Messy by nature

There are farms with lines of white stones that pick out the borders of perfectly crisp lawns. Striped. Formal and formed.

There are farms with trim hedges that behave themselves. Rectangular boxes of clean green lines that picture frame their fields.

There are farms with fields of ryegrass and clover, uncluttered by wildflowers or weeds. Clean of buttercups and wild mint. Drained fields. Dry fields. Fields where nature has been tidied away and shorn of itself. Inch by biodiverse inch.

Our farm is not like that. Spears of metre high grasses fringe the driveway. Hidden in amongst the tangled riot and thickets of green the wildflowers grow. In their hundreds. The brambles twine a thorny route to the sun.

Our fields are home to bluebells and broom, primrose and wild mint, and a hundred other plants many a farmer would think unfit for grazing. A riot of happy plants. A wild place. A great and fertile untidyness.

It can be a challenge living in the midst of what can seem so unordered and untidy a place. But there is order, of a sort, here. Or better said perhaps, there is balance. The balance of the wild world has a cluttered order to it. And that is what we want to preserve in our farming.

There are the deer who sleep in the long grass of our ungrazed fields. Most of our farm is ungrazed, most of the time. Planned rotational grazing like ours does this by design. It gives wildflowers time to grow, flower, seed and reproduce, making a wild and beautiful mess of our fields. In these ungrazed fields, in the long grass of summer, the deer make their beds. Dragonflies hunt the columns of insects above the swaying seedheads. Swallows swoop competing with the dragonflies in their hunt. Red squirrels forage along our lane, avoiding the pine martens who like to perch on the large corner fenceposts of our fields.

In our fields, and in our hedges, summer brings the rattle and buzz of columns of insects. The reason we have dragonflies. Underfoot, in the thick unruly grasses, frogs thrust and leap to avoid my tramping feet. There are lizards asleep in the unpruned borders of the garden.

The seedheads of weeds, wildflowers, and native grasses sway in the heat and the wind. Sparrowhawks flit and arch across the farmyard brought here by the bustle of thrushes and blackbirds that live in our bramble tangled hedgerows. Buzzards are fought off by teams of swallows. And, as night comes and the birds settle into sleep, the bats break cover and crest above the house and the barn.

There are farms that are tidy and trim, and do not have the sound of dragonflies hunting, the late night yip and scream of vixens, that are quiet and silent. There are farms that are cropped and mown and still. That are undisturbed by the fist of a hawk bursting through wild hedges. There are farms of clover and rye where clouds of butterflies don’t drift, where the cropped hawthorn doesnt burst with flower and fruit. But those farms are not ours.

Our farm. Ramshackle. Bustling. Inefficient. Bursting with the buzz of things wild. Hung in the scruffy balance that where wild things thrive. Untidy. By nature.