Springtime, farming and involuntary holiday
13 April 2020 — Easter Monday
We’ve been staying here at our family farm for about 3 weeks now. I remember calling my mum and saying ‘can we come and self-isolate with you’ but I don’t remember the exact date. Mid-March anyway.
When we arrived, it was cold. The wind was blowing from the east and the dog/cat flap had fallen off the outside door, so with the always open dog/cat flap on the inside door having always just been a missing pane of glass, the wind travelled freely through both and I nearly shoved a cushion in the open square of the inner door. There’s a cushion in the porch area which fits perfectly, tried and tested when a terrier comes to stay. The cushion stops her rushing outside around 9pm every evening and barking.
Two or three days later however, the weather changed. It was still chilly but not so windy and spring was showing off outdoors in so many ways. I don’t know if I’ve ever stayed here this long since my childhood. It’s a huge part of my life but average stays were between 2–3 nights, sometimes coming and leaving in one day. I’m finding I’m really enjoying it. I do feel anxious every so often, wondering what will happen over the next few months, whether I’ll still feel I have a purpose if we’re still here, but of course, I have a lot of purpose. I’m getting through selling a whole load of things that were taking up so much space in the garage, and the farm of course. A lot of the farm stuff is thinking, and reading, but being here is channelling the mind to farm matters, of which there are many, or could be many if I had someone to bounce ideas off, and if I were more proactive. I don’t want to make excuses however, so I’m going to write about what I know.
About a week after we arrived here, I messaged our contractor James. He’s too nice to say but he doesn’t really like being contacted too much, probably because, often, it sounds like nagging, and he’s probably right. From our part, we feel like we’re not told enough about what’s going on. When we finally rewild the whole area (currently just a pipedream), and he no longer has a purpose here, there’ll be no more nagging. Will that ever happen? Anyway, I messaged him about a road closure, hoping it sounded more informative than questioning. It had the desired effect and he wrote to say that later in the week they would be working on the fields. Fair to say, he was here in the form of his gear, staff and seed, as well as fertiliser and other, probably nastier, chemicals to force the soil into growing bigger, better and more profitable.
Since we’ve been here, I don’t think it’s rained, not effectively anyway. All winter however, it has rained, a lot. Since October, when the winter wheat is often drilled it hasn’t been possible to prepare the soil without the machinery getting stuck in the mud, or indeed the standing water in much of the fields. Days and weeks and months went by. James was in touch to say that he’d used Crusoe, the variety of wheat usually planted on our fields, on someone else’s field that was drier and better draining, and was planning to get Skyfall to plant on our fields, a variety of wheat that grows faster and is possible to plant in the spring even though it’s a winter variety. The name sounds superhuman, perhaps it’s apt that it makes me think of James Bond. James and his gear and his guys were here the best part of a week, preparing the soil, drilling, feeding all sorts of additives to the soil to ensure it grows. Our farm is small, and usually he’d do a couple of fields in a couple of days. But he had the spring barley to plant in other fields too. I wonder how often he’s planted winter wheat and spring barley in the same week. The wheat started to come up first. Hardly even a week after it was planted, little shoots began to appear. It was lovely to see but also seemed false, not natural too quick. The barley took a little longer, but it’s looking strong now, in its long, farrowed rows of unnatural, manmade perfection.
It still hasn’t rained. I read somewhere that the cold, easterly wind we had dried out a lot of soil, especially stuff that had been ploughed. I’m sure the shoots of barley and wheat need rain but they seem to be doing just fine without, for now anyway.
The weather has also got warmer. No April showers so far, and perfect bbq weather. When we first arrived, I was fascinated by two ornamental cherry trees in the garden. Ornamental because they do not fruit. Planted by my granny 30 years ago to look pretty. And they are pretty. The white blossom was bountiful and stunning against the Arequipa blue sky. I met Gunter in Arequipa, a city where it used to be guaranteed never to rain, with blue skies. Always. I made a point of going to stand under the blossom at least once a day for a few days, to look up and listen to the mad buzzing of all the bees madly collecting the plentiful pollen. So many bees, different types. Honeybees almost certainly and definitely large bumble bees, maybe some wasps, but how many of the other 500 or so types of bees as well? Now those trees are green in the lime green shade of spring leaves. Still stunning but not as spectacular. The cherry tree in the middle has just started blossoming now. It’s a different variety, still ornamental, with pink blossom. It has always been my favourite, until now. Bold and blousy, demanding attention. But there’s not so much buzzing and perhaps also there is more to look at elsewhere. The rapeseed, which was planted in the autumn before all the rain started, then sat in the standing water for too long and is now looking a bit rubbish. I think that two of the fields will be worth harvesting, but two might not be, and the yield is likely to be low. That said, the rape plants are starting to flower and, while not as spectacular as in other years — sometimes, they’re chest height already and a sea of yellow — they are, well, bright yellow, and beautiful. Pale yellow primroses are being overtaken by yellower celandine, white anemones and, now, bluebells. They are just stunning, and it’s a joy to walk on the edge of the fields, in the woodlands and sometimes in the ankle-spraining tractor tyre treads in the middle of the fields, a reminder of how wet it was — they are much wider than usual, have made quite the mess in some fields, and stuff is not growing back where the tyres trod.
Daffodils were out in force when we arrived in the middle of March and they are now almost over. Tulips are taking over, and hyacinths. Poppies are starting to grow in the cracks in the crazy paving, something my mother encourages, to the confusion of George the gardener handyman, who doesn’t know what to weed and what not to.
Sam has tasked me with documenting our hedgerows. Marking out which ones are in our environmental scheme and which of those need gaps filling. It’s a job I agree with and truly want to do, so why am I not getting on with it? I’ve been enjoying the hedgerows too, on this involuntary holiday, the hawthorn is flowering white, and it’s strange to see patches of white along them, reminding me that hedgerows are diverse and made up of different shrubs. There used to be a lot more in the country. Nearly 4000 miles of them have been removed since the second world war in the UK and it’s a tragedy for wildlife. While wildlife doesn’t make money, if we continue as we are with enormous fields of monocultures, the wildlife will all go and eventually nothing will grow. I wonder how many hedgerows used to be at on this farm, how many fields have been enlarged as machinery has grown, at the expense of the hedgerows. If my grandparents were alive to answer, would they even remember?
