The collection of nettle leaves will form part of a delicious seasonal vegetable dish for the household of humans. I have no real interest in nettles. We cats find most vegetables dull compared to a tasty morsel of chicken, or a nice fresh mouse. Intermittently I will partake of a green bean, or some spears of grass I personally pluck to alleviate and dislodge an occasional hairball. Once nettles are cooked their sting is nullified and the resulting simple dish of nettle leaves steamed like spinach is served with a knob of butter, which The Shepherd tells me is scrumptious. However, I much prefer when The Shepherd makes nettle soup, because she uses stock made from the boiled bones from the Sunday lunch of roast chicken. The carcass has been steeped overnight in the simmering oven of the Aga with extra seasoning and chunks of carrots and onions, filling the kitchen with a delicious aroma. She then drains the chicken stock and to it, adds our fresh picked nettles with diced potatoes, boiled until they are soft. Then she whizzes with a very noisy whizzy machine till it’s smooth. She adds some frozen green peas, stirs them in while reheating it only briefly so the peas still have a nice pop when crushed between the teeth. She then serves it with a good scrape of fresh nutmeg on top and if she’s feeling really fancy a spoonful of crème fraîche or a nice dollop of Velvet Cloud sheep-milk yogurt. She talks a lot about the vitamins and minerals in the soup, and I pretend to listen, but really I’m only interested because it smells of chicken.
The Shepherd has not always been an expert in the kitchen, it has to be said. Long before I came here, in The Shepherd’s distant youth she decided to dye some white trousers black. It was the most inexpensive way to get an article of seemingly new clothing. She bought the dye and asked her granny which pot she could use in the kitchen to boil water to dye the trousers. Her granny often used a big pot to cook dog food, which was made up of cheap scrap meats from the butcher. The meat was called offal or ‘lights’ and was usually mixed with lungs, tripe, sheep heads and cow stomachs. Puuurrsonally, I prefer The Shepherd’s proffered raw liver and heart chunks. Her granny would cook this mix slowly in the Aga overnight. It filled the house with a distinctly different odour from that of stew or roast meat. This canine cookery event happened at least twice a week. Once the meat mix was cooked, it was removed to the meat safe just outside the kitchen door, which got little sun and where it perfumed the air in the scullery. The meat safe was an open wooden-shelved structure covered with fine metal mesh and it had a tall latched door to lock it. They were commonly used before refrigerators were invented. In fact, The Shepherd often tells me that the farmhouse’s first refrigerator was rented and it was just a very small white box. The deep freeze proved to be a more useful purchase for her thrifty grandmother: it froze fruit for jam-making and blanched vegetables, which was how The Shepherd’s granny and grandpa extended their season of dining on homegrown produce. Whenever there was over-production of garden fruit and veg, they also saved it to sell as well as for future household use.
Back to dyeing The Shepherd’s white trousers … Granny had said that she could use the dog food pot between her stewing sessions for the canines. But this was impossible since The Shepherd planned to go out wearing the dyed black trousers the very next evening and she had found the pot of homemade dog food still quite full. There was another giant pot that was used to make jam or to boil ham and tongue for the human household to eat. The Shepherd thought this would be fine for her to use as long as she cleaned it well after use. So she worked away dyeing her white trousers black. She stirred the big boiling pot of white trousers and black dye on the Aga’s hottest burner. When she had finished, she scrubbed the pot clean, or so she thought, and pronounced herself very pleased with a job well done. A few days later, her granny placed a ham in the big pot to boil for lunch that day. The boiled ham emerged coloured a deep indigo, much to the fury of The Shepherd’s granny. Lunch that day was a very quiet meal as they all munched on indigo ham. Luckily, there were no guests on that day, or indeed on the succeeding days until they had consumed the whole ham.
I find April a great deal more annoying, because of horse chestnut trees. Just before their leaves unfurl in spring, the horse chestnut release a sticky sap, which covers its leaf-bud protectors. They fall to the ground, then seem to love to get caught up in my fine coat. I spend hours trying to rid myself of these sap-covered bud protectors, often only making it worse as I pull them off, unintentionally spreading the stickiness, so my coat becomes such a tangle that mats form. I then resign myself to the hands of The Shepherd to untangle my mats and comb out my fine hair. She has said this reminds her of times when she worked for the wildlife charity twenty-six years ago, when she watched geckos or lizards as well as big Komodo dragons. How she makes the connection I just don’t know, but it seems when lizards lick their faces and clean their eyes, the way their tongue moves across their face seems like their tongue is sticky but in reality it’s quite smooth.
The Shepherd describes once when the call of nature awoke her in the middle of the night when she was doing fieldwork in Malaysia. Not being able to find her torch, she had to feel her way along the walls to the bathroom. She takes particular delight in describing the hole in the floor that was their litter box – I have no idea why – but on this night, just as she was feeling her way down the steps to the litter box, a gecko jumped onto her face and ran across it, its cool little feet sticking to her skin like miniature suction cups, before leaping onto the opposite wall. Luckily, she didn’t jump in fright or she might have fallen down steps into a deep mucky hole. I tolerate this and other stories as they seem to give her such amusement while she grooms annoying tangles out of my magnificent coat.
As April wears on, flowers spring up and bring in a second flush of colour to the fields around the farm. Cowslips, once a rare sight, pop out of their ground hugging leafy rosettes on slender stems with yellow clustered bells hanging, heads bobbing about in gusty spring breezes. The cuckoo flower’s delicate pink blossoms signal the return migration of the irresponsible cuckoo bird. The cuckoo lays her eggs in another bird’s nest, forcing her to raise the interloper that will result. Then the growing cuckoo chick pushes all of the natural chicks out of the nest. Cuckoos have a distinctive call and in springtime, ‘cuckoo, cuckoo’ can be heard across the fields and in the hedgerows. Sadly, the call is rarely heard any more when this flower blooms, because the modern farm practice of square-cutting hedges in winter means that the nest sites that small birds use – and that the cuckoo loves to invade – are fewer. With magpies able to find more exposed, less hidden nests and eat eggs or young hatchlings, even the cuckoo has less chance of survival.
Dandelions bloom in profusion and feed a hungry multiplicity of humming pollinators. Forget-me-nots flush blue, as does the delicate bloom of speedwell as it sprinkles its colour through the fresh spring green of growing grass. The Shepherd’s favourites are blue wood anemones, with their ground covering profusion of blue stars, each with a cluster of white stamens at the centre. A proverbial sea of purple-blue spreads out under horse chestnut trees outside the kitchen window. They were planted by The Shepherd’s grandmother, who loved flowers.
As spring awakens, it brings with its floral bounty parasites that love to prey on lambs. Ewes have to be brought in to queue up in our sheep yard, along with their lambs, who get their first worm dose, which will be particularly needed if spring has been mild and wet. Some years lambs are fine and need no worm dose. Other years they’ll need several doses if the ground is very moist. There are a large variety of worms, ranging from those who are productive builders of soil to the few that prey on the internal organs and digestive systems of animals. An infestation of parasitic worms among sheep can spread very quickly; if not dealt with, lambs can die or never fully recover their zest for life. Essentially a parasitic worm’s survival is down to its ability to leech out all the vitamin, mineral and protein goodness in a ewe’s milk. The fresh new grass meant to give a lamb healthy growth also becomes a hazard. A parasitic worm’s life cycle is ruthlessly efficient: sheep consume mature eggs from grass they graze. These worm eggs incubate, hatch, ingest parasitically from the sheep’s insides, then lay thousands of eggs, which are pooped out into grass for the next sheep to eat.
To prevent this happening, The Shepherd and I walk the fields every day,