A Long Walk

Scorchio! This was Met Éireann's short-range forecast for
4pm today (29th May)

Scorchio! The island is currently enjoying a very nice, mini-heatwave with temperatures soaring up to 26 and 27ºC. All our friends are delightedly taking pictures of the lanes outside their farms and commenting how different they look from when there were 7' snow drifts only a few weeks ago.

A pleasant surprise in the polytunnel. I don't remember
planting this.

My diary tells me that we have not had any rain since about 3rd May except for one wet night on the 21st, between us shearing our sheep and then doing Sue and Rob's. The ground is as dry as dust and those sheep, which must be very relieved to be 'naked' spend most of the day sleeping under trees in the shade.

Of course, our Help-X volunteer, Laura, who hails from the South of France, is a bit disparaging of our 'heat'; she is more used to 40ºC as 'hot' but we let her away with that as she is still a brilliant help, an absolute boon, a very easy to please guest and very pleasant company. Her current jobs-of-choice are anything to do with mowing and keeping the garden bits spick and span.

This much-abused broom is finally doing colour

She will push that mower for 5 hours and only take breaks when you bully her inside for tea and cake or lunch. Today she was on 'edges' with the shears , edges of lawn, sides of raised beds, all round bases of young trees. We are in danger of looking like manicured parkland.

Laura's new admirer - the male turkey
follows her everywhere. Here she is
actually bring tea out to us but it looks
like she is fetching him some!

She is also what they would describe locally as "a mighty one for the walking". If not pushing a mower for all those hours, she likes to do at least 10 km per day. She walked from here to Ballaghaderreen one day (neither of us have ever tried it - it is a 15 minute car ride!), she climbed Holy Mountain 'Croagh Patrick' one day prior to coming here, having done a 10 km walk in the morning and then on Sunday managed a 4 hour, 20 km one.

Sorry poor photo (bad phone) but can you just
see the 3 foot roundel target 450 feet away down
this path? Nor can I. 

Archery has moved out of doors again for the Summer and our shooting field is almost exactly 20 km from here, south of Castlerea. Laura expressed an interest in coming to see what we were about but asked could she then walk home. We explained that it was 20 km up (gentle) hill and down dale and would take her all afternoon but, no, she knew all that and wanted to do it anyway.

Another fun target for the new outdoor season.
You have to shoot this life-size fox at 40 feet but
THROUGH the car tyre. In front of the stand is a
little owl-model at 20 feet if you need a warm-up.

I suggested that after 2 hours of archery, I would be driving past her on the way home, so I could always rescue her if she'd had enough. Well, I did pass her and stopped to offer a lift but she just smiled sweetly and declined, saying she'd see me later. She eventually wandered in home at ten past six, not a bother on her, as un-tired and un-ruffled as when she had set out. Oh to be 22 again.

3 of Shtumpy's new babies. 

Meanwhile we are enjoying a bit of a population explosion among the baby chickens. In the last post I described our 6 successful hatchings from the grey hen 'Cat Basket Lady'. Next up was our ace Mum with the deformed foot, 'Shtumpy' who managed 2 hatches last year and kept all her charges alive despite her 'disability'. She has just hatched 4 babies from 6 eggs and is now starting to bring them off the nest and show them the ropes.

Laura cooked us this superb apple tart.

This will, we hope, be followed by the 14 duck eggs in the incubator, due 'out' Thursday or soon there after. These are a mix of Sue and Rob's Muscovy ducks (the big meaty, bi-colour birds who are half way to being geese) and our last Khaki-Campbell eggs from just before the final female was out-foxed, plus a few KCs from Sue and Rob to make up the numbers. I don't know what % success to expect here - our KCs have been very low and these are the first Muscovies any of us have tried - but if we get all 14 we will be feeling a bit over-run. Fortunately, it is most unlikely. We may be lucky to get any.

Finally, an even sillier hatch story, and not my finest 'management' hour. Out in the goose-field/orchard, we have a 4' x 2' x 2' nest box intended for ducks, which we call, logically, "The Duck House". This was adopted by one of the hens (Donaldina) 12 days ago to go broody in, so I found her 8 eggs to sit on and promised to lock her up each night safe from the fox. As time went by I suspected that another hen (or more) was nipping in there each morning, bullying Donaldina off the nest and laying her own daily egg into the clutch.

When the politics goes the way you want it to....

I did not get an opportunity to check while there were no birds in there, till today. TWENTY eggs!!! The poor hen can barely spread her 'front' out enough to cover them all. The experienced chicken-keepers among you will also have spotted another problem looming. All the eggs are similar colour (so it's probably one hen repeat laying) so I cannot tell which are the original 8.

Montana putting on a good show.

Come June 7th, Donaldina will have brooded those 8 for the full 21 days but the others for fewer days, so the 8 will hatch (if we are lucky) leaving the nest full of part-developed embryos. If we rescued them to the incubator we might then get one hatching on the 8th, one the 9th and so on. That would be a tricky clutch of babies to manage. Ah well. We shall see. We will cross those bridges when we come to them.

Shtumpy's first hatch,.

There is just one tiny fly in the ointment of our warm days - last night we suffered our first theft from the honesty box. It has been there for months and never an egg or a single cent stolen (as far as I know). Last night, though, some toe-rag cleaned out my money tin and left the dozen eggs in there. It was just 20, 10 and 5 cent coins, total value no more than €1.30, so we'd guess kids, but we don't get any passing kids (on foot anyway) so we'll probably never know. Ah well, guys, who ever you are, don't go spending all that at once now.

Of Cookery (and Other) Failures

The best laid plans, so they say.....

Here is a picture of our very disreputable and grubby looking 'project cat', Pirate, the starving stray who has been hanging around and seems to want to be fed by us and possibly move in. Since the last post this story has moved on. We had been feeding him for around 3 weeks but he was only showing up for food and then slinking away. Suddenly a week ago he was all over us like a rash, accepting food and strokings, yowling for attention if he heard us talking by the pond or in front of the house.

Pirate the Cat

Suddenly he was here for most of the day and sleeping in the shade on the roof of the 2CV in the car port. The plan is to get him some vet attention (mainly a spay, worming and a look at his poor eyes, one of which is absent (there is just a pink, open empty socket which is a bit spooky to look at), the other looks very misty; we are surprised he can see at all). This would involve catching him and putting him in a cat basket, so I put the basket on the car roof with a bit of 'Vet-Bed' blanket in it and the boy adopted it immediately. He slept there a couple of nights and in the morning, when he heard me feeding breakfast to our two cats, would emerge, stretch luxuriously in the sunshine and stroll across to get his share. I was suddenly able to brush him through to ascertain he had no fleas, which was a relief.

Accepting strokes and even a brush-through for fleas.

We thought we were on for the vet and contacted Aoife. We started to arrange check ups and what meds she could bring to get the ball rolling. Also, by the by, neighbour Una invited us down to pick her black currants and in the tea and scones chat afterwards, when the subject of cats came up she said that she had been seeing a dirty white cat with bad eyes for a while - it had been calling on her for food but had recently stopped coming. Pirate is obviously one of these fellas who keeps a lot of options open. But now it seems to be all over for the moment. As quickly and as decisively as he decided to 'adopt' us, he seems to have dropped us again like a hot potato. He has gone back to showing up very late (10 pm+) and quickly eating food left down before slinking away. He is not staying the night and not using the cat basket. He did not show for breakfast this morning and we have not seen him all day. Perhaps he heard me planning his treatments with Aoife and has skedaddled.

Bronze fennel

Also in the 'failures' department, we finally got round to trying our pea-pod 'Burgundy' made last August. I must admit I had not been confident. I made an awful lot of wine as a teenager and the best stuff was always made from fairly promising raw materials - sweet fruit or full bodied stuff like root veg, rhubarb stems, grains and, of course grapes. The stuff made with flavoured but 'gutless' materials never seemed to be worth much unless I was going for the strongly scented light wines like rose-petal or elder-flower. I could not see pea pod working but we made it for a laugh mainly because it is mentioned in the 'Good Life' TV series. Ah well, we tried some today prior to bottling it off and it just tasted thin and very pea-pod-ish, so it was glugged unceremoniously over the compost heap.

Gooseberries

And then, we have had John Deere Bob, who is a diabetic, fondly remembering a local confection called 'Brown Cake' but, being Bob, he has no idea what's in it - he thinks maybe ginger and treacle. We asked around the local ladies and Vendor Anna and were able to come up with two local delicacies which he 'might mean', one a gingery treacle-bread, the other a version of soda bread with treacle added. Rather dubiously, Liz had a go at the first one and the complete cake was set aside to await Bob's next visit. It was brown alright and looked OK but a bit un-interesting. 3 days went by and Bob hadn't appeared, so we decided to try a slice with this afternoon's coffee. It was dry and dull and mainly tasted of the burnt/caramelized tones of treacle or dark brown sugar. 'Ooooh no!' we said, sure that this could not be anything Bob (or anyone) would be fondly remembering. We whistled up the chickens and, being way less discerning than we are, they happily polished it off. Ginger and treacle flavoured eggs, anyone?

Lovage - a gift from Steak Lady

But it's not all failures. Liz has made some excellent paté from the less talked about parts of rabbits and culled out chickens and, today, we knocked out 7 jars of delicious black currant jam from Una's fruit. We have also bottled up 14 bottles of elder-flower 'champagne' which tastes very promising so far but now needs a week to fall bright and build up some 'fizz'.

Lettuce. The red leaves are from the heritage variety
'Little leprechaun' from Brown Envelope Seeds.

I have been back onto the DIY projects, creating a nice run for the ever growing guinea fowl keets. Pictures of this when it is finished, but I am delighted to be able to make this for almost zero cost - about a tenner in hinges, bolts and 'big staples', plus €20's worth of fruit-cage netting for the 'roof'. The chicken wire for the 'walls' came as a cast off roll from our fencing contractor, Paul. The posts were pulled out of a bit of redundant fencing inside what is now the pig paddock. Up-cycling.