'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?

Bird Flu

The news caught up with me just before lunch yesterday.

Over the last few days, things have become easier down on the farm; the weather has given us a respite from the cold, outside water is now flowing and everything that looked so frozen and sad a week ago, has pulled through. Even the coriander in the polytunnel looks as if it might survive to photosynthesis another day.

So, I was in a good mood as I swung into the kitchen to grab a sandwich. Enter my better half; had I heard about the bird flu threat and the decision by DEFRA to impose an Avian Influenza Prevention Zone across England, Wales, and Scotland? No, I hadn’t but I was about to.

There have been outbreaks of what is classified as a ‘highly pathogenic strain’ of avian influenza (there are two strains and this is the nasty one) in several eastern European countries very recently and now the news was of one in France, just across that tiny stretch of water that separates us from all sorts of harm. The disease is spread by contact, bird to bird and through body fluids and faeces rather than airborne so very early yesterday morning the government decided to enforce an ‘immediate and compulsory housing of domestic chickens, hens, turkeys and ducks or their separation from wild birds’; rough quote from the DEFRA website. This applies to all poultry flocks, big and small, from large producers to people like me with a few birds. The order stands for a month until the 6^th January.

As I walked down to shut up my birds, I was trying to work out what I was going to do. My chickens and ducks are free range. They spend their lives outside. They live in small arks and have large runs surrounded by electric fencing which protects them from foxes but not viruses. How was I going to comply and protect them? The arks are too small to keep the birds in for a month. The runs are too big to cover in any way. By the time I reached the smallholding I had had a couple of flashes of inspiration. The chickens could go into the polytunnel and there was room for the ducks in our bird proof fruit cage where I had pulled up a bed of aging strawberry plants in the Autumn.

A plan. I would need to borrow a crate to put the birds in while we moved house for them, we would still need the electric fencing because I don’t trust our fox population, we would need to dismantle part of the fruit cage to move the duck ark inside it and we would need to construct some sort of roosting area inside the polytunnel where the chickens would feel safe at night and lay their eggs.

Somehow today we did it. I rescued some of the plants that were in pots from the polytunnel, cut parsley and coriander to dry and turned my back on the beds of leaf salad and greens and then we swung into action with a couple of pallets and some ply to create a nesting area for the chickens, caught them and introduced them to their new home. Then came the electric fencing around the outside and much swearing.

Once family one was settled in, we concentrated on the ducks and moved their ark into the safe zone I had chosen for them. More electric fencing and more swearing but we did it. There is no pond but they can move around through the raspberry canes and shovel for worms.

Once everything was done I peeped into the polytunnel to see how the chickens were faring in their new abode. The leaf salad, spinach and lettuce were gone and the greens were stripped and they looked remarkably happy with life.

Tonight, as I shut up the ducks and checked the chickens everything was quiet, all had settled down in their new homes; it was just my world that had turned upside down.

Winter

Who rattled Winter’s cage? Who poked a stick between the bars and woke her from her slumbers? Who whispered in her ear, ‘ok enough of this rain and wind. How about some real winter weather’?

As she awoke and we slept, temperatures plunged. Up early, she tiptoed down the lane and brushed the leaves, which had been scooped by the wind into piles at the edge of the road, with frozen fingers. Her skirts swirled across the fields and left behind a rind of white frost. Water turned grey and frozen. The air stood still, holding its breath in the silence left by the cold. The sun rose above the rim of the hills into a spotless sky. The light fired the bare branches of the silver birch and the world shook itself and woke to a winter’s morning.

-7⁰C. I checked the thermometer on the wall outside the porch as I pulled on my coat and struggled into gloves. This was it. My first real winter as a small holder. The dog and I walked into work. A short walk, with the warmth of the sun as it lifted through the trees, with ears stinging with the cold, breath hanging on the air, fingers throbbing, with contrails in a clear blue sky, hips sparkling with frost, with a sudden loud green woodpecker bobbing across a stubble field, with eyes watering, a robin, and with a good to be alive feeling deep in the warmth inside.

Then we were there, standing outside a glistening polytunnel looking out across the field to the chicken and duck arcs pitched in a field painted white by the frost.

When I opened up, the chickens spilled out across the frozen run, fanning out across the grass as usual. When it became apparent to them that the ground they were pecking at was frozen solid they seemed to accept the situation with a large dollop of stoicism and made a headlong assault on the feeder of mash I carried into their run.

The ducks were confused. Their flurry out of the shed normally ends in the pond, in the water in the pond that is. Today this was not to be. They stood on it, tested it, walked across it and one of them tried to take off from it but nobody got to swim.

Water was the first problem. The weather forecast had warned it would be cold but I hadn’t expected all the outside water to be frozen. The pipes were lagged but there are limits and -7⁰ was obviously it. Even water inside the field shed was frozen and the kettle in the veg shed was solid ice. And it was not about to thaw. I was obviously not well organised. There was no choice but to scourge buckets of water from one of the workshops that lies alongside the small holding so the birds could drink and I could make coffee.

Then it was up to the sheep. The field at the top where they are grazing slopes gently east to west and the sun was warming the air and the ground. I carried apples as a treat and hand fed some of the more trusting sheep, lingering in the warmth of the sun and enjoying the view across the river valley to the hills in the distance. The bottom field, where the birds and the allotment are, was still lying in shadow and still very cold.

Then came the polytunnel and greenhouse. As I lifted the bubble wrap from the plants things did not look good. Even with the extra protection, the leaf salad and lettuce, carrots, parsley, and spring greens lay limp and sad. The coriander was definitely not going to be a survivor. There is nothing I can do except hope some of the plants come round as temperatures rise.

Now was the time to get organised better. More water carrying, ready for late afternoon when the ducks and chickens would be fed again and put safely away for the night. Then there were extra buckets of water for the morning wrapped in old paper sacks inside the field shed. I wasn’t going to get caught out again. Extra straw to keep everyone warm. Everything is a learning curve.

Winter is enjoying herself. With another cold night of -7⁰, it dropped again to -8⁰ last night. But I now have a routine. A different routine. Life has shifted a little, like walking into a tunnel where you know you just have to keep going because you can see light at the end which you will eventually reach.

It IS cold working outside but it is also very alive and quite amazing at times.

As I shut the chickens and ducks up it has grown dark except for a smear of light lying along the ridge of the Downs. The rooks lift from the trees on the side of the hill, their noise fills the air, and then as one they settle back into their night roost. Silence fills the sky. The trees stand dark, limbs outstretched against the fading light. Cold drifts up from the frozen ground. And then from out of the trees the moon rises above the line of the hills. So close you could touch it, against a clear velvet black sky, a perfect crescent hanging in the night sky.

Winter is enjoying herself and so am I.