That moment when the end of things and the beginning of things melts and merges into each other. That’s Autumn.
The bushes once bending under the weight of raspberries and rain are now bare. The last of the potatoes lifted. Cooked. Mashed. Served with glistening dark mutton stews. The blackberries are long gone. The sloes will soon be ready to be picked, after the first few frosts. Next year’s gin. Our hay is laid up, waiting to see us through winter’s worst.
We take our lambs and our hoggets now. We harvest the bounty of the last years work. The cold winter days, the heaving of hay up frozen hills, the fitful and headlong dash of lambing. The late nights. The early mornings. The long summer days hay harvest. All that work, harvested in some few autumn days.
We have taken our lambs. Some have gone to customers in Dublin. Some sold to people we know well not minutes from our farm. Some gone to feed new friends in Sligo. Our lambs and goats fed a few hundred with delicious food made by Sligo Global Kitchen at their Open Food events.
In farming, endings and beginnings are the same thing. This is the end of our year. And, with ewes to the ram, the beginning of the next one. The lambs we have provided for now provide for us. And others. And what warmth we draw from the food we harvest we spend, in part, on preparing for the next year. Endings and beginnings blend, merge, become the same thing.
We light the fire at nights, woodsmoke curls like a settling cat around the yard at the front of the house, or threads it’s way up through the woods. The woods and barns smell of drifitng woodsmoke. The mists the morning rise up from the dew damp fields and by school time we can see 10 yards down the drive. The first frosts have come. We scramble to save the last of our grass. Our lamb and hogget fleeces are salted in the lean to, drying in the air, waiting to tan.
We take our animals, harvest them now. And we put our ewes and goats to their Rams to begin the cycle again. We feed the trees and the plants and the soil, and harvest our firewood for next years season. Where trees have fallen, the seeds of new life can come to fruit. In the clearing left, wildflowers and the sibling seeds of the fallen tree will begin to grow. Where lambs were harvested, new lambs will be once more. Beginnings and endings.
We scrape our vegetable beds and garden clean of what there is to take. And we feed the soil as is sleeps in preparation for the next season.
We reap the work of the last year.
We plan for the promise of the next.
If you want to buy our lamb, our hogget (that’s lamb between 1 and 2 years) or our free range pork, please comment, or catch us on Twitter (@HawHillFarm).
