Sonja and Asbjörn

Happy Birthday Deefer, 12 years old on Monday. She's only 7
in this 'memory' picture dredged up by Facebook. Many more years
old lass.

Welcome aboard, then, our 2 latest Help-X volunteers, a German couple in their early 30s, Sonja and Asbjörn, much travelled back-packers with experience of Help-X-ing in Iceland and New Zealand as well as closer to home. He a trained chef and she a pastry chef. Very welcome, in fact, after we'd thought that Help-X was all done with the August blow-out French lad. These two are excellent, capable, workers as well as happy, friendly and relaxed - easy company and a joy to host.

Sonja clears an old spent strawberry bed.

I collected them at 7 pm from the bus stop in Castlerea. Dead easy to find, of course. Castlerea bus stop does not have that many young back packers getting off buses at 7 o'clock on Saturday and I already knew my man (Asbjörn) sported a magnificent gingery beard from their Help-X website "advert". They had been hiking and back packing around and were looking forward to some days based at a single place, where they did not have to pack everything, tent included, each morning and move on.

Asbjörn bones out a pork leg.

We fed them a soup and cold buffet supper and told them tomorrow (Sunday) was a rest day, so they were not to set any alarms or come down stairs suited and booted at silly o'clock. Monday was also going to be a bit weird but time enough to start proper routine work on the Tuesday. Elizabeth and I were off to Sligo on the Monday for me to have another chest X-ray, then dropping down to the pork butcher (Webb's) in Castlerea to collect our pig carcasses. So I showed Sonja the 'livestock rounds' on the Sunday, so that we could leave at 08:30 with the birds safe from Brer Fox, and the Help-X-ers could get up at their leisure and feed and release the birds.

A car full of pig

These guys are both trained cooks but had not, before, had to deal with a whole pig carcass. Sonja was not keen, and opted to go to work in the kitchen garden, clearing an old strawberry bed and weeding a newer one, but Asbjörn fancied a try at the butchery which is way 'upstream' from his normal experience. Brilliant for me, still on 'light duties', and good for the Lady of the House too, as this freed her up to onward process the heads, hearts, livers, tails, ears and so on into excellent brawns, patés, dog-treats and there was even talk of brains soaking in milk (I avert my eyes at that level of offal).

Splitting a pig head for the brawn.

With me 'training' him and his dexterity with knives and the bone saw, we soon had each half carcass reduced to lumps that he would be familiar with, and then there was no stopping him 'running with it' into areas we have not yet explored here. He was soon boning out the 'H' bones (pelvic bits) at the top of my 'Parma' ham legs, completely boning out other legs, rolling and tying them, extracting good looking boneless pork 'steaks' from the shoulder meat and so on. A master-class in food prep. I was just able to take it easy bagging and labelling the cuts for the freezer. I just need to salt down my 'Parma' ham legs and we are all done, all safely gathered in.

Boned, rolled and tied leg.

As I said, while we all played 'pig' indoors, Sonja was working her way down the 5 big 8 x 4 foot railway sleeper beds to brilliant effect, weeding, clearing old, spent, strawberry plants, cropping where appropriate (carrots, spuds, broad-beans-for-seed), teasing out the few volunteer spuds from among the new asparagus "spiders" - a delicate job because of the shallow, horizontal roots on those bad boys.

Cheek meat

Into work proper on the Tuesday and Sonja and Asbjörn prove to be those kind of workers who get stuck in, don't really want to stop for coffee and then carry on after lunch "just to finish off this....." We are delighted. They clean all the pig-poo out of the trailer, and clean the big 1010 litre water butt (IBC) inside and out. Asbjörn then starts chopping a big heap of fencing pales into kindling, while Sonja starts clearing the poly tunnel of volunteer spuds and an enormous fennel plant. The spuds prove to be quite a significant crop with some enormous ones - 600 grammes plus.

600+ gramme spuds. Volunteers from the tunnel.

Other than the work, the couple have settled in well and are much enjoying our food and hospitality. They are proving to be very helpful about the place. They have also introduced us to a fun, 6-dice counting game belovéd of back packers (because the whole game only weighs six dice!), called 'TenThousand'. The scoring rules are good and complicated and the skill is in 'gambling' whether to 'bank' your points or risk rolling some dice again and losing those points. Entertaining.

So, as I write this it is only 10:30 a.m. and I am hunkered down indoors waiting for the worst teeth of Storm Ali to blast their way through. Not the worst ever storm we have had here but plenty of bluster in the trees and some 'apocalyptic' rain squalls. I had delayed letting the birds all out and even held the dogs in for a while, lest they get soaked.

Brawn

Further down in the 'midlands' the biggest agricultural show in the Universe (The Ploughing Championships 2018) is due to start today but it is, like a lot of these shows, really a massive city of tents, gazebos, marquees and other guy-roped canvas. The organisers have taken advice from Met Éireann and postponed the start while the wind dies down (this morning) lest they garrote or bury anyone under airborne tent-age.

Ah well. Enough for this one. Good luck surviving Storm Ali.

Daisy Cutters

Cat Basket Lady with 3 of her 4 chicks

Friends of the Blog may recall that we are now down to our last broody birds at what will probably be the end of this year's breeding season. The last indoor bird, Cat Basket Lady, came off the nest this week with her 4 successful hatches, 3 yellow and one black. She is now well into the "teaching them to be chickens" phase and we see her all around the site, the yard and the grass.

A lovely vegetarian Mex spread for one
 of the suppers

That leaves us with just 2 birds AWOL who we hope are out there somewhere, hidden up in the hedges, sitting on eggs and trying not to be eaten by the fox. One is the Guinea hen who went "off piste" 5 days before I came out of hospital. If she's still out there, that makes her due in a week and a half. Just maybe she will shepherd any successful babies ("keets") home to us and delight us (and her 3 patient 'husbands') one day.

We passed our NCT (= MOT) and I was delighted to be reminded
that this car is still not 10 years old, so NCTs are only every OTHER
year. Expires 2020.

Also out there but not quite so promising is a white hen we call Connie. As of now she has been out there way too long, her eggs will be well past it and we also have a mini-tragedy in her motherhood career.

2 nice steaks made a change to the diet of vegetarian food.

Last week, one morning, when I was the only one up, a commotion of geese in the yard called me running, thinking we had a fox. The Guineas were screaming and I let the dogs go to do their thing. Well, there was no fox, but as the geese moved off I saw a sad, lemon-yellow fluff-ball lying in the yard where they'd been. I also noticed that Connie the hen, AWOL for 3 weeks or so, was back in the yard and chuntering in an upset way.

Daisy the Pig as back seat passenger.

The fluff turned out to be a very new, but dead hen-chick, so my best guess at what had happened was this. Connie had come off her AWOL nest with a single successful chick, but then led it into the yard and way too close to the goslings. The geese would not have tolerated that and quickly killed it. Poor Connie. She stuck around for the morning, chuntering, and then disappeared AWOL again. She may have gone back to the nest to try some more, but the eggs will have been badly chilled in the interim, and she will almost certainly fail, get bored and return to us. If the fox does not find her first.

Have new OSB apron. I'm going in!

The Help-X lasses have gone a-touristing, a train journey to Westport yesterday and then a bus trip out to very popular tourist destination Achill Island, to stay overnight and return tonight (Fri). One of them is a vegetarian and we have been exploring the veggie repertoire out of solidarity with her but, 2-3 weeks in we were starting to crave meat. With the girls off site, it was the perfect opportunity to have steak and chips. Also, by happy chance, it was also the day we collected the pig carcass from town, so we would have a chance to butcher that up without inadvertently upsetting anyone, and squirrel it away in the freezer, out of sight.

The new pork-butcher extricates a sheet of ribs

We had a thoroughly enjoyable time at the cutting. With me being still restricted to 'light duties', we did this one on a 50/50 basis, Elizabeth doing her sawing and knife work while I took a breather and advised her. This was her first pig. It was great teamwork and we had the whole pig (Daisy) cut up in about an hour and a half. That is now wrapped, bagged, labelled and in the freezer. All except for a huge 'ham' joint which we will brine up and keep for Christmas.

Hubble bubble boil and....... The split head gets boiled down.

We also got back the heart, liver, the head (split) for brawn, and a bonus couple of trays of sausage rolls. This morning The Woman of the House took on the boiled head and has produced some rather lovely looking brawn (low salt, by all accounts, for the sake of the 'heart patient'), a rillette made from a pot of neck meat so tender and light looking it might be crab meat, and a stock so rich it sets as jelly when cool. The dogs will get the ears and tail roasted and chopped up as treats, the chickens get a few gribbly bits and we only threw away the skull bones.

A good size ham joint waiting for its fancy spiced brine to cool.

We are now coming to then end of our little time with these Help-X-ers, Emma and Flora. They are home again tonight from Achill, then around for Saturday (we will not make them work!) but on to a train or bus on Sunday morning bound for Sligo and their next 'placement'. On the Monday we take delivery of our next Help-X, a lad this time, Rafael, another Frenchman.

Cuts of Daisy the Pig

He is with us for 3 weeks and by another happy coincidence we may be replacing that chicken house roof. Builder friend K-Dub has us booked in for the 13th and has come to measure up and given me a list of timber and materials to buy in the interim. With me 'Tom-Dick', I was worried I'd not be able to help, passing timbers and sheets of corrugated up to K-Dub up his ladder, but with new guy Rafael here we should be well manned up. That poor 'house' has been under its "temporary" tarpaulin roof for 18 months now and I'd be very worried asking the tarp to survive another winter.

Butcher's bonus. A gift of sausage rolls.

Enough for this one. Good luck now.

Multiple Pork Products

Apple shredder designed and built by woodwork
genius, K-Dub. Photo by Carolyn. 

In the last post, I described a hand-made cider apple shredding device but had no photo with which to 'paint a thousand words'. Here to put that right is the said weapon. The drum is spinning at a fair rate here so the exposed screw heads are a blur and the wooden rolling pin used to hold the more uncooperative apples down on it is also moving. I hope you can work it out.

A car load of carcasses.

We also left the 'late' pigs down at the butcher's cooling and 'setting', hanging in his cold store. This post will show that we have been very busy ever since and not stopped with the pork products thing, till now.

AB looking the part with his ADL "Cooking
up a Storm" apron and a tea-towel over his
shoulder.

AB and I collected the meat on Thursday morning while Liz stayed home to prepare the work surfaces, for which read Dining Table and chopping boards, and to get ready the pile of plastic bags and the labelling 'Sharpie'. We use an excellent You Tube self-videoing butcher from Warwickshire for our 'how to' information. Scott Rea of the @ScottReaProject is worth a look see if you are contemplating doing any butchery or making of pork products like 'brawn' (a.k.a. 'head-cheese' ).

This is very early stages, Whipping
out the "caul fat" which lines the
abdomen and is superb for suet crusts.

Amusingly at one stage Liz was in the kitchen watching the Scott Rea on brawn while I was ensconced in the Dining Room watching the 'whole pig' one. Scott would be proud of us! 

Coo. Mind your fingers there cutting out that sheet of ribs. 

So AB and I set to with the cutting with me letting him have a go on a 'monkey see, monkey do' basis. He was quickly whipping out tenderloin fillets and sheet ribs like a pro, sawing through the spine to separate out racks of chops and generally enjoying breaking those halves down into 'primal' cuts and then freeze-able portions (quarter shoulders etc). 

Slicing up some bellies.

Finished joints were landing on the table only to be rapidly bagged and labelled for the freezer. Occasionally we called Liz in to choose cuts (chops separate or in racks? shoulder in 4 quarters? ribs in sheets or separated? etc) It was a real team effort. It took around 30 to 45 minutes per half which reassured me that we were right to not spend the €50 per pig on having them cut up at the shop. We are also able to cut the chops nice and thick (basically one chop per spinal vertebra and rib), which the shop lads, with their band saws, do not do. They zip through the 'rack' every couple of cm and the saw goes diagonally through several ribs, so you get more, thinner chops but lots of sharp, diamond-shape bones in them.

First fruits. Liz sorted out some small
 cutlets of the new pork to go with our
lunch of left over pie and eggs. Delicious!

By lunchtime we were done on 'our' three halves, though Liz had another full afternoon and some of the next day onwardly processing the other bits. There was liver to make into paté. She was also doing a 'rillette' ('pulled' pork preserved in soft pig fat, lovely to spread on bread!) and, with those 2 split heads, 4 lovely big tubs of brawn. AB and I had a chance for a breather before heading down to a friend's house to deliver their half carcass and to butcher it up for them at their place.

Clockwise from top left. First of 4 tubs of brawn, rillette,
paté and more paté. The green in the brawn is fresh parsley.

The late afternoon saw me mixing up 2 strengths of flavoured brine. These recipes are from the Strawbridge books and are flavoured with a lovely 'Christmassy' mix of cloves, garlic, onion, star anise, bay, mustard seed, chilli flakes, allspice and peppercorns. The big whole ham gets 3 days in the less salty/sugary brew before being frozen till December. The belly pork rectangles for bacon rashers get the stronger brew but only for 24 hours.

The fridge in the Utility Room is rather
over-full, at least in the short term! Here
the two 'Parma' legs stand in dry salt mix
and the other buckets hold cuts in brine(s).

We are also having another go at the dry-cure and air dried "Parma" style hams. 2 whole legs again with one planning to be ready in August 2018 and the other for Christmas 2018. These are rather risky investments - each leg is about €60 gone up the Swannee River if you don't get the salt cure right and the flies and maggots get a hold, but this is our 3rd year at this and we are quietly confident that our salt, sugar and spices (not to mention 16 days in the fridge!) will win the day.

Out in the 'honesty box' we are struggling to keep up with
demand for eggs. The girls are on a 'Go Slow'.

The Utility Room fridge is feeling a bit over stuffed just now. The whole legs are long, so they go in standing on end and we have to take out the shelves.

If you are pinned down by the rain, you can
always break up some pallets for kindling.

The bucket for the bellies just about slides in beside the dry-cure bucket and the big-ham brine container perches rather precariously on top of that. It is only for the 24 hours, though, then the bellies are done and on day 3 the big ham is also cured, so then the legs get some space. They get patted down with more dry salt mix each day and the brine which is drawn out of the meat by the salt is drained off, lest the water dissolve and dilute the dry cure. It's all good fun and technical stuff and, even better, it works!

Meanwhile, Stumpy the hen reaches Day 21 of her 2nd go at doing 'broody' today and, right on time, she has a hatch. I have seen at least 1 baby chick peeping out from under her skirts. Following the new system of naming chicks after your current Help-X volunteers (as in Manu1, Manu2 etc) we guess these guys should become AB1, AB2 and so on. Wish them luck.

Lazy Bones

One of the luxuries of being (pretty much) retired on account of being made redundant is that the working days are your own. Nobody chases you to clock/swipe in or makes you book holidays out of your measly allowance if you fancy a day off.  I do work round here occasionally, obviously, but I find I am an expert at winding down when a big job is completed and that 'momentous' occasion of a 'finish' comes round.

A gorgeous brawn from the pigs' heads. There were 3 such 'tubs'.
One is gone already and one in the freezer. This one made
 a handsome contribution to breakfast. Not all of it, obviously.

The latest such completion was the pigs - reared, taken on their final journey, brought home and butchered and variously frozen as joints, salted down as whole legs, cooked into dog treats (ears) or some 'scratchings' and even brawn (heads). Finally all tidied away out of sight. That was Tuesday and I have to confess to sitting down at that point and not really achieving much till this afternoon (fencing). Like I said - too good at winding down. Lazy bones.

Horse Chestnut. Needs a good frost to do
proper colour but it is trying.

It is one of the reasons why the veg garden is such a disgrace at the moment; the other being that I am also expert in what I believe the behaviour experts call "displacement activity", doing something else to avoid doing the job you should be doing. Office workers, faced with a big pile of jobs will reach, instead, for the "to do" list pad and spend ages compiling one, even adding jobs they have already completed so that they can enjoy the buzz of ticking one or two off.

Three of the ewes waiting for the ram to arrive next month.

In my case, this spring, every time I looked at the scary forest of docks, creeping buttercup, grasses and plantain which was winning in the veg patch, I then looked to my left at the huge pile of tree 'rounds' from our felled spruces and the hydraulic splitter I had borrowed. Needless to say, the logs got beautifully split and stacked and the weeds were left to grow even taller. There was building too and archery, pulling thistles in the East Field, brush-cutting in the woods or through the docks, the poly tunnel, mowing and so on. No end of ways to avoid that veg patch. When I did feel like weeding, there was always the big raised flower bed. I think that won because it is so much smaller and you could see progress and sense the end of the tunnel.

Big field mushrooms in the East Field

And so it went on; all the nice weeding weather of summer (well, there was SOME at least) came and went and still the veg patch is an embarrassment where I dare not take visitors. We even toyed with the idea at one stage of fencing it round stock-proof and letting the pigs or sheep at it.  But no, I cling to the idea that I will get stuck in one day, in my "little and often" mode (like my digging of the pond - 20 barrows (1 hour) a day across 5 months).

Soldier out for a stroll.

Some of we smallholders use volunteer labour - lads and lasses who sign up for a working 'holiday' through one of the green/organic/ecological organisations and will come and do yay amount of hours per day for you for the price of bed and board. We have a smaller scale version of that happening in spring when a friend from Kent who loves digging, weeding and veg gardening is coming here for a week. Some people whizz round in front of their 'cleaning lady' so she never sees how bad it was. I will be getting stuck into the weeding well before this guy arrives so that I can show him that I "made a start" and didn't wait round till May for him.

Nugget earns a free ranging winter by doing such a good
summer job in the bee hive dept.

Meanwhile, one worker who has definitely completed her assigned task is our one remaining rabbit, Nugget. She has done such a good job keeping the grass short around the bee hives that she has barely a leaf left and so she has earned a free ranging winter. She is very sensible and hangs around the house and buildings and must be good at avoiding Mr Fox (touch wood) because she survived last winter when she escaped by mistake and took ages to recapture. This (free ranging) is good because apart from a chunk of carrot I give her at breakfast just to keep her tame and give me a chance to check on her health (and presence) each day, I do not need to worry about feeding her or keeping her drinker topped up. She also might help with the weeding in the veg patch though I doubt it - she's never down there!

Extreme hedging

Over the last few days we have been "enjoying" the sight of someone else working hard - a local farmer brutalising his hedges with an impressive weapon. No flail-mower for him smashing the small branches in that so familiar way, leaving them shredded and a pale eye-sore. No this machine is a big and very fast-spinning circular saw on an arm that can pivot into every possible position. It slices through big ash trunks up to 5-6 inches thick with a loud "Ker-ANGGGG" and a roar of hard working diesel engine.

A 365 pic of, I think, a chunk of bog-oak but I don't really
know what species of tree it is. 

They use these things on hedges which have got away and grown up into tall rows of ash and sycamore. They slice up the sides to remove width and then buzz through all the tops sending big trunks and branches sliding and toppling down - OK if they fall into the field but requiring some rapid work with a grab to clear them off the road. In fairness these are mainly ash which coppices very well, so the hedges only look brutalised (all be it neat and boxy) round to spring time when they quickly bounce back in a healthy display of small leaves and shoots.

Nice colours from lichen and heather in Cloonargid Bog. 

The hedges don't need doing yearly when you do them this way but I can't help thinking they'd be better done little and often. Perhaps the lads have their own 'to do' lists and a rake of possible displacement activities.

Another Project, Another Mentor

Brawn boil up. No pots big enough, so I invented these
foil cone 'hats' to keep the heat in for the 6 hours

Over in Darkest Kent, Liz and Mazy are doing Sterling service, I know, helping Diamond's partner John to go through her stuff (a lot of it is clothes so, like me, John would have been lost in all the instructions describing 'Windsmoor' suits, cashmere cardigans and 'posh' handbags). They are sorting out the known bequests and following Diamond's instructions re charity shops and getting money to the Friends of Kent and Canterbury Hospital, The Pilgrim Hospice and so on. I think the fierce need to be practical and the mountain of physical work are just what they need right now.

Rather gruesome brawn mid-point. Best not to ask.

Back here I have managed to catch a whiff of Liz's cold just as she was leaving, so I am dosing myself up on Lemsip and keeping indoors out of the wind and showers except when the needs of livestock and dogs dictate. I went ahead with converting the relevant bits of pig into brawn which is an amazingly faffy, messy job. Up to now Liz has done all this - the cutting, the 6 hour boil, the stripping out cheek-meat and other muscle, the reducing of stock, the assembly in a mould and the pressing down while refrigerating.

Product. Note fancy 'top' made by arranging sliced tongue
in the bottom of the mould. 

Having had a go this time, I do solemnly swear that I will not ask her again - what a pallaver! The washing up and general kitchen devastation, the gribbly bits, the fat and skin! If Liz volunteers, though, I will not be complaining as the product is just superb and delicious, a slice of that sprinkled with a little salt, wedged between 2 slices of good bread is just superb. It gets a little spiced up with bay leaves, juniper berries and peppercorns in the boil so I couldn't swear that outdoor-reared (in this case Tamworth) brawn is different from 'commercial' but it is certainly as good as any I can remember.

Threadbare in heavy moult. One of
last year's Hubbard hens

Meanwhile we chug along happily into Autumn and the clocks change to bring us early mornings and long, long, dark evenings. The shortening days put the brakes on egg laying and the chooks all come into moult to varying degrees. From 9 hens we get two or maybe three eggs a day if we are lucky - often it is just the one or none. John Deere Bob still shows up regularly for his eggs and we don't disappoint him but, unbeknownst to him he is often clearing us out, taking our last 6! The days of glut and making pickled eggs with the surplus seem a long way away just now.

12 young Buff-Orps. We think, 4 roo's and 8 hens. 

The young Buff Orpingtons (the "Baker's Dozen", as was) continue to thrive. Being still a bit smaller than the adults they tend to get bullied off any food or corn thrown down 'centrally' but I have started to distract the grown ups in one part of the yard, and then sneak round to where the Buffs are hanging around and feed them out of sight/earshot of the adults. Happy youngsters.

Empty pig run. 

All quiet now in the pig department, of course. They didn't actually do as much rootling and clearing as we expected them to do, probably because there was enough space and variety of herbage for them to be choosy. They seem to have cleared dock, ground elder and some bramble, but have only done the edges of grass and nothing very deep. They messed around at the bottoms of fences but were successfully deterred by my bottom strand of high-tensile barbed wire and never looked like tunneling out except down in the ditch, where I have described my preventative measures in a previous post.

A little pig-damage to re-seed. 

Out in the open by the orchard they have stripped some of the turf and then chopped the soil into mush with their sharp little feet, so we have re-seeded that area; we hope the weather is still warm enough to get that seed going.

In the sheep department, as you know, we need to obtain some more freezer space before we dare get the sheep slaughtered and butchered. I am waiting for the 'Catering Manager' to come back and decide what we do about that. All in good time. There's no rush. The existing sheep are big enough but only just.

Shepherd's Pie and black (Tuscan) kale

We are now going to try buying in-lamb ewes which we will look after through the winter and then, we hope, see some new baby lambs out of in Spring. In this we have had an excellent result. We have found, via Carolyn and Charlotte of the Mini Horses, a lady in Mayo who is a friend of theirs, a small scale sheep farmer (about 30 ewes, I think) who is willing to let us visit and ask all manner of silly questions while she shows us around their set-up, but can also sell us ewes of various ages and crosses (including Liz's belovéd Jacobs). She is also willing to hold 'our' ewes back till she puts them to one of her tups (rams) in about 6 weeks. This will suit us perfectly as it will give us a chance to get a freezer and move the existing 4 sheep on.

Some of the 'O'Hara' craft beer range from Carlow Brewing Co.

Finally, I was delighted to find our local supermarket, SuperValu in Ballaghaderreen, selling a relatively new (since 1996) Irish craft beer, 'O'Hara' from the Carlow Brewing Company. They do a good range through from pale coloured beers to stout and I can now vouch for three of them, anyway. I raised my glass in the direction of Darkest Kent on Saturday, Diamond's Birthday. Rest in Peace, Di.