2000th Post

A first frost and an icy sunrise across the East Field

In the last epistle, I drew attention to some votes happening in Ireland and said that I might let you know the results, this mainly for my UK readers. Well the standing President (Michael D Higgins or "Miggledy") did indeed get re-elected by a huge margin and stands for another 7 years. The "crime" of blasphemy was also voted to be removed from the Constitution.

Vicky doles out breakfast on the early morning livestock rounds

Farewell to the Help-X lasses, Vicky and Judith who were our final Help-X guests of the year. We have received a couple of requests since but, honestly, we are so tidy and so ready for winter after the last couple of sessions, that we cannot see a week's work for even a single volunteer.

The ducks get their breakfast.

Vicky and Judith were brilliant, hard working, enthusiastic, hugely useful around the house and pure pleasure to host. They also bonded very closely with the dogs, especially Towser and Poppea (Deefer mainly chose to stay with her 'Dad'). We have never had the dogs so 'loved up' by any volunteers and we are sure the girls will really miss the dogs and vice versa.

First frost for the Help-X-ers' final morning

The last working day for the pair was Saturday and they chose to continue the pressure-washing job, this time on the back terrace, an area of shamefully broken up concrete which is forever growing grass in the many cracks and can be quite skiddy, partly with chicken poo in the wet. This is a high traffic area as it is the route from Kitchen to Utility Room, and is also in the "when we win the Lotto" plan; the concrete will be ripped up and replaced by new block-paving PLUS it will all be covered by a lean-to "cloister" arrangement. In the meantime, a good blast with the pressure washer at least has it free of grass, mud and chook-poo and a nice pale grey, dry, clean, concrete colour.

The ducks hesitate when they see the frozen pond. "There's
something wrong with the water, Dad!"

The Help-X-ers woke up to our first frost on their final morning. We were able after the breakfast rounds of poultry, to watch the young ducks discover the frozen pond and try to work out how to cope with it. The clocks had changed to GMT over night, so it was also bright sunshine. They were very wary. All 6 hung back, peering over the brim and wondering what was wrong with the water. Even the 'Mother' duck who had lived through at least one winter stopped but it occurred to me, she had lived up till we got her in a concrete yard with only paddling pools for water, so may not have needed to cope with ice.

Khaki drake does "ice breaker"

Eventually, having worked their way round the pond a bit to see if there were any less 'scary' places to jump in, the Khaki Campbell drake slid in and promptly skated across the pond to the 'beach' as if  frightened by the unfamiliar feeling under foot. This broke up the ice enough (it was only thin) that the rest of them felt safe enough to follow.

That was pretty much it for the girls. Elizabeth did them the house speciality "Eggs in Purgatory" as a light lunch before I dropped them to Castlerea railway station and hugged them a fond farewell. They would spend a couple of days in Dublin doing 'tourist', flying home to Germany on Monday (yesterday). They are, you will recall, 5 years into their Doctor-training, so they have completed the basic course and now get a year of learning their chosen 'specialities'  (one "radiology", the other "internal medicine"). This is going to be a parting of the ways for them after spending 5 years as best mates and fellow students. Judith will do one of her specialities in the island of Reunion, off Madagascar. They were sure they would meet up again in the future but possibly not work closely together again.

I have taken up card-patience again as a way of passing the
time while I can't work any sense.

We will miss them a lot, but we also love to get the house back. Help-X-ers are dead easy to host but they are here full time and sometimes you just want to be on your own, or just the two of us. I also get 10 days of making sure I am up for breakfast for/with them and sorting the  out tasks, showing them the machines or the jobs and generally feeling like I need to be on my best behaviour. It is a bit unrelenting and the end of it comes with a big sigh of relief.

200th and possibly final post 

...And so, my 2000th post. 12 years or so of posting 2 a week. Maybe I should have saved something momentous or land-markish to go in this one but, no, it has just come out with the usual hum drum everyday tale of small-holdering folk. I should probably say a huge thank you to all the readers out there and supporters - there are now around 130 to 200 of you look at each post. I must confess I am wondering whether to park it for a while, to give it a bit of a holiday. This being ill thing has me at a bit of a low ebb and, unable to actually DO anything round the 'farm', so it is a struggle to come up with material to put in here. Ah well. We will see. If a post does not appear on Friday, you will know what is what. Good luck now.

'Tis the Season

No Turkeys! Out on that bank on our boundary, where Mr Fox
definitely comes patrolling, is NOT a good place to nest.

British Summer Time. Nice long evenings and the dogs waking me up a good hour later than they have been, driven as they are by their own light-level triggers. Spring is sprung and all that. 'Tis the season for procreational activities to break out all over, sometimes covertly.

Occupational hazard of fencing in these parts.

'Tis also the season for everyone to shore up those winter-damaged fences prior to letting the cattle out to the welcome grass. I got involved a bit in order to help a friend and came back with the usual lacerated forearms from the brambles, hawthorn and blackthorn. This was an early morning job, so Elizabeth found herself in charge of fox watch. The fox has never (yet) attacked in an early morning, so she thought she'd be safe enough snatching a rare 'lie-in' and covering the task sitting up in bed. The dogs were up there too so surely nothing could happen 'out there' which she'd not be aware of. Safe enough, you'd think.

Turkey eggs "hidden" in the scrub.

The morning's peaceful relaxing was shattered when the dogs suddenly started shouting and bouncing around on the windowsill. The Guinea fowl were also yelling and a quick look showed our fox-watch that at least one was up on a high perch. Jumping to the conclusion that Brer Fox was among us again, she raced down and outside, releasing the dogs to go do their thing.

The three ducks gave me a scare when the female fell asleep
on an dead clump of Lady's Mantle. She was so well matched
in colour, I thought we were down to 2 ducks.

A few minutes of retrieving Towser from the tarmac lane where he'd gone to round up the confused Guineas and the only reason for the shout seemed to be that 'tis also the season for roosters to start fighting and two of them were going hammer and tongs in the middle of the front lawn. Our dogs are, by now, pretty cool with 'ordinary' chickens but if they see a fight going on, fluttering and kicking, feathers flying the 'distressed prey animal / easy target' thing kicks in and they will as likely as not have a lunge.

So Mrs C was by now wide awake, of course and in her thorough search of the area, came across another 'Tis the Season' thing, a little clump of three turkey eggs hidden under some fine tree branches but right out by the bank over which Brer Fox comes when he does visit. Not a very sensible place to nest, Mrs Turk. (Gloria or Deo, we do not know whom yet.).

Some first "dandelions" for the bees. These
are coltsfoot, (Tussilago farfara)

Friends of the blog may recall that we lost our first turkey hen when she went right off site to go broody and never came back, presumably discovered by an earlier fox. We are pleased that this girl has at least nested on site and that we have found her. If we leave her a few eggs in the nest, she should keep laying there and not get upset and go off to find somewhere further afield to lay. If we let her build up a full clutch and go broody, we may be able to move her and the eggs to a safer place without making her desert.

Gandalf. King of the Hill.

So, as I said, 'tis also the season for roosters to start eyeing up their rivals 'women' covetously and even making the odd move on them. Our alpha-male, Gandalf is top dog here and it is his much smaller rival 'Herme' the Buff Orpington who is always looking to take over. We have two other much younger roo's, who run smaller gangs of peripheral hens, but they are not moving in on the top spot just yet. It was Gandalf and Herme who were doing the kick boxing display on the lawn that woke the dogs up.

Battle scarred Herme.

We wish these boys had a stronger sense of 'self awareness' and copped on a bit quicker that they were losing this fight and should probably pull out and run away. Herme seems to have no such rationale and he keeps in trying even though he is getting 7 bells kicked out of him. He comes away with his facial bits (wattles, comb, beak) well blooded. Those are long, sharp spurs on Gandalf's legs and Herme has no such equipment. Ah well. The fights are fast and furious but always finish just before we need to intervene. It's nature's way and we have plenty of space for the boys to keep apart if they prefer to.

Mucking out the lambing pens and
dismantling them. I get my shed back!

'Tis also the season to be done with lambing and I get that lovely (well, I enjoy it!) seasonal landmark task of mucking out the lambing pen(s) and dismantling them. I get my shed back. This year we have a minor 'hang-over' of that lamb, Bábóg, who needs bottle feeding and will continue to need that till she is weaned off the milk.

Rosie and her twins. Bábóg is on the right.

She is now on full bottle (500 ml) feeds 4 times a day, all now out in the field where she lives happily with her Mum, brother and all the other sheep. Mum likes to keep her close but will not let her suckle. The final feed of each day, 10 pm, is now in the dark, obviously, so we have fun wandering about the field with the LED head torch looking for the reflections of eyes, then hear the excited bleat and watch one pair of eyes detach from the group and come bouncing across the field in the darkness, homing in unerringly on that bottle-teat.

All is now well on the laptop. The PC is destined for the WEEE
recycling.

What else is new? I am now settled into the laptop after causing only one quick wobble when I logged in as the owner and somehow changed her user account name to my email address. There were a couple of anxious hours while Mrs C worked out how to get admin rights and change the name back, plus to set me up an account where I could safely clomp about in my size 12 boots and not do any damage to 'her stuff'.

Finally. 'tis the season for baby chicks. These are Silvergirl's.

Finally, I just want to note the passing away of an English 'character' from this blog but way back in the Kent days, when life was all about the rebuild on the Thames sailing barge, SB Cambria. Two colleague-volunteers, Mark and Cathy Chapman had been on that project for years by the time I started and we had plenty of good times working with them. Cathy was English born (Edmonton) but unknown to me then, her roots were right here in Co Roscommon. Her Mum is still very much alive, but her Grandma was buried 20 minutes from here in the small town of Bellanagare. There are no other family here now, though some cousins live down in the SE, around Tallow. Cathy has since, sadly, died of cancer (aged 52) and expressed a wish that her ashes be brought 'home' to Grandma's gravesite for scattering or burial. So today a small dozen of us gathered at the graveside with a Priest to bury her ashes-urn and pay our final respects. Rest in Peace, Cathy and commiserations to Mark and to the rest of the family. Mark was delighted that he has an old friend reasonably near to his wife's grave who can "keep an eye on her".

A Sunny Day At Last!

Some good size spuds coming from the poly-tunnel. These are
probably just good ol' Roosters. I don't recall buying any fancy
seed potatoes this year. 

A nice short post this time as we have done precious little except hunker down indoors looking out feeling all 'meh' at the drizzle and rain. We have been restricted to indoor jobs except for a bit of digging spuds in the poly-tunnel. They always do well in there despite my worries about lack of moisture. I never water to a degree that I would call 'enough' but these plants must be able to get roots to the sides of the tunnel and catch some of that rain dribbling down the sides. Some of these tubers were 250 kg and more.

Plum Jam

I also got out and picked all the remaining plums off that over-loaded tree, especially when I spotted that the magpies were starting to peck and the fruits and some of the fruit were splitting in the rain. I got 7 kg of good fruit (and the pigs got half a bucket of 'out-takes') and found excellent jam jars at 50 cent each (inc lid) in a shop in town which sells bee-keeping stuff and hence honey jars. I often have a problem getting jam to set and this batch was true to that form. I have created 25 jars of plum 'slop' but, hey, it'll get used up.

The dogs enjoying Kiltybranks. 

Then today, out of no-where, a nicer, sunnier day. I got a chance to walk the dogs while NOT wearing rain wear and took them down to my favourite off-lead walk site, Kiltybranks. The dogs can charge around here, diving into bushes and down ditches with no risk of them getting among livestock. It is so flat and the vegetation so low that you can see any neighbouring horses or cattle for miles, so there is always time to get the dogs rounded up to walk past the stock on leads.

An almost moribund white-tail queen looked OK in the pic
but I don't think was long for this world. 

It is a much more pleasant stroll for the dog-walker, too as three little 10 kg muscled up lunatics are not pulling you in 3 directions at once. Towser may be the strongest forwards-charger for this but Poppea is my Nemesis - the worst walkee EVER. She'd be deadly on the M25 with her random changes of lane, speed and direction, her dead stops for no apparent reason and then her stops-to-poo/pee with no notice what so ever. I swear one day she will trip me right over by slamming on the brakes right in front of me.

On the left the new size 32 gigabyte camera memory card.
On the right the old-size "card" now relegated to adaptor or
"holder". The micro-card slots in at the bottom. 

I am always amazed by new technology but I am in awe of the latest miniaturization move for camera folk. Our lovely "new" digital cameras take a card which is about an inch square which could fit about 8 'Gig' of data (8,000 Megabytes). My camera, on current settings, takes pictures which have a file size of around 5 Kilo-bytes, so the old cards would fit about 1600 pictures. All well and good. That used to last me about 6 months.

That little fluffy gosling is now that huge
guy at the back here.

I would download the pics by copying but keep them on the card out of some old fashioned need to retain a "hard copy" like on photo-albums of old and then more recently write-able CDs / DVDs.

Cider apples wet with rain.

In a recent shout out on FB and Twitter for anyone who knew of a filing system/method for the used cards I received only howls of derisive laughter and people saying I should 100% trust the soft-ware versions - save them to "the cloud" or back them up to memory drives etc. Ah well. I still like the physical object in my hand. Old fashioned, I guess.

Heather at Kiltybranks

Then last week I went to buy the next 1 inch-ish square SDHC card and found that I can now buy (at the same price) 32 GIGABYTES of memory on a tiny micro-card no bigger than a finger-nail. The old card that fits my socket is now relegated to just a carrier/adaptor into which the micro card slots and the tiny flake of genius holds around 4000 pictures which is the same amount of pics as I have taken so far, on the camera, in the 2-3 years I have owned it!

Most of the roses are suffering in the rain ("balling") but
this peachy one survives.

When I think that back in the day we'd get those pics back from TruPrint (who remembers them?) and I'd store about 200 in an A4 size, thick, hard-back photo album. I still have about 20 of those albums taking up window-sill space upstairs. Now I can get more pics than that on a flake of cleverness as small as my little-finger nail.

Scabious at Kiltybranks.

Ah well. This 'short' post seems to have run amok again. Sorry about that.

Kato goes A.W.O.L.

There's a pain in my left ear, Daddy.... Make it go away. Off to the
vet's with #1 Son, 'Towser'. Not happy. 

Off to the vets for #1 Son, 'Towser' this week, when he starts to show a lot of discomfort round his left ear. He seems to do this as an annual thing, so we are ready for him and know exactly what to do. Maybe he likes that 'pub regular' thing of being able to stroll into the vet's and ask for "The Usual, Mr Vet". His problem is a good old heady brew of ear infection going which gunges up his ear canal with nasty, dark brown waxy muck which sets hard and dry around the hair in his ear. He then spends all day shaking his head to flap his ears and try to clear it, or walking around rubbing the left side of his head on the furniture and door frames. Very sorry for himself.

Fancy 4-solution ear gel.

Unable to get him to the vet straight away, I tried a trick that used to work on my own ears which gummed up in my youth (well, younger than now anyway!) to the point of needing syringing, that being olive oil. I thought it would at least soften the 'muck' so I could wipe it out with tissues and I had also heard somewhere that if ear-mites are the problem, the oil 'drowns' them.  Turns out olive oil is NOT a good idea.

A goodly haul for our first pick over the strawberries.

Off to the vets then where our man has a good old look down in there and a wipe around as well as giving Towser a small pain-killer jab and an anti-inflammatory one. He also gives me a tube of ear-gel which he rates highly as it solves all 4 common problems at once - it is anti-parasite, "anti-infective" (?), anti-fungal and anti inflammatory. It is NOT an antibiotic as the vet explained, they are really cutting down on antibiotics now. If this gel has not solved the problem by Monday I must bring Towser back for an antibiotic jab but we don't anticipate that being necessary. "I wouldn't," he says, "put anything oily down a dog's ear as a rule". That's me told.

'We' also do not think we need the anti-parasite aspect as this is not ear-mites, just a heady brew of yeast, fungi and possibly bacteria. Anyway, the lad is on the mend now. The angry pink is gone from his ear, as well as most of the dark brown gick and he doesn't mind so much me dribbling stuff down there, folding his ear 'closed' and massaging the 'bulb' part. He just has to put up with the left side of his face being greasy looking where the stuff smears out onto his white fur, till we run out of gel and can shampoo his head back to Westie perfection.

We had no sensible jars for the strawberry
jam so here is a 2 litre 'bulk-pack. 

But my header says Kato was the one causing problems this week, so what is THAT all about? The pair of marmalade 'kittens' are by now a year old and while the female (Chivers) loves to hang around the house and be with her 'Mum', the boy (Kato) is getting a bit more adventurous. Friends of the Blog will know that on my daily dog-walk down to the bridge, I am sometimes accompanied by the full-grown black and white cat, Soldier, whom I have got used to having along and who is 100% sensible around traffic, quickly diving off the tarmac into the verge when a vehicle comes and staying there till he sees me come back onto the lane with the three dogs.

The cutter heads of my shears come back from the sharpener
with a good keen edge. 

Not so Kato, who seems to be a complete ditz and whom, if he tries to follow me down the drive, I will quickly text Liz to come and wrangle him to safety while the dogs and I get out of sight.

Deep-clean of the chicken house

That plan failed yesterday when I'd got a good half mile down the lane before a loud 'Miaow!' behind me alerted me to the fact that Kato had decided to chase us and had caught up. Ah well, too far 'gone' here to expect Liz to come rescue him, I foolishly decided to give him a try and walked gently on making sure he kept up. There were no cars about so I thought we could cope. I texted Liz to put her on alert.

The authentic lime-wash "slappy" brush

No sooner had I done that than a tractor with mower came round the corner. Kato froze. I flagged down the tractor and made to grab the cat but the cat fled, sprinting along the lane. The tractor driver gave me that "What yer gonna do?" look and moved off slowly, "following" the cat. I watched them go out of sight round the next bend with Kato still sprinting down the tarmac and the tractor carefully following. Every time the cat paused, the tractor man stopped too and tried to inch by but Kato wasn't having any of that and ran on again. That was the last I saw of him (at that stage).

Lime-washing the old stone work. 

Liz then appeared in the car (and in her PJs!) having seen the tractor pass the house safely by but no sign of Kato. I walked the dogs home and was clinging to the fact that no news (no splatted body and no sad marmalade shape in the grass verge) was good news. We then had that awful anxious wait that most cat-owners will know, re-tracing our walk/drive, calling, whistling, praying for Kato to be OK and to come home right as rain. Surely he's just strayed off the lane or gone to hide up, upset, in an abandoned building or barn somewhere. Well, to cut a long story short, he kept us on tenterhooks from midday-ish, right round to just gone 10 pm. I had gone to bed but Liz was still up and stepped into the Kitchen Garden for another hopeful look and spotted him sprinting up the drive, not a care in the world and a relaxed, unworried "Hi, Mum! I'm home!" look on his face.

Well be-spattered with lime wash

Other than that, not a lot of excitement. We have had, as you can see from the pictures, a really good harvest of strawberries for a first pick. These plants are protected behind a chicken-wire cage and I had just been checking the few fruit you can see near the 'fence'. I thought we had a couple weeks more to wait. Then I looked down in from the top and all I could see was red down in below the leaf canopy. We lifted the cage and started picking, quickly filling the tiddly, pessimistic punnets we had started with. In short order we had gathered  nearly 2.9 kg or gorgeous, ripe fruit. This is way more than we can use up 'fresh' so we had to re-think our 'no more jam' policy and go buy some sugar.

You don't want your best clothes on for
this job.

Then today we got stuck into the deep-clean long overdue on the old stone out-building we use as a chicken/goose house. In theory we are waiting till #3 broody goose finishes and abandons the nest but in practise we have become impatient and have started on the non-goose end. We are shoveling out barrow loads of old bedding and poo, giving the internal stonework a good brush down and removing all the old tired chicken wire (no longer fit for purpose and gathering cobwebs to a Gothic degree).

Finally we are going to lime-wash all that algae-encrusted, dusty masonry back to a clean, anti-bacterial, anti-insect white as only lime-wash will allow.

Joint Birthdays

The "Pop Star" at 3 years old. 

June 3rd, so that nice coincidental date for 3 of the animals in this blog, formerly 4 but we lost Rolo in an RTA. Puppies Poppea and Towser, and cats Blue and Rolo were all born in 2012 on a busy night for animal midwifery down in Silverwood's Land. The dogs we were expecting and, in fact we were all lined up to be on call as pup midwives, but Mum (Lily) was so efficient at that stage that she slid all that litter of pups out just supervised, but not messed with at all, by Mrs Silverwood. We had our name down for a boy and had already chosen his name.

Towser at 3

The kittens we had tentatively put our names down for but did not know the expected date and, anyway, knew that some Aunt of the family was getting 'first refusal' on that litter so we didn't know for sure any of any litter would be coming our way. It was only when Mrs S phoned her friend round the corner to tell her the good news, that friend replied "Well, THERE's a coincidence! Our cat had 3 kittens too!" The 'chickens' were hatched and count-able. We were suddenly on for the pup and 2 kittens, all born in the night of June 2nd/3rd but after midnight.

Blue at 3 looking as if he doesn't actually want disturbing.

Readers who were with me in 2012 will know that, in fact, we ended up with 2 pups. There had been a bit of a silly health-scare over one of the bitches and Mrs S had held back from selling her till she was all clear, she came up to the 'farm' with the family on a week's holiday and played so well with her already-sold brother, that it seemed fairest to just re-unite them and for us to take the two pups to go with our 2 mad kittens. Poor Deefer, briefly an 'only child' didn't know which way to turn. 3 years later, that all seems a long time ago.

Buff chick at 2 weeks old.

However, with Liz not yet back from Greece and no big updates on the story of that adventure yet, and with me having only posted yesterday but wanting to mark these Birthdays, I have little to write about, so this post will be an unashamed photo album, using up some pics which I have not yet found a home for in the blog.

Tom

Huge thanks to brother Mark for continuing to use up his bank balance in coloured inks for his printer - he prints a hard copy of this blog including the pictures to put in the post to our Mum, (Pud Lady) down in Hastings, stuffing it in the envelope of his own blog. We have not yet persuaded Pud Lady to join that happy band of "grey-surfers", internet-savvy OAPs and get on line with a lap top (and some internet provision to the house, of course!) so that she can see these ramblings on screen and, anyway, I think she quite likes to have the hard copy as it feels a bit like we negligent children have actually written to her (!) - sorry Mum. Mark must rue the days when I do one of these and all his colour ink drains away. I am very very grateful.

Finally some warm weather for the bees to get cracking
pulling in pollen and nectar.

First flag iris in the pond.

Here, then, are just a few pics with captions to catch you up on extra curricular stuff.

No pictures, please! The chick flees the paparazzi

Quince blossom

Min the Hin on a high roost.

Goldie and Nugget out in their run. 

Good bud break and some fruit on the
Brown Turkey fig.