Sparrowhawk dinner

The sparrowhawk just whooshed around the bird table again. I'm fairly sure it was a female, big and slate grey, although according to my bird book it's the smaller male that usually takes tits and finches. That's the second time this week. It happened so fast it was difficult to see if she got anything.

I think she left empty-clawed when she called on Tuesday - walking up the track with the dogs a while later there was a pile of feathers on the verge that looked freshly plucked. I'm pretty sure it was the remains of a woodcock - the feathers are distinctive, and its the only bird we regularly get around here with this type of stripe.

The woodcock is one of those birds with astonishing camouflage. I see them at dusk flying up from the edge of the forestry. They look very angular in flight, and make a big clattery fuss of it, zigzagging away.





Here's a photo of one in a pile of leaves. You could tread on it if it kept quite still.







I called at the Irish Seed Savers Association yesterday to pick up my order of seeds and potatoes - members can pick five packets of seeds and one sowing of potatoes. I'm trying some new varieties this year. There's an old rare heritage parsnip called Bedford Monarch, a turnip (Tipperary Turnip), Mexican Midget tomato, which doesn't sound local, and Yerevan Parsley which definitely isn't local. It says on the packet that the original seeds were brought back from an Armenian market place.

The potatoes are first earlies and are an old English variety - Sharpe's Express. I also got some garlic, one I've had before called Lautrec. A few years ago I bought a selection of garlics from the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm, and this was one of theirs that did well. Last year, however, it was poor, so I needed to replace my stock. Apparently French gourmands class it as the best tasting of all French garlic, and they should know. Not sure why the Seed Savers have it though, as it's widely available.

The Seed Savers buildings and gardens are in the middle of the Clare countryside just outside Scarriff, accessed by a tiny lane. As I was leaving the  building in the lashing rain there was a Rolls Royce stopped outside the door (not parked in the designated parking place note). It was an 08 Dublin registration, and seemed full of people peering out through the wetness. Back in my car I sat and ate my occasional addiction - a dark chocolate-covered marzipan bar - while waiting for the reappearance of the car. I was intrigued. What could it be doing in a place like this?

It didn't reappear, so it wasn't one of those mistaken drives around the countryside looking for something to do. Had it not been lashing I'd have gone back up to be nosey.

Fake hairy legs and saving seeds

The legs photo shows what happens when you start a job you didn't think was going to take long. It looks like instant hairy legs but is simply the muck and filth off the paving in the courtyard. I had the power hose out to wash my car (NCT imminent - just got this morning - hurray!) and thought I'd give the paving a going over. Three hours later I had it finished. The grime under the trees turned these bright colours to black. To remove it I had to hold the hose six inches off. Every edge threw up this wet blackness. Water everywhere. Intensely satisfying job though.

I suppose the film of dirt is actually a light covering of the beginnings of mosses and lichens on the paving. Stuff that grows so easily in the climate of this country. It was at its worst under the big apple trees that have been in this garden for eighty odd years. The trees are laden with apples of an unknown variety. A local type, probably passed around the farms in this mountainy place as slips and grown on. I have four of them all the same. I don't know if they exist anywhere else. There are many plants like this - only growing in their local areas and vulnerable to development or disease.

Down the road from me is the Irish Seed Savers Association, an organisation that has been instrumental in collecting and acting as guardian for old Irish apples that had gone out of fashion and so were not available in nurseries. Some, indeed, were thought lost, only to be discovered leaning in the overgrown garden of a falling-down cottage, or still-fruiting in an orchard unbeknown to the owner.

Nikolai Vavilov

Seed saving began in Russia with Nikolai Vavilov (1887 - 1943) who collected seeds from around the world, bringing them back to St Petersburg (then Leningrad). Vavilov was one of the first scientists to recognize the need to keep a collection of seeds and plants against future loss of biodiversity.

Vavilov is in the news recently as his priceless collection of fruit trees and berries growing on 1200 acres near St Petersburg at the Pavlosk Experimental Station is under threat from developers. The land has been zoned for housing to provide holiday dachas for wealthy Russians. This collection is probably the most important in Europe.

I suppose some people wonder at the point of all this. Who needs all those varieties of apple or blackcurrant or pear? Or maybe potato. The famine that destroyed half a nation here in Ireland happened because the populace relied on a crop that had no resistance to the blight. We don't know what is going to happen in the future, or which of our plants are going to succumb to disease or, indeed, over-development by humans. To destroy one of our most important plant safeguards to benefit a few of the world's wealthy would be an unbelievable act of human arrogance.

Vavilov was arrested during one of his plant-finding expeditions to the Ukraine and accused of espionage, sabotage and anti-Russian behaviour. He died in one of Stalin's prisons. Now his legacy to the world is also under threat. Sign a petition against this destruction here.