Bouncing the polytunnel

Did I mention that we had a dump of snow last weekend? I did, in passing. It's true that fallen snow is, like ice-cream, mostly air - let's say it has a density of 10% of liquid/solid water. But that can still be a lorra weight it spread out across a large structure. An under-engineered flat roofed sports complex in Tralee collapsed at 06:00hrs during the recent orange snow and ice warning for the South of Ireland [Galway to Dublin downwards, not the 26 counties]. I'm sure the structural specs took data on 100 year snow events, adding 50% for safety, to determine the size of the trusses. It's a roof: you don't want to over-engineer it because you then have to up-spec the walls to carry the additional weight. There will be an enquiry, everyone will lawyer up, nobody will lose their jobs or be sanctioned. Not least because the structure was opened in 1977, so most of those responsible are dead in the 80s or older.

We have a relatable situation in the polytunnel which has a 9m x 17m = 150 sq.m. footprint, with say half of it sort of horizontal. Well. flat enough to hold snow as it falls. On the night 04/05 Jan, we got 9cm of snow. Which is about 10mm of rain equivalent, except that it stayed on the polytunnel roof rather than running away. That's less than a tonne [75sq.m x 10mm = 750kg] of extra weight up there but it l👁👁ked a lot more under the bulging plastic. That 's polythene, which ripped asunder at the height of  the Darwinday Storm of 2014 but is generally good for plastic deformation. We have a convenient length of 50mm ⌀ plastic pipe that can reach all areas on the inside of the plastic, so I put a robust rubber glove on the end of the pipe and, starting at the bottom, bounced some of the snow off the roof. Gotta get the rhythm, bro. Over the next tuthree days, I bounced a little more; until almost all the extra weight was on the ground. No Tralee here . . . this time

You can see the effect in the picture for 2 of the eight bays of the tunnel: a gurt hape of heavy snow on the ground and a clean-ish track on the plastic where the snow has scoured off the algae. You can also see one end of the 2014 Darwinday rip covered with fresh white Fablon® since the 2022 refurb by Rene and Kamil.

We hazarded leaving the sheep [N = 15] in the 0.4 ha field adjacent to the tunnel and they've been getting a breakfast of sheep muesli and some rather tasty-smelling hay which we've had in reserve for the last few years [hey, thanks Syl!]. The sheep seem to be doing okay on such short commons.

Clear as day

Dau.I, the family [photo] archivist, was home over Easter and showed us a 2005-dated photo of our polytunnel covered in [super clear] plastic. That really helped nail down the date: pre-Blob documentary evidence is rare and patchy. The tunnel is therefore almost old enough to vote! But like dogs, polytunnel years are not the same as human years and, like me, the tunnel is feeling its age despite having only 25% of my calendar years. Accordingly, in March we went on a jaunt to Highbank to scope out the cost of replacing the plastic. Polytunnel tech has moved on since 2005 and wooden frames are now considered supremely out of style. We got a blizzard of information about the New Way with polythene fixin's. Although we still agreed that a total re-cladding was required, enough unresolved logistical questions hung in the air that we put the whole project on hold. Eventually I called my tunnel-mentor Rene to have him explain the difference between Richel double clip rails and single Richel clip cladding rails and why the latter might be 3x the cost of the former. A few things became clear: 

• in 2005 the cost of the plastic sheeting €240 was the most expensive part of the inventory; (4 x 2)s, (2 x 1)s and screws being cheap as chips
• in 2022 the plastic was a small amount €420 compared to all the steel engineering infrastructure
• I've lost my mojo for bodging things up from scraps and off-cuts
  

Being a highly suggestible sort of bloke, it was easy enough for Rene to convince me that a good clean was the way forward and it would be a shame to dump out all that plastic for landfill. And, more importantly, with care and attention, there might be / should be years of life left in the ould tunnel. R and his pal K came up on Wednesday [midweek! when - I R retire - I didn't have to be at work offsite] with a vanload of hosepipe, brushes and power-washers and started to clean years of gunk from the top of the tunnel.  

I haven't been totally remiss from cleaning what I can reach with a 3.6m long-handled brush. It's a lot like the nun's instructions for bathing in a shift "first you wash up as far as possible, then you wash down as far as possible; then you wash possible". As our tunnel is 13m over the hoops, I've never been able to wash possible on my own. One time many years ago, The Boy and I tied ropes to the 4 corners of a very old foam-rubber-stuffed floor cushion, waited for a good wet day and did push-me-pull-you back and forth along the length of the tunnel. It was really difficult to clean the high-points over the hoops because the cushion would slide inexorably down into the inter-hoop troughs. You can see the contrast [above L] when K got his head higher than the tunnel top and applied a proper industrial window-cleaner's brush with skill and vim: L.L. after his attention to detail; L.R. awaiting his ministrations. 

And here is K himself advising me that the plastic will soon be clean enough to see, not only the hill on the far side of the valley, but the pixel sheep that dot its flanks. And it was so. More light brings out the best in the look-and-feel of the tunnel. But it must also be acknowledged that The Beloved and Dau.II (who was visiting) really cleared the decks inside, so that the boys could have a clean sweep at the task. Imagine how red would be our faces if K tripped over a lawn chair or a bag of potting compost while staring fixedly upwards as he pounded his brush against the interior dust-layer.  The prognosis seems to be that we are good for another year . . . and another. Until we have a dramatic event like Darwinday 2014 which tore the plastic from its moorings.  As a manifestation of good faith in old plastic, one reason for washing the stuff, while it is still spread out and taut, is that it will defo get reused / recycled if we decide to go with new.

Having clear as glass plastic is a mixed blessing. Wood pigeons Columba palumbus are hardly the smartest beasts on two wings. Yesterday I disturbed one in the tunnel and it flew up in a flap - WHUMPHing in to the plastic . . . repeatedly until I seized it with both hands and showed it the door. Not unlike our testosteropsychotic window thumping blackbird; maybe it's something in the water hereabouts? One reason that we might have a random pigeon lost in tunnel is that it is The Year of the Pigeon. Our trees, which usually support a couple of pair, are hosting a couple of dozen pair in 2022. Who knows why?

Garden update

If someone said it was Ireland's driest Spring since records began, I wouldn't immediately call Rubbish! Lack of rain hits our food-growing capacity harder than some, because almost all the productivity is inside a 9m x 17m polytunnel. At the end of May, we had a delegation of Hickeys come by from the US for lunch. As best as we can tell, their family owned our farm up until ~1873. Many years ago, the whole family returned home to their Patrimony and I rendered them some trifling service. I was happy to do that because you couldn't meet a taller, sunnier, kinder bunch of people. I was adopted by the recently widowed matriarch and included in her Xmas round-robin Annual Report. Over the subsequent years various septs of the clan came by for tea and scones, most recently on St James's Day 2021. When my foster-mother died over Christmas 2014, I had a Mass said for her in our Parish church and was able to double the audience at early mass on my way to work in The Institute.

Mais revenons nous à 2025! #1 Son and #5 Son and their spouses came for lunch. Na mBan Hickey had a tour of the garden afterwards and were delighted to be presented with the first two fat pea-pods for dessert. As well as peas [free from the Library last fall], we've also planted some saved haricot beans [which are taller than me already, but have few blossoms]. Also tomatoes of several different (named but unknown to me) varieties: so that will be a pot-luck bonanza. Actually half these tomatoes are growing up against the sunny front of the house, in the biggest pots we own: where they will get free watering [rain and kitchen rinse water] and a thermal boost from the in🌞ated wall behind them. No pressure to produce, Toms!

I have described the 1 tonne IBCs which act as rainwater reservoirs in and around the polytunnel. I wrung every drop out of these back-up reserves during the Spring 2025 Drought and had to keep things going with water pumped from 35m below grade through our domestic plumbing system. I'm really reluctant to do this because our bore-hole water is really acidic . . . and also because it's really cold. Whatevs, I rinsed out the external IBC and moved it away from the ash-dieback dead ash Fraxinus excelsior to a new, shadier position as ◎ L. It is also 0.5 m higher than before, which should make irrigation run faster. I was ready when we had a drought-breaking storm which delivered steady rain for about 6 hours. It took that much time to ¾ fill the IBC by pumping from the water-butt which takes all the water from the gutter running along the S edge of the polytunnel. 10 days later, it was brimful from drizzle and showers. 

In contrast to [solar] electricity, you can store water against an [un] rainy day! 

Going Solar

aMonda' I mentioned in passing The Works. Long ago, long enough for me to forget all about it, The Blob reports that I had a medium-deep dive into the economics and logistics of installing Solar panel in 2019. We could have gone for it, but the pay-back time seemed long and other distracting things were going on . . . not to mention Coronarama. I'm glad we didn't go solar solo in 2019 because we are now part of a Community Solar Electric Initiative. - hooked by a series of talks in the Village Hall in November 2023. By throwing our lot (and loot) in with the neighbours we get a) a bitty bulk discount b) a huge amount of expertise and support. What happened to Solar2024?? There are government grants for installing Solar and that incentive has driven a market demand for domestic installations [the tumbling price of solar panels helps too). Lots of entrepreneurs  have been asking "How hard can this be? If I sell systems and installations, I can subcontract all the digging, sawing, drilling, cable-laying, and connecting. and add 30% for myself". Entrepreneurs are, by definition, great for the sales pitch but are not all equivalent on communications, costings, timelines, reliability. The Result [a working system for sensible money] is important, but nobody wants to be chewing their beard or losing sleep over the Process . . . with unreturned phone-calls, missed deadlines inconsistent comms.

Eventually we finished up dealing with Eco Horizon from Mountrath who aren't just a glossy website. Solar panels are 1760mm x 1130mm and the DC to AC 'inverter' has a max capacity of 18 panels - or rather the Watts that will be generated by 18 panels in Ireland in Summer. It would be a false economy to skimp on a few panels because the main cost is the labour of installation. in ~2007 we acquired a polytunnel and decided to construct it in the flattest part of the haggard near the house. The alternative flat areas being too far away to be convenient for an asset used daily.  There was room on the same flat shelf to install the panels and their supporting frame.  But first I had to salvage some blocks.

The site was flat for some definitions of flat but was still pocked with hazards: an experimental frog-pond from 1998, some raised beds from 2008, a quince-tree from 2014; and a ragged-arsed dry stone wall from 1898 needed to be tidied up. I had already cut down the trees directly between the sun and the panels. This is the Before Kubota Minidigger BKM picture:

The grey edge to the L is the polytunnel with the strawberry bed in front. South is to the Right.

A few hours of Tonka-toy scooping and filling and pushing cleared off a rectangle of really level bare earth. Eco Horizon prefers to set the panels at 15° to the horizontal rather than 45°. This suits me because there is less windage in the flatter system. They also maintain that 4 x 250kg concrete blocks is enough ballast / foundation given that we aren't [yet!] in tornado country. Here's one foundation with its frame:

They invest in ½ tonne of 804 roadstone for each block because that will solidify with a splash of rain without sinking. 804 has a uniform consistency which allows one man with a minidigger and one man with a shovel to tip and tweak the blocks in 3-dimensions until they are all in line and the right distance apart. Then it is a matter of clipping on the panels and wiring those babies up [with Goran for scale]:

Minidiggers are heavy and are designed to work in muddy wet building sites, but they churn as they turn and you can see where they have been. But the mess is as nothing compared to what would have happened if we'd suffered a normal wet Irish Spring: so we count our blessings.

Monday, a team of four came from Eco Horizon because the cables [electric + data] from the solar array to the fusebox in the house had to be dug in and buried. The route was a 3-D zig-zag: only a short part of which could be handled by the digger-bucket. And (sorry lads) the fine weather broke and they started to shovel in the not-quite drizzle known here as a grand soft day. We are still due another day's work where the company electrician makes connexions and the last bits of kit, controls and wires are installed.

the company electrician? Eco Horizon employ all their Effectives directly: minidiggerers; scaffolders; pick&shovellers; fitters; labourers; tree sugeons; tilers. As our on-site EcoHoz gaffer confided [paraphrase] "you're at nothing with local sub-contractors: they've never done a solar install before, they don't adhere to our standards, they think they know better, so we have to do it all again after we've paid them off".  With an in-house crew, the company can play everyone to their strengths and compensate for their foibles. And everyone gets a chance to [by necessity has to] wield the Kubota, angle-grinder, screwdriver, Kango hammer, impact drill and pick-axe so there is a good bit of learning by doing.

Peas bearing

Last Summer 2024, Irish libraries were awash with little anonymous packets of FREE! seeds - green beans, peas, spinach. Not quite anon: it was part of the Literacy & Food Education (LEAF) scheme - in association with GIY Grow-it-yourself. GIY is just the other side of the ArdKeen hospital roundabout at Farronshoneen X91 NX30. I wasn't greedy about the free seeds (we have enough languished beyond sell-by seed-packets for which we've paid ready money) - but I took one of each for planting Spring 2025.

That duly happened with beans and peas sown into micro pots [11Mar25 and 27Mar25] on a tray under the sofa as well as some saved black haricots. They were showing a week later and planted out in the polytunnel on 28Mar25 and 29Mar25. We can get frost up until the first week in May here, so it's a bit of a risk and I had a Lidl cold-frame ready to pop over the seedlings if MetEireann was giving frost.

The first peas of the season were presented to our USAian visitors on 27May25 - only two pods but much appreciated / soon scarfed down raw. Dau.II had a day off work on 23 Jun and came down-country to mow the grass and graze for food. She soon stripped half a peck [4-5 litres] of pea pods off the ~dozen surviving pea bushes. 10 days later, I went at them again, to harvest about the same amount. Americans are still wearing tricorn hats and britches so they'll know that there are 4 pecks in a bushel. Other folks will have to imagine a bushel-basket as a the contents medium size rucksack.

In May our community contact neighbour La Torbellina de Tenerife gave us a dozen tiny tomato plants of 10 different varieties - all new to us except on Ailsa Craig. I found room in the tunnel for five of these toms and planted the rest out in our biggest flower tubs filled with compost and getting maximum sun on the patio is front of the house. They are now ~1m tall and have a sparse smatter of small yellow flowers. Some of them have been visited by bees and are now carrying modest amounts of small green fruit.

There's one notably productive corner of the polytunnel where we have haricot beans, plum tomatoes and a rogue type=mystery squash plant fighting for space. Squash need more air-space than you can possibly imagine and are companion-planted at your peril. But this one is free-lance. I've pointed out two yellow squash flowers in the jungle-picture above. I think we are on a good pitch this year - in the past we've been eating late tomatoes and beans in Early October so I have 3 months of watering and grazing ahead of me.
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Taming the deluge

Did I tell you we have a polytunnel with a bigger foot-print than our house? I did! Did I ever boast about seeing the Petitcodiac Tidal Bore progressing relentlessly up stream? I did! And I've been on and on and on about collecting rainwater for the said polytunnel; or rather the plants which grow inside it. After a month of drought in May and June this year, we finally had a dump of rain on Father's Day w/e 18th June. We had drained all our water-collection devices - buckets, herring-barrels and 1 tonne IBCs before May was out and were watering >!shock!< the veggies from the tap. Apart from anything else, the tap-water, from the bore-hole in the yard, which serves the house, is a deal more acidic than rainwater and not everything delights in dilute HCl.

After the hottest June since records began, July has been much more unsettled = rainy and 'cold'. After the parched Summer of 2018 and the Great Drought of May 2023, I am inclined to catch as catch can whenever the opportunity presents . . . I am not afraid to run out in my undies through a night-time deluge to capture the water.  

It is all very well to water the veggies but they only occupy a faction of the inside area. After years without rain, the soil is as dry as the Atacama Desert and it can be dusty enough to darken the laundry. But I've covered that part of the floor with a layer of wood chips which lays the dust. The last two (of 8) bays of the tunnel [i.e. between the supporting hoops] has been allocated as sheep-quarter quartier des brebis and was fenced off neatly and securely by Young Bolivar in 2016. Wood chips wouldn't do there because the chips get hoovered up by fleece on the occasions when we have to shear in the tunnel.

That happens only if Paddy the Clip has to come when the weather has been all rainy. Under those circs, we run the sheep up to their part of the tunnel the night before the shear, so they can dry out their own fleece as 37°C convection heaters. That is advantageous because it also starves t'buggers which makes for easier shearing.

I thought we'd get caught thus by the wet June 2023 weather, so I spent a couple of days slopping water on the dirt at the sheep-end of the tunnel. There is a little grass growing by the door - where the rain blows in; and some tired wisps under a couple of small holes in the plastic above. Then [outdoor] shearing came and went without incident and the priority returned to saving water for veg. But I have since decided that greening the sheep-quarter is desirable for the long-term and did two things towards this outcome: 1) I cut several sheaves of gone-to-seed grass: mostly Agrostis spp.and Poa spp. and lurried them up to thresh in the tunnel. 2) I continued to water the soil. In order to enhance absorption, I also dug over the grassless, compacted regions  and raked them flattish. Well, to my surprise and delight, yesterday it was clear that a thin fuzz of green was springing up in several parts of my incipient indoor 'lawn' [R].

The least effort, max return watering device has been to extend the gutter which fills the [currently brimful] tunnel-interior 1 tonne IBC out into the top part of the tunnel with the help of a cross-trees [see this jimmy-up arrangement above L].  The water then runs down-hill - the whole footprint being on a 4% slope because of an inattention error when we 'levelled' it 15+ years ago. You can see L the trickle of water wringing out (at the rate of 15 lt/hr - I measured) the last bit of a rain-storm on 15th July. Later the same day, rain was fair drumming on the tunnel roof giving a rate of >500 lt/hr! Tricking about in the dirt, making water channels is absolutely my jam. I definitely won't mind mowing an extra 35 sq.m of lawn. If everything works out fine, we'll be able to have tea there.

BAYleaves buy mi bayleaves

Sing it! like Nina and Frederick with their MANgoes. There is no harm in wanting to make an honest living creating things which are fun to make and useful to/for other people. Everyone who's had the benefit says I make an mmmmmm good flapjack and a just-right pot of marmalade. I am getting better and better with my sourdough bread too. But it is only because I stand on the shoulders of my grandmother (flapjacks) and Delia Smith (marmalade). Several people, over the years, have said "These are so good, you should sell them." But I always demur with a blush and flutter of my eyelashes. Making a slab of flappjes and watching them go down a graduate student's gannet-hungry throat give a lot of pleasure. Making many slabs and weighing them, packing them, driving to the farrrmer's market and selling them requires a whole other set of skills, few of them delightful. And the health and safety regulations are now nightmare intrusive.

Now here's a picture from shortly before the big thaw of January 2010 which washed out our lane and left us prisoners in our own home for a week.  It shows a couple of small bay trees in the garden behind the house weighed down with snow. A quick shake by Dau.II and they soon rose upright again.

I was up in the garden taking a few progress pics and I snapped the now wall of baytrees, which we have to walk through to reach the polytunnel:

I include some laundry for scale.  We planted the pair of trees in ?2008? as a garden feature and source of bayleaves which are a culliunary essential on our kitchen.  They are now 6m tall and 4-5m across at the base, so I try to harvest the bayleaves from inside the tunnel between the two trees so that we can walk directly to the polytunnel without getting soaked from the rain-wet leaves. I paused to wonder just how many bay-leaves there might be: because I believe guesstimation is a core skill in science and I need examples for teaching this up-coming year at The Institute. Accordingly I counted 100 leaves and reckoned they filled a sunlight-space  / surface-space of 0.1 sq.m. You can work out the surface area (excluding base) of a cone from first principles or you can go to the cone-heads site: to find the formula. The Lateral surface area of a cone  L = πrs = πr√(r² + h²) where s is the slant height which is the hypoteneuse of the h[eight] and r[adius] triangle hence the Pythagorean square root of the sum of the other two sides.
Putting in r = 2.5 m h = 6 m yields the other parameters:  slant = 6.5 m ;; Vol = 39.3 m³ ;; L.area = 51.1 m² ;; Base.area = 19.6 m² ;; Total.area = 70.7 m².  If there's 100 leaves in 1/10th sq.m there are 1,000 leaves in 1 sq.m. and 50,000 across the surface of each tree. I'll add another 50% because, although it is dark in the interior of the wall/bush there are lots of leaves running back almostvto the trunks. So we don't have a million bay-leaves or only a thousand but somewhere in the region of 150,000. If we use a flaithulach 10 bayleaves a week we have enough to keep going for 300 years.

That's clearly a) an under-estimate because it is the nature of trees to make more leaves, possibly in a sustainable manner b) selfish, stingey and inefficient for the culinary happiness of the sunny south-east of Ireland. So you're all welcome to come for a handful. In Tesco, bayleaves sell at 49c for 3 grams or [Schwartz] €1.19 for 6g. 6g is about 20 leaves. So, cutting out the middleman, the packaging, the labour, the plastic, the airmiles then our baytree harvest is 'worth' 150,000 / 20 = €7,500.  Maybe when I'm reduced to my OAP next year, I'll use my free bus pass to bring 50 or 100 packets of  bayleaves up to the Big Smoke once a week and sell them on a street-corner so I have money for my meds and my Paris pants.
Q. What's this about Paris?
A. Why, it's in-Continent
Har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har-har.

One foot in front of the other

Ireland in the Spring is when, if at no other time, we have weather rather than climate. 30+ years ago we rented a cruiser on the Shannon for Easter week: we had broiling sunshine and horizontal snow and everything in between. It has been really dry for the last month, so it's easy to take the good weather for granted. But really, for outdoor chores - counting the sheep [and the lambs!]; chopping wood; planting spuds; turning the compost - it is a good idea to be up and doing when it's not raining. There's plenty of time for tea later.  

On Saturday at about tea-time, I bestirred myself and brought in a basket of fire-wood. I noted in passing that it looked dramatically black over Blackstairs and though to more about it. I hadn't been [back] on the sofa 10 minutes but the Valkyries roared in with a drenching storm which turned to drumming hail. Part of me was annoyed because I wasn't up in the polytunnel for the full grandstand sound-surround experience; but the other 80% was really smug at having the chores done before dark. An hour later, our neighbour across came by with a dozen free-range eggs <whoa brilliant!> and remarked at the heaps of hail under the eaves of the sheds. They had not even had a tinkle of drizzle although they live less than 1km away. What a difference a county border makes. Later still I went up to the said polytunnel and captured a heap o' hail which had been delivered to the rain-butt. I guess like Everest in the Miocene, there was a lot more at the height of the storm.

Carpe diem, lads; because this evening it may be too late. My pal Russ is on the move this upcoming Sunday 23rd May to raise funds for the local chapter of the RNLI. He's undertaking to walk 18km from his home to Dunmore regaled along the way by a relay of friends-and-relations. I think that's a brilliant concept and the RNLI deserves support because fetching sea-farers out of the drink brings out the best in people. My retirement gift to myself was to finish the third part of my Western European Walk [Portugal 1989 - Spain 2004] from St. Jean Pied de Porte in Gascony to Cherbourg. When it was on the long finger of aspirations, several relations said they'd walk a stage with me. Who knows if/when it will happen: as the disruptive tides of Covid drain away so does the synovial fluid of my antient knees.

Anyway, it's not about me; it's about The [Manchester] Russianside Rambler. Give? I gave already.

Peak Bean

They also serve [dinner] who only stand and wait. At the end of April I planted out a few handfuls of haricot beans saved from last year, which sprouted on All Fool's Day. Back then, we were scavenging wild garlic for our ration-of-greens and still anticipating a last late frost. The frost came in May and scythed through the outdoor kitchen gardens of many of our friends-and-neighbours <shakes defiant fist at the sky-gods>. But our beans were cosy-up in the polytunnel and starting to need string and stakes. We are now at peak bean and I am on my knees and up a ladder every tuthree days picking the harvest. At the beginning of last week I picked two canvas bags full: the choicest 3 lbs [=450g, garden produce is packed Old Style] we sent to our neighbours and I chopped and blanched the lumpier lads for the freezer [4 x 300g packed in oval soup-tubs]; and I made three meals out of that harvest.  Then on Saturday I went at it again:

I include a tea-pot for scale. On Sunday, I was up the ladder again because the weight of foliage (and more beans) had broken one of the supporting strings and I had to jury-rig some more rigging. This variety of bean will happily grow to 4.5m (the height of the polytunnel) if string and sticks are set for support. We now have a wall of beans . . . for nothing. The peas which we bought in a garden centre for ready money have been pathetic. It would have been far better to invest in Cap'n Birdeye's frozen peas and leave room in the garden for anything else.

At the beginning of May, as an experiment, I planted the sprouty end of two potatoes into a couple of feed-sacks half full of compost and filled the bags up with straw as a mulch. The results [R with a tea-spoon for scale, is the harvest from one half potato and 13 weeks of time] are better than peas, much worse than beans. 10 potatoes mostly tiny is a meal for two. I think I'll try that again next year though. It's like no-dig [=lazy-arse] spuds where you lay out the potatoes on any convenient patch of ground and cover them with a generous layer of straw. We've tried that in prior years, without a great deal of success. I think that paper spud-sacks are better than plastic fertiliser sacks with holes cut in the bottom. I can imagine it getting really sweaty and mycelial inside an air-tight plastic sack even if the top is open. But do not <spill alert> at any stage, attempt to move paper sacks filled with damp compost. Note to self :try both next year.

Easy Living

One of the stars in The Blob's dramatis personae is The Sofa. Obvs part of the supporting cast! In 1996, we bought The Farm including quite a modest, for Ireland, farmhouse with 500mm thick solid rubble-in-courses walls with a footprint of 450 sq.ft ~= 40 sq.m and an upstairs of the same size. There is but one "reception" room downstairs. It took us a year of builders [fix: no chutes, no taps, no t'ilet, hole in roof, bees in soffit] to move in. We had two rooms downstairs: a living room 3m x 4.3m and a slightly larger kitchen. Eschewing sofabeds (neither a good bed nor a good sofa) we went off to Habitat (Conran the Baptist to Ikea as the source of worldly salvation) and bought a sofa that would sleep a <6ft = 185cm guest. It was white ("to brighten the room"); it had legs so a half-finished jigsaw could be slid under; and it was our loyal support for 27 years. But it was also a trampoline for tweens, a magnet for spilled coffee, and the original loose cover frayed to fritters after years of washing. The springs had sproooiinnnngged under 'my' end of the sofa.

The Boy and his team were coming to visit for August, and shame wouldn't allow us to present our old sofa hammock . . . not least because the Gdaus are now of trampoline age. Accordingly we went on a circular tour of furniture emporia in and between the cities of Waterford and Kilkenny and . . . eventually . . . bought a sofa and a matching square foot-stool as a compromise between "corner-unit" and "limited space". Eircode revealed when the van from EZLiving Centraal circulated in our area and we had a date for delivery - of the sofa. The matching foot-stool was still in a container somewhere in the Indian Ocean; but that could wait. 

It was on us to make space for New Sofa. The sofa-fairies came and took our Habitat heirloom . . . and temporarily replaced it with a  pair of lawn-chairs - like we're the indigent transient students of our youth not the bougie Upstanding Pillars we are now. Rather than leave it out in the rain they transported it uphill to a second life in the poly tunnel:

Note the prosthesis under the left-hand seat cushion. That's where the upholstery springs had fractured and the void has been packed with a couple of pillows . . . it being impossible to use a lap-top if your knees are higher than your ears. Bystander asks: "But, if you leave it in the polytunnel, won't your once-was-white sofa get covered in dust and bird-shit?"

Yup, sound advice. Turns out that the fly-sheet of one of our several "partial tents" is just the right size to catch bird-splat and (we devoutly hope) the territorial marks of the neighbour's tom cat. How ever did these "fairies" move the sofa? You may well ask. Let's just say that, ~50 years ago, one of them served time in NCL National Carriers, the ancestor of Lynx Express, now a wholly owned subsidiary of UPS. What couldn't be door-delivered with a 7 tonne van, had to be schlepped to destination on a sack-truck. EZLiving deliverers have a "driver's mate"; in my day it was just me and a sack truck, which is an amazing power lever. See I've included it in the pics - pride of place, at the Right Hand of Sofa, too.

A few days later, my pal René called to visit. He was delighted at the outcome "See?! I told you 20 years ago: that polytunnel will change your life, you'll live up there". I'd only moved the sofa to keep it out of the rain until the CoCo has a free Furniture Dump Event. But y'know, I like having somewhere to sack out in the fresh air and the WiFi signal penetrates the plastic pretty well.

Ephemeral snow

in mid-April? It does happen but it's not expected. We have to prepare for frost as late as the first week in May although that doesn't happen every year. A sharp frost so late in Spring can shatter the blossom trees and shrivel the salad, so we don't plant lettuce outside [of the polytunnel] until St Pancras Day (12th May). Person or persons unknown set fire to the mountain on Sat12Apr - possible because of the super-dry Mar-Apr this year. Eco Horizon Solar finished up their groundworks on Mon14Apr - phew! in a nick of time to keep the mud under control. But on Wed16Apr, the drizzly rain turned to a slobby snow which a) covered the polytunnel an inch deep, then b) slid off and crushed the rhubarb - which had been doing so well up until then. MetÉireann made no mention of snow, so it must have been one of those rare local mountainy meteorfreaks.

That evening I was informed that my treasured Kiwi cousin had been returned home to die, so I promised that I would yomp up the hill to say goodbye in the morning. What a difference a night makes. I set off at 07:05hrs in bright oblique sunshine. You can do that if you don't have to go to work! The snow was largely gone from our yard but I knew it would hang around for longer on higher ground and I wasn't sure how far I could progress. Multi-tasking me took the branch loppers to cut back the gorse from the roadway, so I didn't arrive at the mountain gate looking back South until 07:30hrs:

Two things: a) that yellow gorse bush [R] is the last one unburned on the hill b) the fire-brigade failed to close the gate  - tsk! - when they finished fire-watching on Saturday and it was now stuck open in a snowdrift. I was very happy to see, looking up along the Narrow Road to the Deep North that our Stephen's Day sceagh hawthorn Crataegus monogyna was untouched by the fire:

"our" sceagh because for a few consecutive years in the 00s, we snuck up the hill at Christmas and festooned that tree with Cadbury Celebrations . . . knowing that at least one neighboring family with small children would walk up the hill on Stephen's Day if the weather was the least bit permissive. It's harder to walk in snow than upon dry ground but I plodded on until the road got to be dangerously icy. Then I turned diagonally up the hill heading for St Fursey's Altar. Despite the snow it was A lot warmer than it was in January upon St Fursey's Day. In fact, it was just plain delightful . . . to be up on the top of our world listening to the larks; and watching the crows pacing along with the wind.

The skylarks were doubtless pissed off that their nests had been swept over by heather burning at the end of the previous week, but I couldn't tell that from their song. My shortie boots didn't quite over-top in the snow banks - there's a lot to be said for dry socks in achieving a quiet contentment. When I headed downhill for breakfast, the snow banks were sparkling like a Disney princess and the water was just starting to thaw - burbling and lupping under the ice. Good to be alive.

2 tonnes an hour

The biggest asset Chez Blob is our 17m x 9m polytunnel. It has a lot more utility that our most expensive asset - the 9m x 4m array of solar panels which we had installed in April just S & downhill of the tunnel. The tunnel is where we dry the laundered wearables; where we grow spinach & beans & tomatoes & squash & tarragon; where I can touch up a chain-saw and store kindling. The only draw-back is that it never rains in the tunnel and even that is only a problem w.r.t. to the veggies.

But it for sure rains on the plastic of the tunnel and from the beginning there have been gutters along each of the long sides which capture rain-water and deliver it to containers varying in size from 20 lt to 1,000 lt. If you add them all up we have the capacity to store nearly 3 tonnes of water [obsessive details and itemisation] which may then be eked out each evening to where the thirsty plants require it. I've said before that, in an ideal world, our average annual rainfall [~1,000mm] was delivered in increments of 10mm every third night through the year. In rose-tinted memory, it was like that in Olde Ireland but now we can expect to go for weeks without any rain at all and did so in 2018, 2023 and now again in 2025.

It was terrible dry for long stretches of the Spring this year and in July, I was reduced to using well-water to irrigate the veggies. I hate doing this because, since we changed the submersible pump in April 2024, prolonged running of taps drags silt up from the bottom of the well, and I have to clean the filter. On the w/e of 19/20 July we were served a dump of rain which topped everything up again. Then nothing for 5½ weeks and I was slopping an algal soup out every evening as the barrels steadily ran dry.

We were promised the scut end of Hurricane Erin on Tuesday 26 August - without the wind but with the hope of some rain. I cleaned the gutters, checked the hoses, mustered the buckets in anticipation. Wednesday, I was woken in the dawning twilight by the drum of rain on the roof and went up to make sure The System was working. It was wonderful and not before time. For two pins I would have [frighten the horses alert!] stripped off and danced in the deluge.

It looks like we caught about 2 cu.m. = tonnes of rainwater between dawn and breakfast. Which is consonant with the fact that we had about 18mm of rain that morning and the gutters run full length and capture close to all the rain that hits the plastic - 17m x 9m x 0.018m =  ~2.75 cu.m. As mentioned we had another wet front slob through on the morning of 03Sep25, so we are now brimful at a time when we don't need it . . . but the soil microbiota in the polytunnel is having a fiesta.

IBC for all

If you're living abroad and rely on The Blob for all that's current in Ireland, it will come as huge surprise to hear that we now officially have a drought in drizzly ould Ireland. It is 22 days since any rain fell. Our yard is 40 shades of beige: umber, burnt umber, ochre, amber, chrome yellow, gamboge, fish-batter orange, cardboard brown, siena, burnt siena and the dead grass is crunchy underfoot. As from 05 July 2018, you are no longer permitted, on pain of a €125 fine, to use the public water supply to keep your window boxes alive; and that hose-pipe ban is in place until at least the end of the month. Even it is rains a monsoon in a week's time, the lack of rain all through June coupled with normal usage has depleted the reservoirs of the July and August supply. It didn't help that parents across the country brought out and filled the leaky paddling pool bought on special last year at ALDIDL.

Met Eireann is not 'giving' rain for another 10 days which is the outermost limit of their forecasting power. It's a good time to reflect on how much clean, chlorinated, coliform-free, cryptosporidium-negative water we piss away in normal life: running the kitchen tap for a minute to get a glass of cold water; brushing teeth to the sound of running water, flushing every tinkle; let alone washing the freakin' car, sprinkling the lawn and filling a kids' paddling pool with treated water.

tl:dr Generators not worth it.
When we had a bad winter and a lot of long-term power outage a few years ago there was a spike in the sales of petrol-fired generators to provide, extremely expensive and inefficient, local power. We didn't go that route: we really have enough Stuff about the place. But a few years later when the power was again out for several days after a storm we were grateful that our farrrrming neighbour lent us his generator for a couple of hours to a) run the deep-freeze back down to -20 b) run the water pump to replenish our supply of 5lt drinking water flasks. We were washing in buckets with water heated on the wood-stove and flushing with the residue. With power-cuts it is usual that they happen from storm damage and storms in Ireland are always associated with water. The one time in 20 years when a generator was handy (not essential, but convenient) is not enough argument to buy one-for-everyone-in-the-audience. They cost a lot of money, they are not maintenance-free, they are noisy; they have a huge carbon foot-print and, from our evidence, are rarely required.

Water otoh is a different kettle of fish. I think that the present drought could focus our minds on our habitual waste of water.  Our water comes from a borehole in the yard with a submersible pump 30m below grade. We only pay for the electricity to pump it up, but we're still pretty careful with the water that comes out of the taps. For the garden, and especially our massive 17m x 9m polytunnel, we catch rainwater and re-deliver it inside the tunnel with a simple-enough system of pipes and buckets. Key to this infrastructure is a pair of 1 tonne intermediate bulk containers IBCs [example R], which take delivery from two gutters running the length of two sides of the tunnel just under the plastic. Actually it's a bit more complicated because, despite our best efforts with the JCB-backhoe, the floor of the tunnel is on a 1:10 slope; so the downhill gutter is almost as low as the uphill dirt.

Accordingly, I had to dig a pit to get the top of the uphill IBC below gutter level:

For the downhill gutter, we catch the rainwater in a big dustbin and pump it uphill to the second IBC which is 2m (empty) to 3m (full) higher than the plants on the tunnel floor.

That gives us a 2,000 reservoir which can see us through many rainless days even if we're rich in super-thirsty tomatoes and beans. As I've said, this system requires some active management: me tricking about with pumps and buckets in the middle of a long-awaited downpour. But I think that has positive 'mindfulness' value: if you've had to work, and get wet, for the water then you're less likely to waste it.

Even if you have a polytunnel, it's unlikely to be, like ours, bigger than the footprint of your house. But if you have a home, and it has a roof and gutters, then you have many sq.m. of catchment for gathering pure rainwater for domestic and horticultural use. If you are paying for water, the cost will be somewhere in the region of $6US for each HCF [=hundred cubic feet =~ 3,000 lt = 3 tonnes]. That's only 0.2c/lt! no wonder we don't value it.

Is it worth spending, say, €100 on a second-hand IBC and maybe another €100 on infra-structure so that the down-chutes from the gutters deliver to the storage unit rather than into storm drains and away out to sea? Our modest home has a foot-print of 50sq.m. and a roof to match. In a typical year that roof will experience 1000mm of rain, which means that 50.cu.m. = 50 tonnes of water can be captured each year and used to flush the toilet, wash the car, water the window boxes. Actually, if we kept the system well cleaned out and we're not too squeamish about algae and mosquito larvae, that could be used for bathing and even cooking. 50 tonnes of metered water would cost us $6 * 50/3 = $100. So the payback time for a fully efficient IBC catch-and-recycle system is only a couple of years. To be clever, you'd want to install the IBC higher than the cistern of your toilet, but the engineering issues of keeping 1 tonne of water safely and permanently suspended 4m above the ground, is more than a a bodger-and-fixer like me could install. It costs remarkably little to pump water: a fistful of dollars a month for thousands of litres a day, so it's probably cheaper, and safer, to keep the IBC at ground level and pump water to the header tank.

A couple of videos to show what can be done a) by an old bodger from rainy Portland OR b) a bloke from the Arizona desert who is a lot more dependent on caught rainwater: so he has a 40 tonne storage capacity.

Ingles, not so much

Things move on . . . and so do folks. Last weekend, Young Bolivar, jack-of-all-trades except grammarian, shifted his duff to the Republic of Cork. Actually, I shifted it in the Little Red Yaris. We had our final road trip on Saturday morning. Since early April the business model has been that we will get him up to speed with his English and he will make himself useful round the farrrm.

The latter half of this devil's bargain has been been fulfilled in spades. The evidence of his tidy mind, attention to detail and skilled hands is at every turn. Field stone walls round the base of the wood-shed; the wood-shed!; a field stone gate-pillar; a clapper-bridge across a drain and steps up the ditch; a field without thistles; doors on the polytunnel; boxes for bees, bats and birds; shelves in the tool shed and a system for keeping it tidier.

The learning English? Well, not so good. If you're over the age of 14, learning a new language is hard. I learned Dutch only by total immersion at work in a zoo in Rotterdam.  All my work-mates m'n makkers, although they left school at 16 because they loved animals, were fluent in English and either French or German or both. I made a pact with those who worked most closely with me - bedankt Yvonne! - to only speak Nederlands on the job. There are therefore a lot of technical terms - bak, dekruit, schoonmaken, water verversen - that I've only used in Dutch and seem clumsy when translated into English. I'm sure Dutch has verb tenses and I may have used them, even used them correctly, but I never bothered with nederlandse grammatica. I've mentioned before how, on an earlier sojourn in Gelderland, I'd bought a Dutch translation of The Hobbit and a dictionary: that helped.

For Portuguese, I had formal one-to-one lessons courtesy of the Portuguese Government, who unaccountably paid for an delightful young woman to occupy an office in my English University and spread Portuguese language and culture. I never opened a book on Dutch grammar, but was compelled to struggle through Portuguese verb endings for the subjunctive,  conditional and imperfect tenses. But I also had an hour a week for many weeks talking Portuguese with a woman who was easy on the eye and not too brutal in her corrections. Later, I enrolled in a Portuguese Conversation evening class which helped cement some of the lingo with other lusitanophiles.  Even when I was In The Field in Portugal, the Atlantic Islands and Cabo Verde, it wasn't really total immersion. I was either walking up the coast, largely solitary, or gathering genetic data with at least one other anglophone. Nevertheless, I was the go-to-guy in our party when haggling with taxi-drivers or asking for directions. And I could comfortably read the newspapers in Portuguese.

Young Bolivar was far too old to learn a foreign language by total immersion and too orderly in his mind to be willing tp make mistakes. He didn't really have the aptitude to have formal lessons either. It's all very well being orderly in a carpentry workshop, but it requires work to apply rules and relationships to words. I found, learning German for a year in school, that writing down and learning off lists and lists of German vocabulary was a skeleton on which I could hang the grammar. But I was good in school with the old rote learning - that's why I'm still pretty good at Pub Quizzes. YB never really enjoyed school except things like art and technical drawing. I printed out pages of pictures of tools and materials with English labels, but that didn't seem to hook him. Hanging out in the middle of nowhere with a elderly couple whose eSpanish was even worse than his Ingles, was not the optimum way to get fluent. Even stacking shelves in Lidl will require an exponential increase in his language skills: the fellow workers are likely to be Poles or Nigerians who have not a word of Spanish and no interest in South American politics. And the manager is almost certain to be a monoglot who will expect his/her instructions to be acted on correctly and quickly.

One big difference between learning a foreign language in the 70s and 80s rather that in the 10s is that immersion used to be easier because that''s all there was. Now we have social media youtube and skype available in your native language. If you're lonely and isolated, it requires supreme self-discipline to switch off the snapchat and engage in the alien but physically present environment in which you find yourself. In my 9 weeks in Wageningen NL in the Summer of 1975, I think I made two phone calls home. YB spend several hours a day watching, listening and speaking Spanish which cannot have help drive the learned English deeper into his brain.

I've no doubt YB will make some employer very happy and he'll have a social life living in the centre of one of the hoppingest small cities in Europe. Thanks for everything and best of luck in the future!

Lett Us Create

On dit que The definition of stupidity is doing things over and over hoping for a different result. It's defo like that with me and lettuce. I like a BLT; shop-lettuce is a dollar a pop & can be awash with coliform; we have hectares. 
Q, How difficult could it be to GIY?
A. For me, molare-sappingly, uneconomically difficult.
But here we are in 2026 on lettuce-repeat. I bought seed, they cost money. I planted them in tiny pots on 21 April. Five weeks later, half of them were no-show; half were 5-leaves / 8cm big and cluttering my window-sill. I planted them out [R]; they fell over, and despite the referee counting they were disinclined to get up.

In May, I was given a 5-leaf courgette plant among a trayful of misc tomato and squash. It is doing much better [L]. Not to be the ingrate, but I get cognitive dissonance over yellow courgette, so I'll have to eat them blindfold. Likewise bell-peppers, which should be green or maybe red, but they are often sold 🇧🇯 🇲🇱 🇨🇲 🇧🇴 🇨🇬 as if a) we all had a faarm in Africa and b) were ardent patriots. We have grown bell-peppers in the polytunnel . . . two of them, the size of crab-apples. At least they were green.

There has been a bit of a reno down at Pat the Salt's gaff on Costa na Déise. A pair of antient wrought-iron gates turned out to be supported entirely by rust and brambles and were pulled out of the gap in the road-frontage wall. Only mad people have steel gates down on the Costa where the half-life of a wheelbarrow is about 15 months. It's the salt, innit. The Beloved was inclined to screen the gap with a garden trellis and encourage honey-suckle or sweet-peas to fill in the gaps. These trellises are made from lath-and-staples which might stop a jack-russell, but were scarcely capable of having me lean-on-the-gate while chatting to the neighbours. and they only came in 600mm, 1200mm or 1800mm lengths [we needed 2300mm] and they cost €40.

It's not for nothing that I've spent half my life, combing the beaches of the Costa. Fathoms of rope, scores of buoys, a dozen fish-boxes, an anchor have all been saved from Poseidon Manannán mac Lir and given a new life ashore. But I have also been slowly progressing a project to make a sculpture from wave-tossed and sand-scoured tree-branches which in cycles litter the tide-line.  I figured that when I had 206 pieces of the right size (from phalanges to femurs) I could assemble an articulated wooden pal for buoy-boy. Obvs, I knew that I'd need more like 2060 timber-toes to pick-and-choose from. 

A few days later, when I was alone on site, I gathered by driftwood archive together. I made a frame from 5 pieces of timber off-cut about 1m long and made a proof of principle ProtoTypoGato; 

I left the original where The Beloved couldn't help but see it and sent a photo to the next generation. Everyone hated it! But were kind enough to say little. Which was just as well because, once The Shock of the New had its corners knocked off by a couple of sleeps, I had constructive comments about how the basic idea could be improved. Rip some of the Western Red Cedar planks from the 2016 woodshed project to make the horizontal rails, for example.  I feel a mort happier about this than I do about verdomde GIY lettuce.

Shear stress

I only use titles like Shear Stress to suck in engineers under false pretenses. Make them step away from their construction sites and get down and dirty [Q. What's brown and sounds like a bell? A. Dunnnng!] in a different way. Last year, on the 10th of July, we were much later that we'd like to be shearing our ewes. [R Shearing the rams by Tom Roberts 1890]. See also Ramming the Shears by Michael Leunig?  This year, the 10th of July came and went and we still hadn't seen Paddy the Clip; although we knew we were on his list. The only thing that makes farming viable as a way of making a living is if YouTheFarmer do pretty much everything yourself. If you have to employ 'hands' to do the ploughing, mowing, shearing, muck-spreading, milking and doctoring, then you'd go bloke. Contrariwise, if you can do these things and have the appropriate equipment, you can do them when it suits you.  If the weather is fine and dry, everyone wants to cut grass for hay or silage; the contractors are mad busy for all the daylight hours and into the night.  If you have, as we have, a handkerchief-sized farmlet, then you're going to be last on the contractors list and you'll probably miss the rain-free window in the weather, the dreaded ragwort Senecio vulgaris will be up in your meadows and the thistles Cirsium arvense will go to seed with abandon. The sky won't fall, but the farm will be a mess.

Yesterday we were off-site.  I was up in Dublin listening to Reports From The Frontier by a couple of bright young scientists in TCD. The Beloved went off in the opposite direction to look after Pat the Salt, her aged father. Young Bolivar was holding the fort and shaking sticks at the sky  to prevent the rain falling until Friday lunchtime because we'd been promised a shearing session on Friday morning. Mid-afternoon, I was on a noisy street in Dublin when I got a call from home to say that Paddy the Clip would be coming at 7pm and would I be coming too? I caught the next available bus to Enniscorthy, where'd I'd left my car that morning.  I had, I though, plenty of time . . . to buy some eggs, a bit of fish-for-friday and a bottle of plonk to wet the fleeces. Half way through this process, I got another call to report that Paddy was incommming in 10 minutes and where was I?

This year we have 24 ewes - up from 19 last year; which tells you how successful we were at the lambing in 2015; that and the freezer full of ram-lamb which we are slowly working through. Worse than having the shearer come early was the fact that a little drizzle had started: a wet fleece is ungood for quality: the moisture encourages bacterial and fungal destruction and may even lead to spontaneous combustion.  Anyway, I arrived about 10 minutes after the shearer and was able to throw on my work clothes and help unload the shearing floor from the trailer. We decided to do the shearing up in the polytunnel where it was a) not raining and b) less fly-blown c) nearer to an active electrical socket.  And it was done.  It took a couple of hours at about 5 minutes a sheep.  This is not record breaking but I don't think that I notably slowed up the process.  My task is to first catch your sheep, then up-end her and deliver her, sitting, to Paddy.  He then, without apparent effort, removes the fleece.  A much diminished animal is then allowed to rejoin her pals.

I only finished down on the floor once and that was more of a stumble than losing a wrestling match. But subduing sheep is a young man's task, I'm not as bouncy as I was, and Young Bolivar had a go. He is up for anything: carpentry, block-laying, stone-masonry, graphic-design and now sheep-dragging. Some sheep are harder to handle than others: this is partly glinting yellow-eyed malevolence but mainly due to weight. Some of the sheep you can almost lift with one hand and others are the size of a small pony. The fleece is proportional to surface area. Despite being late to shear we only had 2 sheep with fly-strike . . . same as last year.  If we kept proper records we'd know if they were the same animals and could off-load those sheep as trouble.  Then again, I'd rather 'off' the yellow-eyed monsters. Strike is caused by the blowfly [probably Lucilla sericata, Ir. = carrchuil] and a period of warm humid weather makes it more likely. The later you shear, the more likely that at least one such weather event will occur. Dagging, which I did last year, helps clean up the read-end and so reduces the likelihood. I still smell of sheep this morning but I'm happy we're done for 2016; not least because it rained all night and the fleeces would be sopping if we'd left the sheep out in the field unshorn.

The price of wool in Ireland is now €1.00/kg down from €1.45 last year.  Damn those Chinese for not wanting to make more blankets!

Great God Mullein

Great Mullein | Coinnle Muire | Verbascum thapsus is [triffid alert] an arresting part of the Ireland's native flora. Up to 2m tall with pale greyn furry leaves as big as a Sasquatch boot-sole and distinctive upstanding reproductive parts. Sometime last year, one of our slightly-woo friends dug up a specimen up and gave it to The Beloved. It was deposited in a packing crate [because it came with a large ragged clot of top-soil] in a corner of the polytunnel and more or less forgotten. Occasionally over the last 12 months, I've dumped a bucket of water into the crate and most if it has run straight through to make a temporary downhill puddle.

But in mid-May, I discovered some poppies Cailleach dhearg Papaver rhoeas struggling in the same adverse xerophytic desert corner of the tunnel. Poppies are the best of weeds, growing in most unlikely places and producing culinary seed - I like poppies. I started clearing around the poppies until The Beloved stopped me with "Whoa, sunshine, that's my mullein you're messing with". So I stopped hacking at the leaves and we carried the crate outside. Later the great mullein (just beginning to show yellow flower) was re-installed with honour in our largest blue-glazed earthenware planter on the recently de-thatched patio in front of the house. Now that I can reach my log-table without getting wet socks, I am resolved to sit out beside the mighty mullein with my morning quart of tea.

Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland BSBI publishes distribution maps of most-all of the plants found on these islands: herrrre's Mullein [map L] the darker the square, the more recently that species has been observed in that 10x10 km location. The Sunny South East seems to be the epicentre of V. thapsus's plan to take over the island and reduce mere people to Those Who Serve Mullein. But that recent activity may be all down to the indefatigable Paul Green populating his Flora of County Wexford [bloboprev]. 

The medical take seems to be that mullein is mostly harmless. If you choose to extract the active principles [saponins, polyphenols] from the leaves by steeping them in hot or cold oil, then you're not going to kill anyone. But you're unlikely to cure asthma bronchitis congestion dropsy eczema frostbite gout . . . either. Part of the problem is that there are 250 species in the Genus Verbascum and folk-practitioners may be using them inter-changeably. Some known anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial compounds have been isolated from some of these species. Maybe it will be as effective for me to commune with the The Mullein (while having tea, like) to spare my life when they uproot and take over the world.

God? Verbascum blattaria moth mullein seems to be immortal. The Beal weed-seed longevity project 1879-2100 is still going.  2021 Seedlings upcommmming.

Aggie aggie update

Did I tell you about corralling the flock into one of the four 1 hectare fields to make them graze it down? I did . . . at length . . . with pictures. The poor sheep had to work their ticket for five weeks between 27Jan24 and 29Feb24. A couple of them had almost eaten their way to freedom through the Sleeping Beauty jungle of briars and furze along the unfenced ditch / dyke / wall / boundary. But I took a saw down and plugged the gap with fresh spiky bushes: "you will eat the grim looking thatch in the field". We are not yet ready to write it off to rutting deer and badgers.

After breakfast on Leap Day, we girded our loins, seized our crooks, and opened the temporary gate to the Field Over the River. The sheep were clearly delirah "man, the FOtR is so borrrring" and galloped through the gap, hoping for fresh pasture. We brought them over to the larger of the two Fields Over the Lane. On arrival, the younger members of the flock were quite spring frisky at the prospect of some nice fresh sprouting grass to eat. It took me about an hour of extra outdoor labour to re-patriate: the temp-gate hurdles; the mineral-lick bucket; the buckets for water (whc scrub clean); associated posts and cordage. 

Did I mention fresh sprouting grass? Grass is grand for sheep, but a mixed blessing for the areas of the farrrm which are No Go for sheep. NoGo because, like, roses, rhubarb and rocket. That grass is on me to mow. Consulting what3words says that this NoGo haggard is ~50m x ~80m or 40 ares in extent; about half of which is given over to buildings, shrubberies, roses, rhubarb and rocket. I can mow this, I have for 25 years mowed this, I will continue to mow this but the site is on a 1:10 slope, some parts steeper than others. My what3words attention drifted East and I found all 15 pixels sheep recorded on GoogleMaps datestamp 2024. Just that info narrows the time frame to 1st-27th Jan 2024, because that's when we moved the flock to the field next-door. The Man at DeptOfAg will know that we were up to quota for sheep for that month. What price privacy?

Meanwhile back in the haggard, Mon 26Feb24 was bright and breezy, so at tea-time I fuelled up the mower, fired that sucker up and thrashed the lawn flat bits in the yard and in front of the polytunnel. This time last year, at that stage, Dau.II (then resident) would have tag-teamed me and finished the job. It's a game of two 25 minute halves. Absent Dau the Mau, I stopped there. It would be toooo bougie if I pegged out pushing a goddam mower up hill at about the same age as my pal Paul Jaffe's heart blew out while pushing-starting a neighbour's car. I was ragin' the next day when all-day rain came back putting paid to any grass-mowing. Wot did I expect in Ireland in February?

 

The weather was similar on LeapDay, a bit crisper, but sunny enough; although Met Éireann was giving rain later. Having sank back exhausted after sheep shenanigans in the morning, a bowl of soup and a slice of toast at lunchtime revived me enough to finish the mowing. As you see above, you can now land your Cessna 172 on the hill up to the tunnel. There will be scones if we're given 60 minutes notice. As it happened, 10 minutes after I got the mower under shelter it started to rain - so that's a carpe mowem win. And the day after that, St David's Day, we had actual [soggy, unskiable] snow by lunchtime, along with half the country. 

Busy Bobby Barfly had a lot on that day, because he also planted 18 beans shucked out of withered brittle bean-pods saved from last year. They'd better take, because we've eaten the rest of our seed corn in that department; I'm not about to, like, buy beans to sow. For the now, I have them in the dark under the sofa, so they won't be short of methane. I'll give each ⌀ 6cm pot 2 tsp water every other day until they show.