One Swallow.....

One swallow, they tell us, does not make a Summer. We hear of one seen in County Clare today and he seems to be doing a blooming good job at the Summer thing. We have had a few days now of blue skies, no wind, warm sunshine and temperatures soaring up towards 18ºC which may not be that hot by global standards but it is pretty good for Co Roscommon in April. We have scanned the blue for our own swallows but none seen so far and unfortunately, when they do, thay may be disappointed again in the nest site searches.

They coped when our cats were tiny kittens but now Blue is a full grown and very athletic hunter who can defend our barn doors like a Premiership goalie defending an open goal. He can leap from a standing start to get an out-stretched paw to any part of the doorway. The swallows, diving from bright sunshine to the deep shade of the Tígín don't stand a chance and last year he caught one of the breeding pair and bit chunks out of it before we could do anything. We love this skill in Blue when he aims it at rats so we have to put up with it if he takes a few birds. The only mercy is that there are plenty more barns round here not 'defended' by Blue.

Purple sprouting broccoli - a bit late on parade but now
yeilding mightily.

By coincidence, the Irish Biodiversity Data Centre outfit sent us one of their periodic 'pep talk' reminders encouraging us to record even the most common-place mammals. "The Brown Rat", they said, "Are you guys not seeing them any more?" Apparently 'we' have only recorded 70 odd for the whole of Ireland in the last 12 months and the IBDC guessed that this was likely a lack of recording rather than the rats magically going extinct. I must admit I'd not been scoring the ones killed by Blue, who probably does for 20 or so per year. Blue promptly obliged me with a carcass left in the yard the next morning, so that one has been noted.

Much to the amusement of several friends I had been using the gloomy, windy, rainy days to carry on with that bit of knitting. Having done a pretty good job on the test-square I thought I had better make someting useful, so Liz found me a pattern for a 'beanie hat', just 24 cm of 109 stitch wide 'stocking stitch' (if that means anything to you) then some fancy reducing and a sew up of a seam. I'm not very fast, so it has taken a while and there were plenty of anguished calls for help to Liz where I had dropped a stitch or, on one occasion gone to grab a dog and slid a dozen off the end of a needle. I finished it yesterday and Liz has actually taken it off to Knitting Club tonight to show it off.

Fancy 'reducing' to get from 109 stitches to about 12.

She has been joking around that it is in rainbow colours because I will wear it to the Referendum on 22 May on Marriage Equality. Well, I'm a Brit so I can't vote in that one  (it's a Constitutional change) and anyway, we don't 'do' politics on this blog so I am not about to comment. The politics here baffles me after the more class-orientated UK format and, for any given policy (The new water charges are good/bad, for example) I am no more sure whether to vote Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil than I was when we arrived. Ah well. I think this was just a ball of wool which Liz had spare and disappointingly does not have any green for the true rainbow. I'll just wear it when it's cold again, shall I?

Those 'barge ends'; the diagonal "planks" of concrete capping
the gable walls.

Meanwhile, our white-washing of the barns ended up very well, with even the apparently thinner areas turning a good white as they dried. It all looks very smart and especially so from a distance. I have been doing a bit of research around lime plaster and it is, apparently, quite a skill which many tradesmen would have worked hard to learn before the days of modern concrete and mortars ( pre 1910-ish). Not only was there all the chemistry around quick-lime, slaked lime and the percentage of the hydroxide powder which was actually Calcium (you'd get 'CL90' grade delivered if you wanted 90% Calcium for fancy masonry for example.

A candidate for lime mortar? The north
end of the Tígín.

Then there was the ratio of sand to lime (taking into account that the lime swells as it wets) which they would estimate by decanting water into the sand to see how much water was needed to fill the gaps between the sand grains. All clever stuff; and old traditional skills forgotten when everyone started using modern cement, so now having to be re-learned by anyone wanting to restore old and listed buildings. I have seen on the internet, some people buying the 'lime mortar putty' by the lidded bucket load and using a 'gun' like the big brother of a bathroom mastic sealant gun to inject it into the gaps. It might be expensive, but I reckon I could cope with that without doing the 7 year Trades apprenticeship.

Off to enjoy some more sunshine now, then. Experience tells us it won't last.

Three in the Dog House

We have three animals currently on the 'naughty step' but I have not photographed them so I will post a selection of nice pics and catch you up with what they are about as we go along - the first 2 though are a Buff Orpington chick and a Jersey Giant (black) at 3 weeks.

First customer for sitting outside the headmaster's office to await his fate is Blue the Cat, who manages to hook a passing swallow out of the air as it dives down and into the Tígín where they are currently nest building. I can only imagine that the swallow failed to adjust his eye sight to the dark inside on a bright morning; they are usually well able to avoid our cats. Luckily I saw him out of the kitchen window playing with the victim who was patently still alive. He would not yield the bird to me, but his 'Mum' (Liz) has a more menacing way of scruffing the cats and growling "MINE!" at them which makes them drop the capture. Liz scooped the swallow up, shaken and not stirred and we laid it in a tea-towel in the only place where cats fear to tread- the Goose House with its two broody geese. It was still alive by lunchtime and then gone by mid afternoon and we have since regularly seen both 'our' pair whizzing about as normal so we assume this time he got away with it and , we hope, learned to be a bit more careful coming through the doors of the Tígín.

Next up, our bitch-pup, Poppy, now 11 months old, so old enough to KNOW BETTER. She has adopted the habit of chewing wetly, or just sucking, the crotches of any of Liz's clothes - knickers, jeans, pyjamas. She does not always actually damage them, just renders them unwearable till they have been washed. She never touches mine, just occasionally has a chew on my sandals, but never clothes. Naturally, we are trying to cure her of this annoying habit. Chunter chunter.

 Our final customer today is the hen we are now calling 'baldy' whom we believe, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, may have given up laying eggs for good. You'll recall that we had a eggy hiatus and changed the feed for an organic, Pedigree Petfoods product. This seems to have sorted the soft-shell problem and the lack of eggs, so that we now get 2 good eggs most days but ONLY 2 from three hens. We watch closely and have seen that the other two hens slope off from the rooster every morning and lay their eggs in the nest boxes, but 'Baldy' (so named because she gets William's 'attentions' so often that his spurs have worn away some of the feathers across her back) is never missing. Mentor Anne tells me that it is almost unheard of for a rooster to bother 'treading' a barren or infertile hen, so she has advised me to beat the bounds, searching all the hedgerows, nooks and crannies, where I'll almost certainly find a huge stash of eggs (Simon says this normally happens in winter as the vegetation dies back; that's when you find the caches). I have had a really thorough search today though, rummaging through nettle patches and ground elder with a hoe, and I am blowed if I can see any. So, unless she gets her act together before the new babies reach PoL (Point of Lay), the stock pot looms for her.

Meanwhile, in happier news all 8 of our chicks have survived to 3 weeks old. This is fairly unusual, apparently, you normally lose a few. The horses are also doing well, enjoying their new 'rushless' field and learning to come to us on call to earn a Polo mint treat. Liz has not yet done her official newt survey but by coincidence I found one swimming in the goose-drinker this morning. It's a very egg-loaded female (says Liz) and was probably looking for a suitable pond, which the drinker is NOT, having vertical plastic sides. We rescued it to a more suitable 'pond' and Liz was able to break out the official forms and record it for our 10 km square (grid ref M68). We got a nice reply from the Official Irish Wildlife Trust website to say that this was a 'New Record' for M68, smooth newts never having been recorded for this square before. This actually makes it pointless for us to survey Bob's pond, as the box has been ticked, but we will do it anyway and they can have a 2nd tick if we find any.

Today we collected up our latest addition, the meat-breed doe rabbit, Goldie. She came from Mentor Anne's 'stable' and is pregnant to Anne's Californian White buck, Bobby. This might get confusing - we have John Deere Bob, our friend and neighbour, Bob the mini-Shetland horse and now Bobby the potential Father to Goldie's 'kittens', who, if all goes well, are due around June 13th. We will be over-run with baby animals if we don't watch it. I do not want to be counting chickens, but we have the potential now for goslings on 22nd May, baby rabbits from Ginny and Padfoot on 2nd June and now Goldie.

Oh - and the other pictures? In order, the three horses having a rest, some horse product on the rhubarb, that newt, Goldie and some pear blossom just opening now on a Conference Tree we had as a gift last summer from Steak Lady.

That's it for now.