

Ram lamb at the end of the rainbow. 

That hedge cutting was all a bit mad. Vendor Anna lives about 45 minutes from here, the other side of Carrick and her house, on top of a rise has a superb view of the Shannon River. Or it would have if this hedge had not rather got away from them with its tall ash, blackthorn, dog rose, hazel and some kind of large leaved lime. It is actually a double-hedge, running either side of a bank, with a big ditch on the lane-ward side. Our job was to get it back to "about head height" but that meant chain-saw work as some of the trunks were 3 inches plus thick. There are also telephone cables running along the lane, so we had to be sure and drop any 'trees' inwards, uphill, onto the soggy lawn.

Macaroni cheese.

You are not really meant to use a chainsaw up at head height (it is supposed to be used cutting downwards from waist height, using the weight of the saw to make your cut) but I risked it. I didn't manage to injure myself but I did get very tired, and 2 hours in I needed a sit down - I was also very relieved that the saw had also gone blunt by then, so we could, with clear conscience, call it a day and we all retreated indoors to a superb lasagna and apple crumble cooked by Anna. The glass of wine went down well, too - Liz was driving today. We did well, with Paul and I cutting and Liz dragging the cut bits clear of the hedge and secateuring the smaller stuff, we got all the way along the 100 feet or so of the 'inside' hedge. The outside hedge will not be such a problem, being mainly thinner, 'loppers-sized' whippy stuff. Paul can play with that till we all come back and, more importantly try to clear the new "hedge" of bits laid along the lawn. He will have shreddings and kindling for years out of that. I logged up some of the trunks for him, too, before the saw finally ran out of sharp. Two tired but well fed gardeners made their way home to rescue the poor goose, walk the dogs and retreat indoors to light the range before the next band of rain came through.

A Kind of Inheritance

My previous post describes the unearthing of a tractor-mounted fertilizer spinner / spreader from the bank at the west end of the (now) Pond Garden and way back I have spoken of a horse drawn hay rake found in the same bank and hedge. These are all part of the charm and interest we have obtained by buying this place, an abandoned farmhouse and surrounding fields. It is our inheritance, if you like, and we have both been very struck by the fact that we have taken custody of a piece of history. We both feel very strongly that we must treat the house and land with respect, keeping it and improving it till we eventually hand it on ourselves to the next custodian(s).

The house, particularly, feels in a way which is hard to define, as if it has a soul or a spirit which we must try to make feel secure and to please. We hope that we have completely gutted the place and renovated in a sensitive way, somehow bringing it new life and warmth. This might all sound a bit weird and spiritual compared to my normal shallow, superficial warblings and I may not be describing it very well, but as we lit the first fires and sent our first warmth and smoke up the chimneys and started to see the rooms and walls dry out, we were both saying things like 'There! That's better, isn't it, house?' and we always wished it well as we went off for the weekends during the build and tried to re-assure it that we were not abandoning it again.

Too weird? Ah well. The previous owner and dweller we have called TK Min in this blog, TK being his initials; 'Min' for him being the son. This farm has been owned and run by the K family going back generations; they were definitely here in the 1901 census, and Dad (TK Max) and Grand-dad, along with Mum and Grandma are all buried in the fine family grave along in the local village cemetery. Grand-dad and Grandma died 1955 and 1963 respectively, TK Max in 1987 and his wife in 1962. 'Our man', TK min died just over 3 years ago on the 18th Feb 2010 although he had moved out of the farm around 10 years ago and the farm has been out of use and not lived in since then.

We never met any of these people. We know a bit about them from talking to local folk and have read the exciting newspaper stories of their instant fame when having their car hi-jacked by the robbers in a local bank raid in which 2 policemen were shot and killed. Our dealings have been with TK Min's sister, our 'Vendor Anna' who was involved with selling us the place on behalf of the estate following TK's passing. We have since become firm friends. There are two other sisters, hence the 'Three Sisters' described in this blog during the conveyancing, but we have yet to meet them also.

So, it was in this way that we came to 'inherit' our beautiful house and the wonderful grounds - the fields, walls, trees, the yard, the 'Secret Garden', the cattle race, the Tígín and milking/calf sheds that we love so much. In terms of physical contents, naturally most of it had been cleared away for the sale, but we also inherited a few bits and pieces and tools - a kitchen knife and an enamel, cream-coloured roasting dish, a couple of pitch forks and the hay rake. A rather nice plate and some personal papers including TK Max's "An Garda Síochána" (The Irish Police Force) membership card and newspaper cuttings, we have passed to Vendor Anna.

Until last week, that was about it. Then we were talking to Anna's Paul about the fact that I had fried my chain saw engine and needed a new one. Paul very generously volunteered the machine in his shed, a nearly new Stihl which originally belonged to none other than our own TK Min! The little we know of TK Min does have him as rather a nervous guy and no-one can actually imagine him using a chain saw. Paul is also not a great fan of these tools, so he has not used it either; nor did he intend to start, so this one is probably about 6 years old (says our man at Stihl Main Dealer, East Brothers of Boyle) and will not have turned a crank for most of those 6 years.

We are delighted of course and very grateful to Anna and Paul as it saves me buying a new one for €370+. I have whizzed it straight round to our chainsaw genius, Felix-the-Fix to check it over, service it and (mainly) re-assure me that it is safe to use. It even came with the instruction book. I have used some of the saved money to treat myself to a pair of those kevlar, chain-saw safety trousers as, in general, I prefer life with both legs.

There you have it then; our inheritance and our plans for its custody and enjoyment.

Park and Ride

We have an unusually posh car outside the house at present as we have now diversified our small-holdering efforts and opened an unofficial "park and ride" service to the nearby Knock airport. Not really, but we were pleased to allow our friends Vendor Anna and her partner Paul to leave their car here while they were away. We were delighted when they turned up with this huge bag of cuttings of willow and dogwood, plants which we were admiring when we visited them.

These species strike cuttings really easily (It's not quite the "Throw it at the ground and run like hell!" of Kudzu weed (Peuraria lobata) in the Deep South but it is close, especially in these wet parts of the country. We originally got interested in willow as a browse-feed for goats but then decided against goats (for now anyway). But we have since seen it in some nice living sculpture hedges, both at Anna's and at the Kiltimagh Petting Zoo and our friends Anne and Simon use living willow mini-igloos as interesting chicken perch features in their runs. The birds seem to enjoy them. We will have some fun using these - thank you very much Anna and Paul!.

While we're outside enjoying the unseasonable mild, still weather, I have knocked up a small poly-tunnel shaped cloche over one of Liz's Kitchen Garden railway-sleeper raised beds. The consensus round here is that you 'need a poly-tunnel' just because it is just that little bit cool and wet to get your seedlings going early enough in spring, or to grow reasonable tomatoes, salad and even stuff like runner beans, never mind greenhouse crops like cucumbers and aubergines.

Well, we looked at poly-tunnels and found them a bit pricey for a decent, strong one tall enough for me to stand up in, but we did see, in a herb and plant shop tucked up a back street in Carrick on Shannon, a rather natty design for a big cloche with an opening side, made in that case with thick yellow water pipe from a building site. Costing me absolutely nothing, I have had a go at reproducing it using left overs from our own building project - tough "Qualpex" water pipe for the arches, sitting on short pieces of left over copper pipe thumped into holes in the wood. left over plastic sheeting and clips made from split-up-one-side bits of 1 and a half inch drain pipe. It looks OK, though it may prove to be a dead loss which blows away in the first bit of wind. We'll give it a go anyway and it might help us get a few seedlings under way.