Gifts from the sea.

Knocknarea, site of Queen Maeve's grave in the distance.

Sunday we had a trip to the coast, we had gone to a poultry sale in Ballina, one of our favourite places, to try to get a replacement Muscovy drake, our boy unfortunately had died a few days earlier from a heart attack, maybe overdoing it with the three ducks. There was very little for sale, it was a poor turnout, and no Muscovy's of any age, but it gave us the excuse to play hooky and have a trip around the Mayo/Sligo coast.

 The weather was not the best, but then this coast is best seen on stormy days, many of these beaches are renowned surfer beaches.

 We had come prepared with plastic sacks to collect washed up seaweed to earth up our potatoes,

Free gift.

seaweed is a wonderful fertiliser with over eighteen trace elements, it also gives protection against potato blight and the salt on it helps to keep the slugs at bay, there is no need to wash it first, it also rots down very quickly, in all we collected six sacks of this wonderful gift from the sea.

I love these stones.

We also found some very pretty stones which have now been incorporated into our rockery,

and a lovely tree stump which will also get used somewhere in the garden.

Moy river.

We travelled back home over the Ox mountains on a road that we had never been on before, crossing the Moy river several times.

Nectar for moths.

A beautiful trip, the wild flowers are now in full bloom and the air was perfumed with Honeysuckle.
We had decided that we would not have the customary Summer Solstice  bonfire, the only day that you are permitted to have a bonfire here unless you have a licence, rather like Spain, and very sensible given the amount of forest and moorland fires that Ireland has. If we had had a bonfire it would have meant burning things that we have a use for, tree and hedge trimmings are of more use to us chipped and used on pathways or composted, and paper feed sacks and cardboard are used to start new beds or as a mulch, so we had nothing that we could burn.
We now have Daffy duck and her sister Dilly sitting on eggs, plus the incubator is full, a friend then offered us the services of his broody hen, I think her name is Betty, she has already hatched out one lot of hens eggs this year and she is now sitting on ten Indian runner eggs for us, another friend had asked if we would hatch some Indian runners for her as she wants them for slug patrols so hopefully we will have some ducklings for her next month.

The perfume is Heavenly.