It's a Long Way (Pig School)

Taxi Driver's Sunrise over our East Field

These taxi runs we've been doing have had me out of bed early enough to see some lovely sunrises coming up across our East Field. My most recent were about getting Charlotte (of the mini horses) away to her Charlestown bus stop for the Sligo bus, off to sit her college exams but Friday's 'Animal Anatomy and Physiology' saw an end to those for the moment. Charlotte is sure she's done OK but good luck, Charlotte, anyway and for the rest of your exams coming up after a 2 week break.

Mum Saddleback shows off four of her children.

Yesterday, though, saw me up early again (OK, not quite so early) for my own education, my Pig Rearing (one day) Course all the way down in Tipperary, almost a 2 hour drive. This proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable and brilliant day in which we all learned a huge amount and, in my case, finally got to get hands-on with live pigs; we'd been feeling a bit like 'book experts' with both pigs and the bees - a wealth of 'book-learning' but zero practical experience!

Mum keeps watch from the doorway.

The course happened at Old Farm, near Portumna in North County Tipperary which is a lovely small holding centred around a beautiful old house and with a goodly rambling collection of outbuildings and 'Pop Larkin' style piles of "stuff" which are all works in progress and projects which will get completed "when there is time". The people were a superb couple, Alfie and Margaret, friendly and welcoming but obviously capable, practical and very knowledgeable, him a stockily built former off-shore commercial diver (North Sea Oil Platforms etc) and later diving instructor all around the world, a natural speaker and presenter with a fascinating style of training which had us all gripped, engaged and amused throughout. Margaret took more of a support role, on this course anyway, and looked after the admin and catering side of things but she is an award winning Blog Writer with a very enjoyable 'voice' (by her own admission sometimes given to rants against officialdom in the food industry). Her 'A Year in Redwood' blog (http://ayearinredwood.com/) has won "Best Blog of an Artisan Producer (Ireland and UK) 2014" and Best Lifestyle Blog 2012. She served up scones and coffee as we arrived and a superb lunch which gave us a choice of pork meatballs in tomato-y sauce or casserole of sausages and chick peas, all their own pork, naturally.

Alfie (with bag) explains the production of real lard

They are both driven advocates of all things organic, welfare, free range, low food-miles, Transition-Town and non GMO and were a big part in establishing a Free Range outdoor pig Quality standard mark (Q-Mark) within the Irish 'Bord Bia' food production quality standards people. Prior to that Bord Bia officials were almost entirely interested in meat for export and pigs by the tens of thousands from "nice clean, healthy" factories, all pink and free from mud, but who never see the daylight or (gasp!) dirt from which they might catch disease. Old Farm had quite a task on their hands trying to get Bord Bia to even come and have a look at their small production set-up, which was interested more in local markets and where pigs went (another gasp!) OUTSIDE and got muddy! Alfie raves against their rules which do not allow him to use brewers grains from the local organic micro-brewery or whey from the local organic cheese maker in his feeds. He despairs that he can sell pork mince but not as meat balls or burgers - for us the lunch had meat balls with (fresh) chopped onion and herbs in and their own eggs to bind them, where commercially he'd have to use sterile, dried onion and herb and some kind of chemical gloop to bind.

Liz's sugar free bread recipe.

The pigs were an obviously happy, healthy collection which he keeps as full families. One enormous Saddleback sow was showing off 4 remaining youngsters in one pen, and we rousted another whole gang out of their siesta during our walk-about - a massive cross-bred boar, 2 huge sows, one pregnant and the other with 8 4-month old piglets 'at foot'. Further round still were a group of market-ready boys and girls who we could scratch, tickle and get to know a bit better; the piglets with sow and the big old boar we had to just admire over the fence. I was amused to find that the 8 piglets were not some kind of blurry mix of all the breeds of pig in their make up, but were all different and all close to one or another of them, so you had recognise-able black and white "nearly Saddlebacks", Gloucester Old Spots, Duroc and so on.

I could see immediately what is meant by pigs being like rotovators, rooting up the ground and clearing any brambles and weeds. The pig pens were finally reasonably dry after a very wet winter and were now a grass-less, dark brown/black crumbly tilth which you could have raked smooth and planted veg straight into. There was not a weed or leaf anywhere. Old Farm keep quite a few pigs and have them all year round, so they rest fields regularly and even have doors both ends of their pig arks so that they can split fields with electric fencing and the pigs get access to the ark from either half.

All in all an excellent, enjoyable day and a superb course. Thank you Alfie and Margaret and the menagerie at Old Farm, and also to my co-students who were all a great bunch, all beginners like us. Good luck with your own pigs; I think we were all going to go ahead with pigs; even those who were a bit undecided to start with and were on the course to see if they still thought it was a good plan. My only 'negative outcome' (as they say) was that Old Farm are firm advocates of electric fencing throughout, and Alfie was a bit doubtful (though politely and nicely so) whether my style of fencing would do the job, but we'll see. If Mapp and Lucia manage a breakout and we find them picking up their own windfall apples, we can always add electric fence strands at a later date.

Broody at Last????

We may finally have a goose going broody on us but the question marks in my subject title are because she (Black Feather) does not seem at all convinced that she should sit there all day. She announced this possible intention by not coming out of the goose house this morning at 8-ish when I let George the Gander and our other female (Smudge) out and went to shepherd them across to the orchard. She has done this before, mind; she often seems to lay her every-other-night egg very late so you have to leave her sit till she's quite finished and then shepherd her across the 'gap' to find her chums.

'Spare' eggs. Black Feather only needs 12 to sit on.

But today she sat and sat (and also seems to have pulled some of her belly feathers out to line the nest, which is another sign). We wondered if we were on, Day 1 of 31 (-ish). We know that geese, even when in the 'heat' of incubation will leave the nest and go for a wander and a wash for up to 30 minutes so, the way we are currently laid out, we have to leave the goose house door open for her and just keep an eye, as she'd then be completely free range, the big pond, veg growing areas, flower beds etc. All being well she'd only be out for the 30 minutes, so wouldn't be able to do too much damage.

First rose of 2014, a 'Dublin Bay'.

Well, she came off after lunch but then seemed to stay off. I wondered if she was trying to 'talk' to her chums, so at one stage I opened the orchard gate and let them all 'commune' but , no, they all three just wandered about eating the nicer grass outside the orchard and bathing in the big pond. At least I had a chance to nip in and steal the 'spare eggs' again - we have being following Anne's instruction to date mark the eggs and then steal the oldest each day, leaving the nest with only 12. Eventually I got bored with watching them stroll about and shepherded all 3 geese 'home' thinking that Black Feather, on being led in there might see the nest and 'remember' her responsibilities. She did. She went to sit and the other 2 wandered back to the orchard. We saw her off the eggs again later in the afternoon too, so I am worried that she is not yet 100% convinced as a broody. Watch this space, I guess.

Keyhole bed fortified with chicken wire.

At this time of year that all our perennials and the tulips start to emerge from the soil with plenty of young, tender, green shoots, very attractive to chickens. They growing tips are turgid with April rain and quite brittle, so that a chicken pushing through the clump, even if she is hunting grubs rather than greenery, will snap off all your tulips and trample down the new green stuff. We go into defensive mode, and can hear Anne telling us when we first met, that there is a big difference between fencing chickens into an area, and trying to fence them out! My ring of sheep fence round the keyhole bed which worked 100% last year was perceived with scorn this year by the new ladies and I had to add 4 feet of chicken wire on top. It's not beautiful but the galvanised mesh is old and dull and if you squint you can ignore it and see the lovely safe tulips coming into unbroken bud inside.

Liz in a cage. I let her out when she's done enough weeding.

We also decided this year to encircle the entire new raised bed with 40 metres of (4 foot high, 2 inch mesh) chicken wire, in this case supported on canes, just because it was going to be a temporary structure. However, Liz so enjoyed weeding without assistance of the chooks and found some more chicken-damage which we had not spotted, that this encirclement may become permanent. If so, we will probably make it more beautiful, all this fencing is starting to look like Guantanamo Bay. The official story for this picture is that Liz has shut herself in. Some might suspect that I lock her in this cage till she's done enough weeding and then let her out!

Flowering currant (Ribes)

There is not a great deal else going on. Broody Betty shows no sign yet of following Black Feather down the 'broody' road. We chug on with our Bee School - Lesson 5 was last Monday. I have 'Piggy School' on Saturday, my training course for Pig Rearing down in Tipperary. I think I will just leave you with some nice 'macro' pics of garden flowers which are currently doing the honours. Enjoy them.

Vital bee food in April - the humble dandelion. 

A new one on us. Coltsfoot (Tussilago)

Pulmonaria (Lungwort)

Doing very well here in 2014. Primroses.

Pig-Slapping your Pastry

Pat a cake Pat a cake, Baker's Man
Bake me a (pork pie) as quick as you can
Pat it and prick it and mark it with ZT210
and into the oven for Heaven knows when!

The slapper head and the impression it makes. 

For those not in the know, your legal, signed up, Ministry-verified pig keeper in this country will generally need to own a piece of kit called a pig-slapper. This is a 2 foot long metal tube with a handle at one end and a plate at the other to which fit 'characters' as individual numbers and letters, set like the print in a printing machine. Each character is (in our case) 30 mm tall and made up of short needles which are used to 'tattoo' your pig herd number into the rump and shoulders of your pigs just before slaughter, so that you can identify your half carcasses as they emerge from the slaughterhouse into the meat plant.

Pig-slapped Pork Pie.

You can see from the first pic that our code is ZT210 so those are the characters I had to get hold of and 'set' into the head, but naturally, they are in there 'backwards' and potentially upside down, so I was looking around for something in which to 'slap' my impression to check that it would read correctly on the pig. Liz was making a pork pie and this generally leads to spare pastry being rolled out into 'pattie' and baked alongside the pie, but to be broken up for the chickens as a treat outside the back door. This led on to us deciding to 'slap' the actual pie crust (gently) - the tattoo plate was clean enough and anyway, the whole lot was to be baked.

Barely visible, slap mark in the golden, egg glazed suet crust.

So there you have it - my slapper works. Unfortunately the code pretty much disappeared in the baking but anyway, it would be fraud (gasp!). The pork in that pie was from Carolyn's Gloucester Old Spots, not from our herd at all. Ours do not exist yet; have not even been born yet!. Actually I am quietly amazed and appalled at this legal requirement to 'slap mark' pigs prior to sending them to slaughter. You keep them as happy as possible for 5 months, loving them and looking after their welfare needs. They come to trust you (hopefully) and think you are a good egg, then just as you are about to send them on their final journey you get this 2 foot long bar with numbers made out of needles at the business end, dip the needles in ink and then smack your pigs hard once on either shoulder (and either rump if you like) to basically tattoo them. It must hurt and surprise them, surely, but you have to do it so you can identify your half carcasses coming out the other end of the meat plant. How can that be 'welfare'? Some say that you do not need to slap them if your slaughterhouse is not insisting but others would argue that unless you slap, the butcher might sneakily substitute your carefully bred and fed pigs for cheaper, mass produced ones.

Blue gets comfy on some tissue boxes on the table.

In the pond department we not only have an 'honest' newt population which we have seen regularly and which arrived by itself, but also two 'scoops' of imported frog spawn. The breeding season had come and gone here and we had been passed over by all the local frogs so we had sent word out. Charlotte was checking her local ditch, well filled with spawn on all previous years, and K-Dub had promised us a bucket from his father's Dublin pond. K-Dub drives a big old yellow works van previously owned by the company I used to work for and sold off at the end of its economic working life. It's very 'tired' at this stage but K-Dub flies about in it OK.

Another good year for the gift daffs from Steak Lady

I was a bit concerned that the spawn, evolved for millions of years to grow and develop in still water and quiet ponds might not survive the rattle and hum of a 2 hour box-van drive across Ireland but late on Friday we received a text message reading a bit like one of those WW2 code messages to the French Resistance "Your spawn is at your gate". Indeed it was, and we hurried down to gather it up and gloop it into the pond where it seemed to be perfectly OK and even hatching, so that we have mini Dublin tadpoles swimming happily away from the landing site. Then Charlotte came through suggesting that if we wanted more, there was some in 'her ditch', so we have nipped down with the bucket and dipped it into the watercress. The Roscommon babies joined the 'Dubs'. It would be interesting to DNA test the emerging young froglets to see who 'won'.

My last New Year's resolution can now be ticked off. I resolved to finish this winter with my log store full. Yesterday in the good, calm sunny weather I dropped the last two weakling, half-dead spruce trees which needed thinning out from our woods, and logged them up. The logs have gone in on top of Bob's hawthorn to refill my log store. Proper job! All the 'sneddings' (twigs and small branches) need dragging out to our bonfire heap in the East Field, but for now we have piled them up. Next time I have access to Bob's tractor, we will get a rope round each pile and drag them out there.

The warm weather and sunshine, tadpoles and newts had us sitting out by the pond and, in Liz's case, thirsty for just something like a lager shandy. Now, we never have lager in the house (in fact we never have anything except the weekly ration of red wine unless it's a special occasion like Christmas or Paddy's night) but rather bizarrely we have in the freezer left over from a guest visit last Summer (no names no pack drill!) some frozen, pretend cocktails. These are totally artificial, like grown up slush-puppy "alchopops", one claiming to be Pina Colada, the other a Berry Daiquiri, but the ingredients lists do not list any known ingredients of either official cocktail (rum, lime, coconut, pineapple etc). What the Hell? They were cold and wet so even though they tasted to us of nothing in particular, we sipped them sitting on our pond side seats.

The blue sky had us suddenly determined that what we needed in this garden was a flowering cherry tree. We have now acquired one of these, going cheap at present (€12.99) at the local supermarket and it has gone in where we can admire it from the kitchen  window and the yard but also from the "Darby and Joan" chairs next to the pond.

Cockfight and Dogfight

No! Don't worry, no real cause for alarm and we've not been up to anything illegal, but as well as the signs of spring and sap rising in the local flora, the local birds have been putting in their bids for their own sap rising and the breeding season coming up to full steam. Last spring, it occurs to us, we had just the one rooster (William), so it all passed off quite peacefully and although we'd seen a bit of sporadic cock fighting at other poultry keepers' places, we had never seen it here and lived in the bliss of ignorance that all 'our' lot would get along peacefully like one big happy family.

William high-kicks Henry in a fast and furious bout.

Well, yesterday our feisty Guinea Fowl cock-bird, Henry, laid that one firmly to rest by taking it upon himself to attack our Sussex Ponte rooster, William. William turns out to be no 'pussy' when it comes to defending his alpha status and gave Henry a good kicking for his pains, but Henry would not take 'No' for an answer and kept running in looping circles returning to William for more. It was fast, furious and noisy. These fights can get serious, we knew, with birds getting badly hurt or even killed and we, as their keepers are responsible for keeping them from harm.

Buffers, before he got involved in the fighting.

However, there is no easy way to catch these two in the open of a free-range system, so we chased around as best we could but basically had to let them work it out. We were relieved when they quickly seemed to, with William 'winning' and driving Henry off. It all calmed down though we did see at one stage, William and our Buff Orpington 'roo' (Buffers, for short) squaring up in that ritualized way - the cocks bowing low to each other, beak to beak, spreading cape feathers wide and displaying wings and tail feathers to make themselves look huge. We supervised and, where we could, a garden boot swung (gently) between the protagonists and waggled helped to separate them.

Blue is back in the ratting game.

It all calmed down and we decided it was over and it would now be safe to go shopping. We were wrong, and returned to what looked like the aftermath of a Hollywood saloon bar brawl. Poor Buffers was well spattered in blood and it had dripped down into his chest feathers. Henry was cowering under the hedge by the 'allotment', unusually quiet and subdued and seemed to have been deserted by his wife, who was now hanging with the hens. William had a few flecks of dried blood on his face and cape, but was strutting tall, presumably the winner.

Hooded crow (top) dog fighting with our Raven.

The boys had obviously been 'at it' while we were away although it now seemed to have been settled. Nobody was badly hurt but everyone needs a good rain shower to clean them up a bit. We have seen no such fighting since. W and B have had a square-off but no more kicking. We are not surprised William came out on top - he weighs easily twice as much as the Guinea cock and has inch long sharp spurs on his legs. Nobody else is armed like that. Later Henry went off into hiding (he was actually just out of sight behind the earth bank but was not about to show his face to William on the latter's turf) and refused to come despite hours of plaintive calling by Min (buck-wheat! buck-wheat!), even to come to bed as it got dark. We tried to shepherd him in the dusk back towards the buildings so we could lock him up safe from Mr Fox, but he was having none of it and kept side-stepping us  and nipping up the Rose Walk or through the car port to his bank. We said a prayer for him and left him to it.

Another egg glut solution - pickled eggs.

I was delighted this morning to find that not only had he survived, but he was sitting outside the chickens' pop-hole, come to collect his wife and possibly a clip round the ear! He's been very subdued today and no-one has tried any more fighting, which is a relief. He shuffles past William with Min in close formation, keeping his head down. Me? Noooooo no no no... I was just going to eat some of this grass. So we HOPE that is it. You get one brew up, one big flash of passion and emotion, everybody sorts out their pecking orders and we all go back to being a happy family. You think?

The passion was also waking up in the wild birds. I had my camera out with the 200 mm lens on it so I'd been able to get the above pic of one of the fights but was also lucky enough to see the local raven (whom we call 'Quoth') harassed by two of the local hooded crows in another noisy, whirling, aerobatic dog-fight. The Raven's loud 'Cronk' calls were being out-shouted by the "Werk! Werk!" calls of the crows as they wheeled their way westward along our ridge top.

And finally, if I can sneak in a quick bit of sad to tie up a loose end, our tiny chick 'Lonely Roads' had showed no improvement in his leg so we decided to cull him out. It's a shame and it's never nice to have to do it, but when we need to we are able. RIP 'Roads', we will miss you but you'd have never thrived here.

Coming Back to Life

'Pirate Wolf' spider. A new one on us.

With a recent run of warm days it has been fascinating for us to see our big new pond coming back to life. Of course, it was never really 'dead' and we have been able to see water boatmen and water beetles nipping about all winter, including under the ice on the few times that it was frozen. We 'finished' the pond last year in May and were soon rewarded with lots of incoming species especially the insects including all manner of tiny whizzers and wrigglers, only a few of which we could identify with any certainty. We bought a good range of young plants and some snails from Mimmack Aquatics (in Essex) and enjoyed them all as they started to get roots down in the autumn, but then watched everything die back to nothing (visible) as winter came and we have waited anxiously through winter wondering which of our species would make it through.

Towser's favourite look-out post, the bedroom window.

The pond has been brim-full since December topped up by rain and the run off from round by the poly tunnel. That can be a bit cloudy with mud flowing in, so our crystal-clear status has been on hold for most of that time and now, as it starts to fall bright again, we find we are peering into the murk, sure that things are growing down there but unable to see in any detail. The trays and planters of submerged plants are all putting out titillating green spikes and there are fronds of hornwort and Elodia expanding. Closer to the surface, in the 'shelves' we have obvious shoots on water mint, flag irises and marsh marigold.

My share of the hawthorn/ivy tree in Bob's link box.

There was great excitement on Wednesday morning when I saw a newt. This is our first voluntary amphibian and is probably our ultimate in the wildlife we wanted to attract to this wildlife pond, which we had deliberately not allowed fish into and have kept the geese away from. I had, in fact, lobbed a few newts and frogs into the pond last year if I had had to 'rescue' them from any grass I was cutting (or in the newt's case he had fallen into the vertical-sided half barrel goose 'pond'). This was just to show them it existed, but the frog breeding season came and went, with a few road-kill frogs in the lane but no breeding or spawn for us. Liz's newt-survey trainer-man had said that it might take the newts 6 years to 'find' us.

I do not think 'proper' conservationists are meant to import frog spawn by the well known 'bucket from elsewhere' method; you are meant to let succession happen naturally; but I must confess that K-Dub has offered us a bucket from the pond at his Father's place in Dublin, which is overwhelmed with the amount of spawn. We are going to sneak this in and see if we can 'help things along' a bit.

We have also noticed that along with all the re-awakening of small wrigglers and insects, we seem to have gained a few new types which we will have to try to identify. There is a spider who seems to sit on the edge-stones with smaller examples (children?) in a little row nearby, and we have seen them all nipping down to the water's edge, apparently to drink, before nipping back up. They 'park' in a tidy, narrow position with all their legs tucked in close to their sides. I have posted his pic on the old faithful Kent Wildlife Trust page on Facebook and got a proper ID, he is a male Pirate Wolf Spider (Pirata piraticus). Ah harrrrr!

Chestnut mushrooms from the poly tunnel.

Away from the pond, life is starting up impressively too. The spent mushroom compost in the poly tunnel is back pumping out fruiting bodies of chestnut mushroom for our supper. All the trees in the orchard are now showing bud break. There is plenty of new green in the thyme growing on our keyhole bed and the front lawn is looking shaggy enough to be needing its first cut.

If you sit by the pond, don't let your cake droop to hen-level!

Finally a very quick update on our baby chick 'Lonely Roads'. Things are not looking great. He is not making any use of his right leg. It is a shame. He is a pretty little thing and full of spirit and 'shout'. He started eating on the start of day 3 (That was a relief!) and now piles into the hard boiled egg I 'peck' up for him on the end of a pencil, and more recently also pecks it up himself from the ground if I drop it. He is a cheeky little thing and will refuse to peck at the 'proper' food (chick crumb) looking at you very old fashioned if you try to sneak a pencil-load of crumb in, in between chunks of the egg. Had he not the leg issue I would be delighted with 'our' progress, both him and with me learning to hand-rear chicks but his duff leg is a cold hard reality; he did not get many winning numbers in life's lottery, Bless him and we think he may run out of luck on Friday.

Lonely Roads.

"Lonely Roads" on day 1

Today a bitter-sweet tale, a bit more tragic than we are used to and one in which we have been unable to help in an animal welfare story to the degree we would have liked. Sometimes, that's the way it goes. Unusually, I am not going to name any of the parties involved, only because I do not know some of them and I only have word-of-mouth summary of events. Also we do not know the sex of the chick involved, so 'he' is just going to be assumed male for convenience. We think he is Rhode Island Red (hence his name) but he is almost certainly in-bred.

This poor little mite came to us at less than 6 hours old (hatched) having already had a rather bizarre, eventful and traumatic life, 3 'owners' and 2 homes. There had been a big incubator into which Owner 1 had 'set' 40 goose eggs and, finding he had spare space had sneaked in 7 chicken eggs. Owner 2, as we understand it had objected to this and gone to retrieve them but had managed to miss 2 and leave them behind to run the full course of incubation. I am not sure how this is possible; I do not know the design of the incubator, but we are told that immediately on hatching and while still with wet feathers, this chick was grabbed from the incubator and passed to Owner 2 as 'your problem'. These people are not set up for chicken rearing and have no brooder-box, Infra-red lamps etc and this is all happening at the crack of dawn on Saturday.

Day 3. Note the right leg held in an odd position

Owner 2 panics and phones the only chicken-person she knows and this is a good friend of ours, Owner 3. Owner 3 has a bad cold and has gone to bed with a good dose of sleepy-making "Night-Nurse" (or similar medicine) and takes the call while groggy with sleep, cold and soporifics. She only half understands but thinks she is getting some chicken-meat because owner 2 "cannot hand prepare" it, so she accepts the delivery and even asks Owner 2 at the front door whether it is breast meat or leg meat (!). The poor baby by now is still wet from the egg and stone cold, limp. Owner 3 rushes to find a hot water bottle and towel (to wrap around it) and probably saves the poor thing's life.

Goldie, hopefully now pregnant.

Wide awake now, Owner 3 realises that she is also not set up for rearing chickens having come out of chickens last year and dispersed all her equipment, so she nips round to the next 'chicken' people on the list, and that is us. We have never reared baby chicks; we always let 'Broody Betty' handle that but, hey, we have an IR lamp and a crate, what could possibly go wrong? In for a penny, as they say. One thing working in our favour is that chicks hatch having just absorbed into their abdomen the remaining yolk-sac, so they do not need to eat for 48 hours or so.

We have you surrounded? Ivy almost rings the hawthorn.

Sadly here, the story now takes another down-turn but don't give up on us yet. Lonely Roads is a spirited trier and, now warm and dry, he survives the night, seems to like being handled and cheeps loudly with excitement at regular intervals. Unfortunately he is not good on his legs. A chick at 24 hours hatched should be sprinting about like a little clockwork toy. Roads is all alert and holds his head upright but is flopping about and squirming along the deck, seemingly only able to use his left leg. His right leg juts out at an odd angle and he puts no weight on it and is unable to open the foot flat. He puts his weight on the heel joint (at the top of the un-feathered bit of''leg') or rolls it onto the side of the crunched up but limp and floppy toes. By day 3 he is up on his one good leg but can only balance if standing still. This is not good. A one-foot chicken has no real future, if only because he would not be able to scratch for worms and grubs. Things are not looking promising.

Tea cosy by special request.

My in-breeding comment earlier is due to the fact that his feet also have extra toes and we know that, especially in Ireland (where we have first hand experience with in-bred geese) the gene pools can get very 'narrow' in these named variety birds. This may be the cause of Roads's bad leg, or possibly there might have been rough handling or damage done by the chilling. We, of course, have no idea. Well, the hard-nosed breeders would probably have been calling 'cull him out, don't waste your time' by now but we decided to give him a week and hope for a repair job.

Primroses along our East boundary.

This, however, is not the end of the tale, as the little lad may be full of shout and beans but he is refusing to eat anything. He has pecked at the tiniest crumbs of hard boiled egg, 'chewed' very half-heartedly on about a quarter cc of cod liver oil and maybe shipped some water. This is now day 3, so he should have used up his yolk stores by now and be ravenous, piling into offered food and fighting off brothers and sisters in the competition to eat. If this goes on he may be making the decision for us as he will fade very quickly if his problems include an inability to learn to recognise food, peck it, eat and swallow. So, Friday is his D-Day. I will let you know. Wish him well but don't get your hopes too high.

Meanwhile, in a previous post I noted that we had been improving the pasture. We seem to have also improved the boundary hedges and flora too. All around the East Field we had badly overgrown hedges with overhanging ash and hawthorn, and great thickets of bramble arching out 8-10 feet into the field and self-layering. We had to cut all this back in order to install the new sheep fence and have since had sheep on it (and then horses) nibbling away at the re-growth, so that we have let a lot more light into the hedge-base. This year we have been rewarded with an impressive flowering of primroses, plants presumably hidden and repressed by the shading tangle of brambles. In some cases these primroses are, themselves, well out into the field, maybe 3-4 feet inside the field.

"Swolly" Hole

We find ourselves both involved in errands of mercy. For Lizzie a run to Galway with Carolyn of the mini-horses. This is mainly about a hospital visit but the girls also go for an explore around Galway, being a city close to us that we had not actually visited yet. It was known to have a Marks and Spencer for the clothes and underwear but Liz also discovered a branch of that favourite source of bed linen, a TK Maxx. The M&S proved to have an excellent vintage cheddar cheese, in this case their "Cornish Cruncher" variety from the Davidstow Creamery.

Wind-felled, Ivy-clad, hawthorn tree

For me, a call from John Deere Bob to cut up a couple of size-able trees blown down in the storms of November and now causing him fencing issues as he goes to turn out cows onto the spring grass. As well as the fields in the immediate vicinity of his house, Bob owns 12 acres the other side of Lisacul village in an area of small fields with overgrown mossy stone walls from the tops of which sprout way overgrown hawthorn and ash trees which were presumably once the boundary hedge. They are now 20-30 feet high and weighed down with a dense canopy of ivy. No one has maintained these hedges for a good few decades (not just Bob, everyone in the area does the same) and the trees are now top heavy and get blown over by the gales of November taking lines of fencing with them. The ivy stems criss-crossing round the trunks to form a tubular 'net' of ivy wrapped around the hawthorn wood make the cutting up of these trees an interesting task, and the thick leafy shroud make it hard to see where to cut anyway. It is slow work. I always take my bill hook down with me and chop away some of the ivy so I can see what I am at.

JD Bob's Swallow Hole

The piece of ground is also interesting to the physical geographer in me. The geology here is lower carboniferous sandstone and (mainly) limestone, so features the occasional swallow hole (they say it "swolly hole" here) and Bob has one at the bottom of one of these fields. It is a good sized feature. The stream running through here is a good 5 feet wide and 2 deep even when it is running slowly; the clear but brown stained water coming off the local peaty soils and bogs. At the hole this all just gurgles away through some openings in the big blocky rocks, to reappear, Bob tells me, way down the valley, below the village, quite near to the main river (The River Lung).

Yellow arrows show the 2 main holes

At the site of the swallow hole is a large basin looking like a nearly dried up lake, with a good lot of twigs and bits of rush and reed at the 'tideline'. Obviously, when the stream is in spate, the swallow hole gets partially blocked by this debris and cannot cope with all that volume of water, which fills up the 'lake' but I could see no sign that the lake overflows as a surface stream. It must be quite an impressive sight to see all that water spiraling round the "plug-hole" as it gurgles away underground.

Meanwhile in the 'zoo' we have a couple of breeding attempts to report which seem to have got parked up for now. The Guinea Fowl have given up on their daily disappearances across the lane, which we had put down to the possible daily egg laying. They did this 7 times but have now stopped. We never found the alleged nest so we will probably never know why this happened and then stopped happening. Maybe she was just having a practise run, maybe she did lay eggs and they got predated by rats or mink, maybe the current chilly NE winds put her off thoughts of spring. The birds remain our most wander-lusty and today we saw them at the far side of the East Field and the wrong side of the fence, actually outside our property, so maybe they are still at it.

When I last posted on the subject of geese, one of the females (Smudge, named for a bruise like dark smudge in the feathers on the right hand side of her head, behind the eye) had accumulated 16 eggs and we were expecting her to go broody any minute. Well, that was the 21st March, and it's now the 28th, so she is now perched on top of 19 eggs as she goes to lay (or her sister does), some of which are double stacked and she still shows no intention of sitting. I am not sure what to do about this. Do we give up and clear the eggs away, or do we keep on keeping on? One thing is for sure - if she DOES go broody over the next few days, I will not be leaving her all 19 to incubate. 19 baby goslings is a bit more than we can cope with.

We have decided to breed from Goldie again, taking advantage of the fact that Charlotte (mini horses) has just bought a NZ White buck ("Kiwi") who seems to be a bit of a go-er and she has him working his way round any of her lady rabbits who she wants bigger kits from. Our meat-breed doe, Goldie, you may recall, had a bit of a thin time of it in the motherhood stakes last year, kindling 7 babies but all bar 2 suffered overnight deaths for reasons we still are not sure of. Some of the later ones, when autopsied, had hugely full bladders so it is possible that some kind of urine-tract issue (blockages?) was the problem. We are giving her another go this year hoping that this was not genetic or was just a 'first litter' one-off. Watch this space. She was mated today, and they take 31 days to cook, so due date is 28th April. Maybe by then we will have broody geese, hidden up broody Guinea Fowl and maybe even our hen Broody Betty back on the case.