Mr and Mrs D?

When I left you at the end of the previous post, our visitors D+D were just leaving us, belly-full of dippy goose egg breakfast, off on the next leg of their surprise (for lady-D) holiday tour of Ireland, bound for Galway and then Bunratty Castle via our suggested scenic tour of Connemara. The 'public' intent was to enjoy a Medieval Banquet at Bunratty. However, as well as the whole trip being a surprise for lady-D, it seems that Mr-D had one more plot twist and 'present' up his sleeve. Bunratty was just a cover story.

Year 2 of the living willow hedge

The couple drove through Connemara enjoying the scenery and (we are told) stopped at a likely lake to get out, stretch their legs and enjoy the view. Lady-D promptly took off down the 'beach' "babbling on" (she says) about how much fun it would be to get the canoes 'up here'. It took her a while to spot that it had all gone a bit quiet behind her and that Mr D was not keeping up with her, or, indeed, part of the canoe conversation. When she turned round she found that this was because he had gone down on bended knee and was clutching an engagement ring! Congratulations the pair of you, D and Mrs D to be. With the banquet now off the books, they adjourned to a fine pub also in Bunratty called 'Durty Nelly's'.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we have finally run out of the miraculous 20 days of windless and rainless weather. We just squeaked D and D in at the end of it which was very nice for their 'petting zoo' stuff. The purple wellies stayed clean and dry.

The cat 'Soldier' is pretty much over his operation and dashing about inside and out like before, eating us out of house and home.

Unsubtle hedge-bashing down our lane.

Poppea, always more of a drama queen (and also, to be fair, subject to a much more serious operation) is healing a bit more slowly. She reminds us occasionally that she has a sore place as she gets down from a chair, emiting a piercing shriek or a whimper, but she has joined in the walks again and joins the rest of us for the half hour off-lead exercise in the orchard. We have to take her back to the vet on Friday week to have her stitches removed. That is going to be a bit of a squeak-fest too, I should imagine.

Roadside hedge or a row of coppiced ash trees?

On a sadder note, we remember our great friend, Liz's closest and longest term Kent chum, frequently mentioned in this blog, 'Diamond' (Diane Loraine Walsh) who died this day last year. Diane's ashes were scattered by husband John at a favourite canal-side site in Surrey and John has driven up there today with our other friends Mazy and Anne to remember her and to scatter flower petals at the place. Thinking of you all. Sympathies at this sad time.

B'n'B for D'n'D

Make it count, Soldier. It is the last food you'll see till
tomorrow evening. 

We finally managed to nail down a vet to do the spay operations of 3 year old Westie bitch, Poppea and young tom-cat Soldier. They were booked into a practise in town for Friday morning so for them (and all other dogs and cats because it is easier that way) starvation from 6 pm on the Thursday evening. This is not a problem with the dogs who are not used to food between meals, but the hungry young cats live a life of harrassing us into feeding them at any time of day or night by just making nuisances of themselves, climbing the shelves, lying on your computer keyboard, pushing things off tables to see if gravity works, climbing all over your lap, shoulders and head purring madly. Subtle in their demands they are not and the only way to shut them up is to realise that it must be HOURS since their last feed. Days maybe. Weeks even....

Poppea, still very woozy from her operation gets sniffed
by the other two. 

Well, we held our nerve and managed to do a convincing job of being forgetful about breakfast come the morning. Come 9 o'clock, we extracted Blue from the cat basket so that we could put Soldier into it and got a collar and lead onto Poppea and her out of the door without the other two joining us, I ran Liz to work and went from there on to the vet's in Castlerea. The patients would be 'done' in the afternoon and we'd get a call to say we could come and collect them.

The makings of a very fine gumbo

We collected them at 5:30 pm, by which time Pops was trying to come round from the anaesthetic under a cosy heat-ray lamp in one cage, and Soldier was still sparko in his cat basket. The cat woke up that evening and was up and running, eating and wanting to go outside very quickly. Our little drama queen is a bit of a different story and is milking it over the whole weekend for all it is worth. She even went all day Saturday without eating and had her first breakfast this morning. We don't mind that. She's not going to suffer for lack of walking for a couple of days and we just have to keep the other dogs from being too boisterous around her. Poor little mite. Get well soon, Pops.

D and D in da house.

Main event this weekend, though, was a superb first-time visit from a second-cousin and her man, these two with very similar names so called, for the purposes of this blog, D and D. She is the daughter of one of Liz's very close, same age cousins from their childhoods, Cathy. Although Liz had met her a few times, she mainly remembers her as a pregnant 'bump' so this was going to be a nice chance to get to know D and her 'fella' better. D is young yet (well, compared to us!) but is madly in love with the idea of small holdering when she retires and keeping livestock. I expect there will be such a project in her future but she had read all about us on Facebook and in this blog and was really looking forward to meeting the animals.

Paté, then slow roast pork, then chocolate mousse with
raspberry coulis for supper.

D-the-man knew, obviously, that she wanted to come back to Ireland where she was born ( she left when she was only tiny) and had conspired deviously with various friends, contacts and family, including us, to organise this whole trip in secret. We had her completely fooled. She did not know till the morning that she was going on holiday and was a bit fed up with her normal friends for being all non-commital or "otherwise engaged" over what looked like being a lonely, boring weekend. D presented her with a simple map-of-Europe jigsaw  and announced that they were going on holiday to the country on the missing piece. Nice one, D!

D falls in love with the turkeys

They had a stop in Dublin to catch up on the friends and rels that end and then headed down this way to arrive about 3 pm. Liz LOVES all this kind of thing - hospitality and hosting and was ready with a menu fit for these honoured guests. They were going to have a quiche and salad stop-gap on arrival, then a superb supper of paté followed by slow roast pork with a dessert of chocolate mousse, raspberry coulis and cream. Breakfast was going to be 'dippy' goose eggs and toast soldiers and/or soda bread with smoked salmon. As many as possible ingredients were from our own produce and there was, naturally, a good but sensible amount of drink about the place.

D's "selfie" with Rambo.

They wanted a good show around the 'farm' and to meet the livestock. D thought she'd like the geese best but ended up being swept off her feet by our charming turkeys. They also seemed quite taken with her and followed her around chirruping happily and in one case even let her stroke his head. She was quite taken with Rambo too, who came loping over to see her every  time she appeared at the gate, 'asking' for her to stroke and scratch his head (Yes, now down a bit.... ooh, and just that bit behind my ear.... ). If a ram could purr, Rambo would be purring. D even took a 'selfie' picture of the two of them on her phone. D and D also asked if they could help on the first feed and release rounds. No problem, but I have to admit I doubted whether they'd get up in time. They did, and were even dressed and with wellies on. There's enthusiasm from a volunteer.

This rose bud came on a branch which had snuck in under
the shed roof so was in the dark out of the weather. 

We'll call that a successful visit, 'topp hosting' from us and perfect 'guesting' by D+D. Everything you could want from guests - they enjoyed everything we did, ate the food, fell in love with the animals and were pure pleasure to "entertain" (i.e. no bother at all to keep happy). Their next stop is Galway and then Bunratty Castle where they are booked in to a medieval banquet. We took them on a quick diversion out to the Sligo rebuild house to show them the more scary end of the "buying a place in Ireland" spectrum (serious buildering) and then set up their sat-nav for our scenic route to Galway through Clairemorris, Cong, Maam Cross and the mountains of Connemara.

Dippy goose eggs.

We went back home to a standard Sunday, dog walks and tidying up after a visit, gently recuperating the patients and sympathising with the turkeys who are behaving as if they have lost a close friend as well as enjoying all the Facebook stuff put up there by D+D. That is, I think, our last inbound visit in 2015, though we do have a couple of away-games to come. We do love these visits and the chance to do hospitality so a huge thank you to our guests and you know that you are always welcome back.

Snugging Down the Bees

'Tis the (goose egg) season says Liz with this
picture posted onto facebook.

We are still thoroughly enjoying this lovely run of windless, rainless days, often with bright blue skies and welcome sunshine begotten of the series of high pressure systems which are dominating our weather for what feels like a fortnight. It has given us a lovely flush of crops hanging in there which by now (mid October) we'd normally expect to have finished - the broad beans, mange tout peas, poly-tunnel tomatoes and herbs like parsley, chives and thyme.

Our first grass-frost on 13th October morning.

We have welcome late (re) flushes of some flowers which you'd normally call summer flowers - all the roses are still pushing open new buds, a yellow geum is going great guns and our three-big-tub group in the yard is a picture of yellow red-hot pokers, yellow dahlia (a 'Bishop' relative), nasturtiums and Welsh poppies. In the keyhole bed an accidental self-seeded red campion has been flowering away as a bush-sized dome since June and shows no sign of flagging.

Frosty sunrise through the trees

As I said, we have been enjoying the warm sunshine, but clear skies and high pressure in October inevitably means the arrival of chilly nights and some first frosts. The first crunch to the grass came this morning with a mist-less morning live-stock round. The internet tells us we might even get views of the Northern Lights but I have not seen them so far possibly because 'North' to us here is one of the few bad sources of light pollution, the cluster of street lights in the town of Ballaghaderreen. Balla-D tends to light up the northern horizon with that well know sodium-light orange glow and may be out-glowing the Aurora Borealis.

The bees finally get their snug 'loft insulation', the (oiled wood)
foam block filled 'eke' on top of the hive here with the standard
roof about to be put on top.

I had been holding off snugging down the bees with the days being so warm and the bees still being so active. They will be foraging the remaining heather and soon move onto the ivy when that starts to open - the ivy flower buds are plentiful but still shut tight so far here. It is a truism in beekeeping circles that it is not the cold which kills bees, but the damp, especially if you have a thin roof on the hive where condensation forms and cold water then drips right down the centre of the hive, into the brood cluster.

A chilly morning for our cattle neighbours in the 5 Acre Field

We think it was a combination of the cold/damp/condensation and having too much space (fresh air around the cluster) which did for our 2014 colony in spring 2015. This can give you a bad 'chimney' effect with the warm cluster pulling in cold air through the mesh floor, and losing warm air through the roof-vents but you are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. You must somehow find the right balance between enough ventilation to discourage condensation, (including that moisture which bees have to pull out of nectar in order to make honey) but enough cosy snugness that nobody dies of hypothermia. Our solution this year is to part-block the bottom by sliding in the varroa-mite counting board but then to completely seal the top with a 3 inch block of house-insulating foam slotted tight into an oiled-wood square called an 'eke'. I am hoping that the warm bees will then thus be so well separated from the snow on the roof, that no condensation will form on their 'ceiling' and drip down. Time will tell. That is now the last time this year we will open the hive to look into it. From now on we just watch the comings and goings and hope that continued activity means that all is well. Good luck you bees.

That is quite a hole we have made in the house!

Meanwhile over in the Sligo rebuild house we have done the complete opposite and smashed a huge hole in the back. This is one of those 2 foot thick walls we know and love from our own rebuild, but in this case the stone is much more helpful, being mainly flat chunks a bit like broken paving slabs. In Roscommon our stones were hard sandstone and the shape of your head so we wondered how the builder ever managed to stack them into walls - we suspect that they did no such thing and just poured the stones and concrete down into a shuttered gap.

Not a dry stone wall, but a stack of good stones salvaged
from the demolished house walls.

Out in Sligo it is all much more professional and 'stone mason'-ish, with the flat stones laid 'bonded' like brickwork, big squared off 'coin' stones at the corners and impressive broad slices as door and window lintels. These are interwoven with proper old fashioned lime mortar so that when you knock bits of wall down it is fairly simple to tap the good stones clean of mortar and stack them for re-use.

Tom the turkey has regrown his tail and is back to his
magnificent best.

I had to smile - the two of us had been hard at this rubble-wrangling all morning when Mum came out to the site with the makings of 'hang sang-widges' and a huge thermos of coffee but brought along young son 'H' (3) so that he could see progress and enjoy some time with his Dad. His Dad must be as tired as me from the rock-bashing but still has the energy to load H into a wheel barrow and run round the site like a fair ground ride, running him up and down gravel heaps, bouncing over boulders and balancing along scaffold planks with H clinging on for dear life and wooping with delight. H is also one for the quick observations "You've made a hole in the house!" and follow-up accusing questions as to who did it and Mum and Dad have been enjoying getting me into tongue-in-cheek "trouble" by blaming me for everything that's 'gone wrong'.

The 2CV gets fired up just to keep everything freed up and
working. Look carefully here and you may see exhaust fumes
centre right. 

The gravel piles I moved with the digger were, in fact "H's mountain" - he had been climbing over them that week and claimed them for his own. "That was Matt!", they grassed me up helpfully "He stole it with the digger!" He wasn't so accepting of the blame for the hole in the house. "I think it is BOTH of your fault!" he said, Judge Jury and Executioner.

Polly and the sunrise.

He was also a bit concerned that the room he had previously chosen was now rapidly disappearing, open to the east winds but is now reassured that he will get a new, nice, bigger room 'upstairs' eventually. If Dad and I don't get arrested for stealing Sligo's mountains in the meantime.

Farming to Keep the Grass Short

Multiple cheeses.

Liz returns from the UK well loaded down with goods - all manner of wool, handkerchiefs, taramasalata, books, knitting needles, sourdough flour, potato starch and, above all CHEESE. Lots of cheese. Enough fancy cheese and good old vintage cheddar to keep us in cheesy heaven for many a week. As well as going to the Isle of Wight for the wedding, which was a dream by all accounts. she was able to spend a couple of days in our old home haunts of Faversham in Kent where-at the suberb and highly recommended farm-shop-cum-world-deli Macknade Fine Foods.

Finally some reasonable apples from the orchard - these
are Red Windsor

This place is a veritable Alladin's cave of foodie stuff - from fancy cheeses and cold meats, vegs and exotic fruit, tins, packets and jars from all around the world. Need some African dried biltong meat? Jamaican spices? Greek salads? Pawpaws? Cajun food mix from the Deep South? Obscure Italian wines? Unusual teas or coffees? Spanish cheese? Macknade should be your first port of call and we never fail to drop in for a browse when we are in the area, even now we live 500 miles away.

Nearly late enoiugh to be 'Winter Fruiting' but no, this is my first
decent pick from the Autumn Bliss raspberry canes this year

This time, with Liz in the UK, I spotted a Macknade promo for the cheeses on Facebook and tipped her off. She came back with little 250 g sampler cuts of the Spanish cheeses Torralba Mahon, Garroxta and La Peral plus some Tomme de Savoie and some local (to Faversham) goat's cheese called "Fremlins Faversham Log" named after the goat, not the brewery! Macknade are so good at this that the sticker bearing the weights also has tasting notes for that cheese written on it so that we know for example that the Mahon is made with "semi- cured DOP Raw Milk: is close textured, salty and full flavoured with a peachy aroma from the paprika and oil-rubbed rind. (It comes) from Menorca in the Balearic Islands and is aged for 3-4 months"

Nice clean 'Orla' spuds now coming out of the ground.

We have tried all these as a mini cheese-course after a supper, but we are planning to do a real cheese-fest, tapas style meal with biscuits, grapes, French bread, port and other 'trimmings' on one of the weekend days, to give them all a proper road-test. Liz also returned with a house-brick sized block of vintage cheddar - this one was a Mazy inspired purchase - which we will use up at normal pace - it will take us about 6 weeks from the size of it.

At least one of the geese has come back into lay. 

With Liz currently working, I find myself back in the kitchen to a whole new degree and working my way through some old repertoire plus exploring some new avenues just to put the everyday supper on the table. Tonight I had some fun with Spaghetti Carbonara which is a dish I like but which we rarely get and I had not tried to cook before. It worked really well but the recipe demanded 7 ounces of bacon and 3 and a half of parmesan (this is Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Book). The bacon I had was some 'cooking bacon' of unknown precedence in the freezer since January and it may have been a bit salty because, with the parmesan and creme fraiche too, the final product was just a tad salty to be perfect. We ate it (proof of the pudding?) but if I use that bacon again I may well soak it in a couple of changes of water prior to frying it. For eggs, the recipe asked for 3 and one of our geese has conveniently come back into lay, so one goose eggs makes 3 hens any day in our kitchen. Thank you Miss Goose. I have also been able to produce some of those lovely meals where everything on the table is our own product. Yesterday our chicken was cooked in our tomato 'salsa' and served with our spuds and our chard.

Spaghetti carbonara.

Meanwhile, in the livestock dept, I could kid you with a lovely brag; I definitely 'rock' as a pig wrangler, to the degree that there is a risk I will become smug and complacent! Not seriously, of course, but the last few times I have tried to move pigs it has gone like a dream so that everyone watching thinks I am some kind of genius pig-whisperer who should be doing it for a living; I just hope my luck holds out. Today we had to try to load Sue and Rob's last pig, a full grown (and possibly in-pig) sow over at their place. She had been bought by a smallholding north of here but they had only managed to load the enormous boar (Rodney Trotter) yesterday; the sow was having none of it and charged off into the field. They sent the buyer off with the boar, promising to catch the sow today and deliver her.

I was there for about 10 am expecting a bit of fun and games. Sue was off delivering a cat to the vet, so Rob and I were on our own. Well, it took us about 3 minutes, certainly no more than 5. We had laid straw all over the trailer ramp, Rob tempted the sow down the 'race' and I brought up the rear with a sheet of currugated iron, trying to bar the way for any attempt by the sow to turn round and get back into the field. Well the sow was like a different animal. She sauntered down the race, took a brief and mildy concerned look over her shoulder at me and my sheet of metal, then spotted Rob theatrically throw his bucket of fruit and peelings into the trailer. She shugged her shoulders as if to say, 'ah well' then strolled up the ramp and ignored us leaping forward to slam the ramp/door shut on her. Rob and I could barely believe our luck. Sue came back and the job was pretty much done. Hitch up the trailer and head to the kitchen for a coffee. The sow is now delivered to the destination and reunited with Rodney, to much happy grunting from both pigs.

We had a deal, Mr Fox. Stay away and we will leave you alone.
Start messing about and this trap is ready for you. 

Here, we have the worrying arrival of another regular fox. This chap started coming every night while the clear skies and full moons were on around the lunar eclipse and the dogs were onto him, so we were getting some interupted sleeps. Regular readers will know that we had a fox problem in January and ended up (very unfortunately) having to have three shot. At that stage I made a little deal with any remaining foxes that if they stayed nocturnal and left my stock alone, then I'd leave them alone but if this lad is going to renage on his part of the deal, then we will be ready. I have the lend of a fox trap just in case but I have left this locked open at the moment so that Mr Fox can get used to it and come to believe that it is a harmless open metal box which occasionally has old fish heads in it.

Rambo has now worked his way round all three 'yows' and
can go home at the end of the month.

Finally, I was very amused to hear a couple of old boys discussing beef prices. One had apparently paid a bit more for some animals than he had liked but commented to his friend that "What else could I do? If I didn't do this, the grass would not stay short". That is now my new favourite farming philosophy - Farming to Keep the Grass Short! Not feeding the nation or making money or breeding the best pedigree animals you can breed, just keeping the grass mowed! Amen to that! Brilliant.

Big Boys' Toys?

A digger of distinction!

I've heard it said that little boys don't ever really grow up; their toys just get bigger. It may well be true. I was certainly like a kid in a toy shop this weekend when invited over to the previously mentioned rebuild job in County Sligo to "help move some gravel". I knew they were getting 2 loads of 20 tonnes delivered into heaps near the entrance (the lorry drivers don't trust the ground to hold the weight of the lorry and release them at the end!) but I assumed we would be back on the shovels and barrows. Wrong again - the main man has now had an olde yellow digger he bought shipped over there (well, low-loader'd anyway) and enough drive has been laid to allow that to move about and make life easier for the gravel movers.

Old but pretty servicable back actor on the Massey Ferguson
digger. 

My job was to learn to use the digger to dig buckets of the gravel up with the "back actor" (rear bucket/arm) and decant them accurately into two waiting wheel barrows without spilling too much gravel on the nice drive, damaging the barrows or killing anyone. The main man was then going to keep up with me running these barrows away to the footings we were creating for a 20' square extension out back of the house. Easy! What could possibly go wrong? Well, only that I have never driven a digger before in my life and I had six levers to twiddle in front of me (never mind all the normal dashboard stuff 'behind' me (you sit backwards for this), the throttle, front bucket and so on)

6 levers to co-ordinate. 

Left to right as you sit (right to left in this photo), if you will imagine the back actor as a human arm, we have a lever for that side's stabiliser leg/foot, then upper arm up/down, whole arm swing left/right, 'elbow' extend/flex and 'wrist' extend/flex. Finally the stabiliser leg/foot that side. The legs you can pretty much ignore once you have set yourself up spirit-level flat, back wheels off the ground and front end raised by flooring the front bucket. You just play with the 4 arm levers. All good clean fun. I was at it for 3 hours Saturday morning and 3 more Sunday morning. I started off, as you'd expect on 'Skill Level = Rubbish/Dangerous' but by the end I was getting some begrudging OKs from the training department.

'804' gravel going everywhere. 

Whilst 'rubbish' I managed to drop the whole bucket onto my own wheel barrow (ooops! Had to be bent back straight by hefty builders' boots) and almost brained the boss with a wrong-direction sideways swoop of the arm. I was also dropping gravel everywhere and plenty of it at the handle end of the barrows, rather than over the barrow wheel. "You're breaking my back here!" Never mind we hit all the safety targets (no deaths!) and moved an awful lot of gravel between us and I did not get the sack. As I understand it, modern digger drivers look back on those Massey Ferguson "council" diggers with affection (They were a grand machine in their day - I LEARNED the trade on one of them etc) but now have it a bit more hi-tech with just 2 joysticks to twiddle so that they can make the bucket move in an accurate circle if they need to.

The log store is full. 

When not playing digger-driver, I was hard at work with the chain saw and/or axe cutting up enough logs and wood to finish filling the log store. As you can see from this picture, I even went a bit silly towards the end and tried my hand at log-store art which I had seen done (very well) in some pictures on the internet - people have created owls, trees, axe-wielding foresters and so on using the mosaic effect of different shapes and colours of log-ends.

My 'sun' of spruce and hawthorn.

I must admit that some of them are very intricate and must have taken hours even if only in the planning, choosing and shaping wood and deciding how you'd build it from the bottom up. Mine is a lot simpler. It was inspired by an artist friend who saw a pic of it half-filled where I had commented that the dark grey wood bottom left was actually ash, so was meant to be bright white but had been kicked around in the mud by the pigs like muddy footballs. The triangle of grey and a stripe of dark wood in the back layer (now hidden) reminded the artist of a mountain and a cloud so I wondered if I could chop up a big disk of spruce but keep the bits in the right order to re-assemble the disk at the store as a 'sun'.

To give it more definition I cut some small hawthorn which I knew would cut bright gold/orange when fresh. It was a fairly easy job to create a semi-circle dip in the existing front row, line it with hawthorn and drop on the big spruce disc bits. Then to 'bury' it under more hawthron and wedges and smaller rounds of spruce to complete my 'sky'. So, Philippa, will you give me "Sunshine on the Mountain"?

Are these pork slices or smoked bacon rashers? Thank you
Rob for an epic bacon-sarnie experience!

Our friends Sue and Rob have been getting into the cold-smoking. Rob has created a cold smoker out of recycled bits and pieces. Sue was more amused than angry when he stole the rake and sawed off 2/3 of the handle to make a pole from which to hang meat. She had found the much shortened rake and wondered if this was the one for the Little People to use. I was gifted a lovely chunk of (I think) shoulder and advised to cut rashers off it. They truly were the meatiest, most delicious bacon sandwiches I have had in a long time. It was a very filling breakfast which weighed me down onto the digger seat and kept me going till way past dinner time.

When you've eaten a bacon sarnie like this you KNOW
you've had a breakfast. 

When not working my little socks off, I have got lately quite into the reading. I have long since worked my way through the house 'library' of old favourites (Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Walter Macken, Eudora Welty, Andrea Levy) and sniffed around a few of Liz's treasures, I then grabbed up a history book Liz had been using to prepare lessons for her student. This was no history tome as I would know from school - all dates, Kings, Queens, battles, but a book about what you'd find if you could go 'there', in this case to the 14th Century.

Old wooden turf barrow. There are still plenty about and
some still being used. 

"The Time-Traveller's Guide to Medieval England" by Ian Mortimer (pub Vintage 2009) has me gripped. It has you arriving at various locations and getting involved in local life - crime and punishment, social structure and rank, travelling, pilgrimages, being a guest in peasant houses, Monasteries and big-nob's Halls, describing clothes, jobs and work, health and medical support, fairs and entertainments, reading books and so on. I was facinated by the bits about food and high status dining and amazed to find that for each type of food there was a special way of carving it to serve it to the Lords and Ladies and their guests. Kitchen boys would be expected to know how to 'unbrace' a mallard, 'spoil' a hen, 'dismember' a heron, 'unlace' a coney (rabbit), 'sauce' a capon or, indeed, a plaice, 'break' a deer, 'display' a crane, 'barb' a lobster, 'splat' a pike (I love that!), 'culpon' a trout or 'tranche' a sturgeon. I am quite pleased I just have a bit of bacon to go in a risotto tonight. Think I'll just 'smite that into gobbets'.

Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

At last - some Autumn Fruiting Raspberries which are edible

I'm not so sure about the fruitfulness, but the past week has been solidly high-pressure, clear skies, warm and blue sky sunny afternoons. In Roscommon in late September, though, that means chill nights and usually waking up to a good mist, if not actual fog. The fog does not quickly 'burn off' like it used to in Kent, so it has been well into 2 o'clock or 3 before we got the sunshine. Never mind, we will take what bits of Keats's "bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core" we can take at this stage.

'Golden Hornet' crabs light up in the evening sun

This year that has amounted to a few very late raspberries now coming ready and edible and one or two apples, plus a decent show of crab apples. Through August and September the raspberries had been coming so slowly, at about one a day, that the blackbirds were stealing them and looking at me as if to say, "Is that it?" Finally I am getting enough that if the birds are getting them, then they are retiring sated and leaving me some.

Crab apple tree.

Most fruit trees were stripped of their crop by poor weather or magpies, but I am looking to go and pick the tail end of that tomorrow. The one exception is a Golden Hornet crab apple tree which is looking very good now for a young one. I am not familiar with this variety, so I am sneaking a well coloured fruit off every now and then and cutting it in half to look for dark colour on the seed-skin which denotes ripeness. So far the pips remain pale blond, so we are holding off picking the crop just yet. They look lovely in the golden setting sun. 'Mellow' is not really a good attribute of apples, but these will get used for cooking, so a bit of extra sweetness and softness will not hurt.

Festoons of hundreds of spider webs on these gorse.

The mists have given me some lovely sights in the mornings. When I am down about my cattle feeding business on the far side of the village, there is one particular gorse hedge which has picked up hundreds, if not thousands, of swags of spider web giving it an almost 'Christmas Tree' look when the fog and dew get on it in the morning. This morning I was booked to trim a goat's feet (I know... rock and roll lifestyle!) so I'd taken the camera. In fact I took no goat pics - too busy concentrating on those spiralling horns - but was able to snap a couple of gorse pics.

New shoes!

You may be familiar with the brand of footwear 'Crocs', a light, rubbery type of clog or sandal. I 'found' these when we first came over - I think Lidl supermarket had them on 'special offer' and they have become a firm favourite as knock-about small holdering footwear. They are reasonably waterproof and don't get wet like the suede 'desert boots' I used to wear, and you can easily slip then on or off while both hands are full of dog leads, eggs, the post or what ever.

At last - these flowered on 30th Sept!

They have two disadvantages - they are no good as a safety shoe for rough work being full of holes and very soft-soled, so blackthorn thorns and stray nails will happily some up through the sole and into your foot. Second, because they are just rubber with no lining, any wet, mud or (gasp) other agri products that get into them stay there as a film between skin and Croc, never drying out and giving you very dirty feet, so socks are a must. All well and good, you might think. Crocs, though, seem to be like Marmite in the public mindset, you either love them or you hate them and if you are a hater, then you cannot resist long tirades and scornful outbursts on social media like Facebook. "Crocs and SOCKS?!!!!!" They seem to be a sartorial mis-step way too far. I'll leave that one up to you. My other problem with them is more general - the Irish as a nation do not seem to have size 12 feet, so when Crocs appear in shops they are usually only up to size 11, so I have to order these new ones on line where a pair with postage, sets you back €42.

The wood store almost there. The pale wedgy stuff is the
big fallen black-spruce. 

I am on my own again, as Liz has hot-footed it away on another UK run, this time to the wedding of an internet chum on the Isle of Wight. She is joining forces with our good friend Mazy in Kent and they are running down together tonight, the nuptials are tomorrow. My role was to drop her to Knock Airport at lunchtime with case, passport, sandwiches and bag of Tayto crisps without which no flight would be complete. I am now general cook and bottle washer for a few days but I have plenty to do so I will not be mooping around bored and pining.

Spider web festoons on the gorse

Main task at the moment is filling the log store with the chopped up slices of the big fallen black spruce tree. Some of this splits nice and easily but some is quite knotty and is hard work. Also, despite falling in November, it has not dried out and seasoned much. The lower trunk is still quite sappy and tends to flex out of the way of the axe blade rather than split down the grain. Still, I am nearly there on the full store, so any big discs of tree than remain will be brought up to the yard and can carry on drying out stacked lying on their sides till I get some space in the log store. All good clean fun.