Trimming the Edges.

Red Bartsia (Odontites verna)

In my dog-walk plant hunter amblings, I have 'found' another plant but I have to confess, completely failed to ID it until I was helped out by Anne. It is, in fact, Red Bartsia, a species I had not even heard of, never mind seen and it grows in good numbers in the verge ON the actual stone bridge at Feigh, as in on the few inches of soil on top of the tarmac. Liz and I had it first as Basil Thyme (which is Acinos arvensis in my ancient "Fitter, Fitter and Blamey") but when I tried to book it onto the Irish Biodiversity Database I could not find it listed, so I assumed I was wrong. I booked it instead as ordinary thyme (Thymus serpyllum) but by then we had met Anne at a garden centre and she had said 'send me a pic'. She advised that it was, in fact the Red Bartsia (Odontites verna) which is quite common out here. The Basil Thyme is, in fact, on the Irish list but is better known along the east side and, anyway, has since been renamed Clinopodium acinos. Every day is a school day. Fortunately, there is a helpful man at IBD who is happy to go in and edit your records if you find you have mis-keyed or made an error so that my plant will be Red Bartsia in perpetuity, not some dodgy thyme.

The geese clip a nice edge onto the front lawn. 

Most folk, if they want neat edges to their lawns, buy an edge trimmer or a pair of edging shears. Liz eschews such technology and lets the geese at ours. Every now and then the sheep-grazed lawn starts to creep shaggily out onto her new clean gravel of what will be the rose bed out front. We leave the sheep in the East Field and invite the geese to spend the day out on the lawn instead. They enjoy the grass not eaten by the sheep and also get into the habit of sneaking their long necks through the sheep fence to trim off the edge, very neatly.

Very very late this year but at last we are getting
a decent tomato crop. Just cheap old supermarket
plug-plants but they have good flavour. 

I have done stories in the past in here about old vehicles and we love that some of the old boys round here drive superbly disreputable tractors. Our near neighbour has an old grey Fergie, long since patina'd up with rust and often in Castlerea on a Saturday you can see an old red MF with a cab constructed from angle-iron, plywood, baler twine and with sheets of old plastic as windows. But our friend Sue took the cake this week with a description of an aul' fella who turned up to collect ten of her piglets (the ones we moved in a recent post) in the dodgiest combination of VW Golf and trailer she had ever seen.

Blue needs his sleep like the rest of us. 

"Well Lordy me (Wrote Sue in Facebook) ,,,you see all sorts over here,,, we have just had an old boy (lovely man) arrive to buy ten of our piglets, He arrived led in convoy by yours truly,,,,,in the oldest VW golf ever,,, think it was the prototype,,towing a ....and l say it loosely ,,,trailer... the boards on the sides that were there (originated on a pallet or ten,,,). They were rotted and split and an elephant could have walked sideways through the gaps,(I exaggerated about the elephant...). He took the trailer off the hook tow ,,,no chain ,,,no lights ,,,and he limped it down to the barn with my help...I prayed that the bit I was holding didn't fall off, the bar of the crossbar was two inches away from the main frame,,,tyres well , we have more tread on the stacks (of scrap tyres) we have here,,,should have sorted him out six for his car and trailer,,,(seven) a spare,,,,,he had wires sticking out of the black rubber lumps that went round,,,the rusted metally hub things,,,,,he looked at piggies ,,commented how fat and healthy they were,, counted me out the dosh,,,,no haggle....we loaded ten very quiet piggies ,,(cuppa declined),and instuctions onto the main road off our nice old gent and piggies went,,I pray that the floor of the trailer holds out and all piggies get to Ballina safely"

2 items of farm scrap turned up this week  - this mini 'horse'
shoe only 3 inches across which we are told may be from a
donkey. The sprung nose-ring is one you'd have fitted to
a calf to prevent it suckling when you were trying to wean
it and 'dry off' the mother. These are still for sale new. 

You just KNOW, don't you, that they all got home OK. Those guys just go on like that for decades - the trailer never quite breaks, the tyres are good for another hundred runs and the pigs would not try to escape just because he is a lovely old character. Ballina is at least an hour away up by Sligo town over some main roads. No-one will ever stop him and ask to see his NCT or driving licence and fair play to him for that. Good luck Piglet-buyer man from Ballina; may the wheels never fall off your ancient rig.

Meanwhile, we plod on with nothing much of drama to report. I am still in feeding JD Bob's cattle each day, a group of 7 bullocks the other side of Lisacul which is a car run, and another group down on his bank/bog fields, which is a borrow-the-tractor mission. I am also whizzing him to Roscommon twice a week to the out-patients. These are 'quick' missions which he often tries to convert into epic runs via assorted banks, cattle mart, the accountant, the Post Office, eateries (I never mind those!), can we just nip up this side street and call at this house (mysterious!) or just plain 'Scenic Tours'. In those latter, he knows these lanes like the back of his hand and obviously loves them but we guess does not get out down them much these days, so we take the back roads via Ballintober instead of the 'big' road through Ballymoe and he asks me to 'take it steady through the village' so that he can look. He tells me that "just round this corner, there is a 2 storey house" and delights to find he is correct as he tells me that if I take "this left at the cross roads" I will come out in Fairymount or Kilmurray. We have never missed yet. He must have this whole area imprinted on a mental map. "Ian KilBoyle is in that garveyard!" "That used to be a school house" "John Something or other lives there - he used to have a pub in Castlerea". No flies on Bob. Someone should write all this stuff down; a real aural history.

A Soft Day

Well, there was a nice surprise. Here in Ireland we all woke up on a Monday a couple of weeks back to find we all now had shiny new post-codes. We'd known it was on the cards, of course, but I assumed it was way off. Not so. Liz turned on the phone that morning and fired up Twitter to find notification - it was all switched on, websites running, messages all over social media and a lot of our friends logging in to find out theirs and what it was all about.

The best strawberries I have ever grown.

It is an impressive and cunning system and seems a bit ahead of the UK system we had all been used to 'over there'. Most importantly the 'Eircodes', which are made up of 7 alpha-numerics starting with a letter-number-number for the region (ours is F45) are unique to each building where as in the UK your post code was shared up one side of a street and could include dozens of houses. This makes them compatible with sat-nav systems and internet mapping (eg Google Maps) software if they need to be so that Mr Postie can pull up right outside your house and know he is at the correct place, even in this land of few road signs and fewer house numbers. There is also an 'app' (application) which will run on smart-phones which can generate directions from one address to another.

The turkeys did leave us a few currants. The raspberries and
strawberries are safely out of their thieving ways.

I am told that the last 4 digits, being numbers or letters allow for city housing densities throughout so that in the unlikely event that someone wants to build a 2nd capital of Ireland in Roscommon, they could actually accommodate all the houses and buildings without having to re-shuffle the codes round and about. Anyway, we have sent ours to everyone we could think of who might need it; if you are ever likely to write us a 'snail mail' letter then email, PM or text us for the code.

That fabulous beef rib roast from the last post

Our only experience of it so far is that it may work too well. I foolishly sent off a pre-paid letter containing a survey result and wrote the 'sender' address on the back including the new post code. The next day this envelope arrived back in our letter box instead of having gone to the survey company! I can only assume that either someone is being a dunce, or the OCR software spotted my Eircode on the back of the envelope and, not having one on the real address, let it prioritise mine. The envelope went back into the post office with a white jam-jar sticker over my sender address (and didn't come 'home a second time!).

There is plenty of colour in the garden just now, so we can
assemble a pretty table decoration.

There is an Irish expression which most Brits know even if they think it is just another piece of cod-Oirish along with 'to be sure, to be sure' and 'Be Jay-zus' and that is "A soft day". I reckon most think that this just means 'wet' and is merely the Irish being colourful and flamboyant in their speaking. Not so, again. A soft day is a day in which the rain is of a uniquely Irish type which I never experienced in the UK - continuous heavy drizzle. You get drizzle in the UK and, of course you get light rain and heavy rain, but heavy drizzle is a seeping, silent, insidious thing which sneaks up on you and wets you through without any of the violence of a good downpour. Without even the hiss or roar of proper raindrops.

Cherries splitting badly from the wet July while still unripe.

It seems to fall all day, evenly from a uniform grey sky, as if an uninterupted, wall to wall layer of cloud was just at tipping point. There are no threatening black patches, no funny lighting effects, no patches of blue and no fluffy, cauliflower-like billowings on a true soft day. The grey can be dark or even quite bright and thin, as if the sun is about to break through and the drizzle can ease (for minutes) and return (for hours) just to tease you but you will be tempted to go out in not your most waterproof coat (ahhh, it doesn't look THAT bad!) and you will suddenly realise that your hair is sopping wet and the wet has got down your neck and is all across your shoulders without you having felt any rain drops hitting your skin or scalp.

Greek thyme.

Why am I telling you this? It rains in Ireland, so what? Only that we had an absolute classic 'soft' day yesterday and even the Irish were commenting on it. It will have been a fairly wet July over all by the time the month ends - I have cherries splitting on the trees as a result of it. Ah well, we'll no doubt survive. Oh and I did once hear an Irishman actually say 'to be sure, to be sure, to be sure' - he was our Estate Agent, John (Sean) Callaghan and we were making small talk in the jungle that used to be the front lawn. Liz spotted me about to react and gave me a swift kick in the shins.

Greek wild mountain thyme

So if we've wanted sun this month, we've had to dream it up and mentally import it from sunnier climes. When Liz was over in Poros (Greece) last month, she was lucky enough to come home via a friend's place in Athens  and was driven about by the friend. They headed for the mountains outside Athens where there was a smallholding owned by another friend and Liz was presented with a small bundle of the local wild thyme plus instructions to dry it in a paper bag and then seperate the leaves from stems. She could then use the leaves as herbs for eating, or to scent a room in a pot-pourri or whatever. That thyme came up to the 'threshing' stage recently; basically you rub the leafy ends between your hands and all the leaves fall away. You pick out the few twiggy bits which try to get threshed out too and, lo!, a beautiful scented handful. An interesting smell, says Liz, like a mix of thyme and mint... quite pine-y. Very evocative of Greek sunshine too.

Like a couple of Greek fishermen mending their nets?

Then, like a couple of old Greek fishermen mending our nets in one of the rainless periods we had the job of sorting through the yards of fruit cage netting I had taken off the big keet run (now vacant for the moment). This is under the black spruce trees, so in 2 years the fruit cage mesh had accumulated quite a few dead twigs and 'pine' cones and we wanted to disentangle all these and clean up the netting before we rolled it up to pack it away for some future use (turkeys and fruit comes to mind!). We sat down with the net spread out in front of us and gradually walked through it with our fingers, teasing out the twigs and letting it fall between us clean. We were just amused by the look of the job - more Greek memories for Liz as antidote to the 'soft' weather here.