Original Features

Newly cleaned out roadside ditch. The white
in the bottom of there is snow.

Yes, we currently have a light dusting of snow on the ground and yes, we still have light snow falling but overall we are definitely drying out. All the puddles are gone or nearly so, and the mud under foot is now sticky, rather than wellies-sloppy. The tarmac lanes are dry and the ditches either side of the road are mainly empty. Long may this process continue.

Original feature? A lot of the road-side culverts are still these
tunnels with stones for the 'walls' and a big flat stone across
the top. 

We have had a couple of contractor lads with a lorry and a mini digger, working along the road digging out the ditches and re-instating the drains and culverts where they pass under people's drive-ways, if necessary. They have even cut across the lane if they need water to flow from north side to south side and laid big new plastic pipes under the road.

Spot the heron.

A lot of the culverts along these lanes are still what an optimistic estate agent would call "original features". They were made by building in the bottom of your ditch a series of arches like mini-Stonehenge arches (dolmens?) with tall stones as the walls and big flat ones across the top. We have a similar structure buried down just outside our yard wall where would have run the right of way for all the locals using the main lane, to access their turf-cutting bog.

I wish the cats wouldn't kill the 'cute' and unusual ones. This
female bullfinch got it in the neck this morning. 

We are told that back then, anyone who had a chimney in their house would have 'Turbary' rights - the rights to cut turf for home fuel. They would have brought their donkey and cart down what is now our land to get to their 'stake'. When we bought the house, the Estate Agent told us that as no-one had used this right of way in 27 years, the route was now redundant and we did not need to allow any donkey carts down there!

Nobody's favourite livestock task - getting a wormer
tablet down the throat of each of your 4 cats. Liz's hands
are shredded!

Be that as it may, the contractor lads were obviously not re-instating these ancient structures as they went along, just burying modern concertina style water pipes and back filling with the stone and clay in what ever order it came available. They were also building up the immediate verges with the dirt and stone from the ditches. They have made quite a neat job of it and the new water-flows are obviously working. The ditches are empty.

The ewe (Lily) and lamb are still brought indoors each night
as the weather is still too cold for a baby to be outdoors. 

Meanwhile, after much deliberation I decided to cull out our bought-in ram, Pedro. It was not an easy decision. I never want to get into killing animals just because they are no longer convenient - if I ever do this then it will be a sign that we should not have bought in, or bred the animal in the first place. This lad was bought in, as regular readers may recall, last Summer, because we had produced no lambs of our own in 2017 and the freezers were almost empty of lamb-meat. He came as one of a pair, his sister being 'Oveja'.

When the time came to send Oveja on her final trailer ride, I decided to keep the brother (Pedro) as our 'stud' ram to save me having to borrow in a ram. I knew that we could always send him to the butchers later if the new set-up did not work out or if he became human-aggressive. This "sort of" worked and we think that all four ewes may well be pregnant, though I only saw him mounting Lily and Polly. Time will tell on that one.

Pedro offal. Oh, and a couple of nice
steaks! Well, I was in a butcher's shop.

As to the aggressive thing, I did take a couple of 'pucks' from him but I think these may have just been argy-bargy trying to be first to any food I was taking to the food trough. I'd get a thump from behind at thigh-height but not really know if he'd squared up on my derriere and done an adolescent head-down charge, or had just run clumsily into the group following me and my feed-bucket. Whenever he squared up facing me, I was always able to deter him by swishing a stick back and forth in front of his nose. It's the lack of trust that decided me. I could no longer enjoy communing with the gentle ewes if I had to keep one eye on Pedro.

The peach tree, housed indoors for the Winter
needed a tree-guard when the cats started
using its main trunk as a scratching post.

I did, though, see him banging the ewe 'Myfanwy' about. Whether she is pregnant or not, nobody likes to see our gentle ladies getting T-boned in the midriff. He was also a bit feisty with Lily and the new lamb when they first met but we put that down to him reminding them who was boss in case they'd forgotten while they were in 'confinement'.

So, the decision was made and Pedro was taken on his final trailer journey on Monday (yesterday). That gave me another interesting reversing task - the butcher's back way was part blocked by a big trailer one side and a shiny 4 x 4 on the other. I could not get to the 'lairage' pens (holding pens)  so the slaughterman (Joe) had me back in the shorter distance to the slaughterhouse door. Elizabeth tells me that the lad was 'offed' almost before his feet hit the concrete - she'd heard the 'pock' of the humane-killer and had seen the main butcher nip in there straight after with the big knife, while I was closing up the trailer and pulling out. He (Pedro) certainly spent no time in the unfamiliar lairage pens wondering what was going on or stressing about this new turn of events.

That was that. I collected the offal (liver, kidneys, heart and tongue, this time) today and picked up a couple of lovely (beef) steaks as I was in a butcher's shop. He hangs the carcass for a week before cutting to allow the meat to "set" so we go down on Monday morning to collect the main meat. I feel as though I have been given my sheep back. I can go into their field and speak to them, tickle their noses and under their chins, pull bits of twig and bramble out of their wool and generally enjoy contact with them. There is no ram there bashing them away from the breakfast food trough or trying to get between me and the girls. A whole new relaxed, calm, stress-free atmosphere has returned. It was the correct decision. This year we will borrow a ram just for the 'tupping' season AND nothing like as early as August - more like December or January. Lambing in January is just daft.

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.

Pig-Slapping your Pastry

Pat a cake Pat a cake, Baker's Man
Bake me a (pork pie) as quick as you can
Pat it and prick it and mark it with ZT210
and into the oven for Heaven knows when!

The slapper head and the impression it makes. 

For those not in the know, your legal, signed up, Ministry-verified pig keeper in this country will generally need to own a piece of kit called a pig-slapper. This is a 2 foot long metal tube with a handle at one end and a plate at the other to which fit 'characters' as individual numbers and letters, set like the print in a printing machine. Each character is (in our case) 30 mm tall and made up of short needles which are used to 'tattoo' your pig herd number into the rump and shoulders of your pigs just before slaughter, so that you can identify your half carcasses as they emerge from the slaughterhouse into the meat plant.

Pig-slapped Pork Pie.

You can see from the first pic that our code is ZT210 so those are the characters I had to get hold of and 'set' into the head, but naturally, they are in there 'backwards' and potentially upside down, so I was looking around for something in which to 'slap' my impression to check that it would read correctly on the pig. Liz was making a pork pie and this generally leads to spare pastry being rolled out into 'pattie' and baked alongside the pie, but to be broken up for the chickens as a treat outside the back door. This led on to us deciding to 'slap' the actual pie crust (gently) - the tattoo plate was clean enough and anyway, the whole lot was to be baked.

Barely visible, slap mark in the golden, egg glazed suet crust.

So there you have it - my slapper works. Unfortunately the code pretty much disappeared in the baking but anyway, it would be fraud (gasp!). The pork in that pie was from Carolyn's Gloucester Old Spots, not from our herd at all. Ours do not exist yet; have not even been born yet!. Actually I am quietly amazed and appalled at this legal requirement to 'slap mark' pigs prior to sending them to slaughter. You keep them as happy as possible for 5 months, loving them and looking after their welfare needs. They come to trust you (hopefully) and think you are a good egg, then just as you are about to send them on their final journey you get this 2 foot long bar with numbers made out of needles at the business end, dip the needles in ink and then smack your pigs hard once on either shoulder (and either rump if you like) to basically tattoo them. It must hurt and surprise them, surely, but you have to do it so you can identify your half carcasses coming out the other end of the meat plant. How can that be 'welfare'? Some say that you do not need to slap them if your slaughterhouse is not insisting but others would argue that unless you slap, the butcher might sneakily substitute your carefully bred and fed pigs for cheaper, mass produced ones.

Blue gets comfy on some tissue boxes on the table.

In the pond department we not only have an 'honest' newt population which we have seen regularly and which arrived by itself, but also two 'scoops' of imported frog spawn. The breeding season had come and gone here and we had been passed over by all the local frogs so we had sent word out. Charlotte was checking her local ditch, well filled with spawn on all previous years, and K-Dub had promised us a bucket from his father's Dublin pond. K-Dub drives a big old yellow works van previously owned by the company I used to work for and sold off at the end of its economic working life. It's very 'tired' at this stage but K-Dub flies about in it OK.

Another good year for the gift daffs from Steak Lady

I was a bit concerned that the spawn, evolved for millions of years to grow and develop in still water and quiet ponds might not survive the rattle and hum of a 2 hour box-van drive across Ireland but late on Friday we received a text message reading a bit like one of those WW2 code messages to the French Resistance "Your spawn is at your gate". Indeed it was, and we hurried down to gather it up and gloop it into the pond where it seemed to be perfectly OK and even hatching, so that we have mini Dublin tadpoles swimming happily away from the landing site. Then Charlotte came through suggesting that if we wanted more, there was some in 'her ditch', so we have nipped down with the bucket and dipped it into the watercress. The Roscommon babies joined the 'Dubs'. It would be interesting to DNA test the emerging young froglets to see who 'won'.

My last New Year's resolution can now be ticked off. I resolved to finish this winter with my log store full. Yesterday in the good, calm sunny weather I dropped the last two weakling, half-dead spruce trees which needed thinning out from our woods, and logged them up. The logs have gone in on top of Bob's hawthorn to refill my log store. Proper job! All the 'sneddings' (twigs and small branches) need dragging out to our bonfire heap in the East Field, but for now we have piled them up. Next time I have access to Bob's tractor, we will get a rope round each pile and drag them out there.

The warm weather and sunshine, tadpoles and newts had us sitting out by the pond and, in Liz's case, thirsty for just something like a lager shandy. Now, we never have lager in the house (in fact we never have anything except the weekly ration of red wine unless it's a special occasion like Christmas or Paddy's night) but rather bizarrely we have in the freezer left over from a guest visit last Summer (no names no pack drill!) some frozen, pretend cocktails. These are totally artificial, like grown up slush-puppy "alchopops", one claiming to be Pina Colada, the other a Berry Daiquiri, but the ingredients lists do not list any known ingredients of either official cocktail (rum, lime, coconut, pineapple etc). What the Hell? They were cold and wet so even though they tasted to us of nothing in particular, we sipped them sitting on our pond side seats.

The blue sky had us suddenly determined that what we needed in this garden was a flowering cherry tree. We have now acquired one of these, going cheap at present (€12.99) at the local supermarket and it has gone in where we can admire it from the kitchen  window and the yard but also from the "Darby and Joan" chairs next to the pond.

Meeting the Boss

Now that the baby chicks have reached a fine, fully feathered, 6 weeks old we had promised them and their Mum that we would release them from the Maternity Unit on the first reasonable day for weather. They could have an explore, meet the other hens and the rooster and, if they wanted to, move back in with them in the 'grown ups' roost.

This happened at around midday - we'd had to nip into town for a hay bale (rabbit bedding - hay may be a mad money from a pet-shop but a whole bale is only €4 from the merchant), for coal and to collect our (shhhhh) hearts, kidneys and livers from the butcher. The weather was mild and only spitting rain occasionally and the hutches are, as you know, in the dry calf house anyway, so we opened the hutch door to see what would happen. The gang are well used to this anyway as I open it several times a day to feed them, but I never stand back and let them lean out properly.

One chick quickly and professionally hopped down to the floor but then thought better of it and could not get back up, so we quickly improvised a ramp from peat turfs to allow easy access.

The babies and Mum had only been down and exploring a few minutes when the rooster and hens wandered into the yard and, driven by their own curiosity, came and had a look. There we were, mixing. It all seemed to go well. We watched from the sidelines but did not interfere. Broody Betty was accepted back straight way, admittedly with a couple of pops from the alpha-hen just to make sure she wasn't getting any ideas. The hens also dopped the babies on the heads a few times in a half hearted way to make a point but the babies were pretty much allowed to run in between and among the hens. They were, of course, excited to be allowed out into the yard and to see real puddles, real earth and real herbage for the first time and their excited cheeping frequently brought a hen running just to make sure they weren't missing out on the best food.

William was keen to "welcome" Broody Betty back (now there's a euphemism!) under his wing but she was, for now, having none of it. He took very little interest in the new babies and they kept a respectful distance. He's a big fella now and they are only 8 inches tall when they stretch right up.

At one point Rolo the cat wandered up. Cats were our other slight worry - these chicks are not much bigger than the rats that at least one cat can dispatch so we wanted to make sure they were an out-of-bounds, off-the-menu shape for the cats. The cat came and tried to go nose to nose to a chick. The chick was bewildered and totally unafraid (a worry!) but Betty came and pecked him on the nose and he retreated in high dudgeon as only cats can.

So, we all mooched around for a while staying within a few yards of the calf house door until the hens seemed to get bored and wandered off back to the front lawn followed by William who seemed in two minds which 'flock' to marshall. The chicks and BB then strolled back into the calf house and climbed the turf ramp back into the hutch. "Our work here is done", they seemed to say. I shut the hutch door and left them to it. We gave them another run out in the afternoon, which went similarly. I guess we just keep doing this till they eventually re-join the main flock for good.

A successful excercise.

By the way, it's been pointed out to me that occasional spam content gets into my 'comments' section. I have purged this but if any of you are commenting under the heading 'anonymous' you may no longer get through.