Bringing home the turf

As you drive the roads around the west of Ireland during the late summer you might see random sods of turf lying by the roadside, which reminds you that if your own turf is still sitting in the bog it is past time to get it home.

For those of you not familiar with Irish rural life turf is a fuel that is literally cut out of the ground in some parts of the country, and then dried and stacked in the protection of an open-sided shed to keep your home fires burning during the long winter. For many of the homes around here it is probably the most used fuel for home heating – many homes having a solid fuel range that is an oven, hob, water heater and backside warmer all rolled into one.

But back to the bog, which is where we’ve all been hanging out for the last week. The bog is a beautiful place, a stretch of peatland that supports its own distinct flora and fauna, as well as being an important source of fuel for rural dwellers. But these days and for much of the summer the bog is a place for hard, back-breaking, hamstring-stretching labour.

Field scabious bobs in the breeze around stacks of turf

Earlier in the summer the turf was cut by a huge earth-eating machine and extruded in neat ribbons of wet squelchy dirt. A few weeks later, when the outside layer of turf had dried out and cracked itself into shorter lengths, these ‘sods’ were turned and stacked into little piles to help them dry faster. Around here these stacks are often created by putting two sods crossways on top of two, on top of two more, a process known as ‘boxing’ turf. Indeed it is fascinating just how creative people can be in their stacking techniques, but then we have to do something to entertain ourselves during our hard labours.

Turf is ‘boxed’ to encourage faster drying

So now is the time to bring it all home before the rain returns and turns the bog back into – well, a bog again. So off we go, tractor and trailer, with the dog and as many people as we can round up, and we rattle down to the bog for the loading of the turf. Bend down, catch as many sods as you can handle, straighten up and throw them into the trailer. Its just like a kettle bell session, but with sky-larks!

The bog is home to many different species of mosses and plants

And then home to the yard, where you tip up the trailer to dislodge its load and then manually fling each sod of turf into the turf shed. When these sods of turf eventually make it into the range or the open fire they will have been handled at least five times! So next year, when we will be legally prevented from cutting turf in our particular bog due to an environmental protection restriction, there is a part of me (my back mostly) that won’t be particularly sorry!

Cruinniú na mBád: The Gathering of the Boats

We stopped off for an hour or two yesterday in Kinvara in south Co Galway for their annual maritime festival Cruinniú na mBád or the Gathering of the Boats. We were just in time to see the very dramatic Galway Hookers round one of the race buoys near the pier walls, their red/brown sails ominously dipping close to the water as they tacked around the marker.

Cruinniu na mBad festival in KInvara Co Galway

A Galway Hooker taking part in the Hooker race at Cruinniu na mBad 2013

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you interested in sailing this 4 day festival gives you an opportunity to see at close quarters some of Ireland’s unique sea-going boats.

• Galway Hookers which are traditional sailing boats of varying sizes. They include the larger Bád Mór (big boat) and Leathbhád (half boat), both of which were traditionally used to carry turf across Galway Bay from Connemara and Co Mayo to Kinvara and the Burren. Gleoiteogs and Púcáns are smaller classes of hookers and were traditionally used for fishing and for carrying other cargo. The Galway Hooker dates back at least two hundred years and while some of the boats you see racing in Kinvara might be quite old (according to the festival website some of the vessels ore 150 years old!) there has been a revival in the craft of building these beautiful boats.
• Currachs are traditional row boats that are traditionally constructed from animal skins stretched over a wooden frame. These also have their origins in the west of Ireland, and are still great work-horses and used to carry all kinds of small cargo. If you are visiting Connemara or the west coast of Ireland generally you might see farmers moving a cow, or a few sheep, in a currach. These boats are very fast in the water so their races are very exciting to watch.
• Climíns are perhaps the strangest of all sea-going ‘craft’ that you will see in Kinvara. A Climín is a raft of sea-weed, constructed by tying together clumps of sea-weed and then floated to a collection point for harvesting. Now that is definitely something you don’t see every day!

Galway Hookers – photo by T. Quinn, from Cruinniu 2013

Galway Hookers taking part in the racing at Cruinniu na mBad 2013 – photo by T. Quinn Cruinniu 2013

2013 Cruinniu na mBad poster – http://cruinniunambad.com/

If boating is not your thing there were plenty of other attractions in Kinvara yesterday – beautiful sea-food in one of the restaurants or bars, live music on the outdoor stage and other street entertainment.  But for Irish music buffs like myself it was straight to Connolly’s Bar to listen to the live Irish music session – yesterday we had 4/5 flutes, accordion, banjo, tin whistle and fiddle playing trad tunes to all of us lucky people who managed to squeeze ourselves in.

And while people like myself in Connolly’s  tapped our toes to Irish reels, the sailing fans on the quayside or out on the water were in thrall to the beat of another drum.  As the festival t-shirt says:

“Táim faoi dhraiocht ag ceol na farraige”

“I am under the spell of the music of the sea”

Liam Ó Flaithearta

Summer Jam Making – Gooseberry and Elderflower Recipe

There is something very satisfying about going out to the garden, picking whatever fruits you have, and turning them into colourful and fragrant pots of jam or jelly. I have some gooseberries and redcurrants in my garden, and despite the best efforts of the birds and the caterpillars to gobble them up before I get to them, this year I have managed to get the upper hand. So using a tried and trusted recipe I have made a few batches of redcurrant jelly, and one large batch of my favourite jam – gooseberry.

The finished product – some of this year’s batch of gooseberry and elderflower jam.

It might seem like a lot of trouble, but actually making jam is quite easy once you are organised and methodical in your approach. All you need are your fruit (in this case gooseberries), sugar, and enough jars to hold the finished product. Jam needs an ingredient called pectin to set, but some fruits are naturally high in pectin so you don’t need to add any from another source. If you are working with a fruit that is low in pectin, such as strawberries or raspberries, then you will have to add either shop bought pectin, special jam sugar which you can buy here in Ireland, or else lemon juice or even some apples which are high in pectin also. Gooseberries have enough pectin naturally so no other ingredient apart from sugar is necessary. However I decided that for a little bit extra flavour I would add some elderflower blossoms which give the jam a beautiful muscat flavour. The following is a step-by-step description of my jam-making process.

1. Top and tail the gooseberries – this involves just trimming the little tail-y bits off each gooseberry – yes its boring but I did it while watching TV the night before I made the jam. Some cooks recommend a sharp knife or scissors – I just did it with my thumb nail which is quite effective and fast.
2. Wash the fruit and place in a preserving pan (or big wide mouthed saucepan – no lid) with I pint of water for every 3 lbs of fruit – bring to the boil and simmer until the fruit is soft. I added around 12 elderflower blossoms tied in a piece of muslin and then removed them before the jam was potted.
3. While the fruit is simmering you can prepare your pots – wash them thoroughly (I do this in the dishwasher) and then dry them with a clean tea-towel. Place them in a hot oven (around 180 C) for at least 15 minutes – this dries any excess water off them and also sterilises them.
4. When the fruit has been simmering for a while (maybe up to an hour) and is soft add in the sugar – approximately 1 lb of sugar to each 1 lb of fruit. Make sure you stir it well at this stage to dissolve the sugar.
5. Bring the fruit and sugar mixture to the boil, and boil fairly rapidly until setting point is reached. This is best tested for by spooning out a small amount of jam onto a saucer, allowing it to cool, and then running your finger over the surface of the jam to check if there is a skin formed on top of the jam. If there is then the jam is ready to be potted. Alternatively if you are very posh and you have a sugar thermometer then setting point is reached when the temperature of the jam reaches 105 C. (My mother made jam every Summer and never owned a sugar thermometer so it is a gadget that is not really necessary for successful jam-making!) During the boiling the jam will change from a watery green mix (sounds awful – sorry!) to a thick, luscious texture with a beautiful rich red colour, and when you are an old hand at jam-making you can tell when it is ready more or less just from the colour and texture.
6. Remove the pan from the heat, remove the jars from the oven (if you have not already done so), and when both are cooled down a little you can start to fill the jars. The jars might crack if you add hot jam to a cold jar, so having the jars slightly heated is good. If the jars are cold then make sure to put a metal dessert spoon into each jar as you fill it – the spoon will conduct the excess heat away and prevent the jar from cracking.
7. To fill the jars I recently invested in a very useful gadget – a jam ladle. This works beautifully but does cause a little bit of dripping. If you don’t have one then a little milk jug that has a good wide spout will do the job just as well.
8. Wipe each jar with a dampish cloth to remove any drips, cover the top of the jam with a little wax disc if you have them – if not I just cut out little circles of greaseproof paper/baking parchment to do the same job. Then you can seal each pot with its original lid or else with the circles of cellophane that you can buy just for this job. If using cellophane do this while the jars are still hot. Wet the outside of the cellophane circle slightly with a finger dipped in clean water to make it easier to stretch it across the top of the jar, and seal with an elastic band.
9. Label each pot with the name of the jam and the date – it is amazing how you forget what is what after a month or a year has passed. This jam should keep for several years if it manages to last that long! Store it somewhere cool and dry. But most importantly enjoy!

A preserving pan is worth the investment

Heat the jam jars in a hot oven for at least 15 mins

The sugar thermometer can be left in the preserving pan during the whole process

When a cooled spoonful of jam has formed a skin it is set and ready for potting

My new ladle beside the sterilised jars

Gooseberry jam ready for potting

A metal spoon will prevent the jar from cracking during the potting process

It is easy to find cellophane and wax discs for sealing jam jars in the supermarket

Making hay

Making hay here in the West of Ireland is a very risky business – the weather always likely to turn nasty on you. The good people of Met Eireann do their best, but it is still a tough call here to choose hay over silage. Silage is fairly rain tolerant and can be baled even if a little bit wet, whereas hay has to be more or less bone dry when it is baled, otherwise you end up with a big mess of rotting mush in a few months time.

Most farmers around here don’t bother even trying to make hay any more because of our very unpredictable weather.  Seems to me it is only unpredictable when you predict good weather – if you predict rain you are very likely to be correct!  In any case we have tried a few times over the past few years to make hay only to have to abort the mission at the last minute and wrap it up as silage bales instead.

So Saturday was a momentous day here on the farm because the hay that we cut 6 days before was actually fit to be baled. My husband has invested a lot of time in this hay – turning it twice a day for the past week – and holding his breath in case the rain would come. It did actually rain for an hour or so a few days ago, but two days of lovely warm weather has evaporated off that moisture. So around lunchtime one of our neighbours rattled up the road with his trusty baler, and under threatening grey skies it clattered its way around the field and magically churned out these golden blocks of hay.

There is nothing quite like the glorious sight and smell of a hay field – and it is very hard to resist the urge to go running around the field, arms out-stretched, or to go hopping from bale to bale whooping with childish delight.

The first bales

Turning the hay

Relief – baled before the rain came!

The hard work of bringing in the hay begins

Drumlin Country

I travelled cross-country today from the west of Ireland where I live up to my home town in the border county of Monaghan. Now county Monaghan is never spoken of as a must-see tourist destination but it is a beautiful place. It has the kind of beauty that doesn’t shout at you but rather creeps up on you in its own quiet soft-spoken way. It is a rather special place geologically-speaking made up as it is of drumlins – little rounded hills that were dropped carelessly here and there by a passing glacier on its retreat northwards at the end of the last ice-age.

When I was younger I was more impressed by the drama of more mountainous terrain, and our little drumlins seemed very inadequate when compared to the broody peak of Croagh Patrick in Mayo or the wild and rugged Twelve Pins out in Connemara for example. I have since learned that size is not everything – and you don’t have to be big to be beautiful!

As I journey homeward to Monaghan the very flat land of East Galway and the midland counties of Roscommon and Longford gives way to more gentle hills, and soon I find myself in the midst of the Cavan and Monaghan drumlins. You cannot see very far in Monaghan as you are always surrounded by these wee hobbit sized hills, unless you climb to the top of one – which admittedly is not that hard to do. Where there are small hills there must be small hollows in between, and these tend to be either bogs or marshes, or little sparkling lakes.

So today I journeyed northward – to the small green fields that creep up the steep slopes of the drumlins, to the thorny hedges that separate one little field from its neighbour, to the sparkling lakes that catch you by surprise as you round a bend in the road, to the farmstead clusters of house and red-roofed sheds that nestle between the hills. The road beneath me twists and curls between these tiny peaks. I am home.