Winter Solstice

Darkness is gathering along the rim of the hills to the east; light spilling from the heavy grey cloud that has sat hunched, arms crossed, along the Downs all day. To the west, at the head of the valley, a thread of silver light, trapped between black clouds and the dark green of the hills holds the last of the day together. The wind is blowing from the west and carries the smell of rain and something sharper; cold and earthy.

I am standing in the middle of my bottom field, just inside the chicken run. In the wood above me, the rooks are settling into the darkness gathering amongst the ash and sycamore that straddle the lip of the hill. The startled cry of a blackbird breaks from the brambles that trail along the base of the slope that climbs up into the trees. There are splashes of rain, and I turn the collar on my jacket up. I have ducks and chickens to feed and shut up for the night, plants to cover in case it turns cold, a polytunnel to close. I grab the chicken feeder and water drinker and head towards the shed where the food is stored.

Slowly, a huge pale grey-yellow moon rises from behind the sloping stubble field that lays behind me, and lifts through the bare, dark outstretched arms of the apple tree that stands beside my vegetable shed. It climbs on a soft bed of black cloud up into the evening sky and hangs above the darkening ground below, spreading pale yellow light across the sky around it.

The wind lifts across the field as the shortest day of the year slips away into the dark line of the hedgerow. Night, the longest night of the year, rolls off the hills.

We have arrived at mid-winter, the point at which the earth’s axis is tilted at its furthest point from the sun. Tonight, is the turning point of the year as the sun reaches its southernmost point in our hemisphere, pauses, and begins its trek northwards again across the sky.

Tonight, is the Winter Solstice. Tonight, is special; has always been special. Special for those who live close to the earth and its natural cycles. Those whose lives depend upon the weather and the seasons for survival. Hunters, gatherers, farmers, fisherman.

Special, for early Neolithic settlers on the island of Orkney, who almost five thousand years ago, created a burial mound, a chambered cairn, at Maes-howe on a flat, windswept finger of land caught between loch and sea. They carefully aligned the low, narrow entrance to the main chamber, to catch the rays of the low December sun before it sank below the horizon. Evidence suggests that they placed a standing stone at the entrance to the tunnel. They also erected a solitary monolith known as the Barnhouse Stone to the west of the cairn. On the day of the Winter Solstice the sun sets over the top of this stone and its last rays go on to illuminate the darkness of Maes-howe’s inner chamber.

Like their descendants who, two thousand years later built the stone circle at Stonehenge, they would have gathered as the day faded and darkness grew and stood in the silence of that burial chamber to wait for the moment when the last dying rays of the sun ran down the passage and cast light across them and their dead.

This was the turning point of winter. It was a promise. Light would grow again, the earth would warm, seeds would germinate. Those rays of light, down the passage, between the standing stones, bought hope.

But why is the Winter Solstice still special? Why do I pause and take a last look at the dark sky locked against the hills before I start for home? Our lives are divorced from the natural world and its cycles. Outside the temperature has dropped to freezing but the room is warm. We buy, we do not grow the food we eat. We are surrounded by things we have manufactured for our comfort and pleasure, we are cocooned from what is on the other side of the window, cushioned from the hardship of the weather, oblivious to the seasons. We no longer see ourselves as part of the natural world, of its cycles and its seasons. We believe we are in control.

Perhaps, we need a reminder that we are just one tiny speck in a vast, complex, symbiotic whole; that we are part of the same cycle as our ancestors were, that we are bound by the same laws of nature as those early Neolithic settlers on Orkney.  Perhaps we need to stop and stand and watch the sky as the longest night begins; to feel at one with what is around us again.

Then maybe, just maybe, a shift will take place in the way we see our place in this world because we have badly screwed up. As a species we have become too greedy. We have ransacked this planet we depend on, used its resources for our own ends, taken, but given nothing back, forgotten that we are not the only species living here, refused to acknowledge that our way of living is unsustainable and in pursuit of our own mean, selfish ends have become too clever for our own good.

On this eve of the Winter Solstice we are standing in the shadows and staring into a different darkness. Our future and the future of everything that lives on this world, is balanced on a fine knife edge. And I am talking run-away climate change here. A disaster of our own making. According to eminent scientists we have ten maybe fifteen years to turn things around, to ensure there is a future for our children and their children.

We need action, determination to do this. We need to put the planet first and ourselves second otherwise both of us will perish. We need to change the way we live dramatically. We need to make hard decisions, sacrifices in order to survive. We need to realign ourselves with the earth on which we live and we need a ray of light coming down a narrow passage way into a darkened chamber. We need hope.

Decisions

Her fleece is milk-chocolate brown, tightly curled against the skin, soft and lanolin-oily as I run my hand down her back. Her head rests cupped in my other hand. Brown faraway eyes, narrow dark slanted irises look up at me. Her nostrils twitch. She knows I have apples hidden in the pocket of my shorts. This is not a stupid sheep. She has not walked the length of the field for me to fuss over her. She is waiting for her treat. There is a rush of noise as the rest of the flock come running down the hillside towards us. They are not stupid sheep either.

I would miss this; this moment of intimacy with another living creature if I gave it up. I look up towards the woods at the top of the field where the rooks are lazily lifting and falling on the warm morning air. The trees shelter the field from the south westerlies that blow from the coast. It is a good field for sheep. It could do with more shade, something I have learned from this summer. Maybe a lean-to shelter of some sort in a corner which catches a cool breeze. My mind wanders off into plans for the future before I quickly catch myself and stop. I have a decision to make; the decision of whether or not I carry on with the sheep.

Sheep were never really part of the masterplan for this place, but then there was never really a master plan either. It just grew and the sheep just happened along. Seven Shetlands in need of a home, four wethers and three ewes. 

At the time my friend Katie was helping out with the allotment side of things, mainly out of the kindness of her heart and the odd bag of nibbled vegetables and pick your own fruit. Katie had been a shepherdess in a former life and in passing had said, with a far off look in her eye, she would love to keep sheep again. That look was there when we went to visit our new potential flock and discovered these weren’t any old sheep. They were Shetlands with a pedigree and proper ancestry. So somehow, we ended up by having a family. Think puppy syndrome. Who goes to view a litter of puppies and ends up coming home empty handed?

So it was, a few weeks and some hard work fencing later, the Shetlands arrived. I knew nothing at all about sheep apart from the fact that they had four legs, hooves that could cause problems if wet, and woolly coats that needed removing once a year. Katie was the expert. I still don’t know much about sheep but I look after them on a day to day basis and telephone Katie in emergencies and for advice. Over the last three years (is it really that long?) I have grown accustomed to having them. They have become part of the daily routine. I have stood and watched them lamb, worried about fly strike, carefully trimmed their feet, and fed and watered them in the snow.

Now things are changing. Last year Katie took on more sheep, renting land near where she lives and now she is seriously thinking about moving down to the west country and buying a small holding. If her dream becomes reality and she leaves I am on my own with my small flock of woollies. The question is, do I know enough to become solely responsible for them. Am I up to the job. Am I strong enough to handle them or am I too old now to do this?

The question of whether or not to keep the sheep or send them down west with Katie poses a larger question. How much do I want to do on the smallholding in the future? Should I be thinking about scaling down, reduce the number of vegetables I grow, phase out the ducks and the chickens and buy my eggs from the supermarket. Do I run pigs again next year; my sweet, playful piglets have become very large and pushy and I have a plaster on the back of my leg where ‘Ginger’ decided I was tastier that the contents of the bucket I was carrying. They are getting scary!!

I have struggled this long hot summer to keep on top of everything in the kitchen garden. I have been running since April to keep up.

Just at the moment I feel I probably need to catch my breath. I have been lucky this summer. I have had a night camping, another bivouacking, two weekends out, and a short trip away. More than a lot of farmers and small holders manage to arrange.  Going away can be a nightmare to organise, exhausting before you go trying to get up close with everything and hard work when you come back trying to catch up. Sometimes it is easier just to stay still and keep on working.

But I find myself wondering what happened to Sunday once a week and the pledge I made the dog that we would get out for a ‘decent’ walk regularly?

Equally, I have suddenly become aware of my age; the mirror in the morning says it all.

I also have a new little person in my life who is going to need her Nan to look after her on occasions.

So, am I saying I should wind everything down, squander the children’s inheritance, buy that camper van and drive off into the sunset?

What I do know is that this autumn is decision time. I need to look at the future and decide what I am going to do with the rest of my life. Do I carry on or let the reins drop and go for a softer, easier existence. Tempting.

There is the sound of quiet munching all around me as the sheep take the apples they are offered. A soft breeze shivers through the wood. The sun is lifting above the hills and warming my back. All is right with the world. I am going to walk down to the veg shed, put the kettle on and go through my list of jobs for the day.

Maybe I can find a beginner’s course on how to handle sheep, enlist some help to re-net the fruit cage and dig the rabbit fence, or even plan a few good canine walks.  

I wonder where the best place for a sheep shelter is?

Surfacing

I am sitting sheltered from the wind in the entrance of a small two-man tent looking down across a hillside topped with line after line of dark brooding conifers. Beneath them, catching the afternoon light, is a fringe of ash, rubbing shoulders with sycamore and field maple. And below them threads a line of quivering silver birch.

At the bottom of the valley lies Ladybower Reservoir, its sunken village and church hidden beneath sunlit silver-grey water that ripples with the breeze. Above, the sun plays games with the shifting clouds, lighting patches of moorland across the mountains in the distance.

I am in Derbyshire for five days. Time out, with the soft murmur of the trees behind me and the rustle of the tent around me and total peace and quiet reaching out with long fingers in all directions. Around the tent purple-whiskered thistles push up through long, dry, brown stalks of grass and tiny pale blue harebells nod in time to the wind. There is a cup of tea beside me and a book lies face down on the dusty earth waiting to be picked up again. I ignore it and just sit and look. I close my eyes for a second and listen to the mewing of a buzzard lost somewhere in the blue of the sky and the grey of the clouds. As he spirals upwards I catch sight of him lifting above the mountains, riding the thermals into endless blue. Up and up and up.

This pilgrimage to Derbyshire at the beginning of August is becoming a habit. This is the fourth year in a row I have stayed here at the top of Hope Valley, taking time out and gradually surfacing from the two busiest months of the year on the smallholding. June and July are manic as every gardener knows. As you turn the calendar over into August things begin to ease off; the sowing and planting are over and the weeding and hoeing become less imperative, and harvesting what you have grown becomes part of a routine.  

Every year is the same but different. This has been an amazing summer, shrink wrapped in heat, with endless blue skies, and not a drop of rain for two months. Holiday weather; weather to lie back and enjoy on a beach, asleep in a hammock in the garden or on a gentle walk through a woodland. Not weather for farmers, smallholders or growers.

It has been totally full on. Hard work, moments of despair when I have wondered why I do this smallholding thing, wonderful moments, moments of anxiety, sadness, and joy.

I need to share these:

Definitely hard work: Spring was long, late, wet and cold and I found myself a month behind trying to get things into the ground. Then at the beginning of June it stopped raining and as temperatures soared the ground dried out and plants struggled to survive despite long hours spent watering. Everything has need extra coaxing, extra care.

Despair: during the long, wet lead up to summer I watched as slugs and snails munched their way through seedlings, demolished struggling brassica; devouring everything green; except the weeds of course. As I re-sowed they came back for seconds.

Couldn’t we come to some sort of arrangement? Eat the weeds, not the crops and I will be extra specially careful that I don’t step on you as you slither around at night on your silvered trail.

Heat drove the molluscs into hiding. The snails found deep, dark cervices between pots and paving slabs and sealed up their shells to conserve moisture. The slugs, slunk off into the undergrowth. But then came the cabbage white butterflies; white, delicate, beautiful, with amazing striped caterpillars which are capable of annihilating a row of cabbages or sprouts, in hours.

After that it was the rabbits that infiltrated my rabbit proof allotment.

But the final straw came when the fruit cage fell apart. It has always been essential for protecting strawberries, raspberries, red, white and black currants from the birds. As holes appeared in the netting, inviting in a variety of feathered friends, it quickly became apparent that old age and the heat had taken their toll. Blackbirds, thrushes, dunnocks and a single black cap took advantage of the gap in defences and feasted on the fruit.

Wonderful Moments; there have been so many.

Waking to an ear shattering dawn chorus camping in the Wye Valley on a stolen weekend.

Bivouacking beside the Adur, lying on my back looking up at a clear, dark sky hung with millions of tiny worlds long since dead. Falling asleep to wake at first light, and sitting with a cup of tea in hand, watching a barn owl hunt along the misty edge of the river bank.

Sharing our bedroom with an elephant hawk moth.

Watching a rare stag beetle flying at dusk.  

Shutting up the ducks as large bats (too big for pipistrelles) winged their way across my bottom field.

Sitting on our patio, glass of wine in hand, listening to the night, surrounded by darkness and the warmth of a summer’s evening.

Lying in a hammock looking up at the trees stretching into the night sky.

Anxiety: sitting beside a sick pig on a hot, sweltering afternoon willing him not to die after the vet had left having administered anti-biotics for an unknown infection. What had I done wrong? Had I missed earlier signs of illness. Was I fit to keep livestock? How did I get fond of a pig I mean to eat?! Everything going around in my head.

Sadness: The sudden death of an old friend. A lovely human being who will be sorely missed.

Then one evening at dusk, as a chill rose from the grass, I walked over the field to shut up the ducks and chickens and stopped to listen. On the evening air came the sound of ewes calling for their lambs. It drifted down the valley from a neighbouring farm and hung around me; sad, plaintive, persistent and I knew the lambs had just been separated from their mothers. The ewes had called through the sticky heat of the day for their loss and they would call into the dark stillness of the night.

Wrapped in the sound was all the sadness of our planet. All the damage we have done to this earth we live on. We have taken away its wild places, stolen its forests, denuded its resources, caused mass extinctions of its animals, polluted its rivers, seas, and air and now we are changing its climate. And we cannot see what we do.

The spectre of climate change has stalked this summer. Record temperatures have been set and then reset. Farmers, those producing our food, have struggled as grazing has dried up, corn yields have crashed, crops have suffered. The countryside is parched and wildlife has had a hard time of it as well. Reservoirs like Lady Bower are seriously depleted. There have been fires. The effects go on and on and this may be only just the beginning.

I looked around me at the brown dried out field I was standing in and prayed for rain.

Then there were moments of Joy: returning in the evening to the pig to see him on his feet coming to the gate for food. A miracle.

You need to hang onto these moments………. like sitting outside a tent at the top of Hope Valley, listening to a buzzard and watching shadows shifting over distance moorland. Surfacing from everyday life, and gathering strength to go back and carry on with it.

Dawn Chorus

5^th May. 4.30am. Dawn. Soft grey, grainy light has slipped into the room through the window pushing the darkness into the corners. Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, a bird breaks the silence of the early morning. A blackbird. Maybe the one that sings from the apple tree at the end of the garden.

I turn over, squint at the clock and hurriedly switch off the alarm. As I shuffle out of the bedroom I ask myself whose stupid idea it was to get up at this ridiculous hour to go on a dawn chorus walk. I could have listened to the bird’s wake-up call lying in bed, cocooned in a warm comfortable duvet.  ‘You booked it’ replied a tiny voice inside my head. No answer to that.

Filled with toast and tea, binoculars and notebook in rucksack I set off. It is the perfect morning to be up early; a chill rising from the ground, the sun lifting into a clear, pale blue sky etched with soft white contrails. And everywhere it is green.

After long months of wet and cold, with a false start in April that sent everyone rummaging for sun cream and shorts, followed by more miserable cold and wet, spring has finally spilled out across the fields, along the hedgerows and through the woods. The lane is laced with waist high white umbels of Cow Parsley, elephant-eared leaves of burdock and the tiny mauve flowers of Herb Robert. Gone are the glossy dark green leaves and yellow splashes of celandines. They have been shouldered out by clumps of Garlic Mustard, (or Jack by the Hedge) with its small white flowers and spicy green leaves. The Hawthorn has finally broken and the Sycamore is shedding its pale green florets across the tarmac. The Horse Chestnut at the bottom of the hill is covered in creamy white panicles each made up of tiny, white, five petalled flowers with deep lipstick pink centres quivering in the gentle early morning breeze.

Early May is the perfect time to meet up to enjoy the dawn chorus. Bird song is at its height because it is the breeding season. We might pause, hold our breath and listen to a blackbird pouring out its song from the top of a tree as daylight fades, amazed at the beauty of the sound but birdsong is purely functional as far as the birds are concerned. It is all to do with sex. The strident song of a wren hidden in a thicket of brambles is a come and get me call to catch that soul mate we all look for. The liquid sound of a nightingale late in the evening is a lure designed to attract migrating females passing overhead. The robin sitting on the fence, singing its heart out as daylight breaks is warning possible competition to stay out of his territory. In May sexual activity hots up and so does the bird song. By June most birds have paired up and the serious business of rearing young takes priority and nights out on the town looking for that perfect partner have become a thing of the past.

I arrive a little late (as usual). The group has already gathered at the edge of the village where fields open out westwards and the Downs sweep up towards the sky to the south. A dozen of us; all carrying binoculars and well wrapped up. After introductions and the inevitable safety talk we set off along a gravelled road dubbed ‘Nightingale Lane’ into the hushed stillness of the morning.

On our left runs an overgrown thicket of Hawthorn, Blackthorn and Elder with Willow, Sycamore, and Ash rising behind. The sun has lifted above the tree line and is picking out the new green growth of the hedge. Behind it lies a mill pond, overgrown with reeds and hidden from view.

We pause to listen to a Chiffchaff repeating its name followed by a trill. I am looking for a small grey, brown bird with paler underparts but cannot see it flitting around amongst the leaves. Migrants, they arrive here in April from the Mediterranean. To the right of the Chiffchaff our guide Andrew picks up the wheezing sound of Green Finches as they dart through the trees. They form loose colonies for nesting. Safety in numbers? We pick up the song of a Chaffinch practising its musical scales. Someone once told me to remember the Chaffinch’s song by imagining a bowler working up to pitch a ball and for me that works.

And then comes one of my favourite bird songs and I see him! A Blackcap performing his rich musical repertoire; just for me. Another migrant which arrives in April. He has a black skull cap, she wears a blue. A Song Thrush competes, repeating the same tune, not once, not twice but three times to make sure we have got it! There are wrens hidden deep inside the hedgerow singing against each other.

Finally, the lane lives up to its name and the warbling, bubbling sound of a Nightingale pours out into the still morning air. Their numbers are declining, mainly due to the loss and degradation of their coppiced woodland but there are other factors involved which we are uncertain about including an increase in the number of deer grazing on the vegetation they need.

At the end of the lane, a gate opens out into a wide grassy valley with steep sides where if you look carefully you will find cowslips and Early Purple Orchids growing alongside each other. There are Skylarks rising and falling and singing around us. We climb and behind us the Weald yawns and stretches out his arms and turning around we can see forever. In the distance lies the smudge of the North Downs. Below us are fields, hedges, woods, churches, farms, villages wrapped in the soft cellophane light of a spring morning.

As we climb, the sun climbs and warms our faces. We are surrounded by open country dotted with clumps of brambles and thorn bushes. Here there are Whitethroat with their raspy song as they take off and dart from one clump of brambles to another. Linnets flit from bush to bush. Someone spots a Yellow Hammer, and we stop to listen to the ‘chink, chink’ of its call.

Almost at the top of the hill, a pause for breath and in the clear blue sky is a Buzzard, up early. This one has not waited for the air to warm so he can use the thermals to lift into the sky. We leave him and as we plunge into the shade of the woodland that runs along the top of these Downs a Green Woodpecker yaffles across the valley. Amongst the trees Andrew picks up the call of a Stock Dove. Often in pairs they nest in holes in trees. Finally, he pauses to listen to the song of a Gold Crest, too high up in the branches to see and too high pitched for me to hear.

Sadly, we begin our walk back. Down from the hills, through the valley, along Nightingale Lane and back to the village. Back to noise and cars and people. Back to reality.

Piggies

We turned off the main road onto a country lane. Narrow, winding, muddy and lined with trees. The Downs were a misty smudge to the south as we headed north into the Weald through ancient bluebell woodland that rubbed shoulders with small lush green fields grazed by sheep. We drove down Furnace Lane, passed a large pond on our right and Hammer Pond Cottage on the left. Ghosts of another age when these woods vibrated to the sound of an iron industry that thrived on abundant wood for charcoal, iron ore, and water for power.

The farm land here was very different. The smallholding we were heading for was on heavy clay, much lusher but also much wetter. More grass for sheep but more problems with their feet. 

The directions were clear. A large red brick wall on the right and a little further on a gate and a large pig arc. As we arrived dead on time, the tight little knot in my stomach tightened.

This was it. A plan, a long time in the making, was about to come to fruition.

We were expected, the gate was opened. Parked beside the track leading into the farm was a Land Rover hitched to a trailer. As I climbed down from the truck and walked over to it a belligerent squeal echoed around the inside of the trailer.

The idea of keeping pigs had been there at the beginning; from the point when I knew I was going to take on my father’s old small holding. It was part of the deal I made with myself. There would be chickens and ducks for eggs, an allotment and an orchard. I hadn’t planned the sheep but they came anyway. I definitely wanted to rear pigs. The plan was to buy in eight-week-old weaners which I would fatten up for slaughter at around seven or eight months to fill up the old white freezer that stands in the corner of the shed.

I know this is the point at which I lose the vegetarians and the vegans have already left at the mention of chickens and ducks.

Why don’t I feel guilty, mortified by the idea of keeping an animal, perhaps growing fond of it, that I plan to kill and eat? Perhaps it is because I am a farmer’s daughter. We kept pigs when I was child. I have dim memories of the pig pens, the smell, the snuffling grunts as they moved around, soft white bodies, floppy ears and prying snouts. I enjoyed the pigs but I knew they were with us for a purpose. They would become pork and I liked pork.

So, when I embraced the concept of self-sufficiency, meat was on the menu as well as vegetables. I respect anyone who has principles about eating another creature but we are omnivores and I am never going to be a vegetarian. I feel it is acceptable to rear an animal to eat, providing it is given a good life, with access to the outdoors and freedom to move around naturally while it is alive. I am turning my back on cheap factory farmed meat, which is what we as consumers demand, and going for something free range and home grown.

As I peered into the trailer at the two pigs that I would be taking home with me, I was aware that this would not have been possible without the help of a good friend, an agricultural contractor I use for fencing and hedging. He was my hero over the pigs.

For a start he didn’t laugh (not even a smirk) when I confided in him that I fancied keeping pigs. He actually suggested that I use the shrubby piece of bank that divides my top field from the bottom as an area to run the pigs on. The larger trees would provide shade, the long grass and shrub something for the pigs to root around in. He agreed to sort out the fencing, which given the terrain, was never going to be easy and then he gently took me in hand and organised my dream.

Work started on the fencing in February and continued through the bitterly cold weather that the beginning of March threw at us. I had decided on stock fencing reinforced with two strands of electric wire at snout height. Belt and braces, because if there is one thing that pigs are good at, it is escaping. Colditz has nothing on a couple of smart pigs. We rigged the electric fencing up to the mains. Then came the problem of water. I had visions of filling a trough with a bucket but this was quickly rejected and I now have a self-filling water butt connected to the mains supply. Pigs drink a lot, and I mean a lot. He moved the pig arc I had bought into place and I took his advice on where to dig a wallow for my pigs to cool off in. Thought and care and attention to detail went into the job of turning this small piece of land into a suitable home for the new arrivals.

Both of them! This was never going to be a big commercial enterprise! The plan was to buy the piglets in the spring and fatten them up over the summer ready to send to slaughter at the end of October. The land would then have a chance to recover over the winter and the process would start again in the next spring. I am a fair-weather pig keeper. I don’t want to wade around in lots of mud coping with frozen water pipes.

I had chosen Oxford Sandy and Blacks, which have been around for almost three hundred years. Without the dedication of a small enthusiast group of pig breeders they would disappear. I peered into the trailer to meet my new pigs. They are, as the name says, a sandy, ginger colour with black markings. We loaded the larger of the two piglets into the dog crate I had bought for the journey home. He was predominantly ginger with small patches of black and one white ear. The second piglet was smaller but louder and much darker with a black rump. His ears hadn’t dropped. They were still pinned against his head. Three weeks on they are still pinned to the side of his head and he is still the loudest.

As we finished loading and I paid for them the enormity of what I had just done settled in the pit of my stomach. I know virtually nothing about keeping pigs. I am learning on the job. I have read up on pig keeping, frightened myself by looking at all the diseases they can suffer from, registered with a local livestock vet who has checked them out and successfully negotiated all the paper work that goes with keeping even small numbers of animals. I have listened to a lot of people with different advice and the main thing seems to be that everyone I have talked to is enthusiastic about keeping pigs and has assured me I will enjoy them.

As I take them their feed in the mornings and watch them rush up to the gate, squealing to greet me, I have to smile. They are characters; intelligent, friendly, inquisitive, funny and yes definitely …. enjoyable. 

If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?

I am sitting in my office at home surrounded by seed potatoes. They are ‘chitting’! I have popped them into egg boxes, each one carefully labelled because I know from previous experience that they get muddled up and one potato looks very much like another, even if it is a red Desiree. They are laid out along the windowsills and across the floor where they catch the light and warmth of the sun. My son believes that I have finally lost it but as I pointed out they would not be in here if he hadn’t returned home after a stint of travelling and reoccupied his bedroom!

Hopefully, the potatoes will respond by sending out tiny grey, green shoots and if the weather changes dramatically by the end of the month I could be living dangerously and planting the first earlies out.  Living dangerously, because the smallest hint of frost will seriously damage the tubers and blacken any leaves foolish enough to raise their heads above ground. For the uninitiated, in the earthy world of potatoes, first earlies, as the name suggests, are the first potatoes planted in the spring. These are real ‘new’ potatoes. Forget the imposters from Egypt. Freshly dug from warm, dark soil they are mouth-watering gently boiled with a sprig of fresh mint and rolled in melted butter. I plant Arun Pilot and start lifting them about a hundred days after they have gone in.

Then come the second earlies. For the last two years I have planted Charlotte. Next come the tough guys; the main crop which, all being well, will provide potatoes all through next winter and into the early Spring. My choice? Cara, Pentland Crown and Desiree.

The potatoes wait. Outside darkness sits around the cottage. The windows are streaked with rain and the rising wind is slicing across the field from the west. It is wet but warm and it seems impossible that just over a week ago we had snow coming out of the east.

Despite the veil of wind and rain that lay across the sodden hills, January and February had carried a seed, a promise that the year had turned but early spring is a deceiver, a siren, calling from the depths of winter. Her beguiling smile tempts us with glimpses of good things to come as days lengthen and the sun, trapped in sheltered corners, feels warmer and the air carries a tingle of excitement.

Light had begun to creep under the window at six in the morning and the birds had started rehearsals for the dawn chorus. The rooks in the wood above the small holding had been adding daily to the number of untidy, large, dark nests that stand out against the bare branches of the ash trees. There were splashes of vivid yellow and purple where crocuses had lifted their heads through the grass. Tiny dark green buds appeared from nowhere on the elder and the lower branches of the elm that grows along the side of the road on our walk to work had broken into tight, soft, pale green buds. Toads were on the move.

St Valentine’s Day unfolded to the sound of a woodpecker booming close to the house and there was a perfect early-spring-warm evening when the dog and I walked home in daylight against the crimson of a sunset that threw its reflection across the eastern ridge of the Downs in front of us and turned the hills a soft pink in the fading sky.

But then fickle Spring turned her back, shook her hair, shrugged a cold shoulder and delivered snow. In a second the world ground to a halt as it vanished beneath a covering of white.

The snow had arrived overnight and by dawn the garden lay masked under a soft sprinkling of white and a flurry of tiny, icy flakes drifted across a dark, grey, heavy sky. The ground turned to iron, pipes froze and the wind chill factor took the temperature down to something that felt like minus three. The dog, from a long line of working Collies, refused to go out. His only excuse as far as I could see was that at three and a half this was the first snow he had seen. I donned another layer of clothing, coaxed the resisting canine outside, slide my way along the lane to the small holding, prayed locks would open, carried water, laid down extra straw in the poultry houses, cracked ice on water troughs, fed hay to the sheep and gritted the yard. This was real winter.

Peering out between hat and scarf, eyes stinging with the biting wind I could only wait for a rise in temperature, a thaw that would soften the ground, open up the water pipes again and uncover the grass for the sheep.

And sure enough, the world turned and having left a trail of disruption the snow disappeared overnight silently and swiftly as it had come.

Wind and rain have filled its place. The mud has returned. But maybe (with the optimism only a gardener processes) the rain will ease; the wind will dry the soil and in a few weeks’ time I can plant out the first of those potatoes.

Something in the Air

The end of January and outside it is still dark as I grope my way down the stairs and put on the kettle for that first early morning cup of tea. Yet there is something in the air, a special magic when I open the kitchen door to let the dog out.  A hushed dark stillness, rain-washed overnight, hangs above the garden. I wait and watch in the warmth of the doorway as black softens into muzzy grey and the long limbs of the trees across the garden lift out of the darkness. From the upper branches of a hawthorn in the hedge comes the muted song of a robin. Then from the top of the elm over the road comes the piecing high note of a thrush, carefully repeating his song, again and again and again. Across the lane, in the bushes on top of the bank opposite, there is movement; birds flashing from one branch to another, silhouetted for a second against the hedge. Excited, long tailed tits.

As dawn opens her wings, a tingle, a shot of magic runs through the darkness and the dampness. Sharp, fresh, exciting; the year is turning. 

I am not the only one to have felt the shift in the seasons. There has been a great tit singing in the plum tree just outside the vegetable shed down at the farm, the familiar, strident ‘teacher, teacher’ call of early spring filling the damp air with its promise of things to come. I watched a pair of blue tits cavorting around each other a couple of days ago and I am sure the rooks in the wood above the small holding are getting restless as they lift and fall with the wind above the rookery. The low dark cloud around them carries the sound of their squabbling as they jostle for landing space amongst the moving limbs of the leafless ash.

On a neighbour’s double chimney pot sit two dark crows thinking about nest building, heads bent together prying into the dark interior of the stack.  

A week ago, there were tightly budded clusters of tiny snowdrops at the top of the lane, knuckled down against the bank of ivy at the side of the road, holding out against the rain and wind driving off the hills. Now they have opened; flawless white flowers standing out against the dark as I walk home in the evening head down against the cold. There are yellow crocuses on the lawn and a single celandine hiding beneath the bay tree.

In the corner of the bottom field, just beyond the boundary fence below the wood and the rookery, someone, somewhen, planted three hazel trees and coppiced them so they rise like outstretched fingers from the stools that were left when they were cut. The male catkins appeared before Christmas and now look long and showy, pale green against the bare branches of the ash that grows beside them. I look carefully and find tiny scarlet tipped female buds growing from the lower stems. They will open in a few days into minute vibrant crimson tufts; small, beautiful harbingers of Spring.

It is all too early but there is no going back.

At the beginning of the month in a surge of enthusiasm and optimism, on a wet, windy morning with storm Eleanor driving across the allotment, rocking the polytunnel and threatening to tear it from the ground, I collected together small pots, an assortment of cell plant trays, plant labels, and mixed a tub of part soil, homemade compost and well-rotted manure and set about sowing seeds. In pots I sowed Sweet Peas; four tiny black seeds, saved from last summer, in each and carefully popped them into a propagator to stop the mice from feasting on them. Over the plant trays I optimistically sprinkled Artic King lettuce seed, and more optimistically Coriander I had collected from the plant that took over a corner of the polytunnel two summers ago and finally totally optimistically I found a half empty packet of parsley seed and scattered that over a tray. Having carefully watered everything I stood back and waited. I put my money on the Sweet Peas but in fact it was the lettuce seedlings which appeared first about ten days ago. As I lifted the bubble wrap I cover everything with at night there they were; tiny miracles. Then the Coriander appeared against all my expectations.

Disappointment inched its way into the polytunnel as morning after morning I lifted the covers on the empty Sweet Pea pots. Had the mice miraculously found a way into the propagator, had the seed failed? Then two days ago they appeared, thin and spindly but definitely seedlings, four to a pot and if nothing else eats them and they don’t rot through my clumsy watering I have the beginnings of my flower garden for the summer.

Now I need to buy the rest of my seed.

It has started. Tomorrow January becomes February and the year is already unravelling, rolling out in front of us, carrying us onwards into the distance.