Author: wiltwhatman
Kindness in the Cold Snap. Council Workers Come to the Rescue
Icebound, Council Workers and a local farmer come to help. With kindness and grit in equal measure.
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Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary: July 2022
As July breaks across the farm the great untidyness takes hold. I live where the green tips of treetops meet across the greenstripe roads. The tangled unmown growth of the roadsides spills across ditches, through ramshackles fences past the field edge and the road. Pinks, purples, reds, blues, yellows. St Johns Wort, Thistle, Wild Raspberry. […]
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Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary June 2022
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 […]
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Beekeeping 101: Swarm Catching, Mid Life Crises and Learning Something New
A shining rippling wing clad teardrop of living things hangs from the crook of a fruit tree. A swarm. It is inches from my face.
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Cuckoos, Swallows and the Fear of What Will Be
“You wouldn’t know this” he said. From the cab of his blue tractor. We were in lockdown. The first year. So that is where he talked to me from. From the cab to the ground 2 metres. A Social and Agricultural distance. He had reversed the tractor back down the road to talk. “This is […]
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Sowing Oats, Sugán Ropes, and Learning to Straw Boy
We gathered to sow a field of oats. So again we can gather to harvest it. Then make take the straw and learn to make straw boy costumes.
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Hawthorn Hill Farm Natury Diary: April 22
We wait. For the curve of a calf beneath it’s mother. For the nicker of a lamb behind the arching care of it’s mother. We wait for Swallow come and Cuckoo call. We wait for things to have be as they always have been.
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Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary: March 2022
The first of the month was a day for the buzzards as they looped and dipped into the curve of each other flight then followed on from treetop to treetop. Broad winged, they circle shared thermals in their courting, their call nailed to wall of the sky like a truth. Everything else hunkers down and […]
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Sharpening Day, Chasing Buzzards and the Poetry of Handtools
The files skates across the axe edge. A rasp of a sound whose pitch rises as you push the file across the curved shoulder of the bit. It sounds like a question being asked of the blade. Sharpyet? Sharpyet? Tools are lined up. Axes. Knives. A Tramontina machete. Pocket knives and fixed blade knives. The […]
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Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary: February 2022
The ripple of birdsong has spread from the far valley and broken ac,ross the farm. If Spring moves at a walking pace then perhaps the birdsong walks with it. Where we are, with the farm backed up against the Hawthorn Hill, facing North, it sometimes walks a little slower still. Across the hill and down […]
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