Pods and Pump Out

A size-able machine for manouvring on your precious
mown grass. 

Friends of the Blog will know that I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a man to do the pump-out on our septic tank. Probably not the best subject for a blog-post (I hope you've had your dinner!)  but a vital part of servicing a small-holding in the West of Ireland, where no mains sewage system comes within tens of miles of us. Also a service not met by some dinky 'Council' contractor with a small truck and garden-friendly equipment.

The huge tank and massive pipe make the "tiny" septic tank
 look really silly!

Here it is some local Agricultural Contractor who will turn up with a huge 4WD tractor and a slurry tank capable of taking massive doses of cattle slurry from the underground tanks below the big "slatted floor" of a winter cattle-shed. These rigs look to be 30-40 feet long (must admit, didn't actually measure it!) and need BIG spaces to manouvre in and to turn around.

For the first time in 5 years we can see the tank empty. The guy
also advises us to fit a 'T' and an up-pipe to the end of that exit
pipe you can see in the pic. 

When you book one and start to worry about this, you realise the lack of wisdom in all your decisions to put a rinky-dink gateway here which is OK for your Fiat Panda and a 6' by 4' 2-pig trailer, and a fence to contain your geese, or a few new trees planted just so. There is also the issue of the guy turning the rig round on your precious grass just so close to your pond. I ended up ripping out some fences and gateways just to get the guy to the tank.

Ah well, he came, he saw, he managed to turn the 'rig' with only one tractor tyre dipped into the pond (!)  and he sucked us all up. His huge tank/pump did such a good job on the 'water' that we might have been left with all the floating solids sitting on the sediment, but the guy turned the pump the other way and whooshed a great dollop of the 'water' back down into our tank to stir it all up and then sucked up the loosened up mixture.

Ooops.
Just the one tyre dipped into the pond.

The tank, we can now see, is a good solidly built sound affair, about 6 feet by 4 and 5'9" deep. Our man advised us to enhance the outflow with a vertical up-pipe and a 'T' - that way apparently the floating solids cannot block the outflow because the outflow draws 'water' from half way up the tank. We live and learn.

The other interesting aspect of this to us was that you are expected (most people.....) to have a place for the guy to empty the tank - a handy chunk of bog for example. They do not normally get asked to take it away and will charge you more for that add-on. Well, we have no such handy bog-field and I did not want 4000 litres of human "waste" spread all over the veg patch or the sheep grazing (even assuming the rig could get access). I happily paid the extra and watched the half-full tanker trundle off down the road. The guy was actually from nearby village Gortaganny and was off to a wedding after my job. He'd already met his friends for Breakfast in Balla-D where they'd joked with him that he better wash the tanker down before he arrived at the Ceremony. A nice lad. We will definitely use him again if we need someone, but we hope the tank with it's newly enhanced outflow will go another 6 years first!

In some lights this gnarly old bit of hawthorn reminds me of a
spooky dog. 

Meanwhile, while I'm on the entertainment value of Septic Tank emptying, I thought you might appreciate a list of our newest version of 'entertainment' out here where we have chosen to eschew TV, where we've watched all the 'old TV' we felt like buying as boxed sets, where we can't reliably get Radio 4 and we cannot get anything 'big' through the rubbish broad-band. That is the relatively new medium of Pod-Casts, or "pods".

We still follow, to a degree, the American politics pods from outlets such as Crooked Media, 538 and NPR (National Public Radio) but after the initial excitement of Trump's coming to power, these have waned a bit because nothing much is happening.

https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-america/
https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-the-world/
http://www.npr.org/podcasts/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/politics-podcast/

Baby Horse Chestnut doing its Autumn thing

We are glued, currently, to the Guardian's Brexit one, "Brexit Means" which seems to be standing aghast and watching with increasing horror as the Brexit process stutters and stalls and comes unravelled. The most recent, which covered farming, was truly scary.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/audio/2017/oct/25/what-will-become-of-food-and-farming-brexit-means-podcast

Misty Autumn Morning

We also enjoy a series of pods from a pair of friends who cover modern Irish culture and direction by also describing the history of these aspects and how Ireland arrived at its current position. The most recent covered the very controversial abortion issue and the planned Referendum next year to "Repeal the 8th" (Amendment to the Constitution).

https://theirishpassport.com/podcast/episode-11-abortion/

I am glued to a farming one by a guy (Will Penri Evans) who farms in Wales and who is on a mission to 'sell' farming to the wider public as a good thing. He gets a different guest on each week for an hour long interview, the guests being the great/good/influential from UK (and overseas) agriculture, particularly when they have a Twitter presence, most recently Tom Edwards who has, over the last few years, set up a company making a 'craft' gin (Warner and Edwards Rhubarb Gin)

http://rockandrollfarming.libsyn.com/website/028-united-in-spirit

Finally, there is a nice one I have only recently locked on to, done via Radio Cardiff by a friend I have 'met' through the Irish Smallholders' Twitter account. She is either Helen Joy or Valerie Chicken (according to taste) and the pods are called "World of Joy". The most recent one covered attempts to re-vitalise the rural economy in the Vale of Glamorgan.

https://www.mixcloud.com/RadioCardiffPodcasts/

If you fancy any of those, be our guests.

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!

Stirring It

The 100-400 mm 'pap' lens I use for the moon close-ups
and some of the wildlife pics.

A short-ish post, this one and another where the photo's bear little relevance to the main story. When you know what that is about you will understand, I am sure. The pics in this one are some of these final '365' project shots saved from the dying embers of the 'year'. There are also a few 'snow scenes' from the rather pathetic flurries of wet sleety snow that we have had over the last day or so. Who can resist a Christmas Card scene after all?

Candle Snuff fungus growing in our front lawn.

My "Stirring It" title comes from the main task today. In my youth, our family in-jokes and clichés frequently had us accused of "stirring it" and family members were occasionally awarded the 'wooden spoon' for stirring above and beyond the call of duty. The job, which I volunteered for before I knew the detail of what was involved was to help a friend re-start a fancy septic tank system which had become a problem.

One of our favourite Irish cookery books, Theodora Firzgibbon

Our septic tank here is the basic one, a single tank where digestion happens (if you're lucky and you don't put too much bleach down it!) followed by a big pit filled with broken stone and beach pebbles which drains away sideways into the half acre field as a whole. This one today was a much more fancy affair; a real eco-bio-digester arrangement with 3 formal chambers and then the stone-filled pit but followed by 3 beds which take and use the nutritious clean 'water' outflow.

The first beer that came to hand as I came in from the snow
and North wind; Shepherd Neame's 'Summer Sizzler'

The first is yellow flag irises, the 2nd tall bull rushes and the 3rd is willow which, I am told. puts up 20 feet regrowth every year and which they can harvest for making hurdles, wicker work or even, if they wanted to shred it, bio-mass for solid fuel fired heating.

First snow flurries.

Their problem was that after a particularly warm and busy weekend in August (lots of guests leaving...um...deposits), the digestion process in Tank #1 had been over-whelmed and the solids were now acting as a dam. We needed to re-mix this crusty mass and get everything gently flowing again in a down-hill manner. Ah well, in for a penny, as they say. We had to ignore the fact that the first snow of 2017 was all over the ground. I had made it there after all. These guys live up on what is called an 'upland bog' here. They are at the top of a mini mountain but that does not result in the good drainage you would expect. Their land is basically bog or forestry with only a few acres round the house 'improved' to grassland or hard standing.

The full moon sinks towards the snowy
ground

To cut a long story short, an hour or so of stirring and scraping the deposits off the sides of the tank had it all chopped up and converted back into a flow-able "slurry" which we could now see was starting to move downhill to the next tank and the lady suggested we wash our hands and come indoors for warm sausage sandwiches. Job done. I wish they were all that easy.

Snow in the lane this morning

The snow had been forecast since Tuesday and I was yearning for it like a child. This not because I wanted to rush out and start a snowball fight with the neighbour's children or build a snowman, but for the '365' picture potential. I am almost at the end of the year of photography now and seriously short of inspiration on what to submit for 'today's three photo's'. There are only so many pictures of ruined barns, cute calves and pretty flowers that you can get away with and some Christmas Card snow would give me an easy ride for 24 hours.

Hey ho. Just like when you were a child, snow always seemed to let you down, flurrying down in disappointingly small quantities and failing to "stick" (we used to say "settle" in Hastings) no matter how many times you looked out of the window. Well, it is no different for 59 year old '365' photographers and I was not to get my Winter Wonderland. I had to try to make the most of the dusting and a convenient full moon.

I have to be careful what I wish for, of course. The year before we arrived here (so 2010/11) they had a brutal winter with temperatures down in the -10ºC area and 18 inches of white stuff. People were nipping off to the village PO in tractors because there is no gritting or snow ploughing round here. You just have to stock up on supplies, shovel your drive (and the neighbour's) clear and wait for the to-ing and fro-ing of farm vehicles to make the roads drive-able again when a thaw comes.

We don't want too much of that. I'd sooner do without the 365 snow scenes. Stay warm.