Au Revoir to AB

AB rocking the mesh visor. 

Farewell then, Augustin (AB), our Help-X volunteer of the last 4 weeks, who I dropped to the railway station this morning for his journey onward to Dublin. It nearly didn't work; as is commonly the case, Castlerea station was all locked up and gone away, unmanned and the ticket machine out on the platform was crashed and inoperable.

Nailing the docks (Rumex)

He and 2 other passengers decided to get on the train anyway and throw money at the first railway official they saw. A text later told me that they had all arrived safely in Dublin and had not been arrested for 'hobo-ing'. AB had done a month in Belfast prior to his month here and is now planning a month in the capital and one in Galway before, apparently, heading for Sweden. Yes. Sweden. It's a French thing, he tells me. They all want to see Ireland and Sweden. Works for me.

The pig paddock has never been so clear

Regular readers will know we've had a great time with the lad and we have done LOADS of work, mainly around Autumn-tidying, clearing nettle patches and pulling out of them, big heaps of old prunings and tree branches (incl. the Christmas tree from 2016!). If this was me doing the volunteer side, my mission would be to leave every place in a far better state than when I arrived. If that is also theirs, then AB should be very proud of himself. We are transformed.

Heavy rain stops play on what was to be
our last task.

His last working day was going to be yesterday and we were going to strip away all the grass growing from cracks in the concrete on the back "terrace" and then mix some cement and fill the cracks. Well, lashing rain in advance of the next named storm (Brian) put a stop to that and we both took a day off after having got up at the crack of dawn to nip down and help a friend move some cattle. AB's last job was on Wednesday, then, when he had a good session at bashing docks with the brush-cutter. We'd translated the stinging nettles as "ortie" but could find no such common name for French docks, so we called them 'Rumex' which amused AB ("It sounds like it should be an insurance company!").

My current favourite evening snack. Goat's cheese and strips of
our bullace-plum "fruit-cheese". 

All good things must come to an end, though, and although we loved having AB, we are home birds, a bit set in our ways and enjoying of our own company, so we were both looking forward to un-shipping the 'help' and getting our house and our routines back. No offence, we hope, in either direction.

One of the cats supervises the wine racking.
(pic by Liz)

One amusing side-line to this is that although AB was the easiest bloke in the world to feed (he ate everything we cooked for him and came back for seconds every time. Liz jokes that her worries were only about whether she'd "manage to fill him". He has a bullet-proof appetite) there were 2 minor mis-matches to his preferences. He does not like fish (he's OK with shellfish and prawns) or cooked cheese, so out of solidarity we avoided fish and cheese for 4 weeks. No pizza, then, and certainly no cheesy fish-pie. We are so going to make up for this, now that AB has gone!

I'll leave the last word to our friend and Archery Coach, 'Con'. We were over to his on Wednesday to help whacking in some tree stakes, to clear the shooting field of its 3D target "animals" (into dry store) and to fold Con's 2 enormous cone-shaped tent canvases. Con obviously likes AB and loved teaching him to shoot for those 4 weeks so in my little 'farewell' to AB on Facebook, Con replied,

"(He is) a big man with a big smile and willing hands - may he enjoy every step of his Path."

A dog on your lap is no protection
when this cat wants to come aboard.
Not NOW Kato!

Meanwhile, as we wait through the gap between Ex-Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Brian (how can you take those two names seriously in the same sentence?), our only other entertainment seems to have been racking off the wine. This was meant to be a 3 week kit but has taken us more like 2 months, possibly because we'd let the kit get old and maybe the temperature. yeast or the stabilizer were not up to much. We thought it had nearly done so we "killed" it with the stabilizer and it just took on a new lease of life, fermenting madly for 5-6 weeks before it finally calmed down enough to be 'racked' (bottled). It is surprisingly good and we find we prefer it to the shop-bought Ozzie Shiraz we had been drinking on the non-gin and non-beer evenings. Bottoms up!

Jungle Clearance

Another chunk of jungle bashed into submission.

I apologise in advance for a bit of a thin report this time. The weather has finally turned nice enough to get out into the garden and life since the last post has been all about weeding. Unless you want a piece entitled "My Battle with Creeping Buttercup, Silverweed, Couch Grass, Docks, Daisies and Plantains", I will struggle to put any drama into the words. The weeding was long overdue but I hate getting the knee pads on and squelching around with the wet threatening to come over the sides of the pads and soak my knees. I have done hours and hours of just plain hand-weeding, bits of several days from around 08:45 to 11:45. The compost piles are mountainous.

A buddleia in a not very sensible position. 

The good weather also attracted Liz out, and, 2-handed, we have been able to get on with some projects. The first of these was to do battle with what we thought was our last piece of 'jungle'. These little corners of rubbish seem to occur in all our gardens - you mean to tackle them but you've no time right now, so I'll stack this 'stuff' in it for the present; of course, you end up with mini 'glory-holes' of stacked canes, sheets of plastic and other junk with brambles and nettles trying to grow through them and all your locals weeds running rampant.

The patch now clear but re-sheeted to hold it. 

Ours was a ten foot wide, 20 foot long gap between the polytunnel and the raised flower bed. When we bought the place this hole was, like several other bits, full of well rotted bales of hay and straw and the 'earth' was a mess of half-buried silage wrap, rocks and old peat-turf, overgrown with a jungle of nettles, brambles and long, lank, wet grass. In the short term, we decided to just sheet it over with black plastic and use that dry, black surface to dry out the chunks of turf I was pulling out of the earth bank at the time (I still am!). Most of this turf got dried and has been burned, but the smaller fragments sat on the plastic through a couple of winters and, as you'd expect, started to grow their own ecosystem of grass and weeds.

The roses are now fighting back after the wet and producing
buds which actually manage to open (!)

The sheeting I had put down did not come right to the edges, so the biggest rat's nest of nettles grew there, I have ever seen - stems were 5-6 feet high and the roots, once finally extracted were more than an inch thick at the centre of the clump. On the outer edge of the gap was the chicken wire we had put surrounding the flower bed to keep the birds off and (again no surprise) the bottom of this had become a tangle of new weeds. We now have the bed better established and 'peopled' with sturdy perennials which can cope with chickens rooting around under and between them, so we decided to do away with the wire mesh in the same project.

A couple of days of fun, then, with fencing pliers, hammer, shears, pick axe (to break open the rotted bales and get the nettle roots out), pointy shovel, rake, stone-buckets, builders one-tonne bulk bag for the weeds and a barrow for the use-able turf. It is now cleared of nasties, dug over, stone-picked and turf-picked, raked smooth and now re-sheeted with better, flatter (and big enough) black sheeting to await the Autumn and its annexing by the existing raised flower bed. Yes, we have more plans.

One of last year's 'Million Trees' oaks is
now getting cracking.

The big bed is now down a couple of years and the plants in it have started to show their true, Roscommon potential. By that, I mean that some of them are surprising us by being bigger, taller and wider than we have ever seen them grow in, for example, Kent. We have only ever had limited success and poor growth before with such as Philadelphus (Mock Orange) and Crocosmia (Lucifer). Here, these plants are huge - the orange has 5 foot long whips coming out in all directions. A Buddleia we squeezed in at an edge (unwise) us now trying to vault across the grass path. Crocosmia is shouting 'HOT RED' in great 4-5' tall fans, one of which is near the front of the bed and hiding all sorts of goodies behind it. The lupins and sweet rocket have now gone over but stand as tall spikes of seed heads which we hate to tidy up but probably need it.

Some rose prunings make it indoors. 

We took all this in while working there and decided that we need to do some moves and shuffling as well as some evictions. The big Buddleia and Philadelphus will be headed to the woodland edge once they go quiet in Autumn. The 'Lucifers' will need lifting and dividing but we will also take the opportunity to move them back a bit, almost certainly into the cleared jungle patch. Some shorter plants may be moved forward. We do not want a rigid gradation by height; we like tall see-through stuff like purple verbena, teasel and Japanese anenome to be scattered about but the beds does need a bit of a sort out. We are currently looking at a way of mapping it all so that when we go to dig things up in October, we can tell our crocosmia from our gladioli and we can distinguish between various 'dead' brown clumps.

Left to right, the 5 week old turkeys, one of the 9 week old turkeys,
a young Guinea Fowl and the olde Marans hen.

Meanwhile, the newest hatch of turkeys have reached 5 weeks and looked big enough, to us, to cope with Soldier the cat, so we have let them out free range. We were delighted to see that the 'Gang of Four', our 2 other turkey poults and the young Guineas straight away adopted them into their gang, rather like older siblings who are asked by their parent to 'mind' the babies. There was no pecking order stuff and no harrassment. The 2 newbies were quickly absorbed and the youngsters all now travel around as a gang of six. For a couple of nights we rounded the new ones up back to their rabbit run in the evening and shut them in, but on the third evening all six went off to roost in the turkey house and looked so cosy together that I let them be and shut them all in together. Everybody survived and now I can tidy up the rabbit runs and stash them back away somewhere dry. Our 2015 breeding season is over. The remaining adolescents just need to grow up in the flock. Only 'Hen with Two' remains in any kind of kindergarten arrangement, with Mum still looking after the 5 week old babies and taking them off to the camping-toilet gap in the Tígín each night. She will soon move into the proper house, we expect.

Male turkey poult (?) at 9 weeks.

The older turkey poults, now 9 weeks, are both looking, to our inexpert eyes, like males (Toms). They have the start of the flap of loose skin at their throats (the wattle) and we have seen both of them doing lttle play versions of Dad's display - tails up and wings down. This does not matter of course - these are still purely meat birds but possibly the males grow faster than the hens. Que Sera.