Sheep Shearing

Definitely not of marketable quality, a pile of white fleece from
our ewes Lily and Myfanwy. Polly's slatey grey fleece is out of shot.

Nothing if not a bit of variety in this post - shearing sheep, snatching a beehive under cover of darkness and a bit of a barney in the roosters dept. Read on.

Not bad - our 3 ewes all looking tidier and a lot cooler

The sheep shearing is the 'biggest' story from my point of view. It is an important job and one I am trying to learn to do myself but I am finding it hard and difficult work. Last year I tried to do my ewes the 'proper' (professional) way - all that upside down wrestling and sheep on its rump between your legs that you may have seen at Agricultural Shows. It is wearing on the back and, while you are not very good yet, tends to take too long - up to an hour per sheep - for all of which time the poor ewe is under a lot of stress. I finished last year helping friends Sue and Rob by shearing their ewe, 'Pink', who is trained to a head collar and stands upright, on her own feet, reasonably calmly and lets you shear her without any fuss and wrestling. Blow trying to do it the pro way, I decided. I was determined in 2016 to do all ours upright. But head collars for sheep?

The ewes sheared with a bunch of this year's lambs. Goat and
kid in the background.

Anybody that knows sheep will know that you should really collar-train them from lamb-hood. They are big, strong, heavy animals and do not take kindly to suddenly having a collar round the neck or a halter about the face. They will buck and jump and fight and thrash about, especially if they can see a way out. We were not at all sure that our plan to corral everyone into a tight space while we collared the ewe and then have Liz whispering sweet nothings in the front end while we got a collar on and tied the sheep to some solid cattle-race ironwork, would keep the ewe calm enough when I fired up the noisy, rattling shearer and plunged it into the wool at the back end.

We followed up our own sheep success
by shearing Sue and Rob's ewe, Pink
(here) and Pink's 2015 lamb, the shearling
 'Rosie' today. 

Well, in a triumph of calmness, it all went OK. Liz undoubtedly had the harder physical job, hanging onto the rope after she'd "put a turn around" the bars (as we narrow-boaters say!) and steering the sheep's body with a spare knee or hand. I started with a long 'blow' up the spine to open up the fleece and then zizzed out and down in long stripes like mowing a lawn, with the fleece falling away like a cardigan put on backwards. I finished by nipping around legs, under the belly and up the brisket and neck, and finally by shifting the collar down and doing the face.

A Guinea Fowl hurls abuse at everyone
and anyone from our "Howth Head" rock.

We took around 45 minutes for the first ewe (already much faster than 2015), and then sped up with 35 for the 2nd and 25 for the 3rd. We were covered in lanolin and sweat (plus a bit of poo!) but happy and delighted that the job was over here. I just needed to get over to Sue and Rob's today to tackle Pink again and their shearling ewe (2015 lamb from Pink), Rosie. Now I can clean the machine and put it away for another year. I am quite proud of myself and feel like I am doing OK at this shearing lark.

A second hive collected at night - still needs the straps tidying
away and the roof settling properly. 

I spoke in the last post of our friend and near-neighbour T McC coming out of bees after a sting reaction and dispersing his numerous hives. We had agreed to take one of these so we were back into the joys of trying to safely move a hive containing 20,000+ stinging beasties. Readers who were with me on 13th April 2015 (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2015/04/reinforcements.html) will know that you have to do this at night because otherwise all the workers are out foraging and they get left behind. You need to wait till around 22:30 and they have all gone to bed.

We got 1.764 kg of lovely lean 'parma' ham off our leg. 

The hive is made up of a stack of square boxes which sit on top of each other with no lugs or fixings, so to secure the stack we use gaffer tape all around the joints (to stop the boxes hopping out of line as the car goes over bumps), then ratchet straps over the stack in both directions. The final move is to block the entrance hole with foam and secure with tape, then heft the stack gently onto a wheelbarrow and slowly trundle it to the car. It gets the softest seat in the car (passenger seat) and is lashed to the seat back. You align the hive's internal frames north-south to minimise the slapping if the car brakes - you take all the corners veeeeery gently. You arrive at your destination apiary in pitch darkness and set the hive down on its stand. You gently peel back the foam and tape from the entrance and leg it back indoors. The hive then sits for a few days to settle before you worry about tidying up the remaining tape and straps. In our case it all went well and the ladies were all out doing orientation flights next morning and then normal missions and returns by afternoon. Good luck Hive 2; we hope you will be very happy and content here. Thank you very much T McC.

The Colonel has been in the wars. His face, here, is
spattered with dried blood.

A while back we had a lovely visit from cousins Dan and Danielle during which Danielle happened to comment on the amusingly creaky 'crow' noise of one of the roosters. We wonder now whether this next story had really started way back then. We have recently kept 2 Buff Orpington roosters. One, The Colonel, we have had for three years; he is our 'alpha'. As back up we allowed one of his children to stay but explained to this lad (The Captain) that as long as he was happy to stay at 2nd-in-Command and did not fight our main man (well, at least as long as he didn't win!) he was a keeper.

The 365 Project is focusing on bio-diversity this week. Our
local crows are all of the 'hooded' variety. 

Well, possibly as a result of the Colonel's loss of manly voice, or maybe the shortage of available hens (several gone broody), the #2 rooster has broken that agreement this week and started attacking The Colonel. This culminated in Liz having to race to his rescue yesterday when The Captain had him down on the ground and was beating the bangers out of him, pecking and kicking. Bad move, Captain.

You cannot leave this kind of thing to run - these are big powerful birds and can do each other serious damage - so we took the not very nice but necessary decision to cull out the young pretender. He is now variously in the freezer as meat, in the bin as feathers and gribbly bits, in the cats as scraps from the stock pot and in a big bottle of stock. RIP Captain. The Colonel is recovering his dignity and pride and looked decidely disconbobulated for the next 24 hours, presumably wondering why his adversary was no longer pouncing on him.

Ram a Lamb a Ding Dong

Rambo has a lie-down while he waits for his taxi home.

In which we bid farewell, for this season, to our splendid and handsome borrowed ram, 'Rambo'. We collected this lad 5 weeks ago and he has worked his way round our three ewes, Lily, Polly and Myfanwy, showing what, to our inexperienced view, looked like an appropriate interest in each. We trust that they are all now 'in-lamb' and by our calculations ahould be each lambing at some point between the 14th Feb 2016 and 23rd March 2016.

Rambo (left) enjoys some last grass while he waits for his lift

Rambo was pure pleasure to 'own' for a while and good experience for we beginner shepherds. We are very grateful to his real owners, Sue and Rob, who came to take him home today back to his wife and son and we have made a tentative agreement to use the boy again next year. Regular readers will know that Rambo comes with a sheep's bell attached because, although he is soft as grease most of the time, when he is with the ewes he is a bit of a one for nipping up behind you and butting you in the thighs or bum. "He can have you over!" warned Sue. We had walked him to the trailer like an obedient puppy dog getting him here and he was grand with me for a few days, but soon started this butting thing.

Handsome lad.

The answer was to stop moving them from field to lawn each day and to stop going into the field to give them their 'crunch' (feed). I moved the trough over to near the fence and took to feeding them by leaning over the fence and aiming scoops of feed at the trough while trying not to let the sheep get their eager faces and heads in the way. Rambo's agressive trait seemed to fade away again (as did the musky, lanolin 'male' smell which he had started whiffing of!) once he had got around all the ewes and, presumably, they had all gone off the boil. We hope this is because they are pregnant, obviously, but whatever the reason, Rambo was as soft as grease again for today's loading for the return trip. He followed the bucket obediently from field gate to trailer ramp and made no attempts to sneak round behind any of us with evil intent.

Rob checks on the boy for his journey home.

It is the jangly bell that had me naming this post as I have. It is a lovely noise and we will miss it while we are Rambo-less; you can hear it out there in the dark and you know he is safe and well out in the field with his women. It reminds me of childhood holidays when we would all be out up some Summer Alp (French, Swiss, German - we worked our way round most of them over the years and the Jura etc) and you could hear the cow bells as the mountainy cattle wandered about their summer grazing.

The 'Ram a Lamb' thing also has me reminded of a favourite restaurant from our Kent days, Read's of Faversham. This was always (and still is) at the pricey end of things, so we'd only use it for BIG occasions, like round-number anniversaries, but we were always delighted and impressed, as well as lighter in the pocket. One such was our 10th anniversary and I can remember the lounge full of easy chairs where you could wait for your table to be ready, and also that you had your own sommelier looking after your bottle of wine; he'd nip over and top up your glasses as soon as he saw them coming empty, but then whisk your bottle away back to a chiller or the rack so that it wouldn't clutter up your table.

Filling tonight's pie (chicken, ham and leek)

I am afraid I can't remember what I had for main course, but I recall Liz was intrigued by the menu choice "Ram a Lamb a Lamb" which turned out to be a collection of amuse-bouche sized portions of six or seven lamb-based foods - a little individual shepherd's pie, a  little cutlet, small slices of roast lamb, a paté and so on. These came arranged in a little circle around the plate. Brilliant. I know that Read's is still there and going strong because a former work colleague was there recently and posted a story on Facebook, so if you are near Faversham and have a bit too much cash burning a hole in your pocket, I can thoroughly recommend it as a place to eat. You will be treated like a King or Queen.

Home made hummus.

And while we are on catering, a quick mention of our entertainment tonight. We are invited to the village's annual "Tea Party" which happens in the Community Centre and where any group or outfit takes a table and brings along food and drink to suit themselves. The local 'Active Age' gang take a table, as do the folk involved in the youth group (Foroige), the pre-schoolers, the Drama Group and so on. I don't think they go quite as mad as the parties who would arrive at the open air fireworks concerts at Rochester Castle with their wicker picnic baskets, champagne coolers and table chandeliers, but they do run to cold roast chicken salads and so on.

Apple sauce from our own orchard.

This one will be Liz's first time for going public on her catering skills under the gaze of the village ladies so if you know Liz, you can imagine that she would not like to be found wanting. "This is not some picnic at the beach," she says, "this is a FRIDAY NIGHT SUPPER". There will be no gritty 'hang sang-widges' or Thermos of 'tay'. Oh No. The catering department had gone into full swing with an impressive spread; a gorgeous looking chicken, ham and leek pie with a suet crust (our chicken and suet, obviously), there is home made potato salad, home made coleslaw, home made hummus with 'crudites' of sliced peppers and what not, Liz's famous chilli-cheese-and-bacon biscuits, chilli 'jam' and elderflower cordial. Our table will be up there, for sure.

Getting the hall ready for the Tea Party

On a related topic, the change to windy wet weather had me whizz round the orchard picking the very few apples and pears still left standing, except for the crab apples which we will get this weekend. The total remaining amounted to barely a pound of fruit but as I was cooking pork chops that night, I decided to 'render' them down and sieve to make a delicious smooth apple sauce - no sugar or spice required. Very tasty.

Finally in a bit of a throw back to the table quizzes we used to do for the Hort Soc in Faversham, I compiled a daft little anagram 'quiz' page for all the tables at the Tea Party based on local place names. It would never work unless you were local, as the place names can be a bit complicated - Corracoggil South becomes "Go Us Gothic Corral", Cloon Bunny (I kid you not) becomes "Bunny Colon" and our beloved Ballaghaderreen becomes "A Green Herbal Lad" - but all the locals seem to know the set up here like the backs of their hands. What could possibly go wrong? The prizes for anyone who gets them all are our standard Hort Soc 'Smarties' for being smart.