Fool’s Spring
and a story from summer on the hill
Thank you to everyone who joined in last week’s discussion post on food. We got some really great comments and you’ve all given me a lot to chew on, if you’ll excuse the pun, while figuring out how we might begin to do things on this little farm as we pull back from sheep and selling lamb and mutton boxes grown from heather and shale on the hill, and move into the humus- and potential-rich soils of this new-to-us little farmstead.
The essay I had planned for this week is still in the works. A week of crisp, bright mornings, a burst of early growth and delicious spring sun pulled me away from the screen and into the garden, to work with the goats in the emerging bustle of Fool’s Spring. February is a restless month. Goats are hungry for fresh greens to fill their freshening udders, bellies swollen with kid. They and the sheep, no longer placated by last summer’s haylage on their winter paddock, are driven frisky for movement by the scents of greening grass and bud burst. Goats ruck and sheep buck and bounce for the sheer delight of spring. But it won’t last. It’s only a teaser, a little taste of the quickening season. These few mild, spring-like days of late winter are precious and demanding. We’re under pressure to finish up winter jobs of cutting back old growth, coppicing and stacking next year’s firewood to season, laying hedges, clearing and feeding ground and fixing up our fences in preparation for the new growing and grazing season, and getting everything done before our next round of kidding starts in a couple of weeks. I don’t want to rush out an unfinished piece, so this week I’m re-sharing a little story from last summer on the hill, where we spent two years living wild with the land.
Thistles and Wild Roses
Come, sit awhile. Here, on this mossy rock, this hunk of granite hewn from the earth and placed here by ancient ice, laced and splotched with lichens and moss in black and chalk and green and grey. Come, sit awhile. Sink your bare toes into squishy, moist mounds of red sphagnum moss beneath the coarse heather that scratches at your ankles. Breathe. Inhale the upland currents humming with the sounds and scents of the landscape: the busy buzzing of bumblebees, hawk’s wing rushing on the wind and stonechats’ chatter, aromatic fragrances of bog myrtle and heather. Allow your gaze to wander, far, over rugged hills of silver-green, olive, deep evergreen and shades of grey—shimmering grasslands and greening heath broken with ridges and crags of shale and quartz—and on to distant, shadowed mountain peaks. Soften. Melt into the landscape, feel the thrumming of the Earth. Let your senses ripple out around you, widen your awareness. Feel the breeze rustling through the grass and through you and …
The idea of a climate where spring might begin in February is astounding to me in its luxury, living and livestocking as we do here on steppes and foothills of Alberta. Green grass might start at earliest here in late March. The stock is then kept off all pastures til late May to give it a good start. The animals better like eating hay. ;) The upside to this is the growth is explosive and the protein content of that growth is supercharged.