Down-Sized Daggin'

After the relatively heavy duty, 'industrial' task of shearing and dagging the sheep, the 'medical team' here takes a marked, factor-of-ten (at least) move down the sizes to deal with a rabbit problem. Our fairly geriatric, ex-Silverwood, rabbit, Ginny, who has always been 100% healthy and fastidiously clean, came out of the wet, cold May with an odd fringe of fluff around her 'seat' and what looked like a dark shadow under her back end as she hopped away from you. It turned out that she was badly dagged up having, we guess, caught a dose of diarrhoea and not been able to keep herself clean.

Strawberry bed looking good and will soon be in need of
protection from the birds - wild and domestic.

She was a candidate for the Medical Wing, but so fine is her fur, so tiny were the actual lumps of 'dag' and so delicate the skin of a rabbit, that this was not a job for clippers or even big scissors. This was a two person job, one holding Ginny to keep her calm (me in this case), the other (Liz) using little 'nibbling' actions with the nail-scissors to cut away the wads of soiled fur. Ginny was as good as gold. If we were given to anthropomorphism we might even suggest that she volunteered for this help, coming to find us and then letting Liz just gather her up without any chase or a fight.

Well, we managed to cut away all the big stuff and decided to leave the last few flecks and her scut a few days while she got over the indignity, planning to give her a rear-end bath, shampoo and conditioner in a few days. We inspected the patient again today and she had done such a good job of cleaning up the rest, we let her off the bath, and just trimmed away that last scut fur. She is as good as new. Having her out of the apiary run gave us an opportunity to swap rabbits around. She is a small rabbit and now on her own, she had not really been keeping on top of the grass growth where as the 'giants', Goldie and Nugget have theirs grazed down "to the clay" almost.

Spuds (British Queen, new) doing well in the tunnel

So we rounded up those two and moved them to the apiary today. They can nibble off all the grass and creeping buttercup, and I will pull the last few stinging nettles. It is important in an apiary not to suddenly change the environment (for example by brush-cutting long stuff) as the bees can get their visual maps of the way home confused and can get lost. There is also an issue with vibration of, for example, chugging lawn mowers, which can cause a gazillion bees to come out of the hive to fend off the 'attack'. Rabbits are the perfect solution -they only change the grass height slowly and they are not a bother at all to bees.

New hive boxes, painted with linseed oil.

That swarm-lure box, meanwhile, still has bees visiting so, this long after the first visit, they can no longer be a swarm scouting for a new place to live. They must, by now, be a swarm which has moved in (Yay! free bonus bees!) all be it, we think from the small numbers, a secondary or 'cast' swarm, rather then a big, 10,000 bee 'prime' swarm. Next job then was to buy boxes for a 2nd hive and to think about getting the new colony down from the tree where I have optimistically lashed the lure box. Regular readers will know that the rule for moving bees is "fewer than 3 feet or more than 3 miles". Bees find their way home using a remembered mental map and if you move the hive more than 3 feet, they cannot adjust this. They just mill about at the old location till they run out of energy and then die. It is OK to move them 2 feet a day, they can cope with that. So to get them down from being tied to a tree ten feet up, I will have to lower them down against the ladder at 2 feet a day, till they are ground level, and then I can open the box and see if we have a colony worth giving a nice new home (hive) to.

A young Scots Pine from the 2014
'Million Trees' batch.

These boxes came from local Alladin's Cave emporium, where the guy has more out-buildings and sheds behind his main shop than anyone really needs - one for fishing tackle and (I saw) crossbows and archery gear, one for the salting operation of pork, one for the bee keeping equipment and so on. While I was ferreting around in there, I also rather nicely got the car washed - there was a gang of jet-wash people cleaning cars in support of the Castlerea Agricultural Show at a fiver a go. It's cleaner now than it has been since we came over here - I never wash our cars. It is a job, surely, for the Sunday Morning, English, striped lawns, semi-detached suburban Mr Jones crowd. One of my 'company' cars used to be so 'agricultural' inside that when a colleague borrowed it (they were owned by the employer so you had to allow them to be used as pool cars while you were on site) to nip out somewhere with another lad, he joked when he got back that he had had to tell the lad off for treading mud all over the carpark from my car. Yeah, yeah, Shane, very funny!

Starting to dig a new flower bed along the front of the house
from what was once lawn. 

Readers may recall that Liz and her gang of internet chat forum chums hold regular weekend meetings in 'real life' to socialise. They are scattered all over the globe, and the person who volunteers to host the weekend invites the friends to their town or city to get a flavour of local food, drink, culture and social life. They either troop round as a gang to chosen restaurants for joint meals or they are welcome to go off exploring (or jogging, walking etc) using the host's place (or recommended hotels and pubs) as a base. Late last year, you may recall. Liz nipped over to the UK to be part of one in Bridport, hosted by our friend 'Airy Fox'.

Vicarious Madrid via i-Phone, laptop, wine, dog and
warm fire. 

This weekend, some of these friends are in Madrid, where a British friend happens to be working and Liz was so recently back from Greece that she opted out, wanting to spend some time here. But these are, after all initially INTERNET friends and you cannot escape them that easily, so Liz has managed to spend the weekend enjoying Madrid vicariously and hearing all about it, regularly supplied with pictures of food, drink, Madrid's terracotta roof-scapes and fancy architecture. She is tongue-in-cheek pretending to be envious,so we sent 'them' this picture of Liz curled up next to an Irish turf fire out of last night's chilly northerly breeze.

Tag, Dag and Weigh

It's not meant to hurt 'too much'.
The sharp end of the tag is pushed
through the ear with special pliers.

At long last, sheep man 'Kenny' arrives to ear-tag my lambs. We love him dearly but he is the most disorganised lad and the most unconcerned about time keeping and deadlines we know. Last year we got lambs with no paperwork (which is no longer allowed) and this year he passed us the lambs and the ear-tag fronts separately, promising to swing by in 'a week or so' and fit them for us. That was August 2nd. In both cases, I would also be in trouble of course for having accepted the lambs in this 'condition' but we muddle along and it all sorts itself out in the end. So far we have not been inspected by any Dept officials.

Contained in the cattle race. 

Kenny texted first to say he'd be with me in 40 minutes (and he was!) but did not bring his son Oisín (a useful and expert sheep-wrangler) and I do not currently have Liz on hand, so the job was down to the two of us. I was a bit concerned that we might have problems persuading the lambs across my yard and into the cattle race; they had never been there. They were as good as gold, following my rattled bucket of grub. Once in the race they were easy prey, with only a confined space and no place to run. We just needed to catch each one in turn, tag them and "weigh" them. There was also one I needed to 'dag'.

All legal now - yellow tags on the right ear.

Kenny let me tag one of them with the pliers. The two halves of the tag fit one into each 'mandible' of the pliers, then you crunch them together forcing the sharp point of the one half through the ear and into the socket of the back of the tag. You try to avoid any obvious blood vessels and the punch must sting them a bit (they jump!) but it is supposed to not hurt them much or for long. They certainly seemed OK and unconcerned very quickly after we did the damage.

The messy end, reasonably clean after
having been 'dagged'.

While we had them contained, Kenny gave me a quick master-class in assessing sheep 'condition' (as in fatness or readiness for slaughter). Push 4 fingers into the back of the lamb either side of the spine. If you can feel the spinal 'processes' sticking up like the knuckles of a tight-closed fist, then we are too thin - the spine needs to feel like the knuckles of an almost open hand. Probe with your fingers either side of the tail - you should not be able to feel any bone here. Push a hand into either side of the lamb just behind the ribs as if trying to make your fingers meet inside the lamb's abdomen. If you can't get in at all you are fat, of you can get a little way in you are 'middling' and, Kenny tells me, if the lamb is in very poor condition you can almost meet your fingers 'through' the lamb's body. All our lambs were declared 'mighty fine' and only days or a week or two away from being 'fit' (ready).

The young Buff-Orps out and about. They will hit 21 weeks
('point of lay' for many chickens) on about Christmas Day!

The official hi-tech way of weighing them today, though I will leave this to Kenny who is way younger, fitter and stronger than I am, was to lift them and declare "Ah... he's ready". Kenny grabs them around the chest from above and hefts them off the ground clutched to his own chest as a child might clumsily lift a younger brother or sister. They want to be about 8 stone he says. I'll take his word for it!

Mapp and Lucia at nearly 6 months.

The final job on the lambs was that I needed to 'dag' one. Dags, for the uninitiated, are the messy, poo-ey 'cling-ons' which dangle behind some sheep, where the poo has not cleared the wool and is all stuck in between the fibres, unable to fall to the ground. Dagging is a regular part of sheep husbandry but (I am told) applies much more to some breeds, such as Suffolk Downs, than others (Texel, Mules etc). They are not 'scouring' (having diarrhoea) in any unhealthy way, they just do loose 'stools'. This may only apply to lush Roscommon grazing, I do not wish to impugn the Suffolk Down breed in general, which may cope perfectly well on the Suffolk Downs.

Mapp

I have 3 lambs this year who all produce, all the time, hard pellets of poo about the size of marbles which rain down harmlessly from bum to grass, leaving the lovely clean wool of the lamb's rear end pristine and clean. No 4 lamb however has a 'softer' approach to life and always has had, so his bum is always in a terrible state and while Kenny had him in a firm grip, I was able to get round him with a pair of scissors cutting away as much dag as I could. He must weigh a few kg less now but Kenny didn't re-weigh him, he just commented that it was me that had the shi**y hands because I was the 'rookie' sheep wrangler. Thanks, I think.

Bust 1.07 m. Nice one, Lucia!

Kenny then stayed around for a while chatting. He fancies a couple of our Buff Orpington 'hins' because one of the farm dogs has recently killed 2 of his own girls, so I'll do him a deal when we can sex them with any reliability. We were also talking about our sheep for next year, when we rather fancy getting into year-round sheep, so we might buy a couple of in-lamb mothers. That way we can be there for the lambing and then have the lambs right round to this time of year. The only issue with this is that breeding-age ewes as a going concern are way more expensive than store lambs for fattening, more like €180 than €85. Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, the pigs are fast approaching their 6 month birthday (10th Sept) and are looking a lot like they, too, are "fit". I measured them today and they have now both aligned their weights - they are both 1.22 m from between the ears to the base of the tail, and they have bust 1.07 m, so by the 'bust squared' method of estimating weights, we have reached 90.8 kg live weight. They also, to our rather novice eyes, look big enough; we just try to imagine what that shoulder joint would look like separated from the glossy, ginger-haired lively young porker who currently owns it. I will soon need to be a-visiting that butcher-man.