Aches and Pains.

No, not chain-saw injury, but rat damage!

I ache like an aching thing. I must be getting too old for all this physical stuff. (OK, not serious really). I had a good old session mucking out JF Bob's cattle barn again yesterday and then today Liz and I were over at Vendor Anna (and Paul)'s place beyond Carrick on Shannon attacking the overgrown hedge we started on back in November before Christmas, the snow and our hosts' 3 week escape to find some Canary Island sunshine all intervened.

Breakfast of Champions - boiled goose egg and toast
'soldiers'. 7 and a half minutes, boiled to perfection.

The muck-shoveling is quite physical but not a problem. It's the hedge that takes it out of me, as it's full of thick, chain-saw sized trunks which need taking off at "roughly head height", so I spend a good part of the day hefting the saw up and holding it there while I make the cut, or clambering around trying to tie ropes on even higher so that Liz can put some tension on the stem and stop it falling into the telegraph wires and onto the lane. I hope I don't sound like I am complaining - we LOVE all this stuff; one of the things that attracted us to this small-holder life in the first place was the chance to do some serious gardening and spade work.

A first egg from the young Buffs (right)? We now have no
idea what the egg on 13th Jan was, maybe a sputter from the
Guinea Fowl?

And we get fed. of course. Any job which involves getting fed is better than any job that doesn't and Anna knows the way to our hearts with her delicious lasagna and apple crumble. No, not on the same plate! So a good time was had by all and the hosts now have a much improved panorama down across the River Shannon from their front door. There were just two uprights that the 'Health and Safety' Manager (Liz) would not let us touch and these had grown up to form a 'Y' wrapped around all three cables running down the lane. These though, Paul thinks the phone people should be willing to come and sort using a man-up cherry picker, especially as we've done all the hard work for them.

The fire hood gets a second polish.

So, 9 o'clock this morning saw us loading all the gear into the car, but we needed to head for the chainsaw main dealer in Boyle (East Brothers) first as I needed chain and bar oil for the machine, a new 4 mm round-file (for sharpening), a new chain (the existing one was well past its sell-by) and, annoyingly, a new pair of posh, kevlar, safety gloves. My 'old' pair (only 3 years old) had survived all the abuse I've dished out in my inexperience in 3 years of using the most dangerous piece of kit on the 'farm'. They were well used looking and soiled but had no nicks or cuts, tears or even undone stitching. Then at some point between me taking them off last week and stashing them, as usual, in the shelf in the shed in my chainsaw hard-hat, a rat has eaten great holes in the old leather of the palms. Thanks, rat! I hope you were one of the ones Blue has recently 'terminated'. So we needed to buy a new pair; simple enough except that my hands are quite big (XL) and all the XL shelves were empty except, by coincidence, for 'Stihl' gloves.

New brush-cutter / strimmer

While we were in that Alladin's cave of man-toys, we also accidentally bought a brush cutter / strimmer. This is a piece of kit which you need for the margins of your territory, where my little lawn mower dare not go and where you cannot allow sheep or rabbits to keep the herbage down. We've borrowed one in the past, to knock back the rushes in the East Field, but we hadn't bought one for ourselves. Every year Liz glowers at the nettles which grow in our 'woods' and I glower at the brambles along the side of my veg patch, at the rushes which grow in the field and the docks and plantains which erupt from the orchard turf, unchallenged by the geese. The geese would not top off a plantain even if they were down to the clay everywhere else. So we bit the bullet and asked the man if he might have a machine tough enough to tackle briars, docks, plantain and rushes but light enough to be managable by Liz (she insisted on being the main destructive force in this department so did not want a hulking great 'professional' machine that only I could lift). We therefore have, sitting in the living room on the sofa waiting for its first outing, a Stihl FS55, a 2-stroke with the 'handlebars' fitting and a shoulder harness. I think I can probably predict what we are up to tomorrow, more physical stuff!

Scorched Earth

One plant spared on this spraying exercise!

In these parts, the lay-by in front of your house or, if you have no front garden, the hard standing between your house front and the lane or public road, is referred to as 'your street'. Your street is very much part of the local culture of 'house keeping' and keeping it tidy is a big thing round here. The thing is to have NO WEEDS or, as far as we can see, no other sign of life apart from the farm dog.

Even a random gateway gets a dose.

Sadly the standard way to achieve this, at least among the older folks, is to spray it vigorously with some kind of broad spectrum herbicide. This might be a contact killer like Paraquat, or a systemic one like 'Round-Up' (Glyphosphate) but the effect is the same - great stripes of straw-coloured death in the verges just when your eyes are accustomed to the peaceful greens. They glare in the sun and stick out like a sore thumb. We find them ugly and offensive; we hate the 'scorched earth' effect and we weep (well, OK, maybe not quite) for the flora and fauna wiped out in the interests of "tidiness". Certainly we worry about the amount of chemical be lashed around.

Both sides of the road, 'napalmed' 

Some of these 'offenders' do both sides of the road and any nearby farm gateways, as well as the 'streets' outside any abandoned farm buildings which they presumably own and feel that they also need to keep tidy. They seem to see nothing wrong in this, so it is a regular feature of a drive down any of the lanes here. Our good friend John Deere Bob does it, and even expressed concern at our drive full of daisies and suggested that we need to spray it off. Our protests about "trying to be organic" and "not using any sprays here" just brought a bemused and baffled expression to his face - we are obviously a bit new and silly and inexperienced and have not yet found the true path to tidiness. You could no more talk him out of it than teach him to fly to the moon. I also have to watch where I am collecting my rabbit-treats. It has been my habit on dog walks to gather a handful of dandelion leaves and red clover stems as a treat for Goldie and the babies. I now have to avoid streets, farm gateways and abandoned buildings in case they have been sprayed recently, lest I bring back glyphosphate to my animals.

We are back to 3 goslings, these two new ones are from the
2nd batch, under 'Smudge'

There is a gleam of hope in all this despair. Plenty of the younger land owners do their tidying with powerful 'strimmers'; so even though the foliage and flowers get it, the ground stays green and is not coated with nasty chemicals. We just scythe our bit down to maintain the 'splay' so that you can see cars coming when you are nosing out of our gate. We have no 'street' to worry about - our front hedge is right on the lane.

Blue skies and Foxgloves

I suppose I should put in a quick comment on my "trying to be organic" line above. We currently think of ourselves as that dubious non-status "Nearly Organic" and I can hear the justified howls of protest from the truer exponents of the regime. The real organic producers have to jump through hoops and keep watertight audit trails on all their inputs (feed bag labels, receipts etc) and outputs (lists of where all their chicken poo goes, for example) in order to earn the certification, so quite rightly, they will guard the status jealously. The fact that we use no chemicals here but do NOT feed purely organic feed (I use standard commercial pig ration, feed wheat, lamb 'crunch', layers pellets, chick crumb and milled barley for example) would count for little in the eyes of the certification bodies. I claim to be 'nearly organic' but not too loudly within earshot of, for example Mentor Anne and Simon. They have been there, done that and bear the scars and trauma.

Keet at 15 days.

So, what else is happening? We are currently enjoying a proper heat-wave, with the Irish midlands getting temperatures of 28 degrees C, the forecasters issuing 'heat warnings' and my poultry discussion forum carrying reminders to keepers to provide extra water and keep it fresh and topped up. We have sheeted over the rabbits and the guinea fowl keets to provide shade, and we have taken to getting up early and doing all our hard physical gardening by about 11 am.

Eating outside in the hot evenings.

The B-team broody goose, 'Smudge' has hatched another gosling, so that we now have 3 including the big strapping 'George Junior'. She has one more egg left in this dysfunctional group, so she tends to focus on that and hand over the goslings to Black Feather, George and now also G-J to rear. He parades them around like a big brother should, teaching them where to drink and how to graze the best grass. The little silver keet who went all wobbly on us, survived a couple more days under 'intensive care' but we found him on his back, eyes closed, last night, so we put him out of his misery. The remaining ten are thriving.

The pigs are now much more used to me and love to have their necks and backs scratched while they are eating. Their bellies too, when they have done in the trough. If I stop I get nudges in the calves by little piggy noses the same as you would from a dog - "Oy, I was enjoying that! Why did you stop?"

With all the jobs done, we've been able to finally unfurl the sun-parasol on the 'terrace' table and to sit in the shade for some of the afternoon and even to eat a few meals outside. It's nice that these can be light and salad-y warm weather food and we are able to supplement the commercial stuff with our own lettuce, radishes, salad potatoes (Sharp's Express) and broad beans. We are looking forward to hosting the Silverwoods for a few nights. We were hoping we'd have bees by now but sadly still no word from the Two Marys, so the Silverwoods will just have to content themselves with the keets, goslings and piggies.

Down the Rushy Glen

Keen to stop all this lovely rain water going to waste, we decided that it would be a good idea to invest in a couple of the huge (1010 litre) water 'butts' that everyone uses round here. These could be a reservoir for refilling the pond and also for irrigating the poly tunnel but also to supply drinking water to a drinker on our East Field for the horses and soon the sheep. These come from Coca Cola in Dublin originally and are for sale at anything from about €45 to €75 but have lately been in short supply. We have clubbed together with Mentor(s) Anne and Simon who can possible get them, delivered, at the €45 end of the scale, but their supply has dried up, so we nipped out and got a pricier one locally, collecting it with the trailer. We want to start accumulating water now so that we have a full tank by the time we finish the pond.

We have rigged up a bit of 2nd hand guttering (also, partly, from Anne and Simon) to collect the water from the car port roof. These tanks are only made from plastic and aluminium, so are nice and light when empty, so that Liz and I could easily lift it between us and wrangle it into position. After a bit of rain over night it is already 5-6 inches deep in water. We find that we are now ahead of the curve. Keeping your rain water separate from the sewers is the LATEST THING in eco-warrior terms and is called "Blue-Greening". Get us!

Look at any picture of the East Field we have printed up to now and you will see a mess of rushes tall enough to tickle the bellies of sheep and horses, tall enough to hide them if they lie down. These grow easily here-abouts as soon as the land is allowed to get wet and neglected. The cattle will not eat them, so they just get worse and eventually take over the fields, rendering them useless as pasture unless the farmers bother to spray them and mow the fields; not many do unless pushed, as in this year, by serious shortage of fodder, or forced contractually by their landlords.

We do not want to be negligent managers of our grassland, and the sight of all those rushes was preying on our minds. I was going to have to hire a brush cutter for a day and have at them. I was talking about this to our fencing guy, Paul M and, generous guy that he is, he offered me the lend of his meaty, 'professional' strimmer to try out. This turned out to work like a dream, scything through the clumps like a knife through hot butter. The field is one and a half acres, so it took a few hours (about 4), some replacement "string" (tough nylon cord in the strimmer head) and 4 tanks of petrol but it looks very good now.

The rushes were sprayed last year by Mike the Cows when he was using the field for his cattle, so they are possibly weakened, and some have grass growing among the rush root-plate, but the theory is that the soft rush regrowth can be eaten by horses and sheep which should finish the tufts off and grass will win the grazing war in the end. Our pasture will be like a rush-free garden lawn (!). Liz fancied a go at this strimming game so we kitted her out with her best pink wellies, and my Husqvarna chain-saw gloves, helmet, mesh visor and ear defenders and she was away. It is not on record who she was thinking of as the whirling string zipped through the tufts sending a spray of mashed rush fibre flying in all directions and the decapitated stalks whipping away in the wind.

Meanwhile we have sought (and gained) permission from John Deere Bob to go newt surveying on the little pond at the bottom of his bank field. We explained that we might have to go look during daylight but also at night with a torch. Looking a bit twinkly eyed at Liz as if calculating how much he might get away with as a tease he warned us to be wary of the faeries in the dark down there as there were known faerie-forts (raths) near that water. I am remembering Pud Lady's little rhyme from when we were all small

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.......