Hay saved and Tipp are in the final

Great summer

It’s October isn’t it? We can be forgiven for a bit of confusion here. For a start it isn’t raining and more than that up until last week we had bright sunny days that felt like a good July. We’ve had hay in the barn since June (I think) and our neighbour TJ even took a cut of haylage off our field (keeps the place looking tidy and his Donkey will eat it). Harvesting is in it’s final throws. The greenhouse is littered with ripe pumpkin and the kitchen is littered with untidy piles of Borlotti beans and the last of the tomatoes. Tomatoes were the big success this year, a wee bit of glass and copious amounts of horse manure makes all the difference. We’ve had so many tomatoes that to be honest there’s a massive bowl of them sitting in the kitchen and we’ve no idea what to do with them. Chutney I suppose. We’ve definitely done better this year than last. For a stat we actually got some spuds (the ones I planted the year before finally showed up), The onions were great, we had so much cabbage that to be honest the slugs and caterpillars ate more of it than we did and the sweet corn! The sweet corn was gorgeous; we finished off the last ears last week and resolved to plant twice as much next year. It needs a good summer but when it’s good it’s so sweet and so good.

Bees

Another harvest was the honey. Now I didn’t do great this year, I messed up and my bees swarmed and then they were too few in number to get the July honey and let’s face it July wasn’t a great month but all these things aside I did get some honey this year, probably enough to do us all year and maybe give some away also. I’ve gone from 3 hives to 6 and then back to 3 again and now I have to nurse those 3 through what is predicted to be a hard winter. Hopefully they will all live and next year I’ll do better. Clonmel is a bit of an epicentre for beekeeping and this year as I am now a proper bee keeper we went along to the honey show to have a nosey. I’d been before and remembered a rather dull affair populated by men all of whom were the wrong side of 60. I was delighted to see what a change a few years can make. The place was buzzing, (literally due to the big hive of bees on exhibition). It had been transformed into a bit of a family day out. Lots of kids, lots of people chatting away and not just about how the honey yield was up this year. I met one of my classmates Malcolm. Malcolm if from some rural idol in England, Shropshire or Summerset or sommit, talks like the lead singer of the Wurzils (remember “buy me a bran new combine haaaarvister an I’ll giv yu de key”). Anyway when I met him, Malcolm wasn’t that happy.

“heard you passed dat bee exam John, congratulations”

“Thanks Malcolm”

“howed you do dat den? Cause no-one else bloomin passed it. I tell you now, I’m not bloomin happy, I thought I’d got about 90% in that exam and they tell me I’d got only 42%!”

“They were funny questions Malcolm I think you just had to be lucky”

“Right, right......you get any honey this year then?”

“ahh not much, just a few jars really.”

“That’s too bad John I did bloomin’ well I did, got 75 Lbs out of one hive, 65 out of another but I suppose you just have to be lucky”

Malcolm was smiling.

The joy of electric skateboarding

When I was a little boy I wanted a skateboard. My mother was having none of it as they were (she rightly pointed out), incredibly dangerous. Of course being the only little boy at school who didn’t have a skateboard made me incredibly un cool (a condition which has I’m afraid persisted throughout my life). Obviously I was deeply upset by this at the time and this minor childhood trauma must have lodged somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious where it has festered for years on end. Then about a month ago on a trip up to Armagh while taking a stole around the local car boot sale I stumbled upon a bargain. One slightly mouldy and water damaged electric skateboard £10. In truth the guy selling it had about 10 of them and wanted to flog the lot of them for £60 but I resisted the temptation. It took a little persuasion to get it to work mind but I’m still handy with a screwdriver and a multimeter. When that didn’t work however I shook my soldering iron at it menacingly and that seemed to do the trick. Now despite the fact that the skateboard is designed to carry a max load of 75 Kg (I’m closer to 100), and that it’s only supposed to run on smooth surfaces (our driveway is grittier than an arab’s underpants) I have learned to use the thing. Finally I can skateboard, a childhood ambition fulfilled at last, festering subconscious purged. Unfortunately due to the fact that I am now nearly 40, wobbling around on a skateboard I look less cool now than I ever have before but I’m happy so I couldn’t give a sh*t.

Cider

It’s been a phenomenal year for apples. People who know these things keep telling me. Given such a bountiful harvest it would seem a shame to let them all go to waste so naturally I was egger to turn them into some form of alcohol. A local farmer we know (let’s just call him big Mickey), has an old old orchard that hasn’t been tended in years, he used to supple Bulmer’s, this year he supplied us. Friends and family got together and half a trailer load of big Mickey’s finest were gathered up. You can do worse than spend half a day picking apples in an orchard. Anyway we got a pulper and press from the local apple farm (thanks Con) and set about juicing and filling industrial food grade plastic containers. Weeks passed, cider fermented. Now its “maturing” but soon I’m going to stick it in a keg and it could be a very merry Christmas. I’ll tell you how we get on.....if I can still see the keyboard.

Heat

Finally we entered the 20^th century and got central heating. I don’t quite know myself. I’m sitting here in my boxers basking in glorious kerosene fuelled comfort. Maybe next year we’ll move into the 21^st century and get some solar water heaters.

Hay saved and Tipp are in the final

As some of you may have noticed there was a bit of excitement down here. Something to do with an all Ireland hurling final? Now more than a month later the flags are finally beginning to come down and the euphoria is subsiding a little but throughout late summer there was a gentle joy about the place. People were smiling. There was a tingle of excitement. Neighbours stopped and had a chat

“how’s it goin Tommy?

“ahh sure grand Jimmy, grand, tis a fine spell of weather we’re havin’”

“Ahh sure Tommy you couldn’t beat it and it’s been a great oul summer”

“Aw stop! The hay is saved and Tipp are in the final”

Oh, I passed mt bee science exam. 70% pass mark, only one in my class to do it, am feeling very clever

We went to Donegal and lost our camera. That’s why there have been no blog posts for the past many months. Without a camera there are no pictures, without pictures there is no blog. The pictures we post on the blog are few and far between but the pictures we take on the camera are many and act as aide memoir for the blog. So I’m here writing this blog trying to think of everything we’ve got up to in the last 6 months. Well there was lots of planting, and a whole lot of digging, everything else is a bit of a blur. It has been an excellent summer, we saw sunshine on numerous occasions and as I write this we’re enjoying a balmy September. We’ve had house extension planning granted and then we changed our mind about it so we’re back to the planning permission stage. We’re just about to finish installing the central heating and moving into the 20^th century (the 21^st century will have to wait for a while). We’ve acquired more cats, they breed like rabbits. We’ve attended the village vintage field day in a vintage vehicle. We’ve thrown the odd BBQ. We’ve reconditioned the mobile home (it’s almost weather proof). We cut and saved hay, then TJ our neighbour with the tractor took a second cut for haylage with our blessing (we’re just glad to keep the grass down). We went camping in a camper van, there was even surfing, yes we surfed and I’ve lost none of my style I tell you, I still look just as awkward and out of control on a surfboard as I ever looked.

D is thriving and is usually good. She’s now really picking up the few words of Irish from the play school we send her to. This combined with her baby voice pronunciation and my complete lack of understanding for the Irish language is causing occasional difficulties. The other day for instance while being installed in a car seat she got quite upset and started complaining about her “browah”. “browah?” I said “what is browah?, you mean brother? You don’t have a brother, whose brother are you talking about?” “browah Daddy ma broawah!” she wailed, waving her legs and now quite upset. Thankfully F was there to translate browah into bróga into shoes. How the hell am I supposed to cope with a bilingual daughter?

Did I mention the chicks? After sever failed attempts to hatch eggs with an incubator we finally gave mother nature a shot and having acquired a broody bantam and some fertile eggs (obviously our own hen eggs are no longer fertile since I had the falling out with Chuckey the killer cockerel),we duly acquired 4 now additions to the flock. SUCESS! Clever chicken. Now my hope is that one of them will turn out to be a rooster of a reasonably docile nature and we can get right back to the breeding program.

OK that’s my lot for now; we’ve bought a new camera so hopefully there’ll be a bit more blog.

to bee or not to bee

I start with a confession. I am a wuss. I am scared of almost everything and this is particularly troubling because I am interested in almost everything as well. For instance, I like to go surfing....am scared of the water. Love to be making things.....terrified of power tools. So also it is with the bees. Bees are fascinating. What other activity gives you the opportunity to become so intimately acquainted with the life style and habits of an insect. More than that they give us honey, which is very nice. The one sting in the tail is of course the sting in the tail. Now I was always a bit scared of buzzy flying things but last year one of them (from what I like to call the hive of death due to their aggressive nature), managed to get inside my protective bee veil and though she didn't manage to sting me did send me running and flapping about in a frenetic attempt to divest myself. It's taking me a long time to get over the shock of being nose to nose with a chitin clad warrior and so in truth I haven't been able to work my three bee hives since.

Working bee hives is quite important. The idea is you open up each hive and go through it, essentially breaking up the colony only to re assemble it. you check for signs of disease and seeing how they are doing generally but of course the bees just think your trying to destroy their home and so they attack. Given my traumatic experience I hadn't been able to get more than half way through any hive so far this year before I lost courage and ran away. So it was that on a fine sunny day last week I looked up from where I was tinkering with a wind turbine suddenly aware of a loud background hum. I turned round and looked up to see the sky filled with a few tens of thousands of bees. One of my hives was swarming.

Bees are what is known as a super organism. This means that we don't think of the individual bee as an organism in it's own right (cause it can't survive on its own), rather we look on the colony of bees as the organism and like all organisms it wants to reproduce. This is achieved by swarming. Basically a new queen bee is produced and the old one buggers off with half the colony. usually more than one new queen is produced and each successive queen leaves the hive with a chunk of whatever bees are left. This can continue until the hive is abandoned and from a beekeepers point of view is highly undesirable. Fewer bees means less honey and besides with a colony of bees costing about €100 there is no point giving them away for free. Action had to be taken and so shamed by my inaction I donned my new bullet proof bee suit and went in. The problem was I'd let my bees build up their numbers far too quickly and they had run out of room in their hives. As I opened each one I discovered queen cell after queen cell all nearly ready to hatch and take flight. The hive that had swarmed I split to make a new "nuc" hive, the hive of death hadn't swarmed but was also full of queen cells so I broke them down (smashed them to bits), and hive number three needed no action. I patted myself on the back, I had finally managed to get through all my hives and do what I should have been doing since March. Unfortunately this was not the end of the tale.

Two days later coming in the driveway I noticed that the hive which had swarmed was very very quiet. There were no bees to be seen. I went round to the yard to look over the embankment to get a better look without the bother of putting on a bee suit. True there were very few bees outside the hive, but there was a curious hum in my left ear. I turned as if in slow motion and there in-front of me hanging from a branch of a blackthorn hedge was the biggest bunch of bees I have ever seen in my life. Studies have shown that at times of extreme stress, perception can be distorted so I think it's fair to say that the swarm in-front of me was not in fact three times the size of my head. Nor was it a mere six inches from my nose, no these were erroneous perceptions brought about by the fact that I was suddenly scared shitless. If I had run a mile it would have been in under four minutes but as luck would have it I only had to make it to the house. I donned the suit taking care to put extra duct tape over the smallest gaps in the Velcro fastenings. I calmly collected a large blue bucket, a sheet of plywood a ladder and a pair of hedge cutters. I took my time to position the bucket beneath the swarm. I placed and ascended the step ladder. Now I really was six inches from a huge swarm of bees and they were't entirely pleased to see me. Fortunately I'd seen this done on YouTube so it couldn't be that hard. They were suspended from two sapling branches which I cut. Snip, snip, frump, buzzzzzzzz. Quickly I got off the ladder and put the plywood on the bucket. I'd just caught my first swarm. Elated I left them to their own devices and went to inspect the other hives. It was then that I found swarm number two. Smaller and definitely more aggressive these lads I suspect had issued from the hive of death. They had chosen to lodge on a thick branch and so couldn't be snipped off with clippers. They couldn't be sawn off either as I discovered when I tried it. The vibrations drove them mental and they attacked with furry. I thought perhaps a good swing with an ax would break the branch but in the end I just gave it a thump and they all dropped off into a waiting box. Hot bee suit, high stress and just the hard work of it had left me exhausted so I called it a night and left them to settle down but I knew I had some hard work ahead. I had no hives for the swarms to go into and knew I would have to make an early start the next day.

Baby D provided the 6am start and so after a bottle and a nappy change (D not me), I went out to the shed and 4 hours latter had produced two "nuc" hives (a nuc hive is a small hive used for starting colonies off). Persuading my captured swarms to go inside was not however as straight forward as it is on YouTube. In theory you set up your new hive raised a bit above the ground with a plank leading from the ground to the entrance. over this you drape a sheet and then simply chuck your bees in the middle of the sheet. They then spread out until following their natural tendency to go up, they find a nice new hive and start signalling to the rest of the swarm to come inside. It didn't quite happen like that. I heaved them out on the sheet and they gradually bit by bit took to the air and congregated on the corner of a mobile home. I placed the hive on top of the mobile home but they pointedly ignored it and flew off once again to congregate back in the hedge, this time on a sturdy branch. It was about this time that I got my first bee sting. What a relief, I didn't drop dead from anaphylactic shock. It was about this time

also that help arrived in the form of Mark whom had been assigned to me as a kind of bee mentor. It has to be said the local association here is brilliant. With Marks help we housed both swarms and checked all my hives again for queen cells. As I stood beneath the hedge while Mark got up a ladder and shook bees down to the hive I was holding in my hands I took a moment to reflect that at the start of that week I hadn't been able to look at a bee hive and here I was with angry bees raining down on my head, crawling all over me and filling the air around me. I had finally channelled my iner bee keeper, gone from three colonies to six and I was still looking ok for getting some honey. What a week

Is it not better to surf than live life entirely on dry land due to an irrational fear of drowning? Is it not better to tinker with wind turbines regardless of the risk of arc eye or angle grinder injury? Bee keeping is tough work. There are stings and swarms and angry bees buzzing and bouncing off your head. Bee suits are hot and claustrophobic and exhausting to wear on a hot summers day. and there's allot of heavy lifting, smoke in your eyes and sore backs from all the stooping over to look in a hive. But despite all that it's a fascinating thing to do and you do begin to love your bees so I suppose the question is, is it not better to bee than not to bee?

The story of the killing of Chucky the rooster

The following is the story of Chucky the rooster, who unfortunately had to meet an untimely demise. Due to the epic nature of the struggle and in honor of Chucky who was after all fine bird I have decided to post this months blog entirely in verse. Homer eat your heart out.

This is the story of Chucky the rooster

It’s a story that might shock

Its about his life, his loves, his hates

And how I turned him into stock.

We never asked for Chucky

He arrived one day for free

From a man who offered him as gift

Then turned on his heal to flee

Chucky started out quite lovely

A fine upstanding cock

His held head high, his feathers sleek

And a willie hard as rock

He set about his duties

With gusto and abandon

But pretty soon hens weren’t enough

he started shagging things at random

First it was the ducks

And then it was the drake

And I’m pretty sure he had a go

At kitty by mistake

Now Chucky was the rooster

He knew he was the boss

But that wasn’t enough for Chucky

And he started getting cross

His aggression levels building

He terrorized the cat

Then turned his eyes to human kind and though

“I’ll have a piece of that”

At first it was my father in law

Then it was my Dad

The rooster terrorised them both

And drove the oul lads mad

Then he just attacked at random

It soon became a farce

When you bent to weed the cabbages

You had to watch your arse

We couldn’t step outside the house

You simply didn’t dare

Then we though what happens if

He meets our wee girl when where’re not there

That thought was terrifying

Enough to make you cry

Chucky’s time had come at last

The rooster had to die

Killing something isn’t easy

A rooster might be the worst

Because before you get to killing

You must catch the fecker first.

I tried to chase down Chucky

To pin him to the ground

But while I could match his straight line speed

He could beat me turning round

Then I though I’d wait outside his coop

And grab him when he came out

But Chucky wasn’t stupid

He knew what I was about

He fixed me with one beady eye

Twitching in its socket

And when I made my move on him

He bolted like a rocket

Twice I tried the ambush

And twice he leapt and fled

This was going nowhere

I’d try something else instead

My standing as a “real man”

Was quickly running out

My wife was getting impatient

As the rooster was still about

She said “I want the rooster gone

before the end of day

I’m sick of playing watchdog

when the child goes out to play”

The game was really on now

No more messing round

Chucky had to meet his end

The cock was going down

I hatched a plan to get him drunk

Put whiskey in his meal

What a waste of whiskey

The bird was made of steal

Instead of getting sleepy

And going to his head

It went straight to his testicles

The bird was seeing red

He was a lousy lover

And his sex drive was excessive

And it turned out when he’d had a few

The bird got more aggressive.

By now I’d lost my patience

I was getting thick

I cursed and swore and dammed the bird

And went and got my stick

Chucky was a coward

That became quite clear

When faced with farmer wielding stick

His crest fell with the fear

Three times I chased him off the farm

Three times he did return

And on the third returning I cursed

“will the fecker never learn”

He must have been exhausted

I know I was nearly bet

But finally I caught him

With an Aldi fishing net

I grabbed him by the ankles

I lifted him on high

He flapped only a little

He knew he was going to die

If you want to kill a rooster

You must at first catch it

But when the chase is over

Just hit him with a hatchet

Chucky started flapping

His prognosis very poor

But I smashed his head against wall

Just to make dammed sure.

To kill a thing upsets me

though that might sound absurd

But killing Chucky was sheer relief

“Die Die Die you bastard bird”

An Air of quiet now pervades the farm

The air tastes sweet and free

The child can play without a care

Or fear of foul Chucky

The chickens regard me with new respect

The ducks are happy again

Now I’m the only rooster

My wife’s a happy hen.

Only one thing worries me

And that’s the bloody cat

I think he’s turned transvestite

I’m not sure how to handle that.

Chucky the rooster 2010 ~ 2010

After a long and bitterly cold winter hibernation it seems things are finally beginning to stir on our wee farm. Daffodils are struggling to push up to the sunlight despite the continuing cold conditions and I see with some relief that the bees are busy and apparently healthy, so far so good. The bees are going to bee a big thing this year I hope. I’ve got great plans to beecome a small scale commercial producer but this will all bee dependant on me getting the industrious little monsters through the rest of the winter. If you had asked me a week ago how my bees were doing I would have exuded an air of smug confidence. “Endless talk about colony collapse disorder, varroa mites and winter starvation would make you think that bee keeping was difficult”, I might have said. “My bees are fine, better than fine, they are great” I’d chuckle, my head filled with recent observations of my clever bees returning to their hives with legfulls of pollen despite the biting cold. A week is a long time in bee keeping and I’ve since learned that legfulls of pollen or not, now is the time of year when bees starve to death. Because of this I’ve decided to feed them and it was while doing this that I discovered what a bad beekeeper I’ve really been. Lots of modern beehives come with a metal mesh floor under which is slung a removable hardboard drawer. The purpose of this is to count varroa mites (little vampire buggers that weaken bees). The drawer on my best hive had sagged a little and left a gap at the front of the hive which it appears the bees have for months been mistaking for their front door. What a scene when this week I realised what had been happening and removed the drawer. There must have been thousands of bees all dead (and frankly a bit mouldy), piled layers deep on top of the drawer. I must have killed half the colony with my complacency. Bad, bad beekeeper. Despite all this it has to be said the bees seem OK and if we get through to mid April hopefully we’ll get some honey off them this year.

Green house use

Although we’ve had night time temperatures that have frequently hit –10°C there is a small piece of An Feirm Beag that is forever Tuscany. Walk into the greenhouse on any day where there’s even a glimmer of sun and you can just bath in its heady polycarbonate warmth. The prospects for propagation are very exciting. So far though we’ve only planted courgettes (Fiona planted and they are thriving), and an entire tray of basil (I planted, probably dead). Now we are warming up for the real challenge, tomatoes, big juicy ones. Now if only there was a plant that grew mozzarella balls and pizza dough we’d be really sorted.

A bit of hedging

To be fair to F the place was looking a bit scruffy and overgrown. Given that this is my own natural state it’s not really surprising that I wasn’t too bothered but F was and so finally, having accepted that I in fact wasn’t ever going to “get round to it”, I relented. And so men were called. They were big men and they arrived with tools, big tools with many teeth and motors. Big motors and…..yeah you get the idea. Two days work and the place is looking a bit tidier but not to be outdone (and probably because their chainsaw was bigger than my chainsaw), I decided I had better have a go myself. There’s a row of small trees along the south end of our vegetable plot that I’ve be threatening to thin out since we first arrived. I started out with the notion of thinning out the whole thing in a day, but the first tree, a tall and spindly ash took me that long to fell and scared me so much that I called it a day before I’d even finished cutting it up. Most of the branches are still out there as I write reminding me that some things are best done by big guys with big chainsaws.

Raspberries & hops

One of our friends gave us five raspberry canes in exchange for some eggs. You have to love the bartering. Anyway not only will these canes produce, we hope a bumper crop of raspberries but it also gave me an excuse to produce yet another ridiculously over engineered construction with which to support the raspberry bushes. Naturally I stuck it up in the hops garden (now a Mecca of ridiculously over engineered horticultural construction) and my hope is that it will be the first of three or four rows of fruit bushes. The hops are still not showing much. Doubtless they won’t show their head until we get milder weather, but they are at least still alive, I think.

Digging with the rotavator

I’m actually very fond of my rotavator. I bought it last year for €80. It didn’t actually work when I bought it but having taken it home and given it some TLC it eventually chugged into life and has been chugging away reliably ever since. Rotavators are not the easiest thing in the world to use. They tend to skim over the surface bouncing erratically like a drunken Duracell bunny only bigger and made of metal but once you learn how to control them (it took me 6 months), they can be a life saver. For reasons of weed control you should never ever use a rotavator to break new soil. It tends to chop up the roots of dandelions and docks which only makes for more dandelions and docks. For reasons of expediency I’ve been using mine to break new soil. I’ll worry about the weeds next year. To get the thing to dig down to any depth I’ve discovered that you need to rock it from side to side, move on a bit and repeat. This is tough work no doubt, but it’s easier I think than digging and it does break up the soil. Inevitably however having just about got the hang of one contraption I’ve begun to harbour an ambition to get something a bit bigger, more powerful and possibly dangerous. I’m slowly but steadily nurturing the idea of getting a wee tractor for the wee farm. Something small and cheep that could pull a plough of harrow. As they say round here, a Massey would be sassy but a Zetor would be better.

Problems with planting

Not for the first time this week cries of “THAT FECKIN ROOSTER” could be heard on the wee farm. Our rooster is a gobshite. As it turns out Speckled Sussex roosters are known for their viscous temperament. Known that is by everyone but us and perhaps by the guy who gave him to us as a free gift. It may not be polite to look gift horses in the mouth but if you are ever given a gift rooster it might be wise to look him up on Google. Apart from his usual sneak attacks when your back is turned and always amusing assaults of my father in law, the foul pecker (rooster not father in law) has taken to leading all the chickens into the vegetable patch to dig up anything and everything we put down. He has to go and soon. We of course rang the man who gave him to us in the first place thinking to offer him first refusal, but it seems he isn’t keen to take him back. He has a rooster of his own which he tells us is doing unspeakable things to his drake. It’s made me even more nervous of turning my back on our fella.

Duck production.

The hens it seems have switched from egg production to vegetable destruction and the egg count is way down. The ducks however have gone into egg overdrive. Ovumdrive perhaps. In any case they are now churning out an egg a day each which is nice though we don’t really know what to do with them all. The Mammy in law has started selling them on the black market. Apparently there’s loads of people out there with a terrible addiction to duck eggs.

Belated December 2009

First of all a belated merry Christmas to all of you. I hope you all had a good one and I hope you all have a great 2010.

So it’s been almost two months since you last heard from us and we’ve had a few highlights. There were of course the birthday celebrations for baby D. we had a lovely party but I think it might all have gone over the wee girls head. Nonetheless the cake was tasty so I enjoyed it even if D was a bit baffled by all the fuss. Naturally to mark such a momentous occasion and as a symbol of her new found ability to walk she had to get shoes. I think D was a bit confused by the whole concept of shoes to start with. Why does one need shoes after all? But when she saw the flashy lights and shinny toes she was won over and now acts like she can’t be seen in public without them. Why shoes should have flashy lights remains a mystery. Thanks to D’s auntie N for buying the shoes.

On the farm I’ve been doing all ot of indoor work so progress has been a bit slow. We’ve managed to cover about a third of one vegetable plot (this is in order to suppress weeds etc) and have created 4 raised beds (also now covered, thanks for the help Pat). I’ve also finally finished the greenhouse frame and now it just needs some glazing, which hopefully we’ll get done over the holidays. A greenhouse will be a real boon and I’m really looking forward to a decent crop of tomatoes.

There’s a lot of life and death goes on on our wee farm. We’ve got ourselves an incubator and I’m really looking forward to hatching our own chicks in the New Year. Our poor turkeys have however gone from free range to oven ready; a process that involved killing, plucking gutting and hanging. Not for the squeamish and yes it would definitely be easier to buy them in Tescos’ but that would be cheating.

Thanks are due again to P&P for their help. Some other new life arrived last night in the form of a stray kitten. He showed up demanding food and shelter, Well I couldn’t turn him away, ‘tis the season of good will and all that, a fact I’m reflecting on now as I nurse the finger the little feral monster has just sunk his teeth into.

Speaking of reflection, We’ll be doing some of that ourselves in the coming weeks. We started off the year with a new house and a new baby and the goals of trying out a little of everything on the farm and trying not to be disastrous parents. I think we’ve done ok on the former but I’ll hold judgement on the latter until I see if D needs therapy for chicken phobia in later life. Mercifully we haven't yet been flooded, frozen, bankrupt or repossessed and it has been a really glorious year for us. Here are two pretty shots of the recent chill, one from Carcassonne and one of an feirm beag.

Thanks for looking in and I hope 2010 is as good a year for all of you as 2009 has been for us!