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| Our plum tree, Victoria, has excelled herself this year |
Autumn is here with a vengeance and the garden is a’swirl
with yellow, red and brown leaves. The greenery in the polytunnel is beginning
to abate, the potatoes have almost all been dug, and Vinnie the vine has yielded the risible harvest with which he deigned to bless us this year.
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| A potato mosaic (variety Rooster) |
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| Could do better - Vinnie Vine's meagre offering |
As predicted in my last post, I spent a lot of my time in
September picking and peeling plums. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, this experience transported me back 31 years to the summer when
I was a mere 19-year-old stripling employed on a dairy farm in Switzerland,
where one of my responsibilities was the gathering and preparation of fruit
from the farm orchard.
The idea of this working holiday had been to improve my
German (mistake number one – Swiss German is almost unintelligible even to
native German speakers, so I’d basically to learn a new language called
“Mundart”) by spending time on a farm, which I thought would be a relatively pleasant
way for a farmer’s daughter to spend the month of August (almost mistake number
two).
I say “almost mistake”, as overall my Swiss episode was
indeed hugely enjoyable – mainly thanks to the wonderful and welcoming family
for whom I had the good fortune to be working. However, it has to be said that
the experience wasn’t quite what Yours Truly – as the daughter of a Scottish
arable farmer – had been expecting...
I think I first perceived that things were different on
Swiss farms when I discovered that the entire farm extended to just 15 Hectares
(around 40 acres). Having spent most of my life on a farm which (at that time)
extended to some 1,800 acres, this was a shock to say the very least.
What’s more, this tiny farm supported not only farmer Hans
and his wife Vreni (plus their two young children) but also Grossvater and
Grossmutter (Hans’s parents) who still did their bit around the yard, although they were
no longer up to some of the heavy work.
And when I say “heavy work”, I am not joking... At home, even thirty years ago, we
had mechanical bale-stackers to lift and load bales onto trailers. On the Swiss farm,
it soon became evident that the bale-stackers were Vreni and... er, Yours
Truly. As I watched Vreni deftly spear a square bale of hay with a pitchfork
and swing it up into the air and on to the back of the trailer, my heart sank
swiftly.
The heaviest thing I’d probably ever lifted in my life at that
point was a curling stone – and they didn’t need to be swung over your
shoulder and propelled several feet up into the air at the end of a flimsy fork.
Vreni and Hans tried desperately not to smile as they
watched “das schottische Mädchen” attempt the manoeuvre, and eventually came to
my aid until I’d got into the hang of it – which I did... after a few days. Indeed when
I returned to Scotland, Supergran reckoned that my shoulders were a good couple
of inches wider than when I’d left!
For me, undoubtedly the most impressive aspect of the Arnis
being able to support a family off so little land was the fact that absolutely
NOTHING went to waste.
Everything (by which I mean fruit and veg peelings, rancid
milk, meat leftovers, dry bread, etc.) was fed to some incumbent of the farm –
be it cows (delightful dreamy dairy cows with huge, gentle eyes), hens, rabbits
(gorgeous giant rabbits, which I loved – little realising at that point that
they were for eating!), pigs (the enormous boar, Hubert, used to stand up on
his hind legs in the sty, with his forelegs on the gate, waiting for his
breakfast and squealing loudly) or the slinking farm cats and quick-to-nip-you
dogs. Not a scrap of comestibles was wasted.
Much of the fresh produce – predominantly plums, carrots and
apples – was frozen, sealed in jars or (in the case of the apples) sent to the
local fruit juice plant to be made into “Süssmost”. This was the local name for gorgeous, cloudy apple
juice, which returned from the plant in dark green bottles and was stored underground in the
farmhouse “Keller” (cellar) to be enjoyed over the following year.
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| Peeled plums playing on my mind... |
The apples and plums hung plentiful and heavy in the
orchard, which consisted of at least a dozen trees (making our one plum and one
apple tree here at The Sparrowholding look a tad paltry).
Needless to say, the bountiful fruit harvest meant hours and
hours – and indeed days and days – of peeling and slicing apples and plums. So
the mere 150 or so plums that I’ve dealt with this autumn pale into complete
insignificance compared with my peeling exploits in the summer of 1982. Back
then, I was actually dreaming of plums when I shut my eyes and was haunted by
visions of rows and rows of plum trees all waving their laden branches at me
and shouting “peel me” (sadly, I’m not joking!).
Still, plum trauma notwithstanding, those intense few weeks
on the dairy farm proved to be a very happy and fulfilling period of my youth, even
though the hallikit* Scottish farm labourer managed to put the spike of a hay
rake through her trainer one day and nearly pinned her foot to the ground!
Working alongside Vreni, Hans and the “Grossis” (as the
grandparents were affectionately known) was a hugely rewarding experience – not
in any financial way, as I think I earned about 90 pounds “pocket money” in
total after deductions for my accommodation and keep, but rather because of
what I learnt about how hard people can work physically, day after day, and yet
still be content with their lot.
It is a period of my life that I will never forget. I lay in bed each morning and listened to the
cows clinking their way (each wore a bell) melodically towards the milking
parlour around 5.30 a.m. I tucked voraciously into lunches of homemade bread
and fabulous Swiss cheese produced from the milk of those same cows. And I
watched, fascinated, as Grossmutter expertly plaited the “Butterzopf”
(literally “butter pigtail”) which was the special loaf of slightly sweet bread
made every Saturday evening as a treat for Sunday morning breakfast.
I am still in touch with the family – Vreni and I ring each
other on our respective birthdays. Days spent in an easy camaraderie working on
the land led to a friendship that has endured over 30 years. That friendship
and the vivid memories of a very different way of rural life more than compensate for
the hours spent peeling plums...
Last, but not least, here are a few autumnal photos which were snapped out and about around The Sparrowholding recently:
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| Courgettes still growing in the polytunnel |
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| Looking forward to making green tomato chutney! |
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| Runner beans are still growing in the polytunnel |
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It was National Poetry Day this week, so
this spade made me think of the late
Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging" |
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| Spot the sunbathing bluebottle! (on the left) |
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| Autumn Crocuses in all their purple glory |
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| Confused.com - this poor lost butterfly was flying round our hall! |
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| We're on the road to nowhere - autumn leaves |
