Too quickly the days shorten, the year speeds away from the summer. Summer’s last richness hangs on the hedges and trees - blackberries, catch them this month before they go fly blown, apples, you know which variety is ripe now because the wasps start eating them, making their odd cuts into the apple, eventually hollowing it out. If you pick an apple with wasps in it, they are gorged and dopey, although I get cautious about which apple I sink my teeth into. I pick wild rose hips and haws, making a delicious jelly (wonderful with cheese). There’s plenty for the birds - next month, uneaten fruit will drop on the ground or rot on the bush.
CROPS - There has been good keep left in the field after harves: chaff and shrivelled grains that dropped out of the combine harvester, or ears bent over and missed by the header (the hexagonal arrangement at the front of the combine, that can’t pick up anything that falls underneath its steel fingers set in a line). When we ploughed, all that disappeared under six to eight inches of soil, just giving food to the birds that follow the plough to pick up the worms suddenly visible, but nothing for the seed eaters. This year, we will scrabble the soil to induce the weeds and that dropped corn, now a weed, to germinate. Later, we will use our minimal cultivator - deep tines to move but not turn the soil, little blades to smooth it back, discs to drop the seed into a cultivated slot, then tines to smooth it back down, and markers to know were the rows are. It will be interesting to see if our arable fields will feed more wildlife with this new method. It’s not that ploughing is bad for wildlife, it’s just that modern machinery means it happens all at once at the perfect time to grow the crop, and the wildlife have had a six week famine amid the plenty of autumn. In the old days, a man ploughing an acre a day with a horse, the job took all winter, leaving plenty of time for wildlife to find new food.
We will take our last harvest, the stately rows of maize, their cobs so temptingly like sweet corn, but starchy, not sweet. For the last time, the great harvesting procession comes onto the farm. The forage harvester is stately with its eight wicked large spikes jutting out of the front to cut the crop, tractors and trailers holding fourteen tonnes to take the cut crop to the pit, the great big rough terrain handler and the largest tractor to squash it all all down before we lay the plastic that keeps it safe, beautiful feed for the cows in the hungry months to come. Lots of farmers are short of feed this year, with the dry spring. With a reasonable harvest, we’ll be all right, but feed will be expensive. Harvest has been completely obliterated in the furnace of a summer they’ve had in the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets.
COWS - The autumn calving cows are now nearly all calved, just a few heavy girls in the field waiting for their udders to fill and the calf to come, patient, curious, crowding around when you come to see them, standing in a tight group to try to keep the flies off. There’s always one who barges forward, the others making way, then she’s there right in front of you, she’s feeling out on her own and exposed in the little circle around you, and you trust she’ll stop before she barges into you, obedient to the fiction we establish with cows that we are stronger than they are.
The milk is good, settled in composition from the new leafy grass that follows rain and the clover that still gives its scented flowers to the grazing.
The heifers are still outside on the grazing, getting wilder, more a herd, as they graze and grow. While they are outside, they are feeding on grass, so they don’t look to people for food. They see the point of us more when they are inside and we turn with dinner.
CHEESE - I like September’s cheese, of course the mature cheese we are eating will be last September’s. It has the benefit of the stalky late summer grass and the leafy autumn grass, a balance and richness that I love. We are in our newly spruced-up cheese dairy after August’s closedown, where we do the work that is too dirty or intrusive (scaffolding and so on) to do when we are making cheese. In the store, we carry on with our blowing of cheese, our solution to our cheese mite problem - fork lifting racks of cheese to where I have a dust extractor sucking, then my champion mite busting team blowing air from an air line to blow off cheese. It’s not a pleasant job (mite and noise) but it means we can keep the mite down to low levels, and we are starting to see cheese come through without mite damage at a year and more old. Now we are getting all cheese that will age onto fork-liftable racks, a big shift round of all our cheese stocks, but worth it to be able to manage this devastating problem.
PRIZES - At the Great Yorkshire Show we won 1st for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar and 2nd for Quickes Traditional Vintage Cheddar.
At the Taste of the West Awards we won Gold for Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Extra Mature Cheddar and Bronze for Quickes Traditional Hard Goats Cheese.
RECIPE - There’s such a lot of tomatoes, courgettes, onions, garlic and now in Tom’s polytunnel, basil, aubergines and peppers. I like this vegetable lasagne, from Philippa Vine, a version appeared in the Farmers Weekly:
Cut the vegetables up into wedges or thick slices except the tomatoes and roast in a pan with olive oil and seasoning, add the chopped garlic just before the end of the cooking time. Make a cheese sauce with butter, flour and milk, and add grated or chopped Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar. Layer the softened roasted vegetables, lasagne sheets, then sliced beef tomatoes, chopped marjoram and torn basil then cheese sauce, I like to top with a little more cheese and dried breadcrumbs. Bake in a lower oven for around 30 minutes, and serve with salad.
MARY QUICKE
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