The first goose lays an egg on 8 February and now they are appearing every day. Goose eggs are big - about three and a half inches long - white and a more oval shape than a chicken's egg. Mildred lays four eggs: also white, but considerably smaller. All of these go into the new incubator when it reaches the right temperature, though we will leave some goose eggs out in the coop for the female geese to hatch.
Eggs are extraordinary things. It takes twenty-five hours for an egg to form inside the chicken's oviduct. The oviduct is more than two feet long and is lined with glands that secrete the materials for the albumen, shell membranes and shell. Strong muscles keep the eggs spinning round, making ten to twelve rotations every hour, like a potter's wheel. The spin gives the tiny embryo its early sense of orientation. As the yolk spins, the cells at the leading edge of the small disc of dividing cells will become the head. Egg formation is a physiological process that can be triggered by light conditions and production of yolks in readiness for breeding. The yolks aren't formed after mating - the delay would be too great - so ripe yolks are released from the ovaries and undergo the process of egg formation even if the male is absent. That's how our domestic chickens manage to lay their five or six eggs each week. In the wild, though, it works differently. Wild birds synchronise egg formation and mating to the time of year, giving us the wonder of birds' nests in springtime hedges, filled with colourful speckled eggs.
When I was a child, our garden in Ludlow would boast at least ten nests in the garden hedges every year. My father was keen on birds and allowed me to collect two or three eggs a season: bright blue hedge sparrows', speckled thrushes' and the blue blackbirds' eggs. If there was a tit's nest, it was well out of bounds, which seems ironical now as our garden is full of tits long-tailed tits, great tits, blue tits and coal tits - but it is rare to see any thrushes, and even the blackbirds, which I remember as being classed as common birds when I was a child, are infrequent visitors. Using a needle, I'd make a tiny hole in either end and then gently blowout the yolk and the white, adding the hopefully intact egg to my collection, stored on cotton wool artfully tricked up with old bits of moss, in a drawer of my bedside cabinet. The question of why eggs are coloured and speckled has engaged scientists for over a hundred years. Many believed that it was for camouflage, useful for concealing eggs from predators, but if you think about it, this theory doesn't stack up at all. Why leave a bright blue egg in a dusty brown nest, signalling its presence to any passing predator? Many eggs, like the white and reddish brown speckled eggs of the great tit, are so distinctive that a blind weasel could find them in the dark.
Recently a better theory has emerged. Speckling may be a unique solution to the engineering problem of how to strengthen unusually fragile eggs. The pigment chemicals that create the speckles may act as a kind of glue, supporting thin areas of shell and protecting them from breakage during incubation in the nest. Ornithologists studied great tits living in woods near Oxford where the soil is low in calcium. Their eggs are very heavily speckled. Calcium carbonate is the main construction material for shells and birds get their calcium from eating snails, which in turn extract their calcium from the soil to make their shells. The speckled areas, which have less calcium, gain reinforcement from strong, flexible compounds called protoporphyrins. This suggests that speckling, far from being a beauty or camouflage aid, actually has an engineering function. But no one has yet explained why robins' eggs are blue.
Boris has pneumonia and his coat is ragged due to a fungal infection. He's looking very miserable and is off his food. I know David is worried that the little pig might not pull through, but I refuse to believe that another one of our herd might die. Although he is meant to be the breeding boar, he is clearly not up to it so one of the other boys has been moved in with Bramble in the hope of successful mating. Their initial meeting wasn't promising as they tore into each other, squealing aggressively and biting each other's ears.
A few hours afterwards, Charlie and I are walking back to the nursery to spend the afternoon planting seeds when we notice the male pig standing in the middle of the sprouts in the vegetable garden. He's making his way towards an open gate, so while Charlie goes off to find some pig nuts I stand in the gateway to stop him getting out. But Number One Pig, as I'd christened this unnamed porker, isn't that serious about making a bid for freedom. He stands quite still in the gateway while I scratch him behind his ears and rub the wrinkly skin above his snout, which pigs seem to like. He leans against my knee and moves his weight forward on to his front legs, his back ones stretched out behind so that he looks like he's getting ready to do press-ups. We stay like this for quite some time as I forgot the key to the feed shed and Charlie has had to go home to collect it. But Number One's attention snaps back when he hears the rattle of the nuts in the bucket, so I tie my grubby white pashmina shawl round his neck like a lead and walk him back to his run. As soon as we turn the corner and he sees Bramble, he breaks into a run, the scarf billowing out behind him. I whip it off his neck just before he scampers through the gate. I think he looked rather debonair in the scarf, a regular pig about town.
In 1842 Charles Dickens was in New York where he met a boar walking along Broadway who inspired him to write: 'He leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat answering to that of our club men at home. A free and easy, careless, indifferent kind of pig, having a very large acquaintance among other pigs of the same character. In this respect a republican pig, going where he pleases and mingling with the best society.' In the 1980s the New York Times reported seeing two adult pigs trotting through Manhattan in the early hours of the morning. They were later spotted strolling along the shore on Staten Island. William Hedgepeth, author of The Hog Book, wondered: 'How in the world did they do that? Hogs can swim well enough, but that would have been stupid. Clearly they got aboard the Staten Island ferry, but how?' We still have no idea how Number One Pig got out of his run. So far, there's no record of a pig figuring out how to unlatch a gate and then close it carefully behind him.
Charlie is growing increasingly concerned that, because of the diversions into pigs and birds, we're neglecting the bread-andbutter of our business, growing vegetables. We started the farm exactly a year ago and its prime purpose was to fulfil all of Dillington Park's orders for vegetables and eggs and we are failing badly in this respect. Right now, in the middle of January, the polytunnels are largely empty, most of the walled garden is empty too and there's now the huge five-acre field, stretching away to the west of the garden, which is still covered in the stubble of last year's wheat. David's energies have been diverted into laying drainage pipes, building a new chicken shed (which will house all our birds if the threat of bird flu means that all free-range fowl have to be moved indoors), planting the fruit trees and fencing off the new land.
All through January, we've been spending several hours every weekend sowing seeds for the first Montacute market of the year. On these cold days, I love being in the potting shed, where it is warm and life springs up all around me. There are heated shelves covered with gravel along two sides of the room, where the newly planted seeds germinate, warmed from below, watered from above by the sprinklers. At the far end, there's a big table where plants in various stages of growth stand in rows. On the remaining wall, another wide bench provides space for planting seeds, potting up seedlings and transferring cuttings into bigger containers. In the open areas underneath the surfaces, black plastic seed trays, pots of different sizes and bags of soil are neatly stacked. Trowels, small forks, scissors, Stanley knives, labels, pens, string and wire are assembled on a shelf above the potting-up bench. Everything you need is within easy reach, including the kettle and the radio. Fat-Boy, as Dylan is nicknamed, likes it too, as the potting shed connects to the room where the eggs are stored and there's usually at least one egg that gets broken, or is cracked and therefore can't be sold, which he then gets to eat, slurping up the yolk and the white, every so often spitting out a bit of shell.
Crumble up the rich, moist potting compost in your hand, pack it into the pots, make a small hole and drop in the seeds. Marjoram, coriander, green basil, purple basil, flat-leaf parsley, curly parsley, chervil, oregano, peppermint: I have planted ninety of each this morning. Then cucumbers, peppers and chillis. Then some flowers: phlox, delphinium, carnations and pinks. The smallest seed is the peppermint, smaller than a grain of salt, practically nothing at all. It is almost impossible to believe that this will turn into a big, leafy, sweet tasting, powerfully smelling plant in a matter of weeks. Soil is extraordinary stuff. The more I learn about it the more I realise that it is at the heart of everything on our planet, the substance that provides us with all life. It is what allows the earth to breathe and to live, to function.
It even has its own association, the Soil Association, whose roots go back to the 1940s, to a group of English eccentrics led by the magnificent Eve Balfour. On her farm in Suffolk, Lady Eve struggled to grow good vegetables and raise livestock. In her spare time she wrote detective stories and played in a jazz band and smoked cheroots. You could find her, it was said, dressed in tweed trousers, leaning on a fork, a cigar clamped between her lips, surveying her crops. She described herself as a flapper-farmer. In 1940 she'd read a book by the explorer and naturalist Sir Albert Harrison, who had spent the previous decade studying the lifestyle of the Indian Hunza tribe. The Hunzas lived well into their hundreds and Sir Albert was desperate to discover their secret of long life. Farmers worldwide had understood the necessity to rotate crops in order not to deplete the soil of essential nitrogen. They'd understood biological control, the process whereby specific pests can be destroyed by predators and parasites. Conscious biological control is an ancient concept: the Chinese encouraged ants into citrus groves to eat caterpillars and boring beetles, even building bamboo runways to aid their progress from tree to tree. Sir Albert, I'm sure, would have known to grow a row of onions between his carrots, to keep the carrot fly at bay and he would have known the extraordinary benefit to the soil of regular plantings of clover. The Hunza did all this, but they had an extra secret: they irrigated their terraces with water from glacial streams, a rich source of minerals released from volcanic dust, which meant that their food was enriched with high levels of essential trace elements and it was this, he concluded, that gave them their long life.
Lady Eve was entranced and she set up the association and published her book, The Living Soil, which encapsulated her belief that that the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible. 'The criteria for a sustainable agriculture,' she wrote, 'can be summed up in one word - permanence, which means adopting techniques that maintain soil fertility indefinitely; that utilise, as far as possible, only renewable resources; that do not grossly pollute the environment; and that foster life energy (or if preferred biological activity) within the soil and throughout the cycles of all the involved food-chains.'
Monty Don once told me that he had a dream when he was a young boy in which he'd been planting some seeds and his hands were buried in the soil, but it wasn't the seeds that began to grow. It was his hands, stretching down into the earth and turning into roots. When he woke up, he knew he wanted to be a gardener. But to most people, and indeed to me until recently, soil is just pretty boring stuff which clogs up the bottom of your wellingtons: it is indeed the dirt beneath our feet. Governments have spent a fortune exploring the potential for life on other planets, but exploring the soil is a fledgling, under-funded and unglamorous industry. Yet the earth in our gardens, our fields, our forests, as well as the sediments at the bottom of every river and stream and marsh, harbour the most diverse life known in our universe. It is nothing short of magical. It is also critical to our survival. Without it, we literally have nothing and would be nothing. Every bit of energy that the world has comes from the sun, and there is only one way that living creatures can obtain it. Only plants can convert the power of the sun into the sustenance that all life on earth needs and it is the soil, in all its marvellous complexity, that allows this intricate exchange of sunlight into digestible energy to take place. Leaves and roots, forged in the reaction between the sun and the soil, have enabled us to create our civilisations and to look outside ourselves towards the distant surfaces of the planets.
Inside every leaf the chloroplast cells are tiny workshops for photosynthesis, the process which traps the sun's energy and converts it into carbohydrates. To do this the plant takes in carbon dioxide from the air and emits oxygen: the exact reverse of the way animals breathe. Using the sunlight for energy, it strips away the carbon and uses it to assemble sugars and other organic compounds needed to fuel life. In the process, the microbes discard the oxygen molecules from the carbon dioxide, creating the most precious waste in the universe. But the plants don't just need sunlight and C02. They need water and they need minerals. Both these come from the soil. Soil has been called 'the poor man's rainforest' because a single spadeful of rich garden soil may contain more species than the entire Amazon rainforest nurtures above ground. Think about it: it is, to coin an overused word, awesome. Two-thirds of the world's biological diversity lives in the soil and in underwater sediments. You could call it a micro-menagerie and it includes uncatalogued millions of microbes, mainly bacteria and fungi, single-celled protozoa, and tiny animals such as nematodes, copepods, springtails, mites, beetles, snails, shrimp, termites, pillbugs and earthworms. Crumbling the rich, dark soil through my fingers, I try to get my head round the fact that this neglected substance is actually stuffed full of tiny creatures all performing an essential part of life's essential rhythms. It's the sort of idea that, in 1960s hippy speak, blows your mind away.
The Harvard University ecologist Edward O. Wilson calculated that 93 percent of the 'dry weight of animal tissue' in a patch of Amazon rainforest belongs to the invertebrates, from mites and springtails to ants and termites. And that, apparently, doesn't count the microbes. Despite their minute size, the bacteria in an acre of soil can outweigh a cow or two grazing above them. Most of the underground creatures live near the surface but there are some extraordinary beings known as 'extremeophiles', bacteria and ancient microbes, which live a mile or more deep in the earth, or in boiling springs or polar ice. Although most soil organisms are tiny and short-lived, some are huge and very, very old. American soil scientists have measured the Armillaria root-rot fungus, a sprawling underground mass which can exceed the size of a blue whale. The largest yet discovered stretches under 2,200 acres of Oregon.
Wilson calls the creatures below our feet 'the little things that run the world'. Soil science is in its infancy, but what we do know is that, acting together, these little things form the foundation for all life on earth. They break down organic matter, store and recycle nutrients vital to plant growth, generate soil, renew soil fertility, filter and purify water, detoxify pollutants, control plant pests, yield up our most important antibiotics, provide us with vitamins and minerals, and help determine the state of the earth's atmosphere by their absorption of greenhouse gases.
In prehistoric times, long before we started mucking around with it, our soils were so rich in vitamins and minerals and goodness that trees could grow ten metres in a single year, and in the late Jurassic period, the gigantic thunder lizard was the size of a swimming pool and weighed twenty-five tonnes. Yet it was a vegetarian with a mouth the size of a horse. To grow that big on a purely vegetarian diet, nutritionists estimate that the plant life must have contained thirty times the mineral levels that we find today.
Of all the creatures that live in the soil, the nematode is the most extraordinary. It is the most diverse and abundant creature on the planet; four out of every five animals are nematodes and in a single square yard of pasture soil you could expect to find ten million of these tiny worm-like creatures. Throughout the world, 25,000 species of nematode have been named, but there are several million more waiting to be identified. Not all nematodes are benign microbe-eating decomposers: they can also be hookworms, round worms,
ring worms and the cause of elephantiasis and river blindness.
Nematodes are so structurally different from us that, in biological classification terms, they are grouped under their own phylum. The phylum that we belong to, called the chordate phylum, also includes all birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, as well as mammals. Nematodes breathe and reproduce in a unique way: they are characterised by their S-shaped, snaky movements. Some are free-living, some are symbiotic, others are parasitic, but they all playa vital role in the process of breaking down dead and waste matter - plant and animaland in making it ready for re-absorption by a new plant.
Each earth creature eats waste and excretes it, in the process making everything smaller and smaller. They then mix the organic matter with the minerals in the soil and with fungi and bacteria. They move the dead matter downwards where it gets eaten again by different types of bacteria. Bacteria come in all shapes and sizes: some secrete a sugary gum which binds soil particles together; others break down molecules so that they can be absorbed by the plant roots. The cyanobacteria, singlecelled organisms in a kingdom of their own, turn the nitrogen in the air into soluble nitrogen which plants can take up through the soil. Other bacteria change molecules into amino acids which plants translate into vitamin C.
Fungi secrete specific enzymes that chop up molecules into the exact sizes and shapes that plants need. Tiny protozoa roam the soil and feed on the bacteria and fungi. In the process of feeding they release excess nitrogen which the plants take up through their roots. Various organisms, including fungi, help plants take up the minerals they need as well as acting as physical barriers around the roots to stop disease. Others attach themselves to roots, operating like vaccinations which trigger an immune response in the plant. Other organisms directly attack harmful bugs. It's a complete, complex, totally interdependent world which provides the basis for plants to grow, and to harness and pass on the energy of the sun. Every plant has its own diet and knows what to pick out of the vast quantity of minerals, acids, carbohydrates, hydrogen molecules to enable it to perform its genetic inheritance. So a carrot will select what it needs to produce vitamin C, beta carotene and other vitamins. Flowers will take something different. Trees something different again. When the cow comes to graze, it will choose to eat the plant - grass - that tastes good but also enables it to grow and produce beef.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 11