Samhain - death and new life
The soft warmth of early autumn soon gives way to colder days and more rain. The landscape is awash with autumn colours: dull reds, browns, yellows, and oranges against a backdrop of bright, wet green. Blustery days see flutters of leaves pulled from the trees and sent swirling across the landscape, creating carpets of leaf-litter. The nights are drawing in now and most days I feel like all I manage to do are the basic chores, feeding animals, picking up manure, building compost heaps, and walking the dogs around Dimitri’s mealtimes and naps. Everything is slowing down after the surge of abundance at the end of the summer; the year is winding down to its close and the feeling I get is one of spiraling gently inwards into the soft dark of winter. I enjoy the slower days, hot cups of coffee, knitting while Dimitri plays, and making candle lanterns out of black card and coloured tissue paper.
Goats
At the beginning of November three goats arrive on the land. I’d been thinking about having a few goats to help keep on top of the encroaching brambles that threaten to take over the more abandoned corners of the farm, sending tendrils out from the terrace walls and spreading rapidly in all directions so gradually that before I’ve realise what’s happened, half a terrace has been swallowed up. It's only been 18 months since I last cleared these; how can they have spread so fast?! Since horses don’t eat more than a nibble of brambles I decided goats would be the answer. I have fond memories of my goats when I was growing up and feel like their presence on the land would be a fun, and useful addition.
I mentioned my idea to an acquaintance who I knew keeps goats when we met at an event at the end of September and a few days later she rang me to ask if I would be up for looking after her three goats for a few months while she and her husband are away. They’ve got cover for all of their other animals but no one wants to take care of the goats. After a few days of serious consideration I say yes. This seems like the perfect opportunity: I get the chance to test out what having goats on the land is really like without the commitment of buying any, get to see how well they tackle brambles, and how much work they add to my already substantial load. If I find it too much, then the goats go home at the end of their stay and that’s that. If I enjoy it and see a benefit to having them then I can keep the kids that two of the goats are due to have while they’re here. It seems like a perfect win-win situation.
Melia and Chris, the goats’ owners come by one day and begin building a wooden frame for the goat shed at the far end of the lowest terrace. When they bring the goats over a few weeks later in the boot of their tiny car, they finish the build, wrapping the wooden frame in a heavy tarp from a billboard advertising a local supermarket, adding some reclaimed floor boards from my village house to build low walls, and reusing an old wooden door for the entrance. Although not a permanent solution, it's solid enough to be functional. If I decide to go ahead and have goats in the long run, I can finish cladding it in wood and add a better roof further down the line. The goats, Penny, Cookie, and Pepita, come with chains, picket pins and swivels. They’re accustomed to being tethered so I can place them strategically around the land to work on whatever areas I need them to clear.
The goats fit easily into my daily chores, adding only a few extra minutes either end of the day when I have to stake them out or bring them back in. By day they eat the bramble patches and at night they eat branches I cut for them from trees that are long over-due pruning. They don’t eat much hay either. I take great pleasure in watching the goats at work, demolishing the huge tangle of brambles that has smothered out a large part of the middle terrace and turning this nuisance into lovely, soil-nourishing manure. This way of land cleaning and processing branches is immensely satisfying and I definitely prefer it to using noisy, petrol-guzzling power tools. They strip the leaves from the bramble canes and trample them down as they go. It’s not a complete clean by any means but it’s enough to knock the brambles back and it incentivises me to go and clear behind them with a bill hook, breaking down what is otherwise a daunting and overwhelming task into manageable chunks that I can chip away at for a few minutes every day.
Cookie and Pepita are due to have kids in November. It’ll be fun having that playfulness around.
One Saturday about 2 weeks after the goats arrive, I stake them out on the bramble patch as usual, get my chores done and head out to my neighbours’ quinta for a cup of coffee. Becky and Trev live a little further up the valley and, on Saturday mornings, Becky offers a yoga class. Since having Dimitri I haven’t managed to go to the yoga class, but afterwards there’s usually a shared breakfast which I try to go to. This is a place where ideas get shared, plans get made, and it’s nice to check in with everyone once in a while. If it weren’t for this weekly ritual I’d probably never leave the farm! This week there are more people than usual to catch up with and, in spite of my best efforts to leave early, it’s quite late by the time I eventually get away. Vlad has taken Dimitri and as it’s a gloriously warm, sunny day my plan is to grab Dakota and go out for a ride.
As I come down the drive I immediately clock that something is wrong. The horses and mule are all standing, heads up, ears alert, looking down the terraces. Next I notice the dogs, also alert and looking in the same direction. What’s going on, I wonder. My first thought is that maybe Pepita is giving birth. She’s due any day now. I park up and hurry down to where I left the goats. Penny and Cookie are also looking over at Pepita, who is lying on the ground, but even from a distance I can see she’s not moving. Something’s wrong. I hurry over to find that she’s somehow got herself tightly wrapped around a small broom bush. So tightly in fact that she’s strangled herself to death. I can barely undo her collar, which is twisted as though she’d flipped over a couple of times. If I’d been 5 minutes earlier...but there’s no point dwelling on that.
The chain is wrapped 8 or 9 times around a tiny, flimsy little bush. So flimsy I hadn’t thought it a likely danger. How on earth has she managed to do this? And her kids? Is there any chance of saving them? I grab my phone to call a neighbour who raises, slaughters, and butchers his own animals. Ironically I’d just been talking to him less than an hour earlier about goats and when he heard that these are tethered, he’d warned me that they can easily strangle themselves. He arrives within 20 minutes with a scalpel and a sharp knife and starts conducting a post-mortem c-section. Sadly it’s no good. The two little kids that he pulls out of her are both dead. I take in the sight of the strangled mother goat, guts spilled all over the ground and her two dead babies. It’s awful, heartbreaking, a nightmare. My neighbour takes away the bodies: he’ll make sure nothing is wasted. There’s good meat to be had and he’s just rescued 9 puppies who were found dumped in a woodland nearby. One is sick so he’ll give it the colostrum. I feel numb. Not only is this an awful experience, but Pepita wasn’t even my goat. I’m now going to have to break this to her owners. I feel dreadful. They’ve entrusted their goats to my care and barely a week in, one’s dead!
Luckily Chris and Melia raise animals for meat. I think they even butcher them themselves so they’re not overly sentimental. These things happen, they assure me, it could just as easily have happened on our land and you don’t know what was going through her head. Maybe some passing dogs upset her.
A few days later I catch my neighbour’s shepherd dogs barking at the remaining two goats. It makes me wonder.
But that’s it now, lesson learnt: I won’t leave the goats staked out if I leave the farm, even if it’s just to pop round to a neighbour’s for a cup of coffee. And I feel that this will be the last time I take on the responsibility for someone else’s animals.
We settle into a new routine with just Penny and Cookie. Penny is a beautiful goat with a creamy white/yellow coat, black legs, and black markings on her face and floppy ears. She's single-minded and determined, a bit of a bully towards Cookie, and a machine when it comes to bramble clearing. She works fast, stripping the canes then climbs and tramples them into the ground. Cookie, on the other hand, barely makes an impact on the brambles, delicately nibbling at individual leaves but she’s a lovely gentle creature, with a long, black coat and brown legs and face markings and she has a very sweet nature. A week after the tragedy with Pepita, I go down to see the goats first thing in the morning and find a fresh, wet little baby goat in the shed. Cookie has given birth to a little female kid. Soon the baby goat is scampering around the land, kicking up its heels, leaping sideways, twisting mid-air - all the moves of a happy goat, filled with the joy of living.
Because Cookie only had one kid, I have to milk the side of her udder that the kid isn’t feeding from. Once the colostrum gives way to milk, I can drink it. It’s weird having milk again after so many years of being vegan. In fact the last milk I had was back in 2010 from my old goat, Alice. The taste is much the same as I remember it, and unlike cow’s milk, it produces no ill effects on my digestive system. I’ve always known if I’ve accidentally had cow’s milk in something because within about 20 minutes my body forcefully rejects it, but goat’s milk, it seems, is fine. And it’s not the nasty, bitter tasting milk that you buy (or at least used to be able to buy) in the shops. This is sweet and creamy. Dimitri likes it, too. Milking every day reminds me of my childhood when, from an early age right up until I was 20, my daily job was to milk our goats.
I’ll definitely miss these girls when they go home in January and know for a fact I’m going to be looking for some more to take their place. Having a source of milk seems like a good next step for the farm. I can make yoghurt and cheese, and it’s something Dimitri can drink. I don’t want to give him shop-bought milk. It’s all UHT shipped in from the Azores, and anyway I don’t agree with commercial dairy enterprises. But, having a few milking goats who will help manage the land to prevent fires, convert brambles, weeds, and waste material into manure and milk, plus perhaps generate a little extra income for the farm if my friends want to buy milk once in a while? That sounds perfect!
The Bees
Continuing in the vein of death and destruction that seems to hover at the peripheries of everything at this time of year, I begin to suspect that my bee colony has succumbed to the incessant predation by Asian hornets. I’ve seen a constant presence of hornets around the hive, but not much sign of the bees in the past few weeks. One day a smattering of chewed up wax appears littering the bottom of the hive. I ask my bee-keeper friend about it and she says it sounds like mice, which spells bad news for the bees. A few days later I ask another bee shaman friend to come and open the hive. Four or five Asian hornets come out and inside we find a pile of dead bees and a mouse nest. Close the hive up for the winter, he says, and wait for a new colony to move in in the spring. If the wax is left in place and the box smells like bees, more are likely to come.
The Garden
The garden is sleepy and slow. Little grows but I still find the stragglers leftover from the summer’s abundance: the odd cherry tomato even at the end of November, a final small courgette trying desperately to grow, a few final aubergines and peppers. The grass is taking over everything, as is the wild mustard. It threatens to choke out my lentils, tremoços, and favas, that I sowed in late October and the cauliflower and broccoli I planted out after the summer but I don’t have the time to weed it. I just hope that my crops can outcompete the weeds, or at least find a way to co-exist with them and the rest I’ll scythe down in the spring when the time comes to plant the summer crops. I like the idea of no-dig gardening and find that subscribing to the theory that all roots are best left in the ground (i.e. no weeding) helps to alleviate any frustrations or feelings of guilt I feel about the chaos in the garden.
I plant out garlic and onions as the weather gets colder, and any cabbage seedlings I have kicking around. I also sow some hopeful radishes, spinach, lettuces, and swedes.
The Olives
The olives ripen early this year and by mid November everyone is out harvesting them, laying nets around the base of the trees and beating the olives out of the canopy with long sticks. I harvest two of the ripest trees for table olives, putting the hard black fruit into a large pot and filling it with brine. I’ll leave it for a few months until all the bitterness has leached out of the olives and they’re ready to eat.
A few weeks later, when some friends kindly offer to have Dimitri, I set about harvesting the other 5 trees with help from Vlad and another friend. A job I thought would only take a few hours ends up taking all day but leaves me with 120kg of olives which I take to the local olive mill where they’re cold pressed into 12 litres of extra virgin oil.
Vlad’s idea of olive harvesting consists mostly of giving the trees a hard prune, chopping most of the branches down so that those of us on the ground can strip off their fruit. This leaves me with several enormous piles of branches. These I take to the goats, hanging a couple of branches in their stall each night for them to strip the leaves off. In the morning I take these out, cut the largest pieces free for firewood, and the twigs go in the compost. Yet another way in which the goats can be made useful on the farm!