'Beam me up Scotty'

I had one of those moments last week, in the middle of a vast supermarket, half way down the ‘dried pasta’ aisle, between the fusilli and a vast range of different flavoured bolognaise sauces.

Maybe it’s my age. I did have a birthday last month which was something of a reality check. Or maybe it is the time of year, with Christmas, the festive shopping season and now the new year sales. Or perhaps it was the blue fading from the sky outside and the dusk gathering across the rows of parked cars, reminding me I needed to get home to shut up my ducks and chickens before Mr. Fox seized the opportunity of an easy meal.

Perhaps, I also need to explain that I don’t often shop in large supermarkets these days. The allotment provides the vegetables I need. The ducks and chickens more than keep me in eggs and the sheep are there to provide meat for the freezer. I try hard to shop locally and I am lucky because the village has a reasonable supermarket, a real greengrocer, two butchers and a fishmonger. Oh, and a chemist.  What more could you need? There is also a monthly farmer’s market which blends local food and local people, adds a dash of laughter, chatter and quite often music, stirs them together and serves them up warm with a sense of community as a side dish.

If all else fails there is always modern technology and home delivery from a van that blocks our narrow road when it unloads the food I have ordered.

Maybe all of this explains why I suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the aisle causing the shopper behind me to mutter something under his breath. Packets, jars, boxes, bottles screamed at me, pleading with outstretched fingers for me to buy them. There were tempting new recipes, bargains galore, a hundred ways to make a quick meal. So much choice I stopped

As I stood grasping the handles of my half-filled trolley I had this overwhelming sense of needing to escape. A ‘beam me up Scotty’ moment.

Suddenly I didn’t belong. I no longer wanted to be part of the feeding frenzy that was going on around me. I wanted to step off this enormous consumer conveyor belt that our human race has built. Saturation point had arrived. I didn’t want to buy anything, spend anything. There was nothing to tempt me. The ads since Boxing Day had failed. I didn’t need a new smart phone, a tablet or a vast television screen. I didn’t even want a choice of six different shaped pasta.

I shut my eyes for a second. Nobody needs all these things. We may want them, desire them but we don’t need them. We are manipulated into believing that happiness and fulfilment can be found in objects; in the latest intel processor or the most up to the minute coffee machine. (If it can’t do the ironing it isn’t worth having!!). Nobody’s life would be empty without them, less rich, less fulfilled but our world, our planet might be in a better state of repair if we were not driven by our greed to own more and more. Our atmosphere might not be clogged with greenhouse gases, our oceans trashed with pieces of non-biodegradable plastic, our forests logged, our rivers polluted and our countryside covered in concrete. Our future might be brighter.

Economists argue we need growth, ecologists plead for sustainability. Me; I want my new grand-daughter to grow up surrounded by a beautiful world that she can touch and see and hear and smell, a world where we have learnt to balance our needs with the needs of everything else alive on this tiny blob in space. I pray that when she looks at nature it is not through a screen, a virtual world of what once existed. I want her to feel the cold, wade through the mud, lick falling snowflakes, enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face, listen to the storm. I want it to be real.

So, what did I do? I chose the fusilli and headed for the cash out, piled the shopping in the back of the car and drove into the deepening dusk. I took the country lane leading down to my small holding, avoided the pot holes at the side of the road and watched the trees glide passed against the evening sky. I fed and shut up my ducks and chickens and stood for a moment looking out across the field to the wood set against the sky and the swelling hills beyond as the day drained away in the west.

What I so WANTED was a small cabin beside a forest fence surrounded by wilderness. A log burner, running water, the basics, energy from a solar panel, a small domestic wind turbine, carbon neutral where the rule was do I want it or do I need it? A home where I could wake to the sound of rooks lifting into the dawn sky and go to sleep to the call of tawny owls across an empty valley.

We all have our dreams. Mine is to step off this world and leave only a small footprint behind.

Is it just me or are there others like me out there?

Autumn

A solitary robin breaks the heavy silence with his call from the plum tree that overhangs the vegetable shed.  A pause as I open the door and look for him amongst the bare branches. He suddenly darts down onto the ground, hops towards the shed and then he is gone, disappearing across the allotment. Silence. Even the rooks have nothing to complain about this morning.

The air lying in the valley is still, quiet. There is a greyness where the sky blends into the softness of the hills in the distance. Corners are fuzzy and there is a hint of dampness hanging just above the grass. There is a smell of rotting leaves and wet earth. For the last month October has stomped its way across the allotment, dragging wind and rain behind it, stirred up storm after storm, picked up the tail of a hurricane turning the sun blood red and mid-afternoon night, rocked the fruit trees, torn at the polytunnel, rattled the glass in the greenhouses and shaken the roof of the shed.

Today is respite, a lull. Above the grey the sky has lightened and scattered patches of blue are floating across the field. It has been raining leaves all morning. They fall gently, drifting down to nestle on the damp earth, small splashes of yellow, orange and red.

The clocks have changed, autumn is sinking into winter, sunrise and sunset have moved closer together, the days have shortened and the air has lost its warmth. Sadness has crept in.

The shed strikes cold as I enter. I need a cup of tea to get me going this morning. As I switch on the kettle I look out at the fruit trees and across the allotment. Last week we stripped out the remaining beans poles, unravelled the tendrils of the plants and collected the brown shrivelled pods. We dug out the dried stalks of the sweetcorn. The sunflowers were chopped up and carted to the compost heap. The last of the husks of the marrows, emptied by the squirrels, were thrown into the wheel barrow and tipped beside the sunflowers. All that is left behind is heavy, wet, bare brown earth.

The end of the season.

Across the field, beyond the fruit cages I can hear the chickens and the ducks. They too know it is autumn. As the days have shortened they have stopped laying eggs and several of them are moulting; pecking around in the mud looking forlorn and scruffy. Some of the ducks have already been through their moult and they are looking very smart with neat well preened dark brown feathers. As they splash into the pond first thing in the morning I watch the murky green pond water slide off their glistening backs. They are laying well compared with the hens and I just wish I could persuade the family to enjoy their eggs as much as their sisters'.

Back in September I increased the size of the flock by buying in some point of lay hens which I am hoping will come into lay any day now to provide me with enough eggs for the winter while my old girls have a well-deserved rest. They are a mixture of black glossy Copper Maran’s, brown muted Rangers and Black Tails (Rangers in disguise with black feathers in their (you guessed it) tails. They have had a rough ride since they arrived; new kids on the block who have been bullied as a new pecking order has been established. They were not welcome at the feeder or into the coop at night to begin with but things seem to be settling down. Cold war rather than armed hostility. One of the incomers very quickly became adept at dodging aggressive, grumpy old hens, pushing in to get what she wanted and the others are slowly following her example. A chicken to watch!  Cleaning out the coop last week and watching the group of new arrivals scratching around I noticed that the combs on the top of their heads have reddened up, a sign that they are about to start laying. My winter egg supply?

I just need to ensure that the chickens and ducks are safe now that the evenings are drawing in so fast. It is dark before five and as the sky gathers the heavy clouds of night together, creatures of the dark emerge. For the last week there has been a tawny owl calling from the trees on the bank above the shed and an echo across the valley. A haunting welcome sound but last night just as I connected the electric fence around the duck run, the hair on the back of my neck prickled as the eerie cry of a fox drifted out of the gathering gloom at the far end of the field. Winter is coming; a lean time for all, cold, wet, hunger, desperation and only a wire fence and a wooden shed separate predator and prey. As I finish the welcome cup of tea and move outside I make a mental note to check the fence is working as it should.

Clear blue sky appears and there is warmth in the sun on my face as I haul the wheelbarrow out of the field shed towards the dung heap. There is still much to do before I put the allotment to bed for the winter. Those areas I have not managed to sow with green manure, turn with the cultivator or dig can still be mulched with well-rotted horse dung. There is celeriac to lift and the strawberry plants need weeding, the long brown stalks of the asparagus need trimming, raspberries need tying in, and there are brambles along the fence beside the greenhouse that need cutting back.

The end of one season and the beginning of another.

Natural Disaster

When disaster strikes there is really only one thing to do: you go home, have a cup of tea and bake a chocolate cake! On the Richter scale of 0 to 10 I suppose, if I was objective, it was a three, maybe a four. It could have been worst; the polytunnel could have ripped in two and taken off across the hills, the glass in the greenhouses might have shattered, I might have lost my ‘inner sanctum’, the garden shed, or the roof of the field shed could have been damaged exposing hay, straw, and tools to the elements.

At the end of the day all that happened was that I lost half of my runner beans which in turn took out half of my French beans as they collapsed under the force of a storm that lashed down the valley, pulled down the shutters on the hills, and swept wind, rain, and hailstones through the allotment. It only lasted for a few minutes but the devastation was complete as the hazel poles supporting the beans; dry and brittle after the heat a month ago, snapped and yielded to the full brunt of the storm.

The beans had taken two and half months to grow and seconds to lose their precious hold on the soil which gave them life. I had lost a crop. As I stood in the middle of the wreckage trying to separate the tangled mass of leaves, dripping red flowers and broken poles, desperately hoping to save something from the carnage, I wanted to sit down, give in and weep. Irrational, illogical response to the situation. I was not going to starve to death. The local greengrocer does a very nice line in runner beans. So why the despair? Was it all the wasted effort that had gone into growing them; saving last year’s seed, sowing them, putting up the poles? Was it knowing that I had ignored my better half when he had pointed out to me, just as I finished putting in the support poles, that I had planted them side on to the wind, making them vulnerable to storms? Or perhaps it was something less tangible.

We have stepped out of the process of growing our food, the cycle of sowing, growing, and harvesting. We live in a world where everything is always available regardless of the season. Standing in a brim-full supermarket we forget that growing food is not easy. The weather, disease, pests all take their toll on the crops we raise to feed ourselves. We have forgotten the importance of a harvest and we have forgotten to say thank you for it.

Our ancestors celebrated the beginning of the harvest season at the festival of Lammas Tide on the 1^st August. It was a ceremony of gratitude giving thanks to Mother Nature for all her fruits. Its origins go back to the Celts who called it Lugnasad in honour of Lugh, the sun god but the Anglo Saxon renamed it half-maesse meaning ‘loaf mass’, the day when the first new grain was milled and baked into small loaves of bread which were offered as thanks giving for the first fruits of the harvest.

If you grow things, raise crops, if you are a farmer, a market gardener, have an allotment or just grow tomatoes in a window box you step back into that cycle that binds us with our past.

Farming may now be mechanised and high tech but nothing has changed; the Anglo-Saxon farmer and the agricultural contractor high up in the cab of his combine harvester are part of something that has turned the world since the beginning of our time. They both play a game of chance with the god of weather working day and night if necessary to bring the harvest in. Once upon a time the corn was cut, stacked in stooks in the field to dry and then loaded onto carts to be carried to the barn for threshing; today the combine cuts the corn, swallows the grain and spews out the straw ready to be baled. Once upon a time the last wagon of corn or ‘hock’ cart would be decorated with flowers and ribbons in honour of the goddess they believed lived in the corn and the villagers would all turn out to escort it home. Today, the driver of the combine turns off the engine, checks his mobile for messages, jumps down from the cab and drives home alone.

But maybe both the peasant farmer and the combine driver pause and look back at the empty field as the light fades and evening creeps in from the corners where the corn once stood and maybe they both smile at what they have done, what they have achieved in bringing the harvest in.

The peasant may have believed a corn goddess lived in the crop and the combine driver may have an on-board computer in his cab but they are both part of the same timeless, endless cycle of sowing and reaping that turns the earth.  

Maybe, whether we grow things to eat or not we all still carry a thread from the past within us where the loss of a crop did mean hunger or hardship.

Maybe, this is why I felt so wretched that I had lost my ‘crop’ and maybe why I still have a corn dolly hanging in my window.

'To Do List'

‘Cut back summer fruiting raspberries, tidy up strawberry plants, hoe winter cabbage, collect parsnip seed, lift autumn sown onions, side shoot tomatoes, tie back cucumber plants, hoe leeks, sort out the pumpkins making a bid for freedom across the main path through the allotment, hoe lettuce, hoe sweetcorn, hoe …, pick gooseberries, pick blackcurrants, make rhubarb and ginger marmalade, clear bindweed, sort out nettles, pull ragwort.’

The ‘To Do List’ is scary.

After almost two months of long dry, hot days with temperatures up in the high 20’s, parched chalky soil and sulking plants that refuse to grow despite lots of watering, the weather broke dramatically last week with a spectacle storm that filled the night sky with sheet lightening and rocked the hills with thunder as wind and rain chased each other through the darkness.

Sitting on the sofa downstairs, petrified collie on my lap trying to hide under my arm, both watching the light show, and listening to the low rumbling of the storm outside, it seemed like the answer to a gardener’s prayer. At last a decent rain that would sink slowly through the soil and reach roots where it was needed.

Now of course, I want it to stop because everything has suddenly gone crazy. Plants that languished in the heat have pushed down their roots and put on inches overnight. I can hear the sweetcorn growing. Which is great, but the bad guys were lurking in the wings and have now taken centre stage and are hogging the limelight as they grow and weeds are stronger, more resilient than anything we are foolish enough to plant to eat.

And where were all those large black slugs hiding from the heat? Because they have come out in the rain to party under the soft light of the moon, slipping between cabbage plants, weaving amongst the lettuce, leaving behind silver trails that glisten with first light.

Suddenly the battle to keep on top of everything in the garden has turned into a war.

I was fine at the beginning of the season, feeling confident that I was managing things well until … the strawberries ripened and then the summer raspberries. Suddenly the red currant bushes were hanging with fruit and I turned around to find they were rubbing shoulders with their white namesakes; tiny, opaque, milky berries catching the early morning sunlight as they ripened. Finally, there are the gooseberries, green and sharp, purple and sweet, nestling amongst their thorns.

As I laboured to keep up with picking and harvesting I wondered what had happened to my plan to turn this abundance into sorbets, ice cream, jellies, and jams for use in the barren months of winter. I did manage to make gooseberry and elderflower ice cream for the first time this year and I knocked out some runny redcurrant jelly and some well set, (with a little help from a bottle of pectin) blackcurrant jam and we have eaten more crumbles, cobblers, fruit salads and meringues than is good for one person but my freezer and cupboards are not bulging with bags of fruit or jars of preserves. There simply wasn’t time and sadly a lot of the ripe fruit has just fallen to the ground wasted.

One thing I hate is waste which is why I am looking for recipes involving cucumbers. This is definitely the year of the Cucurbit. I have cucumbers by the gross. I have never had so many. Maybe it is down to the long dry, hot spell we have had or it could be all the added chicken manure in the polytunnel where the birds spent the winter under quarantine from bird flu. I have given them to everyone I know whether they need one or not, tried to sell them, tried ignoring them hanging below the leaves and now I am contemplating freezing cucumber soup. Under the curtain of darkness courgettes grow into marrows overnight and the squash are climbing up the fruit netting. I ought to be pickling some of these but I can’t keep on top of the weeds and spend time indoors cooking. The upside is that I have melons doing nicely in the greenhouse. These need to be fertilized by hand and maybe I don’t get out enough, but I find it exciting when I discover the pollination has worked and a small, slightly oval shaped pale green, grey melon is hiding beneath the prickly leaves.

 At the moment, I need an eight-day week and then another day to unwind and relax. Gardeners are not good at sitting and enjoying what they have created; there is always a weed just at the edge of your vision that needs removing and a sense of guilt if you just ‘stand and stare’. So, I make moments; sitting in the early morning warmth of the sun with a bowl of muesli and a cup of tea, pausing to watch the butterflies dancing in the warmth above the brambles at the top of the bank when I check the sheep in the morning, the flash of Marbled Whites, Red Admirals with dusky closed wings, bright orangey brown Small Tortoiseshell, Gatekeepers and then a spectacular Coma with its curved wings, trapped in the heat and then from the shade of the trees come dark brown Speckled Woods.

Sometimes things just make you stop; the black and orange striped caterpillars of the cinnabar moth devouring a ragwort plant, a pyramidal orchid amongst the ox-eyed daisies, a cluster of tiny pink centaury, a small magpie moth trapped on the glass of the greenhouse. At other times, you have to make time happen like the evening we pitched our tent in the bottom field and sat beneath the wood listening to the rooks settling for the night as the light drained from the western sky and woke to their noisy calls at dawn.

Summer is so short. There is so much to do. There is so much to see and enjoy. Maybe I need a ‘to be’ list not a ‘to do’ list. Now there is a thought!

Two for the price of one

My aim when I first started writing my blog was to produce something each month but somehow April has become May and this month is fast disappearing so this is a bonus; two in one. I am actually sitting in a cottage overlooking the Atlantic writing this. I have slipped quietly away for a week in Ireland on the west coast along the famous Ring of Kerry. There is no Wi-Fi, no internet; the television has not been turned on. All I have is an amazing view of the sea crusted with small islands, cliffs, and mountains. For excitement, there is a pair of starlings nesting in the gutter, stonechats perching on the fence that rings the garden, skylarks, meadow pipits, and a hare that lops across the garden when I don’t have my camera to hand. I can reach out and touch the silence that holds this beautiful place together, take a deep breath and uncoil.

Because it has been rather hectic.

April came in gently and unfurled slowly; first there were tight dark green elder buds which opened to the warmth at the beginning of the month. Hard on these came the tiny, light fresh green leaves around the bore of the elm that grows by the roadside here and then the sycamore uncurled its leaves, followed by the showy horse chestnut with its chandeliers of white pink tinged flowers and finally reticent dark coloured ash leaves broke at the tops of the trees.

I got used to waking at first light cocooned in the warmth of bed, turning over in the silence just before dawn and watching the outline of the window grow pale as the sun crept up above the rim of the world, fingered its way along the top of hills and spread out along the river and the fields. Waiting, listening for the sound of the first bird to crack the spell of night and drifting back to sleep to the song of a blackbird waking the bird kingdom.

There were special moments: a young deer glimpsed crossing the road in front of the dog and I as we walked to work; the sound of a woodpecker drumming high up on the trunk of a sycamore, the first flypast of a blackbird with nesting material in its beak, and in mid-April, much too early, a lone house martin arrived and rested alone on the electricity wire slung above the disused huddle of farm buildings next door to my small holding. A week passed before two more arrived and then there was nothing and I have had to wait until I returned from holiday to see the sky above this old nesting site fill with the flash of wings and wheeling birds. Is an owl pellet on the roof of a duck shed a special moment? It was for me!

The orchard erupted into blossom. First came the plum, then greengage and the soft white of crab apple followed by a burst of colour from the Asian Pear my father had planted. The heady scent of apple trees in bloom bought out the bees and finally the quince I planted last year caught my breath with its pale pink flowers.

With the rush of warmth and life came the urge to sow seeds; tomatoes, cu’s, kohl rabbi, celery, celeriac, pumpkins, squash, melons, aubergines, peppers, and seed garnered from last year’s flowers in the garden. Lots of pots and seed trays and tiny miracles as things germinated in the balmy spell at the beginning of the month and the warmth of the greenhouse.

Finally, at the end of the month I planted out potatoes, too early maybe but the mice were feasting on the tubers and it was them or me.

The third week in April bought a heavy frost and despite copious amounts of bubble wrap I lost some of my tomato and cucumber plants. Nature has a way of gently reminding us that she is in charge and not us (thank goodness). At least I had earthed up the potatoes and they were untouched.

In the middle of April came the news that many poultry farmers, big and small, had been waiting for since the end of February; bird flu restrictions were lifted from the remaining special areas of protection and I could liberate my chickens and ducks. Maybe it was just my imagination but I am sure everyone was happier as I opened their old homes on the first morning and watched them emerge; the ducks on a mission to get to the pond and the hens scratching for England in the soft soil of their old run.

Then came a few hectic days cleaning up the polytunnel which had housed the chickens since December. I washed down the polythene, dug over the hardened earth where the chicken had compacted the soil, and restored the raised beds. At least I didn’t need to dung it, the job had been done for me.

The soil in the fruit cage where I had deposited the ducks had set solid. After weeks of rain, April had turned dry so I waited for more rain to soften the soil so I could rotovate it, and I waited and waited.

April is lambing.

There is always preparation and earlier this year we had bought a couple of pig arcs which we planned to use if the weather turned cold or wet. We reduced the area the flock were grazing with the use of electric fences so we could look after the new-borns better. I re-read the section on lambing in my sheep keeper’s bible and wished I hadn’t. Do you know how many different ways a lamb can get stuck inside an ewe?

Then comes the anticipation. What will one find when one arrives at work in the morning?

I needn’t have worried about anything because our experienced mums just got on and did it. No midwife required. I was surplus to requirements, arriving in time to catch the afterbirth, spray iodine on tiny navels against infection, and check that all the lambs were feeding properly. Oh, and straw the arcs because the weather had turned cold.

By the beginning of May, the world was green and lush, there were lambs in our field, chickens and ducks enjoying the weather, lots of plants in the polytunnel and I was ready for a break.

The run up to the holiday was panic stations, desperate attempts to organise everything before I left and there were moments when I wondered if it was worth going away. Then came that lovely feeling of release as you arrive and the gradual unwind that a break from routine brings. I made holiday resolutions to carry back with me. Relax more, take time to enjoy, stand and stare, the usual things. Have I kept them? Well it has taken me a week to finish this blog because the days have been so full so ………

Mad March Hares

Even smallholders have days off.

Mothering Sunday. Time for some self-indulgence.  A day off, doing what I fancied doing. So, the lawn, or what passes for the lawn lay uncut, and the oven stayed dirty and once I had fed and watered ducks and chickens and sheep I packed up my rucksack and slipped quietly through the gate and off for a walk. I took sandwiches, binoculars, a waterproof and a four-legged accomplice. As I sneaked away from the house a small voice echoed inside my head; but you have potatoes to plant and that area you dunged in the autumn needs rotovating. But I wasn’t listening because this was a special walk, a challenge, something I had promised myself I would do.

It had started on holiday last year when, driving back at dusk to the cottage we had rented on Orkney, a hare had run across the track in front of the car, the first hare I had seen for thirty years (give or take a century). The easy gait as it bounded along the road until it disappeared into a break in the fence, the sleek body, long back legs, the dark line of the ears, had touched something primeval deep down inside. Rabbits may be cute and cuddly and bright eyed, but there is something mysterious, magical about hares. One sighting wasn’t enough. I wanted to see another one and at my age I don’t have another thirty years to wait.

I bored everyone with the hare when I returned, including an old farming friend who smiled indulgently and told me where I could see them not much more than three miles from home. ‘Here in Sussex?’ I had repeated. He had nodded. So, I made myself a promise that before March (appropriately) was out I would take off in search of hares.

The walk took me down towards the river and then up over the top of the Downs into a clear blue sky that spread for miles across open countryside and softly merged with the sea to the south. By the river, the footpath had been sheltered from the sharp wind blowing from the east by a hedgerow dipped in the snowy white of blackthorn blossom. On the top I walked into the wind. On either side of the footpath stretched green fields of grazing sheep and brown stubble fields that would soon be ploughed and sown again with corn.

Perfect habitat for hares which like open grassland, flat wetland, and arable farm land. What I was looking for as I stopped to scan the open down land was a ‘form’, a shallow nest in the grass scratched out by a brown hare literally lying low sheltering from the wind. Rabbits are easy to spot from a distance because they are social animals. Hares are normally solitary creatures that only come together at certain times of the year. And this was the right time of year.  Around the Spring Equinox nature sends out some mysterious signal, that brings the hares together. The females or Jills stay in one area all their lives while the males (yes you guessed it; the Jacks) range over long distances but once they meet up the partying begins. They are nocturnal creatures and it is often at dusk that they can be seen chasing each other around fields, leap frogging in the air, rolling wildly in the grass and boxing as the moon rises above the earth. The boxing was always assumed to be males competing for females but it is now believed to be a battle between males and females; possibly the females are seeing off unwanted attention or maybe they are testing the fitness of potential mates. 

‘Mad March Hares’. 

It was probably too early to see leverets. Sometimes people stumble across baby hares and mistakenly think they have been abandoned but they are independent of their mothers from the beginning. They are born with fur and their eyes wide open, ready to go. The female or the ‘Jill’ makes a form for each of her offspring and ‘visits’ them, feeding and moving between them but living alone in her own form.

Anyway, I wasn’t expecting to see boxing hares or leverets. All I wanted was to see A hare.

And it was half way up a long haul to the top of the hill, along a narrow stony, footpath, enclosed by wind-blown hawthorn that I spotted a brown shape in the middle of the grassy field on my left. It was a long way off. I rummaged in my rucksack and found my binoculars. The dog wandered further on and stopped, waiting. As I focused I found the wind made it difficult to hold the ‘bins’ still and it’s sting made my eyes water. I could make out what looked like a brown rock with something black laid flat across the top of it. Ears? Was that an eye I could see? I propped the binoculars on top of a fencing post to steady them and looked again. The dog got bored, fixed a questioning eye on me, as I refocused. Was I looking at a hare or was my imagination playing tricks? I so wanted it to be a hare. After a long time, I decided it was a brown rock with black markings.  

I walked on, the dog walked on. I was almost at the top of the hill when I picked up another brown shape amongst the grass on the side hill. Binoculars again. Just in range. I held my breath. This looked like another rock, brown against the green of the grass around it and there, along the top of it, were streaks of black.

Coincidence? Impossible.

I was looking at my second hare.

Imbolc

Midway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox lies the ancient Celtic festival of Imbolc. One of the cornerstones of the Celtic calendar, it fell each year on the first of February and as our distant ancestors awoke, they gathered together to celebrate the passing of winter, the start of spring; the return of the sun and the stirring of new life. They were close to earth in a way that we will never be again. They were farmers. Their lives turned with the seasons and Imbolc marked the beginning of the lambing season, the start of their agricultural year. After the darkness and harshness of winter they looked forward to the promise of new growth and the renewed warmth of the sun and celebrated its arrival with light and fire.

One of the symbols of Imbolc was the Snowdrop. The first gift of Spring in the bleakness of Winter.

There are snowdrops in the lane. Perched on the top of the bank at the side of the road where it bends sharply before falling away downhill through a tunnel of sycamore and ash. Tiny, soft white teardrops suspended below pale green stems that shiver in the biting wind. They have pushed their way through the pointed arrow, dark, glossy leaves of the ivy which sprawls across the bank and up the bare grey trunks of the trees above. Beneath them rain has loosened chalk from the bank and rivulets of grey mud cut through the soft, mushy piles of last year’s leaves lying at the side of the road. Sheltered by the trees from the wind and rain driving from the southwest, these tiny pearls, fooled into opening by the warmth of the sun over the last few days, wait defiantly for the grey heavy clouds to lift from the hills that rise all around them.

Harbingers of Spring. 

They are not alone. Down at the farm dozens of sparrows squabble endlessly in the bottom of the hedgerows. Skirmishes break out inside the hawthorn, scraps take place amongst the blackthorn; birds flash from branch to branch, on the move, busy, attention seeking, vying for a mate, loud and incessant.  In the plum trees, smart black and grey long tailed tits are performing acrobatics across the bare branches, showing off to potential partners. From the middle of a green limbed elder a robin pours forth his territorial ambitions and above him a blackbird, perched high against a grey sky adds his song to the dank mist drifting across the valley. The air is split by the yaffle of a green woodpecker bobbing across the field. Birds in waiting for the spring.

The wind blows and briefly the dark sky lightens and a tear appears in the heavy sheet of grey lying along the horizon. Watery sunlight spills from the cloud and suddenly the wood, at the top of the hill, erupts as hundreds of rooks spill out from the dark, black, bare limbs of the trees. Rising, falling on the wind they wheel and turn against each other, their cries scorching the air. They fly around the top of the trees, settling briefly, and lifting again until the noise rises above the hill top. They know, they are ready, ready to move on with the year, ready to start building their scruffy nests up in the tops of the wind battered branches.

And me?  As I lift my boots from the cloying mud outside the greenhouse and look up at them I know too. The year is turning. Maybe, I will light a candle to Imbolc tonight.

And So, Into 2017

The New Year never happened. Having caught some nasty, vicious little virus that is doing the rounds; the sort that sends you scuttling (rather guiltily) to an out-of-hours doctor at the local hospital because you are feeling so ill, I didn’t get to celebrate New Year’s Eve or enjoy New Year’s Day.

But I did live to write another blog. I am on the mend but this evening cooking supper I suddenly thought how nice it would be to go away for a week. I’m not yearning for golden beaches, swaying palms and warm seas; maybe I am becoming a little weird in my old age (ok, weirder), because what I have in mind is something along the lines of a five-star hotel in the Highlands, with really good central heating, roaring fires, hot showers and deep luxurious baths, serving hearty winter food, with huge breakfasts that I don’t have to cook and a stock of carefully matured malt whiskey. I would like to throw in walks in the snow on crisp bright days and a trip or two out with a local wildlife expert to find red deer, red squirrels and maybe hares in their winter coats.

The reality is a little different. I spent this morning grappling with frozen locks and water pipes. Getting into the duck run through the electric fence was like breaking and entering. The gate, awash in a mire of mud after the incessant rain on New Year’s Day had melded to the ground. It required a hammer accompanied by the right amount of swearing to open their coup. As I watched them spread out across the frozen soil I silently prayed that Defra would lift the bird flu protection zone and they could return to their normal field where the ground was reasonably firm and dry.

As I hauled fresh water and food a treacherous thought rose to the surface. Why didn’t I just go to the local co-op and buy boxes of clean, weighed and sorted unmuddied eggs. My feet wouldn’t hurt with the cold or my back ache and I could be sitting inside in the warm nursing my evil little virus with a hot cup of coffee.

But then I watched the ducks doing their early morning tour of the improvised run inside the fruit cage, checking it carefully out while they waited for me to return with food and had to smile. I smiled again as I struggled into the polytunnel as the chickens advanced on me, pushing, shouldering each other, getting under my feet, eager to get at their food. The polytunnel should be full of winter salad in neat raised beds. It is strewn with straw and covered in chicken shit (sorry) but in the middle, stands our makeshift two-pallet coup and in the corner, are a cluster of warm eggs, dun coloured, brown, speckled, large ones from the older girls, small ones from the birds I bought in the autumn, that have now come into lay. I found myself talking to them.

Then it was the sheep. Our two breeding ewes have returned from their holiday having met a handsome ram so I carried an extra apple in my pocket for them. The sun had climbed into the thin, winter crystal blue of the sky and sent a shimmer of light across the jewelled grass. Life was good.

This evening I reversed the process; fed, water and shut the poultry up, switched on the electric fences and turned off the water. As I stood in the middle of my allotment amongst sprouts standing sentinel in the fading light, running a mental check list though my brain, I glanced up at the bank of trees above me and there was the moon, a sliver of pure silver rising through the bare branches of the ash trees. On its tail sat Venus climbing up into deep blue of the night sky.

Who needs a five-star hotel with luxurious baths in the Highlands?