Cull-a-Cock Curry

Some lovely sunsets. This taken by a friend on the Facebook
"Ballaghaderreen" account yesterday and used with permission.

Rather pleasingly our 2018 which started out with that long, cold wet Spring where no grass grew and we were all feeding our livestock with hay and supplements, has now given us a lovely Autumn. You will recall we also had that humdinger of a heat wave in May/June so it has been a bit of a weird year for the weather.

Full moon - pic blagged off Internet

So the last few weeks have featured no wind, clear skies (lovely and blue by day, big bright moons at night including the 'Beaver Moon' full moon on 24th this month), some light frosts and minor freezing of the big pond. More importantly there has been no rain so we are nice and dry and mud-less. A lot of the beef animals are still outside on the grass, to the delight of the local beef-men. Indoor housing means more work and more slurry to spread from the tanks under "slatted houses". After their tricky Spring, that will come as a lovely relief.

Blue sky, green grass, white geese and a
rather black-ice frozen pond.

For us,with our sheep, it is already the 26th Nov, less than a month to Christmas and Elizabeth is only today having to buy the extras for the ladies; a bucket of their 'salt lick' mineral with molasses and a bag of their "crunch" (mixed grains, again with molasses). These give them plenty of energy, minerals and trace elements to keep their bones, feet and guts healthy as the grass starts to be exhausted. It is especially important if they are pregnant but Friends of the Blog will know that we are not 'doing' lambs this Winter, so that, at least is not a concern.

Frozen pond. Good news for Brer Fox, bad news for ducks.

The cold, dry sunshine has also been a good opportunity for the 'staff' to polish off a few jobs out of doors (we could have made good use of a couple of last Help-X-ers after all!). The Woman of the House decided to tackle the privet hedge out front.

Elizabeth goes 2 feet back into the hedge prior to taking the
top out of it down to about her shoulder height. The daffs in the
verge will love it and we will be able to see out as we nose the
car into the laneway.

This hedge had grown thick (4'?) and tall (8'?) and since we had been here it had only been shaped/trimmed by any passing Council contractors we could flag down and then picked at by us around the gateway 'splay' when we couldn't see to poke the car's nose out of the driveway. Elizabeth decided to "go for it" carving 2-3 feet back into the  front of it, exposing an old cutting-level at about her shoulder height. She will then cut it off at that height - we will be able to see into the windows of passing cars.

The downside of this, of course, is the MOUNTAIN of prunings that have to be coped with, gathered from the verge and disposed of but this is not, in fact a big problem. Just beyond where the lady is standing in the picture is another gateway - that through to our "Primrose Path". Nip in there and on your right is a cleared patch of ground under the trees (scene of much nettle pulling by Help-X-ers (and myself) this Summer). From here the prunings (after the leaves have fallen) can be tossed over the sheep fence and easily dragged across to the fire-pile ready for Bonfire Night (23rd June in Ireland).

Latest 'time-suck' for the heart patient, Mahjongg (solitaire)

Of course, I am chatting away here describing all this hard work as if I am involved. I can only sit and watch, longing to be fit enough again to help, lobbing in the odd "helpful" suggestion (Sorry, Boss!) and killing time with Mahjongg, Card Patience or some such. This is all Elizabeth's doing at the moment and I am extremely grateful. The daffs in the verge will definitely enjoy the extra light and people (including us, of course) will be able to see over the hedge even from normal-height saloon cars. I was holding off the job while we thought about buying a proper power-tool but Mrs C did this with normal secateurs and loppers. Fair play.

Sometimes just a tomato soup and tea
will do.

The frost and ice have unfortunately brought Brer Fox back out scenting around for sources of food other than the mice which are presumably now retreating under ground. We had our first strike since 3rd Sept. It was broad daylight (they all are!) and I was home alone but wide awake. The Guinea Fowl kicked off and I let the dogs out. They went fast a furious making that bee-line for the hole in the hedge through to the 5-acre field, that tells us that this is probably no false alarm. They were gone a good 20 minutes, so presumably chased the scent a good distance. I went to check the birds and found, sadly, only 5 ducks. A female (inevitably) was missing. Why can't they take the drakes?

I guess that the ducks, which have been used to racing out to the middle of the pond for safety whenever Brer Fox's nose appears through the hedge, were snookered this time by the pond-ice and may have been confused and indecisive, long enough, for the fox to nip in and snatch one. Ah well. Down side of full free range. I read subsequently that mine was not the only "first-in-a-long-while" fox strike that day. An Internet friend who small-holders in Derbyshire had a strike and our friends Sue and Rob over by Ballenagare had a turkey-stag taken. It's that time of year.

Processing the roosters

And talking time of year, as we run into Christmas, all those Spring-hatch baby chickens we were enjoying are now reaching the 21 week stage, which is 'Point of Lay' if you are a female, but time to issue those first Cock-a-doodle-doo calls and start bothering the hens if you are a 'bloke'. We hatched about 30 babies this year so the Law of Averages says we are looking at 15 probably roosters - way too many! These guys need culling out, or you end up with cock-fights and the hens getting too harassed. I watched one poor hen get 'trodden' by 3 roos in quick succession. She did not get up off the ground after #3 for a good 5 minutes, till #4 grabbed the back of her neck and tried to climb on. It's not pretty and is horrible to see done to your gentle, lovely ladies.

We chose 4 likely 'roo's and offed them on Thursday. It seems a shame - they are gorgeous birds, bright of eye, clean of leg and beautifully feathered, with their gold flecking flashing in the sun and their black tails glowing iridescent green (think magpie or head of mallard duck). They have had a good, free-range life and theirs was a quick, stress-free, painless respectful end. They are delicious and still tender - only 6 months old, so no need to go down the slow-cooker, coq-au-vin or "cull-a-cock-curry" routes; normal cooking is fine.

We are always a bit sad by how "scrawny" these big magnificent roosters turn out when plucked - you are pulling a good 2" deep 'pile' of feathers off legs, breast and cape and these are only range-y young adolescents of 'multi-purpose' breeding. (Dung heap specials, basically!)  We are more used to the 'designer' 'Hubbard' meat birds which will go 4 kg carcasses even at 120 days age but our source of Hubbards dried up a couple of years ago, so we are now more than happy with these 2 kg 'babies'.

That, I suspect, is enough for this post. Look after yourselves, till next time.

Waning, Weaning and a Good First Night

A bit swampy round the gate in the East
Field but at least the sheep can stand in
the dry to eat the rescue hay. Many sheep
keepers are suffering way worse.

I'm not sure how you, at the reading end of this blog, are doing for weather, but here in Ireland, our appetite for this rain and wet is waning fast. I was off collecting straw today for a beef farmer friend who asked me last time to just get half a dozen because he was sure he'd have his animals back out onto the grass "soon" and he'd not need the full load of 15 bales in my small trailer. Now he is more "they'll not be out to May Day at the soonest now". Another guy at the straw dealer was bemoaning that we'd need a good 2 weeks to dry it out even if it stopped raining today.

At least the sheep can have dry(ish) feet while they eat their
hay. I have spread a lot of gravel into this bit to stop the ground
chopping up so much in winter.

As a whole, Ireland is looking down the barrel of another Fodder Crisis like the one in our first year here (2011) as saved hay and straw start to run out. For luck, I slung a couple of hay bales onto my load - there is precious little grass yet in my sheep field. There is a little movement but the sheep are very pleased to get their crunch and hay each day so they can at least have that full belly feeling.

It's not all rain. I managed to get this complete line of post-visit
table linen through the system.

Which brings me to a related matter - weaning the bottle fed lamb. Little Bábóg is three weeks old now and starting to look very burly. We noticed that all the other lambs have started sneaking their noses in between the adult sheep to snatch a bit of the 'crunch' (like muesli with molasses) or the hay that we are feeding to the ewes. They are weaning themselves off the milk as Mum's milk starts to peak-flow and their ruminant guts start to work as proper grass-fermenting chambers. I have even seen Polly's two lambs (5 weeks) sitting in the shelter cudding.

Our flowering cherry, just starting.

It was back to the books then, for us, and the label on the 'Lamlac' packaging, plus a discussion topic opened up on Twitter to see how you go about this on bottle fed lambs. The consensus seems to be to wait till Day 35 at least and then, if you think (or know) that your lamb is taking at least 250g of solid food per day, you just do a "hard wean" taking the bottle away in one go. No messing about with watered down milk or small measures; the lamb's gut cannot happily do both food types at once unless they are coming little and often.

You are being watched. The ever-hopeful pigs keep an eye.

Readers may know that the sheep liver fluke is a complicated parasite which spends only part of its life cycle inside the sheep, chewing away at its liver and creating a good range of 'unwell' symptoms. The rest of the life cycle is spent in a mud-snail which loves the wet Irish bog-land soil. In normal years it seems to stay away from our, higher ground and we get no fluke problems in our sheep. Every time we send a lamb to slaughter, we get the butchers to slice through the livers and check for any damage. They are always 'clean'.

Silvergirl's thriving and surviving 5 chicks, 3 weeks old here.

This year though, you will know, that one of (ewe) Rosie's post-natal problems was early stage fluke damage. Vet, Aoife, told us that it is such a bad year that pretty much "everyone" has the problem. I can imagine. I look out across those sheep foot-print sized puddles in our field and I can just see the little flukey snail bas***ds thriving and doing a population explosion across the acre.

Sporting their new ear tags. Three of the lambs with one of
the mums.

We got all the flock into the cattle-race on a rare dry day yesterday, fluke-drenched all the ewes and took the opportunity to ear-tag all the lambs. The drench is 5.25 ml of chalky bluish gloop given by mouth using a syringe (with no needle obviously). Legal and healthy all on the same day. There's shepherding!

Meanwhile a minor miracle happened in the never-ending fox saga. The hens won a point back for their score board. The Guinea fowl alarm went up at 11 a.m. and we jumped to, and let the dogs out. They shot off with their "it was a fox" focus and speed. When there is no fox they amble about looking for a scent-trail and soon lose interest and return. We declare it a false alarm and move on. While they were gone on this one, I was able to walk round the far side of the poly-tunnel and spotted the sad slew of grey feathers. I was sure the fox had nabbed a hen.

Young love? The turkeys displaying to one another.

Ten minutes later and still no dogs, so I walked down to by the bee hive to look for distant white shapes meandering back to me between the rushes (that field, which is not ours, is more rush than grass!) and was amazed to see a grey hen walking back towards me from 50 yards out. She was very much alive, chuntering in an upset kind of voice and looking a bit shaken and ruffled. I can only think that the dogs caught up with the fox for some reason and the fox was forced to drop the hen in his flight. The hen rejoined the main rooster (Gandalf). What he said to her is not on record, but they spent the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. Go the grey hen.

Turkey egg.

Of course, you will know that the main story at the moment is nothing to do with rain, weaning lambs or the fox's antics. It is THE PLAY. You'll be pleased to know that the Lisacul Players nailed it on their first night, delighting a capacity crowd with a superb, very funny, enjoyable performance. Everyone is relieved and delighted. There are now two more performances, tonight and on Saturday, so I will give you a more thorough account in the next post, when it is all over and debut Producer (The Lady of This House) has had a chance to recover. If you are going then do as the printed programme says and "sit back and enjoy the mayhem". It is great.

Look Away Now

Another of those meat-based posts where I advise any of my readers who are not comfortable with the more intimate side of producing meat from livestock to 'look away now'.  Today was the day we had to head for the butcher's shop of Ignatius G and see our lamb carcasses cut up for the freezer. We watch, chat and choose cutting styles as appropriate; do you prefer the gigot chops and small shoulder, or the full shoulder? Do you prefer the rack of ribs cut into individual chops or left intact and so on. We love this stage - it has us feeling like 'proper' meat producers, not just someone who keeps a few chickens.

In this case we had done 5 sheep, 2 for our own freezers, one for Carolyn of the mini-horses and more recent half pig, one for the Silverwoods and one for Sparks. Ignatius and his 'oppo', Joe are good enough to cut each carcass up and bag it separately in tough white "bin liners" so that you can get it home assuming you can lift it into the car!

We had in our little flock, lambs all from the same father (sire), a Beltex ram, but we had ram lambs and ewe lambs from three different Mums (dams) and our sheep-man Kenny had asked us to get weights by sex and breed. We'd been expecting heavy weights because the lambs had been ready since October but Kenny had been sidelined by a broken collar bone; these babies had stayed on our nice grass and received their kg a day of Lamb Creep Crunch (a mix of cereals, molasses and minerals).

These guys had indeed gone way way over the weights Ignatius would buy for his shop, but that wasn't a problem for our home use. The 2 ram lambs in particular (both out of Suffolk Down ewes) had got up to 30.7 and 32.2 kg carcass weights (67.5 and 70.9 lbs). Ignatius put a standard leg joint on his scales at the shop price per kg and he would have had to ask €60 for it! Nobody would buy one that big he said. The ewe lambs were not quite that heavy. The two out of Galway mothers weighed 24.6 and 28.3 kg (54.1 and 62.3 lbs) and Dora the Explorer, out of the Texel ewe weighed 25.7 kg (56.6 lbs). Grand total 141 kg of meat or 311 lbs. We have been able to take more weight of meat from this year's two carcasses (for us) at 56 kg, than we got off the three last year (52.9 kg). Respect to Kenny for his choice of the Beltex sire for this year's breeding, rather than the Jacob's 2012 tup.

You will recall that we had already collected the offal (tongues, kidneys, hearts, livers and a lung for the haggis) the day after slaughter. Now we just had the job of sorting and bagging our own meat for the freezer and distributing the rest. Sparks raced down in his car from Dublin to collect his and stayed for a bacon butty, bite of pie and some cold roast pork and salad. We have dropped Carolyn's round to her house tonight and tomorrow we will be delivering the Silverwoods' bag to them. It's all go.

Not much else happening round here but tonight there is a minor hiatus as one of the Guinea Fowl has gone AWOL. At 16:30 tonight he/she managed to get lost between me turfing them out of the goose house where they had decided to roost for the night, and them finding the correct (chicken) house about ten feet away. When I came back having shepherded my geese home, there was only one in the chicken house and, search as we might with torches, looking up in trees etc, we can find no trace and they are, amazingly, not kicking up the usual ruckus at being separated. We've shut everyone down now without the missing Guinea. We are just hoping that as tomorrow dawns, the safe, sound, warm, dry, outdoor roosted, "lost sheep" will creep back into the fold for a happy re-union. I'll let you know.

Frozen Lamb and Failure.

We wake up to our first proper hard frost of the winter and I'm amused to note that the backs of the sheep are frozen with white rime. I presume all sheep get this but as they are normally white, you'd not see it. I take it as a sign that their layer of wool, which is a good 3 inches thick at this stage is good protection and prevents any body heat reaching the outside world. A friend suggests hot water bottles, but I am already being laughed off the park for my rain proof shelter.

As per instructions from our sheep mentor, Kenny O'C, I try them on a handful of hay as a supplement to their new high-protein 'heating food' mix of sweetcorn, cereals and molasses but they are not impressed. They kick it a round a bit and nibble a small amount but it's still there in the afternoon and has actually been flattened by a sheep sleeping on it, so I don't think I'll be repeating that. Maybe with some straw as bedding. The frosted grass and the rime on the rushes hangs around all day as the thin, low sun has barely got above the trees to our SE when a cold mist blows in from the bog-land to our North and blots it out. The lambs manage to find enough grub in the greener stuff under trees and at the base of hedges, but they are fed up 40 minutes into each hour 'sheep watch' and come asking me for the bucket of 'crunch' and to be led home to eat it. I am very happy to oblige as I too have been standing around in the raw cold for those 40 minutes and the house with its lovely toasty range and a bowl of soup or a bacon butty, beckon.

Meanwhile the 2CV as NCT failure saga moves on. If you are not interested in car technical details look away now. Remember we were last seen still waiting for a chunk of rubber for the steering, called an anti-rattle plate, our existing one being worn and allowing play in the track rods? Well, that part never arrived (still hasn't) and my 11th hour re-test was due this Saturday (today) with no more room for postponement wriggle-room. We had repaired everything else the car had failed on (wheel bearing, track rods, non-compliant tyres etc) so the garage guy said he'd tighten up the steering without the missing bit and we MIGHT get away with it on the retest. Unfortunately, that is exactly what WOULD have happened, had he re-set the tracking (wheel alignment) after tightening those nuts.

Off I went to my re-test for 16:55 p.m. today and the very nice man accepted that all the work had been done but the non-alignment caused us to fail something called a side-slip/alignment test. The car is driven over a posh rolling road which tries to push it off line and then measures how far off the road you'd be in metres per kilometer of forward motion. My front end failed because it would have been 20+ metres off line after a km (in the bog somewhere, I guess). The bloke even tried it 5 times to try to get a pass for me, but couldn't. So, here I am with a car which needs no more parts and just a simple tracking adjustment which many garages would do for you free, but I have to go back to square one and submit the car to the full test again at €55. Obviously what we will actually do is wait for the anti rattle rubber to actually arrive, fit that and then set up the tracking with that bit fitted. Hey ho. We are getting closer each time but still not actually on the money.

I need a drink.