Froggy Would a-Wooing Go?

A stunning picture of frogs 'borrowed' from this months entry
for the Irish Wildlife Trust's Facebook photo comp. Sorry but
I do not yet know who the photographer was except that it came
 from a group called "In Touch With The Wild".

It is funny how your childhood memory plays tricks on you. The 'wildlife gardeners' in us look forward to that annual milestone which is the frogs spawning in the local ponds and pray once more that they will adopt our new pond. Last year I tried that trick of importing spawn but was very late and was not successful. This year we are delighted to see that at least 3 frogs have found us 'naturally', presumably males, though I have heard no calling yet and we have no spawn. Also, the snow last night has, presumably put things on hold for now. The first we know of this spring happening is usually (sadly) that we start to see road-kill frogs in the lane and I often find myself be-set by an 'ear-worm' of the childhood song, "Froggy would a-wooing go". In my memory this song had the following lines "..and under his arm he carried a bow, for to shoot at the pretty little doe, among the leaves so green-oh". I was always a bit confused about why froggy should be taking his bow when he went wooing, and also why he'd be aiming at deer but, heh, it's a childhood playground/nursery song; it didn't have to make sense. Liz couldn't help me either as it must be a perculiarly English song and she had no memory of it from her Dublin schooldays.

My snow drops 'in the green' arrive
from England in perfect condition.

Of course, these days you don't need to go bothering your aging Mum or racking your brains for childhood stories - it's all up there on Google, so I nipped in just to check my wording prior to posting it here and making a fool of myself. Silly aul' codger! It turns out that I am remembering it all wrong and that I have conflated the beginning of one song with the rest and the chorus of another.

The 'Froggy' one goes

A frog he would a-wooing go,
Heigh ho! says Rowley,
A frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether his mother would let him or no.
With a rowley, powley, gammon, and spinach,
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

(the rowley-powley being a suet pudding covered with jam) This goes on for 12 verses or so.

The snowdrops are quickly planted in our bank.

The 'Leaves so green oh' is entirely free of frogs and the bow was actually carried by a gamekeeper whom, you will be pleased to know, does not actually shoot the deer, anyway.

The keeper did a hunting go
Under his cloak he carried a bow
All for to shoot, a merry little doe
Among the leaves so green, oh

Jacky boy
(Master)
Fare thee well
(Very well)

Hey, down, ho, down, derry, derry down
Among the leaves so green, oh

and so on. So now you know. Pud Lady (Hello Mum!) probably knew this anyway.

A little snow overnight and black clouds promise more
this morning

On the bucket of spawn thing I am actually being naughty (and probably illegal) too. You are not meant to relocate any wildlife but more importantly, the modern ecologist's view is in favour of letting succession happen naturally, letting the first invaders who find your new pond have their day and then get ousted (possibly) naturally as later, slower species arrive. When we created new ponds in the King's Wood forest in Kent it was always tempting to 'scenically' plant up immediately with rushes, water lily, marginals and so on, but the Kent Wildlife Trust and BTCV preferred leaving it. That way the environment was always more varied, having 'new ponds' as well as 'old established' ponds, with one group of specialised species surviving briefly in the new untill they were ousted by the 'old pond' species.

Waking up to new snow from the bedroom window.

Similarly, they (BTCV etc) liked the old way of coppicing, where a few men would only cut a small area each year (known as a 'cant'), rotating round every year to other areas, returning after 15-20 years. This way, in a small area of forest you would have tracts of new cut, first year re-growth, 2nd year, 3rd year and so on, and the species which favoured any one age could easily move around following the coppicers. Now it is done with bigger machines (where it's done at all!) and bigger areas are cleared in one year, so the wildlife has to travel bigger distances to find the next suitable patch. Nightjars were always a case in point. They are a ground nesting bird typical of heaths but used to use our newly cleared cants till the re-growth of the chestnut started to over-shadow them. Bluebells are also supposed to do better in a cyclic management system. Chestnut, when mature, is a bit dense for them but coppiced every 20 years it is perfect and you get those lovely years when the bluebells come up just after a coppicing event, to bright open skies and sunshine.

The sheep and the East Field

Well, our snowdrops 'in the green' arrived safely from Wisbech in England. Thank you 'Anchs'. There was no sweating and no bruising, so well done the post office and the packaging, I guess. These were quickly into the ground on a sandy bank under the larch trees just inside our front gate. The crocusses on the front lawn came up well but took rather a hammering from wind, sleet, hail and rain and are all but over, but will live to fight another year. I was reading Anne's blog where she says that she plants both yellow and purple crocus but that only the purple come up the 2nd year. We seem to be doing slightly better, with some yellow making it. We are pleased, too, that neither the geese, nor the sheep touch them. Even in the snow this morning I noticed goose tracks all around and about, but nobody had walked on them. I don't know why this should be. Perhaps the geese are focussed on eating grass and do not bother with areas which are 'not grass'.

Liz reads out her eulogy to Diamond at the dinner in
Bridport (Dorset). Picture by Sian Lewin

You may recall that Liz is currently off in the UK. She is at a meeting of the members of a chat forum she inhabits on the internet. There are 19 of them gathered for a long weekend of foodie eating, social drinking and healthy walks along the beach etc. They happen every year and the gang call the event the AGM and this one, being the first since Diamond died (she was one of the group) was a memorial to her name. Liz had written a short, entertaining eulogy full of Diamond-style quirky humour and in-jokes. Famously (among us anyway) Diamond's final words that anyone heard were when she saw husband John off at the door to give the dog a walk, she asked "could you bring me back some posh cheese?" The Posh Cheese was so amusingly and typically a Diamond thing that it is remembered with affection and so Liz's eulogy ends as follows.

"Good food, good friends and good times were important to (Diamond), so it is wonderful that, thanks to our host, Deborah, we are able to come together over this lovely meal to remember her. Can I ask you to charge your glasses: the toast is, of course, Posh Cheese."

RIP old friend. Never forgotten.

Bee School

'National' standard style hive.

We have decided to get into bees and keeping our own hive on the holding. This has got to be good from the point of view of the environment; reacting to the falling bee populations but would also mean that we had more bees locally to pollinate our fruit trees, veg and other plants. Plus it would be fun and it is something I have wanted to do for many years but never had the chance. We have therefore started to ask around for local bee-keeper contacts and have received a lot of help from friends on the internet (Thank you, Rho!) and locally who have now put us in touch with the Longford Beekeeper Group just over the county border. This (hour's drive) might seem a bit daft as there would surely be a group locally, but these were the group we found first and they are a lovely bunch of friendly people, so we are getting in with them for the moment.

A 'frame' of bees; not mine yet, picture 'borrowed' from the
Longford Group (Hope that's OK Elspeth!)

Off we went then last night to our first meeting in Longford town centre to meet our new friends, Joe, Kevin, Dieter and co. They are quite a big group (26 last night) and lively and friendly AND we were excited to find, they are just about to start a training course for beginners which runs through to May leading to the "Preliminary Bee Keepers' Certificate". We sat through the meeting and listened to the discussions on the agenda and both of us actually piped up with contributions from the complete beginner's perspective.

2 hens pick over our pile of John Deere Bob's calf muck

There was then a short presentation by an experienced bee keeper for the benefit of newbies like us on the parts of a standard "National" style beehive; he, Dieter, had one there with him, empty of course. We stayed on after the meeting to talk some more, to join up with the club and to enroll on the training course. It was a good event all round and we learned bags of 'stuff' about bees and hives. We feel as if we are launched already. We now need to get started properly with our beginner mini-hive (called a 'nucleus colony' or 'Nuke'). This is a box containing only 5-6 'frames' of wax on which a young queen and about 6000 bees are starting a new colony. If you play your cards right this Nuke box starts to quickly fill up with the thriving colony and you then buy a full sized hive (which can cope with 70,000 bees), transfer your frames into that and from there it is onwards and upwards, gaining more experience, becoming obsessed, starting to add more hives and so on. We are, for now, only thinking we'll run one hive, but you never know. More reports on this project to come.

I am always completely impressed by the idea of coppicing, the idea of cutting trees down to near ground level every 15-20 years or so, so that side shoots will sprout from the base/stump ("stool") and grow into poles which you can then harvest at the next cut. In Kent, in Challock Forest we had square miles of sweet chestnut cut this way, the poles having been used over the centuries for fencing and building wood, for charcoal making and for pit-props in the Betteshanger and other Kent coal mines. To me it is the ultimate form of sustainable forestry and therefore in sustainable cropping too.

When I was studying ecology at Uni, it was a given that coppiced tree stools in ancient woodland were the oldest known living things on the planet. They had been cut down at least 80 times, every 20-25 years or so for 2000 years or more. Each time the shoots grew from the outer side of the stool, so increased the diameter of the base, eventually marching out into a 'fairy ring', the centre having long since died off. The ring was now many yards across and interlocking with neighbouring rings like some complex Venn diagram or Spirograph drawing. The scientists could check DNA and estimate the rate of spread of individual plants and could thus estimate the age of each stool.

This big ash pole did not come from that tiny cut top left.
It is from a bigger cut out of shot (arrow)

Well, we don't have ancient woodland and our ash in the Secret Garden may only be a few cuts old but it gives me a real buzz to be taking down these ash stems knowing that it is entirely possible that I may be doing it again, aged 70 or so in the future. Meanwhile, they make great logs. Ash, seasoned, is one of our favourite woods for burning on the range. It is also beautiful to split with the axe when I'm feeling all macho and need to do 'man stuff'.

Irish 'Cooleeney' Camembert

We have been delighted recently to find some very nice cheeses in our travels. I have never been that confident of Irish cheese. Growing up, we loved our mature and vintage Cheddars and you could not be any ruder than to describe a cheese as 'like Irish Cheddar' - the only Irish Cheddar you could find back then was insipid and tasteless, described as 'Mild'. Yuck. Liz growing up was only ever given processed kiddies' cheeses like the famous "Calvita" brand. I am told it is worse than the 'Vache qui Rit' (laughing cow) stuff. So Liz, proudly off on her first French "exchange" as a teenager with the Treil family outside Paris, announced to her new hosts that she 'didn't like cheese'. Outraged by anything so preposterous, Mmle Treil set about introducing the young Liz to the huge variety of French cheeses starting with a creamy Camembert and working their way through to the smelliest Pont l'Eveques, Maroilles, Livarot (Le Colonel) and so on.

Rhubarb Crumble and 'real' custard made with eggs.

Of course, we are both real cheese hounds now and will try anything and enjoy them as long as they have a good flavour. We have even been on a specific holiday to the famous cheese area of Normandy hunting down some of these cheeses. We are happy to tell you that even our local Lidl Supermarket now stocks a nice Irish vintage cheddar (Valley Spire) and sometimes a very presentable Tipperary Camembert (Cooleeney) along with perfectly acceptable Parmesans, goat's cheeses, feta and so on. They feature regularly in our trolley load.

Country Lore (John Deere Bob says...)

The Whooper Swans on Lough Feigh are very noisy at the moment, especially on these cold, crisp, windless, moonlit nights. We can hear them clearly honking and chuntering to one another when we go outside in the evenings to check on things and 'patrol' the dogs (those are mainly about comfort stops for the pooches than checking the boundaries, but if it deters our bushy tailed red-furred chum then so much the better). Local Country Lore has it (this translates more accurately as "John Deere Bob tells us that...") that the geese being noisy is a bad sign, a sure indicator of cold weather and frost to come. I suspect that rather, we are hearing the geese more because the air is already cold, crisp and still, and the sound travels better.

2 plus 1 makes three?

Our goose issue continues, with George having paired off firmly with one of the females (Goocie) to the exclusion of the other (Goosey) whom he now drives away, all be it fairly gently and with no killer instinct. This is not too much of a problem during the day, while they are out in the orchard, but he was having a bit of a go too, inside the goose house at night, where she had less chance of escape. As a result she was reluctant to be shepherded 'home' and showed every sign of not wanting to go in. She slept at least one night in the 'foyer' bit just inside the door while George and his chosen one claimed the 'bedroom' part.

We decided we needed to separate them so that she would not get hurt while we sorted out what to do. This proved dead easy; I re-opened the door and she exploded out, as if she couldn't get out of George's way quickly enough, and between us, Liz and I gently shepherded her round the building to the yard-side door and back into the goose house but outside the wire mesh. She now sleeps there among the feed bins and hay bales, safe and sound. I have put a bucket of water in there for her. She trots back to the orchard each morning to rejoin her sister and His Lordship.

William the Conqueror, still our alpha male.

Meanwhile I have posed a question on my poultry discussion website to ask any goose-keepers what they advise. Is this 'One-Woman Man' thing likely to stick, or will George relent as we come into spring time and Goosey joins Goocie in the egg-laying game? Naturally, there were as many suggestions and opinions as there were replies, but they made for some interesting reading. At one end we had 'do nothing, keep them together like you have' and he will accept her as the hormones start to flow. At the other I had an interesting suggestion - to separate George from the chosen one and make him stay with the 'reject' goose till he learned to love her. In between was even a suggestion to keep the gander with each goose on alternate days. Anyway, we decided to play the waiting game, separating the lonely girl at night and reuniting everyone in the morning, hoping that as spring progresses and George comes into sexual maturity (he's only a youngster and has never actually met any other geese till he arrived here, so he'll only now be learning some inter-goose social skills) all will be well.

Our chickens, on the other hand, have all now settled down into a lovely, stable rhythm and pace of life. We have 9 hens from the various sources (the original 'Lovely Girls', the '8-Ball' and the Hubbards) and these are marshaled around , protected and 'seen to' by our two remaining roosters, William the Conqueror and 'Mr Buff', our big Buff Orpington from the 8-Ball group, hatched at Easter. These two boys get on really well with William having a slight edge on the 'alpha male' scale. They all sleep together, with the Guinea fowl on the perches in the main chicken house except that is, for the Marans Girls (Bubble and Squawk) who persist in going to bed in the smaller 'temporary' house, but that mainly because we have not pressed the point and forced them to move in with the rest. I probably should.

In other news, Liz dabbled her toes back into education and training, going on a 'Train the Trainers' course just before Christmas, mainly as a way of consolidating her existing, but UK-based, skills into a form recognised here in the Republic where they even look a bit sideways at her Open University degree. Well, this being Liz, she can do this training stuff with her eyes closed, so the certificate we received this morning carries the very satisfying grade "Distinction". Go Lizzie!

And last but not least some more of our tongue in cheek long-distance therapy by voodoo-chain-saw. One of Liz's contacts had been suffering from the unpleasant ailment, cystitis, and felt she'd quite like the word included on our 'death row' of words painted on logs so that they could be symbolically rent asunder. All done now and the pictures are posted on the image sharing website. That nice piece of (re)coppiced ash you can see me cutting through is neatly stacked in the log store. The contact is now cured but I suspect that the genuine antibiotics she was prescribed may have had more effect on that than our messing 500 miles away, but we hope we brought a smile to her face.

Logging with Bob

...and a Happy New Year from the Lovely Girls. We gather from friends that hens are meant to slow down their production a bit through the dark depths of winter but it's been so mild and sunny and our hens are ignoring that advice. We are on three a day at present from three 'working' hens. Broody Betty is, we are sure, coming back into lay. She has bright yellow legs and bright red comb and wattles and spends a lot more time with the Lovely Girls rather than separate looking after the young ones. The young ones are now very much part of the normal comings and goings, so we see all 7 birds strolling about together.

This morning I needed hay to bed down the chooks once I'd cleaned them out, and for a hay-mulch on the asparagus bed, so a chance to go for a blat in the 2CV. I love this and the roads round here are just perfect for 2CV. The words "bowling along" seem especially apt for the slightly rolling surfaces, especially in the boggy bits of the County, where a straight road tends to undulate over, I guess, harder and softer bits of the peat substrate. So I took Deefer for a trundle down to our hay/straw merchant and threw a bale of hay into the back seat, giving the car a suitably farm-vehicle sprinkling of hay bits. A bale is €4.25 and lasts us for ever, much cheaper than buying the silly little pillow-packs in pet shops for mad money.

Next job was to go with John Deere Bob down to our little stand of coppiced ash to bring back some of what I'd cut down before Christmas. It's been a bit wet to get the tractor down there but has now dried out through Christmas and Bob reckoned he'd get through if he picked a careful route, sticking to the better drained sloping ground and nipping through a hedge-gap rather than using the much-puddled-up gateways. He has a reasonable sized "box" mounted on the 3-point-link of the tractor.

This is, by the way, Bob's only vehicle, so he uses it for shopping, trips to Mass, going visiting and even trips to his favourite restaurant for lunch once a week. He was happy to lend it to me for this job, but I declined, sure I'd get it bogged down, so I persuaded him to do the driving. I followed on on foot across the fields with Deefer in tow, chasing about and exploring the hedges and cattle foot-prints. We gathered up about 3/4 of what I'd cut and brought it home, coming down in through the cattle race and able to turn round in the yard, so we could back the tractor right in to the back door, almost, making it dead easy to off-stack the logs onto our log store.

This is ash so, when dry, burns with a fierce hot flame, very good in the range. It grows like weeds in all the hedges round here and, even better, you can coppice it. It grows back from the base when you cut the trunks down. Sustainability!

Also on the agenda today was to bottle up the home made wine. It had its finings treatments yesterday and had now done the 24 hours of settling to fall clear. First job was to rack it off (syphon it off the sediment) into the 5 gallon bucket, a job best done all in one smooth 'pour' with no interruptions and no movement of the 'source' bucket. If you stop/start there is a risk of the syphon tube letting wine fall back and stir up the 'lees', where upon you'd have to leave it another 24 hours to settle.

We have been keeping a stock of the Rioja bottles we get from Lidl which come with one of those modern tough, stiff, spongy plastic "corks" which we figured we could re-use. We had also kept a few screw-top bottles and had a back up supply of washed out 2 litre milk containers to house any surplus. This all proved to work perfectly well except that at the last minute I decided I had better try to sterilize the corks and tops with boiling water. I tried one just in case they'd go all soft but it seemed to survive, so I went for it.

Unfortunately while I then went about racking the wine off, these corks took up a small amount of the water and swelled. They were an absolute PIG to get back into the tops of the bottles. I used an old trick I knew, to lay a bit of narrow wire down the inside of the bottle to just pinch the cork away from the glass enough to let air out as you draw out the wire, but this wasn't an air-pressure problem, it was just that the corks were now too big. If you are doing this a lot it's worth buying a cork compressor but we've not got that organised yet. I ended up squidging them in as best I could, and then whacking them gently with my rubber mallet. It almost worked. The corks are 3/4 in with a 'muffin top' like a champagne top. We'll have to check they don't start popping out! We will be doing this again and will gear up with corks, the compressor and other stuff.

The verdict? The wine is nice looking, a lovely red colour and clear as a bell. The taste is maybe a bit 'thin' but is pleasant enough and not offensive in any way, not acid, not tannin-ish, not young/sweet. We could believe it was a merlot and we can believe the oak-aged thing but we'd want to blind-taste it to convince ourselves. The thinness has us thinking it is going to be easy to drink and we hope not inclined to give us sore heads or hang overs. A success. We are very pleased. Thank you very much Mr and Mrs Silverwood for this very thoughtful Christmas Present.