mike's blog

When we first looked at the land that was to become Carraig Dulra, Gary Crocker showed us a natural spring, located down the hill, and suggested we use a "Ram pump" to bring the water up to us.  This was the first time I had ever heard of this type of pump, which doesn't require an external power source to push water uphill.  When we bought the land, we also got rights to use this spring for our water, and my research began.

I collected our second colony of bees from the man who taught me beekeeping, Willy O'Byrne, earlier this week.  The hive was placed at the other end of the hive stand and at right angles to the existing one to help prevent the bees from the two colonies from going to the wrong home.  Willie, who's based in Moneystown only a few miles away, had kindly moved the bees to a location farther from us to ensure the bees were far enough away from their previous location that there would be no overlap in their flight paths, which could cause some of them to go

Wooden hives, frames, feeders, wax foundation, queen excluders, varroa treatment... bees don't need any of this, or at least wild bees didn't long ago.

These inventions are all for the benefit of the beekeeper and the crop. Just like in conventional agriculture, we've harnessed a natural process and have bent it to our needs. Our concern for the bees stretches as far as trying to ensure their survival to continue to give us a crop.

Work in the northeast corner of the land has intensified over the past couple of weeks, as we prepared an apiary for the arrival of our first bees.  Luci has been an amazing help building a woven willow fence as a windbreak. I managed not to get too upset when she had to pull out what was several hours of my work because I had weaved it wrong!

We hosted a private birthday party of 8 year olds today, and as part of this I did a few bushcraft/awareness exercises with the kinds, ending with a demo of friction firelighting. This was optimistic because I'd never succeeded in getting past an ember before! However, today it worked and it was thrilling and freeing to produce a fire without modern technology.

It was a busy day: we had another party afterwards (two of our sons), we set up a Tipi with Tipi Dave, later eating our meal in the Tipi sitting in a circle on sheepskins around the fire.

We would love Carraig Dulra to support and enrich the natural habitats that are so rare now. Native plants are adapted to this environment and other species are adapted to work with them too, and, well, it just feels right when you see an Irish tree in Irish soil. So to help this along we're looking into the Native Woodland Scheme, which gives a grant towards costs of planting native tree species. We just had a visit from Katharine, an ecologist from Natura, and Michael, a forester, to walk the site just to give us an idea of what was feasible.

We had a short visit from Suzie's cousin Juliet and her boyfriend Sean, and they brought a few days of some of the best weather we've had in weeks! We brought the kids up and we all camped up on the land for a few days. It made it so much more enjoyable when all of us (including our 3 current WWOOFers Meg, Petra and Chantall) were out working on the land.

On the morning of yesterday's open day we arrived wondering how the day would go, especially considering the mixed weather.  As we got to the kitchen, Maria, a friend of ours, said, "oh, you have a fox", and we saw curled up in a corner, a small and very still fox!  Alive, but barely responding to us.  We all wanted to scoop it up and cuddle it, but fought those instincts and left it be, as best we could with kids and guests around.  The fox eventually got up and limped around between our feet, drinking a little milk.  

I've been doing little else but deer fencing lately.  You'll get different opinions about how high that deer can actually jump.  I've heard some stories that they can clear as much as 9 or 10 feet, but I am hoping they are wrong.  The spec for deer fence grants is only about 6 feet, so I am doing that on the sides farthest away from the deer and where it would be awkward for them to get to, and going up to 8 feet on the sides that deer are most likely to come from.