They say the birdy’s on the wing.
But that’s absurd.
The wing is on the bird.
That’s a little piece of nonsense doggerel taught me by my father as taught to him by his father.
I did recite it to my three young sons but regret not having drummed it into their memories. Not to late I suppose though the thought of sitting some 20-year olds down to a little rote learning is as absurd as the bird being on the wing.
Riz by the way is the past tense of rise.
Having just looked up who wrote it, I see it was written by that very prolific author, anonymous.
Spike Milligan was fond of reciting it.
Spring has certainly sprung here at Marlow Hill and it has been delightful.
We’ve had a bit of equinoctial wind but not bad by usual standards. However, the Hawke’s Bay A&P show is still two weeks away and a regular feature is tents blowing down.
It’s been a pleasure to be out and about on the farm.
The past week has been calm, sunny with a chill start in the mornings then the longer evenings with daylight saving.
The willows have been out for a few weeks and the foliage still has that fresh, lime green appearance.
The poplars are just starting to break their buds with the first hints of leaves, as are the oaks, maples and other species.
The golden elms are smothered in the fresh yellow flower-like foliage that will become a muddy brown before falling off to be replaced by the lime green leaves.
I’ve planted a lot of flowering trees around the farm and the prunus or cherries are just bursting out now for what will be a glorious show.
The malus or crab apples are already cloaked in their flowers. I’ve got about 10 different species and they all have different flowers.
They and the prunus are legacies of end-of-season wholesale nursery sales 30 years ago when I’d get trailer loads and furiously plant them all around the place. Many alongside my lanes.
Because they would be planted in September and October and not having had time to establish, I’d have to do a fair bit of watering over the summer if it was a dry one. But it’s worth it at this end of my career.
Now days, I’ll spot something flowering in a fenced off waste area and go and investigate and find some long-forgotten, unnamed bargain covered in wonderful flowers busy with the early-season bees having sniffed it out.
It’s been a long, relentless haul from mid July as the ewes approached lambing and now the last of the ewe hoggets are finishing off their lambing.
So that will be another round of docking then into drenching lambs as they come up to a month out from weaning. I haven’t seemed to be able to quite catch up on everything but there are a lot of lambs out there.
My neighbours all report a very good lambing as well with near record percentages, which is great news after the early September storm last year that wreaked havoc.
We’ve had enough rain but never too much and with the warmth, the grass is leaping out of the ground and the stock are all well fed and doing well.
The next challenge will be to maintain control but there seem to be enough mouths out there to assist with that challenge for now.
So busy times but working in this wonderful environment reinforces why we are farmers.
