Biodiversity is at the heart of how we are farming here. We want the wildness in our pasture. We want wildness and weeds. It’s better for our land. For our soil. For our health. For our sheep and goats. And it’s better for our produce. A complex, healthy mix of plants, flowers, herbs and grasses will give a better, deeper, more complex flavour profile that anything you can get from a conventional rye and clover field.
This year, I’ve been watching, waiting, for the wildflowers. Almost as anxiously as I’ve been waiting for the fresh spring grass. One to nourish my livestock, and the other to nourish my heart and the farm’s ecosystem.
I’ve watched the primrose begin to colonise the grazing fields. I’ve watched the welcome return of the Cranes Bill, the Bluebells, Cow Parsley and Pignut spreading to our fields. The Marsh Marigolds and the Heath Speedwell colonising the field margins, a violet and gold invasion from the woods into the fields.
All of these food for something. Orange tip butterflies and Dingy Skippers. Large and Small white butterflies. Bumblebees and Native Irish Honey bees. I saw all of them and more feasting on the flowers in our winter meadow. All of these a part of a diverse and healthy wildflower meadow. All of these plants are part and parcel of a complex ecosystem, and all are part and parcel of a complex flavour profile. Our sheep are what they eat. And we believe a truly diverse wildflower meadow gives a depth and complexity of flavour that you simply can’t get on a field that’s been ploughed and sown with pure grass.
I stood in the meadow, surrounded by butterflies that flew circles around me. Damson flies mating on the wing in amongst the in leaf hazel trees. The sky a childhood blue. The creeping buttercup beginning to make of the field a sea of flickering gold.
We farm in the Northwest Ireland. Rare breed sheep that spend more than a year on our pasture. Slow grown. Raised in open fields. Fed on the best, wildest, most varied pasture we can give them.
