The weather has closed like a fist around the farm. It is cold. More like the uncertainty of Spring. Cold days and dark skies that stretch deep into the month and break for a moment into blistering summer heat and then the rain comes again.
I farm in a world that when can flex it’s muscle and shapes me. It makes of the stuff of me what it will. Tis weather has shaped the farm and the farming. Shaped the world for the wild things too. Dragonflies are late. Insects few.
Mid June brings that blistering heat. Bees that have waited for weeks swarm in the hot moment. I catch a swarm hanging from a neighbours fruit tree late in the evening. It has nowhere to go. Gathered round the queen as the evening draws down they are quiet. Calm. I hold my trap hive open with one hand. With the other sweep them carefully down into my box and equally carefully shuffle the lid on, gently clearing any on the rim off with a willow branch or a soft bristles brush.
On the third try it takes, and I manage to catch the queen. I shake the newly reformed swarm back off the same branch and into the box. Bees gather round the enrtrance, flap their wings, sending the queens scent out into the world and calling the rest of the swarm into what is now home. In half an hour the last if the swarm have found the hive and are queitly gathered about the queen.
I tape the lid down, close up the entrance, put the hive on the passenger seat and drive home.
Other friends have bees coming to their hives. But the window is short. The weather snaps shut about our world again and we are served with flood warnings by the met office. It is cold and it is dark and it is quiet once again.
In our attic, my partner spots a pine marten rippling up the hill. Our gable window looks out over Hawthorn hill. It’s a juvenile, probably. Mother will have thrown the kits out of her den to make their own way. Makes it to the first Hawthorn and disappears from plain sight into the I was never thereness of the tree.
We meet young deer on the road who skitter along the tarmac in their anxious this way no that waying rush to get away. You can still hear them on the far side of the woods as they crack and smash their escape, breaking bits of forest in their nervous flight. By year two they will slip fluidly into gaps and never have been there with practised ease. But these young deer are still awkward, splay legged, clumsy and loud.
Leverets too. I spot one on the road in the heat of the evening. It too new to this and awkward enough. Neither speed nor litheness it’s friend quite yet. It’s mother perhaps already tending to a second litter. Her full tilt is a thing to see. The sleek lithe power. The large and fierce hearted speed of her.
Our buzzards return. They spend the last of the evening light hovering over the fields and the clearfell. Swallows gather in the air and arc and tilt at the buzzard ten times their size and more, the buzzard now seeming clumsy in the shared air. The Swallows tack and turn and dive and swerve and tack again in a single wingbeat of the buzzard, She turns like a battleship and drifts off across the valley. The swallows pour through her slow air like water. She no more able to catch or harry them than the stone in the riverbed can catch the stream.
Our swallows, martens and swifts have finally taken hold. The front garden has them swoop and arc in teams, hunting where the hedge and the wall form a funnel, they zip and twist and pivot with the speed of thought. We watch inches from them through the windows and the children mirror them tunneling through the living room air to pivot and twist and roar. One wildness without finding a twin one within.
Our hay meadows grow. We break 40 species of wildflower on the farm. Germane Speedwell, Meadowsweet and Okelly’s Orchid pushing us into our forties. Our three meadows thrive. The back field, ungrazed and clean from a Spring mow is almost thigh deep. Our rushy meadow doing well too. Our pasture meadow grazed till May slow growing now but thick with swirling clovers and coming to midcalf. This will be the lambing hay. Sweet and rich and clover thick.
It is also less diverse. Though the paddock is frosted with a sprinkling of stitchwort. The red and white clovers too good food for pollinators and for the soil. In time this will gather it’s crop of wildflowers. This year we will mow. Then graze hard over winter. Then fence it off for Spring. The flock will scratch and tear the soil and our widflower seedbank will begin to colonise. Primroses, bluebells, perhaps Foxglove too first. Hogweed and orchids will follow. Ragged Robin. Trefoil too if finally I can convince it to take.
Next month we will gather hay, forage berries farmed and wild. The kids will be sugar fueled on the blueberry path through the mountains. The hot weather will come. I know, know, from mid July that I will rue wanting it.
But for now, in the cool dark wet of June, we wait. For summer. That always seems as if it will not come.
