Wanderlust.

One of our most successful crops in 2013 in terms of yield, productivity and the general beauty and cleanliness of the crop was the Jerusalem Artichokes. Back in February 2013 we planted just half a dozen tubers each of 2 varieties, 'Fuseau' and an old fashioned 'knobbly' type obtained from Mentor Anne, each planted as a short row in a 4 m raised bed. The tubers quickly sprouted and rapidly grew into the expected 8 foot tall 'sunflower' style windbreak which were blown around a bit by the strong winds coming across Vendor Anna's 5-Acre field so that I had to stake them.

One of the 'Mini-Buffs' gets comfy in the nest box

When the greenery was all done, I cut off the stems a foot from the ground and left the crop in the ground; it copes very well with that being, after all, an over wintering organ which seems unaffected by slugs and other pests. When we started digging we realised we were in for an impressive crop - at least 2 kg coming off each plant, and half a wheel barrow from each row. If we were going to be eating or even selling these, we'd have been on to a winner. Unfortunately we have tried the first 'fruits' in small quantities and find that both varieties have that marked effect on us for which 'Fartichokes' are famous.  We tried a variety of cooking methods from roasting to boiling and so on, but all to no avail.

Red Elf Cup fungus, prolific in our hedgerows now.
(Sarcoscypha coccinea)

This is amusing if you are still a school boy but we find it excessive and downright unpleasant to the degree where we have decided not to grow them in 2014 and to 'bin' the crop. But wait! We are currently thinking about 'doing' pigs this year and if we do then they will be kept in the Secret Garden and one thing everyone knows about pigs is that they love rooting around for tubers and underground food. So, just for the 'waste not want not' reason, we decided to dispose of the crop by planting them at random in the area where the pigs may be kept. Liz and I barrowed them round today from allotment to Secret Garden and spent a happy hour with me digging random holes with the pointy ended Irish shovel, and Liz tossing in a couple of tubers into each hole. They may grow, they may not. They are under the trees. They may produce a crop, or not, and the pigs may or may not happen and may or may not dig them up and like them, but it has got to be better than tossing them onto the compost heap.

Fiat Panda goes 'farm vehicle' again with a load of hay

I have had to 'rescue' the Guinea Fowl a couple of times over recent days when they have developed a wanderlust and wandered down beyond the main entrance gate. One of them sneaks through the hedge into the lane and then gets separation anxiety and kicks up a ruckus shouting to the mate, who is either still in the garden or has nipped through the other hedge into the 5-Acre field. They would probably sort themselves out in time and return safe. One of my friends on the poultry discussion forum is a game-keeper and says that his Guineas used to find themselves half a mile from home but always got back safely by night fall. We just worry about the lane and the farm vehicles charging about, and the 'ruckus' that would happen if 'separation anxiety' turned into bereavement does not bear thinking about! So we hear it kicking off and we sprint down to the gate and try to round up the wanderer which, needless to say, nips happily back through the hedge and does a pheasant impression, exploding into the air, clucking and flying 6 feet above the ground all the way back to the poly tunnel followed by the other bird.

Re-Coppiced Ash with 21 tree-rings.

Also AWOL tonight (all be it in full view) are the two ex-Silverwood 'pet' rabbits, Ginny and Padfoot who nipped through a gap in their fence which I inadvertently created when moving them to new grass. These ladies have done this to us before and are the devil to recapture as they are very fast these days and nip down to our Northern boundary where there is a collapsed, ancient corrugated shed (might have been an outside loo) which has sagged down a 5 foot bank. They hide under the sheeting and are safe from getting grabbed by us. They also seem to be safe from foxes and mink as they have played this game before and always seem to be there to greet us in the morning.

Tonight's supper, 3.06 kg hubbard carcass!

We catch them by either rounding them up into the Kitchen Garden where we can corner them against the chicken wire, or in Ginny's case, when she runs into the chicken house for some reason, and can be easily shut in and grabbed. That, though, will have to be tomorrow. It is dark now and there is no way we can catch them at present so they will have to take their chances with our bushy tailed, red furred chum. Good luck Ginny and Padders.

Country Lore (John Deere Bob says...)

The Whooper Swans on Lough Feigh are very noisy at the moment, especially on these cold, crisp, windless, moonlit nights. We can hear them clearly honking and chuntering to one another when we go outside in the evenings to check on things and 'patrol' the dogs (those are mainly about comfort stops for the pooches than checking the boundaries, but if it deters our bushy tailed red-furred chum then so much the better). Local Country Lore has it (this translates more accurately as "John Deere Bob tells us that...") that the geese being noisy is a bad sign, a sure indicator of cold weather and frost to come. I suspect that rather, we are hearing the geese more because the air is already cold, crisp and still, and the sound travels better.

2 plus 1 makes three?

Our goose issue continues, with George having paired off firmly with one of the females (Goocie) to the exclusion of the other (Goosey) whom he now drives away, all be it fairly gently and with no killer instinct. This is not too much of a problem during the day, while they are out in the orchard, but he was having a bit of a go too, inside the goose house at night, where she had less chance of escape. As a result she was reluctant to be shepherded 'home' and showed every sign of not wanting to go in. She slept at least one night in the 'foyer' bit just inside the door while George and his chosen one claimed the 'bedroom' part.

We decided we needed to separate them so that she would not get hurt while we sorted out what to do. This proved dead easy; I re-opened the door and she exploded out, as if she couldn't get out of George's way quickly enough, and between us, Liz and I gently shepherded her round the building to the yard-side door and back into the goose house but outside the wire mesh. She now sleeps there among the feed bins and hay bales, safe and sound. I have put a bucket of water in there for her. She trots back to the orchard each morning to rejoin her sister and His Lordship.

William the Conqueror, still our alpha male.

Meanwhile I have posed a question on my poultry discussion website to ask any goose-keepers what they advise. Is this 'One-Woman Man' thing likely to stick, or will George relent as we come into spring time and Goosey joins Goocie in the egg-laying game? Naturally, there were as many suggestions and opinions as there were replies, but they made for some interesting reading. At one end we had 'do nothing, keep them together like you have' and he will accept her as the hormones start to flow. At the other I had an interesting suggestion - to separate George from the chosen one and make him stay with the 'reject' goose till he learned to love her. In between was even a suggestion to keep the gander with each goose on alternate days. Anyway, we decided to play the waiting game, separating the lonely girl at night and reuniting everyone in the morning, hoping that as spring progresses and George comes into sexual maturity (he's only a youngster and has never actually met any other geese till he arrived here, so he'll only now be learning some inter-goose social skills) all will be well.

Our chickens, on the other hand, have all now settled down into a lovely, stable rhythm and pace of life. We have 9 hens from the various sources (the original 'Lovely Girls', the '8-Ball' and the Hubbards) and these are marshaled around , protected and 'seen to' by our two remaining roosters, William the Conqueror and 'Mr Buff', our big Buff Orpington from the 8-Ball group, hatched at Easter. These two boys get on really well with William having a slight edge on the 'alpha male' scale. They all sleep together, with the Guinea fowl on the perches in the main chicken house except that is, for the Marans Girls (Bubble and Squawk) who persist in going to bed in the smaller 'temporary' house, but that mainly because we have not pressed the point and forced them to move in with the rest. I probably should.

In other news, Liz dabbled her toes back into education and training, going on a 'Train the Trainers' course just before Christmas, mainly as a way of consolidating her existing, but UK-based, skills into a form recognised here in the Republic where they even look a bit sideways at her Open University degree. Well, this being Liz, she can do this training stuff with her eyes closed, so the certificate we received this morning carries the very satisfying grade "Distinction". Go Lizzie!

And last but not least some more of our tongue in cheek long-distance therapy by voodoo-chain-saw. One of Liz's contacts had been suffering from the unpleasant ailment, cystitis, and felt she'd quite like the word included on our 'death row' of words painted on logs so that they could be symbolically rent asunder. All done now and the pictures are posted on the image sharing website. That nice piece of (re)coppiced ash you can see me cutting through is neatly stacked in the log store. The contact is now cured but I suspect that the genuine antibiotics she was prescribed may have had more effect on that than our messing 500 miles away, but we hope we brought a smile to her face.

Craft and Conflict(s)

We mixed a bit of fun in with the logging today to answer a friend's desire for a bit of 'revenge'. One of Liz's friends is having a torrid time at work currently being asked to take over and rescue a failed project in another department but at the same time keep the colleague who has failed, sweet. The failing project ex-manager is known only as 'SHE' and she is not at all impressed by being rescued and replaced and is being a total bitch but Liz's chum has been instructed by the boss to (using modern parlance) "suck it up". We suspect that SHE is only still in the job because the company has failed to even start a disciplinary process so cannot actually sack her yet. We think her time may come if she is found guilty of even half the devious and conspiratorial manouvres that have been reported and which include pouring poison into the ear of the external client for whom the project is being done.

Be all that as it may, cleaving through wood with an axe has got to be a good way of venting one's spleen so Liz jokingly offered to paint the word 'SHE' onto a chunk of wood and have me chop it to bits while she took photographs which the friend could then look at and dream of being able to exact a more physical and satisfying revenge on this hated enemy. How could we refuse? Therapy at a distance by axe-murder. The friend (and others) were delighted with the pictures and are suggesting (tongue in cheek, presumably) that we could take commissions! Mad Boss anyone? Evil Nurse D?

Also in a possible conflict situation is the new gander, George. We can't be sure yet but I saw him today having a pop at one of the female geese and moving as if to claim the other, as if he has 'chosen' one of the girls and decided to reject the other. Tonight as I tried to shepherd them home, which normally works easily as a group of three, he suddenly lunged at one of the girls causing her to veer off track and refuse to go into the goose- house with George and the 'chosen one'. I had to call Liz to assist and between us, via several circuits of the building past the no-longer-comforting-bedroom-doorway, we finally got her to go in. This may just be a one-off, heat of the moment thing and they may all be good again tomorrow but we will have to watch this closely. We can't have George going all one-woman man on us, particularly if he is going start beating up the 'rejected' sister. Watch this space on this one.

Meanwhile we have gone all 'crafty'. From Carolyn of the mini-horses, came a generous supply of baby milk formula tins (SMA brand, the 900 g size) with lids. Liz decided these would be ideal for storing bakery ingredients - flour, sugars, nuts and so on - and would prevent the over-stuffed avalanching cupboard problem which you may know from your own experiences. We set about hunting (unsuccessfully) for coloured 'Fablon' book covering 'sticky-backed' plastic but finally settled on shelf covering sheet. Liz scored some of this by asking in a number of hardware stores for "the stuff your Granny used to cover her shelves with". This had the man in Cahill's on Castlerea Main Street nipping upstairs calling back "I know EXACTLY what you mean!" and reappearing with a choice of colours.

So with the tins cleaned out we started a little cottage industry with Liz measuring and cutting and me smoothing the film onto the curve of the tins. Liz then fired up the label printing computer and thus these rather nifty storage tins are born. We have used up the ten we got and are now off down to Carolyn's to scrounge more, of which she has a good supply, having fed Hungry Henry (2 in February) on the contents. Up-Cycling!

Settled in.

Left to right, Goosey, Goocie and George. 

Our new gander, George, has settled in well with his new women. They were a bit shouty on the day we took the previous gander away from them, maybe suffering from separation anxiety but have calmed right down now. There was no fighting - I just saw one prod by one of the geese which had him nipping a few paces out of range, but that evening all three allowed me to shepherd them 'home' to their night quarters where they all three seem to be a lot calmer and quieter about their supper feed. Perhaps it was the old gander doing all the hissing and shouting to make sure that once I'd put the feed in I got out of the way again fast; George does not do this.

William and 'Miss White' (a Hubbard) peck at the frozen pond.

George's former life had him in a bit of lawn with a couple of drakes but just what Charlotte calls "a small paddly pool" to bath in. He does all the head-dipping and showers water over his back and preens himself but we are wondering if maybe he has not learned how to swim. So far he has not ventured into our bigger water bodies (the enamel bath, half of a blue plastic drum and a 5 foot diameter, butyl lined pond) for any kind of total immersion baptism. He watches the women go in but does not dare to see if he will float. No doubt he'll get there; the other geese took days and weeks to learn the ramp up to the bath. So for the moment he looks a little grubby, and not the pristine white of a well splashed, dipped goose.

Sorry for the poor picture. Guinea fowl in flight. 

We are amused by the ability of the Guinea fowl to fly despite being wing-clipped by the guy who sold them to us having clipped their wings, allegedly knowing what he was doing. He proudly showed us to cut only one wing (which would be correct) and to only cut the main primaries back to the point at the tip of the alula (thumb) feathers. Well these guys could fly over Liz's head (about 5 foot 1 inch) from the day they were clipped, so as a method of preventing them tree-roosting or straying it was doomed to failure. This did not, as it turned out, represent a problem because they have been perfect angels from day 1, never attempting any of these bad habits. Min, the female, is seen here descending from the orchard gate; she rather took me by surprise and hence the poor photo quality.

Blue skies! (and a First Quarter Moon)

Meanwhile, we have surprised ourselves by being able to stick rigidly to our New Year's Resolutions. We decided jointly to have a 'dry' January after the excesses of Christmas, so not a drop of alcohol has passed our lips. Admittedly this is only the 2nd weekend but we are feeling good about this and we are likely to hang in there. Liz decided no more smoking indoors, so she now goes outside whatever the weather to puff away. The plan is to make the house no longer smell of tobacco smoke, but it has also had a good effect on the actual amount she smokes. She has even gone outside in the worst weather when I am saying "Ah come on - surely you'd be forgiven in this gale and rain!"

Knitted by Liz - Raglan sweater

My other resolution is to FINISH the winter with a full log store instead of a part, or 'almost', empty one. This too has been going well and lately I have been attacking some big trunk/bole pieces of ash which Bobby and I cut last winter (and in doing so killed my old chain saw). These bits sat around in the yard all year deciding whether to be rustic benches or firewood but I have now started slicing them up and splitting the slices into 'logs' for the range. Today I treated myself to a splitting wedge to cut down on the damage I am doing to my good axe by belting it from behind with a sledge hammer when it sticks part way through the grain.

And finally, Liz has finished my Raglan sweater, her biggest project since the most recent outbreak of knitting. We are both very pleased with it and she has showed it off to the Knit and Natter club where the ladies know about these things and are impressed by the even tension and consistent knitting, as well as by the skill with which she has sewed it all together. Liz is now scouting through an enormous pile of knitting mags borrowed from Carolyn for what to create next. Any suggestions?

George and the Ladies' Christmas

Red Kuri Squash - nice fudgy texture when roasted.

Hot on the heels of my 'Wren Boys' post comes another tradition from these parts which was new to me, that of Ladies' Christmas. Mrs Silverwood's post in Facebook has it thus. “Nollaig na mBan” or “Little Women’s Christmas” is an old custom that’s still celebrated by women all over Ireland. It goes back to the days when large families were the norm. Men never lifted a finger in the house to help, and were never expected to. If a man washed the dishes, he would be called an “auld woman” by other men. No full blooded Irish man was prepared to risk that!

Ominous sky precedes our latest "Category Orange" storm, Christine

But each year, after the Christmas holiday, tired women finally got a break – for one day, at least. On January 6th (the same day as the Epiphany), men would take over of the housework, offering women a chance to go out to relax with each other." Nollaig na mBan would be pronounced 'Nollag na Morn' or there abouts. Now call me a cynic but I think this tradition might be more 'fondly dreamed about' than actually happening. I cannot see those kind of blokes, Irish or otherwise, who'd let their women do all the work and never lift a finger, suddenly bringing their women folk tea and toast in bed on Day 12 and happily volunteering to knock up a delicious curry for when they get back from the pub.

George and the author. Note rainbow.

Readers who have been with me for the past 12 months, will know of our goose in-breeding problem. Our first three geese, Goosey, Goocey and Gander joined us last January advertised as a breed-able trio and we didn't know enough then to spot that Gander had serious wry-tail (or to realise that this might be a problem). We also suspect that they may have been a sibling group possibly even from the same clutch, brother and sisters. They settled in and got nice and clean and healthy; it was when they started breeding that we got some problems - infertile and dead-in-shell goslings, deformed babies with necks twisted round, goslings who went lame after a month or two, completely losing the motor control of their legs or just fading and dying. Out of 17 eggs incubated, we ended up with just 2 full grown young ones.

We decided to cease breeding with these three birds and to either just collect eggs (which one of the geese is still producing every other day all through Christmas and the New Year) or to swap out the gander so that we could out-cross rather than in-breed. Step forward then, our friends Carolyn and Charlotte of the miniature horses who had come out of geese after all sorts of fun and games with mink attacks but had been left with one lonely successful gosling.

This bird, named George even before anyone could sex him was hand reared by Charlotte and is as dotty and tame as anything, loving to have his neck tickled and to be cuddled and handled. As he was on his own, he grew up with Charlotte's motley mixture of call ducks and 'Swedish' ducks and most recently was running with a couple of drakes whom he used to marshall and follow around. We THINK he is a gander. A friend of Charlotte's who keeps a lot of geese thinks he is, from the stance and behaviour but admittedly did not pick him up to check his equipment.

George meets his women (He is closest to camera)

To cut a long story short, we have swapped out 'Gander' with 'George' today and George, after an hour in a holding pen to make sure they'd not fight and to let him see his new surroundings in peace, is now released into the orchard with the girls. They were a bit shouty when their previous fella suddenly disappeared, perhaps anxious to attract him back, but seem to have settled down now with George. I am hoping they have bonded enough to be able to shepherd all three 'home' tonight and shut them up in the relatively confined space of their sleeping quarters. I may have to quarter them apart for this first night. So.... welcome aboard George.

Nearly finished. Raglan sweater.

In other news we are currently surviving the recent wind storms (latest was named Christine; I don't know when Atlantic anti-cyclones started to get names) with, thankfully, no more damage. We experimented with a red kuri squash, a gift from the Silverwoods, and found that roasted it has a lovely delicate flavour and a fudgy texture. We will keep some seeds and try to get it to grow in our calf muck heap. Liz has almost finished my raglan knit sweater, the biggest thing she has attempted in this recent burst of the craft. Meanwhile we are sploshing about in wellies with mud everywhere after the recent, seemingly relentless rain, and wishing spring would come and it would all dry out a bit.

Tough Aul' Birds

I promised to report back on the 'Duxelle' (mushroom and ham based) stuffing Liz created to use up some of our mushroom glut, using the Darina Allen (Ballymaloe Cookery School) recipe, and I am happy to report that it was delicious. Full of flavour, too, was the roast chicken it accompanied, being the tiny carcass of the Sussex Ponte bird we culled just before New Year because she had injured her self 'beyond repair', possibly the rather bedraggledy girl we knew as 'Baldy' last summer. I can not be as complimentary as this about the texture of this bird - we were both really surprised at the toughness of the meat. She had received a fairly standard roast having been spatch-cocked and looked 'normal' but as soon as we started to attack it we were switching to sharp steak knives to cut meat from bone. The meat thus cut was very good and perfectly edible but it was a struggle to bite through the skin and we ended up ripping our half (each) to pieces with our hands and teeth, Medieval Banquet style.

Of course we quickly worked out that these Sussex Pontes, our old originals obtained at point of lay (20 weeks old) in May 2012, are 2 years old, easily the oldest chicken we have ever eaten. Standard commercial birds are pushed to killing weights in just a couple of months, commercial free range and organic birds more like 80-100 days and our own Hubbards were being eaten at between 100 and 140 days. This is why, of course, there are recipes around like 'Coq au Vin' designed to slowly cook a sinewy old bird to edible tenderness. We will know for next time and not try to fast-roast our 'geriatrics'; Heaven knows what the Marans birds will be like - they are more like 6 years old! Ah well, Baldy was left with plenty of meat on her bones when we'd finished our Medieval gnawing (and we were perfectly well fed on the meat we had eaten and the good range of veg accompanying her and the Duxelle stuffing) so she went into the stock pot and got the hours of gentle simmer she'd really needed.

Meanwhile our inner 'tough aul' birds' have been called on over the last couple of days as a result of the weather. Last night another 'orange warning' wind storm came through and blew a hole in my theory that the outbuildings are safe enough as long as the wind is from the south. We heard the mild clang in the dark of a sheet of corrugated iron going air-borne and the dogs woke up and started fretting. In the dark at half six or so, I ventured out with dogs to check on things (the dogs only because dogs fretting in the night can mean that someone has an upset bowel and if they can't get out you will end up cleaning up 'accidents' indoors). Our way up the cattle race was blocked by a long sheet of corrugated iron and a quick scan with the torch showed me that the chickens had lost a roof panel. I think it had simply shaken loose on its nails and slid down like an avalanche to land in the yard; the wooden frame of the roof there is quite badly rotted and probably long overdue replacement. In the dark, though, with the wind blowing a hooley and the rain coming down, there was not a lot I could do - the chickens were all OK not being directly below the new hole. I went back to bed to sweat out the wind noises and pray that no more panels went for a fly about.

That was our job, then, for the morning, trying to shore up and replace rotted roof timbers, then slide the sheeting back up its 'slot' and fasten it down with new screws and waterproof washers. Luckily the wind had abated a lot and the rain was now in bands between which you could nip out and scramble reasonably safely on roof ladders. It remains to be seen whether our repair will hold, the forecast has several more wind systems coming through. Mercifully, we only lost a roof panel and that not damaged. The internet and news are full of homes flooded, power lines down, rivers bursting their banks and coast roads impassable. Our sympathies to anyone who is really struggling through all this. We also take our hats off to the earlier Irish resident 'tough aul' birds' who survived all this kind of weather and mud without the benefit of modern outdoor clothing, power tools, light aluminium ladders and Posidrive screws.

Christmas is all over. The tree has been stripped of its finery and now languishes on the pile of 'sneddings' awaiting its fate on the range fire. The tinsel, baubles, pine cones and fairy lights are back in their crates in the Utility Room till next time. The cards are in the recycling. The Christmas Cake is all gone, the huge pud is cut up into sensible one-meal portions and frozen. Liz had blitzed through the house sweeping up the shed pine needles, pieces of dog-chewed decorations and rescuing the (thankfully plastic these days) silver baubles which we'd displayed artistically in a big bowl on the coffee table. Blue the cat had invented a good game of scooping them out of the bowl with a front paw and watching them roll onto the floor, whence they ended up under the sofa, the settee and the tree. Thank you, Blue, we have retrieved them all now.

Mushroom Soup and Duxelle Stuffing

And so to 2014. Happy New Year. It has dawned for us a bit grey and gloomy but mild enough and windless. We were half of a mind to go to bed early and catch up with it this morning but in the event we ate a lovely meal and then stayed up watching some gentle TV stuff on DVD and we 'First Footed' before we went to bed.

The meal was a beautifully flavoursome, slow roasted shoulder of one of our own lambs (Dora the Explorer) served with sprouts and chestnuts, leeks and parmesan cheese with me doing roast parsnips and spuds, It was followed by some excellent home-made trifle (no 'sponge-fingers' and raspberry jelly for us - we went with some left over Dorset Apple Cake chunks and a purée of blackberries). The lamb had been smeared with olive oil, garlic, lemon juice and anchovies for 24 hours and was then roasted at 130 degrees for 4 hours, then rested under its foil and a tea towel for an hour. Gently does it. We were delighted to realise that most of the main ingredients were our own produce - the lamb, veg, garlic, herbs, blackberries and all the tastier for that.

The TV was a couple of episode from our 1999 boxed set of the Alaska based series "Northern Exposure" which we find very gentle and relaxing, plus the DVD of 'The Blues Brothers' which I got for Christmas. There are very few films that just 'tickle' me - I find them so funny that I am famous for breaking down into a fit of giggles and fall off the furniture struggling to draw a breath like some kind of hysterical lunatic. John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd's musical masterpiece is one such - it works every time. In fact we slightly under estimated how long it would play for and the final chase sequence was in full flow as midnight clicked round, so we missed any Big Ben bonging or Radio folk shouted count-downs and caught up with things a few minutes after the hour.

We always 'First Foot' our houses; in fact we are probably slightly eccentric in the way we treat the house with as much respect as if it was an important relative; a living thing. When we were building we used to talk to the house, as if to check that relighting fires in the hearths after all those years was 'OK' with the house and might even cheer it up to feel warm again. At the end of each week of work, as we left for Silverwoods, we'd wish it goodbye and assure it that we weren't abandoning it, only leaving for a few days. Call us scatty if you like; it's just the way we roll. Anyway, First Footing to us is now part of New Year. The first person across the front threshold must be as close to 'tall dark and handsome' as you can get (No comment!) and must come armed with a coin to represent money, bread for 'food' whisky for 'drink', coal for 'warmth' and salt for 'savour'. You must open the back door to let the old year out before you open the front door to greet the First Footer who represents the new one. Here, I fulfill the role, so I nip out the back as the countdown starts, with all the goodies on a plate, leaving the door ajar (but not ajar enough to let the dogs out) and sprint round to the front and wait for Liz's beckoning which signifies that the midnight hour is rung round. The coal goes on the fire, the bread and salt gets nibbled upon, the money is just the money and you can probably guess the fate of the dram of Black Bush! And so to bed.

Every now and then we like to take a stroll round the 'estate' catching up on how all the parts are getting through the winter. Today we included the poly tunnel in our stroll and were delighted to find more chestnut mushrooms flourishing in the spent mushroom compost. First it seemed to be just a few which I could fit in my hand, but then there were more and more, too much for Liz's double hand-full, then overflowing the first pot we grabbed and ended up as just under the kilogram in a big garden tub - mushrooms are not very dense so a kilogram is a good volume. We suddenly had a glut.

Our first port of call in looking for ways to use up these 'local' ingredients out here in the 'Wesht' is Darina Allen, Queen of Ballymaloe Cookery School (and organic farm) in East Cork and she came up with a lovely mushroom soup into which went the bulk of the kilogram. She also describes a 'Duxelle' stuffing which we can use for the late Sussex Ponte chicken tonight. This is a mix of ham, mushrooms, thyme, parsley, onions and butter. I can vouch for the soup which is a lovely winter-warmer, but I will have to report back on the stuffing.