The Pest From The West

Dippy Goose Eggs. Breakfast of Champions.

Friends of the Blog will know that we had started our goose egg season with a first one laid on the 18th, the day after the layer's sister-bird had been killed by the fox. By tradition, though, in this house we get to eat these first eggs (rather than selling them giving them away) jointly at a breakfast, as 'dippy eggs'. We therefore have to wait for the 2nd egg to arrive (that was the 21st) and then for both of us to be available and in breakfasty mood. That brought us round to Saturday morning (24th) but the eggs did not disappoint. They were well worth the wait. Happy First-Goose-Eggs-of-the-Year-Day everyone.

Anchovy flavoured pizza.

We have also been messing around with pizza. Now that I am steadily into the sourdough baking (we buy very little shop bread any more) I was curious to see whether sourdough could be used as pizza base. Of course it can and no end of my contacts suggested recipes.

Pizzas (raw)

This will have the average 'Mum' laughing in her socks. These days they cut their baby-chef's teeth on pizza assembly; it is real kid's stuff taught to 4 year olds, but at 60 years old I had never actually made my own pizza base and then covered it in ingredients.

Chopped pork pizza

I am happy to report another cookery triumph and one of those in which you can claim a good few ingredients as home made from home grown basics. The sourdough was mine. The 'ragu' had been made by Elizabeth using the rib and breast trimming bits of our most recent lamb. The chopped roast pork which went into one of them was from our own pigs. Other ingredients were probably better than used in supermarket pizza - we used extra mature cheddar for the cheese for example and whole anchovy fillets, fresh salad peppers and onion. These bad boys positively BUZZed with flavour.

Fast growing lamb, Tigger, still takes Mumma's milk but is also
keen on grass, hay and the breakfast 'crunch'. 

The down side of this is that I may have shot myself in the foot. The Head Chef enjoyed it so much that she said "Right - THIS is how we do pizza from now on. No more shop bought stuff!"

Thick ice on the goose bath.

Meanwhile, we are now seeing the first real effects of the cold easterly air stream coming across UK and this island from Siberia, for which everyone now seems to be using the handle " #TheBeastFromTheEast " . We have had the dry, bitter winds for a week now and we are beautifully dried out and frozen firm most mornings, but across today and through to Friday the 'Beast' is forecast to up the ante and start dropping snow and hail on us.

Straw bales keep the wind out of the sheep shelter. The sheep
can hunker down behind a bale. 

Naturally, fore-warned we have been able to stock up on coal and animal feeds and I have bought extra straw bales to give protection to the eastern side of my sheep shelter. That is the theory anyway. In fact the sheep have mainly gone right over to the East side of the field and lain down under the thick hawthorn hedge. The bales are used by lamb Tigger for bouncing up and down 'stairs' on. If I had a Euro for every time I'd stood the walls back up.......

Feathers mark the murder scene and the arrow shows the
villain's escape route. 

In other news then, if the storm is called #TheBeastFromTheEast, then I am calling my fox, who comes from the other direction, #ThePestFromTheWest. Yes. He has been back. On Monday (26th) we were both indoors relaxing prior to me going out to do 'Fox-Watch' from about 4:30 pm till lock up, when suddenly the shout went up from the ever-reliable Guinea Fowl. Rushing to the front window I saw a stream of fleeing chickens sprinting right to left, away from the pond side.

Our #1 Buff Orpington rooster. This is Herme. He survived.
His son, who looked very similar, was the victim

Rushing into footwear and coats we raced out but we were too late. We found the sorry patch of feathers which marked the murder scene and from the colour we knew the fox had snatched a Buff Orpington chicken. We quickly checked all the survivors and worked out that the fox had snatched our #2 Buff Orpington rooster, 'Orion'. I let the dogs off - we now trust them not to kill chickens on the way out or back and they chased around for the trail but they were way too late.

Getting in supplies of feed and coalite to see us through
"The Beast"

Upside(s) to this story. This attack had me chasing up the fox-trap supplier and finding that all their orders for these traps would be dispatched today (27th) as they had now been received by them on the Monday. We should get that this week, all being well. Also a new rooster just coming of age and possibly becoming a nuisance is now saved from the 'relegation zone' and promoted to #3. He looks a bit Marans so might make a future replacement for our #1 bird, 'Gandalf'. Assuming Brer Fox does not get him, of course. Thirdly, the attack put me back on high alert so that today I spent a good part of the day patrolling around outside (yes, in the cold!) and happened to be out with the dogs this afternoon at 4 pm when The Pest came back.

The local Tidy Towns group kicked off
their 2018 season with a very good talk
on composting. 

The Guineas kicked off and I saw a duck fly up and bonk down again onto the frozen pond but I was quickly able to let the dogs out of the lawn-field and was very satisfied to see the three streak away in echelon formation, hot on the heels of the fleeing fox. I don't suppose they caught him for one moment (little legs!) but they were gone out of sight for a good 15-20 minutes and returned breathless and buzzing. Maybe the fox will think twice tomorrow, now he know the dogs here are not ALWAYS under 'control'.

Finally, with The Beast coming across over the next few days, and The Pest very much a factor, we watched the black clouds building in the East and the first flurries of hail and snow come down on a squally wind. I looked across at Polly, our next ewe due to lamb, who was the far side of that East Field and saw that she was pawing at the ground. A definite sign of imminent lambing, though I'd not thought she was 'bagging up' that much yet. Still, we made an executive decision to get her indoors - I was mainly thinking of the cold and wet, but the Assistant Shepherd noted that Brer Fox would almost certainly be attracted to all that birth-fluid smell and fresh blood. Foxes will readily steal a new born lamb while it is helpless. I could not bear that.

So she is now in the pen in the Tígín on new straw, with a bucket of water and some grub. She is not totally happy about this but this is one of those times where the humans need to 'play God' and decide what is best for the animals in their charge. Polly's instincts might all be shouting to her to go find a lonely corner of the field and go it alone, but she doesn't know what we know about the Beast and that hungry, frustrated fox who just missed his duck dinner. Lastly, good luck to all our UK friends, who are mainly around the SE which seems to be the place posting the snowiest pictures on Facebook and may be getting The Beastly snow storms in the neck. Stay warm and dry. 

B'n'B for D'n'D

Make it count, Soldier. It is the last food you'll see till
tomorrow evening. 

We finally managed to nail down a vet to do the spay operations of 3 year old Westie bitch, Poppea and young tom-cat Soldier. They were booked into a practise in town for Friday morning so for them (and all other dogs and cats because it is easier that way) starvation from 6 pm on the Thursday evening. This is not a problem with the dogs who are not used to food between meals, but the hungry young cats live a life of harrassing us into feeding them at any time of day or night by just making nuisances of themselves, climbing the shelves, lying on your computer keyboard, pushing things off tables to see if gravity works, climbing all over your lap, shoulders and head purring madly. Subtle in their demands they are not and the only way to shut them up is to realise that it must be HOURS since their last feed. Days maybe. Weeks even....

Poppea, still very woozy from her operation gets sniffed
by the other two. 

Well, we held our nerve and managed to do a convincing job of being forgetful about breakfast come the morning. Come 9 o'clock, we extracted Blue from the cat basket so that we could put Soldier into it and got a collar and lead onto Poppea and her out of the door without the other two joining us, I ran Liz to work and went from there on to the vet's in Castlerea. The patients would be 'done' in the afternoon and we'd get a call to say we could come and collect them.

The makings of a very fine gumbo

We collected them at 5:30 pm, by which time Pops was trying to come round from the anaesthetic under a cosy heat-ray lamp in one cage, and Soldier was still sparko in his cat basket. The cat woke up that evening and was up and running, eating and wanting to go outside very quickly. Our little drama queen is a bit of a different story and is milking it over the whole weekend for all it is worth. She even went all day Saturday without eating and had her first breakfast this morning. We don't mind that. She's not going to suffer for lack of walking for a couple of days and we just have to keep the other dogs from being too boisterous around her. Poor little mite. Get well soon, Pops.

D and D in da house.

Main event this weekend, though, was a superb first-time visit from a second-cousin and her man, these two with very similar names so called, for the purposes of this blog, D and D. She is the daughter of one of Liz's very close, same age cousins from their childhoods, Cathy. Although Liz had met her a few times, she mainly remembers her as a pregnant 'bump' so this was going to be a nice chance to get to know D and her 'fella' better. D is young yet (well, compared to us!) but is madly in love with the idea of small holdering when she retires and keeping livestock. I expect there will be such a project in her future but she had read all about us on Facebook and in this blog and was really looking forward to meeting the animals.

Paté, then slow roast pork, then chocolate mousse with
raspberry coulis for supper.

D-the-man knew, obviously, that she wanted to come back to Ireland where she was born ( she left when she was only tiny) and had conspired deviously with various friends, contacts and family, including us, to organise this whole trip in secret. We had her completely fooled. She did not know till the morning that she was going on holiday and was a bit fed up with her normal friends for being all non-commital or "otherwise engaged" over what looked like being a lonely, boring weekend. D presented her with a simple map-of-Europe jigsaw  and announced that they were going on holiday to the country on the missing piece. Nice one, D!

D falls in love with the turkeys

They had a stop in Dublin to catch up on the friends and rels that end and then headed down this way to arrive about 3 pm. Liz LOVES all this kind of thing - hospitality and hosting and was ready with a menu fit for these honoured guests. They were going to have a quiche and salad stop-gap on arrival, then a superb supper of paté followed by slow roast pork with a dessert of chocolate mousse, raspberry coulis and cream. Breakfast was going to be 'dippy' goose eggs and toast soldiers and/or soda bread with smoked salmon. As many as possible ingredients were from our own produce and there was, naturally, a good but sensible amount of drink about the place.

D's "selfie" with Rambo.

They wanted a good show around the 'farm' and to meet the livestock. D thought she'd like the geese best but ended up being swept off her feet by our charming turkeys. They also seemed quite taken with her and followed her around chirruping happily and in one case even let her stroke his head. She was quite taken with Rambo too, who came loping over to see her every  time she appeared at the gate, 'asking' for her to stroke and scratch his head (Yes, now down a bit.... ooh, and just that bit behind my ear.... ). If a ram could purr, Rambo would be purring. D even took a 'selfie' picture of the two of them on her phone. D and D also asked if they could help on the first feed and release rounds. No problem, but I have to admit I doubted whether they'd get up in time. They did, and were even dressed and with wellies on. There's enthusiasm from a volunteer.

This rose bud came on a branch which had snuck in under
the shed roof so was in the dark out of the weather. 

We'll call that a successful visit, 'topp hosting' from us and perfect 'guesting' by D+D. Everything you could want from guests - they enjoyed everything we did, ate the food, fell in love with the animals and were pure pleasure to "entertain" (i.e. no bother at all to keep happy). Their next stop is Galway and then Bunratty Castle where they are booked in to a medieval banquet. We took them on a quick diversion out to the Sligo rebuild house to show them the more scary end of the "buying a place in Ireland" spectrum (serious buildering) and then set up their sat-nav for our scenic route to Galway through Clairemorris, Cong, Maam Cross and the mountains of Connemara.

Dippy goose eggs.

We went back home to a standard Sunday, dog walks and tidying up after a visit, gently recuperating the patients and sympathising with the turkeys who are behaving as if they have lost a close friend as well as enjoying all the Facebook stuff put up there by D+D. That is, I think, our last inbound visit in 2015, though we do have a couple of away-games to come. We do love these visits and the chance to do hospitality so a huge thank you to our guests and you know that you are always welcome back.