The heather is coming into bloom. Soon it will be a blaze of royal pink and purple across the hill, splashed with golden gorse and buzzing with the busyness of bumblebees. So many bumblebees! Big, fat, heavy ones that defy the laws of physics as they bumble from heathery tussock to heathery tussock and little, fluffy ones that zoom zigzags across the hill.
We thought about putting honeybee hives on our heather and gorse. With native, Irish honeybees, of course. I use a lot of honey, as our sole sweetener in anything that requires sweetening—as you know if you’ve been following for the last while, we’re eating exclusively locally for a year, and lucky for us very much, very good, wildflower honey is produced locally by very many small-scale, backyard beekeepers. But to have our own honey, from our own heather that grows so voraciously from our shallow, peaty soil, the ambrosial nectar of the land, what a gift that would be! We decided against it, for now, so as not to upset the resident bumblebee population, at least until we start a garden here. If we are to introduce even more bees to the phenomenal number the heather already supports, we figure we had best grow more flowers.
It is with this aim of balance that we try to integrate our farm into the ecosystem, working with the land and what naturally grows and thrives here. Of course, there will always be push and shove and ebb and flow to the balance, as in nature, but we can at least try to shove in gently.
The Irish gorse, aiteann gaelach, is flowering now. Our native, western gorse that grows low on the rocks amongst the heather, splashing the late summer hillsides with gold.
Big, hairy, fox moth caterpillars trundle through the gorse and heather, and tiny, bright green and yellow ones, too. Enormous hawker dragons and pretty, metallic blue damsels dart around the ponds; red admiral, green-veined white, meadow brown and small heath butterflies flutter by. Soon, the devil’s bit scabious will bloom.
Throughout June, spotted orchids dotted the grasslands while the moor grass raced ahead of the sheep, and the goats and I sweated under the high summer sun. Our winter’s hay was cut and dried and bought from the lowlands and lowland farmers worried about the lack of rain for regrowth, while here on the hill extreme heat and drought dried up the streams we rely on for water for the livestock and baked the mud to dust, but our moor grass kept growing, our damp, overgrown grasslands stayed green, and our ewes raised their lambs on green heather and gorse.
June was the month of hauling water and of strawberries and cream and we ate al fresco and grilled spring finished hogget chops dripping with grass fat over open flames. The sheep hid in the shade of the willows through the high summer heat and oh, how we missed the rain. Soft, summer, Irish rain.
July has brought heavy, thunderous, flooding rain, welcome after June’s drought. Now, the moor grass is high and already turning over, and I am woken each morning by the chirrupping of grasshoppers, and the goats bleating for their breakfast. Except when it’s raining. Then, the thundering drumming of rain on our little caravan drowns out all other sound.
We are into the late summer lull, a brief season when everything plumps and ripens and takes care of itself for a moment, before harvest and breeding and the year begins again. The sheep are sheared, and the lambs are growing fast and fat on summer grass and sweet heather freshened by the rain.
We watch kestrels hunt over the high ground, on the open heath and sheep grazed hills where voles are easy to spot. There are at least two resident pairs of kestrels here; we have seen all four birds hunting at once. Sometimes a pair will break out in a screeching, airborne scrawl to a cackling audience of crows. A single merlin races low, chased off by the sparrows.
Every so often when I’m out on the land, I catch a distinct whiff of musk: the mark of a sika stag that’s claimed this patch as his and a pungent reminder that my rams, currently lazing around contemplating their cud, will soon come into rut. Time to check the fences and put some distance between them and the ewes. At dusk and at dawn, we hear the stags roar. It seems early, but, I too sense the seasons roll on. Time to start weaning ram lambs before they, too, get any ideas. Time to build new winter housing for a growing goat herd, and make the decisions that need to be made to reduce the sheep flock before grass growth slows and stalls.
Summer is short on the hill, and we feel the seasons dramatically shift from extreme to extreme on the open rock and heath. The ducks’ ponds are full again. The hazelnuts have set in the hedgerows and the blackberries begin to redden as summer starts to fall.