Then I'll Do It Myself (Said the Little Red Hen...)

...and she did!

As sick as a dog. Deefer on Thursday

Poor Deefer was not well. She was, literally, as sick as a dog. She did not have a good night on Wednesday, nor a particularly good day Thursday. I'm not 100% sure why. I suspect she reacted badly to a cooked roast-pork bone, a chunk of shoulder blade I gave her as a 'treat'. RAW pork bones are their absolute favourite food and have only good, positive effects but this may not be true of the cooked version. As we went to bed, I could tell she was not comfortable, restless, sometimes panting. By 5 o'clock she was 'telling me' she needed to go outside.

Oh Dear Oh Dear. Not happy. 

That walk round finding coat, wellies, dog-leads etc showed me that she had actually been up several times in the night and done an impressive collection of squitty poos and sicks. In 15 minutes or so outside she unloaded a bit more but then seemed brighter, so we all went back to bed. We repeated this at 6 and she continued to improve. She had a fairly 'moopy' day spending most of it just looking sad and sometimes shivering. She just wanted lots of cuddles and declined all food, treats and did not want the daily walk at midday, so I let her off. By evening she was almost back to normal, ate her supper (though not with the usual hoovering gusto) and we all got a nice long night's sleep.

A good haul of beer cans and food packaging
for an hour walking with my litter-picker.
There was even a dumped CD player. 

While I'm on dog walking, I will ask you to bear with me while I have a rare moan. Fly tipping and jettisoning rubbish from your car as you drive along. I was almost certainly deluded and naive when I was planning to move to Ireland, but in my head I had conflated the known respect the Irish have for children/parenting with the '40 shades of green' thing and calculated that the Irish must be much 'greener' and environmentally aware than are we Brits. Foolish Boy! I was quite disappointed when I arrived and started exploring and found that the locals are just as bad as the Brits for tossing beer cans, fag packets, dead CD players and food packaging out of cars as they drive along.

Back in the goose egg game.

There is no equivalent here of the council guy sent out to pick up litter with his Hi-Viz jacket and his neat little row of filled bags along the verge waiting for the lorry-crew to round them up. Tidying up here is all done by volunteers working with the appropriately named "Tidy Towns" group - the local equivalent of the "Village of the Year" thing we were part of in Kent. Tidy Towns do a brilliant and much appreciated job but they mainly do it around the village and they only do it (understandably) in Summer. If you want it doing out here in the 'sticks' and in Winter then you're on your own. I will do it myself, said the little red hen... and she did.

And I do. The locals may see me as a weirdo-eccentric (though a couple have stopped to chat, empathised with my annoyance at those who litter and complimented me) but I just decided one day that this would be one way of giving something back to the area and the environment. I usually wait till just after the verges are mowed so that I can see the stuff lying in the grass but this most recent time was because I was particularly aggrieved by a bigger-than normal dump of a dozen cans and a shopping bag containing glass bottles (broken by now, of course).

This goose may have been interrupted in her egg-making.
An egg and a bit?

I will draw a veil over the fact that these were cans of alcoholic drinks lobbed out of a moving car. Other piles have been of children's orange drink sachets with straws, so I would guess dumped by a family outing with parents present. Hey ho. At least for a short while you can now drive down our lane and admire the 40 shades of green verges and lack of shiny, colourful cans and Coke bottles.

A chicken having a re-think? 'Herme'

Finally and while I am still on red hens, we have a strange tale to tell of odd sexual happenings among the chooks. In short, one of our Buff Orpington hens seems to be having a re-think and turning into a rooster. Friends of the Blog will know that we recently offed our #1 rooster for being aggressive to humans and were left, we thought, with our newest Marans lad, Gandalf. So far so good though we believe, now looking back on it, that one of the buff hens has looked 'different' enough to have been described by us as "the one with the long neck" or the bright cape.

The ducklings discover the paddling pool. 

So this morning I noticed that this particular bird was chasing one of the paler girls about and this afternoon 'she' surprised Liz by jumping onto a hen and "treading" her like a rooster would. We are now seeing 'her' in a new light and can see that 'she' does indeed walk taller than a hen. She also has a bigger, brighter cape and a medium-big red 'face' (comb, wattles) but from thorax down 'she' is still a hen - little feet with no spurs, stumpy hen-tail, no big fluffy rooster 'pantaloons'.

So, what have we here? A very slow, late developer? She was hatched in spring 2016. Her clutch-mates and brothers have long since matured/differentiated into roosters and gone down that route (culled by me or killed by the fox). Google and 'book-learning' give you three possible other explanations which are rare enough to have me shying away from 'claiming' them - proper 'hermaphroditism' where the sexual differentiation gets muddled and the bird is neither one thing nor another, 'gynandromorhism' where the bird is 50/50, sometimes 'sided', where the left half of the bird is fully male and the right side female (these are usually sterile) or, thirdly showing "spontaneous sexual reversal (SSR)". In SSR, the left ovary gets damaged and stops producing oestrogen, so the bird changes sex. So far so rare and so weird.

Our 'weirdo' has been named 'Herme' by Liz because he/she may be hermaphrodite and we'll just keep an eye on him/her. If he/she turns into a full active rooster, then all well and good as long as he stays off the human-aggression malarkey. If the preferred route is to stay 'Little Red Hen' then we can do that too. Watch this space.

'Plane' Sailing

No, not a spelling mistake, this really was an aircraft (a Boeing 767 no less) taking a trip by sea up the West coast of Ireland from Shannon all round Galway and Mayo to end up in Enniscrone on the N coast of Sligo. Only in Ireland I suspect. The story caught the imagination of the social media (the Twitter feed was tagged as #planesailing) and then National radio and we just lapped it up.

Blue the Cat rolling about on the roof of the car.

Businessman David McGowan is mainly an undertaker but in a big way (runs training courses for other undertakers etc) but is your essentially eccentric entrepreneur and turns his hand to anything and has a very amusing and love-able way about him in radio interviews. He has started a transport based 'posh' camping site (glamorous camping = glamping) and already had a load of taxis, buses and other vehicles in there but he needed a focal point. A plane! Why not? Hunting about he found a de-commissioned Russian 767 at Shannon airport and was not put off by not getting permission to move it by road; he spent €25,000 or so hiring cranes and a barge and took it out of Sligo airport "via the back door".

The apple trees are LOADED with blossom
this year.

I think he had the whole country rooting for him in the end and following the every move of barges, tugs, tides and winds. Even the weather man co-operated and only a heavy swell in Killala Bay held him up for 12 hours trying to land the barge on the beach. The plane is now safely delivered to the glamping site and the media circus has moved on but I don't suppose David McGowan was that upset by the massive publicity. Fair play to him!

Scorchio

As ever, much more parochial here. We have been blessed by a succession of scorching hot, blue sky days which have brought out the fruit blossom in bounty and the bees have been having a field day pollinating them. OK, this is Roscommon, so it has only been up to about 21ºC but we are not used to it here and we wilt in heaps and stop working for a good siesta, sit by the pond and watch the blue sky.

Whole leg of Tamworth, salt cured then air dried for 8 months

Even slower at its 'work' (tenuous Radio 4 style link there!) has been our first attempt at 'Parma' ham. You may recall that we 'saved' this whole leg of Tamworth pig when we butchered our pair of gilts at the end of August 2015. We smothered it in a spicy salt-cure for 3 weeks, regularly replacing the salt and draining off the brine that the salt "sucked" out of the meat.

Salt cured air dried ham. 8 months in the making.

We then wrapped it in a purpose built muslin bag made by Liz and hung it up in the spare room (all the heating turned off and window vents open); our "cool dry place" for 8 months round till now. Well, this week, curiosity got the better of us and we interpreted the instruction to "hang it for 4-12 months" as 8 months. We took it down, unbagged it, scrubbed the (allowed) minor mould off the outside with vinegar, then cut away the surface skin and fat. We were delighted - it is lovely! It smells sweet and sound and tastes perfect. As an added bonus we have eaten some and NOT got food poisoning or died in the night, so we guess it is a success.

The ever-more adventurous ducks at 6 weeks.

In '365' project land we have a new mini sub-project. Next week is "Bio-Diversity Week" and the village is submitting an entry in the national "Tidy Towns" competition as their environmental category. This is, of course, right up our street and we were heavily involved in our Kent days in the local equivalent "Calor Gas Village of the Year", even judging. We have both offered our services and been to a meeting discussing the 'Action Plan' but for now we are just asked to do website stuff and to gear the 365 photos that week to flora and fauna. No problem. Happy to oblige.

5 of the ducks have a bath. The 6th, for some reason, sits this
one out under the honeysuckle top left.

On fauna, a little hiccup in the local pollination department. Our good friend T McC who keeps bees one ridge away in a neighbouring townland has 5 hives and was steaming along in his bee keeping work, pushing way ahead of our beginner-ish efforts. However, last Autumn he was hit by that problem all bee keepers fear, a bad allergic reaction to a sting. He suffered mild anaphyllactic shock and as he was on his own, called an ambulance.

One of my girls on apple blossom. 

In fact he had started to recover by the time the paramedics arrived so he spent the winter wondering whether to give up the bee keeping and getting medical tests done, gearing up with tablets and an 'epi-pen' (epinephrine auto-injector). He hoped to be able to start back into it this Spring at his first hive inspections, with me as stand-by / back-up able to summon an ambulance if it all went a bit pear-shaped again. Well, his bees jumped the gun on him today and he got stung while he was just wandering in the garden and came over all woozy again. He decided that this was too risky and too silly and that this would be the end to his bee keeping. He is going to disperse the hives to good homes and sell off his mountain of brand new, unused equipment to friends in the game. The silver lining on poor T's cloud for us is that I have put in a bid for one of his colonies and he is happy for me to buy this and then to give him 'visiting rights' and the odd jar of local honey.

The new poults are also fully feathered at 7 weeks.

Watch this space for our adventure collecting this colony soon. T McC is not strictly speaking far enough away from us - some of the bees out exploring from our hive site may come across bits of 'map' that they recognise from their old missions and follow the old 'roads' home to T's place, but we hope not too many and, anyway, 'summer' bees only live 6 weeks so pretty soon the hive will be full of new workers born and hatched here, who have never seen T's place. Sympathies, T McC. We'll miss you bee keeping and our mutual cross-support at inspections and manipulations.

Jam and Jerusalem

18 days in and we are still very much enjoying (and being amazed by) this lovely dry spell and we are getting as much outdoor time in as we can while it lasts. The current forecast from "Wet Éireann" (as it was becoming called, really it is 'Met Éireann', of course, the Irish Met Office) is that the rain returns on Wednesday but we can't complain now for a while - we've had the best innings ever for a Feb/March nearly-three-week spell.

My first 2 pics here show a before and after of the old compost site mentioned in a previous post. You can see what I mean about the rather unsightly and rushed construction based around an old fence line and loaded with compost more as a way of suppressing nettles and brambles than anything else. The triumph of hope over experience? When did you ever manage to kill nettles by piling 'rubbish' on top of them?

With the compost moved you can see that the space has now been leveled for use as a flower bed and is, in fact, already planted with some Crocosmia (Lucifer) which we had bought in Lidl's. The third pic shows the neater new arrangement. The 'good stuff' is held in behind the wooden paling fence and the nettle-y rubbish, now buried under some rabbit cleanings, held in by corrugated sheet. The chickens are on hand, as ever, to inspect. They loved it - all those worms! Our friend and Mentor, Anne actually grows worms in wormeries as a source of vital trace elements and key base proteins for their (many!) hens and estimate that each hen needs only 7 worms a day to meet that need. Anne was in that business (organic eggs) in a 'former life' and has all the scientific knowledge backing it up. On that basis, our hungry worm-guzzlers have had about a month's worth.

Along the outer edge of our Kitchen Garden we have created a row of currant and berry bushes which we hope will grow to form an edible hedge. I have seen this done before in Kent while judging the Environmental Action category of the Calor Gas "Village of the Year" competition where the team making it happen called it their Jam and Chutney Hedge. They had damsons, gooseberries, currant bushes and more in theirs. We do not have damsons in ours but the name still fits except that we started jokingly calling it the 'Jam and Jerusalem' Hedge and that name has now stuck.

So far this 'hedge' has been a bit of a piece-meal affair with the bushes going in at roughly the correct spacing as and when we bought or were given them. Liz today decided that this needed to be a proper 'project' and the line of the hedge should be more formally marked out with stones and weeded. She's been getting on with that, barrowing weeds round to the new composts, robbing stones from up the left side of the hay-barn and gathering good topsoil from the hay-rake bank. With this area being still on the flat and not yet a raised bed, it has been a damp job even after the days without rain.

Our main weeds in there are creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) and good ol' couch grass, neither of which will happily let go the soil around their roots when damp. By comparison, I have been weeding around my allotment raised beds and I am delighted to find that the soil there has dried nicely enough to crumb up easily at the touch of a shuffle-hoe, and to fall easily off the buttercup, dock, annual grasses and nettles which are 'my' main weeds. It is pure joy weeding down there. We look up occasionally or call 'Coffee?' across the orchard to one another, and then meet up at the chairs by the nearly-pond to chat and sup in the warm sunshine.

Toad

Apologies, but it seemed like ages since I'd last posted and indeed it proved to be. First time I'd gone more than a week without getting the itch. It's been so busy round here, there's been little time for posting and , yikes, we've even missed a couple of walks where Dad was home so late.

I must introduce you, though, to a new chum, name of "Toad". He's a charcoal grey pug and a young chap. Suitable name, I guess, given his dark and ...um.... not that handsome look, but he's game for a bit of charging about. At least we think he's a pug, we didn't ask. Dad was too busy teasing the young lady owner because we'd started out assuming from the red diamante studded harness and pink extending reel lead that he was a she.

"No need to ask whether this is a girl or a boy" says Dad, and then has to retreat in confusion. The owner , though is not offended and enjoys the joke hugely, carrying on the theme by saying that the lead is girlie pink because she is a girlie girl, and he (Toad) is a real Momma's boy.

Busy and about to get busier as Mum and Dad come into the judging season - both for Gardens-for-Wildlife (for Kent Wildlife Trust) and the "Sustainability" (nee "Environmental Action") category for the Calor Gas Village of the Year Competition. With lots of gardens and villages to do between now and mid July, there will be precious few free evenings or weekend days over the next few weeks.

Have a good weekend
Deefer

Thomas

Mum and Dad have finally finished the Village of the Year judging tonight, finishing on fine form with the very impressive efforts of one village (no names, no pack drill) in wrestling back their local chunk of ancient forest from industrial-scale fly-tipping, herberts on quad bikes, 4-wheel-drive nuts and trials riders.

Dad is slightly ashamed to admit that he may now be a holier-than-thou judge, but was once that mildly irresponsible Land Rover nut, member of the All-Wheel-Drive-Club (AWDC) and keen "Green-Laner". OK he was never that brave, and never had all the knobbly tyres and winch equipment that the serious boys have (Just good old Dunlop Town and Countries), so he used to stick to the easy, dry-ish stuff, but he did like a chunk of off-roading, so got tarred with the same brush as the "ripping through the sphagnum bogs" brigade.

They are walked round the village by the main-lady (Vanessa) and her goldie "Thomas", and shown the chalk grassland, the restored paths, the new coppicing, the 4WD-proof gates, the signage, the orchid meadows, the areas that used to be piled with 100 tonnes of tyres, builders rubble, burned out cars etc, the 400-year-old rights of way, the kissing gates and new fencing, the bridle ways re-built by the Royal Engineers, the planters full of drough-resistant plants and on and on and on.

There's still time though, for a walk for us, up round the allotment where Dad has to give the newly planted yam-slips a second settle-in watering. There are a bit of fun. Really a tropical plant, you can just about get away with them in Kent if you get them as cuttings (slips) in June, keep them warm, and then plant them out and keep watering through the hot waether. They are related to the bind-weed (Convulvulus) and that's exactly what they look like at present - little spirals of bindweed seedlings just emerging, only with stems a bit thicker than the UK weed version.

Deefski