Small farms are held together with two things. Baling twine and hope. One, at least, is usually in plentiful supply. On a good day, you have both.
I’m not going to complain in this post. Scratch that. I am. If baling twine and optimism are the bread an butter of farming, complaints are the marmalade. Bitter. Not actually a foodstuff. Banned in several jurisdictions as a crime against jam.
Where was I? Yes. Optimism and baling twine.
We’re a small farm. So it’s a ramshackle affair, lambing. I lamb in the field. In the puring rain. While feeding two orphan cosset lambs their four hourly bottles in the shed. While managing the clothes washing. Feeding the goats. Convincing two small children that vegetable soup isn’t actually a plot to finish them off after the opening the lunchtime offensive with a carrot.
And lambing is a baling twine and optimism affair. Because, even though it’s midspring the ground is still frozen. My ram, Gethen, has a jewelled coating of frost covering his fleece. There is no grass. Grass is life for ewes and milk for lambs. And there is none. So. We worry. We stress. We cart feed and hay over hills and into stables. We fret and chit over whether the ewes are getting enough like first time parents with a week old baby and a bottle. And we manage the fear, uncertainty and doubt. With hope. And with baling twine. The balance this year, is towards twine.
It;s what we’ll hang our gates with, and make our hanging hay feeders from. We’ll build our sheep folds with it and fix our fences with convoluted knotted lengths of the stuff. Bright nests of tangled orange twine will peep out along the fence line and from the gateposts.
If it can’t be fixed with baling twine and a hammer, it can’t be fixed. Duct tape is for people with a budget. Real make and do is managed with twine.
So. Optimism can wait. It;s cold, and wet, and hard out here in the fields. There’s baling twine to use up. There;s marmalade to eat. Lambs to feed with bottled milk becuase mothers didn’t make it. Work to be done.
All that said though. I love my job. Even in the headlong rush of ramshackle Hawthorn Hill Farm lambing, in the teeth of a frozen spring, even then, I get to stop, and pause, in the crystal and ruby light of a frozen sunrise. I get to watch the sparrowhawk as she arcs and thrusts through the yard of the farm punching through the air not ten feet from me. I get to cart hay down the lane in the footprints of the badger and the fox. I get to see the looping ripple of the mother pine marten in the belt of alder that runs from the forest through our farm.
I get warm cosset lambs that I’ve saved nibbling my fingers and yelling “mommy” whenever they see my beard and cap heave into view.
When my children were born, I did a thing. I made the same noise every time I picked them up. For a year almost. A quick sound, like two kisses. So they would associate that sound with me. So all I had to do for them to perk up, smile, gurgle, burble and say hi was make that noise. Even if they couldn’t see me.
I do the same thing with the cosset lambs.
Don’t tell anyone. Real farmers would laugh at me.
