August 23 2015

Of all the weeds on the farm the blackberries at least have the redeeming feature of providing useful, delicious fruit. But for the last three years we’ve had such dry springs that they have barely flowered, so there has been very little fruit. This means that my eyes were alert to the clusters of beautifully black blackberries that we saw yesterday as we walked along the canal, here in Brittany. The Nantes-Brest canal, a massive engineering feat of the early 19th century, traversing north-west France with its succession of locks, provides a perfect walking track. The towpath is flat and wide, running between fields and the water, edged with overhanging trees, with the occasional picturesque lock-keeper’s cottage – stone walls, lace at the windows, apple trees in the garden. We walked beside the water, sheltering under our umbrellas against sudden bursts of rain, and picked a few blackberries on the way. They were ripe, plump and sweet, so when we got back to the cottage we went on the hunt for more. We didn’t have far to go. There were enough growing in the hedgerow fence to fill our containers.  Martin was volunteered to make a cake, his previous upside-down cake prowess making him the right person for the job. We had a recipe from last weekend’s (British) paper that looked perfect – Truro pudding, essentially a batter poured over fruit – and Nick offered to go and buy some self- raising flour. Nick’s knowledge of French, limited to saying thank you and asking for more ice-cream, did not make him the right person for the job, but he was game and returned triumphantly with a packet of flour that proclaimed ‘Pour toutes usages’. I pieced together the instructions on the packet to see if its ‘all uses’ included cakes, but it was the advertisement on the side for a different packet of flour labelled ‘Gateaux’ that finally persuaded me that I was holding a packet of plain flour. 

Happily, on this packet of flour was a most unusual recipe for pastry, so the cake idea was shelved in favour of a tart. Martin followed the recipe (in a saucepan heat 1 cup of water, 100 g butter and a pinch of salt; add 2 cups of flour and mix to form a paste) then let it cool slightly and lined a pie dish with it. He blind baked it for about 10 minutes then put the fruit in (the blackberries plus some apples we had also found growing wild, finely sliced) and sprinkled it with sugar. He made a small custard with egg and milk and poured it over, then cooked the pie for about half an hour. This pie was a masterpiece. The pastry was crumbly, the filling was bursting with the flavour of the blackberries, the tartness of the apple still showing through. But that pastry! So simple, so good. Sometimes the best things really are the ones you find by chance.  

5 August 2015
A friend stayed with us on Friday night. She arrived in the dark, driving cautiously along narrow gravel roads, aware of cows standing in the fields like rocks. After the tour of the house, where we point out its thermal efficiency, its water efficiency, its high ceilings and pretty tiles, we sat in front of the fire watching the deep orange embers form. We talked about difficult work colleagues. People are people she concluded, summing up an entire understanding of the inescapability of human frailty. People are people, I agreed, but some people are peopler than others.

In the morning she came out to the kitchen, startled by the light, the vistas, the beauty that she had woken up to. She loved the bare hill and the forested hills, she loved the siting of the house, facing the forest, poised on the corner of the valley. She loved the winter sun pouring in, heating the cement floor, bringing all those theories of thermal efficiency to life.

After she left I went to feed the chooks. I was a bit late and the bossy one was cranky, strutting, head high. As I was tipping the kitchen scraps onto the ground I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that she had risen up, wings spread wide, ready to attack me. I turned and, balletically, kicked out towards her. As I swung I felt a stillness around me. The butcher bird, above us in the dying tree, threw each pure, perfect, formed note of its song out into the clear, crisp morning air. The toe of my boot met the chook’s exposed chest. She retired to the corner of the pen, cluckily indignant, offended. People might be people, but chooks are chooks.

18 July 2015
After writing my last post, about the attack of the café monster, I came across a stanza in the book I’m reading:
His loathsome head aloft he reared,
With hellish hate he roared,
His slavering lips with froth were smeared,
Vilely his curses poured.
How fitting, with a slight change of gender.

The book I’m reading is Independent People by Halldor Laxness, in preparation for a (two day) touristic stopover in Iceland between visits to family in England and friends in Canada at the end of August. Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, the only Icelandic person to do so to date. This book is so stupendously good that I’m slowing down now, not wanting to finish. When I’ve been reading it for a while, I look up and am surprised that I’m not snowed in, that I don’t live in the loft above the sheep in a dirty little croft with a fire that runs on smoky brush-sticks, that I don’t have to eat my porridge or my salted fish. I’m surprised that I’m not surrounded by the expanse of an Icelandic valley, with a stream that floods in summer and is buried beneath ice in winter.

We have had our first big frost, that kept the grass white until about 8 o’clock one morning, but it’s not house-covered-in-snow cold here. Yesterday we were watching bees in the broad bean flowers. They were having to work for the nectar, pushing down on the bottom section of the flower to make their way their way into the base. The flowers are light mauve, darkening in the middle to a deep purple. The brown bees push and scrabble at the bottom lip of the flower. Sun shines on the pale green leaves.

July 2 2015
Outside the air is freezing, so we’re not standing out there admiring the full moon or how close Venus and Jupiter are to each other. We’re inside with the curtains drawn to keep in the warmth of the fire. I’m feeling safe.

Driving up to the farm today Martin and I stopped at the café off the motorway, as we do every week. I sat at a table next to the windows that was catching a bit of afternoon sun. Outside, a woman and a bunch of children were eating through a range of bags, some from the Macdonalds, some from the café. As I sat down I saw a wind spring up and blow some of their bags and containers onto the ground. The woman turned and looked straight at me. I gave her an ‘oops, you may not have noticed some of your things have blown onto the ground’ smile and pointed at the ground. She gave me the finger.

Martin joined me at the table with the coffees and I told him about the woman and the finger. We looked out the window just as one of the children started picking up the rubbish and putting it in the bin. I couldn’t see the woman, but the kids were doing a great job out there. I returned to my coffee. Suddenly there was a face, inches from mine. The woman, snarling, ‘You stupid old c***. You presumptious c***. How dare you tell me what to do.’ And so on. I said, ‘Wow, you are rude’ which led to her repeating her attack then storming off, bumping into a chair which enraged her anew, causing her to turn back to me and attack again. Martin started to try to stop her, which drew her frenzy onto him. ‘I’m not talking to you!’ she screamed.

Eventually she was gone. The entire attention of the café was turned to us for a split second, then everyone turned away, pretending nothing had happened. One person said, ‘Someone forgot to take their tablets this morning’ which, although crude, was welcome support. The whole familiar café was suddenly unsafe, a place of harshness and brutality.

While the repetitive use of c*** was shocking – it’s a word I don’t use at all, because it seems to be no accident that the worst word in English refers to a distinctly female body part – it was the use of ‘old’ that really struck me. My hair is grey, and it needs a cut. I had dental surgery yesterday, so my face is pretty pale, and a little drawn. Was it my apparent age that let her express herself so furiously? She was maybe at the end of her 30s. She had three or four pre-teenage children with her, and a very overweight husband who I only noticed later, leading some of the children to the car. Was her attack a female version of young buck / old bull? Did she need to assert her (what’s the feminine version of ‘virility’? which is defined specifically as ‘having masculine vigour or strength’) feminine vigour by challenging an older woman?

I could say it was just one crazy person but it’s looking like a bit of a pattern. A few months ago I told a younger woman, who I know well, that she had done something thoughtless. She turned on me – also with a far stronger response than my initial comment warranted – and told me to ‘stop being a fool’ when I defended myself from her attack. She stopped short of the actual term, but ‘old’ and ‘fool’ go together, much like ‘horse’ and ‘carriage’.

I have been thinking about it. Getting old. Maybe those aches and pains aren’t just from too many hours at the computer, or too many hours weeding or mowing. Maybe they’re me, getting old. But does that make me vulnerable and deserving of attack?

I’ve been taking my mother – 94, competent and capable but with failing eyesight – around to retirement villages lately. It’s harder for her to get out these days and she needs more people around her. When I’m with her I’m glad that people take care of her, give her a seat, ask her if she’s ok walking up the stairs, tell her to watch out for cracks in the paving. But she is old, and she has special needs attached to having poor eyesight. These are not gratuitous reactions. My age is being seen as an opportunity for attack; hers evokes compassion.

28 May 2015

Even now, on the edge of winter, the farm is a place of sparkling joy. Sun streams through the windows, warming the concrete floor, hitting points of sparkle. It’s almost too warm, with the embers of last night’s fire still glowing.

Outside, the hardenbergia is covered in flower buds, ready to open into a sprawling carpet of purple. Bean seeds are starting to come up, the boofheads of the plant world, shoving their heavy leaf through to the light. Lettuce seeds, carrot seeds, kale seeds have sprouted, making their way through the soil with their distinctive leaves – round, fluffy and scalloped respectively. Our Christmas-present cima di rapa seeds have made good progress, forming nice rows of radish-like green leaf. Precious midyin berry seeds, that sprouted some weeks ago, are developing their second leaves, with promising signs of thriving. Even the guava seeds, little bullets that we took from that most delicious fruit, are swelling, tiny green bumps appearing on the surface of the soil.

On the other side of the world, in London, my daughter-in-law waits to give birth, my son by her side. I wish birth for her could be as simple as for the guava, with a seed that swells and bursts above the soil into leaves. I hope my son will be as good a companion as the woman who sat by me as I was waiting to give birth to him. We sat and counted the seconds through my contractions, neither of us knowing what we were doing – but what a result!

15 May 2015
I had thought I would be able to write about the return of our bees with pleasure, triumph even. I had thought I could quote from Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, making comparisons between her funereal imagery (she sees the bee box as ‘the coffin of a midget’) and my own happy experience. But no. Plath’s words are wildly prophetic. Once she has described the box, and the din that comes from it, she calls it ‘dangerous’, with the inhabitants ‘angrily clambering’. She is appalled by the noise (‘It is like a Roman mob’) and declares, ‘I have simply ordered a box of maniacs’. And then, like the Delphic oracle herself (to switch classics) she says, ‘I am no source of honey / So why should they turn on me?’

The thing that had actually been concerning me in moving the hive was its weight. We had to lift it from its temporary home of the last few months – where the bees had disgraced themselves by stinging their lovely host Tom not once but five times on the face – onto the back of the ute. Last time we looked, the two boxes of this hive were pretty full. The bottom box filling up with brood, the top box filling up with honey. Honey that we couldn’t extract because it wasn’t capped yet. But, as ever, our mentor Alwyn carried the load. Literally this time. The bees had managed to find a way out of the barrier across their doorway that was meant to keep them in overnight, so Alwyn lifted the hive while we slipped a piece of shadecloth underneath, then lifted it up the sides and tied it on, trapping most of the bees that were leaving to forage – some were inevitably left behind in this manoeuvre. Then he took one end of the hive while the two of us took the other, up to the tailgate of the ute and sliding it along to the back of the cabin. We tied it on, put the canopy down over it and drove it home. It was equally straightforward when we got home, sliding it off the ute, positioning it on its platform, removing the shadecloth and letting the bees go. They were cranky bees. They’d been trapped inside for most of the morning then bumped around to reach this new and unfamiliar place. And some of their group was missing. They bombed us, their little bodies crashing heavily into our helmets. They followed us up the hill to the cars, clambering on our suits, looking for a way in. But they didn’t get their chance. Alwyn drove away in his suit, an alien in a ute. We went inside and watched them from the window, crazy-flying around the entrance to the hive. ‘We’ll leave them alone,’ we said.

I thought I was leaving them alone by finishing a job I’d started earlier today – planting some bean seeds. I had a little patch all dug over – up near the house, a long way from the hive – and I popped the bean seeds in, put a cloche over them to stop any passing wallabies from walking on them / nibbling them, and watered them. I saw a blue-banded bee buzzing around some late tomato flowers. I congratulated myself on my confidence around bees, on how easily we had moved our hive, on how wonderful it was being a beekeeper. The next moment, I realised that the nearby buzzing wasn’t the blue-banded bee any more, but one possibly two bees caught in my hair. I stood still. Ha ha, bees in my hair. No worries. If I don’t panic they’ll just fly off. But they didn’t fly off. I bent down to brush them against a big bunch of parsley. Poor bees, can’t get out my hair. But they didn’t take the hint and kept up their angry buzzing until the burning pain of the sting hit me. Martin to the rescue, brushing the kamikaze bees out of my hair and getting me inside. Then the bees are in Martin’s hair, entangling themselves. Not by accident, but design. Even though we are no source of honey they have turned on us, the devils who disrupted them and stole them away.

Plath’s poem ends, ‘Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. / The box is only temporary.’ I hope, in Plath’s case, they recognised her as their saviour, not their tormentor.

30/4/15
I spent a couple of hours this morning contemplating the front garden, digging up bits of it and pulling things out. The tomatoes have definitely overstayed their welcome – particularly the ones that have tiny little tomatoes no bigger than a pea. Their sprawling branches have started to occupy huge sections of the garden, for little reward. So they came out, and the capsicum / chilli mutant got a severe prune. I’ve decided it was too well staked this year, and the densely packed branches (that, in other years, have snapped off whenever we had high winds) have kept the bush too humid, so that a lot of the fruit has rotted. The constant rain this summer hasn’t helped either. Not that I’m criticising the rain.

Cutting back the capsicum / chilli revealed some kale, planted at the beginning of spring. It has been so deeply shaded that it is now barely bigger than when it went into the ground. Seeing its perseverance inspired me to expose it a little more to the light, so out came the Egyptian spinach (which was going to seed anyway), more tomato plants, and, inadvertently, a large rocket plant that had escaped my notice. I continued my swathe of terror against tomatoes and Egyptian spinach, and added warrigal greens to the pile of ‘once were food, now are weeds’. I might point out, all of these things were self-sown. They came out of nowhere and have been good to us, but it’s no good getting sentimental about them.

When I stopped for lunch, I looked out over my morning’s work – and saw very little. A small area of bare ground near the compost bin, with a large (self-sown) parsley that I couldn’t bear to take out. Another small area in front of that, separated by the radishes. Closer to the house, some room to the side of the asparagus, with some more of the rocket – it looks like it might keep going – and another patch near the stepping stone, where I’ve staked one tomato with a lot of larger green fruit – they’ll ripen. Four small patches of ground with room for more plants. ‘Maybe,’ I said to Martin, ‘we’ve invented a new type of gardening. Patch gardening. A type of gardening that spurns the over-technological application of straight rows, where plants are constrained in the straightjacket of lines, the monotony of one species. Where the seasons are narrowly regulated, and vegetables are on a timetable. Our plants are given free expression, in patches of ground where they can mingle as they will with other plants, without applying seasonal apartheid.’ ‘The Warre hive of gardening,’ said Martin.

21/4/15

I borrowed a book about chook sheds from one of our friends a few months back. I thought it was going to tell you about the essentials in a chook shed, maybe suggest optimal sizes for a chook run, but instead it was a series of pictures with little captions that said how this person had built their shed out of an old silo (complete with curving windows), or that person had converted their children’s cubby house. All of the photos made the sheds look adorable. I gave the book back saying, This is more like chook-shed-porn – something to look at, to salivate over, to desire.

But now that we have our own new chook shed, I have to admit that there’s nothing wrong with chook-shed-porn. Ours is made from recycled pallets and pre-rusted corrugated iron. It has a tiny door with a spindly ladder for the chooks, and a bigger door with a big bolt for us to reach the eggs and clean out the chook-poo straw. The chooks are contained by a wire fence that folds under, to deter digging predators, and it has a gate that springs shut via an ocky strap. Part Heath Robinson, part inspired improvisation, it works brilliantly.

Our old chook shed – a mere, uncharming, unhip kit – sits unloved, its door hanging off since the dog-next-door pushed too heavily to make her way to the eggs, its tiny run filling with a feral pumpkin. We’ve taken down the electric fence that we had used to give the chooks a bigger run. We’ve also stopped giving them unfettered access to the whole garden, and everyone seems happier. Our plants aren’t dug up the minute they’re planted. The chooks seem calmer in being contained, not bothered that they only have one tree (albeit their favourite – the chermoya) to scratch under. Maybe they’re just happy to sleep in such an adorable shed, to form such gorgeous tableaux as they climb their stairs, to be laying eggs in cut-out water containers, and to have a sustainable, ethical abode that could feature in a magazine on organic gardening.

1 April 2015

As we drive along Bucketts Way to the farm the haze starts to rise lightly from the fields. A whiteness shifting over green. I imagine putting my hand down on one of those white-covered fields and feeling the cold and damp of the blades of hard prickly grass under my palm. But I am in the car rushing down the road. The sky deepens in the east to indigo. In the west it’s washed out, a streak of grey cloud drawing a jagged line under its vast colourless expanse.

The moon brightens as the sky darkens. It’s a bit lopsided, still not full, missing a slice out of the bottom. The moon, the haze, the cooling air. Driving out of Sydney to miss the holiday traffic, through choked up roads that finally open onto highways. It all reminds me of Easters past, of my children running in a pack of children on long wide beaches, where the sea splashes fresh against yellow-grey sand as the sun fades. Wrapping children in towels and hurrying them back to holiday rental houses with lino floors and no heaters, cooking sausages on ancient rusty barbecues in dark backyards. Counting children to make sure that none have slipped away. Finding beds and sheets and looking for more blankets in dusty cupboards. Hearing voices rise and fall across the night. Traces of foil easter egg wrappings wherever you go.

Or my own childhood Easters at Lake Macquarie. My parents had a friend who lived there and we would visit every year. She lived right on the shore and the boy next door would take us out in the dinghy. Which was scary, out on the deep wide water. The jetty, where you could lie and peer through the cracks between the slats of wood, watching fish dart among the seaweed fronds, was better. That, and foraging through my showbag, eating licorice, are my main memories. We went every year to the Easter Show, in Moore Park, to see the fruit and vegetable displays and the cows and the sheep and the pigs and then – our annual binge of crass commercialism – to the showbag pavilion. I would buy a licorice showbag with little packets of licorice – licorice strips, allsorts, twists, chunks, bullets. At the bottom of the bag ­– and it was so exciting that I think it can only have happened once or twice ­– were two or three wide straps of red licorice, wrapped in tissue paper, precious. Too precious to eat. I would take my licorice bag with me to Lake Macquarie and ration out the pieces every day, hoping it would last forever. I would lie on the sharp broad grass by the side of the lake, listening to the water lapping, and hoping that would last forever too.