Woodstack

Did I mention we had the Tree Service in? I did. The last time we paid a professional arborist was in 2022 - and I still have one neat under-cover stack of 120-150cm logs from that venture. Up until then, we more-or-less relied on fallen branches to chop and send up the chimney. The negative thing about using random branches for firewood is that it is random - full of forks and twists and knots that make processing difficult. It's not really about the cost of chainsaw gas rather than buying coal from the creamery. It's not about costing my time either: firewood heats you twice - once in the chopping; once in the stove. And I don't need a gym subscription to develop my upper body with my splitting maul. But splitting awkward logs is a hazard - let me show you my shin scars. Indeed I tog up with the same PPE (boots, chaps, visor) for splitting wood as for firing up the chainsaw.

I had The B'ys from Glavey consolidate most of the ash-wood in a hape at the bottom of the haggard on the 7th July. They dumped a substantial pile of wood-chip next door. I've been processing the wood since that time. At not more than an hour or a tankful of chainsaw gas a day. Not every day: if it's wet I have indoor work - bloggin', baking, plongisme. Or tunnel work: watering and picking the beans and liberating butterflies. By the time I filled and capped off the stack shown above, I had ⅝ths [5ft x 4ft x 8ft] of a cord of ash wood against Winter 2027. That's just over 2 stere = 2 cu.m. for not-USA people.

The rest of the heap [I guess as much again] is now saw-cut to length and just needs to be split and stacked. And that's before I start in on the Scots pine which is heaped elsewhere . . . 2 days later:

There's no point in breaking your heart, your wrist or your axe reducing logs / lumps of Ash with too many branches. The fibres run every which way and don't yield to tonking with a splitting maul.  It's good to rise to a challenge - and you can sometimes make progress by turning or up-ending a log, But often not and dead ash will become habitat for something soon enough.
 

Connexions

A hosepipe ban has been implemented this last weekend until 16 Sep 25 in Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Cork. Proper order! The idea of using chlorinated drinking water to wash your car is repugnant to the planet - it's not great for the lawn microbes either. I've said it before and I'll say it again: get yourself a water-butt and attach it to the guttering.

 Not having mains water is fine / great. The water is 'free' and untreated with chlorine and one pal drives from miles away to fill up a 50 lt beer-barrel for drinking and brewing. But a power cut leaves us without water - for drinking, cooking, flushing, washing. Since we had the pump replaced last year, we've had sediment issues and I've had to clean more grit out of the filter in the last 15 months than in the previous 15 years. Indeed the first thing I had to do when I returned from France in June was to clean the water filter 3 times in 2 days: it was completely blocked.

Generally we do not water the veggies from the bore-hole.  The plants outside have to tek their chances. The beans, tomatoes and greens inside the polytunnel get most of what falls on p-tunnel plastic and gets diverted to various reservoirs. Over the years we have upgraded and replaced our stock of water containers and currently have 3x 120lt blue herring barrels; 1x 220lt ditto; 2x 1,000lt IBC; many 20lt mineral-lick buckets. At full capacity we have about 3 tonnes of water for irrigation. That would be plenty if Irish weather delivered the 1,000mm of average annual rainfall as 3mm every third day, preferably at night. But it is never thus.

Like in 2023 and 2018, we have had weeks without rain since the beginning of May and towards the end of June, I had exhausted all the reservoirs and was reduced to using a hosepipe from the bore-hole to keep my beans and tomatoes from shrivelling up and blowing away in the wind. I anxiously checked the weather forecast and tracked the MetÉireann rainfall radar as storms swept across part of the country. Not our part, however! Each belt of rain seemed to sweep her skirts away from our hill as if it deserved not a drop. Then on Sat 19th July it started a desultory drizz and A Lot more rain was promised overnight.

I have long had a system where the interior 1 tonne IBC replenishes one of two adjacent 120 lt herring barrels. It's set so that if we get A Lot of rain, the system overflows into the garden part of tunnel delivering some water adjacent to crops. It seemed a waste if we reached overflow levels in one of the pair of herring barrels and the other one still had storage capacity.  How would it be, I wondered, if I could connect the two barrels with a siphon so their water level rose in sync? And it was so [above R]; and the Lord saw that it was Efficient. The huge horseshoe of black pipe is about twice as long as it needs to be, but with siphons that does not impinge on function. It did rain in the night, I had watered the garden beds copiously the evening before but we still finished up with full capacity when the rain stopped about breakfast time on Sunday 20th July. Win!  It never rains but it pours and rained steady All the next night - it's hard to know whither to divert the water with everything in the p.tunnel so well soaked.

Joint ill

I have been quite the fanboi for Cammy Wilson's YT channel The Sheep Game [though not so much as to get the  merch! [R]. He loves his sheep; their care and maintenance. But it is super hard to make a living in farming without you already own the ground on which the stock graze. Wilson's cunning plan was to keep a video camera always on as he went about his day and then spend hours after-hours editing the footage and posting it to YouTube.

A while back he teamed up with his neighbour Iona Murrray to make studio-based footage for a podcast called Fed By Farmers. They are periodically amazed that 15,000 people will subscribe to get josh and banter with regular updates about farming in Ayrshire. In many of the episodes Cammy and Iona interview someone else in the trade [auctioneers, bankers!, contractors, dairyists, entrepreneurs, farmers, shearers, vets] , to discuss some aspect of modern farming. Michael Goldie for example, was recently on about his losses from Schmallenberg a midge-borne teratogenic virus whc Bloboprev. It is similar in effect to Zika whc Bloboprev along with other flaviviruses.

Not all farmers can master a GoPro as well as Cammy so they have tried other ways of turning an honest penny and keep the farm.  Rebecca and Duncan McEwan, for example started a side-gig growing pumpkins for Hallowe'en which has grown to a Huge seasonal 🎃nt🎃rpris🎃 - parking! - coffee! - swimming pool!?! These people are clearly not gumboots-in-the-dung traditionalists. Possibly because they've given swathes of their acreage over to 🎃 they do all their lambing in sheds. There are advantages: you don't have to course over the ground from dawn to dusk looking for ewes needing obstetric attention. But cramming several field's worth of sheep into a barn is a recipe for the spread of infectious disease. Such as:

Joint-ill is caused by Streptococcus dysgalactiae [etymology = the string o' berries that messes the milk . . . from its propensity to cause mastitis in cows]. In sheep, particularly fresh lambs, the bacteria can cause infectious arthritis. Back in the day, Streptococcal infections were the original case-study for the roll out of penicillin which was really effective against those pathogens. But for the last 60 years, farmers have squandered this treasure by using penicillin as a growth promoter in chickens and not completing the prescribed time-course for treatment. So antibiotic resistance is now a thing. The related Streptococcus pyogenes can cause rheumatic fever and damage heart vales in humans.

Watery mouth. Never 'eard of it. This is another bacterial infection, often caused by rampant growth of Escherichia coli in the neonatal gut. Skittery shits can easily spread into the next pen.

The McEwans believe that bleaching the shed to within an inch of its life before lambing season is not necessarily the most effective way to prevent infection in the flock. They have bought into the ideas of Aled Rhys Davies that an ecosystem of good bacteria will be able to put manners on the pathogens. Davies recommends misting the shed, not with chlorine, but with probiotics. And a proprietary good-bacteria impregnated shed-bedding to improve a) bacterial load b) the smell. They can also mist the undercarriage of dairy cows with good bacteria after milking. Davies has the multi-product company - Pruex Ltd - for the purpose. He was bedding down on a Wexford Dairy farrrm in January. 

You don't need this if you're lambing outside where Strep and Coliform are so busy fighting their corner to survive that they haven't time to infect lambs which have just been born in the lee of a hedge. Other players - Mr Fox, Our Lady of Blizzard and Lord Carrion of Crow - wait in the wings instead.

Knock knock Fraxinus

What a difference a storm makes? When we embraced country-living ~30 years ago, we were largely at variance with our new neighbours as to priorities. We loved that the field-boundaries were full of scrubby trees and bushes. Dau.I and Dau.II named one arboreal section of the walls "Fairy Village" and used to hang from the branches waiting for fairy sandwiches and fairy tea. In 30 years, girls can grow from toddlers to taxable assets for the economy & modest trees can grow to sky-scrapers. We've never lacked for firewood because, in stormy weather ash sheds top-hamper but rarely up-roots.

A bit of consultation since Storm Éowyn focused attention on four mighty ash Fraxinus excelsior on the edge of the lane leading up to our yard . . . and beyond to the moors and mountains behind our house. That lane is a bit of a walker's motorway: it would mortifyin' if a visitor got tonked on the head by a falling branch. Also at risk [litigation alert!] was the abutting neighbour's shiny new sheds which are almost under the canopy of the nearest big tree. We were informed that it would take two days to bring down a tree-and-a-half and that would require the rent and delivery of some height-for-hire like a spider-lift. It would take longer still and be more expensive to do it old-style with ropes carabiners spurs and flip-line.  
Get back to us with a price and a scheduled time we said
I will certainly do that he said
the silence surged softly backward however

But into the breach rode Eoin Glavey of the Déise. Called us up with an hour's notice on his way home from another job. 
Could he come by for a scoping visit?
He could, and he did. I unburdened myself of all our arborial anxieties. He nodded and took notes. At the kitchen table, we put the various jobs in priority order: 

1. the tree-and-a-half by the lane
2. a Scots Pinus sylvestris which was shading the new solar PV array
3. a forest of mostly ash which was looming over the power and telephon lines
4. the biggest, ash-dieback deadest, twa corbiest, ash tree on the property: leaning out over the field of our other farming neighbour
5. a long horizontal Scots Pinus sylvestris branch which the kids used to swing from but was now a) an accident waiting to happen b) shading a shrubbery of blueberry and lavender.

 While I was hiking in France, Glavey Tree Experts sent us a quote: they'd do the whole list in one day and, if €acceptable, get back to us with a date. That date was Friday 7th July 2025 - be ready for an 08:30 start. You know you're getting old when policemen tree-surgeons look young. I made a slab of flapjacks. Six young chaps sprang out of three vehicles [one hauling a brash-chipper] more-or less at 08:30. There were more saws than sawyers:

But that's appropriate. Tree-climbers&limbers need something [one] handy. Fallers will require a much larger saw both energy-wise and bar-length. In between, everyone needs to be able to handle a saw even if the 'pprentice will spend most of the time hauling brash to the chipper and sweeping up the leaves and twigs afterwards. And then there are saws on poles with which much of the thinning round utility wires was carried out. Poles the length of which only your anti-grav fever dreams can imagine. Some of Team Glavey were down the lane climbing and limbing:

One of the four adjacent ash trees was in much better shape than the others and we had agreed that it could be reprieved. That allowed the tree-monkey to set a safety rope high up on a solid branch and from that purchase swing about reducing the top-hamper from the other three condemned trees in turn. Meanwhile back in the haggard, the other climber was determinedly getting on top of the solar-panel occluding Scots pine:

I had promised my neighbour-above that the tree on our shared ditch would be down by tea-time and there would be nothing left but saw-dust. In the event not even sawdust because the 'pprentice used the leaf-blower to such good effect.  

One of the lads was a civil engineering student a week into his summer vacation job: a lot of book-learning there but here meeting tension and compression for the first time in real life. It was heartening how everyone looked out for each other and took a little longer on the job to let the newbies push their envelope. I've spent every subsequent day reducing wood-piles to logs; splitting the logs to billets; and stacking the sticks against Winter 2027. Taking it handy!: I can haul brash about with the best of them; and saw logs and split 'em but I can't / won't do it on the clock and I won't / can't do it for 4 hours on the trot . . . with 4 hours after lunch.

Knocked

When we moved down country in 1996, we secured the services of a pair of well-drilling brothers who lived not 2 km from us. They came and scoped the contract and said that [no way not in a million years] they couldn't get their rig into the yard through the original pair of wrought-iron gates. They were wide enough but the turn was too tight. That put Project Borehole back a couple of weeks until John-the-Digger, the well-drillers' brother-in-law, found us one JCB-day in his busy schedule. John opened up a swooping new entrance at the bottom of the yard across which we hung a 14ft = 4.25m gate. So far so good 20thC. Our borehole bottomed out at 113ft = 35m and has been doing well, with some maintenance, since. 

Over the following ~30 years, we've had to trick about with our new-no-more farm entrance to accommodate the ever bigger Tonka toys of various contractors: No, please don't send that gravel in a truck with a 40ft = 12m wheel-base. We have a vigorous stand of cherry laurel Prunus laurocerasus just south of the gate which grows Up and then droops down under the weight of foliage - very annoying because there's nothing big enough to prop a ladder up against to trim t'buggers. The traditional hay meadow is ready to cut any time after the end of June, which would require access for mowers, tedders, balers and tractor-trailers stacked two high with bales. On 3rd July, I bit the bullet and knocked [felled out] the gate-overhanging laurels at their base [as above R]. This gave the boys and their toys [same crew as last year + pics!] a clean sweep when they came along 10 days later to 'knock' [technical term] the hay and take it off site.

Unfortunately, one of the contractors [nobody owned up, let alone apologized, let alone undertook to make good] knocked the granite gate pillar at the entrance to the hay-meadow. When I went out to check that all the bales had been removed, I found the pillar all-ahoo and leaning out into the gateway. This is ungood because, at the best of times, the gap is 12ft less 2in and these modern machines are 12ft less 6in wide. The smart way to true up the gate pillar is to reculer pour mieux sauter hoik it out entirely; dig a new hole and reset. If I had a tractor with a front-loader at my disposal, that's what I would do.

But I don't, so I gathered up m'tools - a big iron bar, a small ditto, secateurs, trowel . . . table-spoon - and cleaned out the dirt behind the pillar down to about 25cm. Secateurs to cut back the roots. Before starting The Dig, I had to c a r e f u l l y remove the loose stones piled up against the ditch and fallen from the wall - all of which the granite pillar had been supporting. Remove one stone and two more will become loose etc. When I was bored scooping out the dirt, I leaned my arse against the pillar and it shifted to almost upright. I got on my knees again and gave it another round of scraping and scooping; and another dunt with my soft-hammer. Eventually - Good enough! I found and hammered home some wedge-shaped shale rocks to stop the pillar canting forward again and job done.

Last man fishing

Michael Crummey, who he, just recently won a huge literary prize. I thought I'd get ahead of the pack to reserve something from his back-catalogue in the Library. That would be Sweetland, about the closing of the Newfoundland outports. So many communities dotted around the coast, each having existed for two or three hundred years catching and salting fish, planting spuds and cabbage, trying to win some hay to overwinter a cow. In the 20thC amenities and aspirations came in - district nurse, electricity, tinned peaches, all served and serviced by regular ferries to the few proper towns. The Canadian government wanted to allow all citizens opportunity and welfare. Then bean-counters became ascendant and supporting remote hamlets was exposed as crazy economics. Thousands of CAN$ running empty ferries from point to point where half the homes were boarded up. All the outport Effectives working Fintech in Toronto or the oil-sands of Alberta, raising family in the warm and dry, and not even coming home for Christmas. I wrote about the economic conundrum last year.

Moses Sweetland lives in the village of Chance Cove on the island of Sweetland off the South coast of Newfoundland. An ancestor might have been first footer on the island but Moses is the last of that name. It's a village rather than a hamlet because there's sort of shop and a sort of barber and a sort of museum and a church with a sort of minister. The government stopped the cod fishery 30 years before the main thread of the story - and there are very few ways of making a living on shore. Accordingly folks leave as soon as they're old enough to vote (sometimes earlier) for work and partners in St.John's, or go West to continental Canada. But there is also plenty of native nookie and the results of these liaisons are accepted even if marital non-paternity is known or suspected.

It's not much of a spoiler to acknowledge that Moses is one of the last, and then The Last, hold-out against taking the government bounty and leaving Sweetland for good. The departers can't / don't take everything to leave vacant possession because nobody is going to occupy the ancestral home ever again. There are, therefore agreeable echoes of The Day of the Triffids as the remainers snag anything remotely useful or edible from the people-free dwellings. It is acknowledged, given the brutal Winter weather, that unmaintained empty buildings are going to be reduced to sticks within a few years.

Moses alone remains: embracing a quixotic exercise in survival. . . like a man sentenced to hauling beach stones up the face of the Mackerel Cliffs. You'll read your own messages but this is fiction that can offer clues about what it is to be human and how to live with the cards neighbours you're dealt. I'm returning the book to the library; it's all yours.

Thistle-puller

That would be me.  In early July we had An Inspector Calls to assess the bio-diversity of our traditional hay meadow. He was looking for 'indicative species' for such habitats - pretty much any dicot which is not an alien invasive: hay rattle Rhinanthus minor, lady's bedstraw Galium verum, tormentil Potentila erecta, stichwort Stellaria spp., self-heal Prunella vulgaris, yarrow Achillea millefolium, spotted orchid Dactylorhiza maculata. If a threshold number of such species can be found, then the score is 10/10 and everyone is happy except the purveyors of perennial ryegrass Lolium perenne seed.

Actually its a bit more complicated than that. Take thistles: Cirsium dissectum meadow thistle is Good but creeping thistle Cirsium arvensis is a scourge and should be destroyed before it takes over the world. Inspector showed us that creeping thistle (like a lot of weed species) has a shallow root and can be easily pulled. The base of the stalk is spike-free, so you don't need gloves. If a given thistle does not pull up easily revealing a taproot, then it's probably not Cirsium arvensis and y'shoulda left it alone in the first place. It also looks like creeping thistle is on the gallop through the brash left by me processing storm-fallen trees:

You can't scythe them out but pulling works nicely - if you're respectful of the nettles.  In any case, I was able to pull a whole barrow full o' thistles [R] in about 30 minutes. Satisfying and maybe not wholly futile. We are mercifully free of ragwort = buachalán Senecio vulgaris another most undesirable weed species in pasture. Go pull some buachs was a dreaded instruction for idle farm-children back in the day . . . I wish Gdau.I and Gdau.II lived a bit closer to the farrrm . . . we have kid-gloves.

In the Spring, we got Sean and his MF135 mini-tractor to mow two passes round the headlands of the hay-meadow fields chopping back the encroaching brambles and bushes and bringing the 'meadow' that much nearer the field walls. On a 3 hectare field that is increasing 'productivity' by about 2%. When I went thistle pulling the day after inspection, it seemed like mowing might have cleared some thatch to give some thistle seeds their start in life. It's all very well pulling thistles from the base in grassland, but less so in the weedy edges where nettles share the condominium: a brush with Urtica dioecia in the face can be, shall we say, bracing.

Inspector admitted that pulling thistles is great for the abs but maybe a bit much for an ould chap. Imagine if I burst a blood vessel down the fields while straining at Cirsium and wasn't found for three days? The ravens would have started work. He offered another solution in ThistlEx. A highly toxic pyridine dicot-selective weed-killer. It's sold as a concentrated solution of Triclopyr (3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinyloxyacetic acid) and Clopyralid (3,6-dichloro-2-pyridinecarboxylic acid). Dilute as per instructions, fill a 1 litre spray bottle, and give a blast to each plant. These pyridines act as plant hormone analogs: they induce a huge wonky growth spurt and then the plant withers and dies. Harmless to grass and biodegrades in the sun after a few days - what could possibly go wrong? [hint: not a lot of sun in Ireland; plenty rain; Triclopyr is poisonous to fish, Clopyralid not so much; the ester bond is key]