Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

At last - some Autumn Fruiting Raspberries which are edible

I'm not so sure about the fruitfulness, but the past week has been solidly high-pressure, clear skies, warm and blue sky sunny afternoons. In Roscommon in late September, though, that means chill nights and usually waking up to a good mist, if not actual fog. The fog does not quickly 'burn off' like it used to in Kent, so it has been well into 2 o'clock or 3 before we got the sunshine. Never mind, we will take what bits of Keats's "bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core" we can take at this stage.

'Golden Hornet' crabs light up in the evening sun

This year that has amounted to a few very late raspberries now coming ready and edible and one or two apples, plus a decent show of crab apples. Through August and September the raspberries had been coming so slowly, at about one a day, that the blackbirds were stealing them and looking at me as if to say, "Is that it?" Finally I am getting enough that if the birds are getting them, then they are retiring sated and leaving me some.

Crab apple tree.

Most fruit trees were stripped of their crop by poor weather or magpies, but I am looking to go and pick the tail end of that tomorrow. The one exception is a Golden Hornet crab apple tree which is looking very good now for a young one. I am not familiar with this variety, so I am sneaking a well coloured fruit off every now and then and cutting it in half to look for dark colour on the seed-skin which denotes ripeness. So far the pips remain pale blond, so we are holding off picking the crop just yet. They look lovely in the golden setting sun. 'Mellow' is not really a good attribute of apples, but these will get used for cooking, so a bit of extra sweetness and softness will not hurt.

Festoons of hundreds of spider webs on these gorse.

The mists have given me some lovely sights in the mornings. When I am down about my cattle feeding business on the far side of the village, there is one particular gorse hedge which has picked up hundreds, if not thousands, of swags of spider web giving it an almost 'Christmas Tree' look when the fog and dew get on it in the morning. This morning I was booked to trim a goat's feet (I know... rock and roll lifestyle!) so I'd taken the camera. In fact I took no goat pics - too busy concentrating on those spiralling horns - but was able to snap a couple of gorse pics.

New shoes!

You may be familiar with the brand of footwear 'Crocs', a light, rubbery type of clog or sandal. I 'found' these when we first came over - I think Lidl supermarket had them on 'special offer' and they have become a firm favourite as knock-about small holdering footwear. They are reasonably waterproof and don't get wet like the suede 'desert boots' I used to wear, and you can easily slip then on or off while both hands are full of dog leads, eggs, the post or what ever.

At last - these flowered on 30th Sept!

They have two disadvantages - they are no good as a safety shoe for rough work being full of holes and very soft-soled, so blackthorn thorns and stray nails will happily some up through the sole and into your foot. Second, because they are just rubber with no lining, any wet, mud or (gasp) other agri products that get into them stay there as a film between skin and Croc, never drying out and giving you very dirty feet, so socks are a must. All well and good, you might think. Crocs, though, seem to be like Marmite in the public mindset, you either love them or you hate them and if you are a hater, then you cannot resist long tirades and scornful outbursts on social media like Facebook. "Crocs and SOCKS?!!!!!" They seem to be a sartorial mis-step way too far. I'll leave that one up to you. My other problem with them is more general - the Irish as a nation do not seem to have size 12 feet, so when Crocs appear in shops they are usually only up to size 11, so I have to order these new ones on line where a pair with postage, sets you back €42.

The wood store almost there. The pale wedgy stuff is the
big fallen black-spruce. 

I am on my own again, as Liz has hot-footed it away on another UK run, this time to the wedding of an internet chum on the Isle of Wight. She is joining forces with our good friend Mazy in Kent and they are running down together tonight, the nuptials are tomorrow. My role was to drop her to Knock Airport at lunchtime with case, passport, sandwiches and bag of Tayto crisps without which no flight would be complete. I am now general cook and bottle washer for a few days but I have plenty to do so I will not be mooping around bored and pining.

Spider web festoons on the gorse

Main task at the moment is filling the log store with the chopped up slices of the big fallen black spruce tree. Some of this splits nice and easily but some is quite knotty and is hard work. Also, despite falling in November, it has not dried out and seasoned much. The lower trunk is still quite sappy and tends to flex out of the way of the axe blade rather than split down the grain. Still, I am nearly there on the full store, so any big discs of tree than remain will be brought up to the yard and can carry on drying out stacked lying on their sides till I get some space in the log store. All good clean fun.

Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

(Apologies to John Keats, I guess). All the people round here that I know of who were interested in the blackberries have long since taken their fill from the hedgerows, made their wine, jam, cassis, desserts and pies and moved on. There are still many many left in the hedges for the birds and these are now being joined by equally bountiful crops of elder berries and hawthorn haws. The birds and small mammals are going to go into this winter very well fed and good luck to them.

Let's hope they don't need it too badly - so far we are enjoying another 2013 warm spell. Our first two complete years in Ireland really have shown us the extremes of what is possible for the warmer seasons - from the absolute unrelenting drenching of 2012 when we always seemed to have puddles and standing water, to the droughts of 2013 starting with our 19 rain-less days in February. We can't believe that it can do either wetter or drier and we are assuming that all our remaining years will be in between; we think we will be always saying "Ah well, it's wet alright, but do you remember 2012?" Never say never, of course.

The season too for gentle slowing down, die-back, decay and mushrooms. I've been enjoying these guys who come up in their delicate dozens where ever I have spread calf muck about. They are a real early riser of a fungus. At only about an inch across and 3 tall, they stand proud with their new white caps at 07:00 as I do my early morning feed and release rounds, but by 09:00 or so the caps have auto-digested to a blob of black ink atop the stem, presumably dribbling their spores away, their job done. By the time the sun touches them they have collapsed and shriveled back to nothing.

I have no idea of the name but they are a lovely thing to find on these misty moisty mornings. For a while we were also getting edible field mushrooms in the lawn but these now seem to have finished and the bigger mushrooms are all now centred around a long-since sawn off tree stump.

These look a bit parasol-ish so might be edible but I know enough about mushrooms to know that their identification can be tricky to the non expert, sometimes involving detail of cap colour, gill shape and colour, detail of whether there is any kind of skin-collar left around the stem and even the colour of a spore-print left overnight to form on white paper by the spores falling from the cap laid on the paper. Pud Lady used to be very good at it and knowledge-able and we all survived her cookery experiments but we tend to leave them be.

It is also the season when we can start 'harvesting' our meat products so we have been enjoying some meals of young rabbit and also of this La Bresse rooster who was starting to be a problem for William the Conqueror and some of the ladies. He was 22 weeks old and a hefty lad, so that he came out oven-ready as this fine 2.475 kg carcass, at the time, the biggest poultry lump we'd produced. Liz actually jointed him up and just cooked the legs and wings on the day but even that was more than we needed so Liz left a drumstick and me the wing on the side of our plates for cold left overs.

I said the biggest "we'd produced" meaning up to then. We have since had another young goose unexpectedly up and die on us for no obvious reason (possibly another victim of the in-breeding problem we already know about). This one cleaned out at 3.605 kg, not huge for a goose, but not bad for one at still only 4 months old.

On other news, our lambs continue to thrive and we are sure they must be approaching the target 50 kg weight but we have not heard a whisper from sheep mentor, Kenny about coming to weigh them and decide on their dates. Here they are joined at the feed trough, rather cheekily, by some of the Hubbard chicks, our other thriving babies who are 60 days old today. They are reckoned, in a commercial set up, to need only 90 days but we are looking at their huge feet and thinking they might go a bit longer than that and get huge. We should probably take advice from Anne on that one - huge and late may not be good attributes in terms of tenderness or flavour.

Finally we have one of the mini-horses, Falabella 'Cody' back with us for a while. You will remember that we had him and the other two amigos here in the spring time, keeping our grass short and doing a favour for Charlotte and Carolyn when fodder was hard to come by. Cody is the stallion of the gang, being the only one who is still 'entire'. Not for long, it seems. He has been making a nuisance of himself escaping and going in search of mares. The market for miniature foals, along with most other Irish markets has collapsed so that nobody needs the boy at stud at present and his fate is sealed.

He can't have his 'op' just now because the current hot spell has brought the horse flies (locally 'creabhars' or 'craws') out again en masse and it is not fair to create an open, healing wound on a horse with those about, so he is waiting till mid October for his visit from Aoife (Rhymes with Deefer). Our field is secure though, he loves it here because we fuss and spoil him, there is loads of grass despite the 5 sheep, and he is, we are told, OK with sheep. He likes the company, apparently. So he's back among us for now.

That is about it. We are ambling along happily doing lots of tidying, weeding and some planting as well as all the muck spreading in this lovely warm dry weather.