And so a boulder in the middle of the garden is now gone. My scarlet runner trellis is both installed and secure. My enclosed front porch is now unenclosed. Some rubbish is moved. My outdoor living room shutters have been removed and the views are now unobstructed, and several other minor details that have driven me crazy for quite some time are now corrected. Amazing what extra hands can do! I was then left free to clean the one-room cabin I’ve lived in all winter in an attempt to make it ready for spring. It even was possible after last night’s milking to make some cheese, a few brioche, and a loaf of bread from the whey of the cheese. It was nearly one in the morning when I finally got to bed. But sitting at the end of the day in an almost-well-ordered kitchen, drinking a cup of hot milk laced with sugar and very good vanilla, felt like being fairly close to heaven.
Today, the same sweet crew braved the snow and rain and continued onward to create order from chaos in the barn. There is now nearly enough room for the carpenter to begin. A half a day of work will enable him to reconstruct the framing of the missing south aspect of the barn. I can continue on with most of it myself. Especially since the crew have learned to create neatness as they go along, rather than leaving the cleanup to me. I continue to be impressed. There are piles of wood that can be reused, piles of true scrap, and piles of possible firewood. All in order. The waste hay is neatly divided between bedding and fertilizer. And the floor of the downed haymow is now gone. For all of which I am profoundly grateful.
My days are rarely without incident, and today included a disaster that has been expected for quite some time, though no less of one because it was anticipated. However, I was sandwiched neatly between the valiant work of clearing the barn and a touch of delight that has no measure. And therefore the issue is held between the snowflakes and rain that have fallen all day, waiting to come alive on the first moment that I can address it. The delight is Giuseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire. Dale Bryden picked him up today with the truck to have Nunzio’s hooves trimmed at Lazy-Ass Farm. It was a great kindness on Dale’s part; I had no idea how to find a farrier who knew enough about donkeys to properly do Nunzio’s hooves. When Dale and Nunzio came home, Dale had a particular smile on his face that means good news is in the offing. He had tried to work my sweet and handsome donkey after the farrier left, with great success. As I had been promised, but had hardly dared to hope, Nunzio had indeed been trained and knew perfectly well what to do about drawing a cart. He was deemed to be quite nicely trained at that. The news was a pleasure to hear. Soon, my little donkey and I shall be working together to bring order to this farm.
This day is dark and damp and cold. Some of the daffodils have their heads bowed in dismay. But the fire has taken the edge off of the memory of winter. And the kitchen has a welcoming comfortable feeling that reminds me of hopeful times. The colors outside of the windows couple the alizarin crimson of November with the willow green of spring. The rain has caused the grass to become emerald green and the garden is filled with the white and yellow and ivory and orange of the whole family of narcissus and daffodils. The sweet cicely has turned its fernlike elegance into strands of brilliant green. Red-winged blackbirds search for materials for their nests from last year’s cicely stalks. How nicely scented must their nests be. A burgeoning order surrounds the outbuilding. Barn and carriage house alike are freeing themselves from the chaos that surrounded them this past year. Sweet cicely approaches them as well. And order begins to emerge from their interiors and surround them once more. Inside the house is a sweetness of comfort and order I haven’t known for a long long time. Most welcome indeed.
SHADES OF PEACH AND CORAL
MAY LAMBING has begun. In doing so, it has given me my farm back again. And I have missed it sorely. Glencora MacCluskie was first. Daughter to Tippy Hedron. And the day before yesterday, a second ewe lamb arrived from a fairly young dam. A chunky fat little thing, round and sweet. No Finn in this lamb but almost all Dorset, with a touch of the Cheviot of her great grandmother’s breed.
It has been raining. For days. A north wind creates a damp and chill atmosphere that would be both miserable and disheartening were it not evocative of April. Therefore it is just miserable, not disheartening. I moved the lamb and her mother into the lambing room, unused this year except for pigs. It had been shoveled out and only had debris on the floor that was spilled when passing through, from cleaning out the barn aisle. I started limewashing the walls. After spending a great effort on finding whitewash recipes, I’ve managed to put together one that doesn’t seem to powder and doesn’t chip off at all.
In Ireland and some parts of Great Britain, both outside and inside of houses are limewashed. Beautiful colors are made by adding ground stone or pulverized clay or other minerals to the white mixture. A beautiful range of peach and pink is made from adding the terra-cotta-colored raddle that is used to paint on the ram’s brisket in order to mark covered ewes to the whitewash mixture.
Each formula I have found included the use of a fat of some sort. Once I used pork fat, to great success. The latest mixture, from an American formula called Treasury House Whitewash, uses linseed oil as well as spoiled milk. I have some extra milk left over from days when I haven’t had time to make my daily cheese, and whey left over from days when I have enough bread and don’t need any more whey to make it rise. And there is a quart or two that became contaminated when Francesca Cavendish or Millicent Fallansbee kicked the bucket. Therefore, there is enough to make a limewash paint for the lambing room.
I started applying it on the day I moved the latest lamb inside. Uncertain of how the color would look when it dried, I painted some on an interior wall in shadow and somewhere it could be seen from the doorway when opened. I even tried to measure the proportions of raddle powder, salt, and oil so I could reproduce the color, more or less. What I didn’t count on was that different brands of lime would in themselves be different colors, and that the mix using one brand would become pale peach, and a bucket using another would become a muddy drab. Nonetheless, three fourths of a jar of powdered espresso, with the rest filled with coarse salt, plus one and a half gallons of spoiled milk and a half jar of unboiled linseed oil has done it, a pretty pale peach. I’m going to paint the window sashes the same color, the way the Shakers did their buildings, and buy a dark green resin chair to sit in while waiting for lambs to be born. Even partially painted, the lambing room looks absolutely lovely.
Last fall, disaster coupled itself with disaster. I lost some newborn lambs due to avaricious pigs, an experience I hope someday will be erased from the corners of my memory. Madame duVet lost one lamb, as well (not to the pigs), and I bottled her other. Miranda, Tippy, and one or two others also lost lambs to the horror as well.
In the flock is a particularly active Finn-Landrace ram. He has been covering ewes with a consistent regularity that surpasses every ram I have ever owned. Even ewes who never freshen out of season have been accepting his advances. Now in the lambing room are a group of very imminent ewes, bagging and bulging, only five and a half or six months away from their last freshening. Gestation is five months. The fact that they are coming in this soon after losing their lambs is remarkable in itself. But even more remarkable is that some of them have never freshened more than once a year. A testimony to a fine ram. Who is not, by the way, one whom I would choose to be this year’s flock sire. Nonetheless, flock sire he seems to have become. Every ewe lamb, even the singles born in May of a mother who freshened in the fall, is valuable breeding stock. Tiny shreds of hope for the future of the farm.
This is the time to manage the flock most carefully. The financial future of the farm is completely dependent on the choices I make now. I must be most careful about which ram shall be left with which group of ewes, who shall freshen when, and what I shall have to sell. There are several restaurants that are buying lamb throughout the summer, but I must continue to hold back breeding-stock-quality lambs for my replacements. It is imperative that I keep back more than enough replacemen
ts to rebuild a solid flock for the future.
And so, in a deeply familiar movement, I run down to the lambing room five or six times throughout the day to check the latest lamb and the others. I fed them too much grain as a special treat and enough hay to balance it out. Water needs to be carried as well. But I don’t mind. I’m refining the space and rethinking what needs to be built for next winter’s lambing. By today’s end the walls will be limewashed the mottled shades of peachy pink that make everything, including the sheep, look that much softer and prettier. The browns of the mangers become deep and rich. The sheep’s fleeces, as grungy as they are at winter’s end, have a softer look. The dark green chair will fit in quite nicely. I’ll have the men who are putting in a support system in the barn cut me some boards so I can build the shutters I need for the windows. I’ll limewash those shutters as well. The sign Jessica Buel made for me a long time ago will be even more outstanding on the peach pink door. And in all ways that most favorite of spaces will serve me even better than before.
The Finn-Landrace sheep from the Cornell flock had been a great disappointment to me. They did not do well, and never, even remotely, came up to the expectations I had for them. However, the young ram, now about two and a half years old, has done some remarkable things. While I can be certain he is father only of lambs that he both has marked and who look like him, I can be certain that every sheep bearing his mark has been covered by him, and in some cases sheep who never off-season lamb have been set into heat by him. Some of those lambs are his gift to the farm. This pretty space, with sheep about to freshen, and one little lamb who at two days old ran up to me and stood ready to be picked up, is beginning to take shape. And that shape is much nicer than it has ever been before.
THE GOOSEBERRY BUSHES
FOR MANY years there have been three gooseberry bushes set on one side of a soft fruit triangle in my vegetable garden. It took me a long time to learn to wait and let them become that particular shade of garnet with ripe quince overtones before picking them. Now some, oval jewels, lie in my freezer waiting for me to prepare the first gooseberry fool of the year. Their leaves look very much like those on the currant bushes, but their stems are characterized by particularly sharp thorns. Picking them requires gloves. But it is well worth it. The particular combination of well-whipped cream and sweet and tart gooseberries is absolute ambrosia.
Yesterday Ernest Westcott and Jim Wilson and I, in Ernest’s truck, crossed the bridge at the neighbor’s and proceeded to head for the line fence. We had in mind to place another two hundred or so feet of woven wire. Ernest had brought with him some locust posts. I brought Steele and Samantha. Jim brought a willing hand with the fence post maul. We were greeted by the sight of Connelly’s men, also working on the line fence. Stringing barbed wire.
Apprehension set in. Immediately. I was greeted with a calm courtesy for which I was deeply grateful. At last it was understood that we were working together for the common good. Or at least my men and I were serious about keeping my sheep in and preventing his cows from getting out. Not that I have ever failed to be serious about it; it just never counted when my sheep got out, no matter how hard I tried.
Tom’s foreman told me his men had sighted three of my sheep. Unshorn sheep. The ones who got away when we were shearing. This made my tally of eighty-five right. It was hard to believe I’d been counting incorrectly all of this time. These coupled with two others that escaped shearing made my totals work out. But why hadn’t I seen them, and why had they not come home? If the fence I’ve already installed was keeping them from coming home, then they had to be too young to know the escape route on the upper fields. But where were they?
I spent some time being of minor assistance working on the line fence. I’d vacillated about trying to repair the sheep wall that was so very beautiful and in only minor disarray. Were it fixed I’d save a hundred feet of wire. Were it not to be and I placed woven wire across its face, it stood a chance of being destroyed. I decided to do both. And so I began to relay some of the sheep tip stones as Ernest and Jim cleared brush, readying the wall for woven wire.
It was then that I found it. A large, beautiful, leafed-out gooseberry bush. It was tangled in with something else, but it was a gooseberry bush indeed. They trimmed the unwanted (except by wild turkeys who eat the red berries) barberry and dug up the gooseberries for me.
For a moment, I saw a farm wife standing in front of me in a blue-and-white-checked dress, exacting a rarely sought after price from the men working on her farm. “You must dig that bush for me.” Hers was a presence I have neither felt nor seen before. A thin, spare woman, neat in a way I can never be, drying her hands on her apron. The men, silent, freeing the precious find from its entanglement in the stone wall. It came out bare rooted. The woman stood between me and it. And didn’t smile. I did. For her, it was too serious a moment. For me, it was something else.
A bit of the Yankee in me awoke for a little while. It would be only half an hour or so before Ernest and Jim would have to address the problem of the swamp they would have to cross and wire. Almost half of a very heavy roll of woven wire was still left. And neither man was wearing boots. I walked back and forth on the property line hoping for a solution.
Crossing through the wire Tom’s men had restrung, to get to my side, was no easy task, but I did it. And there, five feet away from the first gooseberry bush, on the opposite side of the wall, were several more, smaller, more easily manageable gooseberry bushes. I dug them as carefully as I could while the farm wife in the blue-and-white-checkered dress reappeared, intently surveying my work. I couldn’t get enough dirt around their roots and so, absolutely bare rooted, they went into the back of the truck. The farm wife seemed satisfied and disappeared.
Nearly two hours had passed before I could even think about placing them in the vegetable garden. By then they had wilted. To do something the correct way or to compromise has always been a dilemma for me. I decided I’d put them in the most perfect spots even if the rest of the garden around them wasn’t properly prepared. I couldn’t do a very good job of the digging, but I did what I could, putting composted pig manure on the top of the dirt and left them, wilted and distraught.
I spent too much time indoors today. My chores were more of the farmer’s wife category rather than those of the farmer. It wasn’t until afternoon that I began to feel trapped and raced outside to become alive again. I had been told that the bridgeway next door would be closed as soon as they put the cows in.
Steele, Samantha, and I went to see if we had a day or two of grace left to be able to cross it. And it was there that I spotted the three sheep. Small dots in the distance. Keeping the dogs near me I raced across the bridge and up the hill. The sheep disappeared.
Suddenly, as I climbed a rise, I saw one. She ran. The dogs ran. I ran. And they were gone. I walked back toward the pink gate, calling to the sheep I could not see the call that brings them home. It could be only a futile gesture. Not a sign of them anywhere.
The line fence appeared. And there they were. Frantically trying to come home. But now there was a woven wire fence keeping them out. The fence that was to keep them in. They tried the pink gate. It was closed. They ran the line fence, the dogs closely after them. Running through the swamp, two made it through the barbed wire. One became mired. Her fleece was too thick. The two others, seeing she was trapped, came back to her; they had to be too young to know how to get home without her. Grateful that I wasn’t wearing boots to slow me down, I managed to open the pink gate. The young ones broke free from the swamp and ran through the gate. Home. I went back to rescue the mired ewe. Connelly’s cows suddenly manifested between me and the swamp. I had to go around my woven wire fence again and see if I could reach her from my side.
Of course, when I got there there was no sheep to be found. In my barnyard, having leaped the fence surrounding it, were two very muddy, very wet sheep. One let me hold her. She had always been wary of me, standing behind her dam when I’d c
ome into the carriage house where she lived as a lamb. Her mother was young, nursing twins, and I kept them separate to feed her extra grain. An hour or two later the third ewe appeared, wet and exhausted. She, too, let me pet her. “What took you so long to bring them home?” I said. It had been raining intermittently all day. We were soaked. I went back in the house. The gooseberry bushes were wet as well. Their leaves were no longer wilted and forlorn but rather alert and gleaming. They had taken.
COMPROMISE
IN THE never-ending debate between the right way and the wrong way in which to do things on this farm, very often a compromise becomes the only choice. Yet compromises here are almost always a mistake. While expediency can sometimes be a successful choice in the rest of the world, on a farm, what is expedient most often necessitates returning and doing it all over. On the other hand, how does one decide or have the courage to say no to a load of hay, as an example, that is about to be dumped on some old moldy hay left from the year before, on a floor that had been rained on, through a now-repaired hole in the roof?
Last year I tried to say no but was sufficiently ambivalent that I allowed myself to be persuaded against my better judgment. And while I was profoundly grateful for the hay, I always believed I had made a very big mistake. This year is different. My resolve improves in the fullness of time, and there have either been too many different experiences, or the beginning of some better experiences, that have strengthened it. There will be more animals than ever this winter. I am keeping back at least seventeen lambs as both replacements and additions to the flock. The hay, therefore, must be the best I can buy and the feeders must be the most efficient. The entire feeding operation must take as little time as possible, and I must be able to have more control and less waste than ever. What this means, in part, is that a great deal of construction shall have to be in place before the hay begins to be delivered.
Sylvia's Farm Page 11