Winter Blues in Spring

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Yet it was still two hours from sunset and the middle of March.

I ask myself, Of all the things I could have done with an able body (to say the least) and a bright mind (probably), why would I choose to farm vegetables and cows at three hundred metres in the north west of England?

I slipped as I exited the shed on a patch of mud that was buttercups and rushes when I started growing here, years back. I’d drained the field then, but you wouldn’t know it today, or for most of the year in fact. I see hoof marks – deer – inside the enclosed market garden. They’d always come through these fields, but now instead of a corridor it had evidently become a destination. I had a fence to raise if it ever stopped snowing or blowing a gale.

The mustards and chards and kales and purslane in the polytunnels sat frozen; they wouldn’t thaw until the snow had slid off the skins and let some light in.

I looked down the hill at distant viaducts, Rochdale canal, Halifax Road, and slipped several times as I made my way to the barn. I needed to warm my feet up. Waterproof boots are a fine thing, but if you arrive on site with wet socks before you put them on, they do a job you would rather they didn’t: keep your feet cold and wet.

In the barn, Runt-Twin and Cowed were sectioned off from the others. They both need to leave the herd because they get bullied by the others. At two year’s old Runt-Twin is still not much bigger than a large dog and would cost more to slaughter than the value of the meat on her. There’s a lady in Halifax that has a petting farm, she says she’d take her. It would be a good place for her. It sounds like a nice life, actually. Runt-Twin would really be worth something there because being stroked on her back and neck is something she will stand for for any amount of time. Cowed, who had shifted to the other corner and does not abide any contact whatever and has plenty of meat on her will go for just that. That won’t be for about fourteen weeks. We had an inconclusive bovine tubercolosis test result for another cow two weeks ago. This meant we lost a lovely four-year-old with calf inside, and the herd has to be isolated for four months. Happy days.

It’s no wonder I’ve got the winter blues. I thought I’d missed it this year, but here it is in spring.

I ask myself, Does twenty years of working in farming make me a farmer? Probably.

The year I did my apprenticeship I had a friend drop out of teacher training, two weeks out of twelve months from graduating. Their friends and family, I included, dismayed, asked, Why not just do the last two weeks, complete the course and have it as an option?

They replied then the same as they did when I spoke to them last month: the training taught me I definitely didn’t want to do that; it was a lucky escape.

I remember my lucky escape moment, I didn’t take it. Old Pete and I had it out in his old barn all those years ago – he said I had a problem with authority, and I said he seemed miserable, so why would I want to learn his work and become like him? But actually, I liked the work when I was left alone and I was good at it, so I carried on. Now here I am: my own field and polytunnels of veg, my own barn of cows, all totally reliant on me (and me them).

Trapped (and freezing).

The snow had started to stick. I left the pen of the downtrodden (where I go to feel warm and at home, at such low times as these) and leaned into the main enclosure. Big-Twin, Dungeon and the other fifteen (they don’t all have names, they’re not pets) were all eating quietly.

I slipped several times again as I tramped the fifty metre track to tunnel one (I have three), where I do my plant raising. A month ago, in a seven cubic metre coffin that I’d made from four by two and floorboards I’d rescued from a skip, I made a ‘lasagne’ of cow bedding and muck, last year’s plants, fresh straw, cow bedding and muck, and so on in layers. I germinate seeds on top of this, starting on Valentine’s Day, and with a single layer of agricultural fleece on top the plants carry happily on even when it’s as low as minus fifteen celsius outside.

I set myself up on an old wooden table (one of my early attempts at carpentry) with compost, nine centimetre pots and four-week-old tomato seedlings. The table collapses before I’ve even started, under the weight of the compost. It’s better than it happening midway, to look on the bright side.

Outside, the wind picks up, a sheep bleats and a chainsaw starts up somewhere. They all must be close by, as sound does not travel far in this snow.

I’d been meaning to build a new table. I’d got a load of wood from a friend who had recently relocated to Portugal, it was all stored in the upstairs of the barn. They’d just decided to have a new life in a new country. They could have been Head of Department by now, had life gone another way for them. Also, I’d got a great idea for a table when drinking a beer in a new trendy ‘microbar’ in Hebden Bridge a few months ago. It was made from reclaimed four by two. I thought, I could make any number of those. Well, it looks like today’s the day to start.

My feet were getting a bit warmer as I tramped up to the barn again. I got set up above the cows with a measure, drill, saw, hammer and half a kilo of three inch nails. As the sawdust drifted down to the ground floor, amongst the cattle, I saw myself in nearly a year’s time, putting all that grist into my propagator coffin and help start the next generation of plants. For the first time in a few days the future seemed okay.

The more I sawed, the warmer I felt. I cut a sixty centimetre piece and used it as a template for three more. I cut a seventy and three more. I cut a one fifty and five more. Finally, I cut a single piece of one forty. I made two rectangles with the sixty and seventy pieces. I joined them with the six one fifties as the table top, putting some old bolt holes (from whatever their former purpose had been) all at the same end, just because it seemed sensible. I put the one forty piece joining the bottom of the rectangles.

A cow or two looked up to see where the dust came from, then carried on eating hay.

I’d made a good table, which I could describe as ‘very sturdy’ (very heavy).

I bundled it down the stairs and considered the trip to tunnel one. There was now a carpet of snow over the yard so I upturned my table and threaded baler band (the farmer’s solution to anything a hammer can’t fix) through the bolt holes, puling it easily down to its place.

I removed a gas bottle and roofing torch from an old rucksack (I use this for flame weeding, the odd occasion that the market garden isn’t covered in snow or saturated with melted snow or rain, looking like a ghostbuster that had an odd career change). Into this the broken table went – I needed some kindling for my fire at home. The thought of it in a short hour or two warmed me.

I put my new table into position next to my coffin, performing a couple of cartwheels (the table, not me), and it didn’t move at all as I put the compost down. I set up my production line of seedlings, nine centimetre pots and trays that would hold twenty pots. I made two hundred plants, including a few doubles to allow for slug damage. I find they take a few whether you have spares or not, so you might as well as have spares. I gave them a drink and placed them in their coffin and pulled the fleece over. It was two degrees celsius outside, with an icy wind, but eighteen where they now sat.

I felt warm and a little better. I ventured to the market garden and pulled a couple of leeks out of the snow. I took two large potatoes from my cold store. My cold store is the chest freezer from my parents’ garage, a surface occupied by any number of young men over the years, rolling joints, drinking cans, watching pool or waiting for their turn. Unplugged and sat by the north wall of my shed, it makes a very effective frost free store. I’d harvested these potatoes half a year ago.

In the last light of the day I slung the rucksack on, full of kindling and veg, and made for home. Though it’s five miles by road to my back-to-back terraced house, it’s only two miles over the moors. On my way I saw a tawny owl like a statue on a post, and a barn owl out hunting, both made no sound. An hour later I had my fire lit and leek and potato soup simmering on the ring. I wore warm, dry clothes and read Lord of the Rings (the first book of the Fellowship, where they hike across the Shire, before too many wizards or warriors get involved).

It had turned out to be a decent day.