The Span of a Season

the arrival of spring

Peeps and pips emanating from the living room make the presence of chicks hatching in our Brinsea incubator there known. We have been hatching replacements for our flock for many years now, and those sounds, signifying that life is emerging, never get old. Outside it is finally raining hard, thunder echoing down the valley. This is a good morning to write. I have been quiet for a bit. Let’s blame it on lambing season, which is where I’ll start and end these observations.

Just after midnight, in the middle of March, the next to last pregnant ewe lambed triplets. By eight the next morning the final holdout, a hefty Dorset/Hamp, followed by lambing a big singleton. And then, just like that, having lived for six weeks with lots of anticipation and little sleep, we found that lambing for the year had come to a close. It is not that the other life on the farm ever stops, but during the throes of lambing season it surely does seem like it. The cattle, hogs, chickens, and geese still get fed; chicks are hatched both artificially and the old-fashioned way. Repairs are undertaken and plans are made. Cole crops are planted. But the collective breath we have been holding since the end of January is finally exhaled. And when it is, I sleep until six o’clock the next morning.

The week after lambing season ends we cull two maiden ewes who did not conceive in spite of the fact that both were exposed to the Cheviot ram for nearly three months. They won’t get another chance at breeding, at least on this farm. We also cull from the flock a favorite maiden ewe, a large Polypay who sadly gave birth to two stillborn lambs. (Always look for a reason to cull, as they say.) In the isolation paddock near the hogs resides a Dorper ewe with an always complaining voice, and a February ram lamb by her side. Once he is weaned, she too will be gone: she has been treated once too often for chronic, contagious hoof issues … and then there’s that incessant whingeing. There is one in every flock.

While we’re still keeping the ewes and their lambs mainly in the corrals next to the barn, we have begun to let them out briefly into the farmyards, the orchards, and the smaller paddocks to graze the newly emerging spring grass. (Our off-and-on-again yearlong drought has persisted—the catastrophic bands of heavy rain and wind this week have fallen to our north and west—and, knowing that sheep will clip the grass to the root if you’ll let them, we try to practice the recommendation to “shut your gates to your fields when the rains stop.”)

Because what is to come in the year ahead remains unseen—whether or not the rain will fall and the grass will grow, what the hay harvest if any will be—we recently took advantage of a great deal and bought fifty-four round mixed-grass hay bales. The hay was in very good condition, at an excellent price, and delivered to the farm. It took the seller, whose fields were just a mile down the road, three trips to deliver eighteen bales on each load.

The following morning I spent time doing maintenance on two of my gas-powered chainsaws. I have a big project coming up this weekend or next—anyone want to volunteer to assist?—depending on the weather and my willingness to do the work. Over the past year we have accumulated three very large brush piles that really, really need to be chipped. Currently the brush is perfect for providing refuge for the rabbits who eat my cole crops. This needs to change, truly.

Now we have a good chipper of our own for tackling a modest brush pile, but for work of this magnitude we’ll rent a large industrial chipper. The advantage of the rental is that it will take almost any size branch and pull it in and spew it out in chips, all in a few seconds. Of course, it will also do the same with an arm if you’re not paying attention.

For the past two months the chipper we own hadn’t been working. It had stopped running one morning at the start of lambing season, when my nephew Owen, our farm kid Tyler, and I were using it in the orchard. I devoted the next few weeks off and on, when not observing lambing, doing chores, and napping or otherwise catching rare moments of sleep, trying to get it started. I sprayed carb cleaner in the carburetor, checked the fuel lines, cleaned the spark plug, took the carburetor off and cleaned it, sprayed Master Blaster in the engine, cranked and pulled the rope until my shoulder hurt. It wouldn’t fire, much less run.

Then, one day after a nap, in yet another effort at willing the chipper to start, I examined the wiring. Why, I asked myself, is a cable running up to the maw of the chipper? And what is that key hidden under the lip of the maw actually for? With nothing to lose I turned the key, which turned off the emergency kill switch (my guess is some brush must have accidentally turned it on back on that early February day), and pulled the starter rope. The chipper started immediately. The “repair” only took me two months, the entire duration of lambing season.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

I recently finished writing an essay for Local Culture, the print journal of the Front Porch Republic. It should be out in the spring issue. I’ll post it here after the copy arrives in the mailbox.

Also, those six weeks of lambing season surprisingly provided lots of opportunities to sit in my reading chair and just read, like a man nervously waiting outside a delivery room (do they still do that?), two related titles: Believe (R. Douthat) and Wendell Berry and the Given Life (R. Sutterfield). The first was more than a little too rah-rah Team Humanity for my taste. The Sutterfield book was more to my liking. I think if I was the observant type, I would be of Berry-ite convictions, with an emphasis on the inter-connectedness of all life, which considering the arc of my last six weeks seems more fitting for this farmer. I’m still reading P.G. Wodehouse, of course. This round, it's Meet Mr. Mulliner, Mr. Mulliner Speaking, Mulliner Nights, and the Girl on the Boat.