I am in recovery. So. I set up the farm so its largely self maintaining. Fencing done. Watering set up. Grazing sorted. Feed stored. Lambs tucked away with mothers. Trap beehives set.
I have time, in recovery. From a minor surgery. Nothing major. Nothing threatening. Just. Enough. To slow. Me. Down.
Today I am slow. I take in the farm. And Spring quickens in me.
I watch as the cuckoo arcs above Padraig’s field across the farm from her perch in the old ash tree. I too am perched on the shoulder of a valley that ripples down and out across to Arigna. The crown of the ash tree below is level with me. I can see her settle in the roost. The sun is dipping down. She calls. The echo fills this place. She calls again as I write today.
I am slow. I take this time to see. The beech trees are just alive with the electric green of their first foliage flush. Papery thin. Soft. The light beneath them a kind of blue. The wildflower mix will change soon. Hawthorn fills the air with itself, and beneath it the space is bee loud. The primroses are hanging on. The bluebells beginning to give up now the beech has stolen their light.
The poplars we planted in shade are the first of the native trees to leaf. By far. Ash and Alder are still hiding most of their leaves. They missed the late frost that killed off my potato plants. Willow has come too. Sycamore. Blackthorn in flower before almost any wild thing. We have banks of it on the hill field. Fat berrys too, and good for the birds.
Our wildflower meadow is still flush with bluebells. The pignut beginning to peep through. The tick drifts of bugle flowers are still crowding the verges. Pollinators in amongst their plenitude. One of m y favourites, the cranes bill, peeping up on the lawn just this week.
On the lane the cow parsley is coming up. In the orchard, the deer have been cropping them. And munching our oats. Barking the wild hazel in the lower. Making a much loved menace of themselves. Many plants are late this year. Our field orchids, the ragged robin. The cold has I think been hard.
The swallows late too. An old farmer stopped me on the road. Bid me listen. We heard the cuckoo together. “You wouldn’t know this” he said. Kindness in him as he said it too. “This is the first year I heard the cuckoo before the swallows came” His family have farmed here for generations. He tends his cattle. “There was a hurricane in Northern France as the swallows came through. Decimated them. They will be late to us this year”. It mattered to him. Enough to stop. Reverse his tractor. Tell me. Include me in it’s importance. We are here together he seemed to say. We farm in this place. This is something you should know.
Much is said about the challenges modern farmers face. More about the challenge they supposedly pose. Here in this place, both are true. But so is something else. Many have an intimate and almost unconscious love of the natural world they live in. His eyes lit up when I told him of a tree on the road, his road, a woodpecker had been hunting on. Another called to ask if I knew where the woodpecker that had hunted his farm had gone. I did. He relaxed. Breathed out. Thanked me for the photo I sent.
I plan my own next years work work on the walk. Some for the farms benefit, some for the wildlife, some for both. I will plant the back field with a hedgerow of hawthorn. I will interplant plum amongst them. Rowan, lime, white thorn and wild cherry. All good for the June gap for pollinators. We will put a wildflower mix in the hill field, after grazing it hard in autumn. The bare earth left in patches will help the seed take. We’ll plant in frost and put the sheep back on for two days to trample the seed in. When the new orchard is fenced we will put in apple and sweet chesnut. Again, good trees for pollinators. And cobnut too. The nuts a good food crop, and in a good year each tree will replace two bags of pig feed.
Honeybee hives we will put in each field. Slowly. Building up our pollen and nectar bank as we go. One year at a time. Native Black bees I hope. Kept naturally. We need to think of wild pollinator habitat and nectar/pollen resources too. And so my thoughts turn to whitebeam and linden trees…
As I crest the hill to the new orchard, planning, fretting, worrying and planting in my mind, I finally see them. Two swallows. Late, so late, but so welcome. Arcing above the back field I will sow with wildflower. Hunting. Hunted for in my mind. Now here.
The song goes “When you pass through places, and places pass through you…”. The same happens when you settle in one. It too settles in you. I know it is a small thing. But the swallows return anchors me more securely here now they have come. I relax. Breathe. I am at more so at home.
