Pork Pies (A Passion for Pig)

Stately procession led by a vintage hearse. 

On Saturday an unusual commission for me from the 365 project; could I snatch a few pictures of the funeral of one Paddy Lavin (103), late of Ballaghaderreen and our local village, Lisacul. Not a proper invitation from the family, you understand (I knew them not), more a "you should come along to that; we're going". Well, I did it and I got some passable photo's but I felt very awkward doing it, and worried that I was intruding on the family's grief in a sensationalist, rather callous, journalistic way, sneaking around with a long-ish lens praying that I'd not get spotted, challenged or (worse still) invited in 'properly'. I would have died of embarrassment but I have been told since that that was silly, nobody would have minded and they would all have been quite proud to have been 'zapped' for the 365 project. Ah well, I guess I am not yet fully integrated into the local ways.

Pork Pie filling - shoulder pork, bacon rashers, apricots, sage,
allspice and nutmeg.

I was 'home alone' again over that weekend as Liz had headed off to Silverwood land to spend a few nights en famille and celebrating niece Em-J's 18th Birthday. They did the girl proud, it is reported and her 'special meal' of choice was "proper fish and chips like we had at Grandma Pollards (Todmorden) when we were narrow boating".

10 ml sheep-meds syringe (clean, obvs) used to inject trotter jelly
through the steam hole of the cooked pies.

That, we all remember, included, local (to Yorkshire) speciality 'dabs' - a thin but complete slice of potato covered in beer batter and deep fried, plus huge sausages for the non fish-eaters. No cooking challenge too great for Mrs S and the sous-chefs; it all looked delicious. There was also a 'grown-up' sherry trifle from Liz (no jelly, posh fruit soaked in orange juice, and custard made properly with eggs. Also a goodly quantity of cream. Bellies were groaning and many diners needed a lie-down. Liz stayed down there to recover and then, when it was time to return to these parts accepted a lift from Steak Lady and Auntie Mary who had both decided they would quite like another 'sleep-over' here.

The finished pie with a dollop of Liz's mango chutney. 

While they were all gone and I had the kitchen to myself I decided to try a recipe I had been looking at for a while, that for 'proper' Melton Mowbray style pork pies. These are made with a special "hot water crust" pastry and are injected after cooking, with that greyish jelly that aficionados of pies love to have, cold and solid in their pies. I went with a recipe from our Johnnie Mountain cookery book, "Cooking with a Passion for Pig". I had trotters in the freezer from 2015 and hauled a shoulder joint out of the freezer to thaw so that I could lop off the required 7 ounces of lean before slow-roasting the rest for that day's supper.

A lazy cop-out day on the home-alone menu - pizza and a beer. 

I was delighted with the results which not only looked great but were delicious. Unfortunately in our big muffin tin, the recipe only made 6 pies and I only got to eat 2 of them - I was so proud of them that I was inflicting them on any passers-by and drop-in visitors ("Here - you have GOT to try these!"). Liz and the sleep-over ladies used up the last of them at lunchtime on Tuesday and I have been instructed in no uncertain terms to make them again, only with 3 times the recipe so you make 18. I will need 2 more muffin tins for this. We only own one. I have also been toying with the idea of making those pies with egg up the middle (Gala pies?) so I suppose I could use one of the bigger loaf tins instead of little muffin trays.

Soft goat's cheese with an interesting
"spongy" effect, like bread but the holes
were, of course, filled with whey, not air.

I also came by another 6 litres of the goats milk from Sue and Rob, so I tried another version of the cheese, called simply "soft goat's cheese" in our (Strawbridge) book. This recipe was a piece of cake to follow - warm the milk to 30ºC, add starter and rennet, leave 12 hours at room temperature to curdle, scoop curds into cheese-cloth/colander, hang up to drain for 12 more hours. It worked well and tastes correct but when I had finished draining it and took it down to cut it open, I was curious to find it had a spongy texture and looked a bit like bread - full of spherical cavities.

I had seen these cavities when scooping my curds across (at which point they were filled with whey, of course) but assumed they would collapse as the curds drained leaving me with a professional looking, rather fudgy textured, solid-ish cheese. The recipe says nothing about cutting up the curds before scooping them, or pressing the cheese, though it does say that you can do the draining in a cheese mould which you would turn over a couple of times during the 12 hours. Both the cutting and the moulding (and certainly the pressing) might help to deflate this cheese for next time but this time I will just mash it into plastic pots or boxes before I refrigerate. We are also getting a bit over-run with cheese so I have put a chunk of this one into the freezer to see if it can realistically be frozen and thawed without damage.

The neighbour's cattle. 

Nothing else to report except that my attempts to get nice significant pictures for 365 of the Solstice sunset (20th at 22:00) and sunrise (21st at 05:00) both failed as ugly grey cloud banks obscured the sun both times and gave us no colours at all except slate grey. Also, more cheerfully, we have now secured our dozen hatching eggs of Marans chickens, which are now in the incubator, due to hatch on around the 12th July. These came from our sheep-supplier, Mayo-Liz's farrier, who is called Roy, via the lady herself. I nipped out to their place with Charlotte who wanted to see Liz again after a long gap.

Roe deer (I think) in the local deer farm.

It turns out that Mayo-Liz may be down-sizing the livestock operation including selling some of the horses and most of the sheep which means that she may be trying to find "nice homes" for a couple of elderly ladies who have been more like pet ewes than any commercial sheep. We already have sheep of 7 and 9 years old and these two may be even older but are still sound and pushing out single lambs each year even though technically retired. I am tempted. I find I love these gentle old girls and we could probably absorb 2 more without too much trouble.

I am thinking about it. Maybe I am going soft in my old age, myself.

Goats Milk Cheese

Excellent curds forming.

With the guests safely returned to their homes we had the house back and quickly moved on to new ways of 'messy-ing' it up. We now have 2 sets of friends who are into the milking of goats and producing more milk than they can handle. Charlotte you will already know about, milking just Nanny Óg and her only on a 50/50 share basis with the kid (Henry Óg, but now shortened to 'Henno'). Well Sue and Rob have recently sold off all their many kids at just 6-8 weeks old, so have inherited, as a result, 3 milking nannies who are going at it like mad things - producing good rich milk and lots of it.

Scooping out the curds

As soon as we heard this we put in a bid for "at least 5 litres" (that is a sensible batch size for cheese making) and Sue and Rob duly turned up with 8 creamy litres, fresh and raw. The only cheese making we had done up to that point was the (supermarket) cow's milk Ricotta and then Mozzarella from the kit which I wrote about in a recent post ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/03/blessed-are-cheese-makers.html )  and then Liz's small rapid batch the other day. Nothing ventured, though, nothing gained. I chose a recipe from our 'Strawbridge' books for "Feta style" cheese and nabbed the first 5 litres. Liz did an Internet hunt for a soft goat cheese "with rind" with the remaining 3 litres. Both these batches are currently mid process.

We were both amazed by the amount of curd you get from this raw, full cream goat's milk. When the cow's milk curded it separated into the curds, floating on the surface as a 2 inch thick mass with almost clear whey under it. From the 5 litres of  cow's milk we actually got back over 4 litres of whey for the pigs (I soak their flaked barley in it, they love it). Because of this, in my ignorance, when I went to cut the curds for this cheese, I only sliced the knife in about 3 inches. When I went to scoop out the curds with the draining spoon, I found that the curds ran right to the bottom - the whole depth of milk had 'set' and the whey was only going to leak out of the cut surfaces of the curd blocks. We both made way more cheese than we had imagined we would.

The drained mass from the sieve and cheesecloth.

The curds, once cut, scooped and set to drain, do actually leak that whey slowly so they need to sit in cheesecloth on a sieve or colander and will sag slowly down to about half the volume as the cheese starts to become more dense (and would be pressed for hard cheeses). For my 'Feta' (not actually allowed to call it that as Feta is one of these protected geographic names) the cheese mass now gets spread out on plates and sprinkled with salt to continue the 'cure' while being drained every day.

Liz filling the moulds.

Liz's rinded one goes into moulds to drain further and then gets tipped out of the moulds and left to start forming that fungal 'rind' that anyone who likes the French 'chevre' cheeses would be familiar with. That is the stage we are now at for each, the 'Feta' is curing and the rinded one is growing its rind. More on these in future posts. We do not actually possess cheese moulds, of course, so the 'moulds' were a makeshift collection of plastic cups and punnets with lots of holes punched into them using the hot meat-skewer method

Makeshift moulds.

All this cheese making put us into 'food processes' mode. We are starting to come into the season for 'harvesting' (nice euphemism) some of the stock so we need freezer space. We generally go through the four freezers doing a bit of an audit deciding what we really need to use up, consolidating the few remaining bits into one or two of the freezers so that we can defrost and clean the empty ones.

Trying to grow rinds. 

All this efficiency threw up some pig's trotters which I have been meaning to slow-boil into pork jelly for use in some Melton Mowbray style pork pies. It also showed that we have way too many chunks of pork belly left and I could salt some down for streaky bacon rashers (which would admittedly probably end up back in the freezer). Thus spurred on I hauled these goodies out and thawed them for onward processing. The jelly is now made and the pork pies will be made this weekend. The bellies are dry-salted and being drained of brine each day (the salt on the surface draws a huge amount of water out of the meat) for 7 days. There will be room for young Ebony and Ivory, our ram lambs, when they come back from the butcher's on the 4th of July.

I am no expert but i *think* this is a lesser
butterfly orchid found in one of the local
bogs. 

All this food prep has left little time for any other entertainments. I had a nice early start on one of the mornings, woken at some ungodly (but dawn-lit) hour by a loud cacophony of magpie and jackdaw screeches and croaks. A Hell of a din. In my barely awake, befuddled state as I came to hearing this my brain was shouting "Mink in the chicken coop!", "Pine Marten eating the gosling!" and "Fox!", not registering that it was the maggies I was hearing. Leaping out of bed, then, in a hurry, I raced outside in wellies, jocks and my fleecy jacket (I know! Quite a look!) and found Blue the cat had one of our newly-fledged baby magpies on the ground in the cattle race and the rest of the magpie family plus half a dozen jackdaws all "mobbing" him. Soldier, our other cat was moving in too.

Blue was not actually touching the bird but sitting a few inches away, the way cats do, tempting it to try to take off so that he could pounce on it again. The baby just sat there in shock. I reached down and picked up the unprotesting bird and moved it to safety on a compost heap where the cats seemed to lose sight of it and I could hustle them indoors. When I went out later at a more sensible getting up time (07:30), to do the stock, it was gone and later that day I saw the maggies feeding 2 babies which is all we think they have this time, so my youngster may have made it. I am not sure I love magpies - they steal too many chicken eggs - so perhaps I should have dinged this one when I had the chance, but it was too early in the morning and my merciful streak got the better of me. Perhaps they will name the lad 'Lucky'.

They do, do they? 

Ah well. Enough for this one. More on those cheeses, slabs of bacon and pork pies next time. Cheers.

Fastest Cheese in the Wesht?

Our Arum has finally produced some clean spathes. Last year
they all seemed to get frosted, drowned or munched.

...in which we saw an end to the blue skies, for now at least, experienced a 'first' in the wildlife dept, had our shaggy dogs visited by our tame dog-groomer and played host to some rels.

Yes, the run of blue skies and heatwave temperatures came to an end but we quite welcomed it and saw it as a bit of a relief and the garden has definitely appreciated the refreshment. The 'wildlife' drama was our first sighting, in Ireland, of deer and much to our delight and surprise they were just a mile away, in our own home lane, not even as far as the local village.

Bog Asphodel in Kiltybranks.

These were 2 female fallow deer and we 'caught' them wandering on the lane as we headed off to Balla-D on a mission to retrieve (would you believe) our chemical toilet. The lane is straight so we could see the buff/white shapes  at a distance and first thought they might be dogs. According to the bio-diversity maps, we are 'meant' to have fallow deer all over Co Roscommon and I've been hunting around with my eyes open as this is a species I know well, love and 'follow' from the Kent days. In Kent, when I was involved in the Challock Forest 'friends'

First peas of 2016 - in the poly-tunnel, obviously.

I was the one doing the 'expert' (ha!) guided walks for the public during the rut, and it was fallow deer that we were looking at. I have not seen hide nor hair, not a whisper of a fallow deer in all the 4 and a half years we have been in Ireland. I have missed them. Then there they were, not a 5 minute drive from home, clearly visible and definitely fallow does till they saw us arriving and nipped off down the bank into the young forestry to the left of the lane. We have been back that way many times since but, of course, not a sign. There is one not-so-good possibility for this sighting before we all get too excited. We know that there is a deer farm locally though we have not, so far, found it and I have no idea whether it is fallow deer the man keeps, but these two might just be farm escapes. Never mind. I have added them to the bio-diversity database with that rider in the notes.

Towser gets it in the neck from Charlotte. Everywhere else, too!

The dogs were long overdue for a clip and I took it easy with them all through the hot spell. Regular readers will know that I clip them myself and would normally do them around about my birthday in mid April. This year though, they were booked in long ago for some more special, 'professional' treatment. Our friend Charlotte, trainee vet assistant, animal wrangler and also dog groomer had her eyes on them for some pictures before and after of the 'Westie Cut' (and other styles) for her curriculum vitae, so we were saving them up.

Come on you boys in green? Poppea is ready for the footie. 

She loves doing the westies and as they are white, she can also practise playing with her colours/dyes. These are only the cheap, last-a-few-days, water-based inks which wash off so the dogs do not have to worry long about their street cred. There would be no market round here (says Charlotte) for the proper, €6-a-bottle colours used by the "Creative Groomers" that you might get to use in a city 'salon'.

Towser loves C anyway, even though she
has really 'done' him this time!

So, Towser got a (golden) lion cut which, once photographed, got all cut off again so that his head and shoulders would be cool and he finished up with a 'Gay Pride' style rainbow and many coloured dots. Poppea got an Irish tricolour on one side and a goal net on the other so she'd be ready for the footie (Euros). Deefer got butterflies on 3 sides and a desert-island palm tree (green leaves, brown tree trunks, golden sand) on her rump.

3 flavours of goat cheese - plain, garlic and chives.

There was, too, a nice bonus to this day. Charlotte is now milking that guest-goat (Nanny Óg) on a 50/50 share basis with the kid and pulling off more milk than they have need for over there, so she offered some to us and we, of course, spotted the chance to make some more cheese - we love a feta in particular but also all the younger, softer goat cheeses. I collected Charlotte and all the grooming gear plus the milk at about midday. Unbeknownst to me, while we worked outside, Liz had nipped onto the Internet and found a goat-cheese recipe which only needed lemon juice and heat and a couple of hours. By the time we had done dogs, Liz re-appeared with a chilled pink wine and three flavours of perfectly good goats cheese, plain, garlic and chives. I don't suppose cheese has ever been made faster than that (or eaten!). We are looking forward to more milk as it comes available and have also been offered some from friends Sue and Rob who have now sold all their kids and are milking 3 nannies. They have milk coming out of their ears by all accounts. Blesséd are the cheese makers?

The ducks finally work out what the pond is for. Liz and
Mary look on.

Meanwhile, we have also played host to the Mum-in-Law (Steak Lady)  and Auntie Mary who came up for an over-night and a relaxing look around the farm, plus a visit to Strokestown House. The weather held off for long enough for them to enjoy the out doors and Liz has also enjoyed a bit of feeding the pigs while managing this time NOT to be chased by the gander. The ducks finally worked out what the pond is for and are now regulars dabbling and up-ending so that the ladies were able to sit on our big ash-log and watch them busily going about duck-business. Mercifully, this has not, so far, been too damaging to the pond.

As I write this we are relaxing back indoors after the Strokestown visit (enormous Ploughman's Lunch but too much rain for more than one border of the walled garden) and soon to drop the guests back to the railway station. It has been a lovely relaxing interlude and all the better for being a shade cooler after all that heat but, no, that was NOT the sound of me complaining about the weather.

Blink and You'd Miss It

My pathetic best silaging picture so far. 

I am, as you'd know, always on the look out for new subjects for the 365 photographic project. A year in the life of our village and its townlands (sub-parishes). Silage making time was upon us; surely a crucial, can't miss, event in the year of a farming community. The weather forecast predicted a violent end to our lovely run of hot days so you'd KNOW the silage contractors would be biting on the bit, raring to go. On Wednesday evening I heard my first mowing machine roaring away a few fields out so I expected to be able to photograph the cutting stages followed by the baling and wrapping.

Last of the blue skies for now. Our next
door field with the suckler herd. We call it
(Vendor) Anna's 5-Acres. It probably has a
(better) real name.

Not on your life! So fast were these crews working that I saw a couple of fields mown and in their drying/wilting rows (I'd missed the mowing) but by the time I could get out again with the camera the grass was baled, carted and wrapped. I was left looking at a tightly shorn, rather surprised looking field. These boys do not hang about. The nearest I could get to a picture for '365' was a long-lens shot across the valley, of some baled silage awaiting the carting stage. All we had here was the to-ing and fro-ing of the contractor's bale-trailers gathering the harvest in to the local farm yards rumbling up and down the lane setting the dogs off barking.

A lovely stand of Aconites still going strong in the garden
 of a long-abandoned dilapidated cottage.  

In theory the hot spell has currently ended and we are returning to "normal" weather for June in the 'Wesht' of Ireland. I have to say that I had not noticed it getting much cooler. The clouds have returned and, mercifully, the little grey midges have departed so that I was able to clear a ditch and hedge for a neighbour without being driven to distraction. I don't have a problem with the 'bitey' ones - the real mozzies and midges - they don't seem to find me tasty. My beef is with the tiny grey ones who land in your sweat and then just walk about on your face. I hate them.

Dublin Bay rose always does well for us.

It seems we may have the daftest bunch of ducks in the land. These are our six 'Khaki Campbell' youngsters hatched at the beginning of March and now fully feathered and, you'd guess, as waterproof and buoyant as any duck could hope to be. For some reason they are frightened of going into the big pond. They love a splash about in their paddling pool and even though it is quite a big one, the 6 of them in there together leave very little room for any of them to move about.

Liz's pic of the ducks as close as they ever get to the water.
Feet on dry land and tips of bills in the water.

These guys are fully free-range and can walk pretty much anywhere on the 'farm' in their amusing waddling 'crocodile' of single file ducks. They have been all around the pond and seen it from all (dry land) angles but the nearest they ever get to getting in is when they all line up on the bank, feet on Terra Firma, to dip their beaks in and dabble at the marginal plants.

Interior of our local (RC) church for the
365 project.

I should quickly say that I am more than happy. Regular readers will know that I was always against having ducks because I think/thought that they destroy ponds leaving you with a stagnant, shitty mess with no pond life in it. Your standard village duck-pond in effect, an ecological desert, ringed by bare, brown, eroded bank mud. So to be able to have ducks and not get your pond wrecked seems too good to be true and I am leaving these ducks well alone. If they want to wash and brush up in the paddling pool and touch my lovely pond only with their bill-tips, then I am not going to argue with them. Neither of us can actually see this lasting and we are both quietly hoping to be the one out there with a camera when our little file of 6 ducks set off serenely across the pond leaving just a V of wake and their little feet under the water going like a train, out of sight.

Rain Dance

Neither of us ever anticipated in all this 'move-to-the-West-of-Ireland' project that we would ever be standing in County Roscommon disappointed at the lack of rain. We are not the kind of people who moan about the wet weather and then straight way transfer all that grumble to the heat after just a single hot day. We have been enjoying the blue skies and taking the close sweatiness and midges that sometimes come with it, on the chin. Stoic to the end, us. But my diary records that this run of 'scorchio' started on 11th May, all be it with a couple of showery days around the 20th, so have a heart, Met Éireann; we are sated. You even sneaked the perfect Bank Holiday weekend in there.

Some nice artichokes for a tapas style meal

We are happy, content, have had all we could ask and more. When the run of hot days appeared to be breaking with an 'orange' warning for thunderstorms and heavy rain on (Bank Holiday) Monday, we got stuck into some good weeding, mowed all the grass and raced several lines of washing through the laundry system. We watched with happy anticipation as the promised massive black cloud banks rolled in mid-afternoon. Back in Kent Liz would have been telling our lovely neighbour, 'Angel' Betty and myself off suspecting that we were doing rain dances because we were fed up with all the watering. Here we listened out for the distant rumbles of thunder on the N, S, E and W horizons, commenting cheerfully... "Yes! It's a-coming!"

Alliums

No such drama for us here, though. Friends in all directions were reporting rain. Sue and Rob talked of "monsoon" conditions. Carolyn in Sligo reported lashing rain and cousin Keith in Dublin spoke of massive downpours, impressively heavy although short lived. We stayed dry as the 'dusht' and missed it all. Our clouds built impressively and dispersed. We stayed oppressively hot and clammy and felt quite miffed. Cheated, even. It didn't rain all evening, then a tiny front doorstep-dampening drip came later on and the night was dry. We know we should be careful what we wish for and I am glad that I got the mowing done - I would have been cursing if the shaggy grass had got wetted and then taken days to dry out again. It has not rained today either. Ah well.

In the local bogs the turf cutters are taking full advantage
of the drought. This turf is "footed" up to get some air through
it and we have seen some being cleared and carted away to
store. This is Kiltybranks.

Meanwhile in archery I am still having a whale of a time, loving my new hobby. When weather permits we are out of doors and the instructor is doing his best to get us ready for an assault on nearby inter-county "Field Archery" competitions. Field Archery is where you go yomping around through the woods and fields trying to find and then hit model animals made of dense foam rubber. The beasts are a bit larger than life (to give us half a chance - the crows are more like ravens and the partridges are as big as chickens, for example).

We have also been introduced to the black arts of scoring so that we can see whether we are improving week on week. The animal models are marked with an oval roughly corresponding to the chest/lungs position and a smaller oval where the heart would be. The scores vary according to size, range and difficulty of the target/shot but might be, for example, 15 for a kill (dead hit on the heart), 10 for a 'wound' (chest area) and 5 for a 'hit' (anywhere else on the animal). There is much banter around how the animal is not officially dead even though you have just banged an arrow through his head, in one eye and out the other. There are also silly scores for some of the more ridiculously tricky shots - a rat on a log THIRTY metres away (!). Hit that one, you get 40, knock him off his log with your arrow stuck in him and you score 60. I have not got within a foot of the blighter.

The pigs this evening.

I should quickly add, just to quiet the fears of people who think I have got a bit blood-thirsty, that it is ILLEGAL everywhere in the British Isles to hunt anything with a bow and arrow, even a cross-bow. If you want to go a-hunting you need a licence , a pretty fierce draw-strength bow and you need to be on mainland Europe - Germany, Italy and some of France, I think. We are definitely just playing at it. It is just more entertaining to go 'hunting' between the trees, than to spend 2 hours lobbing arrows down a Badminton hall.

Pastures new. The sheep are back in the orchard. 

What ever way about it, I was 'on fire' on Sunday and it seemed I could not miss those targets. After my first try out 3 weeks back when I scored just 65 as a combination of 13 'hits', no wounds and no kills, I was suitably humble and knew my place - the beginner/new boy/trainee. On Sunday, for some reason, I found myself transformed into Dead-eye Dick. I got 2 kills in the first group and hit several other 'animals' more than once (you get 3 arrows per target). I had surpassed my 65 one third of the way in! I must admit it did not go as 'deadly' as that all through and I still missed my due portion of targets with all three arrows (of course, I have still not bagged 'log rat') but I ended with a score of 145, over twice my first one. No pressure for next week!

Liz (in orange) gives the sheep strict instructions not to eat
or break off the trees. 

The sheep, meanwhile, Have razed the front lawn to the ground and left only a few grass-flower stalks and some now obvious nettles and thistles. The lack of rain has no doubt contributed and the grass has stopped growing. We do not want to let them back into the East Field yet as that is resting, so we have rather bravely moved the gang into the orchard tonight. This is with some trepidation as we know what damage sheep can do to young trees by browsing and by scratching their itches by rubbing at them. We are hoping our trees are that bit bigger and taller so that they can afford to lose a few lower leaf-clusters (raising their 'skirts' or 'Savannah-ing' we call it here). They are also in some cases still guarded by the tree guards we originally fitted when we used this field before, several years ago. We are hoping that the sheep will focus on the lush grass and buttercups and leave the trees alone. Liz has read them The Riot Act.

Two Fat Ladies

Continuing to enjoy those blue skies and
getting great blocks of pure azure into as
many pictures as we can! 

An hour ago I was sitting on the parapet of our local bridge with the dogs, watching a sparrow hawk soaring in the thermals while being mobbed by 5 house martins (the hawk - not us!). From there back here to lunch and finding superb left overs in the fridge (beef liver cooked in cream with onions and mushrooms) and a tray of very generously gifted eggs, the answer was a liver omelette. Next I wandered round to look in on an elderly lady neighbour with whom we catch up periodically and was fed her home made treacle-bread and 'tay' in her lovely old kitchen. Coming home through her gorgeous garden I noticed that her yard-wide clumps of poached egg plant were a-buzz with 30-40 (of presumably our) honey bees. This truly is a small bit of Heaven which I must have done something really good in a former life to have inherited.

Generous gifts of eggs and a couple of all-spice cookies to
try out. 

Ah well, enough of this indulgence. I will change subject or risk starting to be horribly smug. Too late? Those podgy wenches of my post-title? No. It is not Jennifer Patterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright of whom I speak nor indeed any human females*  but , on this occasion, sheep. Specifically two of our ewes, Lily and Myfanwy.

Myfanwy is now lifted off the ground
when her "baby" lambs try to suck

In the last post you will have read that we were visited by Carolyn and Charlotte of the Mini Horses, here that day to collect the guest-goats whose work here was done. Charlotte is our go-to advisor on all things sheep-health and we are always happy to receive her comment, criticism, advice etc. This especially regarding what sheep folk call "condition" or the fatness of the animal particularly around the spine.

Polly (grey) is a nice 3.5 condition. Lily here is way too fat at
around 4.5

You may have seen judges at sheep shows prodding and poking the back of the sheep, squeezing up into the pelvic girdle and behind the ribs. They are feeling for the 'processes' of the vertebrae which stick up (spinous processes) and out sideways (transverse processes). If they can feel them sticking up and out sideways through the muscle blocks then your sheep is down in the 'under-fed' area (Condition 1+). If you can't feel them at all and there are dimples where they should be, then she is up to condition 5. As you would expect, somewhere in between is about right.

Rosie, our 'keeper' ewe lamb is nice and chunky at 3.5 months

Now that our ewes are sheared you can see a bit of this. An expert would be able to judge them without the prodding but you should prod to confirm your visual assessments. Charlotte could see that where I had continued to feed the sheep plenty of crunch despite the grass now growing and becoming quite plentiful, my two Suffolk-y ewes were getting decidedly porky though Polly, our Jacob cross, being more of a range-y, goat-like mountainy beast looked OK at maybe 3.5.

Poached egg plant - great for the bees.

This wouldn't be a problem now but come November and we would be trying to get the girls back into lamb, the condition has a huge effect on fertility. Your ewe wants to be between conditions 2.5 and 3.5 to be at her best, and preferably rising through that range, not falling. We therefore need to get this weight off them through the Summer and Charlotte and Carolyn have jointly advised some changes to grass regimes (rotating and resting various bits of lawn and field) as well as cutting the crunch right out to 'tit-bit' levels. This is especially so because this Autumn our 'tup' is likely to be Sue and Rob's "Silas", full of hormones and teenage vigour but not necessarily that knowledgeable on how the biology works. He is one of the 'suck lambs' from this Spring and not yet 3 months old. We need our ewes to be cracking out multiple eggs to have the best chance of getting more than one lamb per ewe next year.

More blue skies for these '365' pics.

Small quantities are allowed (and even advised) because they make it easy to see all your sheep every day and quickly let you spot any lameness or other health problems. The 'diet' though, is not so popular with the girls themselves and there was much 'Baa-ing' at times of day formerly know as 'elevenses', 'lunch' and 'supper' (yes, I know - there was NO grass and those ewes were all trying to suckle multiple lambs). In fact I think I heard a Management Meeting going on at one stage and the hot headed young lambs were planning to march on a certain house in Sligo with flaming brands, pitchforks and a signed petition. Oy! We want a WORD with you, Charlotte!

Darina Allen's trad Irish nettle soup. Superb!

Of course, in practise, the front lawn was so shaggy with long, rested grass that the sheep have gorged themselves in the sunshine, laid down in the shade with their tummies all spherical and rotund with grassy largesse, fallen asleep and forgotten all about being hungry for crunch and marching on Sligo. They have settled into the new regime quite happily and the out-of-time baa-ing, when it does happen is all a bit half-hearted and unconvinced. Baa????... maybe?... worth a try?

Our Cuckoo-Marans hen 'Squawk' dust bathing

Meanwhile, you may have heard me speaking of the ambition to evolve our chicken flock over, by natural wastage, to just the variety Buff Orpington. Well, it turns out that we are both in love with the oldest hen in our gang, 10 year old 'Squawk', our Cuckoo Marans girl who is still laying lovely dark brown speckledy eggs. The Marans are an all purpose (Western) French breed from down in the 'Charante-Maritime' area.

Happy Birthday Blue, 4 today.

So we have decided to go with Buffs AND Marans and we have been looking around for possible birds or 'hatching eggs' and, once again, step forward Carolyn who tipped us off that Mayo-Liz (our sheep supplier) has a farrier named Roy, who happens to breed three different colours of Marans - Cuckoos, Coppers and Golden. We have put our name down for a dozen eggs of unknown colour hoping to get some Cuckoo birds out of this or, failing that, Marans of other colours which we will probably fall in love with just the same.

Poppea at 4 years old.

Finally I need to wish Happy Birthday to three of our animals. 4 years ago today (June 3rd) while we were anxiously waiting on news of the whelping of Lily (bitch this time, not ewe) down in Silverwood, unbeknownst to us, just around the corner a rather disreputable she-cat (several handsome strangers had been there and she was "no better than she should be" apparently) was kittening to beat the band. Mrs S joyfully phoned her chum round the corner to tell her "our" good news and could hardly get the story out before chum was bubbling back about kittens.

Towser at 4. Please turn a blind one to the grubby wall.
Towser's decorating I think.  

Anyway, long story short, we ended up with 2 pups and 2 kittens. Blue's brother Rolo sadly 'lost' in a fight with a vehicle in the lane a couple of years back and has since been replaced by Soldier whose birth date we know not. Many Happy Returns, then, you lot. Live long and prosper.

*There may be bit of a health-kick going on here at present - no wine, less booze, cream, butter and rich sauces, more exercise etc but nothing is to be inferred from that re any words in my title.