Release the Quackens
March 01, 2024
a small purple crocus, the first of the crocuses I planted last year
The last day of February was the first day of pure sun we have had in a long time. We have had a very wet winter, with a few frosts peppered in.
I noticed the first of our crocuses yesterday, classic purple, popping up near the cherry tree. Unsure if I planted them in the past few months, or last year, I was just over the moon to see them. So too arrived our sheep with their lambs, skipping delightedly into the field after being inside for most of winter.
Today, the first day of March, gave my pickwick crocuses flower. This is the first year I’ve grown them from bulb and I am delighted. Everything is coming to life - every tree and bush is in bud, and I can find green on just about everything, even if it’s just a tiny speck. The snowdrops have died off, and have been replaced with daffodils, also planted by someone long before I existed.
I have been enjoying chopping wood most days. The soothing, repetitive motion calms my brain. I enjoy understanding where my heat comes from, and having to make an effort rather than flick a switch. The wood we buy is kiln dried, and small, but our tiny wood burning stove can barely fit a butter dish, never mind a few small logs. There are a lot of fallen branches thanks to winter storms, but it has been very wet and we are unable to use this until it dries out in the warmer months. Similarly to this time last year, db has been getting up before me to make us coffee, and light a fire.
We also got 5 new chickens, and named them all (but one) after country singers. They are Dolly, Shania, Ella, Emmylou and Mathilda. I joked to db on the way to collect our new girls that I wanted ‘a wee mad scrappy one with extra toes or something’ and sure enough, wee Mathilda has a little stump where one of her claws is meant to be. I have been getting up a little earlier in order to make her porridge with brewer’s yeast and I think she is just fantastic. I often say I would rather just have ducks now, and when all our chickens die, we will not get more. There are a number of reasons for this but none of them really matter since I just got 5 more anyway, which is a common pattern. For some reason, the average egg eater is a little bit freaked out by duck eggs, and make polite excuses when I offer them a box, or make hilarious comments like ‘ohhh no thanks - they’re very eggy’. Because of this, I feel as though we have something of a duty to our friends and family to supply them with very free range eggs from very happy chickens, since we have the time and space for them.
We have been eating lots of sourdough based breads and pastries, which is bad for my heart but good for my soul, and I have been making buckets of very good kimchi. It is a labour of love, though entirely worth it for the exceptional flavour it provides. While I plan to put up a faff free sourdough recipe (for busy, forgetful people) on spooky spices soon, there are definitely people out there with much better recipes, and much more developed flavour profiles than mine could begin to imagine. Sometimes I take the time to make the good stuff, slowly, and other times I accept that whatever I make is better than what I can get at the shop, and slapdash everything together. For kimchi, sauerkraut and miso, I cannot recommend a better book than Fermentation Kitchen by Sam Cooper. It’s beautifully written, photographed and illustrated, with the odd comment which upon reading, makes me laugh out loud.
Sure enough our sheep are back in the field, the mornings grow brighter and the birds seem as though they’ve returned. We have seen our bullfinches again, finally, chaffinches, and the breathtaking starling, which in Gaeilge is ‘Druid’.
Finally, we got a very good, very strong attachment for our hose, which now hangs just outside our kitchen window. This means that instead of carrying water in and out of the house multiple times a day, we can just open the window and pull the hose in. Doing dishes is no longer a mentally exhausting task with 8 steps, and while we still have to empty a basin of water at the end, it’s a very small one, and we can now rinse the dishes straight down the unblocked plug hole, and on the grass. It’s practically like having plumbing!