Around the Farm
September Connection: magic, mist and a recipe for rosehip chutney, plus a little extra perk for subscribers
September has to be the most magical month on the mountain. That liminal season between summer and autumn when time seems to hang in the mist. We watch the sun rise and set above the clouds, the landscape of our hills cast pink and gold, the valley below us shrouded in white, as though we’re suspended in some other place up here, a place between worlds.
I used to think spring was my favourite season. The freshness, bud burst, the awakening of life from the sleep of deep winter… But September on the mountain has stolen my heart. Perhaps also because these last golden days of summer have become a time of relative ease, and abundance, slowing down just enough to soak in the colours and stillness of sunrise and sunset, and reaping the rewards of our year's labour. Sure, there’s still tons to be done, sheep to be sorted, the goat house to finish, the new duck house to build, the endless tasks of running a farm, and it’s a race against the rapidly shortening daylight hours before the weather turns and winter sets in, but it’s all now with the sense of achievement and satisfaction of harvest.
With the final cull and harvest of the season upon us, I find myself piled high with sheepskins. My freezers are still full with last year’s pelts and I need space to stock this winter’s stores of mutton and lamb. Time I get to work on the transmutational process of preserving all those raw animal skins into tanned pelts with the ancient alchemy of bark tanning, a craft I have been quietly learning and practicing all summer. That and weaving through the mountain of wool that’s trying to take over our storage room.
Substack subscribers will be first to know when I relaunch sales of my hand woven and felted wool rugs and traditionally bark tanned pelts from my beautiful, colourful flock of Shetland and Mayo-Connemara blackface sheep and dairy goats. I will send out an email to all subscribers with a preview of what’s coming up before the listings go live on Etsy. Paying subscribers will also receive a special discount on every shop update. The reason I am doing this is I am overwhelmed by your support and generosity. My writing here supports my farm and flock, and my livelihood, so in my gratitude for your subscriptions I want to give something back, and this seems right. I don’t have a timescale for relaunching sales yet, but I plan to spend as much time as it takes this autumn and winter to work through my mountain of fleeces and frozen pelts, and I will update here first when I have something to offer.
Our shepherding year follows the cycle of the seasons. Birth at bud burst, growth with summer’s luscious abundance, then harvest and a slowing down and drawing in as the last flush of grass wanes, the flock dwindling back down to its core now as we prepare for the cold months, when nothing grows. This week we will go through the ewes to decide who will be bred this year, who will be given a year off to regain condition and grow her best fleece, and who will go with the ram lambs in next week’s butcher batch or be fattened on until the end of the year, to become our sustenance.
We will breed only a handful of ewes this year. Our flock expanded to unexpected proportions with this year’s crop of ewe lambs, and I want to keep numbers low for next year without culling out any of my best and favourite older ewes so they’ll just be given a year off and I’ll focus on producing a really excellent wool crop for next year, with just a few lambs born from a handful that didn’t breed last year or weaned and bounced back into condition early. I also want to lamb a bit earlier than last year. Last year we bred late in December, aiming for better weather conditions to lamb on the hill, which put us lambing through May and I felt like I was out of sync with the seasons as spring rolled into summer while I was still deep in the lambing daze. I want to bring them back to April this year. Bringing them back a month earlier also means a few of the ewes won’t yet be fully weaned and ready to breed again (we let our ewe lambs self-wean), and that’s ok, they’ll stay with their lambs, get a year off and grow my wool crop.
Caprine Castle renovations are ongoing…
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