Small Things

Autumn came very suddenly one day about two weeks ago. It wasn’t a gradual process - noticing that the leaves are beginning to fade and turn or that there is a slight nip in the air. No, it was the light; it was as if someone had popped a golden filter over the sun and angled it down in the sky. Blimey! I thought, This is It…End of Summer. And as I thought that thought a flurry of copper leaves fell at my feet and whirled about in an obligingly spooky spiral as if dancing to my thoughts. The wind picked up then, in an instant, ruffling the hens’ feathers and chasing them off squawking in a panic stricken queue, heading for nowhere in particular. The clothes on the washing line billowed and danced like crazy folk and the cats jumped out of trees to avoid a sudden avalanche of prickly sweet chestnuts. And then there were squirrels – four or five - rushing hither and thither, gathering nuts as fast as they could, calling to each other with their strange monkey cries as they ran the electricity cable tightrope up to our loft with their haul. All of this I just stood and watched as if I had nothing better to do and then it dawned on me that I should be doing the same – preparing for battening down the hatches against winter when it comes.

I love this time of year with its whiff of change. Sunny days in September and October feel like a stolen treat. But there is no time to waste and we are constantly multi-tasking. There is the harvesting to be done still – blackberries before the last day of September when the devil spits on them and turns them bitter! (Yes, apparently so!) Then there are the haws and the hips to gather – all to make hedgerow jelly which will find its way onto the the Tin Drum menus. Yesterday Charlotte and I picked bucket loads of wild damsons. Charlotte now works for the Tin Drum – she is our Land Girl, with twigs in her hair from clambering up trees and striding intrepidly through brambles in her flip-flops at the sight of a mass of inaccessible sloes.

When we moved to the smallholding we had just a house in a field. No outbuildings, except one small brick shed in the back yard which was immediately requisitioned for the the dark art of turning the Tin Drums’ spent cooking oil into bio-diesel. Freddie, the bio-diesel machine, lives in there gulping and gurgling as the alchemy is performed.

On a smallholding you accumulate Stuff. You can’t do anything without equipment; tractors, ride-on mowers, strimmers and chainsaws. We pick up antique tools from farm sales – we don’t know the names for these implements and you can’t buy them in garden centres or hardware stores, but they’re invaluable to us and they need places to  live. So every now and then we hitch up the trailer and drive for miles to collect someone’s unwanted shed. Now we have a row of them, like beach huts. Sheds are wonderful things when everything has a place – and I am imposing a satisfying order to them with tools hanging from nails on bits of found wood. Nothing goes to waste.

Back in March we took our first pigs to slaughter. We had fine cuts of pork and learnt to make sausages and salam i and hams. Five legs have been salt cured and air dried and are just about ready to go on to the Tin Drum menus later this month. We now have three more piglets eating acorns in the field and they should be ready by Christmas although we are thinking of keeping one of the sows for breeding but this will mean restoring the old pig shed near the house.

  Our cat, Dixie, had kittens a week ago – three of them that fit altogether into the palm of my hand. She always has her kittens in a wardrobe and after a week she likes to move them under a pillow on someone’s bed. For about six weeks she moves them every few days into the most peculiar places and then one morning they will join us for breakfast and that will be it; kittens tripping you up, kittens in your shoes and wellies and hats, until they leave us at nine weeks old. And then, to add to the piglets and kittens, Peggy the labrador puppy arrived – our guard dog! I can’t see it yet - she is somewhat smaller than a hen and seems to rather like the idea of being one of their flock.

The kitchen garden is beginning to look depleted, and in a way that’s quite exciting. It means that we can bed down the soil under a blanket of manure. I’m looking forward to watching the dark stillness of the land in winter,  knowing that unseen beneath the surface is seething industry as the worms do the work for us, turning the earth and manure into something wonderful and nutritious for next year’s food to grow on.