Circle M Farm

Yesterday morning was so bright and temperate that I comfortably went about feeding the animals in nothing but shirtsleeves. Halfway through hay-hauling, a neighbor pulled up in her truck and we enjoyed a relaxed chat in the front drive. She used the word “hope” in a sentence. I contemplated scratching back some snow and planting peas. By afternoon, the sun had coaxed puddles out of thin ice on the paths. Inside, I spread my garden books across the rug in front of the woodstove and started drawing up plans. Then overnight the temperature plunged cruelly and when I woke today the back porch thermometer needle pointed to negative eight.

Still – there are signs that a new season is just beyond the next storm.

The garden shed in winter. We keep ploughing a path to the door, just in case we need to get in there. Soon we’ll be grabbing seed-starting flats off the shelves.

For several weeks we’ve heard the birds, now we see them. No robins have made an appearance yet, but they’re preceded by gossipy clutches of black-capped chickadees, grey-blue nuthatches and cardinals so scarlet red I’ve several times mistaken one for blood in the snow. Though just faintly echoing summer’s cacaphonous song, our feathered neighbors have slowly introduced a change in the silent landscape we contemplated all winter. A sporadic hammering has begun in the dead branches of our soft maples and the red-bellied woodpecker’s oddly watery call pierces the hushed mornings.

The guineas, incessant noisemakers all summer long, have started to raise a racket in the henhouse where they’ve been cooped up since late November. “Out, out, out!” they cry in their plaintive nasal tones. “Soon, soon, soon,” I think, sharing their impatience.

I shocked myself this morning when I suddenly thought, “I want to ride!” upon glimpsing the horses through the front window. For months now, I’d ceased to even think of them as working animals. I’ve been content to just keep feeding them as magnificent pasture ornaments. But they’ve had just about enough of the same old stuff. During one recent round of chores, I found the hedgerow trees scarred with bright yellow wounds. Most of the year, the horses and goats leave the trees alone, but at a certain point in the early spring, they start nibbling the bark. I theorize that sap starts running beneath the surface, bringing nutrients to emergent buds up along the branches, and perhaps the smell is sweet to the animals. Or maybe they are just sick to death of dry hay, and they get the tree munchies. A shepherd neighbor of ours encircles all her trees in ramshackle scraps of 6-foot-tall woven fencing, but so far our pasture-edge trees appear essentially undamaged by the one-sided seasonal assault on their skins. And I must admit I’m always delighted by the sight of a limber goat balancing on back legs like a circus dog to reach some tasty branch just out of reach.

The goats and sheep are exuberant now when they wake up to a morning that is over 20 degrees. Bucks and rams head-butt so violently that you can sometimes hear the clonk of their horns from inside the house. But the girls and wethered boys get into it, too. It’s like The Lord of the Flies out there in the pens, with even the most docile animals getting “rammy,” as my mom used to say when my brother and I would start to wreck up the winter house with wrestling. What happens at this time of year isn’t like what happens in fall, when the weather turns chilly and the animals act up because their hormones are scenting the air. All of the girls out there are pregnant, so the shenanigans are just the result of pent-up energy and the wildness of emergent spring.

The steers in the back pasture are “rammy,” too, though they get crazy like confused bulldozers in slow motion. Generally, head-tossing and clumsy jostling are the extent of the violence they’ll carry out toward each other, but two of the boys will occasionally make contact with their giant fuzzy skulls. Sometimes I’ll look up from working at the kitchen table and see all four enormous animals lumbering across the pasture in an awkward, jerky race, back legs kicking out at random angles and flared nostrils snorting out steam. I can’t help but laugh – I find cows most endearing.

Some of my pregnant ewes and does, most due in early April, have started to “bag up,” which means their udders are filling out. To a shepherd, bagging up signals the imminent end of winter’s rest. Soon, the exhilarating and exhausting birthing season will begin, and from there rushes forth the busy year of shearing, milking, planting, harvesting, breeding. To me, there is nothing quite so blatantly lovely as the tight, full, delicately pink udder of a young dairy goat in milk, and I’m not alone in this rather earthy sentiment. Ecologist Sandra Steingraber, in “Having Faith,” her sobering book on pregnancy and childbirth in a toxic world, avows, “The nicest mammary glands I ever saw belonged to an American Alpine goat at a county fair in upstate New York. Talk about your velvet orbs! Your snowy white hemispheres, gently trembling! Down to their two erect and perky nipples, these were show-stoppers – the kind of bosoms dissatisfied women empty their bank accounts to have surgically recreated on their own chests.” I generally think more about creamy fresh milk than plastic surgery when contemplating the udders of my does, but I’m no less appreciative.

As does (and, I imagine, cows, though I can’t say from experience) get older, their udders and teats start to show the wear-and-tear of being pulled by people and banged by kids. Lest you think it cruel that humans pull milk from animals with their hands, witness the treatment a doe receives from her young. Kids, and lambs, too, literally slam their noses into the udder multiple times before settling in to quietly suckle. Twins commencing to nurse together will actually lift the mother’s back end off the ground with their deceptively delicate faces. This produces a let-down response from the mother that gets the milk flowing. It also produces some odd-looking teats over time.

Our middle-aged hens are starting to think about producing, too – every few days I see a burst egg or two in the freezing nest boxes. Those girls certainly do enjoy a nice long break between late fall and early spring, when they do nothing but eat, but I put up with their winter lassitude since I don’t particularly want to run out to the coop several hours a day to rescue eggs from sub-zero temperatures. Chickens have a finite number of eggs – a pullet is actually born with all the eggs she’ll ever have, just like a human – so mine might as well wait to lay them at a time when I want to collect them. For this reason, we don’t heat the hen houses. Composting manure on the floor of the coop, combined with the heat of the chickens roosting close together, provides plenty of warmth for the chickens to live and thrive through the winter, but not enough to encourage them to lay.

However, a friend recently showed me a quaint little etching of something labelled a “hen cabinet.” This clever piece of furniture, intended for use in a pioneer kitchen, looked like a modern hutch, with shelves above and cabinets below. The shelves displayed plates, while the lower cabinets housed two fat hens, tucked into hay nests and secured with chicken-wire doors. I thought this a quite elegant solution to the perplexing problem of an egg-less winter on the market-less prairie. I generally buy off-season eggs from neighbors who have younger hens in warmer houses. But next year, I may house two or three of my freshest pullets in a small coop in the garage. They can keep the bunny company and I can collect eggs once a day in my slippers.

In the meantime, I eagerly await the egg-frenzy that should be in full swing here by Easter, just a scant three weeks away. I have faith, as I feel change coming in me, too. I’m waking up without an alarm again, and actually wanting to get up when I wake. I squint painfully through morning farm chores as the days brighten, resolving each day to dig up my sunglasses when I come in. And I mark the lengthening days with relief, knowing that I’ll need every hour the sun will give to get the garden prepared enough for cool-season seeds to go in on time. I’m reassured when I open the door to go outside, because the air smells like spring, even when snowflakes are blowing in.

Inevitably, things will get worse before they get better. As the snow melts, uncovering a season’s worth of un-composted manure dropped in the close quarters of the animals’ winter paddocks, the farm will smell like something else for a few potent days. Also revealed will be lost feed buckets, blown garbage, pieces of stray siding let go from the house and old rugs lent to cats on bitter nights. The early spring homestead is a dump. A muddy dump. And then the mud is tracked into the house, undoing the civilizing effects of winter’s painting and remodeling projects. But nevermind, I’ve learned what spring cleaning is for. To clean up after spring. And to make room for food and flowers. And eggs.