All Go

Nearly complete - the new post and rail fence.

It seems to have been all go here since the arrival of the Silverwoods (see previous posts). Expecting their arrival we had postponed the task by fencing contractor, Paul (the thought of children mixing it with barbed wire  and Paul's 50 kg pile driver...) but once they had gone, Paul was anxious to get back stuck in. We had 2 nice long days at it, working on till 8 pm or so finishing with all the little titivating and tweaking that Paul, who is a perfectionist likes to do before he signs off. We had been joking about the fact that one of the posts nearest the road had his name written on it in green marker pen, where the batch of wood had been identified for 'shipping', but we both know that people will see the nice new fence (and, we hope, admire it) and then want to know who did it. We will happily tell them Paul's name and he will be happy for the advertisement and word-of-mouth recommendation.

New sheep-wire run along the lane-hedge.

On the final day he was collected from work by his wife and 4 children whom we had happily agreed to show round the place, so we were back in 'petting zoo' mode. They all seem to love the pigs and sheep and the little ones loved a chance to hold a Buff Orpington chick; although the oldest boy went all 'teenager' at that point and decided it was not cool. Paul's wife runs some kind of play group and she left wondering to herself (out loud) whether the play group might enjoy a visit. We are going to have to watch it - we already have Guide Leader Mrs Silverwood measuring up the new sheep field to see how many tents she can squeeze in!

Brawn under construction.

It only remains now to carry on the bucket-training the sheep; teaching them to follow the sound of a rattled feed-bucket, so that we can reliably walk them from the East Field round to the front lawn without anyone making a break for freedom. Longer term readers will recall that our first batch of sheep, which were Jacobs cross ewes in 2012 spent most of their time out on this lawn with me shepherding them around to stop them diving through hedges or down across the 'allotment', but they all have to be bucket trained first - it is a lot easier to attract them back by 'carrot method' than to chase them from behind and use the 'stick'.

Mango chutney - the muslin bag holds
the smaller, woodier spices.

As soon as this job was done, Liz wanted to make brawn from a pig's head donated to us by Anne (Thanks Anne) and also mango chutney, but we have no saucepan big enough to take a whole head from these monsters. We needed to split the head. This is always a rather violent and brutal task and seems a long way from the precision cuts and nifty knife work of proper butchery. My way is to hack-saw through some of the skull from the back, till I have made a crack big enough to take the sharp edge of my one-sided bill hook. I can then use the 7 lb 'lump' hammer to whack the bill hook blade through the rest of the way. It's not pretty. Liz still has to dislocate the long, lower jaw halves before it will fit in the pots.

The chicks at 3 weeks are now outdoor birds. 

We hope that when we take our own pigs to slaughter, if we intend to keep the heads and make brawn, we will be able to persuade the butcher to split the skulls for us; he's doing our butchery. Anne and Simon chose to do the cutting up themselves. I do not have the equipment or the skills, so I am going to hand over the money to the experts; the slaughterman / butcher will be doing ours.

Going through the hive debris looking for varroa mites

Meanwhile, it has come round to the time when all good bee keepers must check their hives for varroa mite. Many people know the name, and associate the words with all that is bad and disastrous about hive failures and 'colony collapse disorder (CCD)'. Varroa mite is now endemic in the British Isles and modern bee keepers pretty much have to accept that their bees will have varroa, the same way their cat or dog will probably get fleas, they just need to monitor the mite population and use one of the modern fume treatments twice a year to knock them down if they get too numerous.

Dead varroa mite. 

The treatment our group prefer is a new Canadian preparation called 'MAQS' (everyone pronounces it 'Max') which consists of strips which you lay in the hive across the frames, which fume formic acid throughout the colony. The treatment is temperature sensitive - it needs to be above 10 degrees to 'fume' properly. The bees hate it at first but soon get used to it - (formic acid is actually one of the components of bee sting), but it seeps into all the air-spaces and down through the wax cappings on the brood cells, killing the mites and mite larvae as they grow on the bee larvae. It presumably also seeps into any honey or pollen stores, but it is said not to taint the honey. You leave the strips in place for 7 days to do their work, then discard them.

A red spider mite (yellow ring) photo-bombs a group of
 much less mobile varroa mites. 

The way you know if you need to treat has been our task over the weekend. In the floor box of the hive there is a permanently fixed mesh floor (mouse and wasp proof but good ventilation) but below that 2 rails which will support a slide-in stiff plastic sheet, on which you can place a large sheet of paper. You leave that in place for several days, and then on a calm day, bring it to somewhere well lit where you can examine the debris which has fallen through the mesh floor onto it - dead tiny insects, bits of wax capping dropped by hatching bees, bee poo etc. In our case we also had some whizzy red spider mites who are presumably eating the other debris and over a hundred of our target species, the varroa mite.

Lovely card from Diamond

These guys are shiny dark or light brown, about 1.6 mm wide, and wider than they are long (like a crab). You then divide the total count by the days and if your 'mite-drop' per day is more than a guide figure for that month (33 for August) then you have a problem and you need to treat. Ours is, so we will be putting our MAQS strips in at the next visit.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note a nice Birthday Card for Liz from Diamond - this one all black with a nice London design laser-cut out of the front. Nice one Roger la Borde designs. Happy Birthday to Lizzie for tomorrow. May you have many many more. Oh, and we had another 'petting zoo' visit from Sparks and his son B(7) who also brought along a school chum named Charlie. Sparks and B loved it - Charlie turned out to be one of those kids who is scared of everything animal like - especially dogs, cats, pigs, chickens and geese. We had a bit of a thin time with the poor dogs locked up in the living room and pouring rain all day, but we survived. All part of life's rich tapestry.

Underfed?

Snout in the trough....

I was getting a bit concerned there for a while. I am feeding my pigs with what seemed like a decent amount of food, based on the "by sight" principle of "do they hoover it all up in 20 minutes?" If it's all gone then you may not be feeding enough, if they leave some then you are feeding too much. Well, these young ladies seemed to be hoovering it up in about 15 minutes and are always ready (often squealing their desire!) for each meal. I was feeding by the 1 litre yogurt tub, one each for breakfast, one split between them for lunch and one each at supper. At each meal there is also fruit, so for example an apple and a tomato chopped up between them.

A contented Tamworth almost 4 months old?

There was nothing for it - I needed to refer to 'The Bible', Liz Shankland's (Haynes) Pig Manual. Liz S advises that you feed pig nuts by weight according to age, basically at 0.1 kg per pig per day per week of age, so that a 16 week old pig should be on 1.6 kg of nuts PLUS any fruit or veg you can add to that. She does not advise substituting fruit and veg for the nuts and hoping that your pig will put on weight based on a bucket full of knackered old cabbage and potato peelings.

I love the ginger bristles on these ladies, glowing in the sun

I needed to check the weight of food I am feeding, so a quick experiment with the yogurt pots told me that a pot is equivalent to 850 g. On that basis, Mapp and Lucia's 2 and a half tubs per day is over 2 kg of nuts! I am over feeding, if anything and the girls squealing for more are just lying (telling me porky pies?). In fact, Liz Shankland has pork animals (rather than 'baconers') on the 1.6 kg only UNTIL they are about 20 weeks old - after that you actually cut down to 1.4 kg to avoid the pig laying down that thick layer of fat all round. I am going to have to sneak the volume down a bit without Mapp and Lucia raising a written complaint to the Management!

13 healthy babies

Did I ever give you a final score on the Buff Orpington babies?  13 chicks was how we did; all now in the brooder box under Infra Red (though for the picture, I carried them to the sunlit window so that they could admire the front lawn and you could see them in the natural light). When I say 'final' score, I refer only to the hatch, we expect about half of these chicks to turn out to be roosters who will not be added to the flock, but the hens are very much part of our future as small holders, all being well.

In an earlier post, I was possibly a bit disparaging about the "lacks-a-daisical" time keeping of Kenny, our sheep man. I think it would be safe to include our "fincing" man, Paul in that category too. We have done a lot of business with Paul and we have long ago learned not to hang about waiting on his returning calls, coming up with quoted prices, or showing up to erect fencing when he says. When he arranged to have the woodwork for the post and rail fence round the front lawn delivered "on Monday" we fully expected it to arrive on the Thursday, and when he left us on that day saying he'd be "back next week" (now this week) to put the fences up, we both mentally decided to believe that when we saw him arrive with tractor, fencing wire, rammer, monkey strainer and all his other gear.

The geese and goslings race home to supper,
from orchard to their house

In fact, it has not been a problem, because a) time is a commodity of which we have plenty here and b) it has given us a chance to take advantage of a cheap offer in the Irish DIY chain 'Woodie's' for some 'Forest Green' fence paint. We have been able to unpack the rails and posts, dry them in the sunshine, and larrup a good old layer of this paint onto them prior to putting the fence up. Painting downwards onto fence rails when they are all in one place is always easier than working your way along 54 m of fence painting the bottoms of rails 'upwards'. If some of the rails have to be cut, we can always nip round and paint the grain ends after the event.

There are not many apples in our orchard this year but
this Bramley cooker is looking good so far.

What else is there tonight? Young 'Pirate' is now well settled and getting quite cheeky with his waiting out front of the house and sometimes yowling for attention. He can hear us when we retire to the terrace furniture for a coffee and a chat and will come round and jump up on the table, un-bothered by the objecting shouts of the dogs indoors. He then finds a lap and gets himself comfortable; the only problem being that he is one of those cats who 'knead' you with their front paws while purring, so your belly gets a bit lacerated by those claws through the thin summer clothing. That's about it for this one.

An Epic Jambalaya

Flavours from the Deep South y'all.

The food at this 'restaurant' is (in my unbiased opinion!) always gorgeous and often new and interesting; Liz is always trying out new flavour combinations and new recipes for tried and tested favourites. This leads in turn, to the left-overs also being varied and exciting, with some bizarre combinations left for your blogger to use up on Liz's 'Knit and Natter' evening. A couple of days ago we had a lovely combination of sheets of ribs from our own lambs, marinaded in a mixture of honey, ginger, garlic and soy sauce plus rice from a packet mix by 'Zatarains', a genuine New Orleans company specialising in Creole, Cajun and other New Orleans and Deep South dishes.

Holiday snaps - Outside 'Mother's restaurant in 1998

We love all that kind of thing ever since our visit to New Orleans with our very good, Mississippi-resident, Westie breeder friends Marlane and Norm' C in 1998. We love the 'Po' boy' drip-down-your-chin beef and mayo sandwiches, the seafood dishes, the gumbos and the jambalayas. I am not sure whether "Mother's", spiritual home of the 'Po' Boy' is still there and running after Hurricane Katrina did her destructive worst but I hope so.

Top right - getting ourselves round those Po' Boys

Anyway, where all this waffle is leading is to tonight's epic DIY jambalaya which was pretty much these left over lamb rib sheet cut up a bit, the rice and the meat juices and sauce plus a little water to let it all flow again, eaten with some gorgeous (Lizzie) home made wheat/rye wholemeal bread. Epic. I don't generally starve myself on these Liz-less nights but this one was a cracker which, sadly, will probably never get reproduced. The Zatarain's mixes are not (as far as we know) available here, so we buy them in Macknade's in Faversham when ever we are over and eke them out through the in between times.

Crocosmia 'Lucifer' doing very well

Monday afternoon has now become our regular bee hive inspection time and we are delighted to say that the colony is thriving and rapidly expanding into the 'super' (top box) we added to the hive stack recently. They are an active, contented looking crew and certainly deserve the old clichéd moniker of 'busy'. When I am exercising the dogs in the orchard of an evening, I like to sit down on the grass in the top left corner where I can see the hive flight path and the bees launching themselves off the hive and up at their standard 20-30 degree climb; where I am sitting they are back-lit by the sinking sun and show up well against the dark, shady side of the hawthorn hedge. Just out of curiosity I counted the take-offs recently and saw 46 bees ping away in a 30 second period. Similar numbers return, zig-zagging down or spiraling like planes approaching a busy airport.

Some first hollyhocks. Seed saved from our Kent garden.

One small doubt concerns us. The bees are obviously very busy and productive, and the pollen for larvae, nectar for honey and the ingredients for beeswax are obviously being collected from somewhere but that 'somewhere' does not seem to be OUR garden. If we're honest, we find this a little bizarre and our noses are a bit out of joint. What's wrong with OUR flowers. you ladies?

Yellow 'Bishop' related dahlia

We always garden in a bee-friendly way and especially this year we have specialised in pollen-rich and insect friendly flowers - we do crocus, ox-eye daisies, nasturtiums, hollyhocks, geraniums, ribes and so on; Blimey, we used to win Gold Awards for it in the Kent Wildlife Gardening competitions, and became judges. There must be 5-10,000 bees in that hive by now but I am lucky if I've seen half a dozen foraging in our garden. I have had dozens of bumble bees across at least 3 species, we have a rake of wasps flitting between flowers like bees and we have a good population of the bee-like hover flies. We have a forest of Phacelia tanacetifolium, we have 2013 leeks left to go to flower just now opening and we have the autumn fruiting raspberries all breaking out in bloom, but go look at them and bumble bees will be all you see - the honeybees will be whizzing over your head, up to hedge-top height and then spreading out across the fields and bog-lands all around 'us'. You can lead a horse to water, I guess.

An "artist's" impression of the new fence

Our next big project, it will not surprise you to learn, is some more fencing. That is what most of the previous ones have been, after all. This time, though, something a little different. We are going to fence around the front lawn so that we can graze it with sheep. The rabbits are doing a good job, but cannot keep up with it and it offends me every time I have to mow off all that lovely, nutritious grass and let it rot. But sheep fencing, as we know, can look a bit 'industrial' with its tree trunk posts, green high tensile barbed wire and the square section 'sheep fence' itself. OK where you would expect it, like round a field (!) but not all that beautiful.

Ball head cabbage grown from plug plants

So Liz has put her foot down with a firm hand on this one and when she sits at the terrace furniture outside the front of the house in the sunshine, she doesn't want to be looking at a barbed wire fence. We have set our contractor, Paul-the-Fence (he says it 'fince') the task of doing us a nice post and rail, sheep-proof fence up the drive and along the front of the house. He will then join up the out of sight bits with the barbed wire stuff to give us all-round security, and we will have a gate nearest to the yard so that we can move sheep easily between the East Field and this one without any going astray. They will also be able to enjoy the browse in the hedge base and around the new keet run and tidy that up for us nicely as did the Jacob cross ladies in 2012.

The ever growing goose family

Hopefully we will look most picturesque to any visitors coming up the drive. Pricey though, this post and rail, and we need 54 metres of it. Ker-ching.

I will leave you with this pic of the geese. The two 'babies' are to the right, still fluffy but taking shape. George Junior (centre face on) is fully feathered and looks for all the world like his Mum and Aunt.  

Of Cookery (and Other) Failures

The best laid plans, so they say.....

Here is a picture of our very disreputable and grubby looking 'project cat', Pirate, the starving stray who has been hanging around and seems to want to be fed by us and possibly move in. Since the last post this story has moved on. We had been feeding him for around 3 weeks but he was only showing up for food and then slinking away. Suddenly a week ago he was all over us like a rash, accepting food and strokings, yowling for attention if he heard us talking by the pond or in front of the house.

Pirate the Cat

Suddenly he was here for most of the day and sleeping in the shade on the roof of the 2CV in the car port. The plan is to get him some vet attention (mainly a spay, worming and a look at his poor eyes, one of which is absent (there is just a pink, open empty socket which is a bit spooky to look at), the other looks very misty; we are surprised he can see at all). This would involve catching him and putting him in a cat basket, so I put the basket on the car roof with a bit of 'Vet-Bed' blanket in it and the boy adopted it immediately. He slept there a couple of nights and in the morning, when he heard me feeding breakfast to our two cats, would emerge, stretch luxuriously in the sunshine and stroll across to get his share. I was suddenly able to brush him through to ascertain he had no fleas, which was a relief.

Accepting strokes and even a brush-through for fleas.

We thought we were on for the vet and contacted Aoife. We started to arrange check ups and what meds she could bring to get the ball rolling. Also, by the by, neighbour Una invited us down to pick her black currants and in the tea and scones chat afterwards, when the subject of cats came up she said that she had been seeing a dirty white cat with bad eyes for a while - it had been calling on her for food but had recently stopped coming. Pirate is obviously one of these fellas who keeps a lot of options open. But now it seems to be all over for the moment. As quickly and as decisively as he decided to 'adopt' us, he seems to have dropped us again like a hot potato. He has gone back to showing up very late (10 pm+) and quickly eating food left down before slinking away. He is not staying the night and not using the cat basket. He did not show for breakfast this morning and we have not seen him all day. Perhaps he heard me planning his treatments with Aoife and has skedaddled.

Bronze fennel

Also in the 'failures' department, we finally got round to trying our pea-pod 'Burgundy' made last August. I must admit I had not been confident. I made an awful lot of wine as a teenager and the best stuff was always made from fairly promising raw materials - sweet fruit or full bodied stuff like root veg, rhubarb stems, grains and, of course grapes. The stuff made with flavoured but 'gutless' materials never seemed to be worth much unless I was going for the strongly scented light wines like rose-petal or elder-flower. I could not see pea pod working but we made it for a laugh mainly because it is mentioned in the 'Good Life' TV series. Ah well, we tried some today prior to bottling it off and it just tasted thin and very pea-pod-ish, so it was glugged unceremoniously over the compost heap.

Gooseberries

And then, we have had John Deere Bob, who is a diabetic, fondly remembering a local confection called 'Brown Cake' but, being Bob, he has no idea what's in it - he thinks maybe ginger and treacle. We asked around the local ladies and Vendor Anna and were able to come up with two local delicacies which he 'might mean', one a gingery treacle-bread, the other a version of soda bread with treacle added. Rather dubiously, Liz had a go at the first one and the complete cake was set aside to await Bob's next visit. It was brown alright and looked OK but a bit un-interesting. 3 days went by and Bob hadn't appeared, so we decided to try a slice with this afternoon's coffee. It was dry and dull and mainly tasted of the burnt/caramelized tones of treacle or dark brown sugar. 'Ooooh no!' we said, sure that this could not be anything Bob (or anyone) would be fondly remembering. We whistled up the chickens and, being way less discerning than we are, they happily polished it off. Ginger and treacle flavoured eggs, anyone?

Lovage - a gift from Steak Lady

But it's not all failures. Liz has made some excellent paté from the less talked about parts of rabbits and culled out chickens and, today, we knocked out 7 jars of delicious black currant jam from Una's fruit. We have also bottled up 14 bottles of elder-flower 'champagne' which tastes very promising so far but now needs a week to fall bright and build up some 'fizz'.

Lettuce. The red leaves are from the heritage variety
'Little leprechaun' from Brown Envelope Seeds.

I have been back onto the DIY projects, creating a nice run for the ever growing guinea fowl keets. Pictures of this when it is finished, but I am delighted to be able to make this for almost zero cost - about a tenner in hinges, bolts and 'big staples', plus €20's worth of fruit-cage netting for the 'roof'. The chicken wire for the 'walls' came as a cast off roll from our fencing contractor, Paul. The posts were pulled out of a bit of redundant fencing inside what is now the pig paddock. Up-cycling.

Pig Pen

Pig pen main gate. The orchard is on the left.

What with having freezers full of meat, portions of cooked stuff and veg and having leeks and sprouts still growing, our weekly shop is normally a very modest affair - bread, milk, bakery stuff, wine etc. Just recently though we have gone into 'project' mode and we seem to have been shelling out money hand over fist. The poor old hoover finally needed replacement and Liz is buying a 2nd hand sewing machine. There is the beehive and now the frames and other equipment and there will soon be the bees themselves. There are the parts for the pig ark. We have had a tow hitch fitted to the Fiat (that one was €400) and we are looking for a small stock trailer. Most recently there is the fencing for the pig pen.

We always knew how vital good fencing is to any livestock enterprise and that is one of the biggest costs you will face. Fencing the orchard in 2012 cost €600 and, last year, the East Field set us back €1050. I use a good local contractor who we call 'Paul the Fence'; a one man band with old but efficient fencing gear and a seriously ancient MF tractor with a 50 kg weight 'pile driver' on the back for the big posts. He's a great bloke and we get on really well. He does not mind (and seems to appreciate) me helping out labouring and we chat away, yarning while we work swapping stories and the time flies. He loves his food, so Liz, who loves to cook for an appreciative audience gets into top 'catering' mode baking biscuits and cake for tea breaks and potato cakes or home made pork pie, hot for lunch stops.

Monkey-strainer pulls the 'barbed'

Neither of us had actually kept pigs before or, indeed, done any pig fencing so we are only guessing but I have read and seen described a version which is basically sheep wire with a strand of barbed top and bottom. The top strand dissuades pigs from trying to rear up at the fence and look over. The bottom stops them trying to root underneath from whence they can push up powerfully potentially lifting the posts out and the fence up high enough for them to get under. Some systems back this up with an electric fence (or even rely solely on the electric fence) but I cannot bring myself to trust only that method, so I like something physical in the way of containment. Also electric fence 'pulsators' are mad money!

So we decided to go with the sheep wire and high tensile (green) barbed wire. We also decided that even though a polygon roughly 35 m N/S and 25 m E/W was way way too big for what 2 piggies would need, we could give ours a satisfying and exciting environment (and save fencing money) by allowing them all the area between the existing orchard fence and the existing East field fence. Our N/S runs were already there and would only need the bottom strand of barbed adding. Our E/W runs already had their end posts against which we could strain our wire going that way. We just needed a gate and since this was to be just a pig and pedestrian entrance (no tractor access) Paul had a spare one from a previous job lying about.

Main rain gulley is now the 'wallow'

You can see from the map above that this pen gives the pigs (from left to right) a bit of grass meadow (which may not last long!), then the lovely gnarly bank with its sticking out hawthorn and beech roots and the huge black spruce trees. Then there is the 'under the trees' bit in the shade of the spruce and, on the east side, the big ashes I am re-coppicing at present. This was TK-Max's vegetable plot till he inadvisedly planted the spruces as saplings in the 60's and is more recently a 'forest floor' of thick pine needle litter. Finally, along the east side is the 8 foot wide, 3-4 feet deep rain gulley which takes all the rain water from the house roof and yard. We thought this would make a nice wallow for the pigs, but it created for the fencers an interesting task of running fence across it at either end. Lots of splodging about in wellies too, especially on the Thursday morning when it rained and rained and soaked us through to the underclothes!

All completed now, though and we are all very pleased with it. Paul was joking that we will have to let him know if it 'works' and contains the pigs, so that he can then add 'Pig Fincin' to his adverts.

In the 'pig ark' department, I have all the parts for a nice ark on order. It is to be one of those 'Anderson shelter' style huts you see in fields of outdoor-reared pigs, with a curved galvanised corrugated iron roof. Our local builders' providers proved able to supply the curved sheeting and we both raked out our 2-Pi-R mathematics from school to find that for a 4 foot radius curve, you'd need a 12 and a half foot sheet to start with.

The Fiat gets a tow hitch.

The steel man asked that I come along to see the sheets rolled (and to explain to him exactly what I was after) so that we both knew what we were at. I was happy to. The rolling 'mill' turned out to be an ancient and venerable, rusty dusty beast about the size of a dining table with an old fashion electric motor and flappy drive belts, which they hefted out of the corner of one of their sheds into the daylight with a forklift. The guy ran our (3) sheets through several times each, turning up the tension at each pass, and then setting the sheet down against floor markings to check we had an 8 foot wide 'building'. Fascinating to watch. The sheet and the wood will be delivered on Monday. That's my jobs sorted out for next week, I'm thinking.

Pork, Pigs, Paul and Pancakes

When I left you at the previous post, we were gearing up for our big invasion, expecting 12 mouths to feed on roast pork on the Sunday. We can not really cater for this many and had to get K-Dub to bring with him three chairs and to resurrect from the poly-tunnel our spare table. The latter was the original kitchen table which came with the house, inherited from TK-Min but has been serving time as potting-bench in the tunnel. Sunday morning saw me hefting it round on my back so that Liz could give it a good scrub out at the front of the house.

Spare table - a TK-Min original.

We made up with stools, folding chairs and a mountain of cutlery which we keep in a crate for spares. The day was a great success, the house a chaotic buzz of noise, children. chattering gossip, full-time Mums getting a chance to chill out as someone else minded their charges, K-Dub, Mr Silverwood and me able to do some male bonding, Charlotte getting on really well with J-M and Em-J hunting escaped rabbits and so on. The pork, you will recall, had been very-slow roasted, a quick burst of 250 degrees, then 90 degrees for 24 hours. It was a 6.2 kg leg of Gloucester Old Spots reared by Carolyn and, cooked like that, barely needed carving. I could have picked it up the bone at one end and given it a quick shake but the crackling was also superb. Dessert was a date and rhubarb crumble with ice cream and there was a gooey-centred chocolate mousse cake for later. It was a happy gang of well fed, gossiped-out good company that we bade farewell to. Thank you all for coming and enjoying our place so well.

Big Sarpo Mira spuds are still coming out clean from the store.

Back to work then and, as is our wont, the making of a LIST. We love, every now and then, to take a stroll together round the site and make sure we have a handle on everything that needs doing, so we walk round in a big double spiral, note book and pen in hand listing tasks, in this case 32 of them. We have everything from long-running needs we have been avoiding (Digging out the bank!) and big projects like pig-fencing, to back-burner jobs which might never happen (Make the yard dog-proof*), to quick and easy ones (paint bee hive or fence round the raised bed). This list then gets transferred to a spreadsheet (you probably guessed that bit!) so that we can prioritise it.

Occasional huge eggs. This one weighed in at 118 g

That process brought into sharp focus the need to get ready for the pigs in two areas, building the pig ark and getting the fencing installed. I nipped down to our builders' providers in Castlerea this morning to order the bits for the ark. By happy coincidence, we suddenly got the phone call from Paul-the-Fence quoting me a very good price and saying that he would like to start both my pig fence and two entrances he is improving for Vendor Anna, this week. We are suddenly all 'go'. I had been dropping a few spindly dead trees in our woods and logging them up and was tired from hefting the chainsaw, when Liz shouted "I think Paul has arrived!"

We love a pancake!

There he was in his huge van loaded with galvanized gates and massive, 10 inch diameter (and smaller) wooden posts, sheep wire and barbed wire. I thought he was just unloading, ready to start tomorrow but, No, this is Paul. He stopped briefly for tea and some of Liz's home made orange biscuits and then decided that if we made a start now we could get the main post and gate to the pig field done this evening before it got dark at 18:30. I'll do pictures of this, and the ark, when we are a bit further on but I think I am going to be busy over the next few days. Lovely tonight, then, to lock up the chickens, walk the dogs and come indoors from the post-bashing to light the range, and look forward to pancakes from my own expert and Queen of the Pancake. It is bitter sweet to enjoy these remembering that 'we' always did pancakes (Liz doing chef) in Kent with our good friends Diamond, John and (the late) Denis. We love it here but we'd be lying if we said we never missed the Kent days and pancakes is one of those foods which bring it all back. Happy Shrove Tuesday, Diamond and John. Lovely memories of 'Den'.

*Sounds easy but we worry that the chickens would still try to fly in to get to their house so we need a dogs-in-chickens-excluded solution which does not spoil the look of the back yard. We'll get there. We are just not sure how yet.