Slow News Day

Cowslips in the local verges.

This post might be a bit short but, hey, Elizabeth tells me that the 'voters' tend to like 'same old same old'; it makes them feel comfortable that nothing is going to rock their boat or upset their millpond calm. I will pepper it with a selection of vaguely relevant pictures and maybe you, the reader, will fail to notice that I am not actually saying very much.

Dad-duck is paying a lot of attention to the new ducklings. 

Readers will think from the previous post that we are now letting our sheep out of their secure field to graze the longer grass and herbage around the garden, secure in the knowledge that they are well behaved sheep and will not do a runner into the neighbour's 5-acre cattle pasture.

Another barrow of cut hawthorn for the
log store.

Um. Slight change there - I let them out single handed on a recent day and watched all 9 nip through a gap. I had to stay with them lest they vanish we knew not where but rapidly phone Elizabeth to appear at the gap with a bucket of grub and tempt them home. All safe and sound now but the extra strand of barbed wire I added to the hedge below the one they had dipped under only stopped 3 of the 4 ewes the next day. Our oldest ewe, Polly was shimmying under it like a pro. They are now 'grounded' for the fore-see-able but by now the grass is growing so fast in their field that they will barely notice.

Thus order of a dozen asparagus crowns arrived looking more
28 to me including the scrappy bits. Thank you very much,
English's Fruit Nursery of Co. Wexford. 

The weather has continued mainly mild, so we have been getting on with the serious gardening, even in the absence of any Help-X support. I have gathered up all my wind-felled hawthorn and stacked it into the log store. I love that in May my store is filling up rather than stripped bare.

Asparagus bed with 'marker' row of catch-crop carrots

An order for a dozen asparagus crowns (Connovers Colossal var.) arrived containing my dozen nice fat crowns but also 16 more bits and pieces which English's might have seen as scraps but they look very good to me, so they have all gone into the ground in their lovely clean, weeded, mulched railway sleeper bed. We are looking to crop our first spears this year from crowns planted 2 years ago. Unfortunately the first spear to appear this week was broken off either by me in planting the new plants, or a chicken helper. Never mind. There will be more.

2 cuckoos, each pursued by a starling. 

We are suddenly surrounded by cuckoos. I noted that there were four calling in my 05:00 dawn chorus in the previous post. Since then I have seen 2 chasing about each pursued by a small songbird (possible starling?) and, today, 2 just cruising through our airspace unmolested. I had the camera in my hands for the chased two.

We loved this clever marketing campaign by Lidl Ireland. It's
mainly for the kids, but they give you a free seed pack with every
€20 spent. A tiny peat-pot about an inch cube, a pellet of peat and
a small amount of seeds in a paper strip, plus instructions. Our six
so far are doing very well. 

I have been out and about lately, helping various neighbours. Yesterday this was helping to repair some fencing down by the local main drain/stream and involved me wading about in the stream bed, praying that the water would not be too deep for the wellies (I was close, but OK). The local beef lads use the stream as water for their bullocks, and they cut 'slip-ways' down to the stream using  a digger.

We are re-starting the keyhole bed on the
'sun-deck'

The stream bed is 6' below the grassland at this place, so this lets the cattle down to below the height of the fences. Our job was to scramble down the slipway to fence off the river end of the slipway, so that bullocks coming down to drink could not wander out into the stream and go strolling up- or down-stream, escaping into the neighbour's territory.

A hole in the head. 

Meanwhile, there I was dozing 75% asleep on my pillow one night when a dog (Deefer?) decided to walk across the pillows to another position. As she walked by she just nicked the middle of my forehead with a toenail. I was vaguely aware of the pain and the small trickle of blood but slept on. In the morning I had a superb 'Harry Potter' style Z-shaped streak of dried blood down into and across one eye. It stung and the dried blood made it difficult to open that eye, so I washed it off before thinking to photograph it.

Ox Tail Stew under construction.

Finally, in 'breaking news' we hear tonight that the 'struggling writer in his garret' described in a recent post, Mr Dan, who was writing up a Masters thesis in Economics (actually supply chain resilience) in our spare room has passed his exams. That's all we know for now. He was chasing a 'Distinction' but our source does not say whether he got that. Well done Dan.

October Peas

This cold and wet, miserable, slow vegetable growing season is coming to the end now but is still managing to give a little. We've had 2 good frosts so far, we've swapped BST for GMT and the shops are full of Hallowe'en stuff but I was out there today in the kitchen garden picking and podding broad beans and peas. The leaves are all starting to turn and the birds are stripping the hawthorn hedges of haws; I see flocks of birds moving through the allotment hedge when I'm down that way doing 'sheep watch' (see previous post) but we are still getting excellent curly kale, chard, parsnips and carrots. The cabbage never really thrived and has been hammered by slugs and sheep but still gives us the best hearted cabbage I have ever grown.

2013 is starting to come into focus too, with the autumn planted broad beans and onions now breaking the surface.

The Hay-Rake in the Hedge

 We have discovered in the hedge on our western boundary, just to the left of the new gate through to the field where we dogs go to shout at Mike-the-Cows's Charolais beasts, what looks like an old horse drawn hay rake, all rusted up and looking very antique-ish. Its left wheel is almost clear of the soil and weeds, all be it almost hidden under the elder branches and surrounded by nettles. The rake at the back though, and the right hand wheel are almost buried under a pile of banked-up soil and much of the structure has ivy, elder and hawthorn growing up, round and through it

 The booms which ran out either side of the horse are in a sorry state, one rusted away completely and the other almost rusted through. John Deere Bob (our source of advice on such things) thinks it has been there about 30 years and had soil piled up against it which TK Min may have been 'saving' because top soil is expensive. Also, if the black plastic sheeting is anything to go by, it may have had big-bale silage or hay/straw stacked against it.

Mum and Dad think, and JDB agrees that if we can get it out it might look nice painted up and standing on the front lawn or somewhere as an antique but JD cautions pulling it out gently lest it just fall apart. So Dad is going to dig away and expose as much of it as possible to see if he can free it up. At the same time he will be persuading WD40 and other oils into the wheel bearings to see if they can be freed up. Watch this space for progress.

Deefs