Howdy Folks.

To those of you who read my contribution to this site.  You will know that I have lived on my smallholding in wet (very) West Cork for nearly 11 years and I had three (thought it was four?) allotments in England.  So I have been growing and farming (I try) for donkeys years – well at least 20!

About (let me think!) 17 years ago I decided to stop using man made (should it be person made?) chemicals on my vegetable plot.  I couldn’t believe how good the vegetables tasted without chemicals.  You really do not need artificial chemicals for fantastic tasting food.

In 2001 I came to live in Ireland.  It wasn’t long before I began to question the use of chemicals in farming.  Where is the traceability?  What is organic meat?  What about the welfare of the animals?  Am I a organic farmer?  No!

Why not?

I believe in so many of the organic principles?  Especially the way farm animals are treated with dignity and kindness, straw bedding, local slaughter works instead of hundreds of miles in an articulated lorry…!  Organic meat is gorgeous and every body should try it just to taste how good it really is!

However it is also very expensive, hard to source and you have to have organic certification and a lot of the organic cattle are sold to conventional farmers at mart.

I am neither a chemical farmer or a organic farmer.  Yes I dose my cattle for stomach worms and fluke and inject against blackleg and I feed them beef nuts that are no doubt grown with ‘artificials’ .  However, I don’t use artificial fertilizers on my pasture, hay fields or in the vegetable garden.   We put lime out by the bag and we have even had to spray some of the rushes.

I would love to be organic but there is too much red tape and I can’t afford to buy organic cattle.  Did you know that you can even get organic alcohol?  Apparently beer and wine makers use fish parts in the fining’s process?

In conclusion.  I suppose what I am trying to say.  I farm in my own way.

I would really welcome your comments about organic/chemical produced food and drink?

Thanks!!

Howdy Folks.

This was supposed to be one post a month.   I had to write some more!

That’s a picture of my Jack Russell terrier.  She’s been coughing quite a bit recently.   In fact I got quite concerned.  Especially when I couldn’t hear my music on the Vintage Music channel on Sky.   I am showing my age.  Weren’t the 70’s and 80’s a great time for music and a terrible time for fashion?

Any way.  My terrier is getting a bit fat (aren’t we all? My beer belly cost thousands) and I think her two  chocolate malted milk biscuits (the one’s with the cows on!) don’t help.   They are her ‘dog wages’ for ratting and sleeping and for sitting (lying down) and helping me write.   I think two choccy biscuits a day is good pay.  Don’t you?

Any road (Archie Sparrow talk), I was in the barn one morn piking some hay.  I noticed the above said terrier barking and digging frantically behind a pallet (another use) I have (had) stood up against the wall of the cow shed, that I stand on to pike hay through a hole into the cowshed.  Are you still following me.  A light went on in my head and I realised there and then that the dog was not a happy bunny (even terrier) and was trying to dig out some rodents that had taken to up winter residence in the hay in my lean to barn/tractor house.  She was suffering from: ‘Farmer’s Dog Cough’.

I put the spike on the back of Anna Ford (Archie’s Ford 3000.) and removed the pallet and she’s never coughed since!

I have been doing a different kind of writing this week – a Eulogy for my mother.  It’s been a strange week – a terrible week.   I said goodbye to my mother Phyllis.  To lose your mother is heart breaking.  It puts everything into perspective.  You have only one mother and you have no bigger fan!

I remember fondly how proud my mother was when she held my book in her hand when it was first published.  My mother smiled and said:

“Eeh David.  I have never known a writer before.  I always thought they had to be middle class or been to university!”

Like I said: My mother was my biggest fan.

Hi Readers.

Hope you all had a great Christmas and happy new year?  Ours was very very quiet living in the countryside.  But at least it was peaceful and there was no snow and ice.

Anyway folks.  Its that time of year to make and break your resolutions.  Mine is to cut down on my drinking (at night), to blog once a month and to make some dosh from my writing.  I have two books on the go at the moment and I am going to start sending off my proposals again at the end of the week.  Does anybody publish short stories and essays any more?

I have also wrote a book about West Cork.  For once in my life, I actual like it.  I just hope I will not make millions (“yeah right!”) and tourists will flock here and ruin this part of God’s Heaven.  Do you think writers spoil rural iydlls telling readers about the place?  What would Hardy or Wordsworth think of the tourists today?

Anyway folks.  Farm animal prices are incredible at the moment.  They are great to sell.  But you can’t afford to replace them.  How can this be so in a recession?

Property prices are also dropping and this year could be the year to take the plunge and get yourself a smallholding.  Why not rent somewhere (near a pub and public transport) or even share a property?  I love living on my smallholding but I hate the isolation.  That’s why I write and blog so much.  Isn’t the job of the writer to communicate?

If you’re not ready for a rural life.  Why not put yourself down for a vegetable allotment?  I really miss mine in England.  There’s always somebody there to help, pull your leg and you get tons of chemical free vegetables, may be even a sun tan!

I think I will start ordering my seed catalogues.

Best Wishes.

Dave.

Howdy Folks.

I just thought I would pop over and wish everybody a great Christmas (I hate the word Xmas) and a great 2012.  Lets hope we all get some sunshine (espcially Ireland, Northern England and Scotland) next year.  I can’t believe Southern England suffered a drought.

I’ve been busy writing and waiting for a few comments.  Anyway I’m back just to thank anybody who’s read the blogs and bought my book and to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and peace on earth and power to your shovels and garden forks.

The old weeks been awful here next to the sea, in the countryside in West Cork.  The storms have been terrible, frightening and even been praying a few times.  Not to forget the westerly wind blowing the smoke back in the range and giving us some great coughs and me swearing with the window open at ten o’clock at night.  So if anybody wants to send me a H shaped chimney cowel for the flue for a Stanley range – we would be really grateful.  The ‘lads’ in town want 200 euros for a bit of stainless steel.

Anyway.  We (cattle and sheep) have used half the barn of loose hay already.  Not to forget all their beef and sheep nuts.  So I have ordered 8 big bales of haylage for the farm animals Christmas present.

I still can’t get on the vegetable plot and the groundsel and bits of ‘twitch’ seem to have taken up residence.  My tractor is now sporting a new coat of (Ford) blue and a brand new pair of mudguards.  She looks a ‘proper’ little tractor.

The travelog is now on its second draft and I’m going to start sending it on the old ’slush pile’ trail (book publishers)  in January.   Back to all those rejections that make you say naughty words to the computer.  Especially when you get the following rejections:

“Thanks – but no thanks”.

“Its not ‘quite’ what we are looking for”.

I’ll give it twenty chances and then I will either go down the E book route or maybe even self publish it in a paperback form.  I just love books do you?

I’m also working on two other book ideas.  Who knows one day I might make some money and own a little farm and become a published author.

Oh I almost forgot.  I do own a little farm and I’m a Author.  Shame I’m still daft and still very poor in pocket.

Merry Christmas.

Dave and family and Archie Sparrow and his gang.

Don’t forget to use your baling string to wrap your presents!

Hi Folks,  That’s the title of a brilliant Fairport Convention song.  Listen to it on You Tube.

Its blog 150 today.  I think I feel how Winnie the Pooh felt when he said:

“You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others coming to you.  You have to go to them sometimes.”

Its been a good experience writing all these blog posts for the last 19 months or so.  I have talked about football (Great banter Oscar), rural isolation, unemployment, vegetables, organic v chemical farming, the recession, rock music, allotments, comedians, humour and good old Archie Sparrow and his incredible Baling String tips to name a 150 myriad of other topics.  Rants, jokes and showing that the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence.

THANKS:  Thanks to the Good Life Press for believing in me and publishing my manuscript.  Thanks also to Ben Hardy for all his encouragement and much valued comments.  I would like also to thank my learned friend Pat who got in touch with me after nearly 16 years.  He’s now editing my new travelogue.  Thanks Pat!

Smallholding farming is a lonely life  (like writing) and there is always a price for living in the countryside.  There are no jobs, public transport,  friends, pubs or even street lighting.

I have just bought :Brave Old World – Tom Hodgkinson.  Its excellent and he says the following about being entirely self sufficient:

It is neither possible nor particularly desirable to be entirely self-sufficient.  Self sufficiency implies a wilful separation from others, whereas husbandry is all about sharing the work and sharing the knowledge…

I still miss the north of England, my allotment, going to a football match or a rock concert.

I miss England very much.  Its a fantastic place full of fantastic people.   I hate how the ‘powers that be’  seem to be doing nothing for the young.  I remember being one of Thatchers ‘wasted generation’ in the early eighties, and now David “call me Dave” Cameron is doing it again.   A nation of “haves and have nots”.  Believe in yourself people.  Join a writing group, write a book, start a rock band, get an allotment, brew some grog…

See I am opinionated and write about the real countryside.  I like to think of myself as the Jeremy Clarkson of Smallholding writing.   That’s what true writing and smallholding farming should be!  Not plastic mud and  ‘week-enders’ with five thousand pound Aga’s.  Its not ‘right on’ or trendy to live on a smallholding.  Its like writing – “bloody hard work!”

Anyway.  Thanks for reading the blogs and for buying my book!

I’ll leave you with a Shakespeare quote about England:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi- paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings..

___________________________________

It will soon be Christmas!

Hi Folks.

I thought I would share with you a ‘World Exclusive’ of one of Archie Sparrows baling string tips. Try to imagine if you can?  A northern self opinionated (sounds like me) smallholder  (the lad with the ball of  baling string) reading it to you if you can?

“So where do I begin? Scattered about on the bed there’s a thermos flask, an old mosquito net, flea powder, cider, Brillo pads, Epsom salts, knitting, lipstick, mascara, a wallpaper scraper, a ‘People’s Friend’ newspaper, the bolster pillow, Mills and Boons books and a box of chocolates with soft centres. They have my teeth marks in them, so I knows they are soft.

I suppose at our time of life we should really have single beds.  I mean I haven’t crossed ‘no man’s land’ since Sir Alf Ramsey’s England beat Germany.  And the wife’s always pulling the blankets from under me and her gas mask keeps prodding me in the back.

We have now decided to sign up to a treaty of ’sleep only.’  It was her idea mind, not mine, although the thought of seeing us both in our birthday suits doesn’t sound that appealing.

I tied a piece of baling string to one end of the iron bedstead.  Then I threaded it through the bed linen and tied it to the other iron bedstead.  We now sleep in seperate areas of the bed.  Each one of us has his and her own allotted space to sleep, dream and break wind.  She gets the window but I am in charge of the light switch.  Not that I am rich enough a farmer to pay for the extravagance of light bulbs!”

Copyright: Dave Dealy and The Good Life Press.

Tune in next week for blog 150.

Howdy folks.

If one cares to look back in history. You will find that there have been lots of recessions. The one in 1830 was terrible. Yes I said 1830 not 1930. The Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’ was also very harsh.  The American civil war prevented cotton from being picked and shipped to Lancashire. Everything seems to go in cycles, even bicycles!

My father was brought up in the nineteen thirties and forties in rural Ireland. Times where very hard and he can remember children walking to school with no shoes on their feet.

My father was always looking for ways to make a shilling or ten. One way was to catch himself a rabbit.    He used to sell them to a lady on a smallholding down the boreen (lane big enough for a cow) from my grandparents farm.  The lady was a bit of a entrepreneur herself.   She used to sell sweets and second hand goods and vegetables to the natives from her unofficial shop.

One day my father went to inspect his snares and found two half  fox eaten rabbits.  The top half was missing from one rabbit and the opposite half from the other rabbit.  ‘Necessity being the mother of invention’ and all that.  My dad had an idea.  So he extracted the two half eaten rabbits from the snares and placed them in his pockets.  Then he ran down the road, ransacked his mothers sewing box and sewed the two rabbits together.   Then he carefully combed the rabbit fur over the crude stitches.  He now had one complete ‘new’ rabbit!

My father ran down the lane and knocked on the ladies door.  She haggled over his ‘ Dr Frankenstein’s’ rabbit and they settled on half a crown for his efforts.  My father was very happy and the lady had a hearty rabbit supper – with a few stitches thrown in!

The lady was a self supporting and pragmatic smallholder.  She used to keep a couple of cows and she gave them the lanes for grazing.  The verges, hedgerows, grass in the middle of the road and furze bushes were their pasture.

She also grew the finest lettuces you ever did see.  They would have won first prize at Chelsea flower show, if they gave prizes for Leviathian sized lettuces?  Her green fingered success was down to the ‘gold’ liquid contents of the chamber pot.    She would empty it on the lettuces everyday.  The poor lady couldn’t get rid of them for love nor money!  Not even to a rabbit!

See you next week!

Howdy Folks.

It’s been another week of mixed weather and I can’t get on the old vegetable plot.  Its a good job I did my digging a few weeks ago.   There’s nothing you can do when it gets too wet. Don’t move next to the sea that’s for sure.  Especially when its blowing a gale everyday!

Well there is something you can do.   That is if you’re a writer.  I am busy writing a funny travel memoir at the moment.  I’m currently up to 25000 words and trying to teach my Jack Russell terrier to type.  Mr  Qwerty wasn’t paw friendly when he invented the keyboard was he?   The dog just lies next to me and sighs and dreams about UFO’s.  Well that’s the sound she makes when she dreams.

One thing about being a published author is that you find yourself checking your Amazon book ratings everyday.  Archie was 55,000 yesterday.  Thanks to the two people who purchased copies from Amazon this week.

It really does a writer good to know that somebody buys their book.  Especially when you think how many books are listed on Amazon – literally millions.  Quite a few of the authors are writing books for Jesus.

I also write four blogs a week.  Two on here and two on my own blog.  I don’t get many comments,  but I do get a lot of views – over a thousand on my other blog.  You don’t comment every time you read the newspaper do you?

Thanks for reading my blogs and buying my book.

Howdy Folks.

Let me introduce myself to any new readers (“hiya” regular readers) in Internetland.

My name is Dave Dealy and I was born in Lancashire in 1963. A week after the deaths of CS Lewis (my hero) and President Kennedy.

I used to spend my holidays on my dads parents (my grandparents) little farm in West Cork Southern Ireland. Back in the days when God gave us the football saint George Best and the sun always seemed to shine – even when it rained.

My grandparents had seven cows which they milked by hand, made hay with pitch forks (pikes), grew fields of vegetables and drove around with an horse and cart. It was a wonderful time, and they knew the land like the back of their hands, and what they didn’t know about country living wasn’t worth knowing about.

All good things come to an end and my grandparents went to farm for God, and Ireland joined the EEC, and people started to get tractors and get jobs  and mortgages, and buy frozen meat and vegetables from the supermarket. I think the experts call it: PROGRESS. I call it very sad!

Anyway. I grew up and tended four different allotments (“anybody want some Club-root”) in England and dreamed of one day having my own smallholding.

Ten years ago I moved to Ireland and built my own house (no mortgage) and tried to live off the fat of the land.  Yeah I’m a big John Seymour fan also.  I know now that there is no place for rose tinted spectacles on a smallholding.  Self sufficiency is  like ‘Community’ – its an illusion.  The smallholder will always be poor, but they will always be learning new things, and eating some very good meals.   Maybe even brewing their own medicine?

I am also the author of Archie Sparrows Book of Useful Tips to beat the Recession with…………baling string.  It’s a humorous book about a poor Lancashire Smallholder.   Yeah I have always wanted to be a published writer.  One of those creatures that have to spend every day tapping away at the old computer, praying that somebody will say they like their work!

If anybody wants any advice about allotments or smallholdings (I have over twenty years experience and read tons of books) leave me a comment.  If I don’t know the answer.  I will ask Archie!