The Farming Lifestyle
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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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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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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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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Kindness, quietness and the goodness of people.
The quiet tongueless stories of people who shaped their world and the people in it, and who still shape we who have inherited it. I feel the same about kindness.
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Late Night Walk With Bats on the Farm
My youngest, one hand contained in its smallness entirely in the curl of mine, the other, pointing, tracing the half seen flight of a thing in the sky. My eldest following, twiddling dials, yelping with excitements. All of us giggling and laughing as the fluttering wings of things wheeled feet from our faces
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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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A mornings work and pine martens.
It is morning on the farm. Feeding time. Crows break from the treetops in an awkward clutter as I rattle my feed bucket on our lane. There is a raven amongst them. Fiach Dubh, the Black Hunter. I can tell by the sound. Their long flight feathers beat the skin of the air like a […]
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Machismo, electric fences, and managing randy rams.
It’s 7 in the morning. The kids open the bedroom door. “There’s a powercut”. It’s still semi dark. But the sun has risen behind the thick grey clouds. Storm Ali, the first of the season has made landfall. We are in the North Roscommon. I propel myself out the door. Quickly. The electric fences are […]
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