Piglets

It’s a glorious day, blue skies, wonderfully warm, and grass growing. Feebly, I ask Andrew to do the morning check on Daphne. There may be one or two squashed piglets, notwithstanding the farrowing bar and my care with the straw, and dealing with any tiny corpse is depressing. Instead I head for the cows and admire the mammoth calves, all suckling. Once I’ve mucked out and bedded up, the calves find the sunniest spots in the deepest straw and sleep while their mothers breakfast on rather nice hay.

The cows in Long Lands need another bale of haylage. The round feeder is close to the road and we both go so that I can keep the cows in the field and off the road while Andrew drops the new bale into the feeder with the tractor. I’m expecting to have to be vigorous with the cows as their instinct is to rush towards food and us, but they are at the other end of the field, dopey in the sun. By the time I’ve unwrapped the bale, circling round and round to remove the netting, they have made just the first tentative steps in our direction. When they start to look really interested, Andrew has already reversed the tractor out of the field, the gate is shut and the haylage is sorted. It’s the things you don’t plan for that seem to go wrong, not the ones you do. I had visions of the cows shoving past me to chase each other up and down the road. They may be docile Devons, but they still feel the Spring in their blood and the sun on their backs.

As I unwrap the bale there’s a confusingly intense scent of lavender. This bale was made off the seven acre field and no lavender grow there or anywhere else on the farm, but some unknown herb preserved in the bale is shouting out its lavender tones.

Back in the yard I go and check on Daphne – she has a heap of twelve piglets lying in a mound near her head. Her head is bigger than the whole sleeping heap.

It’s daft, we don’t even need to think about it until September, but someone local is offering a two-tooth Herdwick ram for sale and he sounds interesting. We could do with a couple of hours out, so we make a time to meet the owner and look over his sheep. The five acre smallholding is spotless. It looks as if the concrete is scrubbed daily if not hourly and there isn’t even a wisp of straw or dust in the corners of the sheds. To get to the sheep we have to climb over numerous gates – none of them are hung from gate posts, just built into the fence line, no doubt waiting until the money or time is there to bang in some meaty posts for the job. The ram is splendid – stocky, square, excellent horns and a good masculine face. His young offspring look robust and healthy and he is quiet and biddable. I know we’ll take him and am surprised when Andrew says we’ll think about it and phone him later that day. We think about it in the car for ooh, 30 seconds and then agree we’ll take him.

The last Badger Face ewe lambs overnight. I thought she looked promising and she has delivered. One day inside to bond and then she will join the rest of the last group in the orchard. At the same time I notice the daffodils are dying back. It’s as if the season is in a hurry to come and a hurry to go. It makes me feel immeasurably sad that moments aren’t so much fleeting as suicidal.

We walk across the farm to check if the grass in Pretty Field is long and lush enough for the cows and calves. It’s very borderline, so we decide to feed them one more large hay bale and turn them out once that’s finished. In the morning Moonstone moos and moos, staring out at the sun, knowing that some of her companions are already out a grass. “Just a few more days”, I tell her, “just a few more days.”

In two weeks the piglets have expanded; they look as if someone has inflated them with a bicycle pump.Solid cylinders with shiny black coats, whiffling snouts and a turn of speed.