The Final 9... and a half

Colin has a bit of a sort out of the sheared ewes

In the last post, I promised an end soon to talk of sheep shearing. This is definitely the last word on that subject or at least the penultimate one. Friends of the blog will know that on Saturday I was booked over to Co. Sligo again to nail the final 9 Texel ewes plus, it turned out, a little grey mountainy animal who had nearly sheared herself by losing her winter coat except for some shaggy pantaloons and a fluffy (un-docked) tail. Some sheep breeds do this, the Wiltshire Horn for example, so this girl, Molly, may have some of that DNA in her mix. She was our "and a half" sheep.

For this session our French student assistant was absent, given a lie-in by the family as she'd been working her socks off all week and was exhausted. It was just Colin and I but that was OK. The 3rd hand is useful but not vital. Anne joined us late morning when we were just 2 sheep from the end of the task, a nice "bringing on a fresh sub" move.  We took it fairly steady and got through all ten animals between 9 a.m. and 11:30 even with a break for coffee mid way and a bit of a pause to sort and treat a fly-strike victim.

Fly strike lesion on right side of ewe. Cleaned up in this pic.

You'll recall that one of the main reasons for shearing early-ish in the year (May?) is to avoid the over-heated sheep getting blow flies lay their eggs down among the fleece. These eggs hatch and the maggots crawl down to the skin and start eating that, causing, as you can imagine, all manner of discomfort to the sheep and eventually worse ills.

Letting them all go back out to pasture.

Fly strike is messy, smelly and not nice. We only found the one case, a ewe with maggots down in her groin area. These sheep-keepers though, know their stuff and had what felt like 4 different lotions and potions on hand to wipe on, sponge on, massage in and then (a very bright yellow cream) smear around the outside of the place. Once we had got rid of all the maggots all you can do is prevent more and let the wound, which was not very deep in this case, dry and heal.

So that was me, sheared out for the year. I could clean the shears, de-tension them and send the blades away to be sharpened. Luckily I mentioned this to Alayne, who sends her horse-trimmers off like this and when I told her of the 'brilliant place' on Achill Island I have used before she was able to advise me that that one is closed following the tragic death of the business owner. She gave me an alternative place to get them sharpened.

Had to try these new "Jakoti" hand shears

The reason for my "penultimate" possibility is that I have been tempted by all the @smallholderIRL Twitterer sheep-folk into buying a new toy.

Connie takes her 3 babies to visit 'Big Red' in the Utility Room,
who has just hatched 4 for herself. She does not receive an
enthusiastic welcome. 

This is a pair of Jakoti hand shears looking like an extended pair of Felco secateurs. All the sheep people swear by them now and have been abandoning the olde fashion sprung-steel "double bow" type. I have now received these just after having finished shearing proper but I have one tidy up job I can try them out on - those frilly knickers and woolly dewlaps I left on my own sheep before I had all this practise on Southdowns and Texels.

The Hubbards at 3 weeks are fast out-growing "baby chick"
status

Meanwhile, back home we are awash with baby chicks and more on the way. You'll know we got the 13 (now dozen) Hubbards hatched on 5th June. In the last post I spoke of 3 chicks hatched under our #1 broody, Sussex 'Connie', with Utility Room broody coming up to Day 21 yesterday. Well, right on schedule, UR-Broody (we'll call her Big Red) hatched hers, 4 chicks in her case. Hot on her heels should come 'Stumpy', Due 7th July and now we have found a 4th 'clocker', the part-Araucana we call 'Beeblebrox' whom we THINK will be due on the 15th. We are furiously trying NOT to count our chickens.....

Foaming porridge? A sour dough starter. 

Tipped off by our visitors from Dorset, Mazy Lou and Airy Fox and then encouraged by the 'curator' of that Twitter account (@MagsMorrisey) who did a week of bread making Tweets, I have decided to try my hand at the sour-dough bread. Both of us have tried plenty of yeast bread since we have been here (and before) but never sour-dough. I will not go into detail as this 'muck and magic' has been covered intensively else where but in brief, the bread rises due to the activity of a 'starter' which you keep active, instead of dried or fresh yeast.

Bread makers love and cherish their starter cultures, feed them and tend them like any other livestock. They even give them names. Mine came over from Mazy in Liz's hand luggage and I named it Reginald after the ram I had just sheared. Ooops - sorry, that slipped out.

Anyway, long story short, we have fed Reg for the required week and, finding him foaming like a swamp, I made the first loaf today. Even though I failed to artistically score the top of the lump of dough and scorched it a little by forgetting how fierce our oven can be, it came out very well and is delicious.

Hard to beat. Your own pork. The bread-crumb crust covers
shredded courgette in creamy garlic sauce

Other than that, a nice bit of progress on the kitchen project. We'd been looking for a suitable worktop for in there against the bare stone wall plus wondering how to mount it given the lack of cupboards, then sitting down at our Dining Table to scratch our heads and drink coffee. This is what we need, we agreed, something like the top of the table. Solid wood, 4 cms thick, honey-coloured oak (or similar?), 6 foot long, stripped of varnish and cherished for years with something like our beeswax polish.

New kitchen gets an up-cycled dining table work top. 

BING! Light-bulb moment. Why don't we either find another table and cut it up (well, get K-Dub, our ace carpenter, to do it) or find one to replace this one and cut this one up? So we did. I was out in Boyle last Friday and spotted a "Pre-Loved Furniture" shop (yoiks) and there, right in the front window was the very table. We nipped out to collect it yesterday and texted K-Dub, and he came round today. Bingo! Liz has a perfect-height, solid wood worktop which even has a 'splash-back' with twin double sockets for the various kitchen gadgets. Marvellous.

Legal 'Beagle's

Doggie Documentation

This is another rather short blog post as befits the relative lack of 'stuff' going on.

Our three dogs are so flippin' legal as of today that they were last heard of combing the Internet for a doggie lawyer in case they should need representation the next time they are caught chasing the kittens. In Ireland domestic dogs not only need to be licenced, they also need to be radio-chipped; one of those tiny grain-of-rice sized smart-tags injected under the skin between the shoulder blades.

The Ros go Run Committee pick up their sponsorship
cheque from Drury Oils.

The chipping is a one-off which we did last year, but the licencing works on an annual reminder - you trot along to your local post office with €20 cash per dog in your little paw. This year we had thought we might have got away with it, forgotten in the battle to get everyone chipped. The reminders normally come in December and we had made it through that month and January with ne'ery a whisper. Perhaps it was not happening? No such luck and the three reminder postcards hit the post-box with a resounding 'thunk' on Monday. I've been down today to pay up, tidying up the Postmistress's pad of forms in the process with documents number  599 and 600.

Buffers in process.

I mentioned in the last post that our #2 rooster, the Buff Orpington lad, 'Buffers' had started to attack us when we were trying to feed the birds or what ever, and was likely to need sorting. He persisted despite us warning him  so he is now 'late'. I went out after dark to collect him quietly from his perch (the least stressful way) and he is now  a rather lovely and extremely tender Coq-au-vin. He was a beautifully clean bird, completely lacking parasites or any damage and very, very well feathered, especially around the big, fluffy, Buff-Orp 'pantaloons'. He weighed 2.94 kg oven-ready.

Kato decides to help the plucking process by using the
sink full of fluff as a feather bed. 

He was plucked and then portioned up with all the easy bits (thighs, wings, breast, drumsticks etc) going into the Coq-au-vin via a 24 hour marinade in red wine - a whole bottle! The big remaining chunks (back, pelvis, neck) got boiled as stock and the meat stripped off the boiled bones for the dogs. The 'gribbly bits' (liver, gizzard, heart) went to the cats.

24 hours submerged in some generic Bordeaux softened
him up beautifully. 

It turned out a very successful 'processing' and Buffers should know that he did not die in vain. He went into the slow cooker yesterday afternoon but we judged that he was not really 'done' by supper time. We juggled the menu and decided to eat him tonight, so he got all that evening (6 hours) and then most of today (8 hours) in the crock-pot. You will probably guess he was fall-off-the-bone tender and seriously delicious. Without doubt the best cull-rooster meal I have ever had. That Lizzie is surely a genius in the kitchen.

The young ducks get some closely supervised 'out' while they
meet Mum and Dad. 

Meanwhile, on birds, the 'ducklings' are now almost 6 weeks old and quickly out-growing their little 2m x 1m rabbit run. Today we started the process of introducing them to the adult duck and drake (Mary and William) who are actually their biological parents (and sole duck survivors of the fox attack in November). Of course, the Drake does not know this and has no reason to be particularly nice to them - they are just unknown birds invading his patch and needing telling who is boss. We have to supervise to make sure this stays within decent bounds and nobody gets hurt. Ducks can be quite the violent bullies/rapists if that is how the mood takes them.

I am interested to see how the sexes work out on these three youngsters. The adult birds, as I said, are the 2 survivors from our original group of 6 which were 2 drakes and 4 females and which we noticed had what looked like sex-linked colour patterns. All 4 females had big splashes of white feathers down throat and chest, where the drakes both had solid dark heads and necks and brown bodies. They also had that mallard-style green iridescence on their heads.

We do not know whether white chested females is a Khaki-Campbell breed trait or possibly just true for this family/strain but the three new 'babies' all have this white throat/chest thing (see photo). I am hopeful that all three will be females, bringing our egg-laying number straight back up to the 2016 pre-fox level (4) without any wasteful drake appetites slowing me down. Too much to ask? Maybe not.