I'll Leave You Beyond.

JD Bob's link-box, here full of logs.

For today's post you'll need to know of a very basic chunk of farm equipment, the 'Link-Box'. This is basically a metal tray which mounts on the 3-point linkage on the back of the tractor (hence the name) with, if you're lucky, a rear panel or tailgate. Useful for moving bags of feed, bales, fencing gear and so on around, it is. Comfortable, safe passenger accommodation it is not. There is no suspension except the bounce in the mighty V-Tread tyres, no soft place ot sit, no smooth edges to save you if you lose your footing, no protection from the weather and a clear line of shot for the rooster-tails of gritty road-water arching across the sides of the box from those same tyres. I cannot imagine it is even remotely legal to give or accept lifts in one. We will draw a veil over our proudly displayed (free) "Farm Safety" stickers.

Mrs Silverwood in the Starsky jacket.

Friday then, lashing rain all day from a warm front which inched slowly across the country from 'wesht' to east aligned pretty much north/south. An early call from Bob caught me just as I was about to walk down to his place (it's only 600 yards but no car that day as Liz was in Silverwood-land) and told me it is too wet to walk, so he'd bring the tractor up. I thought he meant he'd then give me the tractor to go do the feeding while he sat indoors here drinking tay and minding the place. Oh no. His plan was to collect me and bring me to his in the link-box. Thanks Bob, that was real luxury! I had wellies, hat and coat and there was only me, so I was at least able to squat centrally and both the rooster-tails of muddy water missed me. I clung to the top link and gritted my teeth.

Very late but at last some decent crop from the tunnel -
4.8 kg of toms today.

Lesson learned - link-box passengering is one of those exceptions to the rule that "even third class riding is better than first class walking". Saturday dawned sunny so I out-manouvred Bob by setting out early, walking, and was into the tractor, loaded and gone before Bob even knew I was about. Not completely though. He invited me in for tea (as usual) and then said that he wanted to come up to the next feed-station with me so that he could check the water-barrels and afterwards, take the tractor off to the village for shopping.

Also later than I have ever grown them - nice young tender
broad beans in September!

We have been out 'wesht' here for a few years now and we have got the measure of most local turns of phrase and expressions but one still defeats me with its tortuous randomness. This is the way they describe the location of somewhere which is at a distance, a village or farm, say, or a pub which is a few villages away. They use a random combination of up, down, over, away, beyond, above and below which seems, to me, irrespective of whether the place is futher up/down the map, more/less elevated in the hills, close or distant or at any compass point from 'here'. The place is "above beyond" or "away below" or "over above" and you just have to hope there might be more clues in the directions... "above beyond by Creaton's pub" or similar.

All food should be clearly labeled, don't you agree?

With the jobs done yesterday and the sun still shining, Bob got me with a classic one of these when he announced "I'll leave you beyond" (he says it "lave" as in "slave"). My blank look had him repeat as if to an idiot. "I'll leave you BEYOND" I worked out that what he was saying was that he'd "run me home" or "drop you to the garden gate" and it would have been churlish to refuse another link-box ride. I was nabbed! At least this time there was no rain and wet to contend with but Bob, who normally goes everywhere in that thing at idling speed, chose this one to cane it a bit on the throttle slider and that road is not flat. I was bounced around like a child on a Thelwell cartoon pony. Shaken but not stirred? Now, at least, Liz and the car are back, so today's feed run was in the comfort of a Fiat Panda driver's seat.

Supper for one in the absence of Liz. An individual cottage pie,
broad beans and (Oh Joy) a favourite beer now for sale locally.

Back at the 'ranch' we finally have a decent tomato crop. I picked 4.8 kg on Saturday which Liz will convert into tomato sauce/passata. She is also after me for some fruit for a new discovery for us 'chilli tomato jam' which we made for the first time last year inspired by a gift and recipe from Mazy or 'red tomato jam'. What I am glad we don't need to make is green tomato chutney, that back-stop for crops that you fail to ripen. All well and good and delicious in small quantities but we have jars of the stuff from earlier years before we learned that plug-plants are the only method that seems to work here.

Lovely clean onions. Not huge, but again the golden variety
did best, with the white-skin and red onions way behind on size.

I also have now good quantities of mange-tout peas, black kale, chard and, at last, a very late crop of young, tender broad beans. I love my broad beans but Liz only enjoys them young. Once they are starting to do that greyish skin thing, then she double-skins them and uses just the inner cotyledons, very nicely, I should add with garlic butter or some such. We crop hard while the pods are still young. I am also using onions straight off the ground. I will not have too many to ripen this year, a good thing in this very late season and the month of September. We are getting plenty of potatoes too but again, for now, I leave them in the ground and harvest as required.

We're all happy to put 2 feet on the ramp but 4? Not on your Nellie

We have 2 lambs now ready and booked in this week for their final journey so over this weekend I have been trying to familiarise them with the concept of 'trailer'. Regular readers will know that we have found this to be a breeze with pigs. Always greedy, a pig will follow a trail of chopped apple or cherry tomatoes anywhere and within minutes will have weighed up the pros (food) and cons (possible trap in trailer) and come to the decision that this bouncy, wheeled wooden box is just another food bowl. The sheep are proving to be a lot more wary and, despite a couple of practise runs, I fear they will not be 'trained' by tomorrow morning. They have all sneaked one or two front feet onto the ramp, craning forwards to reach the bowls of food IN the trailer, but so far no-one has gone all the way in.

Bizarre digital photo effect on this ordinary coalite and turf
fire in the range. This purple flame was not there in "real life"
but is there on all the digital pics. The camera does not lie?

There is the added complication that we only want 2 to load, the twin ewe lambs, so at some stage we must separate the twins from the rest as we may not be able to persuade 2 sheep up the ramp and 4 not to go up. Sheep, as everyone knows, group together when under "attack", so we will either load 6 or none! In practise, we have had a nice offer of help loading from Sue, so we may have enough manpower on hand to grab our required two and man-handle them, out of the flock and up the ramp. Not an ideal situation but at least they get a more comfortable ride than this 'shepherd' does in that link-box. More on this story in the next post.

Busby Berkeley Dust Bathing?

New trees await planting.

The new trees arrived safe and sound on Thursday 27th via the excellent courier, DPD Ireland. Courier-ing and post in general here in Ireland are definitely one job the Irish do better than anything I've ever had in the UK. Post is almost always next day without fail within Ireland. DPD send you a text to say your goods are due today, then follow up with a call 20 minutes out to check you are at the house and finally, in our case, I have persuaded the regular drivers to call at 5 minutes out so that I can go down and stand in the lane to flag them down and make sure they find the place. They are without exception (in my experience anyway, of DPD and other companies) helpful, friendly and, more importantly, careful with the goods, so that I receive my trees in their 'roll' of cardboard and straw, undamaged. I am very happy with both the courier and, in this case, with the tree nursery / supplier, FutureForests.net.

The instructions are to crack open the parcel as soon as you get it (mainly to avoid condensation damage to any evergreens), then to damp the roots but store (roots) back in the bag so that the wind does not get to them. This gives us a chance to examine the trees and they look, as usual, healthy and robust. My 'Camelot' apple was a one year old 'maiden whip', but the other 2 apples and the limes were 2 year old 'feather' (i.e. with side branches). They had good root systems with a good spread of fibrous roots still intact.

Apple trees protected from the geese.

They are all now planted. The apples I managed to squeak in to the orchard by putting them hard up against the fence which was 5 m from my 'first row'. My first plan had been to dot them along the front lawn but this would have involved creating sheep proof guards around them. Sheep are terrors for not only browsing off all the soft new tissue but also for trying to scratch their itches by rubbing their considerable bulk against your fences and posts. Your sheep guards around trees need to be made of serious wood and posts, which is not cheap. My orchard plan meant only 'goose-proof' protection, so I put some old rabbit-hutch wire into use as half-cylinders, tall enough to out-manouvre those long goosey necks. Today, at least, it worked and the trees are free from goose 'tooth' marks.

The kitchen is still in whirlwind mode at present with Liz doing a bit of Christmas cookery and some 'Autumn tidy up' cooking. The pudding mixture, Liz decided to split across 3 smaller bowls - we made an enormous pud last year but it was rather too big to use up AND it tied up the big, useful mixing bowl for all the weeks that it sat in there. This year, then, we invested in 4 smaller bowls and we are now serially steaming them in the slow cooker. The ones not needed for the festive season will keep; puds seem to keep for ever!.

Green Tomato Chutney

I got my instruction today to 'bring in the tomatoes', i.e. to clear the remaining stragglers from the poly-tunnel which were either green or part ripe but not likely to progress any further in the chill, misty days of November, so it is time to make green tomato chutney. This is one of our favourite chutneys and one which I will happy smear on every cheese sandwich I make, no matter what the time of year and weather. So, I cleared the ground and collected almost 5 kg into my bucket and all the plants into a barrow.

Busy kitchen. Bits for paté get chopped and fried prior
to being 'whizzed'. 

The chickens spotted that I was in there and that there was some dry dusty soil on this site after all! They'd been walking on the damp, November grass and wondering whether they'd ever see dust again. When I went back in to collect the barrow, I was amused and impressed by the sight of ALL our grown up chooks dust-bathing, like a bizarre Busby Berkeley synchronised swim interpretation. All chickens lie down on your left side and kick up the dust. Now change to the right side etc. The young Buffs were not there but possibly found the dust-fest later. They do love a good dust bathe these chickens and it does their feathers and old skin good.

View from the front door at 3:30 pm on Tuesday - the mist
comes up and the sun sinks down.

With Christmas looming the Hubbard chicken "gribbly bits" were rescued from the freezer for conversion into paté - hearts, gizzards and livers. These get fried off with cooking brandy and garlic before being 'whizzed' up. The late Diamond always preferred it if you sieved this several times to produce the finest velvety textures as per Nigel Slater's recipes but I must admit I prefer a 'coarse' paté with BITS in it. Now that we are Diamond-less, Liz has allowed that we do not need to sieve it (she sounds relieved at not having too, because it is a real faff!) so I am looking forward to some "Coarse Hubbard Paté" on the menu.

Green Tomato Chutney

We are a bit tied down this morning having to stay in earshot or sight of the front gate waiting on delivery of the new freezer from Euronics in Castlerea. The guy had said he'd phone, but they never do, they just turn up. Luckily, the dogs will generally have at least one of their number on look out through the front upstairs windows or from half way up the stairs and when they kick off barking you just know there will be someone at the gate. And so it went and the freezer is now doing its mandatory 24 hour stand upright before you turn it on, so that any airlocks and bubbles can clear.

Cherry toms and mango and kiwi chutney

So, rather than fire up the noisy chainsaw out round the back again, I opted for the quiet pottering job of stripping all the tomato plants in the poly tunnel of their fruit, either ripe or unripe so that Liz could get cracking on the green (and yellow) tomato chutney and some red tomato "jam" (more like a spiced up relish - delicious!). These plants were all cherry tomato varieties this year, either yellow or red and we have had some decent crop off them but now it is October and they are still producing flowers and looking like they will go on till Christmas. Enough is enough.

Liz had already had a go at one of our house favourites, kiwi and mango chutney and made that superb stock yesterday, which wound up also delivering a big yogurt pot of separated fat which will go very well in the roasting of spuds. Our local supermarket, SuperValue is very canny in this respect, producing 'kits' for prospective chutney makers (this being how we came to 'invent' kiwi and mango); you get a pack containing a mango, some kiwis, ginger, garlic and a lemon clearly labelled "Mango and Kiwi Chutney Pack". No recipe, so we guessed you are just meant to wing it but we were OK with that.

On the left green/yellow tom chutney, on the right red tomato jam

They also do a rather superb Guacamole pack - 2 deep purple Hass avocadoes, tomatoes, an onion and a chilli. In that one they may have stitched themselves up a bit, as the Hass 'avo's were quite expensive that day on their own, and it was cheaper to buy the two in the pack and get the rest of the stuff free. We guess they know what they are doing. Made lovely guacamole, anyway!

Having stripped the toms, I then got all carried away and completely cleared the poly tunnel of its jungle of rampant tom plants, pumpkins and squashes (Yes, we did find a custard squash, all of 2 inches diameter!) chickweed, strawberry runners, nettles, nasturtiums and flat leaved parsley. The strawberries I need to keep have been sheared of old leaves and runners, as has the parsley but everything else has been hauled up by the roots. It all got a bit embarrassingly out of hand this year as I did way too little weeding and pruning. Next year I will not grow anything even remotely rambling, spreading or climbing in there. I have compost heaps a mile high.

While I was in there, Liz converted my tomato haul into a green and yellow tomato chutney and rendered the red ones down as a 'tomato jam'; a 'slop' of toms, chillies, garlic and ginger which is like an extremely zingy salsa or relish. These will both be neatly bottled up in what is now our standard size and shape jar, the 454 g Lidl peanut butter or mayonnaise jar. We had a massive run to the glass bottle bank this week and got rid of mountains of weird and wonderful huge, tiny and odd-shape jars that we seem to have accumulated.

In other news the Marans hens have finally come off lay because they have come into moult. They look very woe-begone with their feathers all sticking out in tufts at strange angles. Bless them, they are 5-6 years old now and probably shouldn't be laying at all, but they both crank one out every 24 hours when they are in lay and kept us afloat this summer while our own Sussex Pontes had a bit of a holiday. One of the sheep (16A) has now got tame enough that he (it's a ram) likes to come up and have his head, ears and neck tickled if I go and stand quietly in the field. If I stop he nudges my hand gently with his forehead as if asking me to continue. Another comes close but dances away if I try to tickle her and the others stand at a respectful distance. I then get very questioning looks from the dogs who smell sheep lanolin on my hands. Love 'em.