Pods and Poetry

Sheep after a shower. 

Friends of the Blog will know that we are both, separately, quite keen on the Social Media, veteran users of Facebook and Twitter and, more recently, receivers of that recent format "podcasts". Some of my readers are, I know, not well versed in these formats, so a quick description may help. Please bear in mind that I am not very good as a computer 'nerd' anyway and do not even own a smart-phone so I'd ask you to read these and smile indulgently if you know better and I have it all wrong. This is the blind leading the even blinder!

Dahlia. Some kind of 'Bishop' relative

Twitter is that fast-paced space where you can rattle in , using no more than 140 letters, what ever is in your head. Maybe a good thought has occurred or something amazing has happened, or you might be "re-tweeting" (sharing on) a good link or a picture that someone has put up. You collect as many followers as you feel the need for and people will follow you if what you are putting out pushes their buttons. I currently follow around 500 people and 500 follow me - not the same 500 but there is quite an overlap. I'd be a fairly minor user at this rate, mainly because I use Twitter from this computer under the stairs, so I can only get to it for small parts of the day in between activities in the real world. Twitter is mainly enjoyed by city types who can go round all day with smart phone in hand, walking into lamp posts etc.

The podcasts were originally a way of listening to bits of radio programmes which you had missed when they were first aired. Radio stations (like BBC Radio 4, particularly) would save the pieces digitally and you could go in much later and download them to your machine to listen to. More recently all manner of specialist media companies have sprung up just to do interviews for saving and releasing as pod casts (pods). This especially around the Donald Trump win and presidency and USA politics, but we have found plenty of other subjects on offer - Brexit, food, science and "how stuff works" and so on.

Cider apples looking promising. 

My most recent find, which actually came through Twitter, is a farming pod called Rock and Roll Farming. It has precious little to do with R+R bar the guitar-break introductory music. It is presented by one of my Twitter friends, Will Evans and he gets to interview for an hour all manner of farming great-and-good, plus people who have made a mark on the Social Media sphere; "famous" farm twitterers or people involved in big farming projects (Farm Safety campaigners, factory farming, experts on the current contentious area of badger culls against Bovine Tuberculosis and so on).

I find those pods fascinating but I should hasten to say that I don't necessarily agree with or believe all the opinions stated and no more would Will expect me to. He comes at it from the point of view that the 'pro' and 'con' camps in each area (usually farmers and 'townies' but sometimes organic vs non-organic or other splits) need to talk to each other sensibly and respectfully till we find common ground. Will puts the question to them in a form like "what would you say to the non-farmers, to convince them that....." . Some of them, though, are dyed in the wool commercial boys, trained in all the corporate wisdom and only able to see that they can make a living IN the system. I don't know how they will ever  'convince' we small-holder, trying-to-be-organic and eco-friendly types. One big Lincs arable farmer, defending the use of Glyphosphate said (and I quote) that "Glyphosphate is the safest chemical in the world" (!!!!). Quite a claim and not one likely to win any admirers as a sound-byte. The badger-cull guy was also frustrating in his one-track only-solution argument. Ah well. They all have the same rights to express their views as I do and fair play to Will for putting it all 'out there'.

Stumpy's chicks growing fast

As an amusing aside to all this serious discussion, one of Will's other guests set a ball rolling which I have been having some fun with back in Twitter in the @SmallHolderIRL account where I do most of my rabbiting. This was a farmer who has since been all over Twitter but who started, jokingly, following a boozy pub night with some fellow farmers, deciding to 'tweet' about his farm life in Haiku format. He became @FarmingHaiku and tried to do a Haiku every day for about 18 months most of which, he says, were absolute rubbish.

For the unfamiliar, Haiku is a very short style of 'poem' where you try to express an idea or a high thought in only 17 syllables, across 3 lines in a 5-7-5 format. They do not need to rhyme. You are also meant to avoid similes and metaphor because you are all about simplicity and directness of expression. Metaphors would introduce another image between writer and poem. Besides, with only 17 syllables you'd barely have room. They suit Twitter as they are short.

Lovely Birthday lunch with Sue and Rob at the
Golden Eagle in Castlerea (Hester's). Barman even
wrote 'ROS' in the beer head to celebrate our county's
recent win in the Connaught GAA champs.

I decided to try a few within the small-holder account and quite a few people found them amusing and came back with Haiku(s) of their own. Some examples of mine, which are nothing special were...

Early morning hen. Tapping at the window pane. You HAD your breakfast!

Meet the need to knead. The dough alive in your hands. Baking smells to come.

Timed to perfection. Golden dome of bread is here. Warm from the oven

Loud farmyard noises. Clamouring for their breakfast. Morning livestock rounds

Getting a bit braver with the sourdough. This a date and pecan
wholemeal loaf (with rosemary and cinnamon).

All good clean fun, I guess. They are actually quite difficult to write or, more precisely, to pare down to the right number of syllables. You try it and see.

Scorched Earth

One plant spared on this spraying exercise!

In these parts, the lay-by in front of your house or, if you have no front garden, the hard standing between your house front and the lane or public road, is referred to as 'your street'. Your street is very much part of the local culture of 'house keeping' and keeping it tidy is a big thing round here. The thing is to have NO WEEDS or, as far as we can see, no other sign of life apart from the farm dog.

Even a random gateway gets a dose.

Sadly the standard way to achieve this, at least among the older folks, is to spray it vigorously with some kind of broad spectrum herbicide. This might be a contact killer like Paraquat, or a systemic one like 'Round-Up' (Glyphosphate) but the effect is the same - great stripes of straw-coloured death in the verges just when your eyes are accustomed to the peaceful greens. They glare in the sun and stick out like a sore thumb. We find them ugly and offensive; we hate the 'scorched earth' effect and we weep (well, OK, maybe not quite) for the flora and fauna wiped out in the interests of "tidiness". Certainly we worry about the amount of chemical be lashed around.

Both sides of the road, 'napalmed' 

Some of these 'offenders' do both sides of the road and any nearby farm gateways, as well as the 'streets' outside any abandoned farm buildings which they presumably own and feel that they also need to keep tidy. They seem to see nothing wrong in this, so it is a regular feature of a drive down any of the lanes here. Our good friend John Deere Bob does it, and even expressed concern at our drive full of daisies and suggested that we need to spray it off. Our protests about "trying to be organic" and "not using any sprays here" just brought a bemused and baffled expression to his face - we are obviously a bit new and silly and inexperienced and have not yet found the true path to tidiness. You could no more talk him out of it than teach him to fly to the moon. I also have to watch where I am collecting my rabbit-treats. It has been my habit on dog walks to gather a handful of dandelion leaves and red clover stems as a treat for Goldie and the babies. I now have to avoid streets, farm gateways and abandoned buildings in case they have been sprayed recently, lest I bring back glyphosphate to my animals.

We are back to 3 goslings, these two new ones are from the
2nd batch, under 'Smudge'

There is a gleam of hope in all this despair. Plenty of the younger land owners do their tidying with powerful 'strimmers'; so even though the foliage and flowers get it, the ground stays green and is not coated with nasty chemicals. We just scythe our bit down to maintain the 'splay' so that you can see cars coming when you are nosing out of our gate. We have no 'street' to worry about - our front hedge is right on the lane.

Blue skies and Foxgloves

I suppose I should put in a quick comment on my "trying to be organic" line above. We currently think of ourselves as that dubious non-status "Nearly Organic" and I can hear the justified howls of protest from the truer exponents of the regime. The real organic producers have to jump through hoops and keep watertight audit trails on all their inputs (feed bag labels, receipts etc) and outputs (lists of where all their chicken poo goes, for example) in order to earn the certification, so quite rightly, they will guard the status jealously. The fact that we use no chemicals here but do NOT feed purely organic feed (I use standard commercial pig ration, feed wheat, lamb 'crunch', layers pellets, chick crumb and milled barley for example) would count for little in the eyes of the certification bodies. I claim to be 'nearly organic' but not too loudly within earshot of, for example Mentor Anne and Simon. They have been there, done that and bear the scars and trauma.

Keet at 15 days.

So, what else is happening? We are currently enjoying a proper heat-wave, with the Irish midlands getting temperatures of 28 degrees C, the forecasters issuing 'heat warnings' and my poultry discussion forum carrying reminders to keepers to provide extra water and keep it fresh and topped up. We have sheeted over the rabbits and the guinea fowl keets to provide shade, and we have taken to getting up early and doing all our hard physical gardening by about 11 am.

Eating outside in the hot evenings.

The B-team broody goose, 'Smudge' has hatched another gosling, so that we now have 3 including the big strapping 'George Junior'. She has one more egg left in this dysfunctional group, so she tends to focus on that and hand over the goslings to Black Feather, George and now also G-J to rear. He parades them around like a big brother should, teaching them where to drink and how to graze the best grass. The little silver keet who went all wobbly on us, survived a couple more days under 'intensive care' but we found him on his back, eyes closed, last night, so we put him out of his misery. The remaining ten are thriving.

The pigs are now much more used to me and love to have their necks and backs scratched while they are eating. Their bellies too, when they have done in the trough. If I stop I get nudges in the calves by little piggy noses the same as you would from a dog - "Oy, I was enjoying that! Why did you stop?"

With all the jobs done, we've been able to finally unfurl the sun-parasol on the 'terrace' table and to sit in the shade for some of the afternoon and even to eat a few meals outside. It's nice that these can be light and salad-y warm weather food and we are able to supplement the commercial stuff with our own lettuce, radishes, salad potatoes (Sharp's Express) and broad beans. We are looking forward to hosting the Silverwoods for a few nights. We were hoping we'd have bees by now but sadly still no word from the Two Marys, so the Silverwoods will just have to content themselves with the keets, goslings and piggies.