Number one son and his girlfriend took some of their pigs to Cork Show at the weekend.
Two of the Saddle Backs were awarded Champion sashes:
Mummy Saddle Back and her piglets. She's eating her breakfast. Aren't her piglets gorgeous? They enjoyed their trip in the box trailer all the way to Cork.
One thing I don't like about summer time is having to leave the windows slightly open to let a bit of fresh air in.
Someone left our bedroom window open last night. It was like one of my annual roughing it camping trips to a Prog Rock festival in Blighty.
We had 20 minutes of pure rooks prog dawn chorus. What a racket!
Mean while back on the ranch. Or even in the front room. Blue bottles have been playing at Battle of Britain dog fights landing on our heads and limbs.
J came back with fly 🪰 papers. They even came with individual drawing pins or thumb tacks like they say across The Pond.
I attempted to press it in a door frame and had to resort to using a Manchester screw driver (claw hammer) and knocked the head off the drawing pin and had to find a nail instead to hang the fly paper on.
A few swear words later:
The veg plot is getting a bit overgrown and neglected at the moment.
I decided to weed several of the repurposed oil tanks/ raised beds and J will sow more vegetables when I clear them.
One of the things I love when I visit Blighty for my prog rock festivals and hiking/ roughing it, literary tours. Is the home baked regional food and drink.
There are not a lot of bakeries, pie,cake shops left here.
Well there is an excellent one in Sneem on the Ring Of Kerry that we have visited several times. I think the lady who owns the shop is English.
Any way or any road. The veg plot is producing a lot of new potatoes and onions at the moment.
Yesterday J decided to make some Cornish mince and onion and potatoes pasties:
They decided to leave their mother's for a while and have a look round about the Haggard.
I took the photo and they quickly ran back and found their mums.
Hopefully they will soon put on a bit more weight and will not be able to squeeze through the head feeder.
Here's Roundabout by English Prog band Yes. I saw them play the Night Of The Prog Festival in Loreley in Germany 🇩🇪 in 2017:
That was my tea today. I dug far too many potatoes again and we made too much food for the two of us again.
I think we would be good catering for an army.
The potatoes were washed and sliced along with one of my whopper Japanese onions and placed in the air fryer.
The onions turned nice and crispy.
We sliced up a tin of Lidl corned beef 😋 to go with the potatoes and onion.
It was very plain but tasty and filling. The kind of grub my mum would give us when we were kids.
The tin of corned beef was 3 Euros 49 and we get two meals out of it. Was a very cheap tea. Food is cheap when you supplement the meat with your own homegrown vegetables.
It's potato blight weather this week in the Emerald Isle.
My cheap Homeguard seed potatoes from the discount supermarket do not appear to be blight resistant. Next year I will grow the Hungarian Sarpo Mira blight resistant seed potatoes again.
Being organic gardeners we don't use chemicals. This is what we did on inspection of the blighted haulms before and after:
Yellowy turning black foliage. I wore a pair of gloves and cut off the foliage with a pair of garden secateurs and piled it in a heap and covered it with grass and weeds.
The other day some one asked me if I knew what was eating the leaves on their mother's Aston Martin plant.
I nearly answered:
" James Bond perhaps?"
I didn't of course. I asked if they had a photo of the said plant on their mobile phone?
They showed me a photo of a beautiful Azalea in flower and it's leaves with holes in them.
I consulted Professor Google like I do for most things and sure enough it came up with Azalea Leaf 🐛 🐛.
One should spray them with Neem oil. I suppose physically removing any flickers would also help?
Regular readers will know I plant Japanese or winter 🌰 🌰 sets every September and they are ready to harvest in June.
I planted some of them in baths complete with drainage holes. The repurposed baths were filled with fym, topsoil and home-made compost.
I think a combination of the wonderful sunny weather in May and now the frequent showers and a good sprinkle of pelleted chicken manure. Have all helped to give us such a bountiful harvest.
You will see in the above picture that the weeds are getting plentiful. I must get my gardener back. He's very inexpensive and a couple of cans of lager or Newky Brown always suffice for wages.
So take heart would be allotment gardeners on allotment waiting lists.
Start collecting old plastic baths and heating oil tanks and grow veg in your back garden or garden. You could even grow them on concrete.
The repurposed raised beds/baths may not be aesthetically pleasing on the eye. But you will be growing your very homegrown organic vegetables.
I took out my mobile phone to take a new photo of my newly extended veg plot.
It was formerly a lawn with shrubs and perennials planted around it's perimeter.
We had a digger in doing some work and number one son duly cut up the lawn.
Instead of putting it back to grass. I decided to extend my vegetable plot and planted ordinary every day vegetables like new potatoes, onions, red cabbage and leeks.
No longer do I need to listen to the not very pleasant dulcet tones of my petrol lawnmower.
I have course lots of weeds to take care of but at least we will eat well.
Anyone else done their own Dig For Victory job on the lawn?
I might put it back to grass one day but then again it's great to have more veg growing space.
This mixed weather of 🌧 rain and sunshine 🌞 seems to just be the ticket for the flowers 💐 and vegetables at the moment.
I seem to be just growing basic everyday vegetables this year.
It's good to go out to the veg plot and dig and pick your homegrown and chemical free vegetables.
The taste and freshness of freshly picked vegetables is exquisite and you can't buy that freshness in the supermarkets.
I would imagine you could buy freshly picked vegetables at a farmers market.
What are you harvesting at the moment?
Regular blog readers will know that I am a big fan of American Prog Rock band Kansas.
I have often mentioned that I finally got to see them in Warsaw in 2014.
Some of the band are new members and Ronnie Platt replaced Steve Walsh on vocals.
In 2019 they released the following track. I think it's very apt for our times. I especially think of the plight of refugees in and escaping countries like Ukraine and Palestine:
I was watching Top Of The Pops from 1977 on the television the other night.
The following song came on our television 📺 screen. Some how it seems to have passed me by:
The lyrics are great and I found it really unusual but catchy.
"So Long" by ABBA was a song I once featured on here that had also passed me by.
Is there any famous songs you some how missed when you were growing up?
I have only 2 sections to walk and I will have walked all 40. kilometres . Stretching from Listowel in north Kerry to Rathkeale in County Limerick.
We walked just 4 KM from Ardagh to Newcastle West in total. Which is two and a bit miles in old slot electric meters.
Here are some photos 📸 for your perusal:
We had our first early potatoes 🥔 😋 for tea last night.
They are Homeguard potatoes. Developed during WW2 and named after the Dads Army civilian soldierss who guarded Blighty by day and night.
I once heard of a local Homeguard volunteer in Lancashire on night manoeuvres shouted:
"Halt. Who goes there?"
The recipient replied:
"MOO!"
Any road or any way:
We cut the new potatoes in half and placed them in a plastic zip lock bag in vegetable oil, garlic granules, a chopped up one of our homegrown Japanese winter onions and a couple of sprigs of freshly cut Rosemary.
J popped them in the air fryer basket and cooked them until the potatoes were soft yet crispy. They were beautiful:
New potatoes imbibed in vegetable oil and mixed with Japanese onions, garlic granules and sprigs of Rosemary.
I remembered that I had planted some seed potatoes a couple of weeks earlier than the one's I harvested.
My trusty long handled fork and me found this hidden treasure:
Usually we are digging and eating our homegrown new potatoes 🥔 by the end of May.
Yesterday when weeding I unearthed a few potatoes 🥔 from under a flowering potato plant.
To my disappointment they are far too small to harvest yet.
They have obviously not had enough rain or water when I watered them during the very dry spell.
We will just have to wait or take the frozen 🍟 out of the freezer 🤔.
Tasker from A Yorkshire Memoir wrote an excellent post on Jethro Tull yesterday.
One of Blackpool's finest and a super prog rock band.
I have seen Jethro Tull five times and the Martin Barre band once in 2019.
I last saw Jethro Tull in 2022. Ian Anderson can still play the flute magnificently but unfortunately his voice is a whisper of what it used to be.
They still keep the Jethro Tull name but without Martin Barre they don't seem to be that great band I loved.
In 2019 I saw The Martin Barre Band at A New Day Festival in Kent.
I particularly like the vocalist Dan Crisp who reminds me so much of a young Ian Anderson.
Here's two songs from probably my two favourite Tull albums:
We went to The Home And Garden Festival at Cork Racecourse at Mallow on Friday.
It cost me thirty Euros for the two of us and Bronte got in free.
Here's some photos for your perusal dear readers:
It was a good half a day out and Bronte got lots of strokes and cuddles.
Why go to Chelsea when you can go to Cork Race course?
Number one son and his girlfriend took some of their pigs to Cork Show at the weekend. Two of the Saddle Backs were awarded Champion sashes...
