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.