The Great Outdoors

The two marmalade kittens are growing fast. At 12 weeks now (we think) they are not big enough to take on the dogs and we don't yet trust the dogs with them, but they are getting too big and lively to be confined to the one room. If you go into the Sitting Room to sit with them they quickly start doing 'wall of death' style charges around all the furniture and racing up your legs or across your shoulders. They are fast and agile and look every inch as if they NEED a bigger space to let off steam into. They also, rather alarmingly, make a dash for the door to their room as soon as you open it a crack, so keen to greet you that they seem unaware of the doggie danger lurking just outside.

Newest member of our menagerie meets our most seasoned
veteran. 

We have taken to smuggling them outside while the dogs are sleeping off a walk and letting them play round the yard and buildings with both of us supervising in case they should decide to split up; one person would only be able to keep tabs on one of these. The weather has been warm and it is very pleasant sitting out there in the sunshine watching the antics of 2 kittens.

Sitting in the sun supervising kittens. 

They have met some of our birds and even play-stalked the Guinea Fowl. They seem to find the chickens and, especially, the rooster, a bit big, so they've not pushed their luck there. Liz noticed that they seem to have an aversion to grass, even new mown short grass. Maybe they have 'feral concrete jungle' DNA, she says, as the kittens race between hard-standing areas and sprint across the grass between.

When you want to take cute kitten pics
among the flowers but they want to play
among the engineering. 

They loved the front 'drive' bits and the car-port with its 'Mad Max' vehicle and stacks of wood. When we carried them over to the 'Darby and Joan' chairs so that we could sit by the pond, they could not wait to get up off that grass by climbing into a lap or onto a shoulder. Ah well. I suppose they will get used to all the rest in time. We are doing all we can to get them to grow big and strong so that they can join the dog-owning half of the family without risk of getting chewed. When Blue was a kitten of course, Towser and Poppea were tiny pups - they grew up together without one side being dominant and when Soldier arrived he was big enough to cope and well versed in dog-management. This introducing tiny kittens to a full grown dog pack is all a bit new.

A nice tight cosy pen seems to be the answer. Nobody has
space to think they might get up some speed if they charged
 'that way'.

My other 'livestock' stories are 1) just that time came round again to foot-trim the sheep and 2) we 'harvested' a first Hubbard rooster. The sheep were last done at shearing and though you can't really get a good look at feet when they are wading through tall-ish grass, I'd been seeing occasional tenderness or lameness when Lily or Polly walked across the dry mud bits of their paddocks.

A neatly trimmed hoof. Lily in this case.

Nothing for it but to run them onto the concrete of the cattle race and give them a proper going over. We could now see that some of the sides had grown a bit long and were splaying, and some toe-points needed attention. We are good at this one now, so it was the work of no more than half an hour to do them all with my special "secateurs" while Liz subdued and calmed the neck and head end.

Every trimmed foot then gets a splash of the bright purple spray even though I could see no signs of foot rot. I even get most of it on the sheep's hoof (and up the gap between the 'cloven' toes) and not too much (OK some) on my hands or up the side of the sheep. The girls are then all released back into the East Field and we like to see the comfortable, relieved gaits on them as they spread out to graze. Job done.

First Hubbard rooster of 2016

At 80 days the Hubbard chickens are right at the start of their 'proper' harvesting time; we normally leave them to more like 100 days to let them get nice and big. However, we fancied a chicken for the weekend roast and had none in the freezer, so one of the boys got it in the neck. He plucked and dressed out at 2.320 kg, or about 5 lbs and was the ever reliable Hubbard version of delicious, tasty, meaty and tender. They really are superb, these hybrids specially bred to do the job under commercial Free Range or Organic systems and we swear by them (and thank Mentor Anne, of course, who can still get them as day-olds despite no longer being in that business and putting in orders for them by the hundred). We are always so disappointed when we have to buy other chicken in supermarkets.

Soapwort. Don't grow it near the pond - it is very toxic to
aquatic life.

Unrelated to any of this I had an exciting and interesting time a few nights back when asked by a friend in the village to 'rescue' his cattle water situation. No pictures for this story - I was not about to take my camera with me when scrambling about in a stream among cattle. These cattle live in a set of fields where their water supply is to drink from a stream just before that stream vanishes down a swallow hole. There are many of these fascinating geo-morphological features round here due to the fractured limestone geology.

The swallow hole in question sits at one end of a shallow pool but the pool-bed and the bed of the stream feeding it are only water-proof because they form a trough and dish shape made of fine sediment. Water can leak off the sides of this bed into any number of similar holes and this was what was happening when the stream became blocked by a log-jam of branches, reed-mace, plastic barrels and empty feed sacks. The 'dam' raised the water level upstream of our friend's land and all the water diverted left and right out of the stream (and underground) before his cattle saw any of it. Poor thirsty creatures were standing in the drying mud lowing their protests.

At last my Archery paperwork arrives. No stopping me now!

The friend is not really up to scrambling about in streams pulling out debris, so my job was to get in there and try to free up the dam while at the same time packing rocks and some of the bits into the 'leaks' in the sides upstream; really trying to get the stream to disappear into the correct swallow hole, rather than the neighbour's ones. Well, it worked and I managed to free up the log jam. The water surged forwards into 'our' pond and the cattle got to drink some before it gurgled away underground. I checked it all again today and it was still free, so everybody is happy.

Goats and Votes

The white goat loaded.

Let me just set your mind at rest - we have not finished today owning any new species. We remain firmly in the 'No' camp regarding the goat species as a good plan. The billy-goats in these pics we were just moving for friends as we have a trailer. Phew. That was close.

Well, THAT was a big busy day for the trailer and even busier in other ways, too. We had three jobs for the beast today - collect pallets from JD Bob, move goats and then go shopping for hay and straw for our horse-rescuing chum, who we will call, for the purposes of this blog, for now, "Murphy's Mum". You may also know that it is voting day for the Referendum and, just to put some icing on an already rich cake, T McC's main hive decided to swarm so we got involved in that retrieval. It's all go.

Out frightening voters in Ballaghaderreen with
our new chum Tommy R. Canvassing.

For Lizzie, certainly, the vote was the main event and we were down at the Polling Station nice and early. The turn-out is reported to be very high but even then our tiny local Polling Station had been amazed to have had 48 people through by the time we got there. Liz had been out on the mean streets of Ballaghaderreen, canvassing with our new friends Steve F and Tommy R and I'd even joined them on the Tuesday after livestock lock-up. The feeling was that it was all a bit 50/50 on the doorsteps and we had a superb time at one where the household were even 'arguing' at the front door and using Liz as a referee. We don't know if a high turnout is a good thing for 'yes' or 'no' but it is surely a good thing from the point of view of democracy - the answer they come up with will be more representative of the national state of mind.

The geese may also be voting 'yes'.

The pallets were an easy one. These were some boards on which JD Bob's "bag manure" (as they call it here; it's basically pelletized NPK fertilizer) was delivered to his fields and he knows that we can always use an empty pallet. He can too, but he has an outbuilding full of them. We use them intact for fencing/hurdles, or we use the wood for scrap wood for making things, or in the end for kindling. I just needed to nip out to his field to collect them in the trailer.

Next up were the goats. Another family we are friendly with are selling up and moving back to the UK, so they are off loading as much 'livestock' as they can to make the journey home easier, plus the likely move they will have to make, short-term, into rented accommodation, where pets may not be allowed. We have inherited a new cat, Soldier, of whom more later, but today was all about collecting their two billy-goats, Jean-Paul 'Goat'ier and Sebastian Farquahar. These guys were a pair of boys originally rescued by our chums from the local forestry where they'd been abandoned and gone half-feral but then more recently kept tethered on their grazing to keep the rushes down. Being 2 boys they were kept a bit apart, so they'd not fight and each a bit spoiled with a make-shift weather proof shelter.

Safe at Carolyn's the boys catch up on some horn-clashing
head-banging, grudge-match pecking order stuff. 

Charlotte and Carolyn of the mini-horses are taking these guys. They are well equipped in the horn department and allegedly can be a bit spiteful but Charlotte, not willing to put up with any such nonsense, gave us a master-class in goat-wrangling. You don't need any of this tempting them with feed bowls and leading them - they have blooming great "handles" on their heads by which to grab them and yank them in the direction you want them to go. Something about being used to getting a 600 kg horse to do what it's told and not putting up with any argy from a 60 lb goat.

We inherited this very smart, young cat, 'Soldier' and now
need to settle him in to cope with the dogs. 

We quickly and efficiently got them loaded and home where we steered them by the 'handles' into a bit of Charlotte's yard. No sooner were they in there than they decided they needed to settle all those grudges they had built up by being tethered 30 yards apart in their field, so we all watched an impressive head-butt fight which Charlotte assured us would not last long; they would quickly establish who was boss. I'll take her word for it - they seemed fairly evenly matched to me but it was an impressive battle. The boys would rear up on their hind legs then smash together, often bouncing their back legs off the ground at impact. An impressive noise. They must have very hard skulls!

Soldier

From there, the car and trailer came home briefly but then had to head for our horse-rescue lady friend's place to go buying hay and straw for the big, impressive Irish Cob gelding (Murphy) she rescued, who is now in a nearby livery/racing stable. At this point there was a brief hiatus when a phone call from T McC told us that he "thought he had a swarm". This from his biggest hive, which we'd actually cracked open yesterday. We'd found queen-cells but had been unable to locate the queen. At the time of his call he'd been imspecting a different hive and had suddenly noticed that the air was full of flying bees - the swarm was on! Now, 'Murphy's Mum' is quite keen to get into bees, so I wondered would she like to come along, out of curiosity, to watch the action, en route to the hay-shop. We ended up being given bee-veils by T McC (and, in my case the video camera) so we rather nervously (aware of our bare arms etc) watched and video'd as he got to work. By now the swarm had coalesced around the queen in a nearby hawthorn tree so we watched (and filmed) a pretty impressive loppering of bush and gathering up of the swarm in a basket, then T walked across to a hive he had ready and tipped the basket full of bees into the hive. We both may be inept beginners who happily laugh at our clumsy blundering efforts but this time it seems he got the queen and the bees in the basket/hive were straight way "fanning". When the workers have landed and are happy with their location they fan off volatile 'pheromones' (scents and chemical hormones) to call all the other bees 'home'. In this case they fanned both their own smell and some queen pheromone (9-ODA) out into the air and quickly gathered all the flying bees and the ones still left milling in the hawthorn bush to them and in an hour or so, seemed to be settled in the new hive, so that T could make his way happily to Dublin to do his own voting. I am going round tomorrow just to check on the new hive and make sure there are bees coming and going. Job Done.

Hay for Horses? Murphy's Mum is just finished working.
The posh tweed coat and strappy pink sandals may not be
the most sensible attire - open toes that close to Murphy's
great big hooves!

From there, off to the hay-shop with Murphy's Mum and then round to the local livery stables to meet the famous 'Murphy', a huge Irish Cob she rescued. Poor MM was just out of work and still in her posh dress, coat and strappy sandals, so it might have been a bit unfair to take her off swarm-wrangling and then horse attending but Murphy is a calm lad with a quiet power and does not skitter about stomping on people's feet uninvited. We got him out to the sand-school, delivered the hay, changed his bedding and stabled him up again without drama.

Meanwhile we are having some fun bedding in the new cat. The three terriers are still in 'mink' mode and think that any slinky black furry creature is game for a three-dog assault, so we are keeping 'Soldier' in a separate (locked) room for now and doing the rehabilition in a series of controlled sessions with dogs on leads or (singly) with grab-able collars. The cat has been no problem - Blue and he are now the best of friends and play like Blue used to with the late Rolo, but Soldier has not yet learned of the need to get up somewhere high when the dogs get a bit feisty. It will work, but it's not going to be a quick fix.

Getting into some Greek food care of a Lidl promo.
Clockwise from top, Squid, green beans in tomato sauce,
 filo parcels with feta and spinach, 'dolmades' (rice wrapped
in vine leaves) and garlic mushrooms.

The broody Buff Orpington in the Tígín has had her hatch(es). We have seen her off the nest with one chick and suspect that she may have another under her skirts. Unfortunately she hopped off with these (?) two during the night and the remaining eggs were well chilled by the morning, so that might be it. Still, the one we have definitely seen looks like a pure-bred Buff, so it will be quite charming to watch mother and daughter(s).

The count on the Referendum does not start till 10:00 tomorrow and the results are expected by about midday, so at least we can get a good night's sleep after all this drama and Liz only needs to be glued to the internet and TV for the morning.

Unwelcome Visitors

Thanks for the 'present' you fly-tippers

No more foxy visits, but lately we have been subject to visits by two other species, namely Rattus norvegicus and good aul' Homo sapiens. The humans were that low-life sub-species, the fly tippers, who generously donated us a series of dustbin liners of mainly bottles, hoyed into the hedge in the layby almost opposite us. In theory the county has, I am told, a 'Litter Warden' who you are supposed to phone and he comes out, checks for 'evidence' (addressed envelopes, I presume) in order to bring the offenders to account and then, presumably has the council operatives come and clear up your mess.

Call me a cynic, but I couldn't see any of that really happening here, in the snow, in anything like rapid time and there was not too big a pile - half a dozen bags. I thought the pre-existence of rubbish might just make other folk think it was OK to dump here, so we tidied it all up ourselves (and, of course, found no addressed envelopes). We donned the "murderer gloves" (actually blue nutrile milking gloves!) and went to work filling the wheel barrow. The glass is in the local bottle bank and the rest went into our wheelie bin which was due to be emptied that night anyway (goodbye shameful fox corpses).

I was annoyed by the effront but I feel more let down in a delusion which I should not have brought along with me anyway. I had always thought the Irish were a more careful nation than we Brits (just me stereotyping mainly), more caring of their children, more concerned about issues like South African apartheid, keener to keep their country clean and the environment more pure. In general they have lived up well to most of my stereotypes, but on litter, pollution and environmental damage this was just a delusion. The Irish are as careless about chucking food wrappers and beer cans out of their cars, and of fly-tipping as are my countrymen. Don't worry, though, you litter-bugs. I am that loony who goes out with his hi-viz jacket, bin-bag and rubbish-grabber and cleans up the local hedges. I pay the honest sub to Barna Waste so that we can get wheelie bins emptied each week. I'll clear it up for you. Don't mention it.

Classic rat damage to stored Sarpo Mira spuds - chewing
marks, shredded potato bits, spuds wet with urine and
'wet cigarette end' poo.

The rat-visitor found our crate of stored spuds. As is normally the way of these things, though, we only found him, and then the damage, when he succumbed to the ace ratting skills of our handsome  and fluffy cat, Blue. Blue normally kills them and then leaves them for us, very dead and partly dismembered or disembowelled to tread in, in the dark. He and his late brother, Rolo, were a real find, the perfect farm cats. They were big and strong, athletic and powerful, patient and magnificent hunting machines (Blue still is, of course). They have kept our rat and mouse population at very happy low levels and have only made a few 'mistakes' - a wren or two, a swallow, a chaffinch.

Blue 'hunts' a soap packet. 

They came from a house near the Silverwoods and, if memory serves, there is some 'feral' in their DNA. Either the Mum or the Grand-mother was, I think, dumped in a box by one of the porta-cabin classrooms at the girls' school and there was a bit of "Mummy.... Pleeeeeeease can we keep this kitten we found?" What ever the truth, these two boys had definitely landed on their great big paw-pads, good hunting country with plenty (originally) of rat and mouse targets to go at. Rolo, sadly, also had a propensity for crossing the lane and came off worse eventually in a drive-by hit and run, but his bro is still here doing Sterling service.

The beautiful county of Sligo (picture blagged off the net)

But it's not all doom and gloom. We went adventuring today, a shopping mission to Sligo. Sligo is another beautiful county which we have on our doorstep (an hour's drive at most) but which we have shamefully neglected since moving here. We went to Sligo town early on (2012) when we needed to get the cars registered as Irish, but we didn't really see the place even then - the route to the registration centre skirts the town and diverts off to Carraroe and into a business park, just warehouses and car show rooms. On one of the runs we found some scenery by mistake when we were diverted off the big roads but we have never been back properly.

In 2015 we resolve to correct this omission and we may today just have found the perfect incentive, a magnificent and well stocked housewares shop, the sort of place where Liz (when she's not in favourite UK stationery outlet 'Staples') thinks she has died and gone to Heaven. Our mission today was straighforward, a food mixer for the baking (and also sausage grinding, maybe) but the shop, and the whole of Sligo Retail Park was a revelation. We had thought we needed to go to Galway or Dublin for such shops and such choice.

Naan bread - we are ready for the next visit.

The scenery en route did us proud, too with the higher bits of the lovely Ox Mountains being white with the recent snow. We were in and out today, though, in a bit of a hurry (possibly a hurry to get the new 'toy' home, unpacked and loaded with cake ingredients) so we didn't go a-wandering. We are determined to return, though and find some scenery to take the guests to which is closer than the current "must see" territory of Connemara. Connemara is gorgeous but there is an hour-plus drive to get to anywhere worth looking at which is better than beef country and dry stone walls. Driving up through Balla-D, Gurteen and Ballymote, you can start seeing good lumpy mountains half an hour from here.

More Sligo (another blagged image)

We have the imminent excitement of some more visitors. More on this soon, but these, we know, like a good curry, so we are going to crack open the faithful Madhur Jaffrey book. I am the chief Naan-bread maker in this house, so I have been playing in advance - we can make the bread ahead of the day by only part cooking it. It gets frozen or refrigerated in a rather blond state and takes on its full colour when heated up for the meal on the day. I love bread making and I thoroughly enjoy the kneading stage, which I find very therapeutic. The fancy-dan new food mixer has a dough-hook, of course, but I will be hanging onto my Naan bread by hand and let Liz try out the new technology on some of her workaday white bread.

Space saving in the kitchen - a nice recipe book stand
from the Steak Lady. Thanks, SL!

With all this new 'stuff' turning up, our tiny kitchen (8 foot square) is starting to look a bit crowded and we wryly look at the occasional Lottery ticket and wonder whether Lady Luck might just give us the money for a big, game-changing, extension of the kitchen. We can see it now - bash out that wall, push the kitchen out along the 'pottery' with a glass roof down from the main house to the Tígín, the 'A Team' all back together flinging joists around and whacking bits with the 14 pound sledge..... ahh sigh. We don't do the Lotto that often, mind, so it might be a while and today, when Liz checked the 'winnings' from a €4 punt she made on Wednesday, we found we'd 'won' €1. Ah Well.