smallholding

Don’t even think of keeping animals (goats, sheep, chickens, cows, horses) without this book.

 

livestock, new.

 

look at the blue eggs

The hen is white, her eggs are blue. We do not give names to poultry anymore. We do not eat eggs until they are a couple of days old.

Sometimes when I eat a soft boiled egg I realize there might be no finer food, with bread and butter. The simplest food often serves to reconcile you with your life in particular and the world at large.

 

small achievements today

Children away for their thursdayfriday at their father’s, and I am a little ill again, this time the chest, my body is telling me that I am tired, I am not listening enough. Listen more, I tell myself in vain. I take Gouttes aux essences, a great blend of essential oils (peppermint, clove, lavender, ceylon cinnamon, thyme) that deals with “acute benign [oxymoron ? sounds good anyway] bronchial diseases” beautifully. No first-aid shelf of any bathroom should be complete without this, we live in the damp north west of ireland and we survive Without Antibiotics Very Well. The brand is phytarma, and you can get it for between €7 or €8 in any chemists in France.

I do my jobs slowly. I establish which of my two goats has a touch of mastitis, by doing the washing-up-liquid-test (add washing up liquid to fresh milk and see if the milk turns like snot). Only one does. Tomorrow I will find out if she has it on both sides or just the one as I suspect, and then I’ll probably try homeopathy. I had a little mastitis myself with each children so I have all remedies leftover and homoeopathic remedies never go out of date. I really think you can only look after animals that you empathize with.

Anyway, no progress with reorganizing my studio because I am really dragging myself around, but I finish the hat I have been knitting at the knitting and chess-playing afternoons (4 to 6, wednesdays at the Dock).

And I make a whisk out of willow for L, L is happy.

 

strange visit from a furry friend

We were driving home around 7 last night in the dark and although I was keeping a good speed some van overtook our car and just ahead of us started to brake and then come to a halt. We thought : ‘we know your kind’ the type of people who overtake you a second before their exit come up and risk missing it and sending you into the landscape. It was a different scenario though. After a minute or two it indicated and drove onto the other lane to pursue its route, so we moved forward to discover that a little baby pine marten was on the road, no sign of blood but not great movement either. I went out to see it, tried to semaphore to it to move onto the grassy side of the road for safety but it just stared at me so. So after a minute’s hesitation I just grabbed the animal by the skin of the neck and deposited it onto the grass. It did not struggle and then just stayed there staring. We decided that we should offer the creature some comfort as we did not want to see its silhouette imprinted onto the asphalt the next day. We happened to have a cardboard box in the boot so I put it in there and again it hardly struggled. We thought we’d keep it safe until it looked fit to be wild again and return it to where we had found it. By the time we reached home it was more alive, we put it in a cage away from the wind, gave it some meat, and went about our evening business.

I know what you are thinking, we have chickens, this was playing with fire, but what else could we do ? And of course it had escaped the next morning (well again obviously) having slightly widened the gap between two thick wires in the cage. Our only means of protection for our chickens—apart from locking them in at night—is conversation with the predators but this one left before we had time to talk so I do hope it understood that we were wishing it well.

Lovely animal though, I was told that it was introduced in Ireland as a predator for the rabbits that had been introduced previously, and it is now a protected species. Funny world.

 

a lot on, thin presence here, I know

Feet not quite touching the ground this week again with upcoming food/guerilla art/performance at 3 on saturday 14 february in the Dock in carrick-on-shannon, Love ? We would like to help, to coincide with the opening of the love show (invites to be downloaded from the ‘so what’s on ?’ page, just clickclickclick) added to the ordinary and to the weekly extraordinary of farming. And the good news is, the little white hen that looks just like her mother who was taken last year just started to lay the magic blue eggs her mother used to.

 

I like odd numbers particularly

This morning, as I started milking goat number two, Biscotte, I thought I’d count how many times I needed to press the udders until I had emptied them. I am milking one udder at a time because one hand has to hold the awkward vessel I am currently using which makes the counting exercise easier. (I can milk with both hands, I am proud to add, which means that the loss of one arm would not stop me.) This morning I needed to press 373 times for almost 1.5 litres of milk, I could press harder and thus reduce the number but I like to go at it gently, I empathize greatly with my goats, especially in the instance of production and extraction of milk as I too have produced milk for my children. I am not necessarily a neurotic counter but I often like counting—sometimes as relic of a childish comforting thing but also, as this morning, in the name of science. I now know roughly how many times I have to press udders every morning for my milk and I feel cleverer for it. Milkers must have interesting muscle development in their hands, I wonder what other use they can be put to. I also brushed the donkey, Alaska, to try and get his dreadlocks away but I was not counting the strokes.

Today I am experimenting with a Hungarian farm cheese recipe Lazslo (thank you) gave me last saturday. Leave raw milk to sour at room temperature. Remove sour cream and heat to near boiling point until good curds form. Drain and salt lightly. So the souring is happening as I write. How many hours, days, curds, salt grains ? The drained whey is great for cleaning linoleum and slate floors, and also the hens love it.