A Genuinely Short Post (Honest)

A welcome cold snap

OK, I know I have many times recently started a post with comments along the lines of "not much to say, so this is going to only be a few paragraphs" and then gone on at normal length. Well, this time, I genuinely have little to say, so I might be for real here. Added to that, one major 'thread' of narrative is under that embargo to which I have already alluded; the main characters in those episodes do not like to be spoken of 'on here' and there is no arguing with that.

Frosty East Field

Main event for this post was the 'Little Christmas' or 'Ladies' Christmas', (Nollaig na mBan or, if you prefer, simply Epiphany) when the men take over the reins of the household and try to treat their women-folk to a complete day of rest.

When you can only find 4 ducks it is a sure sign that #5 is off
hidden up somewhere laying a surreptitious late egg. When
she returns it is then a race against the magpies to find the egg
before they do. 

It is nothing that heroic, so does not generate me much Blog text but it is fun to do and much appreciated by Lizzie. I have to do all the kitchen and dish-washer duties, provide tea on demand and cook the main meals. Also, on this occasion, carve a good snack's worth of thin slices off the 'Parma'-style whole leg of ham mid afternoon and pass in the gorgeous chocolates we were gifted by our French visitors at Christmas (Thank you, Marion, Clara and Augustin). It all went very well.

Frosty early morning view from the new kitchen windows

I have also tried to progress from knowing that we have "around 30 chickens" to doing some kind of census to get an exact list. This is mainly so that we can report egg production, health and progress more accurately and to identify whether we have any 'passengers' who are contributing nothing and need weeding out. Tough old, cut-throat world?

We both wish the cats would not catch these cuties and we are
always amazed how tiny they are in the hand. A goldcrest, of
course. 

Obviously, with the birds free-ranging this is not that easy - you walk one way round the site with your notepad and pencil and try to record who is where but by the time you have nearly finished, are you double counting hens who have gone widdershins round the house and come to meet you again? I scratched down a list of 28 hens by name if they have names, and by a rough description if not. I now have a list that says such arcane things as "Stumpy", "Big Red", "Grey / Dark cape" and "Flat black / big crest" and is peppered with codes like 'A-head' and 'A cheeks'.

Poor little mite. At least we have a strong population of goldcrests
here, so this one will not really be missed.

The 'A' thing stands for Araucana, which is a weird 'fancy fowl' beloved of show folk which has tufts of feathers sticking out of the top of its head and sideways from its cheeks. The latter give it a strange hamster-like look from the front. Pure bred A's lay blue eggs which are quite nice, but we only have crosses between A's and other types, so we only get white eggs and we get hens which are mainly hen-shaped but have some bizarre A-tufts on their heads.

I now need to take my list into the coop at lock-up and double check. I better not bore you with a complete list of all the birds as a fancy tabular addendum. You might think I was trying to flesh out a slow news day. As if.

The half moon goes down into that big patch
of new morning sky where Storm Eleanor
decapitated our larch. 

Finally, we are now at Day 9 of the two major New Year's resolutions. First that #DryJanuary - we are both sticking to this as per the agreed rules; one 'day off' allowed. Mine is going to be Burns Night, Liz went for Nollaig na mBan and brother Mark has a gin tasting he has booked in on 15th. So far so good.

Knitting project gets finishing touches.

Second, Liz was determined to get out all the unfinished major knitting projects and finish them. She loves knitting up the pieces of a garment but hates the stage where you sew all the bits together, so as at NYD, I had a lovely Aran pullover which was all there but for the assembly and Liz had a blue cardigan and a green woolly in similar states. Well, true to her resolution, my Aran is finished, the cardy just needs buttons (and even has a neck-warmer / 'snood' in the same wool, to go with it.) and the green thing is very nearly completed.

Publicity shot for the Men's Shed. The lads were doing a 'bucket'
collection at the check outs in local SuperValu, "Duffy's". 

And that, genuinely, is it. Till next time.

They Also Serve, Who Only Stand and Wait

There were some impressively colourful wind maps.

Friends of the Blog will know by now that the feared 'Hurricane' Ophelia has now been and gone, leaving us relieved, delighted and grateful to have largely got away with it. The feeling among my small-holdering friends is that up here in Roscommon we "dodged the bullet". Nationally the storm killed 3 people, felled a gazillion trees, left 360,000 without power and caused all manner of damage along the south, west and southeast coasts.

About as bad as it got for Roscommon (lined in blue). The red areas
are Force 8+. We stayed in the green (Force 6) and yellow (7). This
my favoured source, being Met Éireann's short-range forecast.

There were pictures and video all over Twitter and Facebook including, notably 2 bits showing the roof of a school gymnasium going airborne for several hundred yards before landing neatly between some houses without killing anyone. I also saw some road-side trees rocking away from the camera with their roots lifting bits of tarmac and road-base up like cartoon mouths opening and closing.

For us, though, mercifully a scary day and some exhausting watching, especially between about 2 pm  and 8 pm but the only damage was a few small branches broken down from trees and scattered across the lawn, and my big house-sign tumbled over. I must say, in fairness, how exactly spot on and correct (almost to the hour) were the forecasts considering this was an "unprecedented" event - Hurricanes never come over this side of the Atlantic - so they can't have had much practice.

A perfect spiral, uninterrupted by fronts. 

Ophelia was a perfect spiral so we knew as she passed up the west coast, hopping over a few headlands (like County Clare for example!) that we'd get winds which nearly went round the compass. We woke up to Nor'easterlies which get right into our yard. These veered round to the East and then the South; passing through the worrying trajectory of our remaining trees tall enough to hit the house. They carried on swinging through SE, where we are OK-ish and into full West where, again we are vulnerable for the poly tunnel and the barn which Doris took the roof off. It was not an easy day.

The Black Spruces got a good buffeting but
stayed put

There was (as forecast) a nice lull mid morning when the sun even came out and then one at bedtime but Ophelia had a possible sting in her tail with those Westerlies strengthening from midnight to about 04:00 Tuesday (today). The spiral had a diameter roughly 3 times as wide as the country, so as the eye cruised up 'our' side of the Island, the strongest winds were the Southerlies hitting the south coast and then sliding up past Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow up to Dublin.

The willow hedge gets turned inside out with each gust.

All we could do was stay indoors and sit it out. The only driving we did that day was to nip out to feed some bullocks for a friend. Our Help-X volunteer got introduced to the concept of "They also serve, who only stand and wait". Yes AB. You really CAN retreat to your room and sleep or play video games. We will shout if we need you. Your job today is to "stand by". You may physically achieve precisely nothing but we will still value you immensely. Honest.

A fine pair of legs

That, though, is surely enough on the Fair Ophelia. The only other news is that the 'Parma' style ham legs have progressed on from dry salt-cure to the air-drying stage. These big ol' lumps of carcass get 16 days in the mix of sugar, salt and spices being patted down each day with new cure and drained of any brine which the dry salt sucks out of the meat. They darken and become quite firm to the touch as they dry out. In this part of the world, the wise man does this stage in the fridge to give the salt a good head-start against the risk of flies and food-poisoning nasties.

Prior to scrubbing off the salt. 

After 16 days they are lifted out of the dry salt and the spare salt is scrubbed off using a stiff brush dipped in cider vinegar. They are then wrapped in rather nifty Muslin bags created by Lizzie, to deter the flies and hung somewhere fairly dry but with air movement for between 4 and 18 months.

Hung in the air for 4-18 months

During this time the meat continues to dry out and the flavour sweetens and matures. You are aiming for a 30% weight loss; too much and your ham will be as hard as wood; too little and the ham will not cure sufficiently (so may not be safe to eat). The 4-18 month thing is personal choice - how firm/dry do you like your Parma? We do 2 legs. One for eating in Summer (so about 11 months) and one for Christmas (15 months). Like us, the reader will just have to preserve their souls in patience and see how we get on come next August. It is not a fast food.

Enjoy the calm days after the storm. We certainly are.

Breakfast in Bed

Baking for the next guests - choc, pear and nut dessert

This post brings a nice sense of tidying up on a couple of issues; of "stuff" being sorted out and squared away. No longer an issue. Move on, as they say. First up, Friends of the Blog may recall that I was anxious about these new pigs - that they did not seem to be eating with appropriate gusto and were also very wary of me and shy of approaching.

Square miles of Ballymoe burned off in the recent fires

Well a few more days in that is all changed. They are now sprinting out to meet me and the breakfast or supper bowls and if I sit quietly they will eventually amble over and start chewing on my boots to find out what I taste like. Sprinting, that is, except for on Saturday when the morning brought lashing rain. That day the pigs were on their feet but standing just inside the ark doorway looking at the rain and at me, approaching, dripping in my big yellow hi-viz coat. They had cleared a small area of floor just inside the door, moving just enough bedding for me to land the food bowl INSIDE the ark, out of the rain. Breakfast in Bed for piggies that day. Spoiled!

The cats have pretty much wiped out the local rats. The very
occasional one we get now seems to be brought in from away
across the fields in a neighbour's turf barns.

The poorly tractor belonging to our friend and neighbour down the lane is also fixed and back home. He phoned me on the morning when I knew we had guests arriving so I thought I might be in trouble - his calls for a 'taxi' (Ah. you might just run me into town...) have a habit of suffering "mission creep" and turning into multi-stop mini-epics.

Liz with visitors Angie (left) and Liz (snr). Chicken Savoyard

When I was working in warehouse distribution, the salaried lorry drivers used to always try to get nice clean one-stop missions - load, drive to the supermarket in town X, unload, drive home arriving with not enough 'tacho-hours' to be given a 2nd run. They hated any mission with lots of stops and drops, rudely referring to them as "milk rounds".

Could be the least desirable cheese you ever saw? Espadán
(I think) is a soft-rind, extra mature goat cheese brought back
from Valencia by Mum-in-Law. It mingeth.

That is exactly how I am with these one-stop taxi runs which, once the 'customer' is in the car, gain extra stops at an alarming rate and grow extra miles and hours faster than I can 'deliver' the legs - can we stop at the bank, or the Mart, or the Railway Station? Can we just "stand" (pause) at this cemetery because I need to see can an extra name be added to a gravestone. Ooh, and we better stop for a bit-een to eat too. It's not worth getting to x-point before 2pm as they'll be closed for lunch. And so it goes on. Somehow we managed to check on the man's cattle and do all this rake of jobs, drop him to his tractor repair and get home still before the guests arrived.

The 'Parma' style ham in its posh new stand

The visitors this time were distant cousin Angie (Great great grandpa in common with Liz (jnr), all very complicated.). This lady is a 'find' from the Internet (Facebook, I think). This family have a very rare and unusual surname which most people conclude is Italian but is actually Corsican. In Corsica way back they were Baron-level land owners but backed the wrong king in some fight (Napoleon?) and found themselves dis-possessed. As Liz puts it, "we were Huguenots, thrown out of more European countries than you can shake a stick at" before some ended up in Ireland and, in Angie's case, Bristol (UK). The rare name means that they can nowadays find unknown pockets of family through Google and the Internet.

Fancy new ham cradle. 

Angie was over in Ireland on a round up meeting all the distant rels she has found during these searches and was here for the 2nd time, taxi'd up in this case by Liz Snr. We had the usual fun doing hospitality. Liz arrived fresh back from a break in Valencia and with a 2nd Parma-ham related gift. Last time she brought the proper purpose-designed ham slicing knife. This time, even more generously (Thanks, Mum!) she had bought one of those special wooden support cradles which hold the leg at a jaunty angle while you carve. It was flat-packed but dead easy to assemble.

'Charlie' Moss rummaging around for suitable plants for all
 four of we customers. 

One of the attractions for this visit, enticing the ladies all the way from Co. Laois was that I have finally made contact with a plant nursery specialising in perennial plants. I have been chatting to the owner of this business (Charlotte Moss) on Twitter for a while as part of the normal banter between small holders on that network but it had only recently dawned that her name on Twitter (@CMossPerennials) could well indicate that 'she' was actually a specialist nursery business.

We finally got round to her beautiful, scenically placed, rambling house/walls/buildings/steps place nestling under the Curlew Mountains overlooking Lough Gara today. We loved them all at first sight and 'Charlie' (she asked to be called) is a brilliant, very knowledge-able plantswoman with a superb collection of potted plants which must surely be the result of endless hours of hard and good work. Over the course of a very enjoyable hour or so we filled the car boot to bursting and made no visible dent in her stocks! We were even invited in for tea and then taken on the tour of the lower fields, the fruit trees and the lovely dry-stone, Sligo style walls. It was all gorgeous and thank you so so much, Charlie, for having us and treating us so well. We now have many hours ahead finding the right homes for all these pollinator-friendly goodies.

Enda on the Exit Slope

Poor Enda. When a hen looks this rough there is usually
only one outcome. 

Enda on the Exit slope? No, no, no, not beleaguered politician Mr. Kenny currently battling to stay in charge of the country. This Enda is Enda 'Vaneera' our now longest serving chicken. We fear she may be on the exit slip-road of hen life. We've had her 5 years now and for the most recent 2 of these she has strutted around in charge of all hens, a real alpha female. She has also batted away any male attention - we are sure she has been barren for 2 years - and has been the keenest garden-helper when ever she saw a human weeding or disturbing soil.

Parrot tulips

Recently she amazed us by coming back into lay, giving us about a fortnight's worth of good eggs but this, sadly, seemed to be a reproductive swan song (at risk of mangling my metaphorage here!). A few days back she woke up suddenly unable to cope with the attentions of our rooster. He jumped her and rolled her onto her side, then finished and she just lay there instead of the usual huffy get to your feet and shake out those feathers. Seeing her still there, apparently submissive he did it again and again till I had to shoo him off and rescue the poor girl.

Pear blossom

I could see that all was not well and gave her some days in the sick bay and isolation to let her regroup. Bad news, I'm afraid, she is not recovering and is going downhill. Friends of the Blog will know that in our experience, chickens don't do "sick". They go from perfect health to dead with nothing in between, so it is amazing that she has lasted these few days. I think she will shuffle off the mortal coil today. I'll let you know.

'Our' pigs with their Mum (Iris) on their first day out of the
sty.  17th April here so 6 weeks old. 

Happily, there are winners as well as losers for every post. Our pig breeder (Hi Adrian) sent us the latest pictures of our soon-to-be piglets who are (we hear) bounding with health and full of mischief. He has also told us when we can collect them, any time from 7th May. We are so excited. We are getting 2 of these, probably a (castrated) male and a female, and our friends Sue and Rob another 2. I presume Adrian has also sold the 5th.

'Parma' Ham, Roscommon stylee. The "Parma" word has
protected geographic status dictating permitted breed, diet
and 'terroir' but we do our best with our local beasts. 

While we are on pigs, with our latest visitor, Mum in Law (Steak Lady to this blog) on site we wanted to crack open this season's first Parma-style ham so that we could taste some and declare it ready. Mum is often in the part of Spain which does the 'Serrano' equivalent and has even brought us back an official, wickedly sharp, designed-for-the-job, "Cuchillo Jamonero" carving knife, with its 9" long by slender 5/8" 'deep' blade which lets you slice off almost transparent slices of ham. The ham was a great success and we have been slicing bits off ever since for starters and tasters.

Our other local fan of this meat is Charlotte, normally now a Dublin resident but, by coincidence (or did she smell the ham?) down here for a few days to look after little H (5) while Mum and Dad were at a wedding. Obviously we had to have her over for a taster and packed her off with a size-able "doggie bag".

The ladies try out the new ham.

This whole leg will do us about 4 kg of ham, we think - the muscle loses 30% of its weight, ideally, during the air-drying process. The 2nd leg is being saved for similar treatment at Christmas. Any friends of the blog reading this and fancying a taster, get in touch while we still have some. We'll be good for about a month but it won't go much longer than that even as 'back up stores' in the freezer assuming there is any left for that.

We love the way Mum does these roasties. Liz calls them
"hedgehog" potatoes but I am told they are officially called
Hasselback. That could just be a foreign word for hedgehog.

Mum's visit, meanwhile, went off really well and was enjoyed by both guest and host. At one stage she even took over the kitchen and cooked for us - she know the way to our hearts! She had bought with her a lovely beef roasting joint knowing that we do our own lamb, pork, chicken and duck. She did this with a stir-fry of veg plus some superb special potatoes. These are cooked whole but see no water or par-boil prior to roasting. They are sliced almost through into very thin slices and the whole then wiped in oil including trying to get some oil down into the cuts. It is great to eat them in these slices. It is like having all the best bits of a roastie in your mouth at once!

Mutt and Jeff. NZ White cross bunnies.

I also took Mum across to see Rob (Sue was in UK) - she loves their place and is quite taken with Rob as he is with her. I think it is the nearly OVER-stocked air of chaos. "How many chickens have you got?" We had a lovely welcome from Rob and the enthusiastic, small and huge dogs ("Woool-ufs" says Mum) - they have terriers plus a St Bernard and a mad maybe-Newfoundland pup which is even bigger than the St B.

Get that grass cut you bunnies!

We came away with a couple of half grown bunnies. These lads (named Mutt and Jeff by Mum) are NZ White crosses, quite a big breed. They are surplus to Rob's breeding programme so, if they can avoid Mr Fox, they can spend the summer doing lawn-mower in our apiary. Bees, famously, hate the vibration of a petrol lawnmower, so rabbits are the perfect solution - the bees ignore them and they ignore the bees. The grass stays short so the bees will always recognise 'home' by sight.

A nearly full house for Friday night. Wednesday
and Saturday were quickly sold out. 

Last but not least among our "Winners" in this post, THE PLAY. This village event, having had a good but slightly wobbly dress rehearsal, played a real 'blinder' on the First Night. It went really well with no hitches and delighted the audience into gales of laughter and frequent enthusiastic applause. Everyone is over the moon. I have written a good review which is now up on the website (  http://lisaculinfo.ie/first-night-review-cupid-wore-skirts/ ) and Facebook and Twitter have been a-buzz with nice pictures and favourable comment. As I write this (Saturday morning) we have also had a brilliant 2nd night and we have high hopes for Last Night which is tonight.

Watch this space.

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.

'Plane' Sailing

No, not a spelling mistake, this really was an aircraft (a Boeing 767 no less) taking a trip by sea up the West coast of Ireland from Shannon all round Galway and Mayo to end up in Enniscrone on the N coast of Sligo. Only in Ireland I suspect. The story caught the imagination of the social media (the Twitter feed was tagged as #planesailing) and then National radio and we just lapped it up.

Blue the Cat rolling about on the roof of the car.

Businessman David McGowan is mainly an undertaker but in a big way (runs training courses for other undertakers etc) but is your essentially eccentric entrepreneur and turns his hand to anything and has a very amusing and love-able way about him in radio interviews. He has started a transport based 'posh' camping site (glamorous camping = glamping) and already had a load of taxis, buses and other vehicles in there but he needed a focal point. A plane! Why not? Hunting about he found a de-commissioned Russian 767 at Shannon airport and was not put off by not getting permission to move it by road; he spent €25,000 or so hiring cranes and a barge and took it out of Sligo airport "via the back door".

The apple trees are LOADED with blossom
this year.

I think he had the whole country rooting for him in the end and following the every move of barges, tugs, tides and winds. Even the weather man co-operated and only a heavy swell in Killala Bay held him up for 12 hours trying to land the barge on the beach. The plane is now safely delivered to the glamping site and the media circus has moved on but I don't suppose David McGowan was that upset by the massive publicity. Fair play to him!

Scorchio

As ever, much more parochial here. We have been blessed by a succession of scorching hot, blue sky days which have brought out the fruit blossom in bounty and the bees have been having a field day pollinating them. OK, this is Roscommon, so it has only been up to about 21ºC but we are not used to it here and we wilt in heaps and stop working for a good siesta, sit by the pond and watch the blue sky.

Whole leg of Tamworth, salt cured then air dried for 8 months

Even slower at its 'work' (tenuous Radio 4 style link there!) has been our first attempt at 'Parma' ham. You may recall that we 'saved' this whole leg of Tamworth pig when we butchered our pair of gilts at the end of August 2015. We smothered it in a spicy salt-cure for 3 weeks, regularly replacing the salt and draining off the brine that the salt "sucked" out of the meat.

Salt cured air dried ham. 8 months in the making.

We then wrapped it in a purpose built muslin bag made by Liz and hung it up in the spare room (all the heating turned off and window vents open); our "cool dry place" for 8 months round till now. Well, this week, curiosity got the better of us and we interpreted the instruction to "hang it for 4-12 months" as 8 months. We took it down, unbagged it, scrubbed the (allowed) minor mould off the outside with vinegar, then cut away the surface skin and fat. We were delighted - it is lovely! It smells sweet and sound and tastes perfect. As an added bonus we have eaten some and NOT got food poisoning or died in the night, so we guess it is a success.

The ever-more adventurous ducks at 6 weeks.

In '365' project land we have a new mini sub-project. Next week is "Bio-Diversity Week" and the village is submitting an entry in the national "Tidy Towns" competition as their environmental category. This is, of course, right up our street and we were heavily involved in our Kent days in the local equivalent "Calor Gas Village of the Year", even judging. We have both offered our services and been to a meeting discussing the 'Action Plan' but for now we are just asked to do website stuff and to gear the 365 photos that week to flora and fauna. No problem. Happy to oblige.

5 of the ducks have a bath. The 6th, for some reason, sits this
one out under the honeysuckle top left.

On fauna, a little hiccup in the local pollination department. Our good friend T McC who keeps bees one ridge away in a neighbouring townland has 5 hives and was steaming along in his bee keeping work, pushing way ahead of our beginner-ish efforts. However, last Autumn he was hit by that problem all bee keepers fear, a bad allergic reaction to a sting. He suffered mild anaphyllactic shock and as he was on his own, called an ambulance.

One of my girls on apple blossom. 

In fact he had started to recover by the time the paramedics arrived so he spent the winter wondering whether to give up the bee keeping and getting medical tests done, gearing up with tablets and an 'epi-pen' (epinephrine auto-injector). He hoped to be able to start back into it this Spring at his first hive inspections, with me as stand-by / back-up able to summon an ambulance if it all went a bit pear-shaped again. Well, his bees jumped the gun on him today and he got stung while he was just wandering in the garden and came over all woozy again. He decided that this was too risky and too silly and that this would be the end to his bee keeping. He is going to disperse the hives to good homes and sell off his mountain of brand new, unused equipment to friends in the game. The silver lining on poor T's cloud for us is that I have put in a bid for one of his colonies and he is happy for me to buy this and then to give him 'visiting rights' and the odd jar of local honey.

The new poults are also fully feathered at 7 weeks.

Watch this space for our adventure collecting this colony soon. T McC is not strictly speaking far enough away from us - some of the bees out exploring from our hive site may come across bits of 'map' that they recognise from their old missions and follow the old 'roads' home to T's place, but we hope not too many and, anyway, 'summer' bees only live 6 weeks so pretty soon the hive will be full of new workers born and hatched here, who have never seen T's place. Sympathies, T McC. We'll miss you bee keeping and our mutual cross-support at inspections and manipulations.