a seasonal masterpiece by Cindy

Fall arrived, perfectly, with a cool front. This morning the predawn sky is a dark purple, star-bedazzled, upside-down wine glass rimmed with light. And the brisk morning air signals renewal after the last summer blast of heat earlier in the week. Sunrise is still a couple of hours away, but the farm is already stirring to life. Out in the coop, the cockerels are giving voice in creaky adolescent tones, like an inexpert boys’ choir, while the older rooster lazily offers up an occasional full-throated crow, just to show the boys how it is really done.

Not that the cockerels have much time left to practice the fine art of greeting the dawn. Another four weeks of fattening and they fall to my knife. This is one of those many small cycles of life lived out on a farm: birth to death to gumbo served on a Saturday night.

The ram lambs are growing well on the late season pasturage on the upper hill. Their days too are numbered. A date has been set for slaughter in January. Truly, they are ready to make the trip any day, but the bottleneck at the meat processor shows no sign of abating. One of their number did depart yesterday. It was slaughtered on the farm by a recent immigrant of Uzbekistan, accompanied by an English-fluent Ukranian who interpreted. He made short work of humanely dispatching the lamb; butchering to cleaning up, all took less than an hour.

The unannounced visit was a nice reset for our relationship with newly arrived immigrants. Earlier in the summer we had a lamb stolen by what we believe were gypsies, who claimed they had just arrived in this country the previous week. Another attempt was made a week later by a different family that we surmised was related to the first group. If you have never seen gypsies in action, they stage an impressive assault. Their operation was a master class in attempted thievery. Adults and children dispersed from the car like a disturbed hill of ants. They spread out in every direction of the farm, touching and fingering anything and everything in and out of sight, far too much for two people to keep track of. But we finally managed to get that last group herded back into their car, sending them on their way without a lamb or the live chickens the children kept trying to grab (although they did snag a few apples, quinces, and possibly fresh eggs). We do hate to mistrust — it is neither in our nature nor in our culture — but, fool me once….

In the new farrowing yard, our Red Wattle gilt is spending the week with a loaner Berkshire boar. All evidence suggests that yesterday their brief engagement was capped by consummation. If successful, in three months, three weeks, and three days a litter of piglets will be on the ground. Farrowing will be in late January, but with plenty of hay bedding and a heat lamp if needed, keeping the piglets warm should not be a problem. Having said that, I do recall a sow that gave birth during an ice storm a decade ago. We had to bring out a small generator to power heat lamps and keep the watering troughs ice-free. But all of the piglets survived. Pigs really are very hardy, and a 400-pound sow is amazingly able to warm 6-12 piglets without crushing any. Which is to say, if one dies after the first week, the fault can generally be laid squarely at your door.

As fall arrived yesterday with the chill of the passing cold front, the signals of this, the dying season, were also easily read in the turned back leaves of the tulip poplars that line one of our smaller sheep paddocks. Against that backdrop, I tilled six test strips, each measuring 4 x 200 feet, and sowed them with three combinations of purple top turnips and annual ryegrass. The turnips are intended as an early winter forage supplement for the pregnant ewes. The rye is to serve as a complement to the turnips in two of the strips and as a green manure to be cut down in the rye-only patch. All will be resown with clover in late winter.

Perhaps it is because I have grown accustomed to viewing life through the lens of a farmer, but each season really does have its own time and place. And even as things die, they are reborn, including hope.

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Reading this weekend: The Hour (B. DeVoto) and Emergent Agriculture (G. Kleppel)

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