Jungle Clearance

Another chunk of jungle bashed into submission.

I apologise in advance for a bit of a thin report this time. The weather has finally turned nice enough to get out into the garden and life since the last post has been all about weeding. Unless you want a piece entitled "My Battle with Creeping Buttercup, Silverweed, Couch Grass, Docks, Daisies and Plantains", I will struggle to put any drama into the words. The weeding was long overdue but I hate getting the knee pads on and squelching around with the wet threatening to come over the sides of the pads and soak my knees. I have done hours and hours of just plain hand-weeding, bits of several days from around 08:45 to 11:45. The compost piles are mountainous.

A buddleia in a not very sensible position. 

The good weather also attracted Liz out, and, 2-handed, we have been able to get on with some projects. The first of these was to do battle with what we thought was our last piece of 'jungle'. These little corners of rubbish seem to occur in all our gardens - you mean to tackle them but you've no time right now, so I'll stack this 'stuff' in it for the present; of course, you end up with mini 'glory-holes' of stacked canes, sheets of plastic and other junk with brambles and nettles trying to grow through them and all your locals weeds running rampant.

The patch now clear but re-sheeted to hold it. 

Ours was a ten foot wide, 20 foot long gap between the polytunnel and the raised flower bed. When we bought the place this hole was, like several other bits, full of well rotted bales of hay and straw and the 'earth' was a mess of half-buried silage wrap, rocks and old peat-turf, overgrown with a jungle of nettles, brambles and long, lank, wet grass. In the short term, we decided to just sheet it over with black plastic and use that dry, black surface to dry out the chunks of turf I was pulling out of the earth bank at the time (I still am!). Most of this turf got dried and has been burned, but the smaller fragments sat on the plastic through a couple of winters and, as you'd expect, started to grow their own ecosystem of grass and weeds.

The roses are now fighting back after the wet and producing
buds which actually manage to open (!)

The sheeting I had put down did not come right to the edges, so the biggest rat's nest of nettles grew there, I have ever seen - stems were 5-6 feet high and the roots, once finally extracted were more than an inch thick at the centre of the clump. On the outer edge of the gap was the chicken wire we had put surrounding the flower bed to keep the birds off and (again no surprise) the bottom of this had become a tangle of new weeds. We now have the bed better established and 'peopled' with sturdy perennials which can cope with chickens rooting around under and between them, so we decided to do away with the wire mesh in the same project.

A couple of days of fun, then, with fencing pliers, hammer, shears, pick axe (to break open the rotted bales and get the nettle roots out), pointy shovel, rake, stone-buckets, builders one-tonne bulk bag for the weeds and a barrow for the use-able turf. It is now cleared of nasties, dug over, stone-picked and turf-picked, raked smooth and now re-sheeted with better, flatter (and big enough) black sheeting to await the Autumn and its annexing by the existing raised flower bed. Yes, we have more plans.

One of last year's 'Million Trees' oaks is
now getting cracking.

The big bed is now down a couple of years and the plants in it have started to show their true, Roscommon potential. By that, I mean that some of them are surprising us by being bigger, taller and wider than we have ever seen them grow in, for example, Kent. We have only ever had limited success and poor growth before with such as Philadelphus (Mock Orange) and Crocosmia (Lucifer). Here, these plants are huge - the orange has 5 foot long whips coming out in all directions. A Buddleia we squeezed in at an edge (unwise) us now trying to vault across the grass path. Crocosmia is shouting 'HOT RED' in great 4-5' tall fans, one of which is near the front of the bed and hiding all sorts of goodies behind it. The lupins and sweet rocket have now gone over but stand as tall spikes of seed heads which we hate to tidy up but probably need it.

Some rose prunings make it indoors. 

We took all this in while working there and decided that we need to do some moves and shuffling as well as some evictions. The big Buddleia and Philadelphus will be headed to the woodland edge once they go quiet in Autumn. The 'Lucifers' will need lifting and dividing but we will also take the opportunity to move them back a bit, almost certainly into the cleared jungle patch. Some shorter plants may be moved forward. We do not want a rigid gradation by height; we like tall see-through stuff like purple verbena, teasel and Japanese anenome to be scattered about but the beds does need a bit of a sort out. We are currently looking at a way of mapping it all so that when we go to dig things up in October, we can tell our crocosmia from our gladioli and we can distinguish between various 'dead' brown clumps.

Left to right, the 5 week old turkeys, one of the 9 week old turkeys,
a young Guinea Fowl and the olde Marans hen.

Meanwhile, the newest hatch of turkeys have reached 5 weeks and looked big enough, to us, to cope with Soldier the cat, so we have let them out free range. We were delighted to see that the 'Gang of Four', our 2 other turkey poults and the young Guineas straight away adopted them into their gang, rather like older siblings who are asked by their parent to 'mind' the babies. There was no pecking order stuff and no harrassment. The 2 newbies were quickly absorbed and the youngsters all now travel around as a gang of six. For a couple of nights we rounded the new ones up back to their rabbit run in the evening and shut them in, but on the third evening all six went off to roost in the turkey house and looked so cosy together that I let them be and shut them all in together. Everybody survived and now I can tidy up the rabbit runs and stash them back away somewhere dry. Our 2015 breeding season is over. The remaining adolescents just need to grow up in the flock. Only 'Hen with Two' remains in any kind of kindergarten arrangement, with Mum still looking after the 5 week old babies and taking them off to the camping-toilet gap in the Tígín each night. She will soon move into the proper house, we expect.

Male turkey poult (?) at 9 weeks.

The older turkey poults, now 9 weeks, are both looking, to our inexpert eyes, like males (Toms). They have the start of the flap of loose skin at their throats (the wattle) and we have seen both of them doing lttle play versions of Dad's display - tails up and wings down. This does not matter of course - these are still purely meat birds but possibly the males grow faster than the hens. Que Sera.

Never Volunteer

Keep your head down and never volunteer for anything..... seems like good advice. So when the Irish poultry discussion website (Fowl.ie) of which I'm a member was struggling under a barrage of fake new member names generated by a robot spam programme and the poor guy trying to manage it was working 70 hour weeks, why did I hear myself volunteering to help? At the time the guy (who owns and manages the site) thanked me but didn't take me up on the offer. Yesterday, though, he decided he could use me after all and here I am, "Global Moderator" for Fowl.ie to go with my responsibilities as 'web-meister' for the Thames Sailing Barge Cambria website (http://www.cambriabargecharter.co.uk/ ).

The fowl.ie site is (obviously) mainly peopled by poultry keepers, breeders etc plenty of whom have interests outside of pure poultry; they are farmers, small holders, pest control people, writers and publishers, all sorts. They cross the whole rich brew of human life, all ages, 'classes', standards of education and strengths of opinion. They seem to go almost 24/7; certainly they can be up gassing way into the night way after I've gone to bed. It can sometimes get a bit heated but is generally harmless, just like a gang of friends bantering in the pub. There are a few muppets we need to keep our eye on but 99% of them are sensible. If anyone stepped over the lines in the past the Moderator had the option to "kill" discussion threads, warn offenders and ban them, sometimes for a fixed 'cooling off period', rarely permanently. A good few of them have given me their best wishes, some with a wry "Good Luck - you'll need it!" It should be fun, and, I hope, will not use up too much time. Feel free to look in on the website(s) if you'd like to know more.

Our drought is finally over. Overnight light rain on Tuesday 5th laid the dust and left us with a smeary, moist soil surface but no puddles. We have had drizzle on and off since then and enough quick heavier showers to fill up the car-port water-butt. The spring like weather, however, has set all the plants into motion and momentum for spring is building. We have now had a first daffodil open - this one courtesy of Steak Lady and her big net of bulbs given to us last Autumn. This whole net was planted in a curved 'drift' and promises to look superb.

Pond digging continues a-pace and yesterday I finally finished the first 'spit' (spade depth) all across the area so, for a laugh, I dug a small pit at one end down into the clay. I am hoping that the Roscommon clay will be sufficiently goo-ey that I can 'puddle' it into a waterproof layer so that we do not need to spend €860 on a butyl rubber liner. I was curious to see whether the geese might help me in the puddling process. I filled it from the water butt, scattered grain around the rim and whistled up the geese.

They were straight in, curious as anything, first dibbling their beaks into the water and then head-bathing. The sides of this mini-pit are rather steep so the geese were a bit alarmed when they sometimes slithered in down the bank. They made some amusing efforts to reverse out, but quickly learned that they could turn round and simply hop out. As well as the puddling thing, I want to know whether they will mess around too much and the water will never settle, especially as the pond gets bigger but that'll be for later. For now this pit does not seem like draining away, i.e. it seems pretty waterproof, so I will have to dig the rest around this pit leaving a dam to separate the filled bit from the digging. Slopping around in sticky Roscommon clay while trying to dig and push wheel barrows about is not fun.

There is little progress on the poly-tunnel front. The tunnel 'kit' was allegedly going to arrive either last weekend or 'middle of this week'. We have started to clear the site and the picture shows the two main horizontal wooden beams (5 by 2's) which will take the tension on the polythene sheet which we have bought so far. These are 20 feet long and , here, roughly 14 feet apart, which is the size of the tunnel ordered. The old hay barn floor is a mess of old peat turf, rotted straw bales and the old topsoil or underlying clay plus, inevitably, our local head-shaped, head sized boulders. The kit did not arrive and a chase phone-call today had the firm adjusting their ETA to 'Definitely this weekend, possibly Sunday morning'. This unlikely prediction is only credible because we know the main delivery guy has an Auntie in Loughglynn, our nearby village!

More successful is news of the return of my belovéd rotovator which you may recall died last summer (after I foolishly left it out in the rain without its cover) and then spent 8 months not being fixed by the tool hire firm Domac. I rescued it from Domac recently and entrusted it to the tender loving care of Felix-the-Fix (Chainsaw Genius) who has now fixed and serviced it. He tells me that Domac had tried to bodge on some lawnmower parts which were totally inadequate for the 3HP Briggs and Stratton motor. ("I love this engine!" says Felix).

Well, now I have it back and have seen it chug-chugging away in the sweet, relaxed, leisurely way it has. Diamond heard the noise while on her visit here last summer and, still in a half drowse in her bed, thought it was one of the small fishing boats putting out from Poros Island. Lovely. Felix being the kind of careful engineer he is, of course has also given it a huge clean up and oil and service, cleaning out air filters, fuel lines and the carburettor. He is also very careful to explain to me how the fuel tap and choke should be used. His charges were, as always, very reasonable and, as part of the deal, I'd agreed to give him the old dead Lidl chainsaw to strip for parts. In the event I was scrabbling in my pocket for the last Euro and he flapped his hands, grinned and said "Ahh... Don't worry... call it a trade in on the saw!" So, readers, the chainsaw was not a complete write off. I got €1 for it!