Sunsets and rainbows.

The end of last week was a mixture of rain and sunshine, some of the rainbows were spectacular, unfortunately I can never quite capture the true beauty of them on camera, I love to imagine the little people burying a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, they must have been busy little people here in Ireland.

The first few days of this week have been warm but with a silver frost most nights, the sunset last night was beautiful and true to the prediction we had yet another lovely day today. I love this time of year, it is so colourful with the autumn colour now coming into it's own of the trees. This week is  Irish National Tree Week, it would be nice if the new trees that we have ordered turn up this week but I don't think they will so today we bought a Virginia Creeper and a Rhus Tifina, I have always called this a tree of heaven although I am probably misnaming it, this time of year it has the most amazing colour, but we will have to wait a year or so for it to really come into it's own.


The last lot of tomatoes we picked are now bottled. I changed the method I normally use, this time I cooked the fruits for a few minutes until they had released their juice, the tomatoes were then placed into the jars, I then reduced remaining the juice, topped up the jars, capped them and then sterilised them in the hot water bath for ten minutes. I will be able to make a direct comparison between the two methods later on when we start using them. Four pounds yielded  three large and one small jar.

This time last year we planted three crowns of Rhubarb,Timperley Early, they established so quickly and although you should not pull the stems on the first year I must admit we have, several times, this has seemly had no ill effects on the plants. The plants have grown very big and look as though they will need splitting next year, but we will see. I think the secret with rhubarb is to keep it well feed with compost, it likes moisture, but not too wet and by keeping it well mulched seems to have paid off.
The grass is still continuing to grow and still requires cutting, the rabbits do their part, but
                    even they cant keep up with it. Talking of rabbits, Peter rabbit is once again a father, in the year we have had him  he has sired over fifty kittens, only twelve for us, but over  thirty for a friend of ours, although we feel that her doe should be given a rest and two days ago another friends doe produced kittens, she made her nest in a compost heap which seems a very good place, a centrally heated nest! clever rabbit.

The rhubarb is looking good.

Garden Cloches

The latest project has been making cloches for the garden. Now we have four raised beds I want to compare growing over wintered onions outside with tunnel grown ones, and broad beans planted outside and planted soon with the ones done a bit later  in root trainers started in the tunnel and then planted out in spring. I feel that if this is successful I can put the tunnel to better use although I'm not too sure what I would be doing that is different. Once we had worked out the design for the cloches they proved to be easy to make.

Each hoop is 8ft. 3/4 inch thin wall plastic water pipe , and the supports are 6mm rebar cut to 2m. Each frame has four hoops and five support rods, this give a cloche that will cover a bed just over four feet wide with a centre height of about eighteen inches, tall enough for onions and beans to over winter. Each cloche can overlap the previous one to give a continuous length.
Once in place they are covered with tunnel plastic and secured by an inch of split plastic pipe.

When cutting the pipe we gave a good allowance for insertion into the ground. If  we find they are disturbed by high winds, we seem to get a lot of those, we can put rebar into the ground and push the ends of the hoops onto them.

The covers are easily removed in the spring and the frames could then be covered with crop fleece or carrot netting. The total cost for forty meters x 4 ft of cloches was eighty euros, much cheaper than the ready made type. We had the rebar cut to the lengths required at the store, no extra charge.

Two  hoops from each frame have 5, 7mm holes drilled at equal distance to insert the rods through, the end hoops have 6mm holes through one wall to give a tight fit at the ends. The ends of the  rods were inclined to slip a bit so the rods have been   secured with water proof tape.

Next season I have plans on growing strawberries under one of the cloches, I will try one of the old breeds, the  Cambridge Favourite, this strawberry is supposed to produce even in bad weather and the cloche can be covered with a crop fleece rather than the plastic as the fruit

ripens.

One cloche has already been put to use, covering the chard and also the new wallflower seedlings, I'm still hopeful that we will have wallflowers blooming next spring.

 We are wondering if this design could be adapted to make runs for the rabbits, at present their runs are made from wood frame work, this has three disadvantages, it makes the runs quite heavy to move, the runs distort slightly each time they are moved and the rabbits like to eat wood.

 Peter rabbit has eaten his bedroom wall so that has to be replace, he has also had a very good go at his run and the whole run needs to be replaced or remade, so maybe the plastic hoops idea will be able to be adapted some way, I don't think he will eat that.








Below is a picture of the pipe clip, just sawn along on side it then will open up to clip over the plastic cover,

 Our cherry tomatoes have been brilliant this year, so far they have produced over fifteen pounds of the best tasting tomatoes we have ever had, with probably as many to come providing we don't get any very hard frosts that effects stuff in the tunnel. Any that remain green will be made into green tomatoes chutney.

 We did have frost last night so we probably have come to the end of the sweet peas, but who knows, they might continue.

The La Bresse table birds have worked out very well, we have kept two of the pullets to breed from next year and are going to look at a cockerel next week.  We had two other pullets that had not feathered well and seemed to be rather small but in fact they killed out at 2lb 5oz cleaned weight, we have done one cockerel  
so far and he weighed in at 2.5kg about 5lb 5oz cleaned weight at 129 days,  when we start to breed them we will be hoping for male and not female chicks. These to us seem the perfect bird for the table, slow growing but not so slow as to make them too expensive to do. With the increase in feed costs, we are now paying twenty euros for a bag of growers, I will try to work out a formula that we can make at home and maybe reduce the cost of feeding a bit, but that still gives the birds the correct amount of nutrients to thrive well. 

Easy Pickles

One of the easiest pickles to make is Bread and Butter Pickle, it is also our favourite, we grow ridge cucumbers just for making this lovely relish. It goes well with any cold meat or cheese and is very simple to make.
Preparation.
4lb cucumbers, 1.5 lb of onion.2oz of salt.
Peal and finely slice the cucumbers and onion, place in a large bowl cover with the salt ( to draw the excess fluid out) and leave overnight.
Next day.
Rinse the salt out from the vegetables and drain very well.
Heat 2.5 cups (1pt) of wine vinegar with 1 cup of sugar, 2 teaspoons of mustard seed and 1.5 teaspoons of Turmeric, stir to mix it all together then add the veg and just bring to the boil, cook for 5 minutes , then using a slotted spoon, scoop the veg into clean warm jars, fill them to the shoulder of the jars, then top up with the remaining spiced vinegar mixture. I always used greased proof paper under the metal lids to prevent the lids from corroding. try to store the jars for at least two weeks before eating, they improve with storage.

We seldom get to the two weeks before we start them, they really are a favourite.

The leaves are now starting to change colour, I love this time of year, store cupboards full of jams and pickles, and bottled fruit. A nice warm fire to sit by and the garden more or less put to bed for the winter. It leaves time for craft work and painting, we are hoping to go on a pottery course in the next few weeks, something we have not done before.

Simon has been busy putting the finishing touches to the sunroom, the floor is now tiled and he is doing mosaics for the window ledges, two have been completed so far, and I think they look great, far more interesting than plain tiles although they are quite labour intensive.

My experiment with freezing eggs worked well, I had done them in bags of six and tried out the first lot by making a cake , they worked as well as fresh eggs. But we do now have a regular customer for our eggs, which helps when we have so many.

Autumn Harvest and adventures.

September continues to be a warm month, the grass is still growing faster than the rabbits can graze it and seeds are still germinating. One of our favourite spring time flowers are wall flowers and we had planted a couple of long rows earlier in the year, they were doing well until they were mistaken as weeds by a helper, any easy mistake to make as we have a lot of wild mustard which has appeared on our land, it's leaves are similar to wallflowers. As the weather has been so good I decided to take a chance and plant more seeds, they have all germinated and are now at the true leaf stage so with a little bit of crop cover I am hopeful that we will have wallflowers to plant out in the spring, they might flower a little later than normal but that doesn't matter.
The tomatoes, cucumbers and courgettes are now abundant. This year I grew a yellow cherry tomato, the flavour is fantastic and it is a heavy cropper, far too many fruits for us to eat so I will bottle most of them to use later on in stir fries and bolognese sauce. The cucumbers are always grown to make Bread and Butter Pickle, this is a combination of cucumber and onions with mustard seed and Turmeric, very simple to make it goes beautifully with cheese and also cold meats.

The sweet-peas continue to flower in abundance, I have even run out of vases for all of them and am now using jugs as vases, I had only planted two dozen seeds of a mixed collection and they have been the best display I have ever had. They will continue until the first frosts. 

The Peacock butterflies have at last put in an appearance, we have had plenty of tortoiseshell butterflies along with other ones but it is only in the last week that the peacocks have made their entrance. There also seems to be more red squirrels around, at one time it was rare to see this lovely little creature but we seem to be seeing more and more of them, maybe it is the time of year, they will now be collecting nuts for their winter larder, rather like ourselves , storing food for the months to come.

With such beautiful weather we decided to have a day out, we had planned on visiting the Cliffs of Moher, however, this was the day that our sat nav decided to play games with us. We ended up somewhere in Connemara, where we were we will probably never know but the scenery was breathtaking, mountains that reached down to the shore of a beautiful lough, small islands and lots of granite outcrops. A place full of history, mystery and mists.
The West of Ireland is truly a beautiful place, one where history can be clearly seen, of times past imprinted on the landscape.

Ducks and Marmalade.

I hate change, especially when something gets changed when it worked well before the change. It might take me some time to do today's blog , as the format of Blog Spot has now been changed. We were given due warning and I suppose I should have looked at the proposed changes before it happened. I get comfortable with things and rarely do I see any benefits of New or Improved , this seems like change for changes sake, but no doubt I will get used to it, or not.

The first of the ducks are now in the freezer, only five got slaughtered, one had escaped it's run and taken it's self off to the  second flocks run, maybe it had sensed what was going to happen. As it turned out we would not have had room in the freezer for the the escape.We ate one over the weekend and it was beautiful and so tender.

 We have now bought a third freezer despite saying we would only need one, there are still nineteen ducks and seven chickens to be slaughtered over the next month. Next year we would hope to have more chickens for the freezer, it takes time to build up breeding stock, we are keeping two of the La Bresse pullets that we hatched and hopefully we have found a supplier for the cockerel who had imported eggs from France, with luck we should have good strong stock. It rather went against the grain to buy chicken at 15euros a time for Sunday dinner, I can buy a joint of Organic beef for less, but the price of  Organic chicken does reflect the true cost of production allowing for the heavy mark up of the supermarkets.

Inspired by someone else's blog I decided it was time to make marmalade, not orange marmalade but lime, this was a childhood memory for both of us, Roses Lime Marmalade, always reserved for the adults in the family, we suspect it was very expensive or it was decided that children would not like it, we were both in our late teens if not older before we tried it, although marmalade is not the easiest thing to make it is worthwhile, even though it is a two day process. The end result, seven jars of marmalade for the store cupboard.

At last some good news on the GM front. At last a long term study has been done on the safety of GM's and the use of Roundup. Instead of the twelve week safety assessment, a two year study has now been done and Peer reviewed, funded in part by the French Supermarket chain Carrefour. The outcome? GM maize causes tumours as does Roundup. This is a debate that I have been involved with and followed for twenty four years. Maybe now governments will stop issuing licences for  growing these poisons and withdraw the licences for allowing Roundup to be sold, but I very much doubt it, after all when you have a ex legal representative of Monsanto in charge of  the FDA in the USA, corruption will reign supreme.
RESOURCES: The new paper can be found here
http://research.sustainablefoodtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Final-Paper.pdf

Intro to key findings and related resources
http://research.sustainablefoodtrust.org    

Harvests

So far September has been a warm and dry month, ideal weather to get the garden prepared for it's winter sleep, we have now built four raised beds ready for next year. We have not done this because the land gets wet, our land is very free draining too much so in fact, but we hope that by having the raised beds we might stand more of a chance against the weeds and slugs, the other advantage is that having deep dug the beds and making them a width that can be worked from both sides they will not require further heavy digging, just cover them with manure and compost in the Autumn cover with black plastic or cardboard and let the worms do the rest. We used to use this method before when we lived in Ireland and it works well. The garden had got quite overgrown and we had forgotten that we had planted some Pink Fir Apple potatoes so were delighted to find we had a bonus crop nearly a bucket full, plus some stray main crop potatoes.

It seems to be a good year for blackberries so we went foraging and returned with over four pounds of fruit picked in a very short time, I didn't want to waste valuable space in the freezer so I bottled them instead, this is a very easy way to preserve fruit for the winter, we ended up with twelve jars, ready to make apple and blackberry pie come the winter.

From time to time we have had our rabbits escape from their runs, normally they are easy to catch or even return to their runs, however, there will always be the exception. Bunsey free ranged for well over three weeks, she was living in the hedge row but still expected to be given her feed every evening, she and the cats became friends with the cats being very curious as to why this rabbit was running around. Our attempts at catching her failed even though we have a large net and she had no fear of us when we were outside. After hearing a fox calling one evening we thought it was time that she was caught and returned to safety, she must have also been aware of the danger as our next attempt was successful, she is now reunited with her sister Goldie . We had no intention of keeping three females but there is no way that she will end up in our freezer, we admire her too much the way that she adapted to semi feral living.

We were pleased to find several frogs around the garden although a bit puzzled as to why they should still be showing their breeding colours, although the seasons are well out of line. We have primroses and Aubretia in bloom and Sweet Williams that I had grown from seed for next years blooming are blooming now.

The Sweet Peas have been spectacular this year and are continuing to bloom, I am hopeful that they will continue until the first frosts come but thankfully their is no sign of that happening yet, the trees have not started to turn colour so we might have a little more of this pleasant Autumn weather.

The butterflies are now coming into their own, at last we have seen Peacocks and masses of Tortoiseshells plus many other varieties but no Red Admirals.

In these very hard times we do not understand why more people are not producing at least some of their own food, we live in a very rural area yet veg gardens are very few and far between, Ireland, like Galicia has ideal growing conditions and although in Galicia all rural dwellers would grow vegetables it was very limited as to what they did grow, the Spanish don't seem to have much use for vegetable unless it's to feed to animals. But here in Ireland people do eat vegetables so why don't they grow some of their own? It can't be lack of time, that's something that people have plenty of, given the unemployment rates, maybe it is all to do with the grant culture, if a farmer is not given grant money from the EU he wont produce stuff, not even if it helps to feed his family.
But this is not just restricted to farmers, most people have large gardens in such a rural area, but they prefer to let the rush take over or use glyphosate rather that dig a garden. As we look around at our own small piece of Ireland we know how quickly the land can become productive with out any chemical inputs at all. We've been back just fourteen months, the freezers are full and in fact we have had to buy yet another one to take the duck and hen harvest, we have a winters supply of potatoes, carrots, onions , a cupboard full of jams and bottled fruit, plus all the cabbages and chard which remains over winter in the garden. Not knowing how to grow stuff is not a valid excuse, there are a number of Grow your Own clubs in Ireland to help the novices get started. Is it just that people are now so far removed from how and where the food they eat comes from? A kids reply to this is simple, The Supermarket. That's all most of them know, what will happen when the world can no longer import from one side of the planet to the other?