A Lucky Rooster

Puff balls

"At last!", I hear you cry, "A post devoid of Doctors, health, hospitals and medical stuff...... well except for here in this first sentence, anyway". September now, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and all thoughts turn to small-holder-ing, harvests and preparing for the Winter. Here that means a variety of meats - duck, chicken and pigs at the moment, plenty of fruit (mainly plums and apples), veg obviously and then. always taking us a bit by surprise, the puffball "pop-up-crop" out on the old muck heap behind the goose house.

Lamb shoulder cooked over a bed of veg which included
our puff balls. 

I spotted 2 nice new puff balls this time around and their delicious mushroominess has enhanced a number of dishes. Elizabeth included them in a lovely mushroom tortilla. I had a try at just cutting one into chips, and frying-pan frying them as part of breakfast, which was delicious, but the Main Chef used them as part of the bed of veg's under a roast lamb shoulder. This made for some delicious 'veg' to accompany the meat first time round, but then enhanced a superb shepherd's pie made with the left overs. Obviously you need to catch them young - don't wait till they are just a thin-skinned bag of dark green 'puffy' spores!

Plum jam. Needs another boil to improve the 'set'.

It has been a very good year for plums. All the heat wave weather ensured a good blossom and fruit set and the plums seemed to all survive the drought, unlike the cherries, quinces and pears which suffered a serious "June Drop". We picked a good 6 kg yesterday and I made 3 kg into plum jam.

Only a few figs this year but it is a very small and young tree.

This morning, though, I am not impressed by the set. I am never very good at setting jam; I never seem to boil it long or hard enough. This batch will go back into the big saucepan when I get the chance, for another good hour of rolling boil and reduction. It has also been a good year for apples but we are not so mad keen for apples in this house, so the pigs have been enjoying the lion's share of our Katy and Red Windsor bounty. Other varieties are more interesting but, this year, a lot lower cropping - 'Irish Peach', Egremont Russet, Braeburn, James Grieves and Bramley, plus cider apples Camelot, Dunkerton Early and Dabinet.

The 'bonhams' enjoying a water melon treat. There is nothing like
water melon for  shlurpy, juice-flying-everywhere, pig-saliva,
lip-smacking show of deliciousness. Happy pigs.

In the Meat Department we have now declared the two boy-pigs (bonhams) "ready". They have caught up well on the late Sister. I have booked them in to the butcher in town for Weds week (12th). That means we just have to do all that trailer-familiarisation malarkey on the Monday and Tuesday, but these guys already know the trailer from when we were doing it with their 'big sister' (Daisy - see earlier post). We will collect the carcasses on the following Monday (19th) to give them a chance to 'set' in Webb's cold store.

A nice clean drake carcass.

Meanwhile, our new ducks have now made their decisions on whether to be ducks or drakes and, unfortunately for them, the 5 babies proved to be 3 drakes and 2 females. This gave us a way out of balance ratio in the 'flock' (do ducks have 'flocks'?) of 4 males to 3 females. We need to 'off' all three of the new drakes to restore the balance, especially as any matings would almost certainly be brother x sister in-breedings. We will then be left with the Khaki Campbell as our drake. He is definitely NOT related to the ladies - he is a different variety.

Let a wet dog on your lap and they will autograph your knee.

The original Mum and 2 daughters will be our egg layers come next Spring. It's a shame that in Appleyards, as in the original mallards, the boys are the pretty and colourful ones. The females tend to be brown and flecked, well camouflaged, but can have a bit of white on their chests. So it goes.

The chickens, of course, have the same problem. Regular readers will know that we run here with a hen to rooster ratio of between 7:1 and 12:1 which gives us good cover (fertility) in the eggs but avoids any unwelcome harassment and rape. Sadly, like most species, baby chicks hatch as roosters and hens on a 50/50 basis; way too many boys. The day someone develops a chicken variety that yields 1:7 someone will make a lot of money.

This 'spare' rooster got lucky

We are, as you know, over-run with 2018 hatch birds, a lot of which hatched around May, so they will be coming to "point of lay" (or not!) between now and Chri***as. We start to see the signs as young poults start to square up to one another, flaring their little baby 'capes' and bowing their heads. This can be from very young ages - 6 weeks even. There is no market for them as roosters, especially the mongrel cross breeds we produce.

The ducks playing on the pond. Much quacking, zooming about
swimming under water like penguins and splashing. 

Normally these guys get 'offed' before they start to cause a problem, but one here at the moment has got lucky. Our archery friends, Con and Niamh have just had their rooster and a couple of hens taken by the fox. The rooster was taken right outside the kitchen window - Niamh saw him bite through the poor fella's neck and then carry him off, limp, before she could get out there.

Sad slew of feathers. All you get to tell
you Brer Fox has been.

We thought our own fox might be leaving us alone - he'd not been (as far as we knew) for several weeks. But 2 days ago, he came by just before 9 o'clock in the morning to invite a Buff Orpington hen to breakfast. My bad. I was downstairs and had just shut the dogs up for yapping at a magpie, lest they wake up Elizabeth. When they started yapping again I assumed it was just more magpie and did not respond properly. The fox had come onto the front lawn in bright sunshine and snatched a hen from the flock out there. Elizabeth spotted the sad slew of feathers on the lawn and a couple more where Foxy had adjusted his grip on his way out through fences etc.

Leaf fall.

Meanwhile, we are now set up for a few visits. The first, today, was by Mum-in-Law (Steak Lady on here) accompanied by her friend/neighbour/minder/factotum, Michelle. MiL had recently broken her wrist and had had it in plaster, so no driving for her. The plaster cast is now off but this would be a first chance for MiL to show off our place (largely built by her son, 'Sparks', of course!) to Michelle and also for them to check up on my recovery. We would catch up on the chat over tea, enjoy a bit of lunch, and then the ladies were off for an afternoon at the lovely Strokestown House (The house, the National Famine Museum and a lovely old walled garden).

Lovely poster from Michelle.

They came (as they say) bearing gifts including a very thoughtful and generous present from Michelle. She has a friend in the printing business and she had had him make up a couple of posters from the newspaper article which featured our garden back in December 2017. See also my previous post on

https://deefer-dawg.blogspot.com/2017/12/too-much-bio-diversity.html

The poster had the article in the middle, surrounded by some more recent pictures extracted from this blog. We are very grateful and delighted. The ladies even brought a poster-frame for the item. We are spoiled.

Geese and their reflections

Tomorrow, it is the turn of  'The Dans' (Dan and Danielle), long term Friends of the Blog. Cousin Danielle, in particular, was deeply distressed (well... OK) that I had sneakily gone sick without very quickly calling on them to come and help, and they have been meaning to get over and support us ever since. We really have the best and most generous friends.  More of that visit in the next post.

All for now. Good Luck.

Winter's back

Winter returns good and proper with an honest blizzard whiting out the sky, laying on roads and dropping a 3-4 inch picturesque blanket all over the town in the space of about 45 minutes. Dad's had to work this morning (it's "that" weekend, just before Christmas) but he's home again before the snow starts. He actually texts Mum telling her to hurry home before she gets cut off, which is not the normal way round.

Rather madly, though, he then decides we should all go for a walk in it down to the boat yard. I love it, and charge about like a lunatic. Haggis is not quite so sure, and starts to look a bit miserable as the frozen snowy klingons start to build up round his feet. Dad has to continuously break them away to give him a chance to walk. It's proper big-flake, sticky, snow-man snow.

Back home we have to be freed of the klingons and this involves a good bit of hand-crumbling, raking with the coarse comb, and finally dipping our feet in a washing-up bowl of warm water; finally we are passed in to Mum who is armed with a huge dog-towel and a roaring coal fire. It's all Christmassy indoors as Mum is 'baking' (none of us is sure that's the right word) the red cabbage. We were going to buy the tree today, but the prospect of choosing one from under 4 inches of snow and bringting it home, shaking all the snow off into one of the cars, was too unattractive. We will go out tomorrow all being well. We are running out of time. Only 7 more sleeps!

But let's not forget a bit of a bitter-sweet memorial day which was yesterday, the one year anniversary of the passing away of our old chum Megan. It snowed all around the 17th and 18th last year too. Dad has her cute face as his screen-wallpaper. We miss her still and she was Dad's first ever owned dog so she'll always be a bit special.

Ah well

Deefski

Here to serve

Winter's suddenly seriously here, with proper frosts and North Winds. This unfortunately coincides with Mum's car's heater deciding to stop working, so her car is frozen inside as well as out today and she's scrabbling around (getting nice and warm) trying to defrost the car, and then trying to get into the 2CV. She did, though, find time to take this rather good pic of a rose in the back garden.

Dad gets in stores of coal and logs. We already have a stock of old newspapers, and a good supply of old house-structure wood for kindling after the Panini brothers had done their stuff.

Dad feels like he's "here to serve" today, racing between various sites for work and then at lunchtime it's works Christmas Dinner in the canteen, and the Managers traditionally serve the colleagues at these do's. So Dad and his fellow Managers get a taste of "waitering" dressed in obligatory silly hats, setting out festive settings and scurrying between tables and food-prep areas with trays of food, plates, glasses of (soft) drinks while three sittings of guys and gals get processed through between about half 11 and 2pm. He takes his hat off to anyone who has done this for a living.

Tonight, more "servitude", representing the views of the allotments tennants as the local Town Council starts to negotiate taking back control of allotment running from the wider Borough Council. We await with interest what that will bring.

Deefski

In the bleak mid Winter

My but it's cold these mornings. OK, not really by European or any other standards - just compared to what we've been used to. Minus 4 this morning and thick fog. Ponds and butts all frozen over but, as I said, probably no more than a centimetre thick, and the soil probably still dig-able.

We have been living off an ENORMOUS chicken, Mum got from our internet shopping provider. She said "large" but didn't necessarily expect this ostrich to turn up. The humans seem to have eaten meals off it for days - and Mum has created a huge quantity of stock. That means, as any dog will tell you, that there is a goodly pile of skeleton bits (avoiding the hollow, shatter-able long bones of course) - spine, pelvis, rib cage, "hands", Parson's nose etc and the supply of dog treats here actually ran out, so we had to "slum" it with bits of chook!

Life's tough sometimes, isn't it?

:-))
Deefer