A short lived Duckling

Connie brings the one surviving duckling off the nest and
quickly has it feeding like a pro.

A quick post this time, as befits the little recovery period we are having betwixt our busy, visitor bedecked Christmas and the New Year weekend. With the French off the premises, Liz headed for Silverwood land for another very quick tour of Mum-minding duty. A family meal with a 3-line whip had been planned but then cancelled without anyone telling Liz so she ended up just doing the one night. Mum is 'fixed' enough to no longer need random daughters fussing about the place. She is signed off now till 15th Jan. 

Little Paddler.

In the mean time, Friends of the Blog will recall that we have a Sussex hen who went broody in late November and then hatched, we think, 4 duck eggs just as the French visitors left. This lady only managed to bring 1 survivor off the nest. I found only one part-chewed corpse, so I guess that the nest got predated by a rat and the other babies were taken alive or dead. 

This double yolker was to be the duckling's Day 4 breakfast.

The survivor ("Little Paddler") was going great guns. His 'Mum' quickly taught him to feed and he was gobbling up the tiny portions of chick-crumb and hard boiled egg I was taking to them 4 times a day. It was alternating snow, hail and sleet outside, so I shut them in the Tígín to be 'safe', warm and dry. By day 3 (Thurs 28th) he was looking very promising and Mum was sleeping on the floor with him under her skirts.

Horrible, sleety, haily weather. Yes, I did get caught with
a line of washing out!

Sadly, this morning, (Day 4) when I went in with breakfast, Mum came down from a higher perch and there was no sign of the duckling. Mum was fussing and clucking around as if asking me where the baby was. We looked everywhere but could find no sign, no sad little corpse. If she had gone up there to perch and left him 'peeping' on the ground, then he'd have frozen to death in minutes and/or been carried off by the rat(s). Maybe he was taken by the rat and she then flew up to perch higher in her angst? We will never know. Ah well. These things happen. Mum spent part of the day all stressed out clucking about, presumably missing him but by afternoon seems to have calmed down and forgotten him. Sorry, Connie. Better luck next time. 

Just a light dusting of snow this time.

We are still determined to do more ducks, so we have decided to buy a Covatutto incubator like the one we used to borrow from Charlotte of the Mini Horses. We will set a dozen eggs in that in the spring time. We may also try Muscovies; not so good for eggs, but much better than the Khaki Campbells for meat. Also,more fun, apparently with their keenness to fly and sit on your roof tops!

Opening up the new Parma style ham.

We finally got around to 'opening' the Christmas leg of 'Parma' style ham. It had been missed off menus and side lined by the sheer amount of food we were trying to cope with, even with the French visitors. 

Roscommon style 'Parma' ham. 

This leg was from the 2016 pigs, so was 16 months at the air-drying / curing and is deliciously sweet. Liz has pronounced it my best so far. I am quite impressed too. We obviously have that job sussed and if any readers would like to come and have a sample (I know Charlotte likes a 'Parma' ham and may be around at present, down from Dublin) then do drop by.

That is about it. We are now all battening down the hatches for the next named storm, Storm Dylan who is meant to roar through on Saturday night. We are under Orange warnings here for 70-80 kph winds all across the Province of Connaught, though inevitably, coastal areas have the highest predicted wind speeds. 

Beyond that, assuming we aren't blown across to Longford, we will also be enjoying the New Year weekend which will also bring me to the end of my latest stint as curator on the @smallholderIRL Twitter account - where I am sharing a fortnight's shift with account boss @foodborn Margaret Griffin. We are nearly done - finishing, neatly, on Sunday 31st Dec. 

Two New Girls for our Lads

A dusting on the ground and light snow still falling this morning.

A minor dusting of snow was our lot in the shirt-tails of Storm Caroline; very merciful compared to the dumps of snow experienced by 'The North'  and then down through Wales and the UK midlands. We are definitely not complaining. Neither are we complacent, as some Met Éireann Yellow Warning snow is forecast for Saturday into Sunday.

Snow on the new kitchen roof, as seen from
the back bedroom window.

I am here on my Jack at the moment as Liz is off 'minding' Mum (Liz Senior) down in Silverwood-land (County Laois). Mum has just had a hip replacement operation up in Swords (Dublin), so Liz (jnr) was off down to Laois on the train last night, where she will take temporary ownership of Mum's car, driving it off up to Swords to gather up Mum in the snow and bring her home. Liz will then stay there round to next Tuesday on this "tour of duty", when The Village Play (and other stuff) will call her home, at least for a couple days.

Not nice in the local village. 

I had my own little "necessary journey" in the snow this morning as I was off to Sue and Rob's to collect a couple of new Guinea Hens as possible mates to our lonely cock-birds, Apollo and Belvedere.

Might not want to park that one there mate - the Guards will
be at you..... Hope the driver was not badly hurt.

I also got a quick peek at the not-yet-hatched duck eggs in the incubator over there where, using Sue's candling lamp, I could see little feet kicking about. In my head, these eggs were due on Wednesday (Day 28) but Sue tells me ducks can easily go 28-35 days, so she was not expecting any hatches till after this weekend. Patience is the thing.

Easiest way to move Guinea Fowl is the kitten-box. 

The Guinea ladies were landed safely into one of our rabbit runs with the 'bedroom' compartment at one end. I gave them food and water and left them to settle in, as I always do. That way, they are able to see our sights and sounds but are safe from being beaten up by other poultry seeing them as intruders.

These are quite young birds - probably not yet sexually mature.
Their 'horns' (top of head) are not fully developed and the little
"chilli-pepper" wattles are pale pink, not yet bright red. 

I suspected that Apollo and Belvedere would find them fairly quickly. I wasn't wrong. I barely had time to take the 'landed' photo and the boys rocked up and were all over them from that moment on. They were walking all over the top of the pen looking down at the girls or running round the outside trying to make beak-contact through the wire, as the girls, in their turn, raced around the inside of the pen trying to get out and at the boys. The poor turkeys, up to now the Guinea cocks' bestest, inseparable chums, were just abandoned like last week's fashion. Fickle things, Guineas, obviously.

I was tempted to fore-go the usual 24 hours "probationary" period and let the 4 at each other but there are two things I know about introducing new birds to the flock, and Guineas in particular. First, if the new birds do come under attack it can be vicious, fast and deadly. Second, once a Guinea Fowl is out, you will probably never catch it again - they are fast and nimble as well as flighty and nervous. They explode into flight like a pheasant. Yes, if they go off to roost in your barn like good birds, and you have a ladder, you can probably nab them at night but these ladies had only just arrived and had never seen the barn, never mind the inside of it. They'd as likely find a tall tree for the night. Patience, again, is the thing. (It quite often is.)

The boys are all over the new arrivals. 

I let them be but put an inverted wheel barrow over the cage to keep the light snow and wet off. Come evening and everyone takes them-self off to roost in the barn, the new girls got left at the barn end of the temporary pen, calling hopefully after their new friends. It was quite a job to persuade them that the pen had its own warm, dry, bedroom and if they would only go in there they'd have a comfy night round till I could let them all out free-ranging on Saturday. They could be dry, preened and spruced up ready for their blokes. I hope they stayed in there for the night, otherwise they'll be stiff as boards from hypothermia by morning.

Blue looks comfortable.

With the return of winter, my long break away from the buildering came to an end. K-Dub has been too busy up in the City to be doing very much to his own place, and my last task was to help pouring that huge shed base in July, 30' by 40' and taking 3 big 8-wheeler mixer lorries. ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2017/07/three-8-wheelers-of-concrete-for-k-dub.html )

Deefer.

Well, last weekend he was going to build the block-walls for the shed in company with a gang of 4 of us. 3 were professional block-layers, 2 from the 'Smoke' one a near-neighbour of his. K-Dub's and my job were to support these guys with a constant flow of barrows of cement 'thrown' up onto their mortar boards with a shovel, and of the heavy concrete "cavity" blocks. Ideally, your block layer needs to be standing at his task and able to lay a block, then turn round and scoop more cement from the board behind him, or grab a block the right way up, stacked at waist height(+) also just behind him. Him, obviously whizzing along the length of the wall doing his course of blocks, so needing to pass a stack or a mortar board about every 6 feet along the base or planks-on-trestles.

Ah well. Only bought it to 'feed' the cake. It was never going to
see Christmas. Sláinte.

It is busy, heavy, unremitting work seasoned by happy banter among the blokes but, d'you know what, I love it! We got on well and in 4 hours, got loads done. I had to come away at that point, but we'd the wall up right round the building to around 6' in places and 8' at corners. The 4 other lads carried on into the p.m. (they all a good 25 years younger than me and they've been doing it all their lives!) but I've not been back to see how much got completed.

The Irish Government decided to not proceed with getting the
population to pay water-rates after all, and gave us back all
the money we had paid since the troubled start last year. 

My other 'builder-ish' job was at a friend's (no names, no pack drill) over beyond Castlerea where a 'new' generator was arriving to replace the old dead one. The 'new' one is an ex Military (British Army, I think) which needed a serious trailer to get it back from the seller's and a big 4WD Tractor with a front-loader to lift it and wiggle it into position. The tractor was being 'lent' by a young farmer's son, who was also going to be driving it - we had to wait for him to get out of school and then have his tea (God forbid an Irish Mammy would allow the lad to go out in the dark and rain without a belly full of grub!). He rocked up at about 5 pm, by which time it was dark and lashing down with rain. The dead generator also meant the house/yard was without power, so we were splodging around with torches, but at least the lights on modern tractors are like football ground floodlights. My job was to clear a pile of rocks and rubble to allow the tractor to swing about, then help the 'genny' to land, connect it up and test-fire it. This to give the batteries a quick blip which would allow the friend to re-start the tripped out wind turbine and (ha ha) solar array. It's all very well being 'off grid' and all green and low impact as long as your genny doesn't fry its crank on a near-windless fortnight such as we have just had, prior to Storm Caroline.

By the end of this post, then, we have 4 walls round a shed, 2 new Guinea Fowl sleeping in the comfort of their bedroom (I hope), my friends have a house with working electricity and the Ma-in-Law is being well looked after at home by her oldest daughter. By the next post we all might be under a foot of snow, but we'll worry about that when it comes. Hope you are also all warm, safe and dry... and lit.

Unlucky 13

Wednesday saw me driving down to Silverwood-land to collect Liz, have a bite of lunch with Steak Lady and get a first look at the new grave stone on Mr SL's grave. That would have been a perfectly good story for a blog post. I didn't need all the death, destruction and drama shoulder-barging it off the front pages. It would have been fine. A nice peaceful happy post. That would have done. Come home, few days to recover and prep the house for our weekend visitors. Everyone's a winner. However, the best laid plans (as they might have said) of mice and men shall come to naught when Brer Fox intervenes. Let me explain.

Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest

Wednesday, as I said, I was off down to Silverwood-land for the 2 hour drive to meet Liz, see this grave, spend a bit of time with the Silverwood gang and a bite of lunch. It was not the best drive ever - I was driving straight at the bright, low sun, on a very frosty morning and the windscreen washers had frozen up, so I had that fine, salty spray off the vehicles in front and was playing that silly game of trying to wipe the windows whenever that car or lorry went through a puddle and gave you a good wet dose of spray. At some points I even had to stop, pull over and get out and wipe it with a rag.

So, I arrived and we drove round to admire the very fine and tasteful head stone (Rest in Peace Theo) and adjourned to a local café for a bite of breakfast. From there round to Silverwoods for a chat with Mr and Mrs S. It was a lovely relaxing day and we headed home in good time to be there for poultry lock-up and to let the dogs out for a 'comfort stop'. So far so good. As we drove up our lane towards our gate, we could see "white stuff" in the verge of our splay and quickly worked out that this 'stuff' was Buff Orpington feathers. Maybe one had got out and been hit by a car?

First inkling of the problem. Feathers in the verge of our splay

No such luck - as we opened the gate and drove up the drive, those feathers were quickly 'joined' by larger puffs  in the drive, on the front lawn, in the 'woods' to the left and then, with increasing horror, the grass around the pond and even strewn across the frozen ice of the pond. We had obviously had a disaster and immediately suspected a major fox strike. In the gathering gloom we could also not see any chickens so our hearts sank; we thought we'd been wiped out, all the birds killed and taken. The sort of thing you read about but you hope never happens to you. The absolute lowest down side of having your poultry free-range.

Feathers on the frozen pond

From that low point it did start to improve. We spotted the geese all intact and could see 2 ducks with them. We started to spot chickens cowering in corners, scattered into surrounding fields, perching high in hedges. Two sad, still lumps of feather proved to be injured roosters who allowed us to pick them up and carry them to safety indoors. Other chickens hearing our voices and us whistling them up decided it was safe to start clucking and to come out of hiding. We shepherded these home more or less willingly. We spotted the old Sussex (Enda) the wrong side of a sheep-fence and helped her over in near darkness. One Guinea fowl started shouting from 30' up a spruce tree in the pig-run and we found his 'wife' (Min) in the rafters.

Brer Fox went this-away? The field
opposite.

As the darkness closed in we had everybody we could safely locked away but could see no sign of the three turkeys, 4 of the ducks, various chickens, one of the Guineas. It was all a bit confusing (as well as upsetting) but we could do no more. We had to leave them be and hope that more birds might be roosting out and might join us in the morning. We also now had a day-time fox who might easily come back for more and who I needed to either have words with or at least show him/her/them that we are now home, alert and ready.

Safe in the Tígín?

By the next day, it was all a bit clearer. Only one Guinea fowl came home - he'd roosted in a tall ash half a field away and quickly replied with his alarm calls when his buddy woke up in the spruce and started calling. Nobody else came home. In our searches in the evening we had found 2 unclaimed corpses, a duck and the old white Hubbard (Miss White). The fox(es) had managed to kill 13 birds and taken 11 of them away including all 3 turkeys, 3 of the Buff Orp poults (the chicks from Dustbin Lady and Crate Lady), 4 ducks, one young Marans cockerel and both the old Hubbards (Miss White and Miss Red). We assume that, though it is possible that the ducks flew away and the turkeys are scattered across the landscape.

Sunrise over the village crossroads

We have also since found the path used by the foxes carrying off the dead ones - they went off across the lane and through that field opposite which we tried to buy and on then through a hedge and diagonally across the 2nd field. After that we lost the scent and could find no more feathers. We are being fairly philosophical about all this and because the fox has not returned (except possibly to collect the last 2 corpses which we threw into a bramble patch) we are not sure what we can do about him/her/them.

Frosty grass is almost Christmas Card-ish.

We are relieved and delighted that we did not lose more birds. We lost no adult Buff Orps and we kept our two old favourite survivors, the old Sussex (Enda) and the even older Cuckoo Marans (Squawk). Our #2 Buff rooster (The Corporal)  is badly injured but is hanging in there and our #1 (Lt. Colonel Sir Bufton Tufton) is so unfazed and immaculate we suspect that he was either in the beer tent when it all kicked off or, possibly, at his London Club. They do say that it is always the roosters that "get it" because they leap to the defence of their women. Buffers does not seem to have read that bit of the rules of engagement.

The kattens are off for their ops.

More on all this fun and games in a future post.

Dustin, Done and Dusted.

Dustin emerges from the American
deep-bath fryer. 

To a man (and woman), Irish 'kids' now grown up and our age, remember from their TV watching youth a classic character from kids' TV, Dustin the Turkey. Dustin was a glove puppet but not like any soppy, mamby-pamby puppet they had ever seen before. He spoke with a strong Dublin city accent and was given to (what must have been) deliciously irreverent and disreputable behaviour, playing up and 'messing' (misbehaving and bantering) in the studio and being outrageously rude to studio guests (well, within the limits of a National TV broadcast). He is now part of Ireland's 'classic TV' culture and is lately enjoying a new lease of life in pantomimes and so on.

Dustin carved up nicely.

This all explains why Sparks, the brother-in-law, decided to name "his" turkey Dustin, the one he collected from us on Wednesday, that we killed, plucked and dressed in my previous post. The plan was to cook this bird for a gang of Dublin builder mates tonight, all of whom would be well familiar with the TV Dustin and his antics. Sparks was also going to print one of our pictures of the bird in life, to put in a wee frame with a black ribbon, as if this was his wake. Sparks is a bit of a foodie and fancy chef, so he has bought this year (ordered from America) one of the latest 'things', a cylindrical deep-bath, outdoor, turkey fryer which looks a bit like the tea urn and cooks a 17 lb bird in about 45 minutes. The bird would also be brined for 24 hours, though I doubt it would need it.

Dustin's Dad (and Mum) out in the sunshine
today.

Well, that is all done and dusted now, the fryer has done its thing and the suntanned bird has been carved up and by now, eaten. Sparks has put a few pics of this up on Facebook in which it looks splendid and I am quite proud of it. Sparks reported that Dustin tasted "Absolutely amazing, sooooo juicy, he was a credit to you". Thanks for those kind words Sparks.

Turkey #2 will have no such fancy fryer finish. He is Dustin's younger brother, at 5 months old (Dustin was 6 mths) and killed out at fresh weight 8.1 kg, oven ready at 6.2 kg (14 lbs). Liz was off to Silverwood land this afternoon, down to 'babysit' the children over the weekend while Mr and Mrs S nip over to the UK to sort out some family business. Turkey #2 went with her smuggled in 2 plastic bags and a towel in Liz's suitcase - she didn't think the staff and users of the Irish national rail service would appreciate a carcass hung by its feet from the baggage racks. I am not sure whether this bird will be roasted by Mrs S or by Steak Lady but I do expect that both the whole family will eat together on the 25th, so everyone will get to taste it.

No turkey for us yet but we did enjoy this excellent salt beef,
only the last remnant here, bought as fresh brisket, brined by
us and then rolled, tied and boiled. Yum.

Meanwhile, we recover from our Desmond Deluge. The water level is dropping in all our lakes and rivers though the mass of water now working its way down the Shannon is causing all manner of flooding and damage now and for days yet - it is a long river! Up here on our hill top all the puddles are gone and we are enjoying some calm, sunnier days.

The laid stone walls visible here and, top right, the start of some
upper walls made from 9 inch cavity blocks. 

Out at the Sligo house, more milestones in the buildering at which I am helping. The bottoms of the new walls, with their beautiful and impressive stonework on the outside are complete and a professional bricklayer has been down today to 'top off' the walls to roof height in 9" cavity blocks. It is all beginning to look a bit like a house!

I'll Leave You Beyond.

JD Bob's link-box, here full of logs.

For today's post you'll need to know of a very basic chunk of farm equipment, the 'Link-Box'. This is basically a metal tray which mounts on the 3-point linkage on the back of the tractor (hence the name) with, if you're lucky, a rear panel or tailgate. Useful for moving bags of feed, bales, fencing gear and so on around, it is. Comfortable, safe passenger accommodation it is not. There is no suspension except the bounce in the mighty V-Tread tyres, no soft place ot sit, no smooth edges to save you if you lose your footing, no protection from the weather and a clear line of shot for the rooster-tails of gritty road-water arching across the sides of the box from those same tyres. I cannot imagine it is even remotely legal to give or accept lifts in one. We will draw a veil over our proudly displayed (free) "Farm Safety" stickers.

Mrs Silverwood in the Starsky jacket.

Friday then, lashing rain all day from a warm front which inched slowly across the country from 'wesht' to east aligned pretty much north/south. An early call from Bob caught me just as I was about to walk down to his place (it's only 600 yards but no car that day as Liz was in Silverwood-land) and told me it is too wet to walk, so he'd bring the tractor up. I thought he meant he'd then give me the tractor to go do the feeding while he sat indoors here drinking tay and minding the place. Oh no. His plan was to collect me and bring me to his in the link-box. Thanks Bob, that was real luxury! I had wellies, hat and coat and there was only me, so I was at least able to squat centrally and both the rooster-tails of muddy water missed me. I clung to the top link and gritted my teeth.

Very late but at last some decent crop from the tunnel -
4.8 kg of toms today.

Lesson learned - link-box passengering is one of those exceptions to the rule that "even third class riding is better than first class walking". Saturday dawned sunny so I out-manouvred Bob by setting out early, walking, and was into the tractor, loaded and gone before Bob even knew I was about. Not completely though. He invited me in for tea (as usual) and then said that he wanted to come up to the next feed-station with me so that he could check the water-barrels and afterwards, take the tractor off to the village for shopping.

Also later than I have ever grown them - nice young tender
broad beans in September!

We have been out 'wesht' here for a few years now and we have got the measure of most local turns of phrase and expressions but one still defeats me with its tortuous randomness. This is the way they describe the location of somewhere which is at a distance, a village or farm, say, or a pub which is a few villages away. They use a random combination of up, down, over, away, beyond, above and below which seems, to me, irrespective of whether the place is futher up/down the map, more/less elevated in the hills, close or distant or at any compass point from 'here'. The place is "above beyond" or "away below" or "over above" and you just have to hope there might be more clues in the directions... "above beyond by Creaton's pub" or similar.

All food should be clearly labeled, don't you agree?

With the jobs done yesterday and the sun still shining, Bob got me with a classic one of these when he announced "I'll leave you beyond" (he says it "lave" as in "slave"). My blank look had him repeat as if to an idiot. "I'll leave you BEYOND" I worked out that what he was saying was that he'd "run me home" or "drop you to the garden gate" and it would have been churlish to refuse another link-box ride. I was nabbed! At least this time there was no rain and wet to contend with but Bob, who normally goes everywhere in that thing at idling speed, chose this one to cane it a bit on the throttle slider and that road is not flat. I was bounced around like a child on a Thelwell cartoon pony. Shaken but not stirred? Now, at least, Liz and the car are back, so today's feed run was in the comfort of a Fiat Panda driver's seat.

Supper for one in the absence of Liz. An individual cottage pie,
broad beans and (Oh Joy) a favourite beer now for sale locally.

Back at the 'ranch' we finally have a decent tomato crop. I picked 4.8 kg on Saturday which Liz will convert into tomato sauce/passata. She is also after me for some fruit for a new discovery for us 'chilli tomato jam' which we made for the first time last year inspired by a gift and recipe from Mazy or 'red tomato jam'. What I am glad we don't need to make is green tomato chutney, that back-stop for crops that you fail to ripen. All well and good and delicious in small quantities but we have jars of the stuff from earlier years before we learned that plug-plants are the only method that seems to work here.

Lovely clean onions. Not huge, but again the golden variety
did best, with the white-skin and red onions way behind on size.

I also have now good quantities of mange-tout peas, black kale, chard and, at last, a very late crop of young, tender broad beans. I love my broad beans but Liz only enjoys them young. Once they are starting to do that greyish skin thing, then she double-skins them and uses just the inner cotyledons, very nicely, I should add with garlic butter or some such. We crop hard while the pods are still young. I am also using onions straight off the ground. I will not have too many to ripen this year, a good thing in this very late season and the month of September. We are getting plenty of potatoes too but again, for now, I leave them in the ground and harvest as required.

We're all happy to put 2 feet on the ramp but 4? Not on your Nellie

We have 2 lambs now ready and booked in this week for their final journey so over this weekend I have been trying to familiarise them with the concept of 'trailer'. Regular readers will know that we have found this to be a breeze with pigs. Always greedy, a pig will follow a trail of chopped apple or cherry tomatoes anywhere and within minutes will have weighed up the pros (food) and cons (possible trap in trailer) and come to the decision that this bouncy, wheeled wooden box is just another food bowl. The sheep are proving to be a lot more wary and, despite a couple of practise runs, I fear they will not be 'trained' by tomorrow morning. They have all sneaked one or two front feet onto the ramp, craning forwards to reach the bowls of food IN the trailer, but so far no-one has gone all the way in.

Bizarre digital photo effect on this ordinary coalite and turf
fire in the range. This purple flame was not there in "real life"
but is there on all the digital pics. The camera does not lie?

There is the added complication that we only want 2 to load, the twin ewe lambs, so at some stage we must separate the twins from the rest as we may not be able to persuade 2 sheep up the ramp and 4 not to go up. Sheep, as everyone knows, group together when under "attack", so we will either load 6 or none! In practise, we have had a nice offer of help loading from Sue, so we may have enough manpower on hand to grab our required two and man-handle them, out of the flock and up the ramp. Not an ideal situation but at least they get a more comfortable ride than this 'shepherd' does in that link-box. More on this story in the next post.

Too Early !

I had a bit of a surprise this morning on the early morning 'ward round' when I found Padfoot's 4 babies all out of the 'bedroom' and on the dew-soaked grass. At only a week old they are fully furred up but they are still blind and are still wriggling along like tiny pups rather than hopping like baby bunnies. They made their way along the front of the 'bedroom' bit and huddled together in a corner of the run. We are having a heat wave here so there was no danger of them chilling but they should not have been out and 'Mum' was not doing anything about it. I cut a shallow tray out of the bottom of a box and risked handling the babies to move them into the box which I put in the 'bedroom' to contain them. Padfoot never batted an eyelid, wandered in to 'count' them and wandered out again.

No such problems with Ginny, whose babies are at the 'far end' of the bedroom bit and don't even look like trying to escape. It is possible than in the heat the nest chamber is a bit hot, so we have moved everything about to give them some shade. I was also asking Charlotte what to do about Goldie's imminent kindling as the design of the ex-Silverwood hutch is such that there is only one small 'bedroom, that being in the upper storey of the hutch and which Goldie uses as her toilet! I had been thinking of a 'basement flat' underneath but Charlotte suggested blanking off the mesh on half the downstairs, providing a lip to stop babies crawling out too soon and filling with hay.

Every now and then the chooks crank out an enormous egg but today's just about took the biscuit. The big egg on the left in this picture weighed in at 130 g, almost twice the size ( at 68 g ) of one of our normal, X-Large eggs. We think these are laid by the 'hin' formerly known as Broody Betty. Fair play to her and possibly another piece of evidence that the new (Pedigree Foods, Organic Layers Pellets) diet is streets ahead of the old cheapo one.

There is a standing joke or myth in Ireland that the sun comes out and a heat wave starts as soon as the poor aul' school children have to sit their exams. In the UK exams around the country vary according to which examining board the school subscribes to - Oxford, Cambridge, London and so on (or it did when I was doing them!). In Ireland no such variety.

Every school in the Republic of Ireland has to go with the National format - the same syllabus and the same exams, questions, scheduled dates and times etc from Cork to Donegal and from Dublin to Kerry. So we know that every child of the relevant ages has started their 'Junior Cert' exams or their 'Leaving Cert' exams on the first Wednesday after the early June Bank Holiday. This includes, this year, our chum, 18 year old rabbit-and-mini-horse-collector, Charlotte from down the road. She was sweating a bit on her MacBeth and poetry for the 2nd English paper, yesterday (6th June) so Liz, who is a bit of a 'girly swot' when it comes to such subjects, offered to give her an hour or two of 'cramming' in the sunshine of the front terrace. We await the results of how she thinks she got on with eager anticipation but the whole nation has now moved onto Maths, so I expect the focus has moved on too and English is in the 'been there, done that' pile. Good luck Charlotte. Knock 'em dead!

Hallowe'en

It dawned on us that although we've been married 19 years, we'd never actually done a Christmas in our own place. Liz has never actually cooked the Christmas Turkey or had guests round. We have always been invited to spend it with Pud Lady and Tom (and, obviously we have been delighted to do so and very grateful to be asked) or we have been asked over to Silverwood to share theirs. Again, we have no problems with that and it was wonderful but now that we have our own place in Roscommon we are determined to correct this imbalance and we are going to do it here so that the Silverwoods can come to us and be spared the need to worry about cooking and kitchen stuff!

Along these same lines, we are also looking to enjoy doing OUR Roscommon version of any other festivals, High Days and Holy Days which come along. The first of these (maybe not a 'Holy' day?) coming our way was Hallowe'en which, here in Ireland, the locals go mad for it seems in lieu of a UK style Bonfire night and Guy Fawkes. It gets very American and all the kids dress up and go out Trick or Treating so anyone who wants to take part decorates the front of their house with appropriate pumpkins and any amount of lit up witchery, plastic tombstones and black-hooded, scythe-wielding, Old Father Time effigies, and stocks up on chocolates and Haribo sweeties for the marauding hordes of kiddies.

Now we live quite a way outside our tiny village and we were not at all sure how many Trick or Treaters might come our way but we decided to try a pumpkin on the gate pier and bought an 850g tub of Cadbury's Celebrations. Luckily, a couple of days prior we also met some kiddies who we knew lived in the nearest big house out walking a dog and established that they were, indeed Trick or Treating on the day.

On the night, about 7pm we were duly invaded by a nice selection of small ghouls, witches and ghosties accompanied by 2 Hi-Viz clad Mums. These were, by all accounts, "all the children in the village" (there were 8) who do this in one big posse. The Mums also, apparently pre-visit some of the senior citizens like our own John Deere Bob who don't really 'know about' Trick or Treating and give them a box of suitable sweets which they can give to the children on the night. The Mums were therefore delighted that we, the 'new people' had opted to join in the fun. The Mums, both in local family we will call McG, are quite close neighbours but we have to shamefully admit (as did they) to not having actually got around to calling on one another since we moved in, so it was nice to be able to say hello and to promise to go meet each other properly. We must actually DO this and not leave it another 10 months!

Happy Hallowe'en!