Sheep as fluffy

 The flight to the city and consolidation of rural holdings into latifundia operated by robot-tractors means few farmers are getting their hands dirty. But publishers recognise a market for romanticized tales of embracing rural bliss. I'm their mark! Return to Ithaka or Driving over Lemons or The Shepherd's Life. Maybe 1'm not the core demographic of folk who read these Good Life books . . . and dream; because we are living that life and have been for the last 25 years. I could write a book too, but it wouldn't find a ready market because our farm life has no publishing hook: no hilarious pratfalls, no earnest tragedy, no stoical privation. I even have a title Ten Minutes from Ballindaggin. It's all in The Blob anyway, just needs a filter to fillet out the farmlife fables.

The hook for Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep & Enough Wool to Save the Planet might be lesbian yarn because the author Catherine Friend does get into carding, spinning, weaving and knitting towards the end of her book. Friend was an author before her partner Melissa brought her into farming: first as the indoor hand but more and more into the bodily fluids cycle of tup, take, birth, shots, suck, wean, feed, shear and death. It's pleasant and empowering to see a city-bred keyboard-jockey get increasingly engaged with farming and the outdoors. It's good see see anyone changing their strongly held opinions about something and embrace The Other. You can't easily call knitting-and-stitching folk "fiber-freaks" if you're knitting your own comfy shockin'pink winter socks. Bonus: knitting from your own wool!

Doing something anything with our wool is a touchy issue. This year we took 15c a kilo for raw fleece and the Agri Strore wouldn't even pay us until they had been paid in turn by the wholesaler. What is the point of subsidizing sheep farmers if the product is mere drugget on the market? There are 3 million sheep in the Republic each producing 3kg of wool that's 9,000 tonnes of wool but there is not a single plant for processing this mass of fibre in the country. Here's the math:

• Sheep's wool house insulation density = 18kg/cu.m.
• 1 roll 100mm x 400mm x 6500mm = ¼ cu.m. costs £30
• or £120 / cu.m.
• we get €2.70 for 18kg of raw fleece
• if They can make a profit on this transaction in Germany and Britain, why not here?

Did someone mention Cumbria? Sheepish mentions in passing that Dalefoot Composting is making a peat-free potting compost from fleece and bracken. I've spent 6 working days on the hill thrashing bracken to free the grass and forbs for sheep. The dead plants were left lying in their own spores. Dalefoot says there is value in bracken and fleece. I'll scythe bracken if you bale it!

Live long live simple

Ικαρία Ikaria is an Aegean island quite close to, but half the size, Σάμος Samos which is real close to the Turkish mainland. Neither has seen the influx of displaced persons that, say, Κως Kos has had to deal with . . . because the rest of Europe balks.

In olden days Ikaria, along with Lesbos and Izmir/Smyrna on the mainland was famous for its Pramnian wine: rich, dark, red and intoxicating. They still produce enough good plonk to keep everyone happy. The island has attracted notice for the number of really old people who are out and about and needless to say the wine has been one of the factors responsible. But others say it's because Ikarians are really crap at time-keeping.

☭ The other red connexion is that thousands of communists were exiled there during and after the Greek Civil War after WWII. But for the fact that so many British [and French] politicians had an expensive education, rudimentary Classical Greek and a romantic attachment to Themistocles and Xenophon, Greece could have slipped behind the Iron Curtain along with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. A number of these Marxist refugees stayed forever and are still influencing local politics towards the left. 

Before that in July 1912, the Ikariots evicted the Ottoman garrison and declared Ελευθέρα Πολιτεία Ικαρίας, Elefthéra Politía Ikarías The Free State of Ikaria [Flag R]. Greece was kinda busy prepping up for the First Balkan War and then fighting it; and didn't get round to annexing Ikaria to The Kingdom until December of that year.

I'm down with the Ikariots because I'm reading a hippy dippy 1970s home-education with spliffs memoir called Escape to Ikaria by Nick Perry. Perry has lived a rather louche life on the edge, seemingly unable to settle down to ordinary suburban living holding down a job in TV. First he bought a Welsh farm with sheep, having only ever seen such beasts through a car window. It took him and his brother and his wife Ros seven years to go bust. During that time Ros had twins and then another chap and they learned how to milk sheep and goats and heave bales of hay about in the Winter. In the late 70s they upped-stakes and took the Magic Bus to Athens, then the first outgoing ferry from Piraeus . . . and landed at Ikaria in the middle of Winter. It thus has a similar beginning to   The Salt Road  by Ray Winn [prev] and a similar ending to  Driving Over Lemons by Chris "Genesis" Stewart [prev]. This is clearly a bit of a genre. I'm sure that having a year on a Greek Island before they turned 10 did the Perry kids no harm. Nick and Ros were able to keep their goat-milking hands in doing for an aged and arthritic Orthodox nun. Nick didn't drown while crewing for a fisherman and didn't injure himself too much working in the building trade for minimum wages without the whiff of health and safety. If you're renting a house for buttons and living in the mo on sunshine, fresh fish, yoghurt and bread, then 80 drachma an hour is enough. It's the car, the mortgage, the shoes, the stuff, which drives wage-slavery.

Engineering 260317

Here's a few clips for engineers

• Building roads at €5/m: plough, scrape, sift, spread, compact.
• Constructing dew ponds on chalk: cut, crush, compact, wet, compact
• Restoring La Acequia de Barjas en Cáñar in Andalucia: hand tools only, concrete a disaster
• Read Driving Over Lemons?
• Levadas curl round the contours of Madeira bringing water from there to here.
• panoramic version
• Building waterproof shipping / transport canals required the use of puddle clay
• Sometimes you have to just shovel snow - may as well make a song and dance about it.
• Did you think the cranes and back-hoes at Oroville looked like lego toys?
• Thermals.  The specific heat of water is about 10x that of steel: it takes 10x as much energy to increase the temperature of a gram of water by 1^oC. With that in mind here's an interesting experiment setting 20kg of iron vs a lakeful of ice and seeing which will win in a race to the bottom. Your hypothesis here:_______. The sequel shows a chain-saw make short work of the ice and a well 'ard Finn jump in.

Bobbie goes to Hollywood

Optional soundtrack - FG2H The Power of Love

We are signed up to Blackstairs Farming Futures BFF, and I have undertaken to log all the evidence of human impact on the environment that will be here in 200 years time. "the environment" here being the 200 hectares which we own in common with 18-20 other neighbours. It's fun because I get to name the artifacts which I find. The more obvious artifacts like the Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis plantation, or the sheep-proof fence that separates it from the commonage; or the sheep themselves? None of them are likely, let alone guaranteed to be there, then. But the stones, split by judicious and musical hammers and wedges? The rocks remain [Horslips] [Maxwell]. I show [L] the most obvious example [it's the parallel lines of wedge-holes, silly] of a project to craft a lintel or doorstep from a granite boulder. For whatever reason the mason stopped his own gallop one minute and cried "Feck it! this is going nowhere" and started work on a more promising rock. It is a snap-shot in heritage time quite as vibrant and informative about human activity as Stonehenge or the pyramids if a trifle more humble.

BFF is a pilot study to help imagine and then create a more productive future for Ireland's upland habitats: there's got to be more to it than burning the heather, running some sheep and planting out more spruce deserts. Can we, with a deft twist of a limiting factor in the environment [Iron; Foxes Vulpes vulpes; Pasteurella haemolytica; blocked drains; impenetrable forests of gorse Ulex europaeus] change the whole landscape like The Man Who Planted Trees? Yesterday, eleven of our commoners rented a minibus and directed it to a Teagasc showcase in Hollywood, County Wicklow. We The Eleven sat in the Hollywood Community Hall for an hour being talked at by ecologists and agrifunctionaries. |Then we were bussed up towards the hills to a commonage called Granamore [view below] to see how ten farmers with mountain rights can get round a table and then round a trough of sheep dip and talk out a sustainable future for their lives and livelihoods . . . and give access to hikers and orienteerers and kite-flyers. They told us a little about the practicalities of road-mending; river-fording; draining; controlled burning and a bit of tree-planting.

One qualified statement got me thinking. They showed a poster of sustainable stocking rates (in ewe-equivalents / hectare) for
upland grassland 1.5-5 ee/ha;
dry heath 1-1.5 ee/ha;
wet heath 0.75-1.0 ee/ha;
blanket-bog <0.75 ee/ha.
Those rates are different for the different habitats but all those habitats are represented on Granamore Common . . . and here are no fences. How to keep most of the sheep out of the blanket bog and more on the few patches of good, palatable, nutritious grassland? One cunning plan that has had some success is to lug a 20kg bucket of mineral lick [essentially candy for cows and sheep] to the areas covered in deergrass Trichophorum cespitosum or matgrass Nardus stricta as a honeypot. While there the sheep will eat some matgrass [though it's a bit bleh to normal sheep], trample some deergrass and give better grass elsewhere a chance to grow after, say, a controlled conflagration. All that is predicated on the fact that farming hill sheep is a really unproductive way to earn cash for children's shoes and cornflakes. Farmers will be better off spending time taking sheep to the mart; working in the mart; shearing, ploughing, mowing and baling for their neighbours; working for Teagasc or as a teacher.

Chris "Drummer" Stewart [Driving Over Lemons is wonderful] retired young to Andalucia to potter and write. He earned an honest crust as a sheep-shearer and got to know his neighbours. Several of them were shepherds who were active on the hills more or less all the time. I always thought that the shepherd and his mastiff's primary task with sheep was to prevent predation; and to stop them wandering into the next village for vino tinto y tapas. Wrong! especially now that we have decimated all the top predators. The shepherd can, by her presence, gently shift the flock wholesale from areas-to-be-protected to areas-where-they-are-a-grazing-asset. Even a chap can serve this purpose: load up his smartphone with credit and let him off up there being useful.