Mary's Marked and Isabelle Isn't

This year's piggies. Berkshires. Mary and Isabelle.

After the trials and tribulations of yesterday with its bee losses and poorly lamb, we needed a good and successful day to restore the equilibrium and our faith in the fact that we have the general idea on this small holdering lark. With great timing, our pig supplier had rung to let us know that this year's pigs were ready for collection at 8 weeks old, down in Colbinstown, Co Kildare, south of Newbridge and Kilcullen.

How would you choose. 

These lovely people (Therese and Michael) have the website  http://www.freerangepigsireland.com/ which resolves, rather alarmingly to a page splashed with the header "PiggyWiggy's". You are trying to be a ruffty tuffty stockman, all professional and serious, and you wonder what you are getting into - Piggy Wiggy's? Don't worry. This is geared to their Kune-kune "pet pig" operation. They get all serious and proper when you want Tamworths, Berkshires or other 'proper' pig breeds. They even do "Iron-Age" pigs (Tamworth x Wild Boar, not for the faint hearted).

Mary (left) and Isabelle (right)

We can thoroughly recommend them but it is a bit of a hike from here - 2 hours 40 minutes which is probably not ideal for the young pigs. They seem to be like human babies in a car, though, and drop off to sleep reassuringly at the drum of the engine and the thunk of the Kildare potholes. €65 a pop, in case you are interested. We have this year and last year made a day-trip of it, taking friend Charlotte along, for her pig-wrangling skills (you should see her grab a scarpering piglet by the back leg in the 'proper' manner and lift it, helpless, into her arms). Liz cooks a superb picnic which we eat at the farm sitting on big logs upturned to make tables and seats. This year it included sausage rolls made from last year's Tamworths but Michael (pigman) declined as he has a gluten intolerance, so he needed 'spelt' flour in his pastry. Ah well. All the more for us. The site also houses their nursery - big beds and greenhouses of hellebores and the like. That, they describe as the 'day job'; the pigs are a sideline.

Crated for the run home.

These two pigs had already been named - we had put the question out on one of Liz's internet forums (fora?) and then offered it to the redoubtable Olive (90), good friend of our own "Poobie" in Leeds. Olive was reported to have gone "pink with pleasure" at being asked to name the piggies, and chose Mary Elizabeth and Isabelle Heather just because they were her favourite names (and spellings!). I baulked a bit at naming a pig 'Elizabeth' but I am re-assured that this is OK provided the Elizabeth in question is not your good lady. So Mary and Isabelle it is, but which was to be which?

Charlotte, ace pig-wrangler, gets a firm grip on Isabelle

Driving home, it occurred to me that one had a big white face-splash marking to go with her white socks, while the other only had the tiniest white dot on her forehead, hence "Mary's marked while Isabelle isn't". Had this (Olive's names) not happened, these were going to be named for the Berkshires in the 'Empress' books by one of our favourite authors, PG Wodehouse, but we will have to save those names for another year. We love that as we drive out of the breeder's site. Michael bids us farewell and "Probably see you next year, then?" We are working our way round the breeds at present and can see no reason why not.

Charlotte and Liz check out the parent sow and boar with
Michael the pig-man. 

The girls are now home safe and were set down in their ark which looks enormous against their tiny bodies and they were quickly out exploring the range of their new home. They seem so tiny, I was worried they might sneak through the fences but we've now watched them for a while and maybe they are just a bit big. Tonight the dogs met them through the orchard fence and they took a few wary sniffs at each other but the pigs were unimpressed and wandered off. Liz tells me that the Irish for pig is 'muc' (pronounced 'muck') but there is also the word "banbh" which comes out as 'bonham' and this is a word used a lot in Irish pig farming for young male piglets. Liz tells me that this caused the young Irish girls employed at London auction house "Bonhams" (where she worked for a while) much amusement especially as some of the managers had a particularly 'porcine' look.

Home and exploring the woods.

I guess I should give you an update on yesterday's woes. The lamb seems to be recovering on her doses of liquid paraffin. She looks much more comfortable today with none of the arched back or high tail stuff. We caught her when we got back from the pig run, to give her another dose and she definitely looked like she had passed some fresh poo, so we hope she is feeling a lot more comfortable and relieved. We will keep an eye on her and keep reporting back to Aoife the Vet, but we hope she is on the way back up. Poor little mite. It cannot have been comfortable to be 'backed up' like that.

Checking out the sunny grassy bit.

When I was out in the orchard giving the dogs their run this evening, I was enjoying the dogs trying to chat up the wary pigs, but also took a look at the hive. It is a bitter-sweet thing. The few hundred remaining bees are soldiering on gamely, still out foraging and flying to and fro. They cannot know that there is no future in this and that they are the end of the line for the 'Two Marys' colony from last year. With no queen there is no new young coming through. These ladies will live out their allotted 6 weeks and fade out. I am relying on the promise of some replacement stock soon as the fruit trees in the orchard come into blossom. It will be a shame to have another blossom season go by with no bees going about their work. I'll keep you posted on pigs, lambs and bees.

The Family Gossip

Honey bee, Picture by Katherine Austin

'Tell it to the Bees' they say. Apparently, in times past, the bee hive and the bees were always considered part of the family and therefore had to be included in the gossip and news or they would feel excluded and might take offence. You would visit them each day and talk to them - catch them up on all the hatches, matches and dispatches. Well, be that as it may I do it, but I suspect that has more to do with getting the colony, for whom vibration and transmitted noise are such a huge part of life, used to our voices and our comings and goings so that they do not all pour out of the hive in alarm and in defence mode whenever we pass by or talk near it. The colony, left to its own devices seems very calm, hard working and healthy now. I can creep in on my hands and knees weeding as I go up and down the ridges really close to the hive without the bees even noticing. I am quite glad about this as I did not want the bottom of the veg patch to be effectively out of bounds, or (more ridiculously) have to start weeding wearing the bee keeping suit!

I'm sure these funny looking ginger dogs
were smaller than us when they first
arrived!

Talking of gossip, Liz has been on a mission to Dublin to touch base with all the family and to catch up on the gossip with our good friends, Therese and Owen. She'd not actually seen T+O for a long time, but said that (as is often the way with really good friends) she slotted in immediately as if she'd just nipped out to the shops. They were amused and delighted by Liz's tales of country living and taking up knitting.

Mutual suspicion? Towser eyes up a Tamworth.

Steak Lady (and Mr SL) have lived for as long as I have known them in a big house chopped up into a gazillion B+B rooms and they have always had this well populated with language students. As a result, they never really retired, and have been working hard, continuously and pretty much all round the year for decades. They have now decided that enough is enough, so the house is up for sale and proper retirement to a single-storey place, possibly somewhere down near the Silverwoods, beckons. Liz was able to catch up on the latest on this while she was there for lunch

A huge supper under her belt, Lucia needs a lie-down in the
sunshine

Meanwhile, Sparks has also moved to a new place nearer to his work and Liz nipped up to admire this place and to catch up on brother/sister news. At all three places she was plied with gifts and as well, called in at IKEA on the way home in search of standard-lamps, so she came home with quite a car full. We have some unusual foodstuffs including red caviar and a jar of baked-bean type beans but not in tomato sauce, these are 'au naturel' in the French style, floating in a clear brine.

Haricot (Navy) beans 'au naturel' and red caviar

The red caviar (we looked it up) is actually salt-cured eggs but not of the sturgeon, these are from Pacific river-salmon. Somehow they are still in a small jar which only has (Russian?) Cyrillic script on it and a Moscow address. Liz made a tapas-style meal tonight so that we might taste these delights; it was my first ever taste of any kind of caviar. The caviar was, as you'd expect, very salty and had the texture of tiny 'bags' of jelly (the fish-eggs) - interesting and OK. We toned the salt down a bit with creme fraiche but we were fresh out of ice-cold vodka (!) Good fun but I don't think either of us will be rushing out to buy more.

Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon
The virgin sturgeon is a very fine fish.
The virgin sturgeon needs no urgin'
That's why caviar is my dish! (boom tish!)

Inch long young quinces looking very promising.

Also in the car was a sewing machine, a generous gift from T+O. Liz has been looking for one of these for a while now, and a chance misunderstanding raised the subject. Owen was asking what we had sowed (meaning fruit and veg), Liz heard this as 'sewed' as in needlework. This machine had been gathering dust in a cupboard, so T was delighted to give it to someone who would be likely to use it.

Crab apples coming on nicely

Meanwhile, back here, the 'waif and stray' white cat, Pirate, is now getting well used to us and Liz was able to handle him today (a first). He (for he is definitely a 'he') is now a regular at supper time, yowling around when he sees the dogs walked back indoors from their orchard exercise session and also, for the last 2 mornings, coming over for breakfast when he hears the bowls being filled for our own cats. Yesterday for most of the day he slept curled up on the 2CV roof in the car port, so I put the cat basket up there with a 'vet-bed' blanket folded into it.

The dogs watch the rabbits, the rabbits watch the bee hive?

He didn't use it that day, but I noticed that this morning, he was asleep in there first thing and it was from there that he emerged to come across for breakfast. This is good news - we will need to get him into that to take him to the vet, so if he is already in, then we should be able to just flip the door shut before he realises what's happening. The poor little mite will definitely need to see the vet, he is not at all well. His eyes are bad; his right eye is completely 'gone' and the left seems very cloudy to us. His ears are scabby and dirty looking, and he is eating so much we suspect he may have worms. On the plus side we can see no sign of fleas or other parasites among his white fur and he is a lot less skinny than when we started feeding him 3 weeks ago. We will let vet Aoife advise us, but we think we may be able to get him well again.