Secrets from Chuckling Goat

by Shann Nix Jones

  You have to give yourself to the job, one piece at a time. It has to be done, after all. It must be done. It will be done. And the sweetness – and the acceptance – creeps in from the edges of my mind… peace. The heavy, slow trudging that accomplishes the work also stills and quiets my mind.

  This is what I’d lost, as I’d raced faster and faster, turning my work over to machines. The ability to ‘give’ myself to a task that quiets the mind – and leaves me with a bone-deep, tired sensation of contentment.

  ‘I’m tired – but it’s a good tired,’ Rich said once, after bringing in the hay. At first I thought he was crazy. How can it be good to be tired? But now I know what he means. It’s a different sensation of tiredness than the wired, weary sense of mental exhaustion that comes from racing too fast.

  Working hard, deep and slow – I never had this experience before I came to the farm. But it is its own kind of elixir – bitter at first, but soothing and warming in the end. I wouldn’t have chosen to drink it, by myself. I did it because I fell in love with Rich – because I wanted to be part of his world, and prove myself strong enough to work beside him; I wanted to be a proper mate, not just a stupid city girl. But having thrown myself into it, I find that the work has its own rewards.

  Today, as I trudged through the rain, dragging the heavy trolley, I found myself smiling. In the end, it has everything to do with meaning. I find meaning in what I’m doing, and so I have a serene little separate microclimate in my head of pleasure, despite the mud and the wet.

  My work isn’t meaningless. It isn’t ‘dog work’. It means something. The heavy bags are food for the goats – our goats. Providing food for the animals, which will provide food for us, stitches me firmly into the wheel of belonging on the farm. My labour isn’t random, or empty. It makes me part of a larger whole.

  I remember an anecdote about US president John F. Kennedy’s visit to the NASA Space Exploration headquarters, during which he stopped to talk to the janitor. ‘And what do you do here?’ Kennedy asked him kindly. ‘I’m helping to put a man on the moon, sir,’ the janitor replied. The man wasn’t just mopping floors – he was part of something larger.

  Human beings, it appears, experience happiness when we feel we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. For me, this means being part of the complex and interwoven molecule that is the farm, as intricate and exact as a snowflake. Each piece is connected with every other piece.

  I love Rich, and I came to live on the farm with him because this is where he lives. I would have lived on the moon with him, or in the city, or in a tent. But now I’m beginning to love the farm for its own sake – for the things that it’s teaching me, and for the life that we live on it.

  I’m still travelling for my work – in my other life, I teach high-level executives to give speeches – which I’m beginning to dread. And Rich is still working at the Harp Centre of Wales – but the truth is that he’s bored there. He has an engineer’s brain along with those fine woodworker’s hands, and now that he’s helped translate the make-one-harp-a-year process into a more efficient six-harps-a-month, he’s doing the same thing over and over, and it doesn’t suit him.

  I wonder… could we ever make a living from the farm? Is there something here that could make the farm wash its own face? Highly unlikely, I know. From what I can gather it’s always a struggle, to make a farm produce income. Usually, you have to farm on a massive scale to make it work economically. But what could we do here, with this lovely little gem of a smallholding overlooking the Irish Sea?

  Biofuel, commercial egg-laying, turkeys, Christmas trees? We go to the smallholder shows, and bring back brochures, and talk over the possibilities – we’d love to do something together; something that would mean that neither one of us would have to leave the farm anymore.

  14 September 2010

  A breezy, blue autumn day – the wind ruffling the curling sycamore leaves and shaking them loose, systematically, from their branches.

  It’s time to pick blackberries – the hedges around our fields are full of them. This year was supposed to be a good one for these fruits – the combination of frost, sun and rain supposedly created the perfect conditions. But when Rich and I went around the fields last, carrying secateurs to slash back the brambles, some of the blackberries looked wizened and unripe, while others looked already mouldy. We need some sun to ripen them.

  Blackberries are one of the great treats of the food year here in Wales. Everyone turns out to pick, filling plastic buckets to the brim, nursing pricked fingers and returning home with berry-stained mouths and clothes. Rich always tempts Benji to eat a sloe, making his whole face shrink up tight with the taste. The tiny sloes, which are unbearably bitter, only come into their own when each one is pricked with a pin (a massive fiddle, when you have hundreds of the things!) and soaked for a year with sugar and gin.

  But blackberries are a different thing altogether. I make blackberry and apple jam – apples are due to be picked now as well – and I learned that apples have lots of pectin, the naturally occurring substance that makes jam set. Now I just toss apples into any jam I make – it adds to the flavour, and allows everything to jell perfectly. A secret weapon that I discovered after making many jars of gooey sludge.

  We’re only just now finishing up the final jar from last year. Opening a jar of jam does feel like opening a piece of time that’s been bottled – all of our trials and tribulations, laughing and milking, animals dying and being born, bread baking and batches of cheese failing… birthdays and holidays, and the days that stretch in between, all captured in amber like the jam.

  Shann’s Blackberry and Apple Jam

  675g (1½lb) blackberries

  675g (1½lb) apples

  150–275ml (¼–½ pint) water

  1.3kg (3lb) granulated sugar

  Pick over the berries and wash them.

  Peel, core and slice the apples. Put the fruit into a large, heavy-bottomed pan with the water and cook until tender.

  Add the sugar, and stir until dissolved.

  Bring to the boil and continue to boil until the jam sets (see below).

  When the jam has set, pour it into warm, sterilized jars using a ladle or a small pitcher (see below). Seal the jars and allow them to cool.

  Don’t be intimidated by jam

  It’s really pretty simple to make jam! You can use any type of fruit that you have to hand, and in any amount. The idea is to boil up fruit with sugar until it’s reduced down, and then preserve it in jars.

  Really, this is a way of ‘preserving’ fruit in order to use it over the winter, hence the term ‘preserve’. Sugar keeps things from going off – in the same way that salt (brining) or vinegar (pickling) do. These processes are just the ways in which our ancestors dealt with the fact that most of the food on a farm becomes ready at the same time – in the autumn – and needs to be kept so that it can be eaten through the winter, spring and summer.

  Many of the classic jam recipes use massive amounts of sugar in order to preserve the fruit. I find this is often too sweet for our taste, so I simply add sugar and taste the mixture until I think it’s sweet enough. The downside of this is that the jam may not last as long in the cupboard. But a recipe like this one really only makes between three and four jars of jam, which you’ll get through pretty quickly!

  A word about ‘setting’

  I had the worst time, figuring out what this really means! The old country cookbooks assume that every good woman knows all about the technology of making jam – and in my case, it wasn’t true. But I finally worked it out, and here’s what I discovered: a ‘set’ means the point at which the jam is cooked enough that it’ll be the right consistency to spread on bread once it’s cooled.

  Here’s how to check the ‘set point’. Put a saucer in the freezer and let it chill. When you think the jam is cooked enough, put a drop of it on the chilled saucer. Then run your finger through it: if it develops a crinkly track mark when you do so, you have a �
�set’.

  A word about jars

  You don’t have to use fancy Kilner jars, although they’re lovely if you have the extra cash. Recycled jam jars are fine, as long as they have the plastic-lined lids with the round dot in the middle that ‘pops’ when they’re opened. (All-metal lids will go rusty.)

  Place the lids in a pan of boiling water for five minutes and wash the jars carefully. When you start making the jam, set the jars and their lids upside down on a baking tray in a very low oven – about 75°C (175°F). By the time you finish, the jars and lids will be sterilized and warm. This is important, because you need to put the warm jam into warm jars, and seal them. As the jars cool, they’ll compress, creating a seal that will pull that lid down tight. When you open it, you should hear the ‘pop’.

  And a final note on pectin

  This is a great recipe because it has apples in it, and as I’ve learned, apples have pectin – the stuff that makes jam set. You can buy preserving sugar that has added pectin, but I find it simpler just to chuck two or three apples into whatever I’m making. They don’t disturb the flavour or texture, and do ensure that your jam will be a good consistency – not too runny. So, throw in some apples!

  Enjoy! There’s nothing more heavenly than homemade jam on homemade bread – everyone will crowd round the kitchen table.

  We always watch the hedgerows carefully through August, to see when the blackberries are ripe. Welsh tradition says that you should never pick blackberries after 29 September, because that’s ‘Devil Spits Day’, the day that Satan himself is said to spit on all blackberries. No-one seems sure why – one rumour is that, when he was cast out of Heaven, he fell into a bramble patch. Of course, another good reason for not going blackberry picking after that date is that whatever berries have been left by birds and neighbours will most likely be mouldy!

  16 September 2010

  Yesterday was the day to take our female British Toggenburg, named Marmite, on a date with the local Toggie stud. Goats come into season every 21 days, for a short period in the autumn. After a five-month pregnancy, they give birth in the spring, when the weather is milder, and the grass is growing, ready for the kids to eat.

  We don’t keep male goats on our farm, because their smell is so horrendous and the males just seem big and scary. So we phoned around to find someone who did keep a proper British Toggenburg gentleman, and would be agreeable to letting it stand stud for us when the time came.

  We’d marked on the calendar the first day that Marmite came into season, and then carefully counted ahead 21 days, and marked it again. Yesterday there was no sign of anything different about her, but when I went out to milk this morning she was bleating and wagging her tail – definitely in season. Nothing noisier than a female goat in the mood for love!

  I sighed – I’d been hoping that she’d wait until Rich got home. I phoned him at work and he said that I could wait until he returned at 2:30 p.m., but I was worried that it’d be too late – sometimes goats only stay in season for a few hours.

  On my own, then. I hooked up the new trailer – purchased specially for this purpose, and small enough for me to tow legally – nerves jangling and stomach tight. I went over and over in my head what Rich had told me – click the latch of the hitch down firmly in place, loop the chain over the round ball, plug in the lights, wind the extra wheel up out of the way and clamp it down. I’d never towed anything on my own before… just one practice run with Rich beside me in the passenger seat.

  It’s a funny thing, as I had all kinds of adventures in my days of newspaper and radio. I went undercover into Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s wedding… sneaked into a Moonie brainwashing encampment for a weekend… pretended to be a high school senior for a month to write a story on the education system in California.

  I’d brashly agreed to take on a radio show with no previous experience, and bluffed my way through many an interview and live stage show, facing an audience of thousands. But nothing I’ve ever done reduces me to the helpless, quivering pile of nerves that I feel when confronted with farm machinery.

  Big, blunt and fiercely coloured, it seems particularly unforgiving. It appears to leer at me threateningly, warning me that it could take off an arm or a leg, or hurt someone I love, if I don’t know what I’m doing. And let’s face it – I don’t.

  Before when I didn’t know what I was doing, I was always able to fake it. I specialized in being a ‘just-add-water’ kind of expert. Jump off the cliff and figure it out on the way down was my motto. In the city, a big attitude and a breezy line of chatter will take you a long way. I often waited until the hour before my radio show to prepare, counting on my ability to skim the material quickly, and make it all work at show time.

  I liked the challenge. But this is real life, real stuff. You have to actually know what you’re doing, or animals will die, tractors will overturn, dumpers will get stuck in the mud. You can’t fake it, and that terrifies me.

  I checked to see that there was enough straw in the back of the trailer to make a comfortable bed, and went to get Marmite. She seemed happy enough to come along and leaped nimbly into the trailer. I bolted her in, and we set off on our journey.

  I had the postcode of the location of the stud goat, and I typed it into the sat nav. We drove along for 30 minutes or so. I was taking particular care to start and stop smoothly, so as not to jolt Marmite. I was feeling pretty proud of myself.

  Then the sat nav told me to turn left, and I did, only to find myself trapped in a residential cul-de-sac. Obviously not the farm that I’d been heading for – and no room to turn around.

  For nearly 10 minutes I tried fruitlessly to back out. But with the trailer behind me swinging immediately right or left, there was no way I could do it. I tried to back the trailer into a driveway – no luck. By then I was sweating and shaking and near to tears, and Marmite was bleating piteously in the back.

  Eventually, I got out of the car, unhooked the trailer, turned the car around, dragged the trailer back into position by hand, hooked it up again, and drove out.

  Back on the road, I passed several farm lanes that roughly matched the description the woman had given me, but I was too frightened to drive down them, in case they were the wrong ones, and I was unable to get back out again. I phoned the billy owner, and she didn’t pick up the phone. I phoned Rich, and he was sympathetic, but there wasn’t a lot he could do. I was just going to have to sort this out myself.

  Finally, after passing one stone church at least three times, stopping to ask kindly but ultimately unhelpful men in a nearby village and banging my forehead on the steering wheel repeatedly, I managed to reach the billy lady on the phone, and she directed me to the correct farm track. We bumped along a narrow dirt road for nearly a mile before she came out to greet us, smiling and waving.

  She was kindly, with wild brown curly hair, not unlike my own – and jeans tucked into her wellies. I recognized her as a kindred spirit at once. People who keep goats nearly always have wild hair. I think it has something to do with always being out in the barn, and having bits of straw fall on you all the time.

  She showed me the two male goats she kept – a handsome silver one with a beard, and a younger, slighter one who was a darker brown. The smell of the billies enveloped us, eye-wateringly strong, musky and almost – but not quite – like pine resin. She asked me which one I’d prefer. Ooh, a difficult question, and another of those things that I would’ve referred to Rich if only he’d been with me.

  Marmite is quite a light Toggenburg, and they’re really supposed to be darker, in order to win prizes at shows. We don’t show our goats at the moment, but we might choose to next year. This would mean a vote for the darker male. But the lighter male had a slightly better-looking pedigree, as his dam’s milk yields had been recorded. This gives the all-important ‘Q*’ rating next to the name on the pedigree – a mark of goat-y success.

  This was another entirely new world for me. I’ve never been an enthusiastic breeder o
f any sort of animal, and the goat world has as many tricky ins and outs, arcane references and incomprehensible expert jargon as any private arena can. I now find myself knee-deep in this obsession, to the point where Rich and I are both proud possessors of ‘South West Wales Goat Club’ patches, ready to be sewn onto our jackets. Sad, really.

  The goat world also seems to have an incredible amount of complicated paperwork, involving registering and transferring the animals back and forth between owners. Each time they are born, or die, or are sold, or move from one place to another, blue and green and pink copies of forms have to be filled out, ripped off, mailed or filed. I wrestle with this paperwork, and with the mysterious codes next to the names of really ‘good’ animals that indicate breeding or milk yield or something. It’s all very confusing.

  In the end, I plumped for the lighter male, simply because I liked the way he looked. He was grand and handsome, with intelligent eyes and a silvery beard – he reminded me a bit of Rich, if I’m honest.

  I thought I’d delicately duck out and give Marmite some private time with her beau – I didn’t quite know how this bit of it was handled. No such luck. I was instructed to hold Marmite while the male came out of his shed, jumped up on top of her and heaved away for a few seconds. And then, apparently, it was all over. Marmite looked as stunned as I felt.

  We tied her up, away from the male goat, and went into a little caravan parked in the barnyard to do the paperwork. I wrote out a cheque, and the lady handed me the carefully printed pedigree of the male I’d chosen to act as stud. Then we went outside again, repeated the whole process – with me holding Marmite still while the male covered her a second time – just to make sure, and then we were finished.