Royal Relief

Honey bee on swede/turnip flower. I left the last half dozen
to run away to seed and the bees love them.

Bad weather, strong winds and heavy showers have kept us a bit pinned down of late. I have to admit to having got badly behind on the gardening. It has been fairly warm, so the weeds have charged onwards even when it's been too wet to get out and tackle them, so I have ground still needing clearing before I can plant things, and seeds still sitting here in packets which should have been in the ground long ago.  Any big projects have been parked for the moment and we have been snatching opportunities to do little jobs in the sunny intervals. These have mainly been livestock, so this post will be a bit of a livestock update.

Our bees on our apple blossom. We are delighted with this
'first' for Feigh. 

The biggest news is that we finally got a chance to crack open the bee hive and were quickly able to establish that we had larvae in the brood frames which told us immediately that the Queen Bee must still be alive. This was a huge relief as we were worried that we might have squashed her in our clumsy, amateurish efforts to re-hive the donated colony. This would have been serious and embarrassing. To lose one colony in a year, as they might say, is unfortunate.... but to lose two...... But no, it is now 25 days since our re-hiving, so any eggs laid by the queen prior to that would have long since completed their larval stage, pupated and even emerged as adults. We are happy bee keepers.

The swarm-box is strapped to the big ash tree, top right. 

At this time of year, beekeepers start to think about swarming, potentially losing their queen and half the work force, possibly catching them or, even better, bribing someone else's absconded colony to fetch up and stay at your apiary. We have our swarm-box strapped to the ash tree but this year, anyway, it is unlikely to catch any prime-swarm of ours. Our queen, we know has been wing-clipped as well as colour-marked, so if our workers decide to swarm, they would boot her out of the colony but then instead of flying off with them to hang in a tree, she will fall to the ground and probably get lost in the grass.

Colour codes for queen-marking.

Some bee keepers do this to try to stop the swarm taking off (the idea is that they realise they have lost Her Majesty and return to the hive). If we are lucky she will gather a small number of workers around her on the ground which we might spot and be able to rescue into the skep, where we can then gather some of the swarm or some workers from the hive to make up a new colony. It's a long shot. You have to hope that the swarm only leaves the hive when it has set up replacement queens ready to emerge from their own pupae and that these (virgin) queens get successfully mated on their mating-flights before returning to the hive to carry on the good work.

Poppea talks to Mary through the fence while Towser watches

Meanwhile, in the pigs dept, our two young ladies have reached the 3-month-old mark. They are thriving, very strong in the appetite area and now grown bigger than the dogs by quite a way. We are very happy with them. They have also become quite tame by now and allow me to measure them with the tape measure (see earlier post) to estimate weights. They seem to be about 17 kgs, possibly a bit smaller than last year's Tamworths but we did not manage to measure those till they were a bit older. I am being a bit more careful to control food intake on these girls as we are aiming for a carcass with a bit less fat covering. They also seem to be a lot more into rootling and churning up the ground, but again, when we got the Tams the ground was dry and hard for their first month, where these animals have had plenty of rain and easy-peel turf.

The Hubbards at 3 weeks feel some first sun on their feathers
and grass under their feet

The Hubbard chicks are cracking on too and have quickly out grown the bodged-up brooder box (made from 2 big potato crisp box 'outers') we have them in upstairs in the spare room. Luckily the weather has turned nicely warm, so we have been letting them out in the sunshine in one of the rabbit runs, all be it with one end well wrapped against the rather chilly breezes and a good layer of shredded wood and hay in the 'bedroom'. They are also just outside the front window where Liz can keep a close eye out for any signs of chilling - there have been none - the birds race about happily chasing each other, scratching for food among the grass and doing some practise play-fights as they set up their pecking order.

The old tumble-down apple tree is in full bloom. It never
ceases to amaze me. It looks almost rotted through at the
broken base but there must be just enough intact sap-wood
to keep it going. 

We rescue them back indoors at night for now, but will soon be letting them do a 'sleep over' in the rabbit run. They are only 3 weeks old tomorrow but these are no ordinary 'little cute fluffy chicks', they grow and put in weight like no other bird we have met. I should probably weigh some tomorrow but in the commercial world these guys make oven-ready weights in 80 to 100 days. It will take longer in our free range set-up - we normally give them 4-5 months. At 6 weeks we usually let them start to explore properly by lifting the end of their run in the morning so that they can escape, and then, for a while, we chase them all back home with a food bribe in the evening. They may voluntarily start to use the proper chicken coop.

New ear tags for the twins. 

Also cracking on are the twin lambs, who made their 6-week birthday on the 7th May. This means that they need to get ear tagged, so we had some fun rounding all 5 sheep up into the cattle race so that we could tag these and check everyone's feet, trim and spray if necessary. No foot problems this time, so with Louise now officially (IE0455809)00002H and Thelma 00003A we are all legal and booked into my paperwork. You don't tag till 6 weeks because the ears would be so tiny and the tag so huge compared to the ear, it would be uncomfortable for the lamb and there is a risk of nicking a blood vessel. Hulking 6-weekers have their blood vessels nicely spaced apart on acres of ear - you can aim more reliably with the pliers.

Turkey eggs in the borrowed incubator
(many thanks, Charlotte!)

The new turkeys did not miss a beat on their egg laying with the move here, so we were able to give the half dozen asked for by a possible new friend of ours requested by Charlotte. This is a lady with a tup (ram) who we may be able to use come August, to service our Polly and Lily (plus one?) so we are looking to schmooze her up a bit, with turkey and Buff Orp eggs as the main bribe currency. Our turkey hen, though, Barbara carried on a-laying, happily joining in with the chickens' current habit of dropping the eggs in the known stash under the elderberry tree in the woods, but also (once) on the nest of the broody Buff in the Tígín. We decided that we might as well incubate a few of these just to see how we get on. We borrowed Charlotte's incubator again (Thanks C) and have set 8 in it. They take 28 days to cook, so are due on 8th June.

(Top to bottom) Chestnut, soapwort,
lemon balm, sweet woodruff and
comfrey in the nursery area

That broody Buff has stuck with the job tucked down between the concrete blocks and the camping toilet and is almost there now, with the 'proper' eggs due in 2 more day's time. 'Proper'? Yes, we were rather horrified to see on Sunday that she had left the nest and there was 'now' a white Hubbard adult hen sitting there, presumably laying an extra egg. Moments later Miss White was off and cackling and the broody Buff had nipped back in, so we could not see if there were extras. The next day we caught them again and discovered that Miss Buff was now sitting on 13 eggs (!), 7 more than we'd set under her and one of these the aforementioned turkey egg. We recovered that one.

Cheese and bacon 'swiss' rolls.

You do not have to be a chicken expert to see that these eggs have turned up at some unknown time between our true start-date (April 24th) and now, so will only be part-incubated by our Day 21 (Thursday). When (if) the 'proper' six chicks hatch and start to get active, Miss Buff will abandon the nest and take them off to play, leaving the unhatched eggs as failures to go cold. We have an option, if we see the move and can rescue the eggs still warm, to nip them into the incubator but that way madness lies. You end up with baby chicks of all ages moving through the rearing processes not necessarily compatible with each other (size differences etc). It is not going to be dull, anyway! We have, meanwhile, closed the Tígín door on the broody. She can do her last few days without interference from her 'sisters' and sitting just on the existing eggs. And yes, we could have marked the original 6 eggs, but hey, that would have been way too sensible.

Dunhills all? The gang on the calf-muck heap. 

That about wraps it up for this one, with most of the livestock covered. The rabbits have not had a mention but they are just mooching along calmly enjoying their big new run. The dogs and cats are just the dogs and cats. No news is good news.

Up All Night (to get 'Lected)

JD Bob and Liz pore over the laptop, checking out election results

...with a few apologies to 'Daft Punk' I guess. I am not a huge fan of politics; I tend to assume that politicians are all self-seeking rogues and who you get does not make much difference to you. As Roger Daltrey of 'The Who' sang, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". However, I do always vote, given the chance. It is a different matter for Liz who passionately loves all of this intrigue and manouvring. the manifestos, the press analysis and the opinion polls.

Post Election analysis

Election Day(s), be they in the USA, UK or Ireland are a high point in each year and Liz will generally stay up all night with the TV running the BBC coverage, the laptop checking out websites and the smart-phone jangling away with the chat, feed and comment. She is glued to every seat gained, lost or swinging. On the big Labour Landslide (1997) , she had got bored and gone to bed just before Portillo lost his seat, so she missed it and has regretted it ever since. She is even more determined to go the distance than before that. Last night was a classic - glued to the screens from about ten pm right round to 07:30 when I was up an about again doing livestock and first cups of coffees.

In this pursuit, Liz has found a firm friend and staunch ally in John Deere Bob who we quickly came to realise was equally passionate about politics; he's a bit of an activist for his local branch of the party and will always bring the new candidates round the village to meet everybody. Bob is delighted to have found, in Liz, a like-minded colleague and even more delighted that Liz has a laptop and the internet savvy to go hunting for the latest info and opinions, which Bob has presumably not had up till now. Bob comes round regularly to discuss this with Liz and has her nipping around in websites and newsfeeds asking all his detailed questions about voting results by party, by area, by breakdowns and, today, going over what actually happened compared to what the two of them 'predicted'.

Cuckoo flower or 'Lady's Smock'
(Cardamine pratense) self seeded into
the margin of our pond. I've not seen it
growing round here, so we know not from
where.

It's lovely to see it happen, to watch them in action and to know that the democratic process is in good hands and well analysed and watched over. Bob does not do the over-night thing with Liz and I'm with him on the line he takes on that - "An hour's sleep before twelve is worth two after". Yes. I need my beauty sleep, so I set the 'onesie'-clad Liz up with a good hot fire in the range, coffees and a goodnight kiss and catch up with all the results in the morning, at which point she takes herself off to bed leaving me with the main headlines written down in case Bob should call and instructions not to disturb her till 2 pm. Mid morning, Bob does phone and I give him the headlines but he asks lots of questions around that and I get the distinct impression he is not all that taken with my 'patchy report' and we know he will be back this evening when the proper expert is awake!

Meanwhile, a quick update on the poor Marans hen who was bitten by the mink. The mink has made no reappearance and the dogs 'tell' me he has not been around; not a sniff of scent and certainly no interest in the baited trap. We assume he is long gone, not fancying the odds round here. The hen is back with the gang and looking a whole lot less swollen. She is able to wander about, scratch and peck with the rest of them, gets plenty of food and water and is still laying eggs and receiving the attentions of the rooster(s). Hopefully she will make a full recovery, all be it, possibly minus one eye.

Chicken for dinner, Mr SL? That's me top left. 

We had a lovely visit yesterday from the Parents-in-Law, Steak Lady and Mr SL who fancied coming up to look around the place and the livestock and take a bite of lunch with us. Liz laid on a superb meal of that family favourite "Black Spring's Nan's Pork Hock" (our own pork, of course). Mr SL was very impressed by the size of the pigs which he saw recently but who have grown fast in the mean time. He's not so hot on his legs these days, though, so for him to meet the 'baby' Hubbard chicks, I brought a couple down from their brooder-box, for a wander around on the dining table (after lunch, of course!). He was intrigued, petting them and calming them down. Liz snatched a few pics with the phone-camera.

When it was time for them to go we assembled a goodly box of produce and garden cuttings - eggs, purple sprouting broccoli, lovage, cheese and chilli biscuits, honey, beeswax polish, seedlings of foxglove, Creeping Jenny, violets and Tiarella. We then drove in convoy to our nearest and improved-out-of-all-recognition garden centre where she filled the car-boot even more with purchases as well as buying us a couple of bits as a Thank You. I think we'll call that a successful visit!.

American Mink

Poor Squawk, badly bitten, bruised and swollen on the right
side of her face, her right eye swollen shut tight. 

A bit more excitement than anybody needs in the middle of the night came our way in the wee small hours of this morning, when a mink got into our chicken house and almost did for our elderly Cuckoo Marans hen "Squawk". Fortunately for us and Squawk, it was a warm night so we slept with the back window of the bedroom slightly open and the dogs, sleeping on our bed, never quite turn off the alertness and the keen hearing for unusual noises. And don't let you slumber on if they KNOW there is something out there.

The patient is in the 'hospital wing' seeming to be unaffected
other than the right side of her face. 

It was 01:30 or there abouts when the shout went up. We'd been woken by an unusual bird-shout from the hen house but, as you do, we were still trying to convince ourselves that we hadn't really heard it, or it was just the geese making love and it was warm under the duvet and raining outside. But the dogs were having none of this and bounced across us to get to the window sill where we could quickly tell this wasn't the normal cacophony of mad barking but an intense curiosity and investigation. They were silent except for the noise of Towser trying to hoover up all the air from the yard into his nose pressed against the window gap, we guess to get the scent of something new.

Escape route. I have never seen an animal
do an 8 foot vertical up concrete before. 

In seconds we were awake and sure I needed to go investigate so dressing gown and wellies on, head torch and out turning on yard lights and so on in case it might be a human intruder. I arrived to find a mink with the Marans hen's face in its mouth held down on the ground, half under the row of nest boxes. I tried to get a foot in there to stomp on the mink, but it let go the bird (who ran off) and shot up behind the nest boxes. Liz arrived at that stage and I called out that we had the mink and could she bring a dog. Deefer was quickly on the scene and when I lifted out the boxes, she chased the mink down under the hutches you can see in the pic. He was safe for the moment.

Escape holes under the tin roof. 

We rescued the poor hen and put her up in the hutches, then called in the other two dogs. They were delighted to suddenly have something they were allowed to try to catch and kill. I also grabbed a screw driver to whizz off the white panels blocking the hole where the mink was now hiding, to let Deefer get in there. We know the chase went down to the left hand end and back, because the back end of the mink suddenly appeared at a gap and Towser and Poppea almost snatched it but the mink had now had enough. He shot back along the 'tunnel' past Deefer and then took off vertically up the concrete block wall and Liz caught sight of his vanishing bum disappearing at roof level through a hole under the corrugated sheeting.

Mink Trap.

He was gone. We were just left to round up dogs and take them for a patrol round the buildings inside and out, calm down the chickens, rue the many gaps and holes in these old buildings many of which are easy pop-holes for an American Mink, no bigger than a stretched out rat. I will attack those tomorrow. Also, as we have a mink trap since about 3 weeks ago and, in the bin, a ripening bag of prawn heads - perfect mink-bait, apparently. We set the trap and decided it had all gone quiet and the scent cooling, headed back indoors for a middle of the night coffee. We knew that if our mink came back, then the dogs would surely alert us to him again.

Come and get these lovely prawn bits, Mr Mink. What could
POSSIBLY go wrong?

That's it, this time - that's all she wrote so far. The chicken survived the night and is now in the hospital wing trying to get some rest despite the constant cheeping of baby Hubbards. She seems fine apart from the right side of her face which is badly swollen. These are the invasive non-native minks, the 'American' Mink (Mustela vison) which are escapes or releases from fur-farms. We do not seem to do the European Mink (Lutreola lutreola) in these parts (in Ireland at all). They are not "evil bastards", they are just very efficient predators, plonked down in a 'foreign' environment, just trying to make a living like the rest of us. It just seems unreasonably wicked that they do not kill our chickens quickly and cleanly, like the bone-crunching snap of a fox's jaws, but instead they grab the head-end somewhere and chew through enough skin and flesh to get blood flowing, which they can then lap up. Their mouth and teeth are similar to those of a cat, with the carnivore 'fangs' (canines) and the secateur-like premolar and molar cutting teeth (carnassials) so the internal injuries from the first grab alone must be horrendous. The bird must die slowly and in great pain and all the other birds just have to watch and wait their turn. Our friend Charlotte has recently had all her ducks killed, maimed or traumatised like this to the degree where the most merciful thing was to despatch the traumatised and badly chewed survivors. If this lad returns and gets himself caught in our trap then I'll have no more problem finishing him off than I did with the foxes. We hope this is a roving young animal who is now so scared of 'us' that he won't try it again. Stay away Mr Mink.

Treasure in the Dusty Shoe Box.

Your blogger in about 1959.

I expect that in many families there is, in some dusty corner of an attic or a lost filing system, the "box of family photographs". Blow the dust off that old shoe-box and there are the packets of Kodak black and white prints and negatives, often of long departed and barely remembered relatives who your Mum or possibly Grand-Ma might still be able to recognise as "That's Alison, who used to visit Mrs Conquest, who lived next to us in Pilot Road" (or where-ever). Maybe like us, the number of pictures reduces with each child born - those keen new parents in the 50s keen to click away with the Kodak Brownie and capture every move and new clothes item of No.1 Son, had become a bit jaded by the time No.2 arrived and barely took any of No.3. Our shoe-box contains hundreds of pictures of my 'big brother', Tom, around a dozen of me and only a couple for younger bro', Mark.

All grown up? 1981 by now and allowed out to play in the
Research Station Land Rover

It was Mark though (and fair play to him!) who now has the time and technology to volunteer (crazy fool!) to scan in all these pictures, digitize them and then spread them around the family in the modern way. Liz had this job for all the old slides of the Dublin/Portmarnock tribe, but Mark is now on a mission to create an (electronic?) "photobook" which can be run through the projector at family gatherings now that most of those children and cousins are in their own 50s and the original photographers, if still with us, are into their Autumn years.

A sofa-load of cousins. I am far right.

The rest of us have seen the occasional one pinged out on Facebook for a sense-check. How old were you in this picture? Here is one of all three brothers - anyone know the date/ages? We've also been enjoying remembering all those "Nana-knit jumpers" and some dodgy haircuts. Mark has now assembled the prototype photo-book which he will air at as many family gatherings as he can get at so that everyone can comment, correct mis-captions and so on before he officially goes to press with the finished version. I am looking forward to it. Good luck with that project, Mark. The joys of retiring and suddenly, in theory anyway, having time to do all these things.

Our wooden bowls get the beeswax treatment.

That furniture polish we made from beeswax and coconut oil is proving to be excellent stuff altogether and we are using it all around the place, on furniture, wooden bowls and now also the handles of garden tools and the like. Because it is all food-grade we don't mind getting it on our skin and this is, without doubt, the easiest way to use it. You scoop out a finger-sized blob and briefly soften it with the warmth of your hands, then basically massage it in to the wood by getting palm and fingers all over it. It's a bit like buttering a baking tin but you try not to leave quite so much loose on the surface. Twenty minutes at room temperature sees all the oilier elements soak into the wood grain whereupon a good buff with the cloth gives you a lovely polished lustre

Talking of old family pictures, 2 of the bowls give us a special pleasure as they were made by my Uncle Barrie who got very keen on wood turning at one stage and kitted his workshop out with special lathes and other gear. He made beautiful bowls out of some special woods and then, rather helpfully, used to burn in (engrave?) with a soldering iron (?) the name of the wood and the year as well as his own name. So in the pic of three bowls above, I can tell you that the paler bowl on the right is of "spalted ash" in 1993. Spalting is the confused-grain scar-tissue which trees produce around wounds and broken off limbs.

Liz getting adventurous with the stripes.

Ash didn't mean anything special to me back in 1993 but now, in Ireland where we are cutting our own trees and logs for the fire, ash is the local 'weed' tree that grows everywhere but which I now love for it's bright white cut ends under the chain saw, its dense, hot-burning well seasoned logs and its co-operation under the axe and splitting wedge. It is also the wood used traditionally for the Irish 'Hurley stick' (the 'camán') and is now causing concern by coming under attack from a new fungal disease, Ash Die-Back (fungus Chalara fraxinea). The other bowl pictured is of 'Amazaque' wood about which I know even less - it is a Columbian forest tree, allegedly.

It's raining at ground level, but maybe
if I go out OVER the top of the back door
I won't get wet?

Meanwhile we seem to be in a brief return to winter. Our lovely warm spell of April is almost a lost memory as we wake up each morning to tanking rain and the huge puddles we know so well. The pond is brim full and all the animal feed bowls have to be tipped out of water before I can feed anyone - only the sheep trough stays dry under the shelter and the trees. The cat is very annoyed that we can't seem to find him an exit where it is not raining. He tries the front door (with his mewing and pleading looks) but then when it is opened for him he flicks his tail in indecision and retreats back in to try a different door or window.

Ah well, not everyone loses. My 2015 'Million trees' batch went into lovely wet soil so there is no chance their roots will dry out - they should get away nicely. The return to chill has caused us a return to lighting the range every day which makes the spare room, with its radiator, right above the (Dining) room with the range, the warmest room in the house. We have been able to turn off the infra-red heater-lamp over the Hubbard chicks so that they can now learn about day and night and can get some proper rest and sleep when it is dark. And we are TRYING TO SLEEP. Bless them. If it just stopped raining we are even looking to let them feel a bit of warm Roscommon sunshine on their backs and the grass under their feet (though they'd obviously be rescued back indoors for the nights, they are barely 2 weeks old yet).

Buff Orpington broody hen

And finally our newest 'Mum', the broody Buff Orp is still hanging in there, sitting tight in her chosen location between some concrete blocks and a camping chemical toilet. We rescued her to a seed tray full of hay as she was almost on bare concrete, but she's now on day 11 of her 21 day sit and looking very focused and content.

Timbuktu

Timbuktu

A brilliant result this morning means we have one less thing to worry about in our busy season, our trusty little Fiat Panda sails through its NCT (=MOT) this morning without even picking up an 'advisory'. This baby has just been our BEST EVER car of all the vehicles which have passed our way since we were wed even including all the 'posh' cars I used to run as 'company' cars and then just because our salaries allowed it. Most of those I never actually owned, as they were always on repayment deals which had you paying just the first 3 years' depreciation.

The Panda we bought as a 2nd car, a "little run about" for Liz to mainly use nipping about with Diamond. We never dreamed it would get much mileage on it or would be used for anything heavy or gruelling. It got named 'Timbuktu' as the UK number plate looked a bit like that word spelled badly. It came from the Fiat dealer in Sittingbourne (Kent), Burgess's and we happily paid off the loan over 2 years. It has turned out to be an absolute gem of a car which by now owes us nothing but keeps on keeping on. Diamond fell ill for the first time (Leukemia) within months of the car arriving so it quickly became a high mileage hospital visit/medical taxi, before being one of our emigration 'convoy' and then a builders' van and lately it is a farm run-about. It has been fitted with a tow hitch and is now also our trailer tug.

Hubbard chicks at Day 9, now with wing feathers. 

We are constantly amazed how much you can fit in it due to its blocky shape. If I buy lengths of wood now I can saw them to 8 foot lengths at the yard and they sit with one end in the passenger footwell and I can still close the back door. I don't think I could have done that in the 'posh' Citroën C4. Every week it happily hauls home from the feed merchant a 40 kg sack of 'Cosyglo' (smokeless fuel) plus various 20 and 25 kg sacks of animal feed as well as all our weekly shop. It is as "at home" on the long Motorway run down to Silverwoods where Liz possibly gives it more 'hammer' than it'd like. We hope to keep it going for a good while yet. We were given a rather coarse Timbuktu quote by one of our builder/contractors, but I'll save that to the end of this post.

Liz has been enjoying trying out some beeswax furniture polish. The wax cleaned up very well through the washes, boils and strains and gave us the required yellow disc which just needed the discoloured bottom sediment/scum scraping off it. This was melted and blended 4:1 with coconut oil (the only ingredients therefore being food-grade; you could happily eat this stuff if you wanted and can certainly get it all over your hands as 'hand cream' while you are polishing. Liz reports her hands and nails feeling marvellous at the end of the job.

Polishing an 'Uncle Barrie' turned wooden bowl. 

The mixture cools and semi-sets back to a white colour (the coconut oil, we guess) which remains workable provided it does not get too cold. We tried it out first on some bits of wood which didn't matter so much - the underside of our beech dining chairs and it produces a lovely lustre and a superb smell. It is now getting used to shine up our turned-wood fruit bowls and, when we can clear the table for more than a few minutes, will get a proper test on the dining table top. It is good stuff.

Testing the new polish on the underside of a chair. 

We were amazed when we looked it up, how much this stuff is worth, not that we would be selling it. We found a polish featuring turpentine and beeswax retailing at €11.59 for just 250 ml and the wax itself we have seen at £3.50 for 100g (£35 per kilo!). One of our bee-school lecturers stressed to us how important was the wax and kept reiterating that rule of thumb that bees create only 1/8 as much wax as they do honey. Comb is an amazingly strong but fine and delicate structure.

Jam jar alchemy. 

The beekeeper eventually gets the used comb 'back'; we are advised to rotate the frames out of the hive at one third per year and we are always scraping off 'brace comb' (wild comb) built by the bees in the "wrong places" in the hive. Brace comb though, is also delicate and only available in small quantities - I cleaned up the old frames from our failed hive today and gained only a smattering of fragments in the bottom of a bucket, maybe 70g?. Bees 'sweat' this stuff from glands under their abdomens and then manipulate it in their mouths to shape it into comb. Quite right that it is pricey, then!

New run for the giant rabbits

Meanwhile, the giant rabbits, Goldie and Nugget moved in to their proper big run today, having outgrown the little purpose-built 2 square meter, portable runs they have been using up to now. This is 3 m wide by 15m long and has bumpy ground, banks and trees to keep their digging instincts satisfied. They seem very happy with it and Nugget (as expected) has already started burrowing. The cat, Blue, joined them for a while, had a curious sniff inside the new 'bedroom' and play-chased them around a few times but he then got bored with them and they got bored with being chased and sat looking at him curiously.

Blue (cat) stalks the rabbits while the lambs and Polly watch.

We hope they will do a good job of keeping down the tall grasses, rushes and other herbs wich grow in there; it is the last remaining 'waste land' in this garden for which we have never really found the proper use. We tried to keep a path open through the jungle but as we never used the path it vanished, overgrown with tall vegetation.

And so to that dodgy rhyme from 804-Pete, our gravel-man. Learning that we'd come from 'Kint', he couldn't wait to tell us his story and rhyme. Allegedly a school mistress had set the class the job of fitting the word Timbuktu into a poem. 'Johnny's answer (why is it always Johnny?) was.

When Tim and I went down to 'Kint',
We met three ladies in a 'tint',
For want of something else to do,
I bucked one and Timbuktu.

I'm not about to explain it to you, so if you don't get it then ask Johnny. Have a heart - my Mum reads this. Talking of which, today that same lady, the 'Pud Lady', reaches a magnificent 88 years old today, so a big Happy Birthday, Mum from this blog.

The Un-Planned Harvest

The remainder of the honey extraction went well as we settled on a workable and non-messy technique. We worked our way through the four, two-sided frames at a couple or three of sides a day and ended up with a very satisfying 22 of our small jars, at 150 g (net). 3.3 kg total. These little jars come from Lidl containing their very reasonable 6-pack paté variety pack and are superbly useful for things like this. We have a lot of people eye-ing up our honey keenly and by potting it up in these 'taster' quantities, we can make plenty of them happy. Oh, and K-Dub... we did try out your method but could not get the honey to leave the honeycomb. K-Dub had suggested that if we un-capped a frame and put this into our tall fermentation bucket at an angle, then whirled it round my head, I might generate enough centrifugal force (I might mean centripetal) to throw the honey out of the comb. Well, I whirled and whirled till my shoulder was nearly dislocated and got no more than a thimble full, hence our change to the warm-gravity method described in my previous post.

Honey on ciabatta for breakfast.

In celebration of our new largesse, Liz decided to knock up a ciabatta bread to eat it on. Neither of us appreciated how sloppy is ciabatta dough and how it spreads out sideways during the rise. The 'knock down' phase prior to the 2nd proving was more a case of trying to pull it all back into one lump but in the end it went into the oven like that and came out as easily the biggest ciabatta either of us had seen. Perhaps we will divide the dough into three or even four 'loaves' next time.

This ciabatta was easily 14 inches square.
That is the oven-tray it is cosily resting in.

No matter, it just got quartered and the 4 portions will get used up via fridges or freezer as appropriate. It was delicious, especially with the honey for breakfast. It has that lovely 'big air-holes' mouth feel, a bit like crumpets.

With the honey all extracted, Liz has rounded up all the 'cakes' of spent wax with a view to washing them clean, melting and re-cooling the whole into an 'ingot' and then trying out some warm jam-jar alchemy involving coconut oil (4 parts to one part of beeswax, we are advised) to make furniture polish. I will let you know how we get on.

Brine cured pork leg joint

Our attempt to brine-cure some bacon did not go quite as well according to plan. Liz cooked it with an old favourite (Delia, I think) recipe in which the joint is slow boiled in Coca-Cola. Sounds horrific but works surprisingly well. Normally, that is. This time, though, it was superbly tender and was very edible but was possibly a tad salty, probably at our salty limit. We think that this is because although the brine cure worked well, I did not have any specific instructions for "3 inch thick round of leg" so I went with ten days in the brine, but then we got all distracted by Liz coming home, then not, then yes, and it did not get rescued till it had been soaking 14 days. Liz soaked it overnight in water but then did not do the boil, water change, boil, water change again thing as she was using the Coca Cola.

A late frost on Saturday night tries
 to catch us out

All is not lost, though. That joint will be converted into bacon'n'bean soup/stew (with no need to add salt!) and the other two joints will be soaked when they come to be used and get cooked through several changes of water. You live and learn. Any future joints will be brined for fewer days, possibly as few as 3-5. We do not need the salt as preservative, after all, as these 'bacon' joints go into the freezer. The brining is more to give us a change to 'bacon/gammon' from straight pork.

Rather white for the end of April.

A rather brutal change in the weather tries to catch us out as we get frosts, cold winds and lashing rain with gritty bits in it; proper wintry showers. It was all forecast accurately by the superb Met Éireann team, of course, which gave us a chance to go and cover up the sensitive stuff, mainly asparagus shoots, and it is too early to hit much in the way of 'set' fruit blossom (only the plum and damson seems to have got that far yet). It did hit some new emerging leaves on my poor 'baby trees' though, some sweet chestnut which has barely topped grass height yet looks badly 'scorched'. I hope it has the reserves to put out some replacement leaves.

This gap will be Goldie and Nugget's new run.

The bad weather rather pins us down for outdoor work but this week I do not mind. I am creating a new run for our giant rabbits, Goldie and Nugget in the 'gap' behind the yard wall and the sheep fence. This needs a 'bedroom' so I am back in carpenter mode building a sleeping house for the ladies which I can do in the (now) turkey house out of the wind. The chosen patch of ground is a nice lumpy-bumpy piece of rough grass into which a variety of mud, old cow poo and stone was tossed 3 years ago when the mini digger cleared our yard. We are hoping that the banks and dips will give Nugget enough to aim her well developed digging instinct at without her needing to tunnel out. She can build a nice safe warren under there away from Mr Fox if she needs to with a 'Mummy annex' for Goldie in her autumn years. There is also a wealth of good grass in there and taller stuff which will benefit from a bit of lagomorphic management. Finally one little minor hiccup in the Hubbard dept, as one of the 12 dies while we are out shopping. We have no idea why, you normally don't. Little birds go from quite happy and healthy looking one minute, to dead and cold next time you look without pausing at 'ill'. The remaining 11 all seem happy enough and are eating plenty and putting on lots of weight. More pics of them soon.