Pedro the Ram is in Love

The sloppy plum jam goes in for a re-try.

I knew even as I was posting those pics in the last blog story, of sloppy plum jam and typing. rather apologetically. that it would 'do', that it wouldn't. "Ah well", I said. "It'll get used up". I was just being lazy. A few days later a friend on Twitter's @smallholderIRL account was tut-tutting that it would spoil and I should boil it again, reduce it considerably and get it to set. True of course, so on Sunday morning, back it all went into the pan. I got a good 20% of the water/volume out of it, it went darker in colour and is now potted up properly. You can tilt the jars to 45 degrees and nothing moves.

Chinese pancakes. 

That turned out to be quite a busy 24 hours for me in the kitchen because, Friends of the Blog will remember, Lizzie's Birthday came round and in this house the Birthday Girl (or boy) gets to choose the stay in/go out, the menu and the chef-du-jour. We'll eat in, she decided, you are cooking and the menu is Chinese Crispy Duck and the pancakes, spring onion, cucumber and the rest.

Chinese pancakes.

That was an enjoyable challenge. I had never cooked duck this way before and certainly never made the little, thin pancakes which are not really pancakes at all. Well, not in the sense of pouring batter into a frying pan. They are, though, not available locally. You can get all manner of wraps and tortillas, pitta breads and poppadoms but not these (unless one of my readers knows different) so we were onto the Internet for one of those American accent 'how-to' videos.

Crispy duck should not need carving under that honey-glazed,
crisped skin. It should shred easily with a couple of forks.

They are great fun but a lot of faff and fiddling. You basically make a sticky-ish dough using flour, sugar and boiling water. You knead that gently like bread-dough, rest it and then roll it out like pastry to half a cm thick. You cut that into 3" discs with a biscuit cutter. Every other 'biscuit' is then brushed with sesame oil and they are stacked in pairs like little dough/oil sandwiches. The pairs are then rolled out "paper thin" (says the recipe - I got them pretty thin and about 6 inches diameter but I'm not so sure about the 'paper' aspect). Each thinned pair is then 'fried' with no oil in a hot frying pan, one and quarter minutes each side, so that they blister up like pitta bread.

Liz took this pic of the main event. 

My only way of timing 75 seconds was using the stop watch function on my olde phone and there were 20-odd pairs to fry, so I was there a good 45 minutes slapping them in and flipping them over. When you lift them off heat, you can open them a bit like a pitta bread and peel the two halves away from each other. You end up with a goodly stack of very thin, single-layer pancakes to either use straight away, or fridge over night or freeze for later.

Choc fudge brownie from local artisan baker, O'Hehir's of Sligo

The rest of the meal went very well too and was much appreciated by the 'audience'. The duck meat was tender enough (as it should be) to tease apart with a fork under that honey-glazed, crisped skin. I had shredded spring onions, cucumber and salad-peppers and Liz had already made, a few days ago, that lovely plum sauce. We had bought a special bottle of white wine. I did a starter of simply-cooked jumbo prawns with wedges of lemon and lime. 'Pud' was a choc fudge brownie from nearby artisan baker, O'Hehir's of Sligo. We'll call it a success. I was delighted to battle through the mountain of washing up and clearing away and to hand the space back to the Chief-Chef.

Where Lily goes (left) you will always find Pedro.

Meanwhile, new ram-lamb 'Pedro' is showing every sign of growing up and finding out what he is here for. We noticed him on Friday almost inseparable from our old ewe, Lily. He was close by her, sniffing her with his top lip extended (the way sheep do when the sniffing is 'amorous'), rubbing his nose and shoulders along her flanks and around her rump. All the other girls were abandoned as his focus increased so she was almost certainly coming on heat.

Then last thing at night, as I took the dogs for their last "comfort stop" patrol of the grounds, I am 99% sure I saw him mount her three times. It was dark and all I was looking at on the front lawn were silhouettes. I couldn't even swear it was Pedro and Lily I was seeing and the 'mount' was just a barely visible rising of the head and shoulders of one silhouette over the back of another but the next day Pedro had lost interest again. We are hopeful that he 'tupped' her and she is now pregnant and therefore back off heat. That would mean a possibility of lambs from Lily on 25th January, 5 months away. Watch this space.

We are enjoying the colours on some of this year's crop of hens.

If Pedro is, indeed, doing the business and things go as they did for Sue's ram 'Rambo' in 2015. Each ewe will come on heat in succession (in their own good time, of course) stimulated by the scent of a ram among them. He will fall madly in love with each in turn (nothing if not fickle!) and we might get lambs out of all four including first time Mum, last year's baby bred here, 'Rosie'. If Pedro can do all that without turning aggressive to me (or any other humans) he's a 'keeper'. Patience is the thing.

Finally, we are quite enjoying the colours of some of this year's batch of young hens. We think they may be the variety 'Marans' (as were Bubble and Squawk of yore) as the rooster, Gandalf, and our one layer-of-dark-brown-eggs, Miss Black, are. They are greys and silvers and are either 'barred' (dark bands running round the body across many feathers) or 'laced' (a dark margin on each individual feather). They are a delight to watch and to see scratching about or perching up on fences and gates. As long as they stay female and don't go off down the big-tail, tall neck, big 'cape' cock-a-doodle-doo, rooster route, they too are keepers.

Donaldina of the Trump-esque wig. 

One has caught our attention by growing the most ridiculous looking top-knot, which would make her at least part the Araucana breed. Reminiscent of the Leader of the Free World, she has been named "Donaldina".

Start harvesting spuds and clearing away the foliage here and
you are likely to find the odd stash of secretly laid eggs.

And that about wraps it up for this one. Good Luck now.

Inventive Suicide???

The patient recovering.

It seems to be a "truth universally acknowledged" (if I may borrow from Jane Austen) that sheep are constantly on the look out for new methods of getting sick and dying, inventing new methods of committing suicide and that shepherds have to be as constant and inventive at trying to stop them and keep them alive. That, at least, seems to be the reaction many people will have to your announcing that you propose to keep sheep.

Some cold mornings but at last the days are sunny

They are rather like the stereotyped garage man who looks over the lady's car with a sharp intake of breath and a theatrical grimace before he makes up his list of the things (£££££) that he will need to do to make it right. There is orf and joint ill and watery mouth and scours and 'gunged lambs' and prolapse and mastitis and clostridium and scrapie and and and and.... you get the picture. None the less, people actually do keep sheep, some very successfully and it can go OK, believe it or not. Our own experience has been mercifully lacking in all these woes though we know of some sheep which have died (Rambo, the ram we borrowed, for one, last year) and a friend on Facebook has had a nightmare week of lambing involving lambs born dead and a ewe dying of sepsis. Touch lots of wood; long may our healthy outcomes continue.

Gorse in flower on Kiltybranks

We did have a little 'wobble' this week, though which we may have caught in time. On Saturday last I woke up to do my first livestock rounds and straight away knew something was wrong. Lily, with her lambs in the 'turkey' house was NOT shouting for her breakfast through the door of the outbuilding, impatient for me to open it and pass in some 'crunch'. I mentioned in a previous post that this was a lady who loves her grub and is always first in the queue. Not that morning; something was clearly awry.

The "pool of the dappled horses".

I completed my rounds and went back for a closer look. Lily was not touching her 'crunch' (a mix of grains and molasses), and did not want hay. She just looked miserable and uncomfortable. One saving grace was that the twin lambs were resting contentedly so were obviously still getting plenty of milk. Lambs do not take long to get hungry and these two were quite loud in their demands (they take after Mum!). An hour later I had decided that this was not going to be a 'keep an eye' job. I could hear those spoilers' warnings ringing in my ears. It was time to get the vet, and we had her on site by 11 am.

She quickly diagnosed a slight temperature and a dribble of rather nasty matter from the vulva which spoke of a small amount of retained afterbirth going infected. Lily got 2 BIG injections of different stuff (one anti-fever, the other an antibiotic to combat the infection) and the vet left me a 2nd dose for the Monday (having showed me how to administer it - it was to be my first intra-muscular go). She also warned me (un-necessarily in my case) to be sure and do the jab even if Lily seems better as well as to warm the mix first (e.g. under an armpit)  and to fire it in very slowly to prevent the needle blowing off the end of the syringe. Lily was to be kept in that day but could be let out for some real grass Sunday and onwards.

Not everyone gets this kind of water feature in their new garden.
This river runs along the Sligo house boundary and under
the main road via this bridge.

She seems to have made a full recovery. Slowly at first, so that I was beginning to doubt whether she was, in fact, getting better but then suddenly perking up on Sunday afternoon. At that stage she was trotting about the lawn obviously grazing away like a pro, followed by her still-thriving twin lambs. I had put her on the front lawn 'field' because the grass is better there after it has been rested since Christmas. She was happy enough to be led 'home' to her turkey house pen in the evening. She has then gone from strength to strength and has had her jab on the Monday. Liz helped with that, holding the front end against the pen-side while I did battle with the big thigh muscle but we needn't have worried; the warmed gloop slid in so gently that she didn't bat an eyelid. A good rescue, we think, and huge thanks to vet, Aoife, our guardian angel against 'suicidal' livestock.

Good progress on the Sligo house roof - real slates!

Guest-goat Nanny Óg is looking at methods of getting murdered instead of the suicide thing. She is currently driving me barmy by raiding the food dustbins at night. She has learned how to flick off the lids and is then necking as much of the contents as she can fit in. Not only is she likely to do herself an injury with bloat or indigestion but I no longer know whether her increasing fatness is a pregnancy or just plain over-eating! I tried wedging the lids down with sacks of feed or trays of catfood tins and later tying them down with baler twine but she learned to toss the weights off the offending bin, or moved onto other bins (she doesn't seem to care - 'crunch', milled barley, whole wheat and layers pellets are all grist to her alimentary mill). She even learned to tip the bins over to save her having to rear up and stretch her neck down into the bin to get at the crumbs at the bottom. She has eaten me out of house and home, that gannet! She then has the brass neck to look at me at breakfast time  'asking' for her customary carrot - she can't reach those because the bag is too high for her!

The west end prior to the block walls getting their pale
'scratch coat' plaster. This gable is not yet ready to be
finished as the electric company need to remove their old
cable, currently strapped to the old chimney.

Ah well. No other news except to show you these few pics of the excellent progress on the slating of the Sligo house roof. K-Dub is still working to a target move-in date of between mid April and mid-May. I have also been out felling ash and logging it up for a near-neighbour and I have made contact with the local archery group and organised myself onto a beginners class, but more of those two stories in a future post. Also, the next ewe, Polly, is due to pop in a few days, so no doubt more on that. Just praying for now that it all goes well and I can report that mother and baby/babies are doing fine.    

Twin Ewe Lambs for Lily

Twins Rosie (l) and Lucy (r) only an hour or so old. 

After the worrying dog-related events of the last post I am hugely relieved and delighted to be able to bring you, in this one, some happy news; being the birth of twin ewe lambs to our 5-year old ewe, Lily on Valentine's Day (yesterday). Regular readers will know we had been anticipating a happy event for a few days now and my timings were based on the almost immediate "bond" (this is a family show!) between our loaned ram, 'Rambo' and ewe Lily on his arrival back last year.

Brought indoors against a frosty night.

We had been getting plenty of clues in the days prior - Lily sitting in far corner of the field well away from her 'sisters', looking uncomfortable and even 'star-gazing'. This is when they must feel the stirrings and get uncomfortable so they tip their head all the way back till their nose is pointing straight up. Then on Sunday morning the crunch-clue, no interest in breakfast. This is unheard of for Lily except on lambing day. The girl likes her grub. We were into hourly checks by now and the binoculars LIVE on the dining room table, so that we can sneak quick peeks in between the proper, up close, checks. I walked the dogs early as a relief from pacing and returned just as my normal dog-walk alarm went off at 11:45. It was at that Lily-check that I noticed the first signs of action - membrane and dribbly fluids.

Lizzie does 'shepherdess'

She had no problems passing the enormous ram-lamb Feste last year, so I was not expecting any this time and pretty much left her to it and kept a close eye. The first lamb slipped out fast and efficiently at around 13:00 - as I walked down the drive to get the gate for Liz nipping to town in the car, I could see Lily now licking intently at something on the ground. I sprinted back over there and could see lamb #1 getting a vigorous licking but already on its feet and trying to find some udder. This was a very dark lamb and looked like a ewe from my carefully distant viewpoint.

It was quickly clear that the show was not over. Lily continued to pace about with her back arched very uncomfortably, turning round and round to get at all sides of the new lamb, and soon passed another big 'balloon' of amniotic sac full of fluid; surely the 'waters' for a 2nd birth. Liz arrived home and quickly spotted that the 2nd lamb had now arrived (14:30), this one another ewe but beautifully spotted, blotched and streaked with black and white. Now we could see that this was the lot - Lily relaxed back into a normal spine-curve and started to shed the bloody, gloopy, membrane-y afterbirth(s). Well done Lily (and Rambo, we guess!) - 2 beautifully healthy ewe lambs and no problems all done and dusted in just 2 and 3/4 hours.

We'll call that a strikingly beautiful looking sauce -
Black Spring's Nan's Pork Hock

With the forecast giving a hard frosty night and our 2 resident hooded crows hopping about the East Field, plus the risk of foxes who will happily carry off a new born lamb we had decided to move the family indoors to the safety of the (now) turkey house. This is easy enough - I pick up the lambs while Mum looks on a bit curiously, and then walk slowly 'home' across the field with Mum following her anxiously-bleating babies and Liz managing gates to stop she-goats and curious other-ewes  from wandering. The new family are now safely penned into my sheep-hurdle rectangle on a nice dry bed of clean straw, warm out of the frost and safe from crows and foxes (and dogs!). They survived their first night and today we did the necessary iodine-spray of navels and (dock) banding of tails. The babies have already been visited and admired by 3 people.

Black Spring's Nan's Pork Hock with simple rice and cabbage

With good timing, the happy event and the should-be-celebratory weekend of Valentine's Day has coincided with the stock-control department here lifting the embargo on using 'new' food from the freezers. The freezers had become a bit over-run with tinfoil trays, 1 litre yogurt tubs and old plastic milk bottles full of portions of left overs from former meals, sauces and stocks. These all needed using up so we'd done a month of lovely but long forgotten curries, cold roast meats, risottos, stir fries and veg plus starting a goodly batch of "hedgerow" wine and creating a few fruit desserts. I also unearthed some brawns and patés.

Mucking out the nanny goat.

The end of this very enjoyable campaign happily coincided too with the Chief Chef having done a weird work-week on a First Aid course Mon-Weds, so that she got Thursday right round to Tuesday 'off' and was keen to get back into the kitchen and at the 'new' meat in the freezers. 2 superb cakes were followed by lovely bread, multiple pots of paté, roast lamb (which then yielded several follow-up meals), a salt-cured leg of 2014 Tamworth (bacon and cabbage plus a lovely Tuscan 'bean and bacon' soup). Crowning glory of this burst of Domestic Goddess-ery was probably a family favourite which I have mentioned before, 'Black Spring's Nan's Pork Hock' but this time enhanced.

An army marches on its sticky toffee pudding?

The recipe calls for "chilli bean paste/sauce" which is something we had never managed to find in Ireland so Liz had been trying to substitute in any kind of chilli 'stuff'; the dish had been delicious but we had no way of knowing if it was delicious 'enough'. Then at the last trip to Macknades Deli in Kent, Liz had found some of the real McCoy, so this try got the right amount of the correct ingredients and the sauce was blow-yer-socks-off gorgeous! A real lip tingling winter-warmer, which only needed simple white rice and steamed savoy cabbage to accompany it. The sauce also LOOKED rather spectacular bubbling away in the pan. Add to all that a heroic dessert of sticky toffee pudding (with ice cream or cream and extra toffee-sauce) and I will happily recommend this restaurant to any prospective customers. Bring your loosest waist-band trousers. No pressure on the sous-chef then, when the boss goes back to grafting and relinquishes the saucepans and the hob.

Big Block of Cheese Day

The eponymous Big Block of Cheese

Fans of the US TV political drama 'West Wing' (one of our favourites) will recall the episode(s) in my title as they were funny and often bizarre. They referred to a day in the White House year when the staff resurrected an old tradition of inviting any madcap pressure group to come and be heard by the Administration and the staff would set up a huge block of cheese in the foyer for the visitors to cut bits off if they were hungry. Last time Liz was over in the UK, our good friend Mazy advised her to buy from local deli and farm shop 'Macknades', a house-brick sized block of a gorgeous vintage cheddar - 1.36 kg at about £13 (UK). I mention this because, Mazy, it has taken us this long to get through it. Not enough lunatics with outlandish pressure group requests, we guess. Thank you very very much.

Fruit scones

Not all good news this time, I am afraid. Hot on the heels of our 'loss' of the cat Pirate, came a call from Sue and Rob to say that the lovely ram, 'Rambo', whom we borrowed to service our three ewes. had died in the night. They'd had no warning and he appeared perfectly healthy on Saturday except for one 'symptom' which they think with hindsight, might have been significant - the lad standing still in the middle of the feild in the rain, when he is usually first in the queue for shelter under the trees. With Rambo dead in the morning Rob could see a little dark blood around the boy's anus and in the poo but we are at a loss. I have contacted our vet to see what she thinks and she is asking whether we vaccinate (e.g. with Heptavac P). I must admit we haven't, though we have wormed and fluke-drenched, so it is obviously something we should think about.

Pirate's grave site and memorial rock (grey lump
bottom right) under the beeches. 

Then there was another good friend, near neighbour and fellow (beginner) bee keeper, T McC. Poor T had that thing happen to him that all beginner beekeepers (incuding ourselves of course) are worried about - that you'll have a dramatic reaction to a bee sting. T was snugging down his bees a week or so ago and got stung, not for the first time but suddenly had "sweating, redness, itching, light headed, flashing lights and a slight constricting of the throat.  Had to lie down on the ground outside. Lucky it was sunny". He had to phone the ambulance and felt a bit silly by the time they arrived as he had recovered except for the big bump on the back of his head (the sting site) tingling.

Beekeepers know that they can react differently to stings and the intensity can also change with time/stings; You can have no problem for a while and then suddenly react, or you can 'get over' your sensitivity and have no more bad reactions after that. Poor T is now going through the tests with his doctor to see where he is, whether he'd be safe to carry on or whether (God forbid) bee keeping is not for him and he'd have to give up the hobby. On the bright side all his hives are snugged down now so he won't have to go near them till Spring. The doctor has a few months to do the tests and come to a decision.

Hallowe'en fare, Champ with pork chops. Our own spuds, kale,
pork and onions, of course.

On happier topics, Hallowe'en went really well for us. We had set up the 'Jack o'Lantern' on the gate pier and made a long "chain" of candles in jamjars all up the new fence, one on each post. We also hung our two posh gift lanterns on trees, so that the drive up to the house was nicely inviting and we were publically 'up for it' to any random passing groups of witches, ghosties and vampires. We had the obligatory big bowl of sweeties and we sat back to enjoy our own Hallowe'en fare, of 'champ' with pork chops.

The turkeys try out the pumpkin seeds. Bit of a mixed reaction
but they did all disappear eventually.

You never know round here, how many kiddies will come. We are out in the sticks and there are no children in walking distance, so they come carted round likely places by Mums in huge people-carriers and farm cars. Well, we had none till quarter to 8 which was nice because it meant we could eat our own supper in peace, but then a veritable army showed up and annihilated the sweeties in short order. The bowl now contains a lonely refresher bar and half a dozen tubes of tiny Parma Violets which we'll never eat, so we need to find a post-Hallowe'en victim for those.

Traditional unmolested Irish Stew after Theodora Fitzgibbon 

I am partially Liz-less at the moment (she's shuttling between Silverwoods and house/Dad sitting for part of each week and back up here for work the other part so I am King of the Kitchen temporarily and continuing to expand my range. Today that meant that my favourite Irish Recipe book, Theodora Fitzgibbon's "A Taste or Ireland (in food and in pictures)" (pub Pan 1968) was dusted off and cracked open. Irish Stew! I had a chunk of our own delicious lamb, our spuds, onions, parsley and thyme. Theodora tells me that "the pure flavour is spoiled if carrots, turnips or pearl barley are added, or if it is too liquid. A good Irish stew should be thick and creamy, not swimming in juice like soup". Well, I'm happy to report that it was delicious, but I do not know where the 'thick and creamy' comes from. There were no thickening ingredients on the list and my gravy was definitely 'wet'. Perhaps she uses a different kind of spud which breaks down better and solidifies the gravy for you.

Sheep hurdles assembled into a pen.

I have also been out spending the hard earned loot (I did clear this with the Chancellor of the Exchequer first), investing in some sheep bits, namely hurdles and dagging shears. The hurdles assemble into a 6 by 4 foot pen for containing sheep while you work on them, but I bought them for their handiness singly as temporary gates. I have posted before of the plan to install some new runs of fence to give the sheep a new bit to graze and tidy, but I need to leave 'holes' through which to push the trailer when moving pigs or just to move geese about. Rather than invest in 4 permanent gates, this was a cheaper (and more flexible) solution.

Dagging shears. 

While at the farm supplies 'co-op' I spotted a rather nifty pair of old-style (springy scissors) "dagging shears". One of our ewes (Myfanwy) came with full length tail (some mix up at her own birth) so she is prone to great chains of 'klingons' adhering to the underneath of her tail and around the bum, where the output cannot fall freely to the ground. These will sort that out and be good for any other small trim ups for example where I have missed bits on the shearing.

Definitely getting a bit TOO cheeky now!

Finally, I leave you with a brilliant local expression I picked up recently. This where the old boy involved had come into the building with me but nipped off for a quick wee while I made the tea for us. "Ah, you're as good as a bad woman" he said. Made me smile, anyway.

Unwelcome Noise

Young white rooster at 4 months.

There is a sound you don't really want to hear at this time of year from a small holder chicken flock and that is the young, quavering try-out "Cock a Doodle Doo" of an adolescent rooster practising his new vocal skills. You don't want to hear it because it means that one more 2015 hatchlings has grown up a boy instead of a useful, replacement, egg laying hen. That can only end badly for him in a flock which already has a good pure-bred cockerel and a useful p/b heir.

Poppea finally gets a bit of that beef.

Being a hybrid there would be no market for him (It's difficult enough selling p/b roosters for the simple reason that roughly 50% of chicks are boys but people go for more of a 7:1 ratio in the adult flock. I'm sure you can do the sums). Unfortunately his path lies down the plucking and freezing route but he's young and will be a nice tender bird so he won't go to waste. That was this morning when we both heard the unfamiliar crowing (obviously we are well used to our two existing roo's and the noise they make) coming from the yard, when we knew most of the chooks were out front, so I nipped round and there 'he' was, looking a bit self conscious, the only bird on the scene.

The two new 'windmills' at Roosky Farm now complete and
spinning away in the brisk breeze. Blues skies and puffy cumulus

He is the white chick from 'Hen and Two' hatched at the end of June, so he is about 4 months old. When we look at him now, of course, we can see that he does have a very upright stance, more so than the other chick, who is buff coloured but with a dark tail. Ah well, no need to react just yet. We still have plenty Hubbard meat in the freezer and he can put on a bit more weight before he gets into any fights with our main men.

Tomatoes still ripening well in the polytunnel.

Meanwhile, our amazingly merciful late season continues to delight. The dry, settled weather collapsed a bit over the weekend into showers and breeze but for the most part the sky has stayed blue with just puffy cumulus shower clouds and warm sunshine keeping us up at 14ºC day times and 7 or 8º at night. As is the way of these things, it will probably get announced as the warmest driest October for yay amount of years. Our polytunnel continues to pump out very flavoursome tomatoes and the veg plot is doing chard, kale, mange tout and a few last broad beans. The weeds, of course, are also growing to forest proportions.

Cowslip flowering in October. 

In the front garden bed a confused cow slip has come into flower. Just today some pelargoniums we bought admittedly very late and quite small and backward opened their first flowers. We watched them sulk all through July and August and began to worry in September whether they'd manage to do anything before the frost wiped them out.

Pelargonium doing a good effort. 

In October we saw flower buds forming and for days now we have been seeing them show colour at the bud tips and have been saying, "One warm week is all they need, you'll see!"

Dylan, Suffolk Down lamb born in June

Other than that, not much to report as we continue to wind down a bit into autumn. The sheep are enjoying a bit more fussing and human contact now that young Rambo has gone home and does not try to monopolise all the forehead scratching and chin caressing (Yes, we're ruffty tuffty, hard nosed shepherds alright!) and also lets me into the field with the ewes. I have gone back to coming into their field with the feed as opposed to lobbing it over the fence, and they all come over for a fuss and a gentle 'lean' on me. Dylan, the June-born lamb who came to us with his Mum, Myfanwy is 4 months old now but still not big enough to 'finish' so he's good for roughly Christmas before he becomes an issue. They are a happy little flock and doing a good job on trimming the front lawn, the East Field and, soon, a new bit which we will fence in to let them tidy that up.

Ram a Lamb a Ding Dong

Rambo has a lie-down while he waits for his taxi home.

In which we bid farewell, for this season, to our splendid and handsome borrowed ram, 'Rambo'. We collected this lad 5 weeks ago and he has worked his way round our three ewes, Lily, Polly and Myfanwy, showing what, to our inexperienced view, looked like an appropriate interest in each. We trust that they are all now 'in-lamb' and by our calculations ahould be each lambing at some point between the 14th Feb 2016 and 23rd March 2016.

Rambo (left) enjoys some last grass while he waits for his lift

Rambo was pure pleasure to 'own' for a while and good experience for we beginner shepherds. We are very grateful to his real owners, Sue and Rob, who came to take him home today back to his wife and son and we have made a tentative agreement to use the boy again next year. Regular readers will know that Rambo comes with a sheep's bell attached because, although he is soft as grease most of the time, when he is with the ewes he is a bit of a one for nipping up behind you and butting you in the thighs or bum. "He can have you over!" warned Sue. We had walked him to the trailer like an obedient puppy dog getting him here and he was grand with me for a few days, but soon started this butting thing.

Handsome lad.

The answer was to stop moving them from field to lawn each day and to stop going into the field to give them their 'crunch' (feed). I moved the trough over to near the fence and took to feeding them by leaning over the fence and aiming scoops of feed at the trough while trying not to let the sheep get their eager faces and heads in the way. Rambo's agressive trait seemed to fade away again (as did the musky, lanolin 'male' smell which he had started whiffing of!) once he had got around all the ewes and, presumably, they had all gone off the boil. We hope this is because they are pregnant, obviously, but whatever the reason, Rambo was as soft as grease again for today's loading for the return trip. He followed the bucket obediently from field gate to trailer ramp and made no attempts to sneak round behind any of us with evil intent.

Rob checks on the boy for his journey home.

It is the jangly bell that had me naming this post as I have. It is a lovely noise and we will miss it while we are Rambo-less; you can hear it out there in the dark and you know he is safe and well out in the field with his women. It reminds me of childhood holidays when we would all be out up some Summer Alp (French, Swiss, German - we worked our way round most of them over the years and the Jura etc) and you could hear the cow bells as the mountainy cattle wandered about their summer grazing.

The 'Ram a Lamb' thing also has me reminded of a favourite restaurant from our Kent days, Read's of Faversham. This was always (and still is) at the pricey end of things, so we'd only use it for BIG occasions, like round-number anniversaries, but we were always delighted and impressed, as well as lighter in the pocket. One such was our 10th anniversary and I can remember the lounge full of easy chairs where you could wait for your table to be ready, and also that you had your own sommelier looking after your bottle of wine; he'd nip over and top up your glasses as soon as he saw them coming empty, but then whisk your bottle away back to a chiller or the rack so that it wouldn't clutter up your table.

Filling tonight's pie (chicken, ham and leek)

I am afraid I can't remember what I had for main course, but I recall Liz was intrigued by the menu choice "Ram a Lamb a Lamb" which turned out to be a collection of amuse-bouche sized portions of six or seven lamb-based foods - a little individual shepherd's pie, a  little cutlet, small slices of roast lamb, a paté and so on. These came arranged in a little circle around the plate. Brilliant. I know that Read's is still there and going strong because a former work colleague was there recently and posted a story on Facebook, so if you are near Faversham and have a bit too much cash burning a hole in your pocket, I can thoroughly recommend it as a place to eat. You will be treated like a King or Queen.

Home made hummus.

And while we are on catering, a quick mention of our entertainment tonight. We are invited to the village's annual "Tea Party" which happens in the Community Centre and where any group or outfit takes a table and brings along food and drink to suit themselves. The local 'Active Age' gang take a table, as do the folk involved in the youth group (Foroige), the pre-schoolers, the Drama Group and so on. I don't think they go quite as mad as the parties who would arrive at the open air fireworks concerts at Rochester Castle with their wicker picnic baskets, champagne coolers and table chandeliers, but they do run to cold roast chicken salads and so on.

Apple sauce from our own orchard.

This one will be Liz's first time for going public on her catering skills under the gaze of the village ladies so if you know Liz, you can imagine that she would not like to be found wanting. "This is not some picnic at the beach," she says, "this is a FRIDAY NIGHT SUPPER". There will be no gritty 'hang sang-widges' or Thermos of 'tay'. Oh No. The catering department had gone into full swing with an impressive spread; a gorgeous looking chicken, ham and leek pie with a suet crust (our chicken and suet, obviously), there is home made potato salad, home made coleslaw, home made hummus with 'crudites' of sliced peppers and what not, Liz's famous chilli-cheese-and-bacon biscuits, chilli 'jam' and elderflower cordial. Our table will be up there, for sure.

Getting the hall ready for the Tea Party

On a related topic, the change to windy wet weather had me whizz round the orchard picking the very few apples and pears still left standing, except for the crab apples which we will get this weekend. The total remaining amounted to barely a pound of fruit but as I was cooking pork chops that night, I decided to 'render' them down and sieve to make a delicious smooth apple sauce - no sugar or spice required. Very tasty.

Finally in a bit of a throw back to the table quizzes we used to do for the Hort Soc in Faversham, I compiled a daft little anagram 'quiz' page for all the tables at the Tea Party based on local place names. It would never work unless you were local, as the place names can be a bit complicated - Corracoggil South becomes "Go Us Gothic Corral", Cloon Bunny (I kid you not) becomes "Bunny Colon" and our beloved Ballaghaderreen becomes "A Green Herbal Lad" - but all the locals seem to know the set up here like the backs of their hands. What could possibly go wrong? The prizes for anyone who gets them all are our standard Hort Soc 'Smarties' for being smart.