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Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary June 2022
The weather has closed like a fist around the farm. It is cold. More like the uncertainty of Spring. Cold days and dark skies that stretch deep into the month and break for a moment into blistering summer heat and then the rain comes again. I farm in a world that when can flex it’s […]
Read MoreHawthorn Hill Nature Diary: March 2022
The first of the month was a day for the buzzards as they looped and dipped into the curve of each other flight then followed on from treetop to treetop. Broad winged, they circle shared thermals in their courting, their call nailed to wall of the sky like a truth. Everything else hunkers down and […]
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Winter, Firewood Season and the Wonder of a Blackbird
he blackbird couple that hunt the drive. They will turn the same leaf ten times over in a week. The pair will hold this territory for their lives perhaps. Much as they hold to one another. For life
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We Harvest Our Lambs, Work With Neighbours, and Learn
It is dark. The trailer ramp clatters and rings. The whinge of it as it swings open. The rams are gathered. Mostly. My hands are aching. The worst of the work is still to come.
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Why Farms Were Less Lonely in the Fifties
We came round to a farmer over the hill. Out the road. Past seventy. His tractor rigged with strings and pulleys, hoists and straps for getting in and out, a place to stow his crutches
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Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary September 21
The swallows gather, flock above the field and go. Summer holds its breath for one more year. The month has been warm. We have fresh grass. The lambing field is almost knee deep in rippling green.
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Small Farms Build Community. Industrial Farms (often) Don’t. Here’s why.
Small farmers live where we work. And we love where we work. We live with our choices, and their results and consequences. In the land we live in.
Read More Don’t. Here’s why.){kind=link}
Hawthorn Hill Farm Nature Diary: August 2021
The heat broke in late July. Rain came. In great sheets. In misting drizzles. In grey swirls. In torrents. In floods. It has rained almost every day since. The stream that runs down under the road and down the shoulder of the farm to the valley floor has become thunderous. Its water is clear though. […]
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Andy Brennan, Uncultivated taste and getting out of the way of good taste
Andy Brennan’s Uncultivated is like slow food. But cantankerous, slightly drunk and on steroids.
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Lambing 2020
Lambing is almost done. Sweat, tears, heartbreak, joy and new life, on the farm and for the farm
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