Today

Not a great day for any sort of farming today, I just get going on an outside job and down comes the rain, sideways! Living on top of a hill has its advantages (views, wonderful, more than 12 miles in some directions over the Boyne valley) but the wind! While I waited in the barn for one shower to stop the turkey 'daddy of them all' (or possibly 'daddy of most of them', we wait to see who was actually the daddy of the two surprises), just stuck it out in the middle of the yard. He was probably right since it takes him so long to toddle anywhere (unless helped by the puppy) that the rain has stopped by the time he gets there. I have to make and take some special, favourite food for all the chicks down to them in their various apartments. Apart from the ones in the pic there are 11 peachicks with 2 mothers (safe in a big stable, the chicks are so small) and 5 hen chicks (safe in another stable with their mother, one of our fancy hens that wander the yard). This very special food is scrambled eggs, they go mad for it and it is very good for them.

There was to be a trip down the Boyne today from the Old Mill (just at the bottom of my road, by the Stackallen bridge) down to the Newgrange visitor centre. However, it has been cancelled because the river is too low. The water must be all stuck up on my hill.

When I venture out shortly I am going to photograph what must be our fastest running ewe, her lambs were born 7 days ago, 10 weeks after all the other ewes had had theirs! I also have to call to the visitor centre at Tara to see how book sales are going.
Fiona

Chicks

Mix of chicks 7 Black Norfolk turkey (with Yellow faces) 5 Bronze turkeys (tabby ones) 2 peachicks (big one in centre barred wings and tail) and 2 surprises which hatched out of Turkey eggs but are the colour of peacock chicks. The one at bottom right seems to be trying to die but I am trying to change its mind.

Technology- organic farming-technology!

Hi everybody (or anybody!) I hope that is the correct term of address for a blog. Can't understand how I was so slow to get going, took much prodding by my very good friend Jennifer Kennedy - meaning she is very good to me - and her husband. I have a unique (probably, perhaps) history in computers, in 1969 I was at the top of the computer tree, running courses on computer control for postgrads at Bradford University Management Centre, but of course no-one had a computer! Well, except for a big steel mill in Sheffield and Green Isle Foods in good old Dublin, two of our case studies. When I left there I came to Dublin (what a co-incidence) and married, worked, had children, got ponies, back to work and back to computers. In the 1980s things were beginning to take off, I was lucky enough to always get the latest in office equipment which will seem hilarious to you computer-babies. My first word processor was an electric typewriter with a screen - well, the screen was about 8" (sorry, even changed the measurements since then, so 20cm, although that was a big mistake if you read my book) long and ONE LINE high!! Yes, as I typed the words came up on the screen and scrolled along from right to left till the line was filled and if it had no mistakes the 'carriage return' button (another change, now known as the 'enter' key) printed it. Then on to the next line. It even seems funny to me now, although it was top of the range and expensive then.

The next machine had a bigger screen, about 10 lines high so a paragraph could be typed before being printed, and then came a thing like a typewriter with a modern size screen and a printer attached. The memory was extremely small, one page, and the printing quite slow so I actually had two of these machines so that one machine could be printing while I was composing and typing on the other. You don't know the half of it now, how spoilt you all are!

Eventually we got hitched up to a small computer which could store full documents and even got connected to the web and one day the salesman who was selling these fabulous machines arrived to show us how we could download pictures from the web. He had already sold us one of the first digital cameras - the best at the time, of course, in my opinion, and I still have it. A Sony Mavica which cost more than £500 and now on ebay at about £40, which took photos onto floppy discs (suppose most of you have never heard of those, long out of date and I have to have a separate little reader to look at those photos on my computer now). Well, this promised picture downloading took nearly 40 minutes. It came line by line on the screen buuuuuzzzzz, buuuuuzzzzz, buuuuuzzzzz. Nearly drove us demented, and this was an advance!

Anyway, most of you will know the extremely fast progress of technology since those days, the mobile phone (we had one of those, too, about the size and shape of a housebrick with a thing like a car battery in another pack. It all weighed a ton and the battery lasted about 40 minutes!! STOP LAUGHING.) Then email and websites and whatever you're having yourself.

I baled out of the technology bit when I retired early about 15 years ago (where does the time go?) and became an organic farmer, so back to the ponies - well, I never left them - the animals, cats, dogs, hens - in big numbers - pigs, peacocks, turkeys, sheep, etc. but was recently dragged back to technology in the guise of twitter, facebook and blogging by events, several good friends and having written a book (about neither technology or organic farming, but about the Ancient Irish).