Ross's Turn

Down in the rain ditch, one of the pigs
manages to nudge the barbed wire aside
from the hawthorn roots. In this pic I
have wedged a spare sheep hurdle into the
gap and wired it down solid. 

After the dramas of the previous post about kitten suicide missions, the next day one of the pigs (Ross) decided that she, too, needed a bit of a break out. I am a creature of habit and routine and I always do the early morning livestock rounds in the same order; that way I don't miss anybody. I had fed, watered and released the baby chicks and Mums, the young Marans, fed the sheep, then the young Hubbards. All this time I can hear that the pigs are awake and getting all excited about their breakfast - low bassy grunts and some squeals come at me round and over the main chicken house.

Somerville fancies a taste of camera,

I gathered up the pig food and fruit, then walked down through the side-gate of the cattle race, expecting to go across the 5 yards of space to the pig-gate and be met by the pigs. I was a bit surprised then to find Ross wandering about in this gap but my worries about how I would recapture her evapourated when she looked up at me as if to say "Ahhhh, now THERE's a breakfast!" and she happily trotted after me down the 'race' to the gate and in through it to join her sister at the breakfast banquet. This was our first ever pig escape in 3 years and felt a bit like an initiation. I hunted down the escape hole which proved to be at the top of the rain ditch among the hawthorn roots and grabbed a spare sheep hurdle to wedge into it, wiring it firmly in place. When the pigs are gone I will fix this properly (I can't afford to just 'lose' a sheep hurdle into a hole in a fence!).

A 365 pic of a sunlit lane just after a shower

While I am on pigs, a fascinating fact I read in a book today ("Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes", Rosie Boycott, Pub Bloomsbury 2007). I knew, of course, that Truffle Pigs exist and get used down in Perigord (France) for hunting out these 'foodie' treats but I had no idea of the mechanism. It turns out that the truffles grow in symbiosis with the local oak trees where ever there is a shortage of phosphorus. The fungal mycorrhiza (filamentous roots) grow into the oak roots and act as an extra root system to extract the phosphorus from the soil and in return the oak supplies the fungus with carbohydrates. The oak can breed and spread via acorns but the fungus, being wholly underground has no easy way to spread its spores about.

Nicely back-lit teasel head.

Step forward the wild boars of that area which could find these truffles and then spread the spores on their snouts as they went rootling onward. In a rather clever example of co-evolution, the fungus adapted by producing and releasing a synthesised copy of a testosterone chemical called 5-alpha-antrostol which smells, to the female pigs, exactly like a randy boar. They go rooting around convinced that somewhere under those trees is a buried boyfriend. Everyone is a winner, I guess, except for the frustrated sow who never finds the boar. It is to be hoped that a supper of truffle fungus is compensation. Thank you for that gem, Rosie Boycott.

A nice afternoon snack - Autumn-fruiting raspberries and
a slab of ice cream. 

In Yoga, I am now 4 sessions to the good and I am definitely improving and still enjoying it. My Wednesday evenings are enlivened by a series of animals (OK Yoga positions); cobra, eagle, downward-facing dog and other weirdness (Warrior 2, Plank, 'Child' position etc). We blokes get well stretched about and warmed up trying to follow the very bendy instructor at the front but it now feels like good 'pain' and work to me. It's like freeing up a rusty hinge with a drop of 3-in-1 and then pushing/pulling the flaps ever further till you can move the hinge to its fully open/closed positions.

The muscles particularly feel as if they can now extend further when relaxed and tighten up further when retracted than they have had to do for decades. In one move I was whisked right back to childhood; lie on your front, flex a knee and grab your foot, then pull the foot all the way down till your heel is touching your thigh and your knee is bent to 180º. Now, I should rapidly add, I can NOT do that one all the way like I remember we used to do as boys (we could all do it standing up on the other foot and hopping around pretending to be pirates), but 'teach' was quite impressed by how flexible I was after only these 4 sessions. And relax.

Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm'

No progress on the Kitchen since the last post except that we have had our delivery of the timber and building materials and we have secured the fibre glass at a very reasonable price. We love that K-Dub who is used to his friendly Dublin prices where the quantity of stuff he buys from his tame builders' merchants gain him good trade-discounts, hates to re 'ripped' off by the smaller local shops out here in the sticks. He hunts around locally and finds the best price he can but still brands it daylight robbery and gets on the phone to his Dublin colleagues. He doesn't HAVE to do that. We love him for it.

Houdini Duck

There's always one. Houdini Duck is out AGAIN. 

There's always one, isn't there? Ours at present is one of the ducks who, unlike his 5 colleagues, is refusing to be contained by my attempts to ban ducks from the big pond. The 5 just went into the 'new' pen (the orchard) on the day we decided to move them, whinged for a while walking up and down the wire fence, but then settled down, uncomplaining, to a life with the geese. They may have tried to nip through the fence and the sheep hurdles a few times but when they couldn't break through at ground level, they relaxed and stayed put.

I was trying to get a good "It's lashing down!" pic for 365.
I was happy with this one.

Duck #6, though, had other ideas. Every time we ran the ducks into the orchard, you'd hear him a few minutes later quacking loudly in the yard or on the front drive. The escapes quickly earned him the name 'Houdini Duck' and we had to keep an eye on him to see how and where he was escaping. He's not that subtle, bless him, and brazenly escaped again while we watched. He had realised that while the bottom 'rungs' of a sheep hurdle were close together (to stop baby lambs), the gaps got bigger further up the hurdle, and if he hopped up to rung #3, he could squeeze through there.

We are getting some striking sunsets with all these storm clouds.

I covered all the hurdles with 1" square 'aviary mesh' to stop his little game, but the lad sussed out that the same size changes also applied to the sheep wire as a whole. He could get out anywhere around the orchard perimeter with a simple hop up to a foot from the ground and a slither down through, but so far only does it nearest to the big pond. My next step is to run 2" chicken wire all along that fence line. This bizarre psychology is one of the good things we have learned about containing poultry. Chickens, for example, will happily fly up and over a 6 foot solid, opaque wall, but do not think they can do the same flight over a transparent, chicken wire fence. They walk up and down the fence looking through it and bumping off it with their beaks but it never seems to occur to them to fly up and over.

They might look pretty in the slanting evening sunshine but
they are still thistles and need clearing

Actually he is not a natural 'free bird' and does not do anything with his freedom. He seems rather upset that his 5 colleagues do not follow him and he hangs around sadly just outside the fence, quacking at them. He does not even go onto the pond much on his own, so the pond is, in fact, recovering slowly. He is, though, a nuisance (as well as an affront to my fencing ability!) so he needs to be contained by this next plan or he is going to find himself 'ate' if he doesn't watch out. I am talking 'He' here, of course. He may not turn out to be a drake but if he is and he is not the only one, then he may be first against the wall come the revolution. [I am hoping here that my readers know me well enough to know that all this may not be 100% serious. We do not, in fact, make 'harvesting' decisions based on how annoying the livestock are!].

Lamb

In other harvesting stories, we were booked to nip down to our butcher in Castlerea on Monday to collect and see cut up, our two ram lambs, Ebony and Ivory. It is fascinating to talk to the lads down there and we wondered how our lambs would fare especially as the slaughterman always has a bit of a light hearted chunter at our lambs being too big or, sometimes being black-wooled and therefore less likely to grow as well. The guys have been at it for a long time, so they should know, but I have to admit to a bit of 'pinch of salt' at the 'black wool bad' thing.

First fruits for 2016. Some nice lamb chops for Monday supper.

This time they were spot on - the white wool boy was definitely fatter and bigger. There is not a lot we can do about this, however. Our #2 ewe, Polly' is half 'Jacob', a bicoloured mountainy breed, which is almost certainly the reason for the black wool and less heavy shape of her lambs. What ever the case, we saved 4 chops from the freezer and had them as our 'first fruits' of 2016 meat. They were a tender and flavour-filled delight.

Thistles for the compost.

The remaining 6 sheep are currently mowing my front lawn for me while I get a chance to nip round and pull the thistles in the East Field. After the rain, it is a good satisfying task as a vertical gentle pull will give you all the stem and leaves plus a good chunk of taproot. The field is not too bad because I do this every year - if you pull the root the sheep can straight way return to graze there. If you mow or cut the shoot and leave the top or any leaves still there, the sheep will avoid the grass and your thistle will just re-grow. I guess there are about 3-4 man hours of work at it and 3 towering wheel barrows of thistles for the compost.

The Hubbard poults spread out across their new paddock.

My only other news is that the Hubbards, at 50 days old are now well settled into and enjoying their new run and have learned to take themselves off to bed in the correct place (in the coop not under it!) as it gets dark. . This was not an immediate thing and I had an abortive day when I'd got 9 of them in, all calm, when Blue the Cat decided to 'help'. That day I had to hire the 'assistant chicken wrangler' to help round up the upset, scattered poults and steer them back towards their (now cat-free) home for the night. It's never boring with livestock.