The Farm Diaries

#6 Farinata with prosciutto, pecorino and asparagus

I just wanted to say how much I am enjoying writing for you all on Substack. The moment I sit down to reflect on my week fills me with such peace and joy. Last time I wrote something more vulnerable than I am used to, about a state of overwhelm and struggle that I’ve been grappling with and god I’ve had a good week since. Busy and chaotic, lots has gone wrong, but I’ve found a new state of mind. I think writing something down really makes you own it and that helps instill change. So thank you for being here with me, for listening and supporting, I really appreciate it. If there is anything you’d love to know more about or things that you’d be interested in me writing about please do comment below.

This week has been utterly stunning. Holiday weather. Dorset has felt like the south of France, scorching hot, not a cloud in the sky, 25 degrees. Everything is starting to really grow now. Cow parsley spilling in the hedgerows over bluebells and pink campion, the grass in the fields is flying at last and nearly all the leaves are out on the trees, lime green and electrically vibrant. I have burnt my back to a crisp, digging and composting the garden between endless sheep checks. The lambs are thriving, we still have more to come, but are down to the stragglers now. I used one ram for my 45 ewes this year, I think the upper limit for one male, and let's just say I think his plums ran a little dry towards the end, so the last few to give birth are being quite sporadic. The lambs are pure joy, tearing around the field in great mobs, hopping, skipping, nibbling and literally jumping for joy, then calling loudly for mum and running back for a vigorous drink. I could watch them all day (and have been).

It has also, excitingly, been a week of bees. On Monday, I took Penguin, a beautiful billy goat, over to mum and dad’s. He was born earlier this year but sadly his mum died shortly after giving birth, so Ellie and I have been raising him ourselves on the bottle with another sweet girl called Wren. They live with the flock and are huge fun. Penguin is a real beauty, with symmetrical markings of grey, black and white. Far too pretty to castrate, which is what I usually have to do with males, so I’ve kept him as a breeding goat. But, at only 3 months old, he’s suddenly started humping all the girls, some of whom are also only 3 months old, which could lead to an absolute disaster and has done in the past. So I quickly bunged him in the car with a few friends he can’t get pregnant and took him far away! Goats are such horny little devils that once they get it in their heads nothing will stop them. They will escape from anywhere with sex on the mind, locked trailers, electric pens, horse boxes. I find 10 miles on a different farm seems to do the trick.

While dropping him off, I heard a huge swarm of bees buzzing above me in the apple orchard. One of our hives had swarmed! Tens of thousands of bees in the air with their queen, off to find a new home. It’s incredible the noise, the whole sky roaring above you. The simple way to explain swarming is that when a hive gets too big it splits in two. The old queen leaves with half the bees to start a new colony, leaving behind a young queen to carry on her legacy. It’s how bees spread and populate the wild.

Often we just let the bees go! It’s nice to know that our healthy hives are thriving and populating the countryside around us. Pollinators (and all insects really) are having a staggeringly hard time with modern farming, lack of habitat and pesticides, so looking after them and helping them flourish is one of the main reasons we keep bees. But sometimes, we catch these swarms, to set them up in a safe home where we can look after them. The issue with swarms is that naturally they find a crack in an old oak tree, or a hole in a mighty ash. But a letter box makes a great home, as does someone’s chimney or crack in a roof and often, as a result, they get exterminated. So having just moved house I have no bees and this swarm seemed a golden opportunity to build my own hive and give them a great home!

When bees swarm they eat a load of honey to fuel their journey, then spill out of the hive with their queen in a great cloud. It is an awesome sight. They find somewhere safe to land, usually the branch of a tree or tangled bit of bush, and settle there with full stomachs in a great buzzing ball with the queen at its heart. While the scouts, ranging miles, search for the perfect home. It can be quite an intimidating sight, a huge cloud of bees, but in this mode they could not be safer and are totally uninterested in stinging you. So if you ever see one in your garden, or on the street, have no fear and just let them BEE. Anyway, this moment when they are in a ball is a great time to catch them if you know what you’re doing. You have to be very careful, and I’m not going to go into detail here, but I managed to catch this swarm and carefully put it in a Nuke box - a temporary hive that they can live in for a while with food and some bee frames for them to build on. It also has a door so that I can safely transport them to a good site on my new farm. Having turned up with a car full of goats I left hours later with a car full of bees!

When you set up a hive, location is everything. Bees need to be sheltered from the worst of the weather, in a place with morning sun, and obviously not next to your favourite sunbathing spot in the garden or by a track that you use often. Once you pick the spot and set down the bees you can’t move them! That position is set in stone. Bees need to be moved either under 3 feet or over 3 miles, any more or less and they leave. One of my cousins in Australia got in trouble with his neighbours after his bees stung one of their kids! They asked him to move his bees to the other end of the garden away from their fence. So every couple of weeks he carefully moved the hive 3 feet. It took him 8 months to slowly swap them from one side of the garden to the other. Anyway, I found the perfect spot, sheltered by a vast sycamore, in lieu of a hill, near enough to the barns for my bee equipment, but far enough away from any paths or high traffic areas with great morning sun. I set the bees up in their new spot, sun setting on the horizon, the sky warm and hazy, after a magical and bountiful day.