Los Chicos están Despiertos

The boys offer to cook for us on Wednesday.

(The Boys are Awake) Finally a proper day off. The Help-X lads are off today on a train-ride adventure to the lovely town of Westport and I am just back from dropping them to Castlerea railway station to which they are not due to return till 07:15 pm tonight.

Chef and Sous-chef (we'll leave them to
argue over who's who). The food was delicious!

Liz has declared this a "Pyjama Day" and intends not to get out of her PJs till, at earliest, when I get the 'please pick us up' call this evening. I, too, am going to do only daily vital chores (live stock etc) and no big jobs.

It's not all dirty jungle-bashing for the lads.
They like a woodwork project for a change.

Don't be fooled, mind, into thinking that nothing will get done. Liz tends to start off with the good intention of a relaxing day and keeps the PJs on but as often as not slings an apron on over the PJs and gets just as covered in flour, the gentle bloom of oven-steam or the 'dusht' of a distraction into 'just tidying this'. I will have to go feed the bullocks for a friend and I also have a newly arrived smallholder couple to see, to sort out some safe storage for a motorbike.

Robbedy (9) gets to shoot a few arrows with the Roscommon
club, under instruction from our very generous coach, Con. 

Our 'days off' normally go this way. Last weekend I'd not long dropped the guys to the bus-stop (they were off to Galway that time) when Mrs Silverwood advised that they would be passing through here en route from home to Achill Island (Co. Mayo). Achill Island is 2 hours further NW from here and is in the Irish speaking part of the country (Gaelteacht) and older niece J-M was off there for 3 weeks incarceration where students are only allowed to speak Irish.

I can never see how this is comfortable but the stairs are a
favourite sleeping perch for dogs. 

Robyn did not fancy the extra 4 hours in the car so opted to stay here for the 6 hours and do a bit of 'farm' with Uncle Matt and Auntie Liz. Parents and grand-parents will know that a lively, excited 9-year-old, given an nicely unfamiliar environment and space to run about out of doors, is more than capable of turning 6 hours of relaxing day off into an exhausting marathon.

When Pedro told me that Spanish bread is mainly baguette-shaped
I had to have a go. Not as easy as it looks!

I took the lion's share of that, including taking her to 'see' the archery gang (which turned into shooting with them under the generously provided supervision of our coach, Con) while Liz realised the whole family would need feeding as they passed back through, and rattled up a splendid curry and the trimmings for 7 appetites. She'd already assembled a magnificent packed lunch for the Help-X lads, (Yay, it is written. No Irish Lady shall ever send forth their 'children' on an adventure to the foreign without a good pack-up!) so there was not a lot of relaxing going on in that kitchen, that day, either. We saved a bit of the curry for Manu and Pedro, who I had to shoot down and collect from Castlerea just after we un-shipped the Silverwood Five.

Beeblebrox (Beebs) with 6 of her chicks

Meanwhile, back on the 'farm' the various clutches of baby chicks are now reaching the 6-week age where their Mums lose interest in them and they are cast off to a life in the flock generally. Connie's three and Big-Red's 4 are pretty much 'flown' now, though Stumpy's 5 and Beebs's 7 are still hanging with Mumma. It is amusing to see these groups coalesce into bigger groups as they move about. Stumpy is regularly seen with 5+3 or 5+4 babies in tow and last night as I went out with the dogs I could see on the (nicely shaved) front lawn a coincidental Stumpy plus NINETEEN chicks. I wish I'd had my camera. Actually Beebs (Mum of 7) was there but hiding behind a tree stump and Connie's three were only passing through but it looked very sweet for that few seconds.

The new lambs, Pedro and 'Oveja' (Spanish for ewe)

We got word at last from Mayo-Liz that my lambs were now weaned and ready to collect from out by nearby town, Kiltimagh. I had 'ordered' these to meet our meat requirements when I accepted that we would produce none of our own this year and the freezers would be lamb-less. My phone call to Mayo-Liz though, found them still as "babies with their Mums", so I'd have to wait while they weaned. This sounded like an adventure the Help-X lads might enjoy. We hitched up the trailer and headed off to Liz and Ray's farm which sits a-top a mini-mountain jutting out of the Mayo plains.

The new pair (centre) in with the aunts.

The two lambs for us were penned but still needed ear-tagging before we could load which led to a bit of fun. Neither Manu nor Pedro had had any experience of handling sheep and between us we let the ewe-lamb escape with a flying leap past Manu's ear - she raced across a small sand-school to be with her gang. Easy enough to catch again and the boys couldn't quite believe their eyes when having cornered and grabbed the ewe, I flipped her up on to her rump while Ray ear-tagged her and then I lifted her up and carried her back to the pen and trailer. Pro-shepherd? Maybe not. The lads were impressed but I must admit I might have been showing off a little!

Photo-bombed by this Soprano Pipistrelle (circled) on a lovely
sunset. 

The new pair needed names, one girl and one boy. We toyed with Pedro and Emanuel  for a while but then went with Pedro and 'Oveja' which is Spanish for 'ewe'. We have a black hen sitting on eggs currently, due this Thursday, so we have told Manu that if he is feeling left out we will name the chicks Manu1, Manu2 and so on. As soon as I saw these beautiful lambs (Mayo-Liz's lambs are always well bred and gorgeous-looking), I wondered whether they might be a bit high quality for use as "just meat". They are Hampshire x 'mule' (which I guess just means they are 'mongrel' or, at best "half Hampshire") and the boy, especially might get saved his trip to Ignatius G (Victualler) and might bide a while here as possible stud-ram for our existing girls. Have to think about that one..... No such luck for Oveja, I suspect, or Liz's freezers will remain lamb-less and we would have to be looking for a butcher who does boxed, butchered, whole carcass deals.

New neighbours. 

What else is new? We have, at last, some new neighbours in the 5 Acre field to our west. Friends of the Blog will know that these fields around us changed hands last winter, so Mike-the-Cows had to take all his cattle off at the end of his tenancy. No cattle have set foot on this since and we have watched, nosily, as the fields seemed to be left to neglect. Occasionally we'd see the new owner's son exploring, taking soil samples or checking fences but he said that they did not have enough animals yet to sensibly use the land. Well, they have obviously been out shopping because a group of 30-40 mainly black animals were walked in there this week and set up with temporary fences and water bowser, "just to eat all that grass off". Welcome to our townland, guys.

Blue takes it easy in the sunshine.

That will do, I think, for this one. I will finish with a few random pictures just because I've taken them and don't like them to go to waste. Enjoy.

Veg garden looking a lot more under control.

If all these plums change colour and are not stolen by magpies
we are promised a bumper crop

Apple with a confusing variety name - "Irish Peach".

The 'Ramones' Final Gig

George Junior with his swollen neck. 

The "poorly goose" of my last post (George Junior) did not make it, but passed away quietly in standard goose sleeping position (beak under wing) in a box of hay and tucked under a blanket. We found him on the 2nd morning, so just 48 hours from first spotting that he might have a problem. Frustratingly, we have no idea what went wrong or what killed him. He had that swollen neck or crop but that seemed to be mainly full of air - when I gently massaged it at the bottom end the bulge moved up into his neck like playing with a part-inflated balloon.

Oven ready version - 2.2 kg

Finding him dead yesterday morning I hung him up head-down in the shed to relax into an easier 'shape' to pluck him and over the next couple of hours quite a lot of clear liquid (water?) drained down out of his mouth, so that by the time I plucked him the swelling was gone. The crop and gut cut open told us nothing - just some part digested food as you'd expect, small wads of 'chewed' grass, some grain. No obvious blocked places or torsion, but all of that could have relaxed away due to the head-down hanging. Ah well, some you win..... We decided to eat only the carcass (2.2 kg) and to bin the 'offal' we'd normally keep (gizzard, liver and heart). He was only a young lad so he is not really filled out enough to look like a proper oven-ready goose and does not have the usual thick layers of sub-cutaneous fat. The other 5 geese seem fine to us, behaving and eating normally. We remain completely in the dark as to what 'took' this fellow. Unusually, my on-line support (the poultry discussion groups) were also disappointingly silent on the subject.

What no sheep?

The open gate pictured, and the empty field tell the tale of this year's store lamb quartet having gone on their final journey, off with a one-way ticket for their appointment with Ignatius G (Victualler) in Castlerea Main Street. I did all the 'shock horror' pictures last year and the year before of hanging carcasses and of Liz dealing with the 'crop', so I will spare you that this year. These 4 were named 'The Ramones' after the punk-band by a friend (a pun on the fact that they were all, allegedly, going to be male (Ram lambs)) though in fact one was a ewe. The real Ramones (the band) had a song called "I don't want to be buried in the Pet Cemetery". Don't worry, you guys, that is no part of the plan.

The trailer is left open while the
chooks pick it clean of spilled food

They were easily the simplest and most trouble free batch we have had. Nobody escaped, nobody got their head stuck in the fence, they were all dead easy to bucket-train and then, in the 'practise runs' and today for real, they obediently followed me from field to cattle race and thence into the trailer. We had them loaded, literally, from field to ramp-shut in under 3 minutes. Yes, of course it feels like a betrayal as reward for their good behaviour but it does confirm that they are not scared or distressed at all by the loading and transportation. Trusting to the end, poor lambs, which in our case is when we encourage them out of the trailer and into one of the clean, straw-strewn holding pens at Ignatius's lairage while we chat to the happy butcher-man about his recent holiday in Canada and the birth of his newest Grand-daughter, Blaithín* (also in Canada).

Christmas Cake ingredients get an overnight soak
in apple juice

These lambs were two Texel x Suffolk Down and two Texel x 'mule' (the mule being a cross between a mountainy sheep and a lowland sheep). They may also well be our farewell to doing business with sheep-man Kenny, as we are moving now into in-lamb ewes and keeping sheep year round, rather than just buying Kenny's store lambs in Summer to 'finish' them in November or December. We've done it the 'Kenny' way for three years and 12 lambs and he deserves our thanks. It has been a good grounding in what was to be a new species for us. We feel ready now to get involved in all that shearing, foot trimming and dosing for liver fluke that 'proper' shepherds have to do.

Follow the yellow brick road to the spot marked 'X'

All around this sheep-work we have continued the sneaky 'drift' of the young Buff Orps' new house, down the cattle race and into the yard. We move the house a couple of feet each day and the chickens seem to be untroubled by the fact that their house each evening is in a slightly different place. We are both reminded of my mother's (Pud Lady's) wartime anecdote. Living at the start of the Blitz in Bromley-by-Bow on the River Thames, she and her 'big sister' were evacuated as children several times down to Somerset. Every time the Blitz eased and they could come 'home' they had actually moved house because their previous house had been bombed out in the intervening period. By the time we boys came along, Pud Lady had a framed map of the evacuation village on the Living Room wall as a momento, but amusingly the framing job had been done by 'cropping' a bigger map to remove the huge first S and last ET of the county name, so I grew up thinking Mum had been evacuated to a place called 'OMERS', The framed map is still there in the Hastings house.

Blue looks balefully at the metal duck

Finally, as cats do, Blue has adopted a new favourite sleeping place, on top of our Living Room dresser. This, of course, involves evicting any inconvenient "junk" he finds there (trophies, plaster kingfishers, a posh 'Moet' insulated sleeve for your champagne and egg boxes - this after riffling through the stack of open 'nested' boxes like a professional card-sharp). In this picture he has cleared himself a good space but doesn't look too happy about the metal duck ornament eye-ing him up from stage right.

*Another good Irish name for the British readers, Blaithín is pronounced 'Bloh-heen', the 'Bloh' having a short vowel like in the word 'Blo(ck)'. It translates as 'Little Flower'.... ahhhh!