11 July 2011
Bright, hot and sunny day, with blue skies. My mother’s 72nd birthday. I wish she was here with us today! Rich has gone out to begin to mow the hay – a momentous day, and a big risk. Today is Monday, and he has to gamble that the weather will be clear and sunny through to Friday. A near impossibility in Wales – and all the other factors have to be balanced as well.
The hay is so important for us – it’s our main asset. We’d never be able to afford to buy in the amount of hay that we make, so it enables us to keep our animals through the winter. And we’ve never had so many – we’re up to 22 goats now.
26 July 2011
Tomorrow is the Cardigan show and somehow – I’m still not sure how – we’ve been persuaded to enter and show our goats. I didn’t want to. I was quite firm about that.
‘We don’t have time,’ I told Rich and everyone else who asked. ‘We’re trying to launch this business. We’re flat out. We simply haven’t got time to prance around in white coats, competing in the show ring.’
But then Roz from the goat club called. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘It’s only me and Ian Grant entering goats at all this year. Without more entrants, they’ve threatened that next year they simply won’t have a goat category.’
Rich and I talked about it – and it seemed clear that we needed to support the cause. It’s important to us that the dwindling number of goat keepers in the area don’t disappear altogether. No goat keepers means no billies, no nannies coming for our billies, no stock for us to buy or sell. We don’t want that to happen – so we’re going to have to do something about it.
And that something seems to be showing our goats.
So, Joli and I spent most of today scrubbing our white goats, trying futilely to remove the stains down their sides that come from the nasty habit they have of lying in their own poo – which they seem always to gravitate towards, despite the fact that we lay fresh straw every day.
The problem is that our great friends the Grants will be at the show tomorrow – they’re the people who we’ve bought most of our white goats from, and they’ve shown for many years – and I can’t stand the thought of showing up with our goats poorly turned out. It seems sloppy and ungrateful.
But the stains refused to shift – shampoo as we might. We tried the commercial white-horse shampoo from the farm co-op, tinted purple like the rinse that old ladies put on their hair. And at Joli’s insistence, we also tried the cheaper combination of basic shampoo with a vinegar spray.
The horrible and expensive commercial product won hands down. The goat kid we washed with it gleamed an ethereal, show-winning, fluffy blue-white, while the homemade vinegar shampoo kid just looked damp and slightly yellow.
So. We washed the rest of the white goats with the expensive purple shampoo, and scrubbed them with the stain remover. But we still couldn’t remove all the yellow stains on knees and flanks and brisket.
To top the problem, we all have to show wearing white coats. Ours arrived and were tried on for size, but they were wrinkled, from the packaging. This doesn’t, on the face of it, seem like a huge problem. Just press them, you might say. But I’m a She-Who-Does-Not-Iron. It’s always been a point of pride for me. If clothes need to be ironed, I send them to a dry cleaner, I used to say, back in the days when I owned those sorts of clothes.
These days my wardrobe consists of leggings that fit easily under my wellies-and-waterproof-rubber-trousers-combination that lurks always by the front door. And men’s flannel shirts (short- or long-sleeved, depending on the season). And massive fleece jumpers, as warm and soft as possible. Nothing, but nothing, that needs ironing. Except, it seems, white goat-show coats.
Sigh. She-Who-Does-Not-Iron plugs in the iron and gets on with it…
24 August 2011
Well, we packed up 10 of our goats and went to the show. It was bright, hot and sunny. Two of the entrants were quarrelling about where to put the hurdles. Once they’d sorted out the details we put hurdles together to make our four pens, and released the goats into them. We gave them buckets of water, hay and branches to eat.
Children crowded around the pens, thrusting the branches into the goats’ faces. We wandered idly until 1 p.m., when it was time for the judging. We put on our nicely ironed (!) white coats, dragged the goats into the ring and looked around at the other entrants – all of whom we knew – to find out what to do.
We lined up and held the goats facing forwards while they were examined by the judges, who handled their feet, checked their teeth and had a look at their udders. The goats apparently found this incredibly ticklish and ours – poorly trained, apparently! – had fits and tried to escape. Very embarrassing.
Then we led the goats around the ring, so that the judges could watch them walk, and then reversed direction and led them the other way. Then stood still again, while the judges had a last conference and placed us in order, and handed out rosettes, and shook our hands.
When the judging was all over, it turns out we won loads of rosettes, of which we’re inordinately proud! It was hot, stressful and exhausting. Still, we came away wanting, for some strange reason, to do it again.
The idea behind these shows, I’ve decided, is that farming people don’t get to go on vacations like other folks. You can’t just hire in a pet sitter to look after 20 goats who need to be milked twice a day. But we still need some excuse for fun! So our outings are day outings, rather than two-week outings. The winters are harsh here, and most of the year everyone is on their own little isolated farm, struggling with the hardships that tending crops and animals bring.
But in the summer, the weather is milder, and everyone turns out to show what they’ve been working on so hard for the rest of the year. Breeding prize-winning sheep, making quilts, producing jam, sewing cushions, training horses – all the farming community brings out their best, to show off to one another. And that’s a local summer fair. It was brilliant.
Lucky for us that we had that lovely day – because we’ve been having a horrific time since then. The bills keep flooding in – £500 to the vet for infectious disease testing, £200 per month for the feed. We’ve spent huge wads of cash doing up the barn, fitting out the dairy, painting and scrubbing and getting everything ready for the hygiene inspector. And now, at this moment, I have no money coming in.
The sales for milk are trickling – we’re making around £50 per month. We’ve had to put off the approval day for the kefir, because the goats came down with a horrific virus that left their udders completely covered in oozing, scabby blisters. I milked Teasel by hand one day and came away feeling sick and nearly in tears, my hands covered with blood. It was like some horrible nightmare, but I just had to keep milking her, or she’d get sick with mastitis!
We’d wormed half the goats, and had to withdraw their milk for a week – in the meantime, they caught this virus. So we couldn’t muster enough milk to take to the Food Centre Wales at Horeb. We’ve moved the date now – we won’t be approved to sell the kefir until the first week of October.
So that only leaves the soap. And I’m terrified that I won’t actually be able to sell it – or enough of it to make a difference. The thing is, we’re to the edge now. We have the packaging and the labels. The soap is made and cured and sitting in the airing cupboard, ready to go. We’re about to have the website ready to launch – and the massive bill for that to pay! So it’s make or break time.
The whole idea suddenly seems ridiculous – whatever made us think that we could support ourselves in this way? I just want to go to bed and sleep, and sleep….
5 September 2011
Things are both a little better, and a little worse. We had a bit of a break with the hay – the weather abruptly turned warm and sunny, and we were able to mow and bale all of the hay but one field. So we should have enough for the coming winter.
But we are, abruptly, completely out of money. We spent our last £500 on three new goats and a load of straw – bedding for the winter. W
e need to get the goats up to a critical level so they can produce milk through the winter – if we’re going to have any chance of keeping the business going until spring. So we cross our fingers, and hope.
30 October 2011
A relatively warm and sunny Sunday. Joli and Benji and I turned out to muck out some stalls in the goat barn – any dry day now, when the goats are outside, must be seized to do mucking out. Benji, age five, shovelled an entire stall’s-worth of dirty straw into a neat heap, higher than his head. He worked like a full-grown man, all day, wrestling full wheelbarrows and slinging much with his full-size pitchfork – only the handle cut down to size for him.
And Joli got up earlier than anyone this morning and milked all 10 goats by herself, filtered the milk and made butter with her new electric butter churn – bought with money she earned from selling her first two goat kids. She amazes me – at age 12 she can skin a rabbit, turn it into a stew and accompany it with a loaf of homemade bread. She’s also an A-star student, a fine flautist, reads incessantly and has biceps bigger than mine.
The farm has been brilliant for her. It has made her self-reliant, and unafraid of hard work. I’m very academic and tend towards the impractical, ivory-tower side of life, and Joli was much like me in that – but the farm has rounded her out, made her more pragmatic, taught her to handle all the difficulties of the real world. I wonder what kind of life she’s going to choose for herself as she gets older.
And as for little Benji, he’s become a complete mini-me of Rich. Rich has completely swept Benji up as his own – as has Taid, Rich’s dad. Benji perches on the arm of Taid’s chair like a little parrot in the evenings after supper, while Taid feeds him forbidden sweets, which they try to keep secret from me. (Ha! Fat chance – the all-seeing eye of Mother can always spot the evidence of random Haribos.)
But the real love affair here is between Rich and Benji. I often joke that Rich only took me on to get hold of Benji. They are certainly two peas in a pod – they sit on the squashy leather sofa, Benji tucked happily under Rich’s arm, poring through tractor magazines and discussing the merits of 710s versus 810s, or why a Fordson Major is better than a David Brown.
Rich has bought Benji an entire toolkit – a proper one, not a toy version – and adds to it every Christmas and birthday. They come in together from the workshop – or man cave, as we call it – where Rich has a car pit and a treasure trove of man-junk. Aladdin chests full of curling wire, nuts and bolts, hammers and spark plugs, bits of engines from Land Rovers, the odd sit-on mower, clamps and wrenches and vices galore.
Accustomed to other men in my life who’d collect junk and never really use any of it, I used to think that Rich was just a hoarder, and that his man cave was just a conceit. But over time I’ve seen that he actually does use all these things – he can buy in a battered tractor and fix and weld and make new bits, until it actually goes again, and he can then use it around the farm or sell it on. Amazing. He’s a bit of a wizard.
And so gentle with it. Rich used to teach woodworking to schoolchildren, and he loves to have Benji trotting at his heels, banging nails into bits of wood and practising with his wrenches. Over time this relationship has grown, until now, Benji will actually anticipate Rich’s needs, and like a fine nurse with a surgeon, will have the correct 7/8 drill bit (or whatever it’s called!) to hand, just when Rich needs it.
The two of them come staggering in after long hours out in the workshop, black to the eyeballs with engine grease and grinning like twin fools. Rich says that if he can’t have Benji (or his brother Rhys) to assist him out in the workshop, he’d rather be on his own, because it’s faster. I certainly am no good at helping him – I just trip over things and stare stupidly at the jumble of tools, trying to work out which one he wants, until he sighs and gives up and gets it himself.
But Benji always knows, somehow, just what Rich needs.
And when Benji goes off to stay at his bio-dad’s house, which he does on a regular basis, it’s Rich, I think, who hurts the most. He’s that little bit saddened, his spark a tiny bit quenched, until Benji comes back.
I miss Benj, when he goes. But Rich grieves for him.
It’s a funny and complex thing, this creating of a blended family. There are four children here – I gave birth to two, and Rich fathered two. The way that we get around the split seams that generally keep something like this from working, is this:
1. Rich and I back each other, absolutely. Our first loyalty is always to one another, and we are indivisible on this. (Mind you, I can only afford this luxury because I can trust completely in Rich’s innate kindliness – he’d take a bullet for any of my children, or his, so I need never fear for them.) Any disagreement we have on how to handle the kids, we discuss in private. But in public, we’re always a unit. This has ensured that the kids aren’t able to get in and drive a wedge between us, which is always a kid’s tendency, isn’t it?
2. We try our level best to make sure everything is equal and fair. Everyone gets the same, and genetics don’t factor into it. Taid is brilliant about this – he has embraced all the kids, and treats Joli and Benji just the same as his genetic grandchildren. He gives everyone the same thing for Christmas, and for birthdays. He’s welcomed us into his home with more grace than I ever would have imagined or expected.
My own father, to my eternal grief and shame, seems completely uninterested in entering this sort of experience. He’s only concerned with his own genetic grandchildren, and so I feel pity for him, as he’s shut himself out of a world of loving and happy connections. Such a sad thing – and such a deep, ongoing loss for him.
But the rest of us know a true secret – that families are not born, but made. Made with determination and loyalty and fierce resolve. It’s a choice, and a discipline. It’s a practice. It’s a path that you walk.
Families don’t have to be genetically related. Far from it. Families are groups of people who choose to love each other. They can come in all shapes and colours and sizes, and be made up of all sorts of unlikely individuals. Connection is connection – and it’s always golden.
Anyhow, back on the farm we loaded the wheelbarrows full of muck into the tipping trailer, which Rich will later drive into the field with the big blue tractor, and empty onto the muck heap. There it’ll rot down until it’s ready to be spread back onto the fields.
The two children were in the barn, forking the dirty straw into the wheelbarrows. Then they rolled the barrows out, and Joli and I lifted each wheelbarrow up and turned it upside down into the tipping trailer. Then they went back for another load, and I forked the straw towards the back of the trailer to make space for the next load, trampling it underfoot to pack it down.
There was one moment, when I paused for breath on top of the growing mountain of straw, and looked out towards the sea. The sun was warm and bright on my shoulders, spreading the mountains with sherbet colours – peach and mango and russet brown. The landscape was, abruptly, almost unbearably near and tender – personal, like a message from someone I’d loved long ago. I suddenly felt completely happy. The shovelling, the manual labour, leaves my mind calm and clear, emptied. Dirty stalls, clean mind.
On another note, we’ve been completely out of money for almost two months. And oddly, it’s been a freeing thing. We’ve cut our grocery bills by about 90 per cent. We’ve bought nothing that we could make. Our shopping list looks like something from the pioneer days – sugar, flour, oil, tea, bacon. I went to the farmers’ market and bought bags of potatoes and carrots, plus boxes of plums to make jam and chutney.
Joli’s been making butter for us in her new electric butter churn, whipping the milk until the grains form and then smoothing and working the results with a wooden paddle until she has delicious, pure white butter.
We worked our way through the unused tins of food in the kitchen cabinet. And somehow, we found, we were eating better than we ever had. I made goat’s cheese on a regular basis, and we kept the bread machine humming every
day. If we got a craving for sweets, we made oatmeal cookies. We threw a party and cooked everything from scratch.
Somehow, having no money to spend at the shop made us creative, and clever. The gift of poverty, perhaps.
2 December 2011
First frost today, and the hills and hedges are iced with the faintest silver, reflecting the palest pinks, smoky lavenders and baby blues of the sky… I love this time of year in Wales; in the early morning, when the icy mists hang over the icy fields, and everything is coloured with the most delicate pastels.
On the way to school, Benji said, ‘It looks sad when all the hedges have lost their leaves, doesn’t it, like they’ve died?’
‘But what’s really true?’ I said.
‘They’re only sleeping,’ he said triumphantly. ‘And they’ll come back in the spring.’
And that, I figure, is just about all I need to know.
22 February 2012
Fate must have overheard me boasting to my mother that I wasn’t satisfied with the book Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life, and that I planned to write my own version. Fine words, spoken from the depths of a comfy chair, holding a glass of sherry. A very different thing on a cold, bright, wintry morning when everything is frozen hard as bone and I have to actually carry water, because all the water buckets are full of ice.
So, as I filled the yellow bucket from the one remaining unfrozen tap, I tried to remember why it was that I ever thought this whole process of carrying water was worthwhile and interesting. I decided to think of it as research for the book. The first thing that occurred to me as I carried water is that carrying water is a pain in the arse! It’s heavy, it’s awkward, and it constantly slops onto your leg as you walk.
Secrets from Chuckling Goat Page 11