Starsky and Hutch

Jars from the rebuild house 'treasure' haul.

If I may, I will briefly catch up on a couple of stories from previous posts. The 'rebuild' house yielded up a couple more bits of treasure before moving to "completely cleared out" status, with Liz briefly sweeping the floors clear just in time to see her efforts come to naught in a shower of jackdaw nests, rubble, clinker and soot as the middle chimney got cleared out downwards. These treasures were a couple of nice little glass vases which can be used for table decoration or some such, and a government pamphlet from year 2001 concerning voting in the referendum on (among other things) stopping Capital Punishment.

Lasagne style composting - this calf muck gets alternated with
weeds and grass cuttings

I had not realised that Ireland still legally had the Death Penalty until the 90s, although it had last been used in 1954 when the State asked our own UK hangman (Albert Pierrepoint) to come over and do the job on a rapist/murderer. After that the Death Penalty could still be handed down for crimes such as killing a Guard (policeman) but it was always commuted to 'Life'. In the 90s it was removed from statute and in this 2001 Referendum the Constitution was changed to outlaw it as well as to ratify two Euro-treaties (Nice and Rome). There. Every day is a school day.

Em-J's book.

My other catch-up concerns our Irish nieces, the older of whom, Em-J, we noted in a recent post getting good results in her Leaving Cert. She is also starring in another way. I will quickly say that I know very little of this subject and would fail badly in any test of knowledge of the current sub-culture of Japanese style 'graphic novels' (comics to we older ones) in the "Animé" genre. Em-J loves them and reads them avidly as well as using her considerable skill and talent as a cartoonist to produce her own pictures in the style. This drive led her to get accepted onto a course up in Dublin where all the budding writers and would-be illustrators got to help in the making of a proper, published book, "Demons in Disguise".

Our first outdoor spuds in this slow, chilly season. These are
variety Orla

This being a proper book is now published and is subject to a proper launch up in Dublin, to which, naturally, all the contributors have been invited. Em-J is going up there tonight 'en famille' with proud Auntie Liz in support as one of the drivers. She will be bringing the little ones home to Silverwood at a sensible 'school night' hour and then stay overnight a couple of nights to catch up on the family gossip. Also to congratulate the other niece, J-M who is following hot on the heels of big sister, with some good results in her Junior Cert (equivalent to 'O' levels, roughly) published yesterday and getting herself onto national television (RTE) news, no less. It's all happening for those girls. Their Dad is sure they must get their brains from their Mum!

Starsky style knitted jacket. 

As she was Silverwood-bound, Liz decided she also had a chance to see Mrs S and to produce a nice, though 40 year late, surprise. Readers who are as old as us may recall American cop thriller series, Starsky and Hutch, from the 70s and may remember that Starsky was often seen wearing chunky knitted patterned jackets with big roll collars. Back then they became a fashion item you could often see in shops and Liz tells me that Mrs S has always regreted that she "never got her Starsky jacket". So when Liz saw a pattern for one on line and had a supply of the necessary chunky-knit wool, she realised she could rattle one up fairly quickly.

Gladioli doing well.

This turned out to be true up to a point. Knitting up chunky knit is quite fast because of the size of the wool, so Liz zoomed up the back panel, cracked off the sleeves, pockets and front panels. There was a little hiatus as she picked up all the hundreds of stitches up one front edge, round the collar and back down, so that she could knit the "button band" (no buttons) outwards at 90º to the front panels. Then came sewing all the bits together which is Liz's least favourite bit but with Em-J's book launch now looming, time was running out and things were getting a bit pressured, that is to say heated. We are thinking of getting some of those labels for these garments which say things like "Hand knitted with pride by ...etc" but ours are going to read "Hand knitted without too much swearing by....". Anyway, as I type this at half eight on Thursday evening the garment is complete and has been delivered. Mrs S is delighted to have finally "got her Starsky jacket", a bit of an early Christmas present. They are all at the book launch, so maybe she is even wearing it.

Apple variety "Irish Peach"

Meanwhile, back at the 'ranch' we have been enjoying a bit of an Indian Summer. The weather came good on the 4th of September and is due to fall off a cliff tomorrow (11th) so maybe at 7 days long it is more of a Summer-een but it has been lovely to get out into the garden properly. I have done a mountain of weeding and harvested some first outdoor spuds. These were variety 'Orla' which struggled so through the chill wet July and August that they never really put on any tops. They never reached a foot high and didn't flower, so when they started to do autumn fade I first feared blight and then just worried that there would be nothing underground. There was, in fact, no blight and they have done an amazing weight of good sized spuds which cook beautifully in the skin-bursting 'floury' Irish style that just asks for a lash of butter to be melted into them as they are served.

Czar plums pecked to destruction by crows or magpies.

Less succesful have been my plums - a tree loaded with lovely Czar. This was my most successful tree and I had watched with mounting excitement as the fruit enlarged and started to ripen but today, while the fruit was still way too sour and hard for us to enjoy, the bountiful crop (20-30 fruits) is pecked about and stolen by the crows or magpies. I even found one carried to a handy fence post to be pecked to pieces. Some fruits were on the ground where the slugs were now finishing off the robbery. I have around 6 fruits left on the tree and I can't see the maggies suddenly going off plums and letting me keep those, can you? Annoyingly this same tree did a lovely crop 2 years ago and not a one magpie stole any. Perhaps they have learned this like the old bluetits used to do with tin-foil bottle tops on the doorstep.

Twins Thelma and Louise grazing with youngster Dylan
looking hopefully at the cameraman. 

Finally, our little March-born lamb twins, Thelma and Louise have now reached an age and size where they must go on their final journey, so they are booked in to our friend and butcher-man, Ignatius G Victualler for next week. With them out of the way I am a bit happier about getting our tup round to service the grown up ladies. I did not want anybody too young to get hurt or to get involved in that, though Ignatius tells me that they get a surprising number of ewe lambs coming through their place themselves in-lamb where they have been got at by a brother or 'cousin'. We are hoping that our boy 'Rambo' will complete his mission around the end of this month, which we hope will give us all three ewes (Polly. Lily and Myfanwy) in lamb through the winter and due end of February or into March. Fervent prayers are being offered up.

Butchery and Buildery

Saturday saw us back involved in the butchering of pigs, specifically the split carcasses of two full grown sows for our friends Sue and Rob. These girls were actually the mums of the piglets we moved in an earlier post and the  helped catch and load on Wednesday evening (Sept 2nd). I find I love this work and thoroughly enjoy taking pride in trying to produce good looking cuts of meat, presentable racks of rib, sheets of spare rib and in knowing my way round a carcass. I should quickly add that I am no expert but I am learning fast with every side I cut up, so I was delighted to be invited over to help out.

Rob, I know, would have loved to have been there and wants to get involved in the next one, but this time, the issues loading the animals last week pushed the butchery back into a week when he had already booked on a flight home to visit Mum, so he missed it and just had to watch the pictures go up on Facebook. He'll be back for the sausage making though and for the onward processing of all the many joints which ended up in buckets of brine or dry salt cure.

A spot of belladonna to cure what ails ye?

He will also be there for the eating. I was joking with JD Bob about Sue's bulging freezer and he was rubbing his hands with glee and joking that "there'll be some ate-ing in that house this winter! The pan'll be frying!...." Thanks then Sue, for letting us 'play'. Being full grown sows they were HUGE compared to our little 6-month old Berkshire gilts. We think about 60 kg a side, so nearly a quarter ton of meat. We actually had to cut all the legs (except one for dry cure) into several pieces just to make manageable joints for cooking for three appetites. I now find myself looking at pictures of carcasses and starting to plan where I would make my cuts and where I'd saw through bones.

Old Arklow pottery

We were also able to get back into the buildering in a small way, a lovely nostagic job to take us right back to our own demolition-ing of 2011/12. No names, locations or pack-drill on this one as it is rightly someone else's story to tell and those who need to know are already enjoying the Facebook feed and pics, but I hope the owner of this tale will not mind me telling our little sub-tale of treasures found and historic interest. This is an old property bought by a family of friends we know just across the county boundary, which they will 'do up' over the coming months (years?) but which they bought, like we did, in an abandoned state still well stocked with old "stuff" - furniture, crockery, cutlery and so on.

A government pamphlet on coping with a nuclear
accident from the 60s and a pack of pills to help
with radiation sickness from year 2002.

The place was formerly owned by a little old lady who lived to over a hundred (she eventually died in a nursing home) but who seemed to have kept everything, certainly Birthday and Christmas cards, letters and notes going back decades, hand-written, pre-decimal financial records and the like. Now Lizzie, you will know, LOVES her history and gets expecially fascinated by the history of the ordinary people, rather than Kings, Queens and politicians, so this was like treasure trove to her, a veritable gold mine.

An old but intact clay pipe and this lovely
brass hand-bell were among the finds.

The friends invited us over to help with some of the early stages once they had gained access and for Liz that meant a chance to root through the 'stuff' a bit while clearing what she described as "30 years of old clothes and mouldy rugs" out towards a fire pit they had going. I was put to work lump-hammering render off the outside of what is now beautiful stonework, which will be properly pointed up with old fashioned lime-mortar (the lump hammer does less damage to the stone faces than would an electric 'kango' hammer-drill). Liz carried big rubbish out, barrowed the shovel-up smaller stuff out, and dived in to rescue interesting finds with the daughter of the house.

Some of this the friends did not want, so we have it, but other bits we are cleaning up for them to create a mini-museum display of treasures from the house. Mazy will be amused to know that Liz has therefore spent her afternoon up to her armpits in brown sauce and brasso (the sauce is the perfect combination of sticky and acid for "marinading" the tarnish off metal cuttlery; rinse, dry, elbow grease and polish. Bob's your Uncle). There was a small collection of silver and silver-ish cuttlery and a lovely brass hand-bell. There was an intact old clay-pipe and a broken one. There was a small amount of surviving pottery from the Arklow pottery, Ireland's "Staffordshire" back in the day. There were assorted bottles of booze - rum, armagnac, whiskey and others. All the family drugs were there including, we noted, a belladonna based one for stomach problems which we guess has been superceded by now (!). The drugs have, of course, been safely parceled up for sensible disposal.

Brush cutting long grass in autumn here has you discovering
stashes of free-range eggs - these are 16 guinea fowl eggs

One of the most fascinating things from my point of view was a government pamphlet posted out to all the citizens in the 60s explaining the new threat of nuclear accident and fall-out. The one Liz found is specifically aimed at farmers (I assume there was an urban version) and how they should go about protecting stock, crops and grass from the effects of fall out. With it she also found a government issued pack of Potassium Iodate tablets against radiation sickness but we have looked both items up and the tablets are much more recent. They were issued in 2002 after a political scandal when one TD (Irish MP) was accusing another of not having done anything about protecting the public etc etc..... The pills are use by 2005 so must be among the last things our old lady stashed away for safe keeping.

Our water station for the "Ros Go Run" half marathon. 

The only other thing to report is our involvement, once again, in setting up a watering-point for the thirsty (half) marathon runners of the 'Ros Go Run' fun-run. The runners lope past our front gate almost at the end of their efforts, in the 12th mile, so we set up a table and bottled water which we can pass to them as they whizz by, not breaking their stride (or they are happy to stop and chat for a rest if they are almost done in!). Last year the planners had badly timed the run so that it clashed with a run in the nearby big town (Westport, I recall) so they were disappointed to only get 67 runners and were hoping for more this year. We were ready. I do not yet know what went wrong with this but on the day there was a tiny turn-out, with only 21 runners doing the course and, because there were almost as many water-stations round the course as runners, I only actually gave out 6 cups of water. I suppose it is quite possible that the organisers will call it a day and there may not be a 'Ros Go Run' next year. We did our bit, anyway.

Trimming the Edges.

Red Bartsia (Odontites verna)

In my dog-walk plant hunter amblings, I have 'found' another plant but I have to confess, completely failed to ID it until I was helped out by Anne. It is, in fact, Red Bartsia, a species I had not even heard of, never mind seen and it grows in good numbers in the verge ON the actual stone bridge at Feigh, as in on the few inches of soil on top of the tarmac. Liz and I had it first as Basil Thyme (which is Acinos arvensis in my ancient "Fitter, Fitter and Blamey") but when I tried to book it onto the Irish Biodiversity Database I could not find it listed, so I assumed I was wrong. I booked it instead as ordinary thyme (Thymus serpyllum) but by then we had met Anne at a garden centre and she had said 'send me a pic'. She advised that it was, in fact the Red Bartsia (Odontites verna) which is quite common out here. The Basil Thyme is, in fact, on the Irish list but is better known along the east side and, anyway, has since been renamed Clinopodium acinos. Every day is a school day. Fortunately, there is a helpful man at IBD who is happy to go in and edit your records if you find you have mis-keyed or made an error so that my plant will be Red Bartsia in perpetuity, not some dodgy thyme.

The geese clip a nice edge onto the front lawn. 

Most folk, if they want neat edges to their lawns, buy an edge trimmer or a pair of edging shears. Liz eschews such technology and lets the geese at ours. Every now and then the sheep-grazed lawn starts to creep shaggily out onto her new clean gravel of what will be the rose bed out front. We leave the sheep in the East Field and invite the geese to spend the day out on the lawn instead. They enjoy the grass not eaten by the sheep and also get into the habit of sneaking their long necks through the sheep fence to trim off the edge, very neatly.

Very very late this year but at last we are getting
a decent tomato crop. Just cheap old supermarket
plug-plants but they have good flavour. 

I have done stories in the past in here about old vehicles and we love that some of the old boys round here drive superbly disreputable tractors. Our near neighbour has an old grey Fergie, long since patina'd up with rust and often in Castlerea on a Saturday you can see an old red MF with a cab constructed from angle-iron, plywood, baler twine and with sheets of old plastic as windows. But our friend Sue took the cake this week with a description of an aul' fella who turned up to collect ten of her piglets (the ones we moved in a recent post) in the dodgiest combination of VW Golf and trailer she had ever seen.

Blue needs his sleep like the rest of us. 

"Well Lordy me (Wrote Sue in Facebook) ,,,you see all sorts over here,,, we have just had an old boy (lovely man) arrive to buy ten of our piglets, He arrived led in convoy by yours truly,,,,,in the oldest VW golf ever,,, think it was the prototype,,towing a ....and l say it loosely ,,,trailer... the boards on the sides that were there (originated on a pallet or ten,,,). They were rotted and split and an elephant could have walked sideways through the gaps,(I exaggerated about the elephant...). He took the trailer off the hook tow ,,,no chain ,,,no lights ,,,and he limped it down to the barn with my help...I prayed that the bit I was holding didn't fall off, the bar of the crossbar was two inches away from the main frame,,,tyres well , we have more tread on the stacks (of scrap tyres) we have here,,,should have sorted him out six for his car and trailer,,,(seven) a spare,,,,,he had wires sticking out of the black rubber lumps that went round,,,the rusted metally hub things,,,,,he looked at piggies ,,commented how fat and healthy they were,, counted me out the dosh,,,,no haggle....we loaded ten very quiet piggies ,,(cuppa declined),and instuctions onto the main road off our nice old gent and piggies went,,I pray that the floor of the trailer holds out and all piggies get to Ballina safely"

2 items of farm scrap turned up this week  - this mini 'horse'
shoe only 3 inches across which we are told may be from a
donkey. The sprung nose-ring is one you'd have fitted to
a calf to prevent it suckling when you were trying to wean
it and 'dry off' the mother. These are still for sale new. 

You just KNOW, don't you, that they all got home OK. Those guys just go on like that for decades - the trailer never quite breaks, the tyres are good for another hundred runs and the pigs would not try to escape just because he is a lovely old character. Ballina is at least an hour away up by Sligo town over some main roads. No-one will ever stop him and ask to see his NCT or driving licence and fair play to him for that. Good luck Piglet-buyer man from Ballina; may the wheels never fall off your ancient rig.

Meanwhile, we plod on with nothing much of drama to report. I am still in feeding JD Bob's cattle each day, a group of 7 bullocks the other side of Lisacul which is a car run, and another group down on his bank/bog fields, which is a borrow-the-tractor mission. I am also whizzing him to Roscommon twice a week to the out-patients. These are 'quick' missions which he often tries to convert into epic runs via assorted banks, cattle mart, the accountant, the Post Office, eateries (I never mind those!), can we just nip up this side street and call at this house (mysterious!) or just plain 'Scenic Tours'. In those latter, he knows these lanes like the back of his hand and obviously loves them but we guess does not get out down them much these days, so we take the back roads via Ballintober instead of the 'big' road through Ballymoe and he asks me to 'take it steady through the village' so that he can look. He tells me that "just round this corner, there is a 2 storey house" and delights to find he is correct as he tells me that if I take "this left at the cross roads" I will come out in Fairymount or Kilmurray. We have never missed yet. He must have this whole area imprinted on a mental map. "Ian KilBoyle is in that garveyard!" "That used to be a school house" "John Something or other lives there - he used to have a pub in Castlerea". No flies on Bob. Someone should write all this stuff down; a real aural history.

Sausage Stuffing Failure.

The impressive looking sausage meat grinder /
sausage stuffer. This is it doing the first (coarse)
pass on our cubed belly pork. 

The expression "You don't win them all" was ringing in our ears today when we failed rather disastrously to make any more than 4 sausages. The short version of this story would read 'failed to slide any casings onto the stuffer horn' which, if you have played this game, you may already be problem-solving me.

We had been loaned the use of an almost-new and very shiny, impressive looking sausage meat grinding machine cum sausage stuffer to have a play with some of our belly pork. These machines are like an electric version of aul' Granny's hand grinder -  a funnel drops the diced meat down a tube, a worm-drive pushing meat through a perforated plate via a spinning blade but they convert, by swapping the blade and plate for a plastic spacer and a tapered plastic tube over which you slide the concertina'd tube of "sausage skins" (casings). You run the twice-ground meat, rusk and flavourings mix back through and allow the casings to be gently pulled off the horn by the mix extruding through the exit hole. Every 3 inches or so you give the filled casing a deft twist and then you expertly knit three strands of sausage into those professional links of 'sossies' that festoon butchers shops. What could possibly go wrong?

On the right 'plain' sausage meat; on the left with apple and sage

We were grand to start with, going great guns, "away on a hack" as they say. The meat all went through the grinder, got mixed with our expertly prepared seasoned and wetted rusk mixture, got split into two and run back through the grinder on the smaller 'screen' - 5 mm holes - in two halves, one as was, the other with apple and sage added. We broke for coffee and the man-made casings which came with the machine got to soak in warm water, still in their concertinas as per the instructions.

4 sausages was our lot. Not our finest hour. 

That is when the wheels came off the operation. Right there where it is all supposed to get funny, with endless potential for schoolboy toilet humour and good old British smutty innuendo and 'double-entendre'. The casings, once wet and pliable are meant to slide easily onto the horn using wet slithery hands to (yeah... I know... stop tittering at the back!) slide yards of it up there, hand over hand so that you can subsequently pump as may yards of sausage meat down the horn carefully releasing folds of casing concertina as you go. You try to avoid air bubbles and take care not to split the casing as you deftly twist the  filled skin every 3-4 inches or so. We have since seen YouTube videos showing demonstrators whizzing yards of casing up their horns, barely pausing to untwist the empty casing lest it become entangled at the end.

The chickens celebrate Liz's Birthday

Our problem was trying to get ANY of the casing over our 'horn' end without splitting it. It was a stretch to get it over and even when we managed to get a start, it was very tight to try to slide it up the tapered shape of the horn tube. The casing inevitably burst after a few inches, and the split would then run the full length of the loaded bit and you had to start over with a cut off, unsplit empty end. We took turns, both trying to help.

Bergamot, a gift from Anne last year. We thought we had
killed it all, but we have 2 surviving clumps.

Eventually I reckoned I had very slowly got about a foot on, so Liz started pumping (Stop it!) and we created 3 sausages before the casing then split once more and we had to start again. I then got another short length to work, one more sausage, but we were by then so fed up and frustrated that we decided to freeze the remaining meat for pies, scotch eggs or a 2nd attempt when we knew what we were doing wrong or what was wrong with the method or kit. Our total output for all that effort, then, 4 bangers and a 1.1 kg lump of frozen sausage meat. I put pictures of what we had up on Facebook to see would anyone suggest anything or spot any howlers.

The hollyhocks are looking good out front.

The concensus seems to be that we have a wrong size of casings for the spout/horn. This could well be right. The outside diameter of the smaller, exit end of the horn is 21 mm. The concertinas of casing in their raw dry state are about 16 mm internal diameter. We may well be trying to slide chipolata or Irish breakfast sausage casings up the horn designed for standard British bangers. To be fair, the lenders of the machine had not tried out these particular casings and are now in search of bigger ones and possibly natural 'gut' casings. We are all beginners fumbling around in the dark. They will probably be the next people to try this so they are as interested as we are in getting it right. None of us knew that you could get different size casings unless you were trying to make big salamis and chorizos etc and the butcher would not have known the machine size when he generously handed the pack over. Finally, to add insult to injury, I tried 2 of the sausages we HAD made and they split badly as soon as they hit the fat of the frying pan, so I squished them flat with the spatula - I might as well have just lumped in a couple of uncased patties of the meat! Delicious though!

Brawn with loads of fresh parsley in it.

Well, we may not (yet) be any good at the sausages but we are pretty good at other foodstuffs. Liz claimed the brawn job this year so she had all the fun of boiling up those heads for hours with a few trotters thrown in for added jellification. She has produced a classic among brawns having adding late on in the process, fistfuls of the fresh parsley which now thrives in our polytunnel and has also produced as a sideline 5 good litres of an epic pork stock which sets as a jelly when it cools. To freeze it in foil portion-tubs I was more slicing blocks off than ladling it out.

Salmon baked in cream with cucumber and lemon juice.

My chance to shine came over Liz's Birthday weekend. The family tradition is that the Birthday girl/boy can choose the menu but the spouse cooks it and Liz, having sneaked the chance to cook 'first chops from new pigs' from under my nose (delicious, fried with crushed juniper berries and lemon juice), let me do family favourite, Theodora Fitzgibbon's old Irish recipe of salmon baked in cream with cucumber and lemon juice. We both love this recipe while always being delighted that the lemon juice does not curdle the cream.

Split pig skulls as art materials?

Lastly we may have taken the "everything but the squeal" and recycling thing a bit further than was wise this week. We have a friend in Wales who is a successful professional artist. No names at present because we have not checked with her that she doesn't mind me posting a link from these less hallowed halls; this lady holds exhibitions of her latest work and installations. We know she is good and does well and we admire the quality of her work but she will not mind me saying that the product is not to everyone's taste; you would maybe call it 'thought provoking' if you were being ambivalent, perhaps 'unusual' or 'weird'; if you were being less polite. Liz finds some of it rather too unsettling to want any in the house on our walls.

By the admission of her own website "Her themes are magical, often found in folklore, fairytales or the manifestations of the strange around us, but just as magical is her transubstantiation of thoughts into haunting visual images – her translation of woven baskets into a drawn language as intricate and ordered as the baskets themselves, her conjuring of pieces of lace or coral as reliquaries of past life, or her invention of a scene so impossibly familiar that one wonders if it has rekindled a spark of lost memory." In practise she paints raggedy crows and magpies perching on babies cradles, pictures featuring skulls and mythical runes and folkloric stuff.

Tidy sized mushrooms coming off the front lawn now.

When she is creating 3D stuff, models and the like, the work can include real teeth and other parts. For this reason, it occurred to Liz that the lady might like our pig skulls from the brawn-boil, teeth and all and when Liz suggested it, our artist was delighted. Naturally, Liz wanted to clean them up a bit before posting them off so they got more boiling and a good scrub and pick over with an old toothbrush and assorted sharp 'picks'. They are packed and ready to go - we just need to decide what desription to put on the customs docket! We will be fascinated to see what the lady makes of them and with them. That may be years away. She apparently finds or sees things and they can then be a long time rattling round in her head before she thinks of something to make with them.

The Butcher's Apprentice

Mary and Isabelle enjoy their last few days, here chatting to
one of the westies

This is another one of those posts you might like to avoid if you do not want to know about the messier side of meat production. The back end of this week saw our two Berkshire gilts 'finished' at just over 6 months and weighing around 60 kg each live-weight. I have posted before that these ladies were way lighter than last year's Tamworths who were fed to demand and laid down what we thought was an excessive amount of fat. Even JD Bob was a little disparaging about their size, but we know he comes from a tradition of pig rearing in Ireland 40+ years ago when very fat baconers were the thing. No, we stuck to our guns and we are delighted with them.

Practise loading - the pigs get fed in the trailer for 2 days prior
to D-Day. That way they load without fuss when you need them to

They were booked into pork butcher Webb's in Castlerea for Thursday morning which puts us into needing to practise-load for the Monday afternoon and for Tuesday and Wednesday. Readers here last year will know that we built a special 'race' from their gate to the top of that slope into which we could 'plug' the trailer with no room for pigs to sneak round the sides. On D-3 we then give them a nice long, leisured explore. It doesn't do to hurry pigs anywhere. You are better off throwing down some fruit and letting them find it at their own speed.

Who needs a fridge-van? 4 half pigs and a bag
of 'bits' fit into the Fiat with the seat down.

Then on D-2 and D-1 we feed them in the trailer and they soon get into the rhythm of sprinting up the race and the trailer ramp, shoulder-barging their sister to one side in order to claim the 'best' bowl of meal. Then on D-Day morning you put the bowls in with only fruit (no nuts) and up they go so that you can quietly close the trailer door behind them. The 'no nuts' thing is just because the butchers prefer you to 'fast' pigs prior to slaughter so that the innards are more manage-able at the cleaning stage (Sorry if you're just enjoying your tea!)

I get to play with the new bone-saw

This year we had decided to have a go at the butchery ourselves. The slaughter (including cleaning the carcass, scalding and scraping and splitting in half down the spine, costs €50 per animal and the butchery costs another €50, so we were saving €100. We had a rough idea what to do and, for a laugh, we watched a You-Tube video on "Cutting up half a 'hog' ", 2 and a half minutes of American 'good aul' boys' complete with bushy beards and baseball caps plus random discussions of last night's drinking session and chicken noises off! However, this unlikely 'training resource' explained perfectly where to make the first cuts, how to pull out the 'leaf-lard' (big sheet of top-quality fat which lines the abdominal cavity) and other useful tips, so don't deride it till you've tried it.

In we went, then with all the big chopping boards mustered on the (bleached and scrubbed!) dining table and the knives and my new bone-saw all razor sharp. We completed the first animal in about an hour with a nice ham selected and readied for brining for Christmas and a whole leg chosen for a dry-cure 'Parma' ham style air-dried long mature. I took a break to walk dogs and for coffee, before we tackled the 2nd animal. We found that we were getting better with each half-carcass - some of the first cuts were a bit 'rookie apprentice' but the 4th was a better, more pro-job. I was particularly pleased with how the proper saw worked having only before experienced a carpenter hack-saw (worse than useless). If anyone reading this is contemplating butchery, then your bone-saw will be €40 or so very well spent. It cuts through bone in a jiffy and never clogs with sinew, bone fragments or myelin sheath. We also like quite thick pork chops and we were delighted to find that by sawing through the 'discs' of the spine and running a knife up between the ribs we got fewer, but thicker chops. If you look at supermarket chops you will find that they are half a vertebra and various sharp-ended part ribs because they are band-sawed through perpendicular to the spine, every half inch or so regardless of where the ribs and vertebrae sit.

The Christmas Day ham.

We weighed one of the halves and found it to be 21.3 kg, so a whole animal is 42.6 kg, which is a very useful 71.6% conversion live/carcass. That is about right for pigs. We had also had the heads, hearts and livers back from Mr Webb and the kidneys were still in the carcass halves. Mr Webb had also very generously offered to split the heads ready for the brawn (head-cheese) making and I only needed to cut them again top from bottom (separating the jaws) for them to fit into Liz's big brawn-pots. As I write this, they are now boiled or boiling gently prior to all the onward processing tomorrow. We love our brawn and Liz has found a smashing recipe which uses plenty of parsley; a herb we have in abundance growing in the polytunnel.

A leg gets well smothered in dry-cure
mix (salt, sugar, star anise,
bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli)

We also decided to try some more salt curing. We picked out a nice cut of ham weighing 6 kg and have brined it in a wet-cure mix of salt, sugar, bay, onion, garlic, lovage, mustard seeds, cloves, chilli, allspice and peppercorns. This will get just 48 hours in brine, then be cleaned, patted dry and frozen till December. Next we chose a full leg intending to do the 'Parma' ham salt cure / air dry on it. This gets a longer cure (21 days) smothered in a dry mix of salt and sugar plus I had some fun with the big pestle and mortar "lightly crushing" a mix of star anise, bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli. I love all that pounding. I think my favourite expression in this area is when you "pound the garlic to snot". 'Nuff said, maybe. The cure recipes have come from our lovely new books from Steak Lady. Thanks, SL!

Liz surveys the wreckage.
How am I going to fit all this into the freezer?

Well, 4 hours or so in we were all done. Mountains of bagged pork cuts and bags of scraps, dog bones and suet have been assigned to their places in the big stand-up freezer(s). The sawn-up heads are being reduced to brawn. The cured joints are sitting in their cure. There was only ever going to be one thing on the menu for supper tonight - those lovely thick pork chops.

Liz served them with slices of Ottolenghi's cauliflower cake and we both decided two small edits of the recipes to suit local conditions. OUR pork chops need nothing like the amount of butter that Nigel Slater uses for dry old supermarket chops and OUR eggs do not need the support of all that yellow turmeric to make the 'cake' look bright. The dogs have also done very well today what with some bits of raw pork rib (their absolute favourite food) during the butchery and some roasted ear and tail later on as a treat.

More dustbin lid art. This time for the turkey 'finisher'

That was that. Pigs and butchery all done for 2015. Next year we are fairly sure we will do this again but try with the Tamworth ginger pig breed again but on our 'maintenance diet' of 1.4 kg meal per animal per day; to see if we can reduce the thickness of that subcutaneous fat layer. Meanwhile the pig patch is in recovery mode, even though it is very poached up and wet. We plan to let it all dry out a bit then slot some spring bulbs into each hoof print, rake it over and sow buckwheat and more phacelia into the bare areas. We feel nicely 'Harvest Festival' ish. All is safely gathered in, freezers are rammed with meat, Autumn is looking like it is here and we are both very well fed tonight and pleasantly mellow on Lidl's very quaffable 'Baturrica 2010' (tarragona) Spanish plonk. Cheers.

All Growed Up?

We do not claim to be experts in Meteorology but we are reasonably knowledge-able (A level in Geography, Environmental Science as part of the degree, that kind of thing) and we are sure that we had around 3 inches of rain over Saturday night into Sunday morning. This would be quite amazing and I am sure I would think "pull the other one" if it was only being told to me by a "bloke in the pub". I remember that rain guages are all a standard shape and size, with known diameter, knife-sharp horizontal rim, placed out dead-level in an uninterupted air-flow and so on. Well, we don't have that but I did have a vertical-sided bucket which I am 99% sure was empty the day before, and accumulated a good 3 inches of rain overnight. My second witness would be the all night roar and hiss of rain on roofs and windows. My third the huge puddles all around the place on Sunday on what had been only damp ground and I would also draw your attention (M'Lud) to the River Lung under Feigh Bridge being higher than I have even seen it and Lough Feigh being fuller. Under the bridge a large diameter pipe drains water into the river from fields on the west bank and is normally a good 6 feet above the water so that water falls in quite an impressive 'force'. I have seen on previous wet spells, the water half way up this pipe but yesterday (Monday) it was over-topped. Finally in Met Éireann data, Knock Airport had 37 mm on the Saturday, up to midnight and I can easily believe that another 38 mm fell after that (data not yet published - perhaps they are double checking their figures too!)

A first tiny egg from 'OneChick'?

Meanwhile, back with the poultry, all hunkered down in the buildings out of this rain (and me hunkered down playing on t'internet) we think we have had a first egg from 'OneChick'. OneChick was hatched in late May by one of the Buffs in the Tígín, so she is only 3 months old; a bit young to be laying eggs but if not her, then we don't know where this came from. There has only been the one so far, so maybe she is just practicing being a grown up.

OneChick at 3 months.

Actually, we are a little confused by her parentage and as she grows up and starts to look like an adult bird, we are no longer so certain she is purebred Buff Orpington, which had been our first guess. She is losing her Buff-Orp shape and getting a bit longer legged and necked. Also she has a few dark feathers in her wings and one or two dark tail feathers, which I do not think Buffs are "allowed". She also has a dark 'cere'; the flesh where the nostrils come out, above the base of the beak. None of our pure Buffs have that. Her father will definitely be a Buff as these are the only roosters we currently have, but if biological Mum is not a Buff, she might have been either of 2 other red-ish 'breeds' we have. We have the red Hubbard, 'Miss Scarlett' still laying. We also have a couple of hybrids which we call the 'Mini-Buffs'. They were bought as Buff eggs but proved when hatched and grown to be smaller and short-legged like some kind of bantam as well as having dark feathers in the tail and cape, as per Sussex hens. Ah well, she is a delightful little thing and if she proves to be a reliable layer, she is welcome here.

Part of the last joint of the 2014 lamb meat, a leg coated in herby
bread-crumbs and then slow roasted at 100ºC for 6 hours.

Hot on OneChick's heel in the growing up race, come the Two Chicks hatched by the Buff under the elderberry bush. These two are now two months old, fully feathered but not very independent. Up till last night they had all crowded into the little space in the Tígín at night, where OneChick was hatched. Then last night at lock up I found the pair wandering in the yard, cheeping in a confused manner, but with no Mum in attendance. I eventually found her in the grown-ups coop happily settling down to roost with her 'sisters'. She had apparently decided to move house without telling the youngsters or they had not been listening. I had to shepherd them gently into the coop where they continued to cheep on the floor as if seeking permission to sleep in this strange adult world. I checked them a few minutes later and they had worked it out. They were up with the Mums and Aunts on the perching ladder. Poor sweet little mites.

Em-J in the Debs dress

Talking of growing up, another 'Proud Uncle' post - the niece and God-Daughter, Em-J who featured in a recent post as getting good results in her Leaving Cert exams is tonight making that modern Rite of Passage claimed by all young Irish ladies, the 'Debs' (Debutantes' Ball). Best bib and tucker for the lads, glad-rags, hand-bags and the best jewellery for the lasses, with Mums, Grans, Aunts and assorted family friends all converging on the place to help get the Deb ready and to see her off to the posh 'Reception' at 4 pm. Liz has hot-footed it down to Silverwoods to be part of this and to spend the night celebrating at the homestead with the Silverwood parents. She has promised to take some pics and ping them up here via the miracle of the Internet, so I promise in my turn to edit them into this post as soon as I get them.

I am unable to attend (though sure I'd LOVE to spend several hours in female 'getting ready' mode!) because I have 2 other 'growing ups' to worry about - our piggies Mary and Isabelle are now 'ready' and booked off on their final journey Thursday morning. Our experience tells us that the best way to persuade pigs to climb up an unfamiliar wooden ramp into a trailer is to start 3 days earlier, giving them their breakfasts and suppers up there. They soon learn that the trailer is 'safe' and full of food so that, on Thursday morning we can load them quietly and calmly with nobody getting stressed out. That is the intention - in an ideal world the pigs get right up to the slaughter-man's stun-gun (or humane killer) without a Scooby-Doo that they are in danger.

The Wild Bunch

The turkeys seem to have melded into an all-age gang. Here
one of the first hatch is far left, then Tom and Barbara, with the
surviving 2nd hatch ('Solo') far right and the other plus the young
Guineas at the back.

First in this post. a quick note to close out the story of our sparrowhawk and, more specifically, whether I could have done any more for her. Anne told us of "Eagles Flying", a falconry centre half an hour's drive away. I e-mailed their office describing our situation to see what they could offer in the way of A&E vets and recuperative care.

One 'Lothar' replied with

"Having an absolutely fresh fracture, it is not a major challenge to reset the bones, as long as the joints are not affected. Ideally the bird will be anaesthetized before the procedure. Of course 9 pm is not the best time to find a working Vet,  but the wound could have been dressed up, the bone ends disinfected and kept moist (saline solution) and the bird kept dark in a box until the next day. A Vet being very good with these things is Dr. Niall Curran, Animal Hospital, Moneen, Castlebar"

Steak Lady (left) and Mr SL (r) bring the sun with them for
a quick visit to look round and catch up. 

Fair play to them for a good, helpful and professional reply. In answer to a follow up question they replied that they would of course be happy to accept the 'fixed' bird to do the recuperation and possible rehabilitation and release back to the wild. If you are ever in our situation then, as they say. "now you know" but for me, reading between the lines from my slightly guilty viewpoint, having destroyed the bird, I could see a couple of issues which still lead me back to having done the right thing. One was that Niall Curran, though no doubt an excellent vet, probably does not work for free and Eagles Flying looked a bit like they were swerving the vet costs in my direction. The second was that I was not 100% sure the hawk could ever be released back to the wild so that I might have just created one more captive 'zoo' bird. So, there it is. Make of it all what you will.

Ear tag number 274. I love this bullock. 

My other continuing saga is of JD Bob and the cattle which you will be delighted to know are now pretty much sorted, all be it with 2 new twists in the plot. Bob himself has now been diagnosed with a possible broken bone in his foot and hence his failure to 'get better' as quickly as he'd like and we therefore have a run to Roscommon's embattled hospital next week for X-rays etc. Then last night quite late we took an anxious call from Bob who had spotted a break out. One of the groups of 7 bullocks had managed to break a fence post and escape into the neighbouring farmer's land, hungry for some female company. We had a bit of running around today, then (another example of Bob failing to rest his injured foot!) to extract the 7 from the girls' territory and repair the broken fence.

The original 'Wild Bunch' (those who were jumping the fences "like hunters") were finally corraled and collected by the meat factory. Everyone was pleased to be finished with them.

Theo, who is a tiny little man, is almost eye to eye
with our enormous turkey, Tom as they warily
check each other out. 

On Tuesday we play host to Liz's Mum and Dad, Steak Lady and Mr SL who come up to give Liz a bit of an early birthday treat and presents, to have a look round and to take a light lunch. With impeccable timing the sun bursts through the cloud and we can all enjoy a beautiful warm sit out front like normal people do in warm sunny August in places other than Roscommon (!).

Those biro-thick feather shafts emerging from Tom's tail.

Tom the turkey comes over to check out the 'strangers' but quickly decides they are harmless and welcome and joins our matey little group at the terrace table. As he grows back his new feathers after his moult which had him very threadbare and woe-begone, he is now starting to look magnificent again. The 'shield' feathers on the lower wing are a beautiful burnished bronze colour and the tail fan is starting to look a bit peacock shaped. We are impressed by the size of the feather shafts for these big feathers, which are as thick as a biro.

This lovely set of books were part of Liz's birthday present.

Finally a bit of sad news to relate as we lost a good friend, Sean R suddenly. He was a lovely, popular man and always so full of life, the father of one of the students Liz teaches and husband to Dawn, who has appeared in these posts. They were the family involved in recent goat-move posts and the people who gave us the cat, 'Soldier' because they were planning to move back home to the UK. Our thoughts are with the family at this sad and difficult time. Rest in Peace, Sean; way too young and taken too soon. We will miss you.