Two Minor Crises

Home made pork "scratchings" or, as they are known round
here, "dog treats". 

Two minor crises drop their pebbles into the calm mill-pond of our quiet Autumn and leave us feeling guiltily worried that we should not really have that superstition about bad things happening in threes. We should not really be waiting for the third thing to go wrong but there it is. niggling away. Our first involved the septic tank getting a blocked exit and the 2nd involved the oven 'checking out' with, we think, a dead heater element.

Sorry if you've just had your tea. Septic tank
(bottom left) with one cover-slab open and,
just outside it, hole dug into the shingle-pit
to expose the out-pipe.

I am not sure why I spotted the septic tank thing - for some reason I walked down there at bird lock-up time and peered down the inspection hole, to see the reflection of my face looking back from 3 inches down, instead of the standard (for 5 years) 12 inches down. A quick check at the top 'manhole cover' up by the new kitchen door, showed that the 'water' was backed up in the sewer too. I was home alone at that point and, anyway, could not really ask Help-X volunteer 'AB' to fix it, so the buck stopped here. Liz and AB arrived a few minutes later so they did, in fact, get to help. Bad timing, guys!

Brine-cured pork belly bacon rashers.

For those town-dwellers with mains sewage and no experience of septic tanks and 'local' sewage treatment, perhaps a few notes on how these things may work (or are meant to work). Your household waste (toilet, sinks, shower, washing machine, dishwasher) all wooshes down the sewer pipe to end up in a big concrete pit - in our case about 6' by 4' by 6' deep.

A very late water-lily flower.

While it all sits in here a good old bacteria and fungus culture gets at it reducing the solids to a fraction of their 'live' volume and creating a reasonably clean, clear 'water' fraction. This exits at the far end of the tank via a 4" pipe about 12" down from the brim, into a big, 6' deep pit filled with beach shingle. The pit is covered with membrane and then 6" of local clay-ey soil and grass grows over it to disguise it all. The pit 'leaks' like any good soil and the 'water' quickly runs away into the 'run-off' area, legally at least half an acre of YOUR land.

A rubbish pic but quite fun, with the camera almost touching the
ground. Stumpy and her 2nd brood chicks. 

A quick exploratory grope about by hand (elbow deep - nice!) told me that the outflow pipe was well blocked with waddy, raggy stuff (we guessed old loo paper etc) and lumps of white floaty fat. Nothing for it but to dig down into the shingle pit, find the other end of the pipe and rod it all out with likely sticks and garden trowels. Obviously with the exit blocked the shingle pit was as dry as dust (well, you know, as dry as any part of this county gets in October), so when I broke through, I knew immediately - the tank level fell and the shingle pit filled up.

The current waterfowl count. 5 geese and
5 ducks.

We knew we were sorted, but it would only 'fix' at the speed the 'water' could leach away into the soil from the shingle pit. Overnight, then. By next morning the tank was back at standard depth and the shingle was, once again 'dry'. It only remained for me to shovel all the pebbles back in, refit the membrane, re-cover with clay/grass  and replace the concrete slab. A good hand wash and a bacon and eggs breakfast were enjoyed before the rest of the house was even awake. I hope that didn't put you off your tea.

The oven was not so easy to DIY. It 'died' on Sunday and failed to fully cook my latest sour-dough loaf  despite looking like it was working - fans, lights, pre-heat light and so on. It was, in fact, only cooking to 80ºC. Our delve into the instruction books and tech manuals and some internet searches led us to believe that these machines have a re-place-able heating element which can fail. This is a 5 year old oven from IKEA.

More pork products. Pig kidneys and bacon.

Onto the phone for us then, to try to rustle up a 'Mr Fixer', with the inevitable run-around that that can dish up. IKEA do not actually make ovens (now, there's a surprise), either 'Whirlpool' or 'Electrolux' do that for them and it is to these guys you must apply for after-sales service. In our case, Whirlpool's main base in Nottingham, UK. In fairness they have been quite efficient and have (for a €155 fee) agreed to send a bloke tomorrow who should arrive with a working knowledge of this oven and, we hope, an element in his back pocket. These days, such missions are covered by a text info service which is nice. I was a bit amused, though, by my text which advises me that the man will arrive at some point between 07:39 and 10:39. Why those times, specifically? I smell an automated route-planner / scheduler and a job sequencer in action.

Grand-Mere Pierrette's Boeuf-carrottes under construction.

Ah well. Other than that we are just chugging along assisted by our Help-X Frenchman, 'AB'. He is proving to be as solid and successful at the 'boring and hard work' jobs as he was at the more glamorous butchering. We have mainly been pulling nettles and moving piles of old hedge cuttings, branches of fallen trees (remember Storm Doris?) and other woodwork through which those nettles are growing. It's all looking a bit tidy in areas we did not get at with the Spanish lads.

Supper is served. AB does the honours. 

AB has also cooked for us, a favourite family recipe called 'Boeuf Carrottes'. Huge respect to 'Mere d'AB' and to source of this recipe, Grandma 'Pierrette'. Basically a stew made with 'chuck' steak (from upper shoulder of the bullock) and carrots, it was a delicious revelation, with the beef meltingly fall-apart tender and the sauce brim-full of flavour.

Tidy and nettle-free.

Thanks very much AB. I'm cooking tomorrow. No pressure!

Lazy Bones

One of the luxuries of being (pretty much) retired on account of being made redundant is that the working days are your own. Nobody chases you to clock/swipe in or makes you book holidays out of your measly allowance if you fancy a day off.  I do work round here occasionally, obviously, but I find I am an expert at winding down when a big job is completed and that 'momentous' occasion of a 'finish' comes round.

A gorgeous brawn from the pigs' heads. There were 3 such 'tubs'.
One is gone already and one in the freezer. This one made
 a handsome contribution to breakfast. Not all of it, obviously.

The latest such completion was the pigs - reared, taken on their final journey, brought home and butchered and variously frozen as joints, salted down as whole legs, cooked into dog treats (ears) or some 'scratchings' and even brawn (heads). Finally all tidied away out of sight. That was Tuesday and I have to confess to sitting down at that point and not really achieving much till this afternoon (fencing). Like I said - too good at winding down. Lazy bones.

Horse Chestnut. Needs a good frost to do
proper colour but it is trying.

It is one of the reasons why the veg garden is such a disgrace at the moment; the other being that I am also expert in what I believe the behaviour experts call "displacement activity", doing something else to avoid doing the job you should be doing. Office workers, faced with a big pile of jobs will reach, instead, for the "to do" list pad and spend ages compiling one, even adding jobs they have already completed so that they can enjoy the buzz of ticking one or two off.

Three of the ewes waiting for the ram to arrive next month.

In my case, this spring, every time I looked at the scary forest of docks, creeping buttercup, grasses and plantain which was winning in the veg patch, I then looked to my left at the huge pile of tree 'rounds' from our felled spruces and the hydraulic splitter I had borrowed. Needless to say, the logs got beautifully split and stacked and the weeds were left to grow even taller. There was building too and archery, pulling thistles in the East Field, brush-cutting in the woods or through the docks, the poly tunnel, mowing and so on. No end of ways to avoid that veg patch. When I did feel like weeding, there was always the big raised flower bed. I think that won because it is so much smaller and you could see progress and sense the end of the tunnel.

Big field mushrooms in the East Field

And so it went on; all the nice weeding weather of summer (well, there was SOME at least) came and went and still the veg patch is an embarrassment where I dare not take visitors. We even toyed with the idea at one stage of fencing it round stock-proof and letting the pigs or sheep at it.  But no, I cling to the idea that I will get stuck in one day, in my "little and often" mode (like my digging of the pond - 20 barrows (1 hour) a day across 5 months).

Soldier out for a stroll.

Some of we smallholders use volunteer labour - lads and lasses who sign up for a working 'holiday' through one of the green/organic/ecological organisations and will come and do yay amount of hours per day for you for the price of bed and board. We have a smaller scale version of that happening in spring when a friend from Kent who loves digging, weeding and veg gardening is coming here for a week. Some people whizz round in front of their 'cleaning lady' so she never sees how bad it was. I will be getting stuck into the weeding well before this guy arrives so that I can show him that I "made a start" and didn't wait round till May for him.

Nugget earns a free ranging winter by doing such a good
summer job in the bee hive dept.

Meanwhile, one worker who has definitely completed her assigned task is our one remaining rabbit, Nugget. She has done such a good job keeping the grass short around the bee hives that she has barely a leaf left and so she has earned a free ranging winter. She is very sensible and hangs around the house and buildings and must be good at avoiding Mr Fox (touch wood) because she survived last winter when she escaped by mistake and took ages to recapture. This (free ranging) is good because apart from a chunk of carrot I give her at breakfast just to keep her tame and give me a chance to check on her health (and presence) each day, I do not need to worry about feeding her or keeping her drinker topped up. She also might help with the weeding in the veg patch though I doubt it - she's never down there!

Extreme hedging

Over the last few days we have been "enjoying" the sight of someone else working hard - a local farmer brutalising his hedges with an impressive weapon. No flail-mower for him smashing the small branches in that so familiar way, leaving them shredded and a pale eye-sore. No this machine is a big and very fast-spinning circular saw on an arm that can pivot into every possible position. It slices through big ash trunks up to 5-6 inches thick with a loud "Ker-ANGGGG" and a roar of hard working diesel engine.

A 365 pic of, I think, a chunk of bog-oak but I don't really
know what species of tree it is. 

They use these things on hedges which have got away and grown up into tall rows of ash and sycamore. They slice up the sides to remove width and then buzz through all the tops sending big trunks and branches sliding and toppling down - OK if they fall into the field but requiring some rapid work with a grab to clear them off the road. In fairness these are mainly ash which coppices very well, so the hedges only look brutalised (all be it neat and boxy) round to spring time when they quickly bounce back in a healthy display of small leaves and shoots.

Nice colours from lichen and heather in Cloonargid Bog. 

The hedges don't need doing yearly when you do them this way but I can't help thinking they'd be better done little and often. Perhaps the lads have their own 'to do' lists and a rake of possible displacement activities.