With calving and lambing finished, it’s a joy to wake up in your own bed! But with farming, that great feeling of putting down your pen and knowing the report, novel or speech is finished to your satisfaction never arrives. As the seasons roll on the jobs just keep coming and this month much of the work involves the mundane tasks of getting the farm itself into good order.
Ours is very much a small traditional livestock farm that probably hasn’t changed much in the last fifty years. Small fields, patches of woodland, slightly creaky barns and lots of scruffiness. We have permanent grass pasture which means the fields never get re-sown and this low input approach suits us and our Sussex cows perfectly well. But farmers looking for better returns from each acre will choose an intensive system with faster growing or better milking breeds of cattle who need high-performance grass with high digestibility, and high sugar content to maximise milk or meat yield.
We do, however, harrow and roll our fields in the spring. Harrowing, like raking, is used to aerate the soil and remove dead thatch, and then we roll them. This gets rid of the divots, ruts and holes where the cows’ hooves have poached the soil in the autumn, and smooths
out the ground which encourages more even

grass growth and grazing. We’ve also got to make sure all the fences are in good order, especially those around the perimeter.  Ash dieback has meant there are far more dead trees on the farm than there used to be, and quite a few came down in the winter gales taking the fence with them.

We have permanent grass pasture which means the fields never get re-sown and this low input approach suits us and our Sussex cows perfectly well

Cows are especially inquisitive creatures, and a gap in the fence with the possibility of exploring unchartered territory presents an opportunity never to be missed. The hedges were all cut in the winter – you can only do this between September and February when the birds aren’t nesting – but for the past few years we have not cut the biggest hedge which runs down the spine of the farm as we

wanted to lay it. Hedge laying is a traditional countryside skill that involves partially cutting through the stems or ‘pleachers’ of the woody hedge species like hawthorn and field maple, bending them over at an angle, and securing them to form a thick, living and stock-proof barrier. Tom was our man and, in February, having deemed it was ready, he arrived and over the weeks turned a scraggy overgrown hedge into a thing of great beauty. What I hadn’t realised was that there are many different styles of hedge laying, with each ‘hedgey’ region of the country, as opposed I imagine to those with walls, having its own style.Not surprisingly Tom does “South of England Style” but we could have chosen from dozens of others including Cheshire, Derbyshire, Midland or Montgomeryshire. And if you want to know what they all look like then visit The National Hedgelaying Society website or, better still, go to the national show and see them all being made or is it laid?
So the fields are harrowed and rolled (we even have stripy lines!), the hedges are laid and it all looks rather neat and tidy. Probably just as well then that most of the gates don’t work. They never open and shut with ease, you always have to jiggle, hoik or quite often employ brute force, and it drives me mad – but then what would we have to do in June?!