On cold misty mornings when we walk up and down rolling green hills of the 14 acres of our part of a 50-acre farm, mist from our exhaled breath fills the air. We feel we are on our own until all of our flock of sheep troop up to us, baa-ing, out of the misty banks of air. When a cold winter sun leaks weak milky light and frost whitens the ground in dark dawn of day, black shapes linger far across fields and then draw close as they are called for breakfast. The rattle of the Magic Bucket of sheep nuts lures them towards us.
Of course, many jobs other than winter-feeding must be done. I like to oversee the vaccination and dosing for worms of sheep and lambs in particular. I sit on a wooden worktable or on a ledge of an old stone wall that overlooks the working sheep yard. I chat with a sheep occasionally as The Shepherd vaccinates or doses each one. When farm machinery needs a grease or service I stand by to supervise. I enjoy gardening and when not directing The Shepherd as she digs, I sleep in the deep cool shade of box hedges. If someone passes and I wake up, I always shout, ‘Meow’ to say, ‘Hello’ and rise up out of my cosy bed to steer them towards another job. Farming is like that: there are always a thousand jobs to do and many of them never get done. For farmers a weekend is still a weather dependent daily job dictated by season not hours or a categorised allotment of days.
In rain, sun, snow and wind I pad down laneways, cross winter streams, carefully walk through muddy gateways, weave my way through long summer grasses, jump on to the tops of fence posts to survey my flock of sheep, or wander along tops of walls to view them from a great height. So far my fluffy tail has never been closed in a gate, but I have sometimes been left on the wrong side and have had to crawl under or through it – most undignified. Mind you, I’m quite immune to wet muddy yards now as my city-slicker days of long ago and my distant youth are far behind me. This is my life now and I wouldn’t wish it any different.
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During the mucky, muddy month of March on Black Sheep Farm there is a unique sight to behold as daffodils flower. In what is called the ‘middle lawn’ field, it looks like the sun has gone splat and landed there. There are at least twenty-one different kinds of daffodil that flower and there could be more. The Shepherd’s grandparents planted all the bulbs many years before my time. This is how they earned their livelihood – by selling flowers and vegetables at local markets.
Black Sheep farmhouse, with its lovely pale yellow and pink exterior, now covered with a thick layer of ivy, its fine porch supported by four Tuscan columns (not installed by the Tuscans, obviously, but much later), its large slate roof, and its warm stone outhouses, has been in The Shepherd’s family for generations. She occasionally pulls a dusty old book, dated 1801, off the shelf to show guests the history of our farm. I always sneeze when she opens that creaking book with its cracked leather binding. She indicates where her triple great-grandfather wrote long ago about sheep farming. In those distant, now almost foreign times, a horse or donkey powered the plough. Many flocks of sheep had their standards and qualities measured by how many cheeses their milk made per day from the milk collected. Back then, sheep gave birth, kept their lambs only six weeks before weaning and all ewes were milked (today, with modern farming, most flocks of sheep are farmed just for their meat). There are a few dairies these days that milk sheep and more coming on line in Ireland as humans become aware of how delicious sheep’s milk is, much to The Shepherd’s delight. The farmers produced delicious cheeses from sheep’s milk that were then sold weekly in nearby Kilkenny city. In those days, with no refrigeration, sheep’s milk lasted longer, never soured and kept its fine flavour better when it was made into cheese. So, sheep that could be milked and whose milk produced a lot of cheeses were considered a superior flock. Cow’s milk was a rival, but when made into butter or cheese tainted more easily in pre-refrigeration days. Sheep’s cheese was more durable.
Nowadays, as well as using the wool to make fine woollen blankets, The Shepherd still follows many other agrarian tasks that she learned from her grandparents when she was a little girl, visiting Black Sheep Farm from her home, which was then thousands of miles away in America.
Unlike myself, an Irish-born Kilkenny city feline, The Shepherd was born in New York City, where her father (now a tall, still-handsome man with a stoop and a diligent, calm manner) worked in city hospitals. When The Shepherd was born, she was not a completely well child. It was soon discovered she was allergic to cow’s milk. In fact, soon after I arrived on the farm, The Shepherd and her mother were cleaning out a tall press in the kitchen when they discovered on the top shelf hidden at the back a big blue-grey tin of Gerber’s baby soy milk. It still had the price tag and label from a Belfast shop. The Shepherd wanted to save it as a souvenir but her ma did not, saying, ‘When you were a baby, you were so thin, people thought I was starving you.’
The Shepherd is lucky to have known all her grandparents and some elderly cousins to whom she could ask questions about her family history. Her bloodlines are about as pure as our mixed mutt, Bear. Her hodgepodge American-Irish ancestry reflects input from Ireland, Scotland, England, colonial Maryland and Ukraine. Farming runs deep in her blood, though. On her paternal side her many times great grandfather was born in 1735, in Maryland, where he farmed in Pleasant Valley, Washington County, a mile or so west of Crampton’s Gap in South Mountain, a north extension of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Shepherd’s paternal grandfather was a very handsome Don Juan, who pursued many beautiful well-known women between and during his first three marriages. He abandoned his first wife (The Shepherd’s grandmother), who was a successful journalist and fashion writer in the 1920s, when The Shepherd’s father was very young and his sister just a baby. His mother, Louise, survived the Great Depression as a single parent and supported her children through her careers in Benton & Bowles advertising firm in New York and editing the Connecticut state guide book. When finances were difficult, kind farmers let her glean leftover potatoes and carrots from harvested fields. The Shepherd’s father remembers how his mother would create a sense of picnic and adventure as she roasted their meagre dinner in the fireplace of their small farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Now, vegetables and fresh, tasty lamb are plentiful on Black Sheep Farm, but the thrift and care that The Shepherd learned from her parents and grandparents has never left her.
When The Shepherd and I are gone, my beautiful Zwartbles flock will disperse and the farmstead will pass on to its next inhabitant. The Shepherd’s only wish is that her philosophy of steady improvement of farmland will continue with whomever comes after her. She fell in love with country life and sundry farming tasks as a child. Her mother’s family has farmed this land hereabouts in Ireland for many generations and from her maternal Irish grandfather, whose family had owned Black Sheep Farm, she learned how to look after and harvest vegetables, red- and blackcurrants and raspberries in his market garden. He also taught her how to pick and box apples, pears and plums from his orchard. Her Irish grandmother taught her how to bed and grow flowers and cut and arrange bunches to sell. Her maternal grandfather called himself a market gardener, but he was also a gifted writer of five books of acclaimed essays. Her grandmother was a painter and poet, and she also fostered many children during the Second World War and other troubled times.
In the USA at her Maryland cousins’ farm, The Shepherd learned how to milk cows by hand, befriended the sheep and began to understand the rudiments of tending their flock. The cousins also bred championship ponies, which is how she first learned to ride, and only bareback at that. She later learned how to gentle the wild young ponies to the human touch. She often surprised people when she took a saddle off a horse before riding it, saying that she was uncomfortable in a saddle because she couldn’t feel a horse’s intention with the saddle between them. Now, as a much older woman, she enjoys the luxury of riding in a saddle.
Here on Black Sheep