Category: News

Dia is Mhuire dióbh go léir a cairde and welcome to my Report.

September is moving along beautifully, giving us lots of sunshine and  some of the loveliest hours of tranquil pleasant moments if you were lucky enough to capture them. The fruits of the Earth continue to mature and ripen.  Every day there are offers of juicy plums, damsons, and wild crabs . Soft fruits which have to be nipped at the right time before they over ripen and fall of the branch.  The same goes for the hazel nuts. How we loved to climb the precarious limbs to retrieve them. When we had teeth of our own, it was no bother for us to crack the hard shells  with our teeth to get out the little treasure within. Rose hips are ablaze of colour just now as their greenish yellow fruits are fast turning to a rosy red. We have often heard of Rose Hip syrup but never made any.  There was really no need to venture into the world of such high class preserves when our world was full of blackberries and strawberries, rhubarb  and a whole range of  items  which gave us enough of jars of   jam  to see us right through the winter.

[read more …] “Eily’s Report – 10th September”

Dia is Mhuire dióbh go léir a cairde and welcome to my Report.

Welcome to the month of September. When our climate was fairly predictable, September was the month when we reaped the fruits of our labour. By the end of this month the hay would be long stored into the haybarns and the last of the grain crops, the wheat and the oats and the barley would have reached the stage of full maturity.  September was a busy month, but then as the farmer lived hand in hand with the weather, every month was a busy month. Cold weather in winter, when Mother Nature sent frost and snow to turn everything off and let the land rest in preparation for the planting and growing seasons ahead. There was no forward predicting of the weather like there is now and I can often remember seeing my Dad with a worried look in his face as he tried to find the best was forward and saying in a low toned voice, ‘May God direct me’ and He did because we survived. By September the turf which was won from the  bog in Caherdowney, five miles away, was drawn home by animal power. The horse and crib, by the grown men or the old reliable humble donkey by my growing brothers. The potatoes which were dug and stored in shallow pits in the field were  temporarily covered with a light covering of earth and straw. Very often children got days off from school for this important work and even with breaking backs we still looked on it as being better than going to school.  With the corn threshed and the all important grain, stored in the loft it was time to go back to the  potato field and sort the spuds. Needless to say on the day that they were dug, we emptied our buckets into the pit big ones and small ones all together. Hence the task of separating the big from the small later on. One of the coldest places on earth is when you go on your knees around the pit in an open plain with where was no escaping the icy breeze. There you knelt hour after hour sorting the big from the small. The call for the dinner giving a welcome respite before returning again.  The small potatoes or the waste as they were called were dumped in a shed where they were fed to the pigs and the geese and the fowl.  How we loved watching the ducks as the swallowed the small ones whole  and we could see them moving down along  inside their long necks until the ‘lump’ went into the crop and waited for the next one. The right-sized spuds were carefully loaded on to the horse and butt and transported into the yard and carefully stored, either indoors or in an outdoor pit but well protected from the winter frosts and the marauding rats. The supply had to see the family and the animals fed, well into  the next year. Like the wheat and the oats, hay, straw (for bedding the animals)and the turnips and the mangolds . Every month was important but September was special because it was a culmination of all that was done in the previous months. In many places Harvest Thanksgivings or Harvest dances were held when as they used to say, the cares of the year was over.

[read more …] “Eily’s Report – 3rd September”

Dia is Mhuire dióbh go léir a cairde and welcome to my Report.

Nice things are happening all the time. In a world that is so full of negativity it can be hard to find one sometimes but they do come and little things mean a lot. You know by now the love that I have for wild mushrooms and can you imagine the joy I felt during the week when I found a little bag of them hanging from the handle of my door.  To double the joy it happened again two days later. I hope that the kind person who left them has some idea of the pleasure that I got from her gift. First of all the very thought of it and then the lovely breakfast that I enjoyed. Money cannot buy wild mushrooms, they either grow or they don’t and even though we can get mushrooms in any quantity in the shops they lack the taste and the mysteriousness of the ones that you happen to find in your field. I melted a little real butter in a saucepan and tossed them in before adding some milk and loads of fresh ground pepper and a dash of salt. Oh the taste when I dipped my buttered brown bread in the liquid and eat the solids, savouring every  morsel. Recalling the days of old and the homemade coarse brown bread made from our own home grown wheat. The seven of us around the plain wooden kitchen table and Pete doing his best to see to us smaller ones, while the others fended for themselves. Things didn’t always go well when someone would shout out Ah Pete, you put too much bread soda in the cake or God forbid if an actual lump of the stuff happed to go into somebodies mouth. He’d spit it out and say “I can’t ate it” His reply came fast and determined “you can ate or turn your ass to it”, or “if you don’t ate it, that will leave more for the next fellow”, and the meal would continue. There were no fancy gadgets back then to make life easier. Because there was no sieve, the bread soda had to be crushed in the palm of the hand to take out the lumps and of course now a then it didn’t turn out perfect. Too much made the bread a yellowy, foxy colour which was a dead giveaway anyway. I never saw it to happen when our Dad did the baking.  Another one of Pete’s faults was on Fridays which were fast days  and no meat allowed. We didn’t always have fish. But he would make a pot of white sauce. I can still see the pot or warmer as we called it, aluminium, bent and broken with age, no handle. We loved the white sauce with the onions with our spuds on a Friday evening. But the trouble was that it nearly always burned and how we hated that burnt taste. Coming in the boreen from school it aroma would be out to meet us and on arriving our first words were Ah Pete you burned the sauce again today and his reply was always the same and we’d eat it. But the gentle Pete had many finer qualities which made little of his draw-backs at the end of the day.

[read more …] “Eily’s Report – 27th August”