News From the Hill

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At last the rains have come…

May the sun bring you new energy by day,

May the moon softly restore you by night,

May the rain wash away your worries,

May the breeze blow new strength into your being,

May you walk gently through the world and know it’s beauty

All the days of your life

Apache Blessing

We have had a wonderful week of sunshine and the wildness around us is bursting into life again. Everywhere I look there are beautiful yellow flowers and seeds.

Open Willow Seed Head

Closed Willow Seed Head

Yellow Daffodill and Narcissus

Narcissus

There are a few amazingly large bumble bees flying around our heads from time to time, however I have not yet been able to get a good photo so apologies for the bad quality of the shot below.

Irish Bumble Bee

Apparently there used to be 18 species of bumble bee in Ireland at one time, sadly there are not many to be seen these days. When I do get a good photo I will hopefully be able to identify which species of bumble bee it is.

It is so wonderful to look about these days and see life bursting forth everywhere. There are buds on the trees, birds are singing to attract partners, frogs are singing and have already found their partners.

We have been tending to our hedges here over the last week. We are lucky enough to have inherited some great Whitethorn (Hawthorn) hedges on our land, some of which have not been trimmed in perhaps sixty or seventy years. They had become very stringy and were looking a bit top-heavy, especially when they were covered in snow over the winter.

In order to prevent breakages due to snow or wind damage but mainly to encourage new growth we cut our top hedge down to about eight foot tall. I am looking forward to seeing the new growth over the next few years as the trees regenerate.

Right now we have a lot of thorny branches and trunks to trim, chip, cut and stack. The thinest pieces we are trimming and chipping, leaving cleaner bigger pieces of wood to deal with.

We have an electric hand-saw and an electric wood-chipper which have been given lots of use over the last week. Luckily we had plenty of power to run the tools and we only used one at a time which was also the most efficient way for us to work.

I trimmed the smaller pieces whilst himself cut the bigger pieces down to workable sizes for me to work with and we created a few different piles of brushwood for chipping which we then both fed into the chipper. The chips are then wheelbarrowed to the gooseberry bed for use as mulch.

Once we have a good size stack of timber we start chopping and stacking. The branches are cut to a size that fits our wee stove and stacked to dry for burning next year. We’ve heard that Whitethorn wood burns with a high heat so if next winter is like the one just past then we will be glad of the warmth.

When the tree trunks are left for a day or two you can see the moisture dripping out of the cuts. It’s a little sad to be cutting such lovely trees however it helps to know that the wood is all going to good use, firewood and mulch.

It’s also both comforting and promising to be building a wood pile for use over next winter and we are hopeful that we will be burning it in our new home, warm and cosy within the walls which we are soon to build.

I have some friends who are wind turbine mad, they teach people to build their own wind turbine and that’s why I have a lovely turbine spinning around today generating all the power I need to write this.

Well I also have a friend who loves staying fit and was reluctant over the last two years to get out on his bike in the inclement winter conditions and bad roads around his home in north Leitrim.

These two friends got together during September last year when Hugh Piggott was over here doing his annual guest teacher slot and they created a new machine that would both help my friend to stay fit and also to generate enough power to run a laptop, printer and desk lamps.

Irish Turbike

The resultant creation is now viewable on youtube, sorry I don’t have the movie up here, you will have click on the link here and go view it for yourself.

It’s worth the click!

Happy Bridget’s Day

I have been happily hibernating since Solstice, very much enjoying the “cut wood, carry water” lifestyle of the old days, although it is more like carry turf-briquettes, collect water in my neck of the woods. The really severe weather which started before Christmas got us into a routine of doing basic chores and cutting back on energy expenditure, really hibernating.

The important jobs were cleaning out and relighting the stove, filling our water containers each day because our water pipes were frozen, carrying in the day’s fuel for the fire from our outside store, feeding the birds and making sure the cats had fresh water to drink a few times a day because the water in their bowl would freeze quickly and so on.

We learnt a new way to manage the fire in our stove so as to keep some heat all night long and to be able to clean the stove without removing the live embers and so relight it with the remains of the night fire. Keeping a large pot of water on the stove at night was also important as that meant that we had warm water in the morning to defrost the gas cylinder so as to cook breakfast and we also had some nice warm water for a morning wash – ah, what luxury!

Keeping the fire going

We didn’t go down to town often because we had stocked up with food to avoid unnecessary journeys. The few times that we did venture out on the road we often met the postman and collected our mail and that of our neighbours and then we would deliver it to the neighbours on the way home. The postman was unable to travel on our road because of the snow and the constant freezing conditions. It was nice for us to have that contact with our neighbours which we might not have had otherwise.

Delivering the post

We walked every day and were enthralled by the tracks of the wild animals in our area. Each day we could see the new tracks and were surprised by how much one local fox travels across our land and also delighted to see mountain hare tracks. It’s like being let in on a secret world. These animals all exist here along side us all the time and we rarely see glimpses of them. We felt quite honoured to have been made privy to their comings and goings, thanks to the snowy and freezing weather.

So now the cold weather is well and truly gone and I find myself slowly and reluctantly trying to re-enter the world of schedules, grocery shopping, cyber world and forthcoming elections…..

Lá Fhéile Bhríde shona dhuit