Once a week

Once a week we are looking at this patch of ground – top sown with my special pasture cocktail.  Watching the grass grow. I am excited. The pasture not so much. In case you cannot see the whole of the picture in your header, and after all who can see the whole picture in many areas of our lives, here it is again.

So if we look carefully we can see that after a week there is NO new growth. Absolutely nothing is happening. Well, that is good. Everything is going according to the schedule!

Aunty Del the Ayrshire heifer is quite the most beautiful animal.

And she is wondering what is going on in the milking shed.  Nothing? Oh.

Lady Astor is wondering why the milking shed is not open for business as that is where all the good feed is.  But without a cow to milk the shed is a bit useless. Clean but not doing much yet. I am going to guess that Lady has at least a week to go. Seven days. If I am wrong I will eat a chocolate fish. And I am not a chocolate eater and being the daughter of a man who built fishing boats: not much fond of fish either.

There is something beautiful about my cows lately. Every day I find a quiet moment, usually very early in the morning after John has gone to work and before anyone else is awake, and I go out into the field and walk amongst the cows feathering my fingers across their bellies and backs,  scratching their heads. My self drifts down until  I am underwater, floating through them, moving slowly like I am another lazy fecund shadow cow. Feeling their necks and their legs and the tissue that connects with their bones. The heat of them. With a hand on their sides I can feel the breath of the cow like a magnificent wave of nebulous cloud rolling down from their throats and into their lungs lifting their magnificent sides out and back up.  I can feel Lady’s calf pulsing behind her hide, waiting. Aunty Del still feels like a girl to me but it is early yet – if pregnant she is not due until July 10.

The turkeys are laying an egg a day each.  For the life of me I was so focused on the turkeys I did not even consider that there would be eggs.

With the news that Poppy will not be having piglets  this season I was able to quickly acquire four Berkshire piglets (plonkers) to grow on for the freezers. They will be delivered today.  So all is not lost!  In fact I am now ahead of the game. I hate to waste the extra milk Lady will give and the chickens are laying twenty eggs a day  (and the turkeys two) to the cause so we can still grow good clean meat for four of the families who are depending on us.

Poppy will go back to the boar in the early winter. She can spend the winter with him. And in the meantime let’s hope Molly and Tahiti are pregnant. Or at least one of them.

See? If I stand on one foot long enough to realign my thinking the answers will come!

I hope you have a lovely day.

celi