Ivy

Buff Orpington youngsters go free range at 6 weeks

We are still very much enjoying the unseasonable warmth and sunshine of this 'Indian Summer' but we know that the year is on the change, leaves are starting to turn colour and fall and the garden is a lot about seed heads rather than new flowers. For the bees, though, the most important season of their year is just about to start; the ivy flowering season. Not many people outside of bee keeping know that 'our' Irish dark bees (Apis mellifera mellifera), sometimes also known as 'black bees' or 'Buckfast bees' show a behaviour unique to the subspecies, that of keeping brood (i.e. larvae) alive all through the winter months.

Ivy flowers almost open

Our bees in summer are like any other type, with the colony made up largely of a succession of fairly short lived worker females, each lasting about 6 weeks but capable of 'rearing' in that time, an average of 3 younger 'sisters', so that the colony can rapidly expand in spring up to the 20-30,000 population typical in a late summer Irish hive. Come September, though, there is a significant change with the larvae being produced being physiologically quite different. The winter workers can live up to 6 months and can lay down fat in their bodies in autumn to see them through as the honey and pollen stores start to dwindle.

Ivy covered old farm house.

These workers shrink the colony down from 30,000 bees till it can be massed in a dense, football sized 'winter cluster' in the middle of the hive, with the queen and some brood kept warm at the centre of the football by the warmth generated by bee bodies. Bees do not hibernate as such, though they do go quiet and do not leave the hive unless outdoor temperatures are over ten degrees or so.

More ivy than ash. A well covered tree

As is the way in these 'co-evolution' set ups, the plant partner to all this is the ivy which not only flowers this late in the year (starting about now) but also has pollen which is uniquely very high in fats and oils giving the Irish bees what they need. Ivy is very very common here, growing in ditches and hedge bottoms, covering walls and abandoned farmhouses, climbing high up into the canopy of big ash trees and way up trunks of the big spruces. It even commonly climbs all the way up telegraph poles leaving them completely encased in a shaggy blanket of foliage as if they themselves were some kind of bizarre palm tree. It is a real saviour for the bees as long as the weather stays warm enough for them to forage through the flowering season. I have not seen any flowers actually open yet but it cannot be long. We have high hopes.

Ivy on Black Spruce

With me back from the UK and the Buff Orpington youngsters now making 6 weeks, we have let them out free range. They love the access to the grass (which probably could do with a mow!)  but do not yet go far, hanging around by the home run and the house end of the big pond. They know the two-tone whistle and the tap of a plastic beaker full of growers pellets and come sprinting over to get fed at meal times and they take themselves off back to their familiar (rabbit) run as it starts to get dark, ready to be shut up for the night, safe from Mr Fox. We fancy that they are starting to show the enlarged combs in the possible cock birds and we are fairly sure we have at least 4 'boys' in the dozen. It will be nice if it is no more than that; 8 hens to add to the laying population!

Fodder beet for the pigs

The pigs, meanwhile, have been enjoying some fodder beet I grew for exactly that purpose. This was a new crop for me but I have done OK with it. The seed was pelletized with a fungicide and an insecticide (oops) and was a bit variable in germination, so I have gappy rows and a lot of variation in size. Some, though, are good weights and when tasted, raw, are quite sweet, like an over-sweet carrot. The pigs approve and grunt with delight as they chow down, taking either complete half beets which they carry around so that the other sister does not get any, or eating them pre-chopped into wedges.

Mapp and a chunk of Fodder Beet

Having had my turn at 'holidays', I am now taking my turn and looking after the place 'solo' as Liz took the call yesterday to say that the expected house move by the parents from Dublin down to nearer the Silverwoods was suddenly all go for THIS WEEK, today in fact! She hurriedly packed a bag and her 'Kim and Aggie' cleaning basket and jumped in the car, her job being to help with the last of the packing up in Dublin, then blitz the 'old' house ready for the buyers. This will be followed by a hike down to Silverwood-land (My ol' man, said foller the van?) to help clean up and then unpack enough stuff that Mum and Dad can move in. She's going to a tired little scullery-maid by the time Mum's done with her! Poor Liz. She was so looking forward to getting a lie-in once I was back. She only managed the one!

Finally, a Happy Birthday to my UK-born Westie girl, Deefer-dog who gave her name to this blog (and started it?). She is 8 years old today. Many happy returns, the 'Deefs'; may you have many more and live to see the ripe old age of your predecessors, Megan (13) and Haggis (15).

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!