Original Features

Newly cleaned out roadside ditch. The white
in the bottom of there is snow.

Yes, we currently have a light dusting of snow on the ground and yes, we still have light snow falling but overall we are definitely drying out. All the puddles are gone or nearly so, and the mud under foot is now sticky, rather than wellies-sloppy. The tarmac lanes are dry and the ditches either side of the road are mainly empty. Long may this process continue.

Original feature? A lot of the road-side culverts are still these
tunnels with stones for the 'walls' and a big flat stone across
the top. 

We have had a couple of contractor lads with a lorry and a mini digger, working along the road digging out the ditches and re-instating the drains and culverts where they pass under people's drive-ways, if necessary. They have even cut across the lane if they need water to flow from north side to south side and laid big new plastic pipes under the road.

Spot the heron.

A lot of the culverts along these lanes are still what an optimistic estate agent would call "original features". They were made by building in the bottom of your ditch a series of arches like mini-Stonehenge arches (dolmens?) with tall stones as the walls and big flat ones across the top. We have a similar structure buried down just outside our yard wall where would have run the right of way for all the locals using the main lane, to access their turf-cutting bog.

I wish the cats wouldn't kill the 'cute' and unusual ones. This
female bullfinch got it in the neck this morning. 

We are told that back then, anyone who had a chimney in their house would have 'Turbary' rights - the rights to cut turf for home fuel. They would have brought their donkey and cart down what is now our land to get to their 'stake'. When we bought the house, the Estate Agent told us that as no-one had used this right of way in 27 years, the route was now redundant and we did not need to allow any donkey carts down there!

Nobody's favourite livestock task - getting a wormer
tablet down the throat of each of your 4 cats. Liz's hands
are shredded!

Be that as it may, the contractor lads were obviously not re-instating these ancient structures as they went along, just burying modern concertina style water pipes and back filling with the stone and clay in what ever order it came available. They were also building up the immediate verges with the dirt and stone from the ditches. They have made quite a neat job of it and the new water-flows are obviously working. The ditches are empty.

The ewe (Lily) and lamb are still brought indoors each night
as the weather is still too cold for a baby to be outdoors. 

Meanwhile, after much deliberation I decided to cull out our bought-in ram, Pedro. It was not an easy decision. I never want to get into killing animals just because they are no longer convenient - if I ever do this then it will be a sign that we should not have bought in, or bred the animal in the first place. This lad was bought in, as regular readers may recall, last Summer, because we had produced no lambs of our own in 2017 and the freezers were almost empty of lamb-meat. He came as one of a pair, his sister being 'Oveja'.

When the time came to send Oveja on her final trailer ride, I decided to keep the brother (Pedro) as our 'stud' ram to save me having to borrow in a ram. I knew that we could always send him to the butchers later if the new set-up did not work out or if he became human-aggressive. This "sort of" worked and we think that all four ewes may well be pregnant, though I only saw him mounting Lily and Polly. Time will tell on that one.

Pedro offal. Oh, and a couple of nice
steaks! Well, I was in a butcher's shop.

As to the aggressive thing, I did take a couple of 'pucks' from him but I think these may have just been argy-bargy trying to be first to any food I was taking to the food trough. I'd get a thump from behind at thigh-height but not really know if he'd squared up on my derriere and done an adolescent head-down charge, or had just run clumsily into the group following me and my feed-bucket. Whenever he squared up facing me, I was always able to deter him by swishing a stick back and forth in front of his nose. It's the lack of trust that decided me. I could no longer enjoy communing with the gentle ewes if I had to keep one eye on Pedro.

The peach tree, housed indoors for the Winter
needed a tree-guard when the cats started
using its main trunk as a scratching post.

I did, though, see him banging the ewe 'Myfanwy' about. Whether she is pregnant or not, nobody likes to see our gentle ladies getting T-boned in the midriff. He was also a bit feisty with Lily and the new lamb when they first met but we put that down to him reminding them who was boss in case they'd forgotten while they were in 'confinement'.

So, the decision was made and Pedro was taken on his final trailer journey on Monday (yesterday). That gave me another interesting reversing task - the butcher's back way was part blocked by a big trailer one side and a shiny 4 x 4 on the other. I could not get to the 'lairage' pens (holding pens)  so the slaughterman (Joe) had me back in the shorter distance to the slaughterhouse door. Elizabeth tells me that the lad was 'offed' almost before his feet hit the concrete - she'd heard the 'pock' of the humane-killer and had seen the main butcher nip in there straight after with the big knife, while I was closing up the trailer and pulling out. He (Pedro) certainly spent no time in the unfamiliar lairage pens wondering what was going on or stressing about this new turn of events.

That was that. I collected the offal (liver, kidneys, heart and tongue, this time) today and picked up a couple of lovely (beef) steaks as I was in a butcher's shop. He hangs the carcass for a week before cutting to allow the meat to "set" so we go down on Monday morning to collect the main meat. I feel as though I have been given my sheep back. I can go into their field and speak to them, tickle their noses and under their chins, pull bits of twig and bramble out of their wool and generally enjoy contact with them. There is no ram there bashing them away from the breakfast food trough or trying to get between me and the girls. A whole new relaxed, calm, stress-free atmosphere has returned. It was the correct decision. This year we will borrow a ram just for the 'tupping' season AND nothing like as early as August - more like December or January. Lambing in January is just daft.

'Oveja' está en el Congelador

A fine looking carcass

'Oveja' está en el congelador ('Oveja' (The ewe) is in the freezer). One good up-beat story tonight and, I'm sad to relate, a couple of less happy ones. First up, after the mixed feelings of slaughter-day and taking our bought-in ewe lamb (Oveja) on her last journey to town, a week later we get the happy job of seeing the carcass butchered up and bringing home the product.

Ignatius splits the carcass

We have a lot of time for the guys down there in Castlerea (Joe the Slaughterman and Ignatius G (Victualler). It is lovely to watch them work and we chat away. Do we want the legs as halves? Do we want the full shoulder or gigot-chops? Do we want the chops as 'racks' and how many chops to a rack?

Labelled for the freezer after cat inspection

I love the old chopping block in that shop - a massive lump of wood on a robust looking stand of darker wood. The block is actually made as a parquet-floor style bundle of smaller blocks, surrounded by a rim of thick planks and strapped at each corner with thick wrought-iron 90º pieces.

We got one rack back as chops so that we
could give a couple to a neighbour.  We
"tidied up" the rest in house.

By now it is shaped into big sweeping curves where they have chopped out big 'valleys' over time and left ridges, then obviously spun it round 180º at one stage and turned it over to use the other side. (I should have grabbed a photo, shouldn't I?). I asked them how long a block like that would last. Ignatius told me that 'this one' was 35 years old. The lads have had the shop about 40 years at this stage and there is an equally venerable block out 'back' which they got when they first bought the shop and had it 'done up'. Lovely.

A lovely "pie" to go with those chops. Leeks and cream cheese
sauce.

The meat is now home, labelled and stashed in the freezer. This was only one lamb so we both doubt the store will see the year out but all being well the first 2018 babies might be born in January, so by June/July we might be able to restock. That's if Pedro (our new ram) continues to behave himself.

The 'late' Prada from my post on 19th Aug
2016

My first "less happy" story involves the sad loss of our good friends, Sue and Rob's gorgeous St Bernard dog, 'Prada'. Sorry for your loss, S+R, we know how close you were to that lovely, soft old girl and how much she will be missed. Our commiserations.

Red sky in the morning? It rained all day.

These massive dogs do not tend to live very long because (Sue tells me) the heart was never really bred to cope with the size of the dog. S+R have always had St Bernards but have never managed to 'keep' one beyond about 5 years. Prada was 7/8 so the longest lived St-B they had ever had and they were always amazed by her. Rest in Peace, you gentle giant. We will miss you too.

The last of that lovely cream cheese went with bagels
and (properly) smoked salmon.

Finally another loss and this one I need to do on that 'no names no pack drill' basis which I do when I do not have the blessing of the main players. This one is the sad loss of the biological mother of a little girl who is very dear to us. Our deepest sympathies. Those concerned will know who I am talking about here. Sorry for your loss.

Rob took this lovely pic of Prada just
enjoying the company of their Grandson
as he fished. Happy days. 

That is probably enough for this post. Look after yourselves

A Million Hens but No Eggs?

This very late cousin of "The Bishop" dahlia sneaks a few
flowers out before the first frost.

As I put out the 'Sold Out' sign on the egg Honesty Box again, I rue the bad timing that had me starting those sales just as, it seemed to me, the egg production dried up. I go round each morning and collect 2 or 3 duck eggs from the ever-reliable Khaki Campbells and then, at the moment, pick up the very sporadic 1-3 hen eggs through the day from the various hidey holes.

An unidentified fungus from the front lawn. 

We are knee deep in young chickens at present. We must have around 30 chickens total but regular readers will know that 26 of these are still deciding whether to shout cock-a-doodle-doo or to lay an egg. The old guard are currently on go-slow, presumably due to the weather.

Egg production stats.

It is not, in fact, as bad as it seems. Way back when we first came over, I used to haunt various Internet discussion groups on the subject of keeping chickens (Fowl.IE was one) and someone on there suggested we all keep score on our egg laying. I have done so ever since. I can see from these data that the current situation is by no means unprecedented and the current year is probably the best yet.

These things go in peaks and troughs. The total eggs produced in 2015 was 1639, 2016 was only 926 and this year we have 1563 so far and every chance of topping 2015's total by Dec 31st. Last year the hens laid fewer than 100 eggs per month from May right round to October even before half were wiped out by our fox attack in November. This year no months have seen hen eggs below 100 and we had 199 in May and 200 in August. Do not despair you poultry-watchers.

The late 'Oveja', bought-in ewe lamb.

Obviously we hope for a smart pick-up around Christmas as these new birds come of age and we are also upping the ante soon with our addition of 2 female Guinea Fowl. Also today, we have decided to increase the number of ducks so we have contacted friends Sue and Rob to arrange to bring them over half a dozen eggs to put in their incubator. These will be Khaki Campbell again though we may, at some point, look at a few more meaty birds - Muscovies for example.

Talking of 'meat' I noted in the previous post that our bought-in ewe lamb, 'Oveja' had come up ready, so we had booked her in for her final journey on Monday. I still hate these days - they feel like such a betrayal - but we have now done them enough that I am more confident that all the feared things that might go wrong, no longer scare me so much - Will we be able to catch the lambs? Will the trailer break? Will the car break down? Will the butcher reject them? Will the paperwork be OK? Will we be able to kiss them goodbye?

First 'fruits' - the offal, which you collect on D+1. Left to right
 here, kidneys still in their (suet) jackets, liver, heart and lungs.
The carcass hangs a week and will be collected next Monday.

We are now almost casual about it. I was determined this time not to drive Liz the usual amount of crazy with my pacing, worrying and drumming my fingers on the table. We shared a leisured tea/coffee, ran the sheep across to the race, separated and loaded our required 'cargo' (just Oveja), drove to Castlerea, unloaded and processed paperwork, swapped instructions with the butcher-guys and adjourned to nearby Benny's Deli for a croissant-based breakfast. Pride in a job well done.

We even 'got away with' that risk of having to drop your one sheep into the lonely empty 'lairage' pen where she would 'baa' piteously at you as you drove away - the pen had 6 ewe lambs already in it, so Oveja sprinted in there to be with her new 'friends'. Safety in numbers... for a while anyway. Today I picked up the offal but I did not see Joe, the slaughterman. I had asked him to check for me whether the lass was pregnant. When ewe lambs are run with their brothers past 5-6 months this can often happen and in our case it might give us an early indication that Oveja's brother 'Pedro' who we plan to keep as our breeding ram, is able for this job. Not very "nice", but one of those hard facts of life.

Village Calendar 2018

Meanwhile, Liz has created the next year's Village Calendar again based upon pictures from the 2016/7 "Lisacul 365" project, our photographic portrait of the 18 townlands as a 'Year in the Life'. Liz decided this time to mainly choose 'nature' pictures, so they are, I am proud to say, mainly mine. The calendar is a lovely thing and, this year, they are selling at only €5 (it was €10 last year) and going like hot cakes. Liz is looking at a 2nd print-run as the supply dwindles. If you want one (or more - they would be great stocking fillers) go to the village website - LisaculInfo.ie .

Hard to beat a good 'Cosyglo' fire. 

Liz's other main project at the moment, the Village Play, is also progressing. The group have been reading through various plays proposed by the 'boss' (Tom C) but have only had print-outs of olde-font play-scripts in PDF format to work with, so Liz has started typing these into her laptop so that they have a live version they can mess with as desired. The first (Her Step Husband by Larry Johnson) was over 30,000 words so it took her a while. To no avail, as it turned out - the players have now settled on 'Anyone Could Rob a Bank' by Tom Coffey (1960) and all the actors have now been cast, so Liz is going to have to get the laptop out again and fiddle another 20,000+ words into it. Ah well. Life is never easy for an Assistant Producer.

While we are on creative writing, I have just completed another week (my 3rd) as curator of the @SmallHolderIRL Twitter account, the 'voice of Irish small holders', if you like. I seem to go down OK on there and it suits my style of chattering and wittering. My Dad would have used the words "Happy" and "Garrulous", I expect, but hey, it works for me. I always get good feedback and also I get asked back to do it again so it can't all be bad.

This is not my picture, but may well have been 'my' buzzard.
Pic is by Michael Bell, who goes on Twitter as @learnnature
and was taken in Ballyleague (Co Roscommon). 

Finally I am in between, currently, the various wild-life recording events to which I contribute, on the (Irish) National Bio-Diversity database. The bumblebee survey finishes at the end of October and we don't start the big bird-watch till the end of November. What I do in the meantime is input any sightings I see of anything note-worthy including roadkill. Exciting, then, to see my first buzzard since I've been here. I am not even sure it was a buzzard (though I thought so) - it was soaring in the blue sky with its wings held in a rather high 'V', so more like a harrier but it was against the sun, so I could only see the black silhouette. It was nice later that day to get a post by Liz re-sharing a pic taken by a guy (Michael Bell, who Tweets under the name @LearnNature ) who had photo'd 2 buzzards soaring over Ballyleague. That town is a good 50 minutes drive east from here, right over by the River Shannon, but I'd seen my buzzard at 10 am and he was making good speed over the ground, so it might just have been the same bird.

....And that is enough for now. Good Luck.

Fettling the Trailer and failing to grow Tomatoes

A time to relax, kick the wellies off, grab a coffee
and a good book and be invaded by various cats.

A genuinely short post this time as we are definitely 'between' bursts of excitement. We are recovering from some, bimbling along on others and waiting and preparing for the next batch.

Proper cheese mould with follower "piston"

In the 'bimbling' section would be a tech improvement in the cheese making, in that we have acquired a couple of proper plastic cheese moulds. They do nothing for the flavour (they don't need to - it is gorgeous!) but they give us professional looking cylinders of cheese without the strange indents in the ends which you get if you use (clean) plastic flower pots.

Kato

Firmly in the 'preparing' section is the arrival of our new Help-X student, our second bite at this cherry after (readers will recall) Pedro and Manu who came for 2 weeks in August. This one is Augustin, a lad from Paris, who is 18. I collected him from his bus in Castlerea at 4 pm and he's now in, established, had a good look round, met the pigs and sheep and all the rest. More on how this all goes when we've had a chance to get to know him.

The trailer gets shored up with rather dodgy
skirting boards made from pallet laths.

And while I'm on 'meeting the pigs', that is my other 'prep' story. The pigs go off on their final journey on Tuesday so I was worried at the bad timing for our French guest in case he might be a bit squeamish around animals being killed for food.

Always very late. These yellow kniphofia
just coming into flower in our yard for the
Equinox

No problem, apparently. Although he has no farming experience what so ever, he loves his pork, knows where it comes from and is very practical around the high welfare, outdoor reared, old-breed stuff. He has no worries with helping to trailer-train the victims or coming with us to betray them into the slaughterman's lairage pens.

Good weather for puddle-ducks.

Friends of the Blog will know that we make the job of loading the pigs on The Morning a whole lot easier by feeding them all their meals in the trailer for the 2 days prior, so that on the day they trot up the ramp obediently expecting the normal breakfast and barely notice when you quietly close the door behind them. That's the theory anyway. Wish us luck.

However, at 6 years old the trailer is starting to look the worse for wear. The lower sides are of fairly thin marine ply and have started to rot out at the bottoms, so that daylight was starting to be visible down there. I was worried that one good bulldozer move by a pig snout and the whole would flap open like a big cat-flap leaving the pigs a 2 foot tall gap through which they could skip out onto the tarmac.

A bit of a pig-flavoured pattern forming in the beer purchases
this week? It wasn't deliberate. 

The answer, of course, is to rip all this wood out and replace with new but short term, I think (famous last words?) I can get away with adding skirting boards to those walls made from decent pallet laths. That stopped the daylight, so I think the pigs will not even know to try the bulldoze thing. I am hoping to be able to breathe a sigh of relief as we un-ship the pigs at the correct destination in a few days time.

Pathetic, weedy, diseased tomatoes with no
ripe fruit even by mid September. 

In the 'past tense' bit is just the dismal failure (again!) to grow tomatoes out of doors here. We are declaring it a truth universally believed. This year we did all the right things - started with plug plants, grew them up a south facing wall, fed and watered them. We still have poor, pathetic, diseased looking straggly things with hardly any fruit and no ripe fruit yet despite it being the Autumn Equinox. We have never yet produced a tomato outdoors in time for the salad season. Ah well. Plenty other crops to grow.

Ignatius G Victualler

This then is the second and final post which should be avoided by anyone who thinks the detail around slaughter and butchery of the late lambs is "too much information". If you don't want to know about such things, look away now. Normal service and happy animal stories will resume with the next post.

"Ignatius Gannon (Victualler); Beef Mutton and Lamb as in Season. None but the best quality stocked". So says his paperwork and we can vouch for the fact that Ignatius G is an excellent butcher, a small local business in Castlerea thriving and surviving despite being almost opposite the SuperValu Supermarket. He is a tall, strong bloke with brawny arms, grey hair, a white shop-coat well smeared with the expected gore and a ready smile and jokey wit. He was also very good to us 'newbies', helped us a lot through the process and answered all my myriad questions as we went along. His prices also compare very favourably with the Supermarket prices, so that, in this exercise, we have used his as our estimate of the carcass's worth even though it would have looked even better at SuperValu rates.

Readers will know that we have already had back the 'offal' last Monday (hearts, livers and kidneys) but the main carcasses have to hang for a week, so we were back today to collect the main event and 'supervise' the cutting up - we had to choose, for example, whether we wanted shoulder joints or the much more popular (locally) gigot chops. We did. You then have to choose how big to leave the 'shoulders' - how far up the rib cage do you want the 'chopping' (for shoulder chops) to come before you stay stop, and keep the rest of the shoulder intact.

Ignatius and his 'oppo' and slaughterman of 34 years, Joe set to work sawing and cleavering and in this case they agreed to bag it up as they went along as if it was meat for sale, so that we could have all the bits labelled and we could know the price per kilo of the bits (from €9/kilo for breast meat and neck, through €11 for leg, €12 for cutlets, €13.50 for shoulder and up to €17/kilo for loin chops; this comparing to €21/kilo we have seen in Supervalu. The labels also showed the final price of the bag, so for example, a shoulder might be €32.83, 'half legs' up to about €20 and bags of 4 loin chops around €7. The output from one animal was then loaded into a tough white dustbin liner so that we could work out some numbers per animal. They charge, incidentally, €30 per animal for the slaughter and butchery though we gave them a bit of a tip too for being so brilliant.

So, having completed our other shopping we headed home with the little Fiat very well loaded down with meat. We excluded all the animals from the living room and sorted all this booty out on the Dining Room table. We were able to tap all the numbers into a spreadsheet (I can hear anyone who knows me muttering "Typical!" at this point. From this we know that for example....

1) Our three girls had carcass weights of between 17 and 18.2 kg respectively
2) The total weight of meat (excluding offal) was 52.9 kg
3) The carcasses would have cost us €213, €218 and €227 over the counter, a total of €659.24
4) Our most expensive cut is a 2.56 kg shoulder at €34.56
5) A 6 foot tall, €400 freezer will just about fit three carcasses of this size (which was a relief).

In terms of finances and 'did we make a profit' the following figures might be interesting. The sheep originally, back in September, cost €80 each. They cost €44 in supplementary feed (the grass was free as we have not yet had to worry about cultivation or fertilizer!), we paid Kenny €20 diesel for haulage to the butcher and paid €100 for the slaughter and butchery, total inputs €404.

The meat was worth €659.24 as we only used Ignatius's prices (we could have quoted Supermarket prices and we could almost have said they were organic - Heaven KNOWS how much organic lamb is worth - our grass has had no chemicals applied and these ladies had no growth promoters or other unnecessary drugs, only our bought in feed was not organic, and we cannot answer for the first 5 months of their lives. We are estimating €9.75 for the 'offal' so our outputs are €668.99, so effectively we made a profit of €264.99 which makes a nice contribution to the €600 fence we had to erect around the paddock. Mentally we were depreciating this over ten years but at this rate it's more like 3 years!. Our own man hours are not charged as we had so much fun doing this. It's been a blast and a lovely bit of learning to be small holders. Yes, we had to do the sad slaughter bit at the end, but that comes with the territory and we coped OK; we know how much love, respect, care, good food and shelter had gone into these animals and we chose our butcher with care and you can't say that if you buy stuff you've not reared and kept yourself.

Thanks to everyone who had a hand in this, especially our sheep mentor, Kenny O'C (who pronounced our results as "mighty"), to our small-holdering mentors, Anne and Simon (who found us the butcher and reassured us that we were getting good growth rates) and to Ignatius and Joe, the heroes of this particular post.

So, what's for supper then? That'll be chicken and chips because we had some to use up!