Friday, 14 February 2025

Like a tonne of blocks

Actually, not like a tonne of blocks but a tonne of blocks: all 44 of them. Ten years ago, when I used to teach remedial math, I set some students a task to calculate the volume of a bale of 44 x 4in-solid concrete blocks. The data were given in mm [because that's how blocks are reported at builders' merchants] (100mm x 215mm x 450mm) -- and requested&required an answer in cu.m. [because that seems an appropriate metric for something that fills a small farm-trailer]. Few of the answers were correct and some of them were hilariously wrong. hilarious? I was careful not to laugh at students who'd just ground through the appalling Leaving Cert math curriculum which teaches by fixes and tricks and rote learning while Not developing a feeling for numbers and their relative size. I was otoh delighted to share the results of my speculation about why 44?? which hinged on the density of concrete [2⅓x the density of water] and that 44 blocks weighed exactly 1 tonne.

Well, I don't teach no more because I R retire. otoh, although there is no money in it, I try to do some work every day: use it or lose it. If I did no exercise, my limbs would atrophy and visitors would find me a mere skittle prone upon the sofa. It is also obvs that I'm not 25 anymore: when I was fit for 8 or 10 hours of pully-hauly a day and ready for more the day following. I am contracted to run the chain-saw for the full of one tank of gas . . . and then stop and clean up. Dangerous, dopey, things happen when I'm using a chainsaw at the best of times; there's extra hazard in there if I'm tired or fussed or under time pressure. 

Last week, we had two brilliant back-to-back dry sunny days and I knew I'd regret failing to make progress on the outdoor chores. As a change from working my upper bod with the chainsaw, I decided that I would salvage and move a bale of concrete blocks [result! L]. Those blocks formed the perimeter of a raised veg.bed in the top garden, which was assembled in Apr 2o2o nearly 5 years ago One edge of which you can see in the pic.  Much earlier, before Dau.II had left home, the two of us had created a few raised beds inside and outside the polytunnel. They were constructed by a) levelling out the ground, b) laying out sides of horizontal 4in-solids c) surmounted by overlapping vertical 4in-solids d) the blocks fixed in place with a 4:1 sand:cement mix.

Block beds were a fabulous improvement on beds made of {timber | election-posters | pallets} and the same for compost bins. But y'have to be confident that the bed/bin is going to useful where it is built for twenty years. In Apr 2o2o, I had no such confidence; I didn't have someone to help; but I did have a lorra blocks. Accordingly I made a lazy-bed by piling 3 layers of horizontal blocks atop each other and filling the basin with compost and top-soil. Now we're going solar, and the panels are scheduled to be installed where that 'temporary' bed was located. 

It took me more than one hour but less than two to salvage the tonne-o-blocks and stack them out of the way of Team Solar when they arrive for their site works -- soon we hope. For reasons, it didn't happen last year, despite me filling a valise with folding money and shaking it enticingly at solar contractors across the sunny south east. The trend nowadays is to pay money to a 'gym' to lift weights to develop abs or pecs or upper body strength. Whatever the solar costs, I know I'm ahead by doing weight-training for free at home rather in a gym in town.

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

More hay, less speed

Thirty year ago, it were, when we were living in Dublin. Bright and early one Saturday morning, The Boy getting hammered on Thunderbird in a dip in the dunes at Portmarnock being at a pal's gaff overnight, we took a figairey to visit Souad & Pat the Salt on Costa na Déise. There was no M50 and no M9 back then, although the Naas Bypass 30km from Dublin opened in 1983. We took the scenic route, albeit called the N9:  Naas - Kilcullen - Moone - Castledermot - Carlow - Paulstown - Gowran - Dungarvan- Thomastown - Ballyhale - Mullinavat - Waterford - The Sweep - Kill - Tea! With clear roads and a following wind it usually took 3 hours: . Then, sometime after Kilcullen, the car started to peck and stutter. We pulled into Carlow, were given a diagnosis of air-in-the-fuel-line, and advised that we'd be fine if we kept to 80km/h rather than bouncing up and down like pop-corn poppin'. On Sunday evening, revived by the sea breeze and good food, we sedately returned to Dublin. It was busy enough with traffic, as loadsa 1st or 2nd generation Dubliners returned from helping with the {shearing | haying | muck-spreading} at their several home places across the country. Being compelled by mechanical necessity to keep the speed below 50mph = 80km/h, the return journey took us all of 3hours and 10 minutes. And Arrive Alive: which is always a win.

The Man aka The Nanny State has since last Friday 7th Feb 2025 curtailed Our Rights to drive like the clappers down any and every road in the country by setting a default 60km/h on Local roads - down from 80km/h. That is the meaning of the bend sinister with 5 lines sable on a ground argent [as L]. Huge Ballyhoo in Ballyhale! and across the country. The importance and, to an imperfect degree, the quality of Irish roads is designated by the initial letter: M motorway - N national - R regional - L local. Every highway and byway in the country is so designated - on a server in the National Roads Authority.

Less so in the hinterlands. Where a lesser road connects with a greater, the signage is present as at the start of the L4015 in Waterford. But at any subsequent forks in the road all bets are off. With SatNav and GPS and EirCodes, physically labelled road intersections on roads less travelled is a bit yesterday. Old timers still navigate from farm-gate to the creamery or into town for new wellies without any sort of road sign. The intention is to install the new bend sinister signs at the start of all L roads, so drivers know where they are . . . even if they have no idea where they are, like

Whatevs, so long as R roads still default to 80km/h, I don't think it will much affect journey times. If they get cranked down to 60, then we'll have to allow an extra 5 minutes to get to the railway station. That well-used [hey, free travel!!] journey offers two routes
1) directly over the hill [20.6km 24 min] or
2) 500m to the R702 and then into town [23km 26 min]
As route 1) is almost entirely L roads, it is likely to now take longer to accomplish at a mandatory 60km/h. But t.b.h. we gave up on that route after two actual tips and several NDEs: meeting boy racers coming round blind corners on two wheels or a handful of sheep burst out of a gap in the hedge. Option 2) 'main' road is winding, with potholes in the margins, but at least there is a line down the centre and enough room for a car and a 30-tonne dump truck to pass without clipping each other. 

That road with which we began our journey today used to be The Waterford Road and then The N9. Since they opened the M9 motorway, the N9 has been down-graded to the R448. Proper order too, it was a terrible road if you were in a hurry: with l o o n n g stretches where we were compelled to bumble along behind a mud-slinging tractor because the road was all twists and turns and blind gateways.

Footnote on etymology. I was always confused by more haste, less speed because in modern usage haste and speed are close synonyms.  But in Old English spēd meant success or luck, a meaning which still exists in Godspeed for bon voyage. Which makes the translation: take it handy or you may regret it.

Monday, 10 February 2025

Oh, it is a farmer's life

We were at our neighbour's 90th b.day party in the middle of January. Quite trad: the PP came to say mass and offer the sacrament. Two dozen, incl. PP, sat down to a long table with heaping plates of hot turkey&ham or salmon plus mash&roasters and mixed root veg. Followed by huge quarters of apple pie (or cheesecake for wimps) and then mugs of strong tea. I got talking to the oldest chap, now a father in his turn, from the family that bought the rest of 'our' farm in 1996. I complemented him on his two nieces, whom we see more often because the second son was doing most of the farming; the oldest having escaped to college and engineering. We were ould fellas on about the youth of today in surprisingly complementary terms. Those nieces were hard as nails, up for anything, alert, interested and beginning to be assets although neither has started primary school. Their cousins might do Scouts (on the weekend, like) learning about owls, but the nieces could be up to their knees in shite, facing down a skittish beast, any day of the week because that's what farmers do.

Not everyone wishes . . . to spend the majority of their life dressed in the kind of clothes designed to be hosed down. But those who do tend to be assets. That quote is from Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst; my latest dead-tree book. It is excellent. The first chapter describes her riding shotgun with The Fallen Animal Guy; who is licensed to haul away stock which have the misfortune to die before getting lurried to the abattoir and added to the food-chain. We have the equivalent here. Years ago, a friend from USA was visiting with his son. By coincidence we had a dead sheep in a wheelbarrow awaiting removal. Friend thought this was an excellent teaching moment for his city-boy teenager. When the ramp of the dump-truck came down there was a rolling waft of mammal guts from an enormous cow with legs pointing every which way. Our visitors took a step back and half raised their arms in futile defense. A teaching moment indeed . . . Bathurst's chapter is like that in sp♠des.

The rest of the book explores other aspects of the darker side of British farming. But it is also a rolling tribute to families who rise to the challenge of wresting a living from the land and the hoops [financial, ethical, bureaucratic, inter-personal] they must negotiate to do what they love - rain or shine, hail or heat-stroke, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, 70 years a lifetime. My second [that's 2/2] graduate student was a farmer from East Galway. Not a farmer's son, although he was that too, but a farmer and contractor in his own right although only 22. He'd put himself through college getting paid €€€s for driving machines during silage season and any time something big needed to be moved somewhere else. I guess he learned to reverse a tractor-and-trailer though a narrow gateway years before he was legally entitled to do that.  A tractor is essentially the same [because the design-of-things makes it intuitive] as a back-hoe - dumper-truck, - forklift - combine-harvester . . . and it's a transferable skill.

Perhaps more significantly, when you're at the end of the far-acre and your mower stops going it's not so easy to call for expert help and the help can't come till after the weekend and the hay must be knocked because a front is barrelling in from the Atlantic. Farmers don't give up then, they scratch the head, roll up the sleeves, find the lump-hammer in the toolbox and see if it can't be fixed, or bodged enough to finish this task before dark. Bathurst sums it up: [son of the soil] works at a recruitment agency in London who only employs people from an agricultural background. The thing about farmers, he says, is that they’re adaptable – the human multitools of the professional world. ‘You get someone off a farm and they can fix a car, fix a plug, fix a boiler, put their hand in a ewe and pull a lamb out – they’re so practically based that . . . they’re like twice three times better.  I feel the same about anyone [chapeaux! The Boy] who has successfully finished a degree at The Open University. Except that farmers have all the gumption, drive, stoicism and can-do of OU students and have a Masters in Vice-grips.

Friday, 7 February 2025

Harry's Gate

No, not Harry's Game; read on.  In March 1996, after six years a-lookin' we bought an old farm-house (with 7 hectares and some outbuildings) halfway up a hill in the Irish Midlands. It required A Lot of work: the 1941 vintage house had no plumbing (inside or out); the electric was rudimentary; half the front-door was missing; and there was a long-ignored hole in the roof. The Beloved was the contractor - sourcing well-borers, plumbers, sparkies, central heating ppl able for underfloor heating, tilers, builders, carpenters . . . who all came in series or parallel as required. It took a year of unremitting effort, by-passing obstacles great and small; incl. driving the lads to keep working till 6pm rather than gawping at Comet Hale-Bopp. Don't imagine I did much on site - I was usually in town

We threw a party for everyone and their families on the Sunday of St. Patrick's weekend 1997 and woke up in our own new beds, in our own new bedrooms, in our own new home. We had exhausted all our treasure and stamina and had still only made the farm-house habitable. But it was enough core infrastructure to start raising two small girls, a few sheep and some chickens; and living the good life. It took ten (10) years to get our mojo back for building.  In 2007 a couple of craftsman builders Harry and James coursed over our horizon and were tasked to put a slated roof on the most solid of the derelict sheds. They were only in roofing for the money: James was an architectural heritage bloke: all lime-mortar and details; while Harry was an artist in metalwork who would have stopped in his forge if there was any market for his craft. They were a bit on the blow-in side, like ourselves, and I remember a few hilarious lunches when they came up to the kitchen for soup and cold-cuts.

When the slating was done, we had pity on young Harry and commissioned him to make two steel arty "pedestrian" gates to keep dogs and sheep out of the garden while allowing easy human access [it's all in the hanging and the hinges]. I had recently returned from Santiago and the design referenced the concha de peregrino. A very few of the hikers up our lane have caught the reference and talked about their own camino. Here is Harry's top gate between the two granite pillars that I made a bit more vertical to frame (and hang) the steel.

Now, I ask you: does it look like a gate? Despite the the sunburst / scallop design, it still looks like a gate, yes? rather than a bedstead . . . or a toilet?? 

but one walker last week was bamboozled enough, by a trick of the light or an optical illusion, to squat in the lee of the gatepost for a piddle. Fine, fair enough, but also thought it was fine fair enough to leave her tinkle tissue for me to pick up and contribute to our compost heap. They say that Chinese peasant farmers with holdings abutting the road would install a closet with a bucket in the hope of securing some humanure as free fertilizer. But we're not in Kansas China anymore! It's not the first time I've had to clean up after the entitled.


Wednesday, 5 February 2025

Seville Savvy

I have written records of our marmalade making adventures going back to 2002. I must have made it before then because when, we lived in England 1983-1990 a lorra jam was made from a lorra different sorts of fruit. What couldn't be boiled up with sugar and sealed [jam] was warmed up with sugar and yeast and bottled [plonk some mildly radio-active]. But around 2002, I got alongside a canny method for fool-proofing marmalade. This involves separating 

  • process "pectin release" [simmer oranges for 3 hours in enough water to cover] from 
  • process "combine pectin, acid and sugar to make jam that sets" [bring orange gloop (less seeds and pith) PLUS 2x as much sugar PLUS coarse chopped skins to a roiling boiling and keep it there for 10-15 minutes].

Looking back on my early marmalade notes shows that we've made considerable changes to the protocol mostly in the line of simplify simplify.[that would be Thoreau]. Now we've got the right kit and the lived experience and the notes to reliably knock off a year's supply of marmalade from nothing more than oranges, sugar, water and time [maybe seven hours elapsed time from a standing start, of which half is actually working]. The other solid is that we have a reliable "3 generation" team: BobTheSeville, Dau.II and the latter's odd-mother who have known and liked each other for 30 years.

We haven't made marmalade since Jan 2023. Our Seville supplier from 2 years ago has retired and I had to scrabble for another. Top-tip: make sure your dentist and your fruiterer are much younger than you are. Shout out for Bolger's Fariview of Waterford: serving the SouthEast retail and wholesale for 75 years!  Although it was late in the marmalade season, Bolger's sourced me a 12kg flat of Sevilles, to be collected on the morrow, for €25. The next Saturday, Lá Fhéile Bríde, I was alone in the house and started on processing 24/93rds of the oranges as a first batch . . . to see if I still had the touch. 7 hours later, result! [L] showing that I could still do it. Note also the latest bit of kit - a 2kg quartz boulder to keep the wafer-thin lid down on the stainless steel saucepan in which I now do the 1st 3-hour boil. Seville oranges float, hot Sevilles positively bob and the pan is Full. A weighted lid really minimizes water-loss and a steamy kitchen. Cast iron 7.5lt Cousance? so yesterday! And so damnably heavy.

Cost: it is remarkable how well oranges have held their value over the last 20 years: between 2005 and 2015 a crate of Sevilles cost €20±€2. Now it's about €25±€2. Sugar otoh has gone vertical: up 50% from 2021 to 2023. For this batch 

  • Materials. Sugar €6.80, oranges €6.45, water €0.00. 
  • Labour: 1 hour prep. 2 hours process. 3 x €MinWage = €38.10 
  • Total €51.35 or €2.85 per jar
  • cf: Fruitfield Old Time Irish Coarse Cut Marmalade 454G €3.29 
  • If you ignore labour it’s €0.80 a jar
  • cf: cheapest Stockwell & Co Orange Marmalade 454G €0.49

Team Seville assembled on Lá Fhéile Blaise the Monday following Lá Fhéile Bríde which has been a public holiday since 2023. I sprang out of bed at 06:30 so that Process Pectin for Batch II 2025 could start at 07:00 and the hard work could start after breakfast at 10:00. As soon as the the Pectin Process Pan PPP was empty, I started off batch III for after lunch.

By the time we'd enjarred Batch III we were all kinda knackered: but were revived by tea, toast and . . . marmalade. Over the weekend we created 18 + 18 + 23 [some kinda a small - we ran out of jam-jars] pots which should see us through the year. We still have [rotate your stock!] 5 pots of vintage 2023 to eat first. 

I froze the last 20 oranges after first scrubbing them down with a 4:1 solution of white vinegar against the surface fungi.

Monday, 3 February 2025

ill thrift

Farm animals are subject to all sorts of conditions & diseases with exotic names: bloat, braxy, fluke, hoose, scour. These can be congenital or infectious or some sort of trace-element deficiency. It can be difficult of diagnosis: the symptoms of too-much selenium overlap with those of too-little. Once they've got a reliable diagnosis, farrrmers want to knock it on the head in a way that is timely, effective and cheap.

Thyroxine is essential for growth and metabolic health in humans and livestock and also incorporates iodine. Just a little I goes a long way, but if your soil is deficient, iodine won't appear in the fodder and something must be done. Likewise with vitamin B12 and cobalt. Lambs which get along fine, and meet their weight markers while on their mother's milk, sometimes fail to thrive after weaning. This is known as ill-thrift or [cobalt]-pine, and becomes a known thing on some farms because,

 like our selenium deficiency, there isn't enough cobalt in that soil. It then becomes an addition on the long list of ThingsToDo to prepare the product for market. The treatment is known, readily available and the cost-benefit is clear: "Oral cobalt supplementation costs less than 1 penny per 25 kg lamb. Production losses from poor growth and delays to marketing may cost £10-£15 per lamb." But it's a time-eating pain to bring the lambs in every month and given them the cobalt or vitB12 that they need.

Well, it turns out that some varieties of willow Salix spp. are hyper-accumulators of cobalt and lambs have a taste for the stuff. It also grows fast, especially in the wet soils that are suitable for sheep . . . because barley or spuds or mangolds or cattle aren't an option. A trial in NE England sponsored by The Oglesby Charitable Trust, has been investigating the effects of feeding willow to lambs

It's interesting that lambs are avid for willow; because our sheep feel the same about ivy Hedera helix. When we had snow followed by 5 days of sub-zero temps two weeks ago, we were a bit caught with our pants down. We had only one 25kg bag of mmmm good sheep muesli but that's like dessert and not enough to sustain 15 sheep indefinitely. We also had a big round bale of hay but about half of each armful gets trampled into the snow and/or shat upon. Accordingly I coursed about the property looking for the biggest, greenest, nearest sources of ivy and dragged them up to the top field where the sheep where sheltering in place. It's not clear if ewes love ivy because if supplies a dietary deficiency or because it is green and available in the winter.

Back when I was still active in science I spent a few years facilitating an enthusiastic young scientist towards his eventual PhD in Lithium Sudies. One of the sub-projects which got published was an investigation of whether different species of plant preferentially extract lithium from the soil. It turns out that they do:

The local garden centre was selling seeds for oilseed rape Brassica napus; cabbage Brassica oleracea; sunflower Helianthus annuus; tomato Solanum lycopersicum and bittercress Cardamine hirsuta. The Effective planted them out, dobbed the soil with lithium and measured the concentration of that element in the leaves and stems. Figure 2, shown above, suggests that some species, like bittercress, suck it up goodo while others, like tomato, won't have anything to do with the stuff. Crap-detector: you shd be suspect of any paper where none of the authors and none of the editors noticed a typo H. annuus and also that the publishers MDPI are flagged as predatory: they will publish any-old-shite so long as someone pays the page-charges. So a pinch of lithium salt here although the observation can be easily replicated. 

And it is known that some species, like the daisy-adjacent Berkheya coddii, can hoover nickel and cobalt out of the soil. This can be an elegant way of remediating old industrial sites or mine tailings.

Friday, 31 January 2025

Credit for everyone in the Union

I R retire. There is little enough to amuse me in the Winter evenings, now that I've given up YouTube; gone half throttle on The Blob; and can only spend so long eating dinner and washing dishes. Then I remembered that January is Credit Union AGM season and checked on the web for the date. It was only there that I discovered the option to not get mailed a 36-page booklet with the accounts & agenda for the last financial year. I filled in the no mail application on line and got a phone call the next day telling me a) I was 5 weeks beyond the deadline b) my AGM bumpf had been sent the day before c) I was no mail registered now & forever d) the AGM was scheduled for 8pm Weds 29 Jan 2025. If they want to get more members saving the cost of a stamp, they could be more proactive on the comms.

I thus more or less obliged myself to leave home in the dark, with 1°C on the car-dash, and drive 20km to bear witness. I dumped our glass-trash in the bottle-bank [✓] on the same trip. There were 12 'officers' on the top table, three employees getting some overtime [I hope! they get paid buttons], and . . . 19 members incl me. The average age of the latter was about 70. It took 90 minutes to cover the 20 item agenda.

Gotta say that much of the information was given redundantly in different reports by auditor, chair, different sub-committees and it's all in the AGM booklet anyway. And without a powerpoint prez, reading a lorra numbers off a sheet is kinda useless, There were three different elections, which were tallied by 'independent' CU-volunteer tellers and all officers up for re-election were re-elected. We weren't told how many people voted "not this person for the love of Mike" which is the only really interesting info. In the past I got snitty about starting the meeting with an invocation aka Make me an instrument of your peace supposedly by St. Francis of Assisi. And also about failures to embrace modern tech [heck, even PPTx is an Ask!] These are related: if you're going to attract a younger, more techie, class of volunteers, let alone muslims and wiccans, ya gotta ditch the "Invocation". Vote for next year: Prayers Out Powerpoint In.

The Blackstairs Film Society BFS [MultiPrev] was killed by Coronarama but also a little by its niche interest. Years ago, an acquaintance from the next county came once to a BFS event [was it Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley?] and never again. A while later, I caught up and asked why we didn't see him at BFS more often. hhmmm, he mused, drive 20km in the dark in February as temperatures plummet, to sit in a drafty hall bundled up in a plaid rug watching a sub-titled film about Mongolian tractor drivers? OR stay home and pop another log on the fire?? 

The CU-AGM feels a little like that, because logistics and regulations require a Winter AGM, but the CU has their own incentives. As part of our community's social glue and a public good, in the run up to the AGM, they shake down all the local businesses for contributions to the door prize. Everyone who braves the weather and rocks up is given a single raffle ticket. While the election ballots are processed, the ticket stubs are drawn and winners get to choose from a number of prizes. In the before times, the top prize was a rural appropriate ½ tonne of peat briquettes. Most of the prizes seemed to be sundry vouchers in envelopes. My ticket was 399, and my hopes dashed a little when the first tik drawn was 398 and I was, like, wrong wrong almost right. But I was tangling myself in the gambler's fallacy because the numbers came, in >!data!< order: 398 394 382 392 387 384 388 385 389 399 393 383 390. 382 to 399 more or less matches my [N = 19] members head-count. The top table having, appropriately, recused themselves from the lottery. 13 prizes among 19 people is just about [cw: The Late Late Show is a hateful grabfest] one for everyone in the audience. My 399 was quite a ways down the list but I had the choice of a) two bottles of indifferent plonk b) a €30 voucher for the butcher c) a bottle of Jameson's d) a tin of biscuits the size of a Yaris spare wheel.

See [L with kettles for scale - hot whiskey for the win!] for my choice - the Yaris already has a spare wheel. Afterwards, at 21:30 hrs! tea, sangers and iced-dainties appeared at the back of the hall. That's waaaay too late for tea for me but I couldn't in all conscience just leg it out the door with my loot: I hung around in desultory chat with the other olds. My membership number, from 25 years ago,  is 3894. I met Mary [#324] and her husband [#84]. His dad, long deceased, was one of the CU founders in 1976. 

In Jan 2024 there were 3940 members. In 2024, the CU acquired 92 new members but the total membership increased to only 3960. That suggests that 72 members of the Credit Union died last year. The national death rate in Ireland is 7/1000 but it is 18/1000 in the CU membership - nearly 3x higher but not as high [39/1000] as the death rate for Irish pensioners. Pensioners happily [in the fullness of their years etc.] contribute 84% of all deaths despite making up only 15% of the population. So CU membership skews higher than median age; but CU membership who turn up for the AGM skews higher still.

Ho hum, nothing a few hot whiskey's won't cure.