Will’s World: Losing a fight with a blackberry bush
Will Evans © Lee Boswell Photography What passes for a romantic date these days, the present Mrs Evans and I have just returned from a very pleasant evening spent blackberry picking along the wood that borders my favourite field.
I say pleasant, but my arms and T-shirt are both equally ripped to shreds after she egged me on into ever-increasing sized clumps of brambles in pursuit of the plumpest specimens.
I’m just glad I wasn’t wearing shorts.
See also: Hay and straw harvest better than expected despite drought
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In fairness, I didn’t take much encouragement given how partial I am to blackberry and apple crumble with custard.
So much so, in fact, that I’d probably choose it for my death row meal dessert, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Blackberrying always reminds me of my granddad, God rest his soul.
When he was well into his 90s, my mother called in to see him one day, only to discover he was missing.
After frantic phone calls to multiple family members, a search party was launched, where they discovered him merrily picking blackberries in the top field, blissfully unaware of all the fuss back at the farm.
Going postal
The only slight irritant from our own expedition was discovering that half the posts in the new fence we put along the wood not five years ago have already rotted off at ground level.
What do they make them from these days, straw? It’s not as if they’re cheap either.
Anyway, don’t get me started on planned obsolescence or that’ll be the next two months’ worth of columns taken up with me having an old man rant.
That aside, we came home with a basket full of lovely fruit so hopefully one of us will get round to making some delicious pudding when we’ve got some apples to go with them.
At the moment, despite the drought, it looks like we’ll get a decent crop of them too, so at least something’s going to yield well this year.
I’ve been struggling to keep some of the trees that I’ve planted in the last couple of years going though, not to mention hedges, and some of them are already starting to shed their brown and withered leaves.
There’s only so much watering you can do when things aren’t within handy reach of a hosepipe, and I’m expecting a hefty proportion of them not to make it, disappointingly.
Finding the positives
I’m doing my best not to lie awake at night thinking about how desperate the current weather situation is and the effect it’s having on our finances, but it’s certainly not easy.
Still, I suppose that’s farming, and we’ve always been exposed to the vagaries of climate.
Perhaps not like this before though, and the new reality is going to take some adapting to.
For someone who’s prone to anxiety at the best of times, I need to be particularly proactive in staving it off when times are tough.
And after listening to a recent episode of the FW podcast where farm leadership, mindset and resilience coach, Sammy Seaman, talked about the importance of celebrating your everyday wins, I’ve been trying to do that.
The early harvest has meant that I’ve spent far more time with my numerous adolescent daughters than I usually would over the summer, and despite the usual teenage dramas, I just about consider that to be a good thing.
I even managed to take the intrepid youngest to her ice-skating lesson last Saturday morning, and we really enjoyed hanging out together.
The only downside was it involves leaving the house at the ungodly hour of 5.20am.
My respect for the nation’s dairy farmers has never been higher.
