Despite the Best Efforts...

Despite the best efforts of Met Éireann and of lone New Zealand writer and weather-herald, Ken Ring (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2013/07/ok-im-ready-now.html) August has mooped past without delivering any really hot weather and delivered us to the threshold of Autumn. We can't REALLY complain; we had amazingly hot dry spells in June and July and our August has been warm even when breezy and cloudy, so it has not stopped us doing anything and the garden has cropped away and the livestock has all got on with the job.

Hubbard chicks at Day 30 stretch out in a sunny patch catching the rays

We have been fascinated to see the Hubbard chicks develop. These guys were bought as something for Broody Betty to 'mother' when we took the ducklings from her and, rather excitingly, our 8 were only part of a larger batch which ended up in 2 other destinations and would enjoy 2 other feeding and brooding regimes. It has been fun to compare 'notes' with Mentor Anne's batch - indoor brooded under a heat lamp to start with and fed organic (and GM-free) chick-crumb.

Ours were brooded by Betty, of course, and were quickly out free ranging and scratching for worms and grubs, but were fed 'ordinary' mass-produced (i.e. not organic) crumb. By 20 days they were very different. Anne's seemed to be 10 to 20% bigger than ours but still covered only in chick fluff. Ours were smaller but were well feathered up, with wings showing primary,secondary and covert feathers, with well feathered bodies and with tails. It is interesting to think about whether the active outdoor life has them cooler and quickly growing feathers, while the indoor, heat lamp version has them not needing feathers as quickly, so able to put all that protein to body weight. It would be good to know how the third batch are doing and under what regime.

Now, at 30 days, Betty's work seems to be done and she is rarely with them. She has rejoined the 'Lovely Girls' and possibly re-started laying eggs. We have found a couple of new eggs; we have not seen who is laying these yet but BB may well be credited with them. They now find their own way about without her, moving round as a reasonably tight group like the 8-Ball did and take themselves off to 'bed' all piling into one of my new nest boxes rather than perching with their 'Mother'.

Achillea

Time finally ran out for our unfortunate little under-developed gosling, Fotherington Thomas. He lost the use of his right leg and did not look at all like improving despite a week of enhancing his Vitamin B3 and giving him physio-therapy swims on the big pond. We culled him out yesterday and now that he has been put through the kitchen-preparation stage we think we know why. His poor little scrawny, thinly muscled body (he was only 790 g 'oven ready' at 3 months) was built on a frame with what looked like every structural mis-shape of skeleton he could have inherited from his wry-tailed Father. His whole spine and pelvis curved round to his bad side and his neck had a serious 'chicane' double-bend half way down. We are now convinced that our adult geese are a sibling group and not, as advertised, a breeding trio, so we have been guilty of extreme in-breeding, brother to sister(s). At least that is a mistake easily corrected - we will just use the eggs next year and not let anyone go broody. At some point we may swap out the gander for one from a different blood line. The three remaining goslings all look fine, so they may just be the lucky 3 out of the 17 eggs originally 'set', in the DNA lottery of life.

Our orchard, you will recall, is all very new and has only been 'in' a year with planting started in August last year with one or two year old whips and 'feather' trees. We intended only to let it all sit for the first year getting established. We were happy that it blossomed but were not expecting any great fruit crop this year, so we were not disappointed when little fruit set but the Victoria Plum down at the far end of the orchard has quietly been getting on with producing a couple of dozen good sized plums. These are now colouring up well and starting to feel a bit ripe. There will not be enough for jam, but we should get a few desserts out of them and maybe a few for the fruit bowl.

The vegetable garden continues to pump out a lovely selection of vegetables more than enough to keep us and all our guests going and to make a big dent in the freezer space. We will need to invest in a decent size chest freezer this year to cope with the lamb meat. I was out this morning picking a yellow builder bucket full of runner beans and climbing French beans. I have been digging new potatoes of varieties Foremost and Ratte which fortunately escaped the blight. I have not started yet on the double-length row of Sarpo Mira main crop but they have such healthy foliage I cannot believe there will not be a shed load of tubers underground. I am storing them dried a bit but unwashed, in paper sacks in which I buy seed-wheat.

You can see from the pictures that I am still very good for rainbow chard, flat leaved kale and black (Tuscan) kale and calabrese and my small, spring-sown globe artichokes are even producing tiny chokes (which we will probably not actually eat; we will let the plant build up strength and start on that next year). We started into the carrots for the coq-au-vin this week. I have also been making sure to succession-plant to ensure a continuing crop which is not anything I was particularly good at in Kent so that I have more peas and radishes about to start and young beans at the 'first true leaves' stage.

The Jerusalem artichoke plants are huge, towering, 8 foot 'trees' so we are hoping for some good yields there, the French beans keep on coming and the turnips, which we found way too bitter, have kept the rabbits very happy for weeks as a supplementary food and a nice change from grass and herbs. The crunchiness of the turnip roots will also have been good for their teeth.

As crops finish and we move into Autumn proper, I need to be thinking about over-winter crops like onion sets, broad beans and Spring cabbage. It's all go.

Moving up a Gear

Springtime is moving up a gear here and we have new things to discover almost with every wander round the garden. We are now regularly getting 'sworn at' by blue tits, great tits and coal tits as we move about. Our swallows are back from their migration and are now a regular sight up on our phone wires, twittering away and zooming down to inspect access to the Tígín where they successfully nested and raised 3 young last year. We have magpies nesting in the big Black Spruce tree at the top of the 'secret garden' (yellow circle) - we can hear the babies squeaking in a most un-magpie-like way when ever Mum or Dad bring them food. We know they are potential predators and would be getting shot if they'd chosen some of our neighbours trees in which to nest, but to us they are all part of the 'wildlife' we try to encourage; we just need to keep our potential new chicks safe from airborne raids.

We have seen plenty of other bird mating activity although no nest building yet, but they are welcome to the windblown dog-clippings when they find them. Here Broody Betty (left hand box) has 2 laying hens to keep her company for a while in the morning. She is almost there; this is day 17 of 21 and we are delighted with the tightness of her sitting. In theory they get off the nest at least once a day to do toilet, feeding and drinking and last year we saw plenty of that but this time Liz has only seen her off the nest once and I have not seen her off at all. We wait with eager anticipation to see how many (if any) hatch out of the 12 eggs.

In the goose department, our two ladies have now amassed 11 eggs between them but as yet there are no signs of anyone going broody. They start to pluck their own breast feathers to create the warm 'brood-patch' of bare skin, and they use the feathers to line the nest bowl. You may recall that we were worried that the birds using the same hay box might end up in conflict and we started a 2nd box but that so far this has been ignored. You can lead a horse to water.....

This morning I found one of the new eggs outside the first box, whether through bad aiming (for the box) or deliberate starting a new clutch, we do not know. I have picked this up and laid it in full view in the 2nd hay box, hoping that goose 2 might take the hint. These are very young inexperienced geese, of course, so this might all end up being a waste and we will have just dipped out on cooking with or eating the dozen eggs but, Heh, we can cope.

In the garden we are finally staring to get some new colour so the hungry, early start bumble bees will now be able to enjoy a bit more than the yellow of primroses, daffodils and dandelions. Here (above) is our orchard's first ever fruit blossom, in this case Victoria plum. The purple flower here (left) is some Perennial Wallflower just now starting into flower. We hope to have more variety established, from purchases and self seeding by next spring. This spring has been a bit of a carry over from our late start in 2012.

It's an exciting time for us. It has looked mainly green for months and we look forward to being able to see different plants and some hot colours as we come up the drive or walk about. These 'Concerto' tulips are admittedly white, but they are a start - they were grown in tubs so have gone into action faster than the orange and red ('Triumph Princess Irene' and 'Ballerina') bulbs planted straight into the keyhole bed. We are also taking care to plant plenty of bee-friendly flowers among the veg and in productive areas - nasturtiums, calendula marigolds and the like. I will keep you posted on our new delights as they happen.

The Orchard and the Cattle Fence

With a good start from the apple and pear trees from Steak Lady, we get all inspired to carry on with the orchard. We have space in the western field (and therefore space inside the as-yet-only-imaginary sheep paddock), for 4 rows of 5 trees each at 5 metre spacings, i.e. 20 trees. This is an amount of space our trees in the so called 'orchard' at Faversham could only dream of. We had crammed them in as whips and could barely give them 5 feet between trunks so that the fast growing quince and greengage quickly dominated the space and the poor cherry and damson felt very left out. Not this time. The trees here can go 2 and a half metres (8 feet or so) radius out from the trunk before the branch tips touch, so we are hoping for some good shaped big  productive trees.

So we nipped off on the Tuesday to seek out cherry, greengage and plum. We scored the GG and a 'Morel' (sour, cooking) cherry at the garden centre in Balla-D and later a sweet cherry and a Victoria plum at the one in Castlerea. They just about fit in Mum's little car if she sits in the back behind Dad and the pots go in the front passenger footwell, the top branches just inside the rear hatchback window (which we know from buying wood for building, is just over 8 feet away!)

The main issue here, says local advice (and we'd know from Dad's many failures of allotment crops this year) is water logging and drainage. Plums and "stone fruit" in particular do not like their roots to sit in the wet. Dad therefore adapted/created a special planting method which he calls the Volcanic Cone Method. You cut out a circle of turf as you would anywhere but so that this does not create a sump or pit for the rain to collect in, you dig within this effectively a raised bed for each tree. This leaves you a cone of soil with a circular moat for drainage, and the tree hole is dug into the top of the cone so that the whole thing looks like a flattened volcano cone. Dad then staked the trees against the prevailing SW winds (Atlantic Gales!) and covered the cone in black plastic sheet to both stop any weeds and also to further shed any water. So far they seem to have worked and they should (as we say talismanically about everything we plant) "get away nicely". Mum usually adds "Grow you bugger!" for good luck. Dad's comes from Geoff Hamilton's TV show Gardeners' World and Mum's from the magazine of the same show but much later when Alan Titchmarsh was in charge and writing pieces for the back pages each week.

Meanwhile our fencing guy, Paul, shows up to erect the cattle proof fence to run down the west side of our east field just outside the trees. This will stop the cattle that will rent the grazing out there from coming into the garden, onto our 'primrose lane', and out the front gate onto the road, so it was vital that we do it before Mike the Cows would entertain letting his cows in. They will come and go from our Vendor Anna L's land 'round the back' of us (to the North) through a gap which is currently fenced off. Readers will know we have already had 2 batches of cattle from the lane 'escape' into our ground and smash up the soft, soggy lawns (see picture) so that we are anxiously waiting for local forge Tully's to create our entrance gates. I will probably have to bark at them as they loom ever closer over the yard wall!

Paul turned up with posts and wire and then came back with a post whacker attached to the back of the tractor. This is a brutal and dangerous weapon, capable of whacking an 8 foot long, 10 inch diameter pointy-ended post down 4 feet into the Roscommon clay in minutes, thumping it from above. Paul tells us he has heard many stories of people losing fingers or hands, mainly those who only hire the kit once in a blue moon. Our Irish friend in Kent, Rona D tells Dad they are known locally as the 'Widow Maker'. Anyway, Paul used it and came out unscathed and we have a lovely taut fence running 83 yards down the field and into the ditch, secured by three strands of green-coated barbed wire. That should keep Felix and his ladies and the children out.