Biker Boy

Our first 2016 'clocker' goes broody in a completely useless
place. And sitting on NOTHING. No eggs. Nada.

In the last post, in all the excitement about the Lisacul 365 project, I managed to completely forget to note 2 good signs of Spring. The first is that lovely burst of realisation when your eye falls on a 'new' clump of crocus which you obviously planted at some point last year but then promptly forgot. I have two nice ones in the bank beside the driveway. One is nicely backward so may do OK but the other came out into the teeth of the last named storm and it's little retinue of fronts.

Barbara on some hay bales.

Crocus should (and like to) push their flowers up through the warming grass into the Spring sunshine where they can open the top part of their flowers nice and flat and bright. These poor things emerged into a howling gale and lashing rain, so they have sat and sulked, firmly closed, for the last week and I fear are being knocked about so much they may never open properly before they rot off. Our other spring note was our first 'clocker'; one of the Buff Orps went broody in the worst choice of place ever - in the car port. Yes she was well hidden behind the wheel of my pushbike and she was on the remains of a good, dry bale of hay. She was also slotted in between the 2CV and the hay-barn wall but she was, too, exposed on 3 sides to Brer Fox.

Progress on the Sligo house. The pale upper walls in the centre
are 'scratch-coated with a pale clement. 

We think from her subsequent behaviour that she is the one from last year who was fiercely determined to go broody under an elder bush and had to be protected in situ becuase we couldn't persuade her to move or quit. No option to do that this year and anyway she has gone broody on nothing - not one egg, so I am reduced to gathering her up at lock up time and carry her, chuntering angrily to herself, back to the safely of the main coop. When we release her in the morning she makes a beeline back to her little slot and humpily sits down on the empty nest for another day. Idiot bird. I expect when we want her to go broody on some pure Buff Orp eggs she will have lost interest.

The porch - I get to lay some blocks!

Good progress out on the Sligo house rebuild and, for me, 2 new experiences. The exterior is coming on well with 90% of the fancy stone work done and now the upper 'half' of those new walls given their 'scratch coat' (rough plaster) of special pale cement made with crushed granite sand and white cement powder. This looks gorgeous and sets off the darker stonework beautifully. The outer finish coat will be the same pale buff colour and will not need painting. The chimney stack has now burst out through the new roof and is being dressed with a stone capping and that same pale cement covering. The roof is now 99% covered with membrane and battens ready to take the natural slate which was delivered today. The 99% thing is due to the old western chimney still having the original electricty supply lashed to it and needing that removed (by ESB) before we are allowed to take down the stack and finish off that gable.

The way that day worked out found K-Dub minding his poorly young son in the mobile home while Mum shot off to the shops, giving us an enforced, rather long lunch break. I'd finished and was ready to go back to work but was on my own. We were all set up to lay blocks up into the gable of the new porch so the boss suggested I just start on my own. Never laid a block or brick in my life but I've (now) seen quite a few laid and anyway, if I made a complete Horlicks of it, it would have been the work of minutes to tear down and start again. I did OK. When I step through that front door now and look up, I will know that up there, above the 'head' (lintel) stone are 2 courses of 4 inch "solids" that were all my own work! "There's kudos in building porches!" said K-Dub. My work stood and he carried on up when Mum returned to look after the boy.

An old gravestone for the 365 Project

My second treat that day was to be given a lift home the 20 minutes riding pillion on K-Dub's 'serious' motorbike. This, I am told, is a BMW 1150 RT, a cruising bike with saddles like armchairs, built for comfort rather than racing performance. I have not been on any kind of bike since the 70s (I was asked to ride a moped home from the hay fields to the home farm) so all the leaning was a bit of a surprise (a thrill, if you like) but K-Dub was very gentle with this rookie who was hanging on tight round his waist. I survived and was delivered safe home intact.

Dead now, my faithful Canon EOS D1000

Finally, who knew that you could fry the mother board of a Canon EOS digital camera by taking too many long exposures of night sky in succession. I managed to make my lovely, faithful but old camera go sick while photo-ing the Perseid meteors (or, rather, failing to capture any on film). It was suddenly unable to stay turned on and would power down at the first hint of work (auto focus or the need to use the pop-up flash). I parked it and have been using a little 'compact' ever since but with all this 365 photography going on I decided to disinter it, find out what was wrong and whether it could be fixed. Liz was off to the local camera club to do a presentation about 365 to them, so I asked to come along too in support and might as well bring the EOS and see if there were any experts in the club.

To cut a long story short, long exposures can warm up the mother board on "some Canons" and successions of long exposures overheat the board. They only have a design life of about 10 years anyway so my 7/8 year old one is now not economic to repair (it would be €250 touch). This  thought-process and research has now led me to a rather unwanted conclusion and , combined with the imminent need to acquire archery equipment, to making a hard decision and a life-changing move BUT, that is for another post so you will have to hold yourselves in patience till next time. Mean, huh?

Earth Stood Hard as Iron?

All through the recent snowfalls, pretty though they were, we have not had any really cold weather. Under that snow, as your boot heel squeaked down through it, you could feel the mud still yielding and 'fudge' soft. Where we did get a bit of a crunchy surface crust it was very thin and had softened by midday as the sun turned the grass back to green from white. Well, not this time. Over the last few nights the air has gone down to the -4's and -6's and with the wind chill factor it has been bitter-raw.

This is a bit crunchy, Dad! Can we have some wet stuff?

The sheep are OK with their straw shelter (though I did tie some more sheeting to the fence to stop a 'knife' of WNW wind taking the noses off the poor things as they ate from the trough). The birds are all OK in their solid buildings - a bit draughty maybe but not actually windy. I lashed up some of the big 40 kg coal sacks to the North side of the giant rabbits' run to give them some protection. I am also obviously into carrying out liquid water to the anybody whose drinker is solid, the geese in particular. Blue has been able to try out his pond-skating skills again.

That's more like it. The geese make do with a bucket of fresh
indoor water.

The main pond is a sheet of bobbly ice, where falling snow has landed and floated, combining to form the top-crust. I used to doubt those experts who'd look at the sky and say "too cold for snow" (I'm fairly sure it snows at both poles!) but that does seem to be the way of it here, or perhaps it is truer to say that it only gets really cold along this Atlantic margin, when we have high pressure and no clouds. Me personally, I enjoy the fact that it is frozen and 'dry' rather than the sloppy mud we have had some years. I love that stage where the puddles crust over with ice but then contract back into the earth. leaving the top-crust hanging there, above ground, fixed to a few blades of crisp grass.

Frozen puddle.

Our grass remains intact this year and has not been reduced to square yards of brown slop where humans have walked, geese have paddled and chickens have scraped. The exponents of wildlife gardening and helping the pollinators, of course, advocate planting plenty of very early flowering plants so that the bees have something to get at if they emerge early. These lists generally include snow drops, crocus and the flowering currents (Ribes) and pussy willow and hazel for the catkins. We are getting there. We are struggling to source snowdrops "in the green" as we used to do in Kent but have planted some dry and rather unlikely looking bulbs. We have planted a good few crocus each year into the lawn, though the 2014 batch have come up just as the snow hit and are now the must-have breakfast choice for one of the Buff Orp young roosters. The poor things are looking a bit ravaged. However, the bees have also been hunkered down in the hive since 25th January, so they've not needed the crocus flowers.

A frozen wash-out? Autumn sown broad beans.

In Kent, too, I was always able to grow autumn-sown broad beans. I would get them into the ground in October and they would emerge and grow to be sturdy 3-6 inch tall plants by the time the cold weather came. They would then go alarmingly limp and sorry looking at every frost but would bounce back well as the frost cleared and steam on through spring to produce a lovely early crop in May/June before the black fly had even spotted them. I was advised not to bother here and I know that Mentor Anne has done trials and now stopped trying; she does them in early spring now using root trainers and does not bother with the autumn sown varieties.

The rather ravaged crocus.

The plants do not like the constant wet. I suspect they could cope if it was just cold, but the wet, wet, wet has the biggest leaves turning black and falling away so that the poor lads either die or struggle on as a weak looking stem and tiny leaves which never really get cracking in the spring. I had three good rows going into the winter and great hopes for them, but I am now reduced to half a dozen plants and lots of gaps plus a conviction that the advice was correct. 2 failed winters. Life's too short. We always garden to our strengths anyway and never try to force things to grow which need 'the wrong soil' or shade/full sun or what-ever. Every day's a school day.

Purple sprouting broccoli, ready soon.

We do seem to be able to grow all the kales, cabbages and broccolis. I have a lovely stand of purple sprouting broccoli out there at present which has gone through winter with its sprout-buds tightly closed and tiny and is now starting to move; well, it was till these -6ºC temperatures came along. A warm week or two and we will be able to start cutting that and bringing it into the kitchen. The Brussels sprouts are nearly done, with just a few tiny buds left at the tops of the stems and, again, a warm week might let those expand a bit.

Talking of 'frozen', everyone was a winner yesterday when we dug a pork shoulder joint out of the freezer but decided to make a curry of the lean meat having first boned it out and stripped off the skin and subcutaneaous fat. Raw pork bones are our dogs' absolute favourite (and the best for them, it seems; no upset stomachs, that 'lovely' white chalky poo) and there were three good chunks for the three dogs. I skimmed the skin off the fat and roasted it into 'scratchings' for dog treats and the fat, finely diced, was hoovered up by the frosty chickens. The curry was a Madhur Jaffrey "Goan hot and sour" which we served with white rice and home made Naan bread.

Ear tags and pliers.

Finally, our sheep ear-tag 'pliers' and first batch of ear tags turned up. Under EU rules we have to identity-tag every sheep and lamb we 'produce' on this 'farm'  before it leaves (even to the mart or for slaughter) the premises or before it reaches 9 months of age. There are, of course, standard designs of tags you must use and you have to buy them from proper official suppliers who hold the databases of sheep flocks in their patch, in our case the excellent Mullinahone Co-op (Tipperary) who also supplied our pig 'slap-mark' numbers.

As you sign on with them as a customer, they pull up your details and start a sequence of ear-tag numbers; always here, the letters IE (for Ireland), then 04 (species code for sheep), followed by a 5 digit flock ID - I am 55809 and then 5 digits and a random letter for the animal number. You start at 00001 and off you go. Liz spotted a charming coincidence, that our first lamb (so IE0455809-00001F, to his friends) happens to have the random letter 'F' - his name is Feste. Our first batch of tags was the minimum size, 10 tags. It may take us a while to get through them at this rate even if the girls knock out some pairs of twins. We feel all grown up and official now in our 'farming'.

Pig Ark

A very welcome rain-less week is currently drying out our ground beautifully, so that our thoughts and plans can turn to gardening and getting on the ground without damaging the soil. Our crocus bulbs, planted last autumn have finally felt the sun on their petals and opened properly - they'd been sulking in that nearly-open state that crocus do when the rain is falling. Our tête-à-tête daffodils in the tub outside the front door are also cracking on now. But we are being patient and letting the soil dry nicely before we rush in and we have plenty of 'hard standing' tasks we can do, not least building the pig ark.

This we have un-ashamedly 'lifted' from the Haynes Pig Manual written by Liz Shankland (but actually designed and built by her husband, she says). It is based around 8 by 4 sheets of plywood and corrugated iron rolled to fit round these as a roof. We have had some fun putting this together, one of those nice projects where we can work together. It is quite a substantial construction incorporating tanalised '4 by 2' and '3 by 2', with a floor of 7 by 1 inch planks. It is in two sections, the floor and the roof.

The floor frame on its own was too heavy for one person to lift. The roof is a bit lighter but whether we can realistically flip it up off to clean out the ark remains to be seen. I suspect I will be crawling in there on hands and knees and shoveling out straw. I am told that pigs are clean animals and will not dung in their bedroom, so it would only be their mud I am crawling about in!

The ark will sit in the new pig-pen down in the 'Secret Garden', well out of range of any extension leads that I can deploy to drive power tools, so the roof section has had to be pre-drilled in bits up by the Tígín and then carried down to be assembled with my cordless, re-charge-able screw driver. We have also given the semi circular boards a coat of varnish / wood preserver, 'Sadolin's "Antique Pine" colour. So it might look like Class 3 Floor-grade 18 mm plywood to you, but I assure you it is now the finest word in sophisticated piggy accommodation. In this post are various pics taken 'en route' I will put up a pic of the finished article in its woodland setting when it is complete.

We have been out shopping over the last couple of days and have scored some notable successes. In general, the Irish do not 'do' gardens, with most houses having a broad expanse of grass with a few spot plants and trees. Garden centres as we Brits know them are few and far between and do not stock much in the way of unusual plants. We have yet to find what we'd call a 'specialist nursery', though they may exist. Our biggest local garden centre is probably Ardcarne which has a branch in Boyle, but also one in Roscommon Town. The Boyle branch seems to disappoint more often than satisfy us, but in Roscommon on Wednesday we managed to find several things we'd been hunting down; bare root summer-fruiting raspberries and bare root Ribes, first early seed potatoes (Rocket and Foremost) and red cabbage seed. We also picked up some heritage variety blue potato 'seed' for a bit of fun.

Then today we dropped in on one of our favourite shops, Flynn's 'Alladin's cave' of a hardware shop in Castlerea, the like of which has long since died out in the UK; seeds and hats are jumbled in alongside porcelain hen and chicks statues, bacon, glass 'chimneys' for oil lamps, playing cards, willow pattern china. devotional pictures, camping 'gaz' cylinders, local gaelic games sweaters, white spirits and meths and so on. Our mission, though, was bee related. We had heard that Mr Flynn was a bee keeper and might be selling bee equipment. He was indeed, and quickly furnished us with a price list for hive parts, bee smokers, beeswax 'foundation' and frames. We'd also heard that he might have seed for fodder beet, something we might be able to grow to supplement the food of our pigs. Again, he was there, quickly finding a commercial sized box of the stuff, from which he measured us out a 'handful' into an envelope for our €2 worth of seed. How much seed did we need? An area, we said, about the size of (glancing around) your chill cabinet! Ooops, though - the seed is agricultural 'pelleted' seed. The seeds come coated in a tiny bright red sphere of insecticide and fungicide to help them go through the seed drill and give them a good start in life. There goes our claim to be 'organic' this year, then!