It's been sometime since I've written and I wonder if anyone reads but as I was sitting on Sandilands with friends the other day, drinking coffee, they said 'what you're doing is inspiring so carry on writing'... so here is the next instalment.
I don't know what to do. I'm laughing as I write this but I feel a fear to proceed in case I get it wrong. Sound familiar? I remember a quote I read a long time ago, something like
‘The best thing to do is the right thing
The next best thing to do is the wrong thing
But the worst thing to do, is nothing at all.’
Paralysing inertia, and with Sandilands I seem to have been watching the grass grow, literally. What has happened since I last wrote in May is - a huge tractor and machines took off the grass, we had a party, it rained a lot, the grass, and other plants continue to grow, we drank coffee and ate cake covering subjects like a life well lived, or not.
A local farmer who cuts the grass of others, The Contracted Cutter, which sounds a bit like a netflix series, came in and cut the sward or in layman's language, cut the grass. The sward is ‘the grassy surface of land’. It’s from the Old English sweard or swearth, meaning "skin" or "rind". It originally meant the skin of our body and was then extended to that of the earth's. I like that. Like the earth is an extension of our skin or we are an extension of it.
I'd wanted to be there. I remember the hay making of the 70’s and ‘80’s on Sandilands - the intense summer heat tumbled up with the sweet smell of freshly made hay. The orange bailer twine that cut painfully into your fingers as you loaded the square bails onto the trailer. The high tractor cabs that made you feel like you were on top of the world. The days following tinged with fear that the hay barn might explode into flames. The excitement of creeping into the hay barn, watching the dusty rays of sunlight, and feeling that heat caress your skin, lulling you to curl up like the farm cats.
But, fast forward to 2024 and the farmer came while I was away, and it wasn’t like I remembered. I returned to a bare field, a brown hare’s mangled body, and discovered it had been done in 1 day with huge tractors leaving deep treads in the soil. On this day the process had been cut, gather and wrap in plastic as large round bails for silage. A more, modern common way of working with the wetter, unpredictable summers, where there is frequently not enough sunshine, or dry days to cure and dry the grass into sweet hay. This was in the third week of June, and there had been 5 days of no rain, but it wasn’t enough. June is an early time to take the grass off but I was having a party.
Plus, I want to lower the nutrients on the land and don’t particularly want all the grasses in there to re-seed. When you start managing a traditional meadow, there’s a lot involved. I now realise that knowledge was in the older farmers I grew up with. They knew, and this knowledge was passed down orally, generation to generation. I don’t have this, so I don’t know what I’m doing, like I ‘lost’ the earth’s ‘voice’.
At the party, my 50th, I drank, and apparently praised the pagan gods (for the sunshine) while also laying out my field management strategy - listening to the land.
It’s humbling to step back and listen, aware that my fear originates in releasing intellectual control somewhat, because us humans think we know. For example, when I was planting the trees this April, I was given advice like use glyphosate to get rid of the grass, put black plastic down to stop the grass around the trees growing, that the weeds will be a problem to the tree growth. Now, 5 months on, when I look at the trees, they're all doing just fine, weeds and all. Some of the trees, particularly the hawthorn, then spindle, are twice as big. The hazel have been the slowest to establish and come through, but most are still alive.
I received a scythe for my 50th birthday. A tool of reaping and harvesting, and also now a symbol of mortality as the grim reaper harvests souls. So next year, gather a group of souls who want to go old school and scythe the grass, make hay the really traditional way. First, learn how to use the scythe and not end up a grim reaper statistic of scything deaths. And by the way, if you google – death by scythe, you might find this paper - Death by scythe: Where forensic pathology meets arts and symbolism, where ‘Fatal impaling injuries are mostly accidental.’ The opening paragraph centres on an older man, drunk, who jumps a stream with his 70cm bladed scythe, slips and well, is now held in time, here. We’ll be having no drunken, scythe jumping and if you’d like to join us on Sandilands to scythe, let me know.