It’s been a while since I wrote a seasonal, farm newsletter. Winter is slow, and also laboursome. Short days filled with the monotony and physical demands of farm routines, trudging across the hill through the mud and ice twice a day with feeds and hay. The cold. The endless grey. Keeping fires stoked and draughts out, us and animals fed and bedded and dry through torrential rain, howling gales and a bitter freeze.
The sheep are hungry now and they mob me for the half bale of hay and bucket of beet that I haul down to them morning and eve. They’ve been working on the lower slopes since late November and they’ve eaten just about all there is to eat. The heather and the low growing, western gorse down there are bare now (intentionally so—we want pastures to come back there). And the ground is thoroughly mulched with seedy, summer hay that I’ve been hauling down to them and spreading to seed new pastures over the old. I carry as much as I can, but soon they will have to move to a fresher, closer piece of ground because I can’t carry anymore, and they’re hungry now. They will move up onto our highest heath soon, for the little yearlings to grow on and the few ewes we bred this year to gestate their lambs on the fresh, protein rich, frost softened gorse. I’m stretching the ground they’re on now for as long as I can, saving the fresh green forage for as long as I can because what they eat now in winter will not grow back in time for spring, for late gestation and lambing, or for when their milk comes in and they really need the green.
The bulk of the land is saved for summer. Growth has stalled now under the floods and frost. Our winters here are wet and windy and the frost seems to come later every year. We’re lucky if we get a few weeks of good, hard freeze to soften the gorse and sweeten the green, kill off the pests and disease that lurk in the mud, and tell the seeds to germinate in spring. I’ve been researching the ecological effects of these cold cycles, how vital the freeze is to the proper order of things, for the regeneration and continuation of forests, heaths and grasslands, the resting and renewal of the land. Heather, birch, alder and rowan all require a long period of cold stratification to awaken their seeds from dormancy. Many native grasses and forbs require a cold period of winter dormancy to stimulate them to flower and set seed in the warmth of summer. Gestation and germination. That’s what winter is for. That and the clearing out of the old to make way for the new. Floods and frost, snow and storms, short, grey days and long, black nights, they all have their proper place and purpose.
Next week is Imbolc, Lá Fhéile Bríde, the festival of Bríde, ancient earth goddess, now known as Saint Brigid. Imbolc, said to stem from the Old Irish root i mbolc meaning in the belly or in the womb. The beginning of Spring according to the Celtic calendar that follows the cycle of the sun. Soon, we will see the bellies of the ewes and the buds on the trees begin to swell, and it will be time to prepare for lambing and a new season of growth. The sheep and the goats can feel it already, the change in the air, the fresh scent of spring in the soil, and they are restless and eager for fresh forage. But spring won’t emerge on the hill until the hazel buds begin to burst and the cock chaffinch shouts it from the fence post right outside our caravan window. Until then, they will grow their rounding bellies on heather and gorse and I will trudge on with their sacks of saved summer hay.
Imbolc (Old Irish, i mbolc): in the belly of the mother.
We have been coppicing willow for firewood and general maintenance of the copse. The trees will thank us in spring with a fresh flush of vigour and send up new shoots from their roots. And then we lost a tree we were trying to save in the storm. A beautiful, old willow, with creviced bark clothed in green moss, and thick honeysuckle twining like ropes around her. Uprooted—flood water that runs down from the new forestry next door had got in and washed the soil from under her, loosening her hold—there’s no saving her now. We are going to build an arbour where she stood to try to save the honeysuckle, which will provide windbreak to the tree that’s left standing alone behind and shade shelter to the sheep, in the willow’s place. We’ll plant new trees, and channel the flood water away, but that’s a summer job when we can get a digger down here.
We’ve got bare root hazel, alder, willow and oak waiting to go in the ground for new hedges, coppices and shelter belts, and leggy old hedges still to lay to thicken, before cutting season ends and the chaffinch claims his section of the hedge (he’s got competition, there are two new cock chaffinches around this year vying for a prime piece of real estate in my hazel hedge).
And we’ve been processing ducks. They’re fat and fully feathered for winter and I’ve been saving their fat for cooking and their feather down for…maybe a pillow, when I’ve plucked and saved enough. I’ve had a few questions on what we do with all the “odd bits” when we’re processing animals. You all know our current lack of kitchen or food storage space requires that I keep things as easy as possible, so admittedly this time round our dogs are well fed (nothing ever goes to waste when you’ve got a giant, hard working, sheep herding, pack carrying, raw fed German Shepherd around the place), but normally I try to make use of everything that’s edible—livers into pâté, feet into broth, fat saved for cooking, etc.. And when we’re processing sheep there’s even more wonderful odd bits like delicious sweetbreads (we like them sautéed, preferably in the fat of the animal they came from for synergism our taste buds recognise) and delicate caul fat (for wrapping lean meats in sumptuous lace), and even their skins become beautiful, willow bark tanned pelts. But I’ll write on all that in due course.
By popular request I’m working on upcoming posts on keeping poultry, ducks versus chickens, nose to tail eating, and a series on raising goats. So as I figure out my writing schedule for the next while, I’m opening this post up to all for your questions. What do you want to know about any of the above or how we do things, working with sheep and goats and living from the land on our little Irish hill?
I’m working/budgeting so that I will be able to pay and support your writing more tangibly, but I wanted to thank you in the meantime. As a first generation shepherd and young woman trying to figure out an awful lot on her own, I am deeply grateful for you sharing your wisdom so accessibly and generously. The lack of elder wisdom/guidance is deeply felt by alot of younger landworkers, and you certainly help bridge this gap. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
I love how intentionally you work with the land. Remembering and really living those ancestral practices that tend and work with all part of the animals you shepherd. So inspiring! Thanks for sharing these lil bits of wisdom.