It’s been a a while coming. Our first frost of winter arrived in mid January. Months late. We’ve had temperatures of over ten degrees Celsius. A warm house. Growing grass.
It’s…unheard of. Welcome, to be sure. My Shetland sheep are happy out on pasture that still has some sweet grass. For them 10 degrees in day time is positively baaaaalmy. Sorry.
But finally, after months of waiting, winter came. It didn’t bite though. It nibbled. We had a snow day. The fields lightly dusted in an inch or two of perfectly powdery, cotton white snow.
We woke up to the sound of the kids quite literally bouncing off the walls with excitement. I put their school lunch together and staggered out into the white, pelted with snowballs, and out up the hill field to check on the ewe and ram flocks.
I love the frost and the snow. The clarity and crispness of the light seems a beautiful thing. What is to be done is clear, that it needs to be done pressing. It’s a clear, simple, uncomplicated and necessary world in the snow. There is only what needs to be done and the doing. There is no time or space for complication.
The rams have still to learn what treehay is. Or hay for that matter. Rams are…slow on the uptake. If you need smarts in a sheep, you’ll find it amongst the ewes. It’s a rarer characteristic in rams, really. And probably not that useful.
The rams ignored hay, treehay, and anything else apart from the grain bucket and a ewe in season really. The ewes crowded around the treehay bushels, protested huffily that it wasn’t a bucket of grain, and, while pretending to be standoffish and disillusioned about the whole affair in a “how could you” sort of a way with a couple of “well I nevers” thrown in for good measure, descended hungrily on the bushels of dried summer leaves and devoured them in minutes.
Treehay is old. Very old. You cut branches from a palatable species – the above is willow, but in Ireland ash, poplar, willow and sycamore work well – in summer or early autumn. Too late and they will start to lose their nutiritonal value.
You hang the branches out in the hot sun for a day to dry, then tie together bunches of branches and hang them under cover in a well ventilated area until the leaves crisp and dry. Just like regular hay. But treehay tends to have a hihger protein content. At it’s best it can be equivalent to grain.
Treehay has been harvested for millenia. It’s what sheep and goats like to eat. It’s high protein. And it’s sustainable. Soya based feed comes from slash and burn farms in former rainforests a continenet and an ocean away. Treehay comes from my orchard, my hedgerow, my woods and my driveway. To feed grain to sheep, you have to cut down forests. To feed treehay, you have to grow them
Returning down the hill I stopped to take in the landscape. Our hill field looks down the valley from on high and across to Arigna and Sliabh an Iarainn in the far distance, now all wreathed in fog, what was still visible was quietly cloaked in perfect and undisturbed white. And across the field I picked out a perfect maze of tracks. The entire four acres of it crosshatched with the pawprints of animals. Too indistinct to be deciphered. Some were probably of the local pine martens who hunt our land. Some of the quiet and retiring vixen so shy of people. Some from our cats. Some may even have been from the badgers who beat a path through our land from their forest-side sett over the brow of the hill. Their paths were plain to see, crossing over one another, the surprisingly busy wildlife traffic of the previous night stored in snow pirnts.
I’m lucky to live here. Lucky to have the life I do. Lucky to feel myself needed in the work I do, and the feel the work I do useful enough to warrant necessity. I make food. I make it in the midst of raw, wonderful, and profoundly wild beauty. And I feel privileged.
