I have spent the morning harvesting bark and goat forage from the fallen willow. Willow, as you know, is unstoppable and the tree keeps giving from her recumbency. She’s just bursting into leaf now, greening where she fell in a late winter storm, still verdant and fertile, her lime green catkins now swelling into silvery seeds. (Willow is dioecious, carrying male and female catkins on separate trees; I say “she” here quite literally). I’ve been waiting until the time is just right to harvest the bark before my husband cuts the timber for firewood: when the sap has risen and the tannins are high, before she sets her seeds on the wind. I will use the bark for medicine and tanning sheepskins. I use willow bark for all manner of ailments where there is inflammation or pain, and where cooling astringency is warranted (it’s incredible for burns, I can attest). It grows wildly, abundantly, generously on our wet, rugged land and is a first aid staple around here, liberally splashed or sipped for cuts, scrapes, knocks and aches, the casualties of farming. How the land provides. It’s true willow bark is the original source of aspirin (salicylic acid), but there is so much more to whole plant medicines than their isolated constituents. If a goat gets sick or goes off her food, often willow is the only thing that will pick her up and get her eating again.
Over the past year or so I have been learning the craft of bark tanning. I bang on a lot about how my flock must feed us, and it must, but besides that, wool is the main product from my sheep; skins are a valuable byproduct of the handful of sheep and goats we rear each year for meat. I’ve been tanning our sheepskins with the fat (or brain) and smoke method which is traditional to drier parts of the world than ours for years, but the results I’m getting from bark tanning, using the alchemy of local plants to transform the skins into leather, are just beautiful and much more consistent and suited to our extremely damp climate. I know a few of my most loyal and generous readers on here are people who have previously bought wool products or sheepskins from my flock. Your support is most humbly appreciated. But, besides practicing/experimenting with bark tanning and working on a few wool pieces for our own home, I have neglected my crafts these last couple of years living rough on the land with little space for anything beyond the basic necessities of living and working on the farm; I now have two large chest freezers packed full with sheepskins waiting to be tanned and a roomful of wool in storage. Plans are underway for a dedicated tannery and wool-working room, soon, along with some big changes to how we live and work on the land. I’ll write more on that as it evolves.
The swallows are back. They arrived right on time, just as the evenings warmed and the midges began to swarm around the drains and muck heaps. They swooped in jubilantly for the feast on a fine mid-April evening, and now, as I write, I’m watching them dart in and out of the goat house and duck coop with beaks full of white down to line their nests with. The cuckoo is calling. He was here before the swallows, staking his claim on the holly cliff and the high heath where the robins and the meadow pipits nest. The butterwort is in bloom, purple dragon heads bobbing on slender stems over their neon green, sticky, carnivorous, star rosettes that cling to the mud like starfish, catching midges by the streams. The ducks are sitting on their eggs and the lambs are growing as fast as the moor grass that’s now racing ahead of the sheep into summer’s verdant abundance. Our green season is short and furious, the hills erupting into vibrant green life from dormant brown almost overnight. The sheep are all on the grass now, and I can breathe with relief that we made it through winter and spring and lambing with all in fine fettle and hay to spare.
But it was a long, hard winter. We have grazed too hard on the heather and gorse for too long, the sheep are still too many for my aims for the land, and with a majority of ewe lambs for the second year running despite keeping breeding numbers down to a bare handful, breeding very selectively, I’ve got more hard decisions looming. We run all our ewe lambs for a year before making decisions on them when I’ve seen how they grow out and how their fleeces develop. So decisions to be made now are on last year’s ewe lambs and older ewes; ewes that I’ve had a few years breeding and seen what she consistently produces (or doesn’t), how well she’s holding up, whether she’s worth breeding again or retiring to the wool flock, or neither. These are the really hard decisions, where economics have to trump sentiment because we just can’t afford to keep them all or end up with a decrepit flock of non-producing resource eaters, out of balance with the land. We eat more mutton than lamb—older sheep that have to be thinned out each year as younger generations come along. That said, we do have a few (too many) old pets and retirees that won’t be going anywhere for a while. Ones we just can’t bear to let go: bottle lambs and faithful ewes that have reared replacements and earned an easy retirement growing wool.
My goatling, Willow, a grown, mother doe now, birthed a beautiful buck kid. I lost his sister. My husband tells me not to blame myself. I know, I’m not supposed to beat myself up about it, just take the lessons, be grateful my young doe is alive and thriving and will breed again and move on. But it was my fault and it haunts me. I knew she was coming. I knew she was coming and I was ready. She would be reared on her mother; I would bottle the big buck brother so she would have all her young mother’s care and nourishment. A precious baby doe born of an accidental breeding to my best doeling, reared into the herd. I knew she was coming and I lost her. I didn’t pull her out in time. She died in the deep, warm waters of her mother’s womb while her brother wobbled and slipped in a puddle of slop—a big, gangly boy, all floppy ears and legs so long he couldn’t find his feet. She, a perfect, cream coloured, lop-eared beauty, would have matched his length and weight; my little doeling did so good to carry both. But she was coming wrong, much too big for my little doe and I was too slow, I didn’t pull her out in time.
We planted her under a hawthorn down by the willow grove where the soil is good and deep and life hums around the May blossoms in summer. Where the willows give shade, forage and medicine to the herd and the goats hang out, giving back their compost to the trees that feed them. We gave her back to the soil she grew from. To transmute into May blossoms heady with honey and berries full of heart medicine, made alive in the spirit of a May tree.
Mama’s doing fine. Sore and milky and loving her boy kid. She’s too young; one is enough for her. Nature knows. Or so I console myself. Perhaps something in me knew, too, that it was better to let one go. The loss of a kid, one so perfect and so close is a blow, but my does are my ladies: her life, her safety, her health comes first. Kids are conceived with no guarantees; the goat that already breathes, the one we bottle-fed and bonded with and her ability to breed again is infinitely more valuable. She shouldn’t have kidded until next year. But she alive and thriving, she is rearing her beautiful big buck kid effortlessly and blossoming into motherhood, a joy to behold, and a balm to my soul.
How heart-rending for you all Carly but your Willow and Chewy Duke are doing well and look wonderful!
I'm sorry for the loss of your little doe. I agree with your husband, that you shouldn't be hard on yourself, but I also understand the pain of loss, especially when you thought you were prepared to avoid it. xx