They Also Serve, Who Only Stand and Wait

There were some impressively colourful wind maps.

Friends of the Blog will know by now that the feared 'Hurricane' Ophelia has now been and gone, leaving us relieved, delighted and grateful to have largely got away with it. The feeling among my small-holdering friends is that up here in Roscommon we "dodged the bullet". Nationally the storm killed 3 people, felled a gazillion trees, left 360,000 without power and caused all manner of damage along the south, west and southeast coasts.

About as bad as it got for Roscommon (lined in blue). The red areas
are Force 8+. We stayed in the green (Force 6) and yellow (7). This
my favoured source, being Met Éireann's short-range forecast.

There were pictures and video all over Twitter and Facebook including, notably 2 bits showing the roof of a school gymnasium going airborne for several hundred yards before landing neatly between some houses without killing anyone. I also saw some road-side trees rocking away from the camera with their roots lifting bits of tarmac and road-base up like cartoon mouths opening and closing.

For us, though, mercifully a scary day and some exhausting watching, especially between about 2 pm  and 8 pm but the only damage was a few small branches broken down from trees and scattered across the lawn, and my big house-sign tumbled over. I must say, in fairness, how exactly spot on and correct (almost to the hour) were the forecasts considering this was an "unprecedented" event - Hurricanes never come over this side of the Atlantic - so they can't have had much practice.

A perfect spiral, uninterrupted by fronts. 

Ophelia was a perfect spiral so we knew as she passed up the west coast, hopping over a few headlands (like County Clare for example!) that we'd get winds which nearly went round the compass. We woke up to Nor'easterlies which get right into our yard. These veered round to the East and then the South; passing through the worrying trajectory of our remaining trees tall enough to hit the house. They carried on swinging through SE, where we are OK-ish and into full West where, again we are vulnerable for the poly tunnel and the barn which Doris took the roof off. It was not an easy day.

The Black Spruces got a good buffeting but
stayed put

There was (as forecast) a nice lull mid morning when the sun even came out and then one at bedtime but Ophelia had a possible sting in her tail with those Westerlies strengthening from midnight to about 04:00 Tuesday (today). The spiral had a diameter roughly 3 times as wide as the country, so as the eye cruised up 'our' side of the Island, the strongest winds were the Southerlies hitting the south coast and then sliding up past Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow up to Dublin.

The willow hedge gets turned inside out with each gust.

All we could do was stay indoors and sit it out. The only driving we did that day was to nip out to feed some bullocks for a friend. Our Help-X volunteer got introduced to the concept of "They also serve, who only stand and wait". Yes AB. You really CAN retreat to your room and sleep or play video games. We will shout if we need you. Your job today is to "stand by". You may physically achieve precisely nothing but we will still value you immensely. Honest.

A fine pair of legs

That, though, is surely enough on the Fair Ophelia. The only other news is that the 'Parma' style ham legs have progressed on from dry salt-cure to the air-drying stage. These big ol' lumps of carcass get 16 days in the mix of sugar, salt and spices being patted down each day with new cure and drained of any brine which the dry salt sucks out of the meat. They darken and become quite firm to the touch as they dry out. In this part of the world, the wise man does this stage in the fridge to give the salt a good head-start against the risk of flies and food-poisoning nasties.

Prior to scrubbing off the salt. 

After 16 days they are lifted out of the dry salt and the spare salt is scrubbed off using a stiff brush dipped in cider vinegar. They are then wrapped in rather nifty Muslin bags created by Lizzie, to deter the flies and hung somewhere fairly dry but with air movement for between 4 and 18 months.

Hung in the air for 4-18 months

During this time the meat continues to dry out and the flavour sweetens and matures. You are aiming for a 30% weight loss; too much and your ham will be as hard as wood; too little and the ham will not cure sufficiently (so may not be safe to eat). The 4-18 month thing is personal choice - how firm/dry do you like your Parma? We do 2 legs. One for eating in Summer (so about 11 months) and one for Christmas (15 months). Like us, the reader will just have to preserve their souls in patience and see how we get on come next August. It is not a fast food.

Enjoy the calm days after the storm. We certainly are.

The Admin System Creaked....

Another egg from 'Laundry-Pile' hen

John's weapon of choice, my Old Father Time scythe. 'Cigar'
whet-stone in his pocket, these nettles don't stand a chance

A shorter post this time as befits the fact that I should be spending more time with our guest, good friend from Kent, John W. He is with us till Thursday and shows every sign of loving the slow-paced rhythm of life here, the 'plod' of gardening and the chances to relax, walk the dogs, eat good food and quaff a few beers or sip on a nip of Kilbeggan.

We finally open up some lovely clean ground
and get a load of long overdue seedlings in.
Here kale, chard and calabrese.

Some of the time I have been working with him but some I am off in another part of the site doing something else and we just cross paths then on coffee breaks or at lunch. Then we'd be off on an errand or a mission, shopping or whatever and he was happy to come along and get a look at the local area.

John contemplates a meal of duck in Guinness sauce

On Monday this ended up being more than once, as we are currently trying to get a replacement driving licence sorted for Liz. The local licencing office may be good at many things but it is not firing on all cylinders when it comes to the unusual request by a returning Irish citizen who has lost an English licence while in Belfast and now needs an Irish licence. Add to that the fact that this lady has changed her name on marriage from her maiden name to mine but VIA, on some forms, using a double-barrelled combination of both.

The admin system creaked mightily as we tried to prove that UK-Liz and Roscommon-Liz are one and the same even though both looked identical in their pictures and had identical signatures. At one stage the clerk even asked if it would help if she took a copy of a cervical smear appointment letter (?). In the end, after 3 runs to Roscommon (an hour round trip each time) that day we sorted it with a Marriage Certificate but even that the girl had a long reluctant look at "from corner to corner", as Liz said. Now we just have a 12-week wait (!) for the document/card to appear in the post. Don't hold your breath.

If anyone is reading this blog and dreaming of making the move out here, like we did, then I would offer the following short list of advice 'bullet' points.

New tiles for the kitchen. The mark on the
middle one is just tile-dust we'd not yet
swept off. 

• Don't change your name on marriage (taking your husband's name) and certainly not via a hyphenated combination of both names.
• File in a special file examples of utility bills in your chosen surname for both your old address and your new - don't let your husband pay all the bills or do all the admin and leave you with no inbound letters bearing your name. 
• Keep your passport and book all flights, car hire etc in your 'old' name. Also sign onto doctors, dentists and anything else in that name. 
• If you have to attend any interview like this then take your passport, PPSN card, any other 'smart card' with photo ID, marriage cert etc but probably NOT your letter of appointment for a cervical smear test.
• Don't lose your driving licence in Belfast. 
• Drink plenty of tea or maybe some gin.
• Be prepared for a 12 week wait anyway.  

In the middle of all this, our heroic builder-man, K-Dub, rocked up, first to cement in the step from one kitchen to the other, covering in the dish-washer waste and then to tile the kitchen floor.  He also created the step down from new kitchen to garden out of doors. The latter new cement was immediately walked on by chickens and kittens and I was thinking about painting in these prints to show them up, but heavy rain came and obliterated the prints. We (mainly K-Dub) did a really good job on this and it now really only needs grouting, skirting, 2nd-fix electrics and paint to finish the room.

Duck in Guinness sauce. 

So what else is new? The only real notable event was today nipping across to Sue and Rob's place so that they could meet John  and so that I could help/show them how to butcher up the carcass of their 'failed' ram lamb, Silas.

Silas gets reduced to kit form.

Friends of the Blog will know that that lad, orphaned and bottle fed from birth never made the size and stature of a ram capable of getting anyone's ewes pregnant and scored a big fat zero in our flock as well as in Sue's, where he has lived as 'man and wives' for his whole life excluding Nov and Dec 2016 when we borrowed him.

The amateur butchers cut out a shoulder joint

Well, it's a rough, tough world in smallholdering, Silas, and having blotted your copy-book with a nil score you then turned aggressive towards Sue and started butting her hard when ever she went into the field. Well, long story short, he went on that short trailer ride to Webb's in town and came home today in kit form. Most of him is now in the freezer but they kept a shoulder joint out for tomorrow's roast. Happy to help, Sue and Rob, and thanks for the sausage rolls and fresh (poly-tunnel) strawberry gateaux.

Nice tall fox gloves in our woods.

Well, now we sit this evening looking a bit anxiously at the sky. The ewes here have now enjoyed 2 days without rain and if we stay dry we can shear them tomorrow. John will be able to help, which he is quite looking forward to. But it has gone quite 'close' and some grey clouds are cruising through, so this plan may founder. Wish us luck.

Sausage and apple pie.

A Long Lost Twin Brother?

Blackthorn blossom.

We are at peak blackthorn blossom time here in Roscommon. The hedges are white with the froth on the still-leafless branches. We are amazed every year by how few actual sloes can be had from these bushes always loaded with flowers. Some of that is down to the 'haircut' given by the contractor hedge trimmers as soon as they are allowed (September) but the local bushes do not seem to produce many fruit even on the field sides of the hedge.

Blackthorn

Meanwhile, by happy coincidence, I have found a friend who was born on exactly the same day as me, almost 60 years ago. Friends of the blog will recall that a couple of our archers have produced a lovely baby girl, now 8 months old, for whom Liz once knitted a hat in the colours of an archery target. Well, a group of us were chatting at one of the shoot coffee-breaks a couple of weeks back and one friend started quizzing me about a significant birthday which I had let slip might be fast approaching. Eventually I admitted that it MIGHT be this Friday, April 14th, where-upon the baby girl's Mother (Yulia) pricked up her ears and looked at me in amazement. She asked how old would I be at this birthday and it turns out that baby (Feliz)'s Dad (name Colly) is also born that day and will be the same age. We are therefore some flavour of 'twins', all be it him born in Dublin and me in Hastings. Small world. Happy Birthday for Friday, Col' !

The ceiling goes up first holding up the insulating wadding

Huge progress in the Kitchen project. K-Dub contacted me last Friday asking if we could have a crack at it on Saturday and get all the "slabbing" done. Slab is the word used to describe the modern 'dry lining' plasterboard which is bonded to a sheet of dense (and fire-proof) insulating foam of various thicknesses. We use 30 mm on the ceilings and 70 mm thick on the walls. We also used a bit of foam-less old style 'plasterboard' where we needed to marry in to the existing 'old kitchen' ceiling.

Slabbing in progress

Our ceiling also had armfuls of fluffy wadding wedged up between the rafters just because K-Dub had a load left over from his own house. We can all remember handling this material when doing the parent's loft in Hastings, when the wadding was itchy fibre-glass and you had to work with sleeves rolled down and without wiping your hands anywhere sensitive (eyes, neck etc) or you would suffer terrible itching for days. The 2017 version of this stuff is much more forgiving - soft and barely itchy at all.

View from 'old' to new through the new arch. 

The task also involved framing up the arch through from new to old kitchen so that we could slab round all these corners but this was money for old rope for K-Dub, a Master Carpenter. It took him about half an hour while I pretty much followed him round picking up discarded off cuts of slab and sweeping up shavings and debris.

...and we're done. Slabbed out and awaiting
the plasterer(s)

I was also chief gloop-mixer. The wall slabs are glued to the uneven wall by mixing a bonding agent to what you chefs will know as the "soft peak" stage. This thick gloop is trowelled onto the wall every couple of feet (horizontally and vertically) in big dollops which stick out from the wall a good 3 inches. That way the slab is sure to touch the 'peaks' before it hits a sticking-out chunk of the stone work.

A slab profiled to butt up to the exposed-stone
wall

Another interesting feature of this task which may be worth sharing is the way K-Dub copes with a flat-sided slab butting up against a very uneven, stone and cement wall. It was fascinating to watch - you butt the slab up against the wall and then wiggle a pencil down the wall to create a template line parallel to the bumps and dips in the stone. The bumps and dips in your line are always just enough to cope with the 'deepest' bump/dip. The spare outside the line is then nibbled out with an ordinary wood-saw and Bingo! When you offer up the wobbly edged slab it should now touch the wall most of the way down. The plasterer does the rest, neatly filling in the small gap without messily splashing plaster on your nice clean stone-work.

Probably best not to ask.

That's the theory anyway. The "plasterer" here, though, looked like being K-Dub and I for a while, neither of whom can plaster, at least not in any free-flowing way that a pro would recognise. K-Dub has, in fact, done it on his own house, with plenty of this fancy edge-against-stone but he will freely admit that it was more of a 'tape and joint' style job (The American Way) using pre-mixed formula and around 6 cycles of slap it on, let it dry, sand-paper off the excess and repeat. We could do it but neither of us was looking forward to all that sanding and the Lady of the House would definitely not have wanted all that plaster dust drifting through her kitchen for however many weeks it would have taken.

Had to smile at this after our dog-prints in the new concrete
picture. This is a discarded Roman tile unearthed in Leicester.
2000 years on and dogs are still messing with we builder's heads!

By (another) happy coincidence I still have on my phone the number of one of the Mayo brothers who did our whole house back in 2011 and who subsequently became a great friend, sheep-mentor, breeder and supplier of store lambs for several seasons. A quick text to him confirmed that he was still in the plastering game, had lost my number but often thought of us and would be more than happy to come round in the week to look at the job and give us a price. More on this soon. If it works, it will save us lots of time and dusty mess.

Finally, every time I come into this blog-site to write a post one screen shows me how many views my most recent epics have had... how many people have clicked in to read them. Now, I gave up any dreams to have as many readers as JK Rowling ten years ago and have been happy to chug along with my 30-40 readers whom I know are mainly family and friends. My recent post about Senator Frank Feighan and the artist fella, Brian John Spencer amazed and delighted me by breaking this mould with a score of 210+ views - a record, I think, for the blog. I put this down to FF and BJS 'tweeting' links to it and my mention of it in the interview he had me do with him on 'Audio-boom'. Looking around I have had a couple more with good scores ("Stirring it" on 13th Jan had over the hundred and "Legal Beagles" had 136), but my norm is still between 28 and 80 so you won't find me on the Booker shortlists any time soon. Thank you for reading these who ever you are.

Yellow and Blue

A sports fan? Well, maybe not.....

Go the Rossie Boys! When we upped sticks and moved from our old jobs to the 'Wesht' of Ireland, I seem to have come from one sport mad environment (the DHL/Sainsbury warehouse) to another (this whole country!). The local area is knee deep in fans of soccer and of the 2 GAA sports ('football' and hurling, use the 'football' word round here and everyone will assume you are talking about Gaelic-rules footie. The UK 'permiereship, Man-U and all that jazz is always specified as soccer).

A 365 pic from my "yellow and blue" period. 

All my friends and rels will know that we 3 brothers managed to get born without the 'football' gene strand in our DNA. We have had no interest in the game for our whole lives and what we know about it you could write in capitals on the back of a postage stamp. I have happily carried that on into Ireland and the GAA game but you'd have to be blind here to not know there was something going on.

The strawberry season is upon us.

The whole county is a-flutter with the yellow and blue Roscommon flags; cars, flag poles in front gardens, sheep sprayed in those colours. Roscommon has not, up till now been known for its sporting prowess but while all sporty eyes were turned towards an exciting run in the soccer 'Euro's' which took the national team to the final 16 for the first time ever, The (GAA) Rossie boys have been sneaking up on the final of the Connacht (province) championship. The 'Big Game' was to be against the heroic Galway team and 'we' were definitely underdogs.

Peas and beans from the polytunnel.

Liz had bought me the top for Christmas and had been talking to her boss (John, who is a genuine fan) about my hopelessness as a fan - all in good part, I have to say, and in fun. They had decided that I should wear the shirt for the main games in the run up as it seemed to be having a good and talismanic effect - they kept winning! With tongue in cheek, she also gave me some 'authentic' lines to say should I get asked any tricky questions (like "did you see the match?" for example). I am (allegedly) very happy with the season so far and also delighted that 'they' are finally doing up the (Douglas) Hyde ground because the surface has been unplayable all through the winter when ever it rains.

Summer fruiting raspberries

Well, underdogs or not, I wore the shirt as advised at the weekend and Roscommon drew with Galway, so there is a replay game on Saturday evening. My only other involvement has been that I thought it would be fun to do a series of '365' pics for the project during the intervening week, based on the Rossie colours blue and yellow, so I have been wandering about looking for anything to shoot where blue and yellow are in conjunction and are the main colours.

Coo. There's a whole exciting world out there!

Meanwhile, back in real life my dozen Marans eggs have now 'cooked' in the incubator and have started hatching but in an unusual way. Normally 12 eggs set on the same day in an incubator will almost synchronise their hatching - the theory is that they all feel each other moving within their respective shells, rocking about and hear each other cheeping, so they all get encouraged to greater efforts. You get a great surge of pipping and hatching and so few in the 'tail' end that it is not really worth keeping the incubator going in case of stragglers. Well, not for us this time, it seems.

Early Bird

We got 2 really early birds on day 17 (should be 21), followed by a pause, then a burst of 3 more on day 20 and only one today (Day 21). 6 chicks now, then, and the remaining 6 eggs all quiet with no signs of even any pipping. We are guessing that the strange spread is due to how the eggs were stored before we got them - they have managed to sneak in 4 days of early development before they ever went into our incubator so possibly they were kept warm.

A first try at mould-pressed, matured, harder goats cheese

I will give the final 6 eggs till tomorrow (Day 22) evening before I take them out and carefully open them (one at once, obviously) out at the compost heap. They may be sterile, addled or 'dead in shell', ones which failed to make it out of the egg. If any turn out to be alive (oops) I will put the rest back in and give them a few more days but I would be amazed if this is the case.

Blue the floofy cat in one of his more classy sleeping poses.

That's it for this one. I am afraid I have a cold and I am bunged up, fed up and not able for happy creative writing. Forgive me.

Rain Dance

Neither of us ever anticipated in all this 'move-to-the-West-of-Ireland' project that we would ever be standing in County Roscommon disappointed at the lack of rain. We are not the kind of people who moan about the wet weather and then straight way transfer all that grumble to the heat after just a single hot day. We have been enjoying the blue skies and taking the close sweatiness and midges that sometimes come with it, on the chin. Stoic to the end, us. But my diary records that this run of 'scorchio' started on 11th May, all be it with a couple of showery days around the 20th, so have a heart, Met Éireann; we are sated. You even sneaked the perfect Bank Holiday weekend in there.

Some nice artichokes for a tapas style meal

We are happy, content, have had all we could ask and more. When the run of hot days appeared to be breaking with an 'orange' warning for thunderstorms and heavy rain on (Bank Holiday) Monday, we got stuck into some good weeding, mowed all the grass and raced several lines of washing through the laundry system. We watched with happy anticipation as the promised massive black cloud banks rolled in mid-afternoon. Back in Kent Liz would have been telling our lovely neighbour, 'Angel' Betty and myself off suspecting that we were doing rain dances because we were fed up with all the watering. Here we listened out for the distant rumbles of thunder on the N, S, E and W horizons, commenting cheerfully... "Yes! It's a-coming!"

Alliums

No such drama for us here, though. Friends in all directions were reporting rain. Sue and Rob talked of "monsoon" conditions. Carolyn in Sligo reported lashing rain and cousin Keith in Dublin spoke of massive downpours, impressively heavy although short lived. We stayed dry as the 'dusht' and missed it all. Our clouds built impressively and dispersed. We stayed oppressively hot and clammy and felt quite miffed. Cheated, even. It didn't rain all evening, then a tiny front doorstep-dampening drip came later on and the night was dry. We know we should be careful what we wish for and I am glad that I got the mowing done - I would have been cursing if the shaggy grass had got wetted and then taken days to dry out again. It has not rained today either. Ah well.

In the local bogs the turf cutters are taking full advantage
of the drought. This turf is "footed" up to get some air through
it and we have seen some being cleared and carted away to
store. This is Kiltybranks.

Meanwhile in archery I am still having a whale of a time, loving my new hobby. When weather permits we are out of doors and the instructor is doing his best to get us ready for an assault on nearby inter-county "Field Archery" competitions. Field Archery is where you go yomping around through the woods and fields trying to find and then hit model animals made of dense foam rubber. The beasts are a bit larger than life (to give us half a chance - the crows are more like ravens and the partridges are as big as chickens, for example).

We have also been introduced to the black arts of scoring so that we can see whether we are improving week on week. The animal models are marked with an oval roughly corresponding to the chest/lungs position and a smaller oval where the heart would be. The scores vary according to size, range and difficulty of the target/shot but might be, for example, 15 for a kill (dead hit on the heart), 10 for a 'wound' (chest area) and 5 for a 'hit' (anywhere else on the animal). There is much banter around how the animal is not officially dead even though you have just banged an arrow through his head, in one eye and out the other. There are also silly scores for some of the more ridiculously tricky shots - a rat on a log THIRTY metres away (!). Hit that one, you get 40, knock him off his log with your arrow stuck in him and you score 60. I have not got within a foot of the blighter.

The pigs this evening.

I should quickly add, just to quiet the fears of people who think I have got a bit blood-thirsty, that it is ILLEGAL everywhere in the British Isles to hunt anything with a bow and arrow, even a cross-bow. If you want to go a-hunting you need a licence , a pretty fierce draw-strength bow and you need to be on mainland Europe - Germany, Italy and some of France, I think. We are definitely just playing at it. It is just more entertaining to go 'hunting' between the trees, than to spend 2 hours lobbing arrows down a Badminton hall.

Pastures new. The sheep are back in the orchard. 

What ever way about it, I was 'on fire' on Sunday and it seemed I could not miss those targets. After my first try out 3 weeks back when I scored just 65 as a combination of 13 'hits', no wounds and no kills, I was suitably humble and knew my place - the beginner/new boy/trainee. On Sunday, for some reason, I found myself transformed into Dead-eye Dick. I got 2 kills in the first group and hit several other 'animals' more than once (you get 3 arrows per target). I had surpassed my 65 one third of the way in! I must admit it did not go as 'deadly' as that all through and I still missed my due portion of targets with all three arrows (of course, I have still not bagged 'log rat') but I ended with a score of 145, over twice my first one. No pressure for next week!

Liz (in orange) gives the sheep strict instructions not to eat
or break off the trees. 

The sheep, meanwhile, Have razed the front lawn to the ground and left only a few grass-flower stalks and some now obvious nettles and thistles. The lack of rain has no doubt contributed and the grass has stopped growing. We do not want to let them back into the East Field yet as that is resting, so we have rather bravely moved the gang into the orchard tonight. This is with some trepidation as we know what damage sheep can do to young trees by browsing and by scratching their itches by rubbing at them. We are hoping our trees are that bit bigger and taller so that they can afford to lose a few lower leaf-clusters (raising their 'skirts' or 'Savannah-ing' we call it here). They are also in some cases still guarded by the tree guards we originally fitted when we used this field before, several years ago. We are hoping that the sheep will focus on the lush grass and buttercups and leave the trees alone. Liz has read them The Riot Act.

Maternity Chaos

Hubbard chick at 2 days

The little list of birds currently keeping us waiting grows ever longer. There is turkey hen Barbara, of course, possibly still AWOL, out there in the fields sitting on eggs or possibly hatchlings and maybe, just maybe, planning to walk them all back up here to the farmstead at some stage. At the other end of the 'hope' scale, of course, there is no Barbara and the bones of the former Barbara are drying out in the midden heap outside some fox's lair. We can only wait and see but turkeys are famously mainly grass-grazers, so if she is out there somewhere in the lush Roscommon grass, dodging the hooves of clumsy cattle and teaching the young 'uns to eat grass, we could be waiting a while.

The broody geese, sharing the manger 'trough' and swapping eggs between the two nests each day are also devoid of fluffy goslings. Day 28 for the first eggs we knew about, was 16th May, so we are fast running out of 'late hatching' but regular readers will know that our goose 'breeding' is fairly chaotic and the sister birds have been happily dropping new eggs into the trough for the last few months. There will be eggs in there coming due every day from now till Heaven knows when.

Class of 2016. 18 Hubbard chicks.

We have three separate broody chickens on the go at the moment. One is a-top a 4-bale high pile of straw, wedged up into the door lintel. I suspected when she started that she was sitting on nothing and today she hopped off and confirmed this for me. She has sat for 28 days on fresh air and straw. Might be time to move her on and break the habit. I was toying with the idea if she even hatched ONE egg, of sneaking a few 'ringers' in there (of which more soon).

Gone broody in an old dustbin

One is, rather daftly, in an empty feed bin, 2 feet tall and only containing a few bits of rubbish plus any straw that has fallen in. I was using it as the shed dustbin. This nest has also been plagued by all manner of other poultry hopping in there, squeezing the 'clocker' aside and laying 'cuckoo' eggs in there for her to brood. She had 11 including some Guinea Fowl eggs last time I looked. But think it through, hen! Once they hatch, how do you get them out into the world? I can see me having to do some surreptitious tipping over of the bin at some stage. The 3rd broody hen is the only one doing it sensibly in an actual nest box in the actual coop. Yes, it happens occasionally.

Holding up the beekeeping jobs. Blue asleep in a commercial
'super' box. 

The antidote to all this failed Maternity Suite malarkey is, of course, the annual purchase of our day-old 'Hubbard' meat birds. Hubbards are our most delicious and fast growing (free range) meat bird of choice and we are generously included in the run made by friends Anne and Simon up to an industrial scale hatchery up by the N. Ireland border where they know the team and are allowed to buy small quantities of day-olds (as opposed to the 10,000 bird batches the 'factory' would normally supply to commercial growers.) We 'ordered' 18 this year and these arrived on Wednesday. We had the brooder box set up ready and the 'electric hen' heater plate running. The babies quickly settled in while we fed tea, cake and home-cured 'serrano/palma' style ham to Anne and Simon and chatted. as usual, poultry, gardening and small holdering in general.

Neat and tidy now with a 'super' box (dark
green) added to the top of the stack and
the roof straightened out. 

Meanwhile, outside of poultry and broody birds, I have been settling in the new bees - after a few days of just sitting, getting to know the area, we tidied up the new hive removing the straps and gaffer tape that we'd secured it with, adding an empty super to give them more space (trying to discourage swarming) and settling the roof straight. In the dark we'd not lowered it on quite right and it was a bit drunken looking.

Although I know of no proper 'bluebell
 woods' within our 365 patch, once you
get your eye in, there are plenty of small
patches in hedge bases etc. 

This manipulation also gave us a chance to see if any more work was needed to set it up for summer, and we found, as T McC had said, that the upper brood box (painted white in my pic, above the silver gaffer tape) had some dummy blank frames in it. These will need replacing with proper frames and wax foundation for honey comb next time we are delving around in there.

Lough Adreen, in Cloonargid (Silver Field)

I have been out and about some more on the 365 project photography and as this week is 'Bio-Diversity' week I have been asked to go get pics of flora, fauna and 'natural' stuff. I found myself exploring one of the local cutting bogs down south of Lisacul, in 'Cloonargid' (Silver Field) and found this lovely little lough - I'd known it was there from the map; it is called Lough Adreen (there's no real translation unless the "dreen" is one of those transliteration jobs from 'small oak' like for Ballaghadereen (Bealach an Doirín)). I am convinced that even after 366 days of photography, I will still not have seen the whole patch. Which is good.