A Genuinely Short Post (Honest)

A welcome cold snap

OK, I know I have many times recently started a post with comments along the lines of "not much to say, so this is going to only be a few paragraphs" and then gone on at normal length. Well, this time, I genuinely have little to say, so I might be for real here. Added to that, one major 'thread' of narrative is under that embargo to which I have already alluded; the main characters in those episodes do not like to be spoken of 'on here' and there is no arguing with that.

Frosty East Field

Main event for this post was the 'Little Christmas' or 'Ladies' Christmas', (Nollaig na mBan or, if you prefer, simply Epiphany) when the men take over the reins of the household and try to treat their women-folk to a complete day of rest.

When you can only find 4 ducks it is a sure sign that #5 is off
hidden up somewhere laying a surreptitious late egg. When
she returns it is then a race against the magpies to find the egg
before they do. 

It is nothing that heroic, so does not generate me much Blog text but it is fun to do and much appreciated by Lizzie. I have to do all the kitchen and dish-washer duties, provide tea on demand and cook the main meals. Also, on this occasion, carve a good snack's worth of thin slices off the 'Parma'-style whole leg of ham mid afternoon and pass in the gorgeous chocolates we were gifted by our French visitors at Christmas (Thank you, Marion, Clara and Augustin). It all went very well.

Frosty early morning view from the new kitchen windows

I have also tried to progress from knowing that we have "around 30 chickens" to doing some kind of census to get an exact list. This is mainly so that we can report egg production, health and progress more accurately and to identify whether we have any 'passengers' who are contributing nothing and need weeding out. Tough old, cut-throat world?

We both wish the cats would not catch these cuties and we are
always amazed how tiny they are in the hand. A goldcrest, of
course. 

Obviously, with the birds free-ranging this is not that easy - you walk one way round the site with your notepad and pencil and try to record who is where but by the time you have nearly finished, are you double counting hens who have gone widdershins round the house and come to meet you again? I scratched down a list of 28 hens by name if they have names, and by a rough description if not. I now have a list that says such arcane things as "Stumpy", "Big Red", "Grey / Dark cape" and "Flat black / big crest" and is peppered with codes like 'A-head' and 'A cheeks'.

Poor little mite. At least we have a strong population of goldcrests
here, so this one will not really be missed.

The 'A' thing stands for Araucana, which is a weird 'fancy fowl' beloved of show folk which has tufts of feathers sticking out of the top of its head and sideways from its cheeks. The latter give it a strange hamster-like look from the front. Pure bred A's lay blue eggs which are quite nice, but we only have crosses between A's and other types, so we only get white eggs and we get hens which are mainly hen-shaped but have some bizarre A-tufts on their heads.

I now need to take my list into the coop at lock-up and double check. I better not bore you with a complete list of all the birds as a fancy tabular addendum. You might think I was trying to flesh out a slow news day. As if.

The half moon goes down into that big patch
of new morning sky where Storm Eleanor
decapitated our larch. 

Finally, we are now at Day 9 of the two major New Year's resolutions. First that #DryJanuary - we are both sticking to this as per the agreed rules; one 'day off' allowed. Mine is going to be Burns Night, Liz went for Nollaig na mBan and brother Mark has a gin tasting he has booked in on 15th. So far so good.

Knitting project gets finishing touches.

Second, Liz was determined to get out all the unfinished major knitting projects and finish them. She loves knitting up the pieces of a garment but hates the stage where you sew all the bits together, so as at NYD, I had a lovely Aran pullover which was all there but for the assembly and Liz had a blue cardigan and a green woolly in similar states. Well, true to her resolution, my Aran is finished, the cardy just needs buttons (and even has a neck-warmer / 'snood' in the same wool, to go with it.) and the green thing is very nearly completed.

Publicity shot for the Men's Shed. The lads were doing a 'bucket'
collection at the check outs in local SuperValu, "Duffy's". 

And that, genuinely, is it. Till next time.

Autumn Tidying

Red Kuri Squash and yellow courgette

Our amazing run of rainless, blue sky, sunny days is still managing to hang in there, though the forecast tells me that a front may nip through and interrupt this happy situation tomorrow. Let's hope only briefly. The clear skies at night though, have given us the first few frosts and crunchy grass in the morning and so, inevitably, have done for the foliage and stems of the most tender crop plants - our bountiful red kuri squash and yellow courgettes, the borlotti (runner) beans and the French and 'Gaucho' drying beans. Surprisingly, however, not the nasturtiums yet; I expect these to turn into a soggy black, stringy mess at the first whisper of frost but they are untouched so far.

'Autumn Bliss' raspberries still giving us some good two-person
dessert sized pickings

Nothing for it on these collapsed plants but to pull up and cut out the stems and foliage and to collect up any 'fruit' for storage in sheds and the polytunnel. The latter was for the drying beans both of which varieties I am not 100% convinced by despite the claims of the heritage-variety seed company we bought the seed from. They (Brown Envelope Seeds) tell me that these beans are all proven in County Cork, so should 'work' here but I think our season is just not long enough.

That lovely pink-pig scarf gift. 

Both the 'Borlotti' runners and the 'Gaucho' French-style did the growing, flowering and podding up well enough but despite our Indian Summer they have not really completed the end stage, the ripening and drying. These beans are meant to move all the moisture and goodness from the pod-skin to the bean seed, leaving the beans big and hard enclosed in a papery thin, rustling, desiccated pod by about September. You pull the pods and easily rub out the seeds  so that you can store them and further dry them as an over-winter dry ingredient in stews and so on. These pods are still fleshy, thick skinned and moist, though I can feel full bean seeds inside, so they are in the poly-tunnel on a wire frame to see will they finish the drying process away from the bines.

Pig Party. A splash of the black stuff in their wheat and
milled barley. 

The pigs came up to their 6 month Birthday on the 10th October, so we decided that they should be allowed to celebrate and finally try out some Guinness. For their lunch I replaced their usual pig-nuts (which I thought might turn to mush when the Guinness touched them) with a 50/50 mix of whole wheat and milled barley with a generous glug of the black stuff stirred into it. They were mightily impressed.

Very interested in the empty tin!

Not only did they scarf down this new food, but also they kept trying to get at the empty can just outside their fence where I'd put it down while I took some pictures. I also swear they were looking at me a bit 'old fashioned' at their supper time when the exciting new flavours were replaced back with boring old pig nuts and apples. With Autumn in the pig-keeper's world comes the annual Ministry census. We get a sheep census too, but we've only ever had a zero count to record and we've had to avoid the option where zero might mean you are no longer a sheep keeper and you would like them to close your herd account.

Pig Census form.

It was nice this time, then, to be able to record a '2' - yes we do actually HAVE pigs and we intend to keep on having them. We are not sure how this will translate next year, but probably with a try at pure-bred Berkshires, the black pigs. The supplier of this year's Tamworths (freerangepigsireland.com, which 'resolves' to a website called PiggyWiggy's) impressed us with their set-up and the quality of stock so we may go back there for more. Last year they had Berkshires on sale too, though I can find no mention of Berkshires now on the website. Ah well. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.