The Heat was Hot.

We don't get many weather maps here with this much yellow
and brown on them!

Scorchio! Out of nowhere we have been delighted to receive 2 blisteringly hot days. No wind and very very close with the promise of thunderstorms to come on the Tuesday evening. As I write this we are clouding over and we can believe the storms, but we are waiting, as you do, for the weather to 'break'. We read that in yesterday's bit of the heat wave, our local mountain (Mt. Dillon, Co. Roscommon) was the hottest place in Ireland at 27.3ºC. Pah! (I hear you cry) Not that impressive by the standards of the British Isles as a whole, but fairly unusual for us out on the Atlantic margins. [Newsflash from Weds a.m. Mt Dillon repeated the 'hottest place' feat on the Tuesday with an even hotter record; 30.4ºC !]

It's official. Hottest place in Ireland!

We are amused anyway by being the record holders. We moved here from Faversham in Kent which had also been, since 30th Sept 2003, the hottest place in the UK. The weather station at Brogdale, the fruit research station, recorded a 38.5º on that date putting Faversham firmly on the map. I have just searched Google etc because in my head somewhere is a glimmer of memory that Brogdale was recently out-done and knocked off the top spot, but I can find nothing on t'Internet to confirm this. Ah well, we must enjoy this burst of heat while we can. We were wondering whether summer had come and gone with the lovely 3 weeks in May/June so we are relieved that there may be more where that came from.

Mumma-Buff with her two "black babies". We believe they
Araucana x English Game crosses.

The warmth has given us a chance to do a lot of livestock jobs out of doors. The little Marans chicks, still no more than a week old, have been allowed some 'out' in one of the rabbit runs. Typically for tiny chicks, they do not really do much with this time, making only occasional short forays out onto the grass from the safety of their dark, 'bedroom' section but they are thriving and I am very happy with them. That is, all be it that EVERYthing seems to grow very slowly compared to the Hubbard poults who, at 60 days or so are great big rollicking, fully feathered young chickens who are already starting to look edible.

The roses are doing a cracking job in the garden.
This is "The Lovers". Beautifully scented.

The one Buff Orp hen who managed to do the broody job correctly is now doing an equally good job rearing her two little sparrow-like offspring. The eggs were blue, so we thought they might be of the 'fancy fowl' variety, Araucana but Sue and Rob (who know these varieties and supplied the eggs) say that the flecked brown chests on them make them more likely to have been fathered by their English Game cock.

Apples coming along nicely.

Also outdoors for some first exploring are the two Marmalade kittens, Chivers and Chip. They, too, are thriving and Liz is trying to keep their lives full of stimulus and interest despite them being too tiny to risk any close interaction yet with the dogs. They are locked in the Sitting Room while the dogs are about and let out while I have the dogs out for a walk or in the bedroom for a nap. Today, in the heat and with the dogs tired from a long morning walk in the local bog, we sneaked the kittens out into the front garden for a chase about. They met the Guinea Fowl and our elderly Sussex Ponte hen (Enda) and survived.

As pants the Westie for cooling streams,
when heated in the chase?

One sad bit of news. A few posts back, I reported that one of the geese was struggling to get back on her feet after her session doing 'broody'. Well, she was showing no signs of improvement and I was concerned at the anguished cries of pain and upset she made every time the rest of the geese left her behind and she flopped about trying to struggle upright. Today I culled her out and as I type this, Liz is even now plucking her. We have no idea how she will cook and eat - she will be in very poor condition after the nesting and the subsequent inability to move about much to graze. She might also be quite old.

The pigs come up to 6 months.

If she is one of our original ladies from Jan 2013, then she'd be a 2012 bird and 4 years old. A challenge for Liz's slow-cooker skills, perhaps, or maybe a 'render down' for stock and goose fat (with the liver probably rescued!). She will decide when she sees the girl 'naked'. Even a fat healthy goose can look very scrawny and meatless along side a turkey for example.

Curly tail equals happy pig.

Also a teeny bit less "meaty" than previous efforts are our happy pair of piggies, Somerville and Ross. Regular readers will know that we estimate pig weights using a standard method out of our pig 'Bible', called the "Bust squared times length" method. [Search this blog for the link]. Well, these ladies are approaching 6 months and are around 48 kg. This, as I said, is lighter than our Tamworths (2014) or the Berkshires (2015) but we are very happy with this and it is deliberate. I am a bit of a 'feeder' (says Charlotte) and tend to overfeed my animals unless you beat me with a stick. Our pork up to now has been quite fatty. This year we are sticking more rigidly to the Bible's "maintenance diet" and these pigs are growing measurably slower than previous years, which we like.

Finally a couple of nice bits of nostalgia which came my way, deriving from my long interest in olde wooden sail-powered work boats. First we heard from a Kent friend (thanks Joanna) that there was to be a programme on Irish TV about the 'Galway Hookers' or, more specifically, about the last owners and sailors of the 'species', the 'Bádóirí' (boatmen). I managed to scramble up writing this on the calendar and tried to turn it on a month after it had aired, so I had a frantic search and rescue job trying to obtain a DVD or find a link to somewhere it might be archived. To the rescue the gents from the film company and a magazine which had set it up who managed to find me the DVD and posted it to me. Thank you very much Joe St Leger and the team. The film was superb but might be a bit 'specialist' if old boats are not your thing.

Nick Ardley's latest book.

2nd in the boats dept, a copy of the latest book by my friend from the Cambria era (he used to read my reconstruction blog and comment upon it), Nick Ardley. Nick is nearly the same age as I am but his family home was a converted Thames Sailing Barge (the May Flower) so there is not much he does not know about them. He is now a mad keen sailor who spends his leisure time exploring the creeks and inlets of his home county (Essex) looking at old barge ports, old boats and hulks, old military installations and industrial heritage. He has written a number of books starting with one about his childhood growing up on the barge. When I find out he has a new book out I always try to get hold of a copy and this latest one he generously agreed to post to me here and has written a nice inscription and signed it. If he ever becomes rich and famous....... If you are at all interested in the history of barging and of the Essex coast and Thames Estuary, I recommend it.

Injuns in them thar hills? OK, just a silly garden feature made
with broken arrows and holes drilled in the wood with my drill.

And that is pretty much it for this one. 21:40 now and it has started raining.

Not Yellow but Primrose.

At some signal unknown to we smallholding observers, the geese suddenly decide that the time for sitting brooding on those last eggs or empty nests is over and we should all wake up one morning, stride purposefully out of the goose house and go graze the good orchard grass. This gives me a chance, at last, to nip the door shut and muck the place out. It is long overdue - so long that some of the debris underfoot is turkey feathers and we last had a turkey here on May 9th!

Marans chick.

Our final score on the goslings was just the one but we are delighted with that. Regular readers will know that we are frantically trying NOT to breed geese; we steal all the eggs we can for the kitchen and only get out-manouvred right at the end of the season when a goose goes broody on us overnight. This gosling is a possible keeper (unless he turns out to be a gander) as we have a possible problem with one of the adult birds going lame.

Take a large mixing bowl and add half a dozen newly hatched
eggs......

Since her turn at brooding she struggles to get back onto her feet but we are giving her the benefit of the doubt. Every time we get worried about her and start thinking we may need to make the tough decision, we then see all the adult birds wandering about the orchard with the gosling and not a bother on them. Maybe she is just "a bit stiff in the morning". Geese are a poor shape to be suffering from aching ankles and knees - all the weight of the breast, neck and head is well forward of the legs. Watch this space.

We love the monochrome effect of the black, grey and white
fluff on these guys.

A lot more success, fortunately, where we did want it, in the incubator hatch of the Marans eggs. Here we ended up with 6 babies in a lovely range of blacks, greys and whites. The remaining 6 eggs were infertile - just yolk and white like the day we bought them. We have passed the results to our supplier. It is not a complaint. These things happen. We just know that people would rather know that their rooster is maybe under performing. 50% is not bad in the scheme of things.

A screen-grab of the Lisacul website

Meanwhile, Liz has been having a load of fun setting up and running the village website ( www.LisaculInfo.ie ). She does this as part of her work and you will know that the '365' photographic project was born out of it and continues to supply most of the pictures which are used on the site. I am not just saying this out of loyalty - go check for yourselves - but it is a fine, bright and fresh site, always with something new to look at. It is currently being very well received by the village's on-line community but also, we know, the Lisacul diaspora all around the world. It is a website to be proud of and we both are.

Happy farmer in a recent 365 picture.

The most recent bit of fun on it was a tease around the support of Roscommon's GAA team which made the Connacht final, drew the game with Galway and must now play the replay on Sunday. I came up with the idea of taking a load of yellow and blue pics of every day objects (yellow bucket on blue trailer, coffee mugs, a WD40 can, yellow and blue flowers etc) which Liz then used in a jokey "we are being impartial in our support, honest" web-page. Incidentally, I stand corrected on this. I have been rattling on about 'yellow and blue' and I now know that we are technically 'primrose and blue'. Get back in yer box, lens-man.

Other than that, I have got over my cold and I am a picture of health again (yeah, OK). I have been out to the buildering and got involved with a fascinating 'new' technique (new to me, anyway), that of using a rough and tough version of a cake icing syringe to fire wet mortar into the gaps between the stones of an old wall.

Little Chip

This wall had been left with very fluffy 'mortar' or just dirt with a tiny bit of lime in it (and lots of rat's nest debris) between the stones, so that it looked more like a dry stone wall than a house wall. K-Dub had then made it 'worse' by raking out all the loose debris, so that the pointing cracks were 3-4 inches deep. The icing syringe, which is actually like a 3 times normal size mastic-gun, forces mortar right down into these cracks and fills them from the 'back'. If you tried to use a trowel you might get the outside filled but you would likely have great air gaps and cavities behind your pointing.

I didn't have the camera, sadly, but it is a technique I am definitely going to use on the end of my goose house, where the wall has that same 'dry stone wall' effect. I gather that the 'pros' even use a pump version to fire in a continuous tooth-paste bead from a bucket of mortar without all the business of having to refill the syringe.

Yellow and Blue

A sports fan? Well, maybe not.....

Go the Rossie Boys! When we upped sticks and moved from our old jobs to the 'Wesht' of Ireland, I seem to have come from one sport mad environment (the DHL/Sainsbury warehouse) to another (this whole country!). The local area is knee deep in fans of soccer and of the 2 GAA sports ('football' and hurling, use the 'football' word round here and everyone will assume you are talking about Gaelic-rules footie. The UK 'permiereship, Man-U and all that jazz is always specified as soccer).

A 365 pic from my "yellow and blue" period. 

All my friends and rels will know that we 3 brothers managed to get born without the 'football' gene strand in our DNA. We have had no interest in the game for our whole lives and what we know about it you could write in capitals on the back of a postage stamp. I have happily carried that on into Ireland and the GAA game but you'd have to be blind here to not know there was something going on.

The strawberry season is upon us.

The whole county is a-flutter with the yellow and blue Roscommon flags; cars, flag poles in front gardens, sheep sprayed in those colours. Roscommon has not, up till now been known for its sporting prowess but while all sporty eyes were turned towards an exciting run in the soccer 'Euro's' which took the national team to the final 16 for the first time ever, The (GAA) Rossie boys have been sneaking up on the final of the Connacht (province) championship. The 'Big Game' was to be against the heroic Galway team and 'we' were definitely underdogs.

Peas and beans from the polytunnel.

Liz had bought me the top for Christmas and had been talking to her boss (John, who is a genuine fan) about my hopelessness as a fan - all in good part, I have to say, and in fun. They had decided that I should wear the shirt for the main games in the run up as it seemed to be having a good and talismanic effect - they kept winning! With tongue in cheek, she also gave me some 'authentic' lines to say should I get asked any tricky questions (like "did you see the match?" for example). I am (allegedly) very happy with the season so far and also delighted that 'they' are finally doing up the (Douglas) Hyde ground because the surface has been unplayable all through the winter when ever it rains.

Summer fruiting raspberries

Well, underdogs or not, I wore the shirt as advised at the weekend and Roscommon drew with Galway, so there is a replay game on Saturday evening. My only other involvement has been that I thought it would be fun to do a series of '365' pics for the project during the intervening week, based on the Rossie colours blue and yellow, so I have been wandering about looking for anything to shoot where blue and yellow are in conjunction and are the main colours.

Coo. There's a whole exciting world out there!

Meanwhile, back in real life my dozen Marans eggs have now 'cooked' in the incubator and have started hatching but in an unusual way. Normally 12 eggs set on the same day in an incubator will almost synchronise their hatching - the theory is that they all feel each other moving within their respective shells, rocking about and hear each other cheeping, so they all get encouraged to greater efforts. You get a great surge of pipping and hatching and so few in the 'tail' end that it is not really worth keeping the incubator going in case of stragglers. Well, not for us this time, it seems.

Early Bird

We got 2 really early birds on day 17 (should be 21), followed by a pause, then a burst of 3 more on day 20 and only one today (Day 21). 6 chicks now, then, and the remaining 6 eggs all quiet with no signs of even any pipping. We are guessing that the strange spread is due to how the eggs were stored before we got them - they have managed to sneak in 4 days of early development before they ever went into our incubator so possibly they were kept warm.

A first try at mould-pressed, matured, harder goats cheese

I will give the final 6 eggs till tomorrow (Day 22) evening before I take them out and carefully open them (one at once, obviously) out at the compost heap. They may be sterile, addled or 'dead in shell', ones which failed to make it out of the egg. If any turn out to be alive (oops) I will put the rest back in and give them a few more days but I would be amazed if this is the case.

Blue the floofy cat in one of his more classy sleeping poses.

That's it for this one. I am afraid I have a cold and I am bunged up, fed up and not able for happy creative writing. Forgive me.

Every Which 'Whey'.

365 Pic of the local church and the rose
garden Liz is now helping in and advising on

One of the 'rules' you find in every cheese making book is "DON'T throw away the whey!" It is nutritious, tasty and valuable stuff, we are told. Feed it to livestock or use it in the kitchen where ever a recipe says to use stock and in lots of places where recipes say water. To taste, you might have guessed, it resembles very watered down milk without all the chalkiness and with most of the protein and fat removed; "very skimmed milk" if you like. It is a savoury, rather than a sweet taste.

The taste of nostalgia - currently on promo in
the local Lidl supermarket.

Use it in soups, sauces and stews, the books advise, for extra richness. Use it in bread making instead of water or milk. We have done both of these - Liz turned out a beautiful brace of white loaves and followed through with an epic chowder.

I give some of it each day to the pigs. As part of their ration they get rolled (flaked) barley which I had been wetting with water to make it a bit more palatable; everybody knows pigs like a good schlurrrrpy mash to snuffle about in, not dry dusty barley. Now I glug in whey. I have in schoolboy memory (I used to LOVE Geography) that the famed 'Danish Bacon' industry ballooned up out of the industrial/commercial scale dairy industry, with most cheese factories tacking on a pig unit to the end of their buildings. Win win.

One of our 3D foam 'field' targets. Despite its new 'porcupine'
look this rat would actually still be alive under competition
rules, only "wounded". You can see the 'heart' circle straddled
by arrows but not actually hit. 

In the Archery Dept we had an interesting diversion mid-week this week when our club was asked by the local equivalent of the Sports Council to hold a taster session for local teenagers (etc). This happened at our indoor venue, Castlerea's "The Hub" Badminton courts/gym. Instructor Con had to do the serious training (he's the only one insured) - we 'foot soldiers' went along to set up the hall and the targets and to be on hand to help if there were floods of hopefuls. In the event there was no flood, so we got an hour or so of free practise at some targets down the far side of the hall and occasionally got used as models in the training. "Look at that guy, notice how his upper body is in exactly the same position for every shot?" etc. We dismantled it all once the session was over. Interesting. The club do it every year, I am told.

A rather embarrassing scatter of holes around this hare and very
few hits but in my defence, that is my blue stripey arrow scoring
a bulls eye into the 'kill' zone. Blood-thirsty lot!

Other than that, not a great deal to report. I was back into the 'buildering' on Thursday with a vengeance - we had the cement mixer out just like old times. Part of that day's effort was to lay the limestone slabs into Carolyn's walk-in pantry / scullery, to match the rest of that (Utility room / extension) area.

Red currant jelly, anyone?

We enjoyed a goodly harvest of red currants (for jelly) and also a smaller haul of goosegogs from the 'red' gooseberry bushes. We are leaving the green ones for now as they are as hard as bullets and bitingly sharp to eat. All these bushes have been grazed a bit by chickens and Guinea Fowl who jump up and snatch the low hanging fruits.

Every time we see gooseberries we are reminded of an old neighbour from the Faversham days. Eric, a fisherman, always amused us with the same gooseberry comment when he gave us some first, new season mackerel so fresh the eyes were still bright and the skin iridescent. He was a mad keen mackerel fisherman but didn't actually like them to eat himself. "There," he always said, "is proof that God exists if you ever needed it. He makes the gooseberries come ripe just as the mackerel season starts!" No arguing with that, I guess.

Houdini Duck

There's always one. Houdini Duck is out AGAIN. 

There's always one, isn't there? Ours at present is one of the ducks who, unlike his 5 colleagues, is refusing to be contained by my attempts to ban ducks from the big pond. The 5 just went into the 'new' pen (the orchard) on the day we decided to move them, whinged for a while walking up and down the wire fence, but then settled down, uncomplaining, to a life with the geese. They may have tried to nip through the fence and the sheep hurdles a few times but when they couldn't break through at ground level, they relaxed and stayed put.

I was trying to get a good "It's lashing down!" pic for 365.
I was happy with this one.

Duck #6, though, had other ideas. Every time we ran the ducks into the orchard, you'd hear him a few minutes later quacking loudly in the yard or on the front drive. The escapes quickly earned him the name 'Houdini Duck' and we had to keep an eye on him to see how and where he was escaping. He's not that subtle, bless him, and brazenly escaped again while we watched. He had realised that while the bottom 'rungs' of a sheep hurdle were close together (to stop baby lambs), the gaps got bigger further up the hurdle, and if he hopped up to rung #3, he could squeeze through there.

We are getting some striking sunsets with all these storm clouds.

I covered all the hurdles with 1" square 'aviary mesh' to stop his little game, but the lad sussed out that the same size changes also applied to the sheep wire as a whole. He could get out anywhere around the orchard perimeter with a simple hop up to a foot from the ground and a slither down through, but so far only does it nearest to the big pond. My next step is to run 2" chicken wire all along that fence line. This bizarre psychology is one of the good things we have learned about containing poultry. Chickens, for example, will happily fly up and over a 6 foot solid, opaque wall, but do not think they can do the same flight over a transparent, chicken wire fence. They walk up and down the fence looking through it and bumping off it with their beaks but it never seems to occur to them to fly up and over.

They might look pretty in the slanting evening sunshine but
they are still thistles and need clearing

Actually he is not a natural 'free bird' and does not do anything with his freedom. He seems rather upset that his 5 colleagues do not follow him and he hangs around sadly just outside the fence, quacking at them. He does not even go onto the pond much on his own, so the pond is, in fact, recovering slowly. He is, though, a nuisance (as well as an affront to my fencing ability!) so he needs to be contained by this next plan or he is going to find himself 'ate' if he doesn't watch out. I am talking 'He' here, of course. He may not turn out to be a drake but if he is and he is not the only one, then he may be first against the wall come the revolution. [I am hoping here that my readers know me well enough to know that all this may not be 100% serious. We do not, in fact, make 'harvesting' decisions based on how annoying the livestock are!].

Lamb

In other harvesting stories, we were booked to nip down to our butcher in Castlerea on Monday to collect and see cut up, our two ram lambs, Ebony and Ivory. It is fascinating to talk to the lads down there and we wondered how our lambs would fare especially as the slaughterman always has a bit of a light hearted chunter at our lambs being too big or, sometimes being black-wooled and therefore less likely to grow as well. The guys have been at it for a long time, so they should know, but I have to admit to a bit of 'pinch of salt' at the 'black wool bad' thing.

First fruits for 2016. Some nice lamb chops for Monday supper.

This time they were spot on - the white wool boy was definitely fatter and bigger. There is not a lot we can do about this, however. Our #2 ewe, Polly' is half 'Jacob', a bicoloured mountainy breed, which is almost certainly the reason for the black wool and less heavy shape of her lambs. What ever the case, we saved 4 chops from the freezer and had them as our 'first fruits' of 2016 meat. They were a tender and flavour-filled delight.

Thistles for the compost.

The remaining 6 sheep are currently mowing my front lawn for me while I get a chance to nip round and pull the thistles in the East Field. After the rain, it is a good satisfying task as a vertical gentle pull will give you all the stem and leaves plus a good chunk of taproot. The field is not too bad because I do this every year - if you pull the root the sheep can straight way return to graze there. If you mow or cut the shoot and leave the top or any leaves still there, the sheep will avoid the grass and your thistle will just re-grow. I guess there are about 3-4 man hours of work at it and 3 towering wheel barrows of thistles for the compost.

The Hubbard poults spread out across their new paddock.

My only other news is that the Hubbards, at 50 days old are now well settled into and enjoying their new run and have learned to take themselves off to bed in the correct place (in the coop not under it!) as it gets dark. . This was not an immediate thing and I had an abortive day when I'd got 9 of them in, all calm, when Blue the Cat decided to 'help'. That day I had to hire the 'assistant chicken wrangler' to help round up the upset, scattered poults and steer them back towards their (now cat-free) home for the night. It's never boring with livestock.

Oy! Git Orf Moy Pond!

Here, then, is the post that plenty of our friends and fellow small-holders will have been expecting since February when we revealed that we were "getting ducks". Followers of the blog will recall that I had always been dead against ducks because of the damage they do, particularly to ponds. All manner of other species came and stayed or came and went, even including geese who were easy to keep off the main pond and were supplied with 3 alternative water-bodies in which to bathe and play. Ducks, though were always beyond the pale. Ducks would reduce our lovely pond to a stagnant, shit-loaded, lifeless mess with brown 'muddy-desert' margins.

Pond plants left broken and floating - the
well known downside of having ducks

The duckless pond established and then flourished with a rich mixture of plants and some good pads of waterlilies developing. It was a-buzz with damsel flies, water beetles, dragon flies, water boatmen, pond skaters, whirligig beetles and we had a good number of smooth newts. Some visitors asked why we didn't have a few fish (gold fish, Koi Carp or the local favourite 'roaches') in there but we always fended them off with the insect larvae and tadpoles arguments.

Cattle-race side gate shored up with mesh
and woodwork. 

Regular readers will know that we 'cracked' back in February. We decided that such a well established pond would have enough 'ecology' going on to be able to stay in balance with just a few ducks... perhaps 3, a drake and 2 ducks. That way we could let them breed and enjoy the sight of Mumma duck leading her little crocodile of yellow fluff-balls out onto the water. There was even a little duck house on the bank in the plan somewhere.

A run under construction for the Hubbard poults to keep them
 out of the yard and sheds.

We nipped out to the local poultry sale in March looking for a pair of Muscovies and came away, instead, with half a dozen Khaki Campbell eggs for the incubator. 6 hatched in early April and delighted us through the fluffy stages. They even convinced us for a while that, now fully feathered, they would still avoid the pond and preferred their little paddling pool.

Having another go at the Feta cheese - this time with moulds
(yogurt pot with bottom cut out) lined with cheesecloth "socks".

Well, if that was the honeymoon period, then it must be almost at its end and the true nature of this 'marriage' is taking shape. They are now 3 months old and no longer ducklings, but full size, chunky ducks (all be it not sexually mature yet, so none of the curly tail feathers on the drakes' rumps.) We have watched them with increasing alarm and decreasing conviction that we might get away with the duck thing, that they hadn't eaten ALL the plants, or damaged the edges and we were definitely not stagnant.

Cubing up the Feta 'rounds'. The cubes now get 4 days
of being sprinkled with salt and dry curing. 

They have though, pretty much eaten all the floating plants (water lilies, floating pondweeds, hornwort) plus the tops of all the emergents except bog-bean. They have dabbled up all the oxygenators which were rooted into the light sediment (there is a rubber liner) leaving them shredded and floating in a tangled mess. We also seem to have no more beetles or boatmen, damsels or dragon flies and we have not seen newts lately.

Good firm Feta cubes dry-curing (in the fridge)

We jointly decided that this was not working right and that we would keep the ducks but try to keep them off the big pond. Friends advised that they should be perfectly OK in with the geese - they would quickly learn to steer clear of the gosling, the Mother goose and George the Gander. I have now started to confine them into the orchard and the "old dung heap bit" and am having an interesting time with one particular bird who has a talent for escaping. I think my sheep wire and hurdles are duck-proof (they do seem to be for 5 of the ducks!) and I have shored up a few leaks in gates and fencing found by the Houdini-Duck. They have been satisfyingly NOT ON THE POND today anyway - even Houdini doesn't go onto the pond if he's alone. We will have to watch the pond with interest to see how it recovers.

Larch

On a related subject, I am creating a run this year for the Hubbard poults. These guys have always been fully free range before but their winning growth rates are a result of eating MOUNTAINS of food which, being chickens, they convert into meat but also a fair quantity of... um.... "guano". They are friendly (or mercenary) souls and tend to hang around lazily in the yard waiting for the next feed, and taking shelter from rain in our good sheds. Not for them the extensive grass ranging or a scratch of the woodland floor.

You can probably guess where I am going with this - all that guano tends to end up in the 'human areas' (yard, feed-sheds) and we get fed up with wading through it or slipping on it as we move about, not to mention how much can get walked into the house. The down side of full free-range? So, this year, now that they are approaching Day 50, they are getting moved to the baby-forest (also overgrown dock and thistle patch) behind our Darby and Joan chairs beyond the big pond. We have no problem with them clearing that to a brown desert - it could use it and they will not damage the young trees.

The kittens explore the "foothills" of Mount Matt. Pic by Liz

Finally, we have been enjoying a 'take 2' on the cheese making. We have learnt from the last Feta batch and this time we bodged up some moulds and Liz created cheese-cloth 'socks' with which to line them. I also cut the curds in the saucepan stage much smaller (cm cubes instead of 2 cm). You can see from the pics that these changes have all made the finished cheese 'rounds' much firmer and they taste and feel very genuine. The rounds now cubed up again get sprinkled with salt and gently dry-cured for 4 days before they get packed in brine (where they should last 3 months in the fridge). It is all looking a bit good!