Farming
Winter, Firewood Season and the Wonder of a Blackbird
he blackbird couple that hunt the drive. They will turn the same leaf ten times over in a week. The pair will hold this territory for their lives perhaps. Much as they hold to one another. For life
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Farm Bathing – How Hard Work on the Farm Keeps Me Sane, Healthy and Fed.
It is good to work. The rhythm and lift of a scythe or an axe. The weight of hay on a forks end as you pivot the handle with a palm and lift it into a loft. The spade as it cuts bright slabs of clay from the soil. The turn and pitch and sway […]
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Harvesting Willow and Slowing Down with a Broken Arm
My broken arm has slowed me. Tied me to the farm and it’s surrounds. I cannot leave to pick up trailers of hay. I have rams in the barn. In recovery, and hungry. So, I crisscross the farm harvesting forage. Have done for a month. I travel the same paths, crest the same hills, walk […]
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Why Farms Were Less Lonely in the Fifties
We came round to a farmer over the hill. Out the road. Past seventy. His tractor rigged with strings and pulleys, hoists and straps for getting in and out, a place to stow his crutches
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Shetland Sheep – Why They Work For A Sustainable Smallholding
Shetland Sheep. Small, tough, smart good mothers. A short blog on what’s good, and not so good and why we chose them
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Small Farms Build Community. Industrial Farms (often) Don’t. Here’s why.
Small farmers live where we work. And we love where we work. We live with our choices, and their results and consequences. In the land we live in.
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The Past is a Farming Country…
You are always in time. On time. Out of time. On a farm. Always. Seasonal time. Geological time. Daytime and night time. Deep Time and no time. You are in the time of fertility and the time of harvest. Your year might be framed by frost time. Sow after the last harvest before the first […]
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Waiting for a Swarm: What bees mean to me
I’m waiting for a swarm of bees. If it happens, it will be quick. A kind of inverse tornado calmly and efficiently funneling themselves down, by the thousand, and in to the hive entrance. Up to twenty thousand of them. And it is done. The colony has reproduced. Swarms begin when the workers in an […]
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The birds and the bees: Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary 01
I have time, in recovery. From a minor surgery. Nothing major. Nothing threatening. Just. Enough. To slow. Me. Down.
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Lambing 2021 begins
Long stretches of boredom and grinding work interspersed with fear, terror, exhaustion and joy. It’s lambing 2021. And it’s started.
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