There's still a bit of farmer in me!

In Dad's 1978 Zetor tractor.

A regular Saturday activity for me is to make the 90 kilometre trip to Ballingate to visit my Mum and Dad, and brother Joe. It takes an hour and 20 minutes to drive down - on Saturdays cycling clubs and horse boxes make this a slow trip through Rathnew, Rathdrum, Aughrim, and Carnew. Apart from the road to work, it is probably the most travelled road for me. Before lunch, my brother Joe and I decided to head for the bog and feel a few trees. This is forward planning for next winter - this timber will dry out over the summer and we will spend many a further Saturday sawing the tree up into logs for three houses, (Mum and Dad's, Joe's, and mine). I took a car boot load of ash logs home and placed them in my back garden for next winter.

I also got an opportunity today to drive Dad's tractor with a trailer. It is a Zetor and he bought it new in 1978 - we are looking forward to its 40th birthday next year. I even managed to reverse the tractor and trailer without doing any damage - I was proud of myself for not having forgotten this skill which is an essential one for anyone working on a farm. The field in the photo below was once a bog which Dad drained in the 1970s. It is now planted with trees, so we are being environmentally friendly by replacing trees that we cut down for fuel. The trees we cut down today are all oak trees over 75 years old - it seems a pity to cut down these magnificent specimens of wood, but they were overhanging the edge of the field and had to go.

You can take the man out of the bog, but you can't take the bog out of the man!

Our job today was to kill these trees.