On the Farm

January

A Chara, dear readers, a short note before this week’s story.

Until now, despite my best efforts to keep some things back for paying subscribers, I have sent out almost all posts free to all, and I have been overwhelmed by the generosity of those who choose to send me a few notes in reciprocation. I put a lot into the words I share, and like everyone else I also have bills to pay, as well as a farm that doesn’t make any money to run. Writing these stories takes time and dedicated practice. When I am not herding goats, tending sheep or working the land, I am writing. My paying subscribers quite literally enable me to dedicate the time and energy to writing and sharing these stories, while also supporting my small farm and flock.

From now, I will be paywalling monthly On the Farm posts, as well as the occasional extra bits that my paying subscribers have already been getting. Posts over a year old are already paywalled, so upgrading also gives you access to the full archive. If you enjoy or find some value in the stories I share and can afford it and wish to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thank you.

For those who don’t want to upgrade, I hope you will stick around for the free posts. Your “likes”, comments, shares, and simply giving my words your time is greatly appreciated.

If you would love a full subscription but genuinely can’t afford it, or you’ve been a long-time reader and you feel like it’s unfair of me to lock you out, reach out and I will set you up with six months complimentary (which I will happily renew indefinitely—just ask).

Now onto the story…

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Goats take up the bulk of these short days. My ladies consume my every day-lit hour with their demand for green, fresh forage, my refusal to keep them locked in eating haylage for any hour it isn’t raining, and their refusal to stay in one place when I let them out. There is not a goat proof (or anything proof) fence on or around this entire, small property, and the bounds between our ground, common ground and neighbours’ grounds are vague, so letting the goats out for fresh forage entails walking with them, keeping them on the banks of bramble, track hedges, swathes of rough ground and woodland edges they’re allowed and off the neighbour’s lush fields of ryegrass set aside for his cattle’s summer grazing. The neighbours are all glad to have them clearing brambles and keeping back the hedges, and keep offering more patches to be cleared. We work together, the goats and I, through these unseasonably spring-like, unusually dry, late January days clearing, cutting, chomping and trampling through years of thick, thorny overgrowth. We are followed, always, by a red-breasted robin vying for the grubs and worms uncovered by the goats’ disturbance.

We clamber through the brambles, they and I. I armed with leather gloves and secateurs to cut through thick, thorny, arching bramble stems that threaten to tear their low-hung, dairy udders. I climbing monkey-limbed into half-fallen, half-rotted trees to pull down the ivy they can’t reach. And they chowing enthusiastically into the greenery, filling their bellies and their udders as fast as they can with all the winter greens this patchwork landscape of wood, hill and pasture offers before rain drives them indoors to eat saved summer haylage again. A small herd of goats can put away a vast amount of forage, fast. They make short work of banks of bramble, stripping tree trunks of ivy, clearing up the fallen debris after a storm, finding boundary lines and old, fallen fences long lost into the brambles that know no bounds and make mockery of the lines we draw, pulling down fences into their sprawl. I climb in beneath a low, ivy-hung canopy into the crook of an aging hawthorn, reach and pull a large chunk of ivy from high in its boughs, drop it to the ground where the mob pounce on it and sunlight pours deliciously into the space in the tree I occupy, lighting up the living core of the tree. The tree opens, soaks up the sunbeams and breathes with the weight of ivy lifted.

It is true, goats do climb trees.

These are old, dying hawthorn, still clinging onto crumpled, brown leaves that failed to catch enough sunlight to feed the failing tree last summer, smothered with bramble, wrapped and weighed down with ivy as thick as my arm, rotted boughs breaking under the strain, partially shaded out by much taller, younger white willow and alder that stretch skyward from the wet gully below on thick trunks with deeply creviced bark. Goats have a somewhat deserved reputation for damaging trees, and sure they will in young woodlands or when forage is scarce or weather forces them to hang around under cover. The trick is to keep them moving and well fed on a broad array of forage, and don’t let them stand around bored or hungry where they might get notions to chew bark. If they still insist on chewing bark when there’s plenty else to eat and keep them occupied, they’re likely looking for minerals or tannins that are lacking in their forage. They won’t hurt these mature trees with tough bark and the bulk of their canopy well above browse height, where the forage is thick and plentiful and I’m keeping them moving on to the next mound of greenery. Here, they’re getting the ivy and undergrowth down, letting the trees breathe, letting light touch the forest floor, opening glades and filling an ecological niche that indigenous deer would have filled in the old forests of Ireland. We’ll see if relieving the old hawthorn of some of the smothering weight of bramble and ivy helps them bud into a new lease of life, and what else springs from the disturbed soil beneath them this summer.

All this tree talk brings me on to sheep…