Kick Boxing in the Snow

More snow.

I may have been making too many references lately to Spring-like warmth and things drying out, tempting providence to too high a degree. The Roscommon Weather Gods decided to teach me a lesson and we got another wintry front come through with appropriate weather warnings for the wind and the white stuff.

View across the pond to the new willow 'arbour'

In the event the mornings we woke up to were pretty and picturesque but not disabling - plenty of beautiful white stuck to trees and fences, but only about an inch on the ground. Elizabeth has been heard complaining that the weather keeps "messing about" and she wishes that we got some "proper snow", indicating a depth of about 2 feet with her hand. Careful what you wish for, there.

"Not a lot of drying in that!" Possibly should have rescued these
tee-shirts before the rain came at lunchtime. They are as stiff
as boards this morning. 

I was worried (at the warnings) that I might not get to town to collect our lamb meat; Pedro's carcass. I drove over compacted snow and ice most of the way, only coming onto cleared (salted) tarmac when I was almost there. The slaughter-man was there at the (butcher's) shop on his lonesome that morning so he was a busy lad. However he had no new animals to 'off' that day, so he was relaxed and chatting as he worked away speedily, breaking down our carcass into the various cuts as we specified - racks of chops, full shoulders instead of gigot chops, half legs and so on.

The Kentish souvenir fallow-buck antlers
get a dusting of Irish snow.

We know him well, by now, of course, having used 'them' 5 years running, but it was nice that he remembered Liz's love of the more unusual cuts and found us an ox-tongue to throw into our bag. As usual, I brought the bag home and we spread it out on the dining table - it was bagged into thin bags but not labelled. I like to 're-assemble' the animal so that I can label it shoulder, leg (upper/lower), shanks, loin chops, rib chops etc.

I also wanted to write 'Pedro' as he was both male and the oldest 'lamb' we had killed, so potentially the nearest to 'mutton' flavour. That's now all in the freezer.

Turkeys kick-boxing, battling for Gloria's hand in marriage?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our two new turkeys are increasingly convinced they are both male, even though we selected a big one and a small from the group. This morning, when I was only just up, I could hear some seriously loud 'gobble-gobble' male turkey noise from just outside the front door. I mean, maybe INCHes beyond the door. I looked out and could see both the dark new turkeys strutting that tail-up display they do and circling each other. The 'old' turkey, 'Gloria' was looking on with interest.

Pedro in kit form.

The dark ones were looking like males and one is 30% bigger again than the other. Any fight was not going to be well matched. If it was going to go on for more than a few seconds, I would have to intervene. Well, it didn't. There were a couple of very quick bouts of kick-boxing and the smaller lad retreated sensibly. Game over. Gloria wandered off with the bigger lad.

I have been very impressed by, and very much enjoying a book by one Louise Gray, feature writer on 'The Environment' for big papers like the Scotsman and the Telegraph. There she specialises in food, farming and climate change. Louise decided that for a year (which became 2) she was only going to eat meat (including fish) she had killed and for which she knew the history. She had to also know the growing conditions of the specific animal and for that industry she also to have researched the welfare statistics, environmental impact and so on. She also writes a blog.

As you'd expect, this limited her meat consumption to start with, never having killed an animal thus far, so she wryly comments that she was "mainly vegetarian". But she then takes us with her as she shoots her first rabbit, visits her first abattoir, goes deer stalking or fly fishing, goes out on a commercial fishing boat, learns about control of edible 'vermin' (like grey squirrels where the conservationists do not want them driving out the reds), and the use of roadkill.

An enormous vat of lamb ragu under construction.

She is a brilliant writer and I take my hat off to her - you can feel the nerves as she goes for that first rabbit and the upset when the rabbit runs off despite being shot and the shooters cannot confirm that it is dead. You feel her revulsion and horror at the first slaughter-house visit but she is fair, balanced and thorough through-out.

The new incubator. Same model as the borrowed one you may
have seen in posts from previous years. 

If you are not on social media for these subjects (farming groups, smallholders, animal welfare people) you will not be aware that there is currently a fierce and heated debate raging about the rights and wrongs of meat eating, going vegetarian, the activities of vegan 'activists' (think the bad old days of animal libbers). There is a lot of passion getting aired and no end of ill-informed and even bigoted anger flying back and forth often with bad language.

Louise's book is easily the best written, most thoroughly researched, fair and balanced contribution to this debate that I have ever seen. I try my best on this blog, but if I could write anything half as good as "The Ethical Carnivore" I would be a happy writer.

Duck eggs set in the incubator. 28-35 days should see them
cooked.

Finally, Friends of the Blog will know that Mr Fox is gradually nibbling away at our laying duck numbers, and that our fight-back is taking the form of finally buying our own incubator and setting some duck eggs this spring, so that we can hear, once again, the splatter of tiny webbed feet. This week the exciting big parcel arrived and I have been stock piling the eggs since I placed the order, so I was able to start the batch this morning with 9. I will add any laid overnight tonight - the 16 hour head start for the 9 will make precious little difference. So, wish us luck and wait on my reports from around the 13th March. Peep peep. Quack quack.

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.

First-Born Feste Finished

61 lbs of ram lamb carcass

This is another one of those posts you might like to avoid if you are not happy with the butcher's stage of the production of those New Season Lamb cutlets that look so delicious on your plate. Our main event this week was the collection of the carcass of our first-born ram lamb, Feste, taken off on his final journey last Tuesday. My fears were that in having to get him out of the way because of the risk of him tupping his Mum or Auntie, he was killed at 5 months old and I thought he'd be a tiny carcass. No such thing. He was a chunky lad, and had made similar weight to the store lambs we have done before, at 61 lbs.

That old favourite job - portioning, bagging and
labelling the cuts for the freezer.

The butcher's 'mate' Joe was even given to a mutter about him being 'too big' and bigger than the ones they'd handle through the shop, but main butcher Igantius G reassured us that as he was a ram lamb he'd not be fat, just nicely conformed. That was true - we got very little 'suet' off him.

A lamb chop and a salad "of incident"

Due to Feste being born so early and therefore finished early, we actually still have a bit of last year's lamb in the freezers which we will use up before we start on this 'New Season' meat, but we couldn't let this event pass without at least trying the lamb out, so we saved a chop each from the ice and had it for supper with a lovely salad. Very nice he was too. We now need to plan those 2014 lamb shanks, cutlets and the stewing 'breast' meat into menus to clear the decks. As to lamb for those readers who are normally  included in this largesse, do not worry. We only produced three of our own lambs this year, so we are back in contact with our old sheep-supplier, Kenny about store lambs to make up the numbers. Kenny is doing his usual 'Scarlet Pimpernel' routine but we expect he will turn up all of a sudden with his usual request to meet him with a trailer and some cash somewhere.

Meanwhile, Liz has joined me (again) in being a blogger. Again because she has written a private blog for a while, but this one is a bit special. The guy running the website for nearby village 'Kilmovee' put out a shout for anyone living in the area who would like to write a guest-blog, just light hearted stuff about living here, once a month. Liz thought she would give it a try and contacted him, and got accepted/selected. She has just written her 2nd one. Liz called it "Smallholder Life" and you can find it on this link.

 https://kilmovee.info/smallholder-life/

Scraping the floor of the cattle-race clean

We are both very pleased with it  and happy to help out - we both know how hard it can be to keep a website fresh after the initial surge of enthusiasm has worn off. Mind you, Kilmovee seems to have quite a lot going on at the moment in particular with the completion of a new 'astro-turf' (all weather playing surface) sports facility as well as a thatched roof heritage centre both of which they have managed to photo from the air, I suspect with one of those new-fangled pilotless drone camera-platform thingies.

Young European Lime tree finding its feet

What else have we been up to? We have been loving a recent burst of just a few hot days and we've spent most of the daylight hours outside. We have been digging along a new front garden bed, formerly lawn and we have been giving the cattle race a thorough blitz. The concrete of the race is a bit old and pitted and the cracks and dents accumulate pine needles and muck plus, I guess, sheep-poo, daggy bits of wool, spilled feed. It all makes for a great substrate for grass and weeds, so in the few years since we first stripped it clean for the caravan (ahh the nostalgia!) it was getting quite a healthy turf layer; it needed mowing, never mind scraping! Well, that's all done now and we are back to pristine concrete - it even got hosed and brushed down which was a job which took me right back to student days, cleaning up the cattle pens at the end of a milking down in Westfield (Sussex). Moor Farm. Even more nostalgia. See also the haymaking pic below.

Local lad Kevin R gets the vintage gear out for a spot of
haymaking in the field opposite this house. 

Back in 2015 we have now made contact with three more local beekeepers, we are suddenly over-run with them. When I first got into bees I was a bit worried that I was the only bee keeper for miles and that any new virgin queens which went out on mating flights from our hive(s) might not actually find any male bees (drones) with which to mate. We now know of beekeepers at most points of the compass within the required 10 km or so of us, so this should not be a problem.

(Spoiler: Bee facts paragraph(s) - skip on by if bees are not your thing). You may not know that an emerging queen bee must get out and get mated on a mating flight (or more than one) within a few weeks of 'hatching', or she is doomed. Male bees in warm weather go out in numbers from the hive during afternoons and gather in specific patches of 'sky' called Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs) and these have to be found by the virgin queen - she zooms through the DCA chased by a 'comet-tail' of sexed up drones who each try to mate with her. She plans to be mated by 12-20 drones in quick succession (they get about 10 seconds a pop and actually die in the process), each 'successful' drone falling away from Her Majesty, to be shoved aside by the next suitor. In this way, amazingly, she takes in enough sperm from many different Dads to keep her laying fertile eggs at up to 1500 per day for up to about 4 years. It is presumably a short sex-life but a happy one. She returns to the hive to be welcomed home by her workers and never leaves the hive again till swarming time.

New toys for the chicken dept - an 'electric hen' chick-heater
and leg rings. 

No-one really knows why DCAs are where they are, though many have been 'there' consistently for decades. Some research in the German Alps suggests that the position has something to do with 'U' or 'V' shaped horizons, but beyond that it is just something hard-wired into bee DNA all around the world - the males know where to congregate and the females know where they will be. We just trust that somewhere around here, devoid as we are of alps, there will be a piece of sky which suits the boys from Moyne, Kilmovee, Driney, Feigh and is find-able by the ladies. Party on, bees. Bee genetics is a bit complex, partly because your queen is the mother of all the 50,000 bees in your hive, but also that drones are 'haploid' (they only have 50% of the chromosomes, 16 not 32) and are produced from unfertilized eggs (they have no father, only a grand-dad!), but suffice it to say that it is better for the queen to mate with a good mix of bee gene-pool from your area, not just the drones from your own hive(s). Enough, I suspect, on bees for now.

One of our honey bees on Summer Fruiting Raspberries

Anyway, our new friends are a young couple (A and TS) from beyond Lisacul to the west of us. They have a lovely neat place but no livestock as they are given to long tours of Europe in the summer months. The other is an aul' fella called Joe who comes from near the village of Moyne, to the east of us. We all met round at A+T's place just to drink tea and chat but also so that Joe could help them go through their 4 hives to check on general health and queen-right status. All good clean fun. We also met their lunatic female Patterdale Terrier, Patey who would, literally, play retrieving tennis balls all day if you had the strength in your arm to keep throwing it for her. Settle her down for a breather and relax for a few minutes but then, if your hand was low in your lap and palm upwards, you would soon find a ball dropped into the palm as Patey was bored now and needed some more ball throwing fun. Unusual name? Apparently, when she was a puppy her fur was black and velvetty like the cover of a 'Patey' style trad horse riding hat. (http://www.pateyhats.com/).

Pork, pork and MOAR POARK!

A good vet could get it back on its feet?

Thursday 28th saw us having yet another new experience, getting our pork cut up by the abattoir guys and bringing it home to sort through, make decisions on and pack away. I have been saying in these posts that we were doing a carcass for carcass swap with one of our lambs but we have re-crunched our various numbers since then and that would be massively unfair in our favour. Our lambs feed on "free" green Roscommon grass, where a pig has to be fed pricey, paid for ration and barley its whole life which, in this case was January right round to now.

Liz Soprano disposes of the body?

Farm gate prices for a whole pig carcass and a whole lamb can be tricky to compare because your 'carcass' might actually be somewhat processed into sausages or salted for bacon, but even so it was clear that a lamb is 'worth' only half what a pig would price at, so we settled with Carolyn that we'd just take a half carcass plus the 'odd bits' that we'll use but which Carolyn does not - the head for example, trotters and any kidneys we could get our hands on.

Growers "slap mark" (actually a tattoo)

So we arranged to meet at 3 pm at the meat factory where we'd be allowed into the big stainless steel walled cutting rooms to watch our carcasses being jointed up and to choose from options like boned or un-boned, chops or joints and so on. This was nothing like going into our little lamb-butcher in Castlerea with his old fashioned butcher's chopping block and one band saw. This was an industrial space with ten or so guys wearing white plastic aprons and chain-mail gloves, working away at steel tables, the carcasses rolling in hanging from overhead steel railway tracks, noisy circular saws you pull down from the ceiling to cut out the spines, band saws that zip through trotters in a trice and hydraulic rigs that brace themselves against the back of the meat and pull out shoulder blades with no need to cut.

Shoulder and neck joints

We were treated to a Master Class of butchery. Our guy worked away with effortless skill and dexterity. Ask him to 'tunnel bone' a leg and watch the flash of the blade and a blur of wrist twisting and wriggling as he delved down into either end of the joint freeing up the main bone before slipping it out of one end almost clean of meat. Ask him to bone out the ribs and you'd watch again as with a couple of knife strokes he was able to peel up the whole rack of ribs intact. We actually had one for our tea. In under the hour we had our meat in bags in our car and Carloyn's three half-pigs in bags in hers.

Home then to sort out what we'd got - the simplest way seemed to be to spread it out on our big table and reassemble the animal so that we could bag and label our bits, decide which bits to try salt-curing, work out what to do with the head and the cheek meat for brawn, separate out trotters, tails and other off-cut bits. We also decided, as I said, that supper was going to be a taster of this Gloucester Old Spot (Purebred, pedigree) meat, so Liz roasted the rack of ribs smeared with a little of our homemade spicy tomato 'jam', and very nice it was too, served with cous-cous, fried mushrooms and a tomato and feta salad. Very porky and succulent. Filling too - these were the full length chest ribs, 12 inches or so long, spine to sternum, not the short cut-up bits you normally buy.

Rack of whole ribs.

Today, with our meat safely stashed, we headed down to Carolyn to help her sort her batch, which was three times the size of our own job. Also Carolyn already does a lot more salt curing and making sausages, so she was pleased to have the extra manpower cutting away big sheets of skin from the loin/flank/belly slabs and cutting up big lumps for going in the sausage mincer. Liz got stuck into bagging and labeling and in 2 hours we were celebrating the last lump 'processed' and Carolyn was frying us a pork steak each as a reward - delicious folded into a heel (crust) of brown bread as a substantial sandwich.

Greek style pork?

Finally just for a laugh (forgive me). Liz and Diamond were amused by the way pig carcasses were sometimes displayed in the butchers shops on the island of Poros in Greece, so here is our 'homage' to Greek style pork, complete with shades and fag on. I don't know if it improves the flavour. We are not actually going to be able to smoke any of this meat but there is no reason why we might not construct a cold-smoker in the future if we do get into rearing these fascinating animals for ourselves.