DIARY FROM A FAMILY FARM IN ULSTER
MORROWS WORLD
DIARY FROM A FAMILY FARM IN ULSTER
I KNOW it is nearly May but I am still trying to get to grips with my New Year resolution. Every year, just before Christmas when my head is full of cranberries and stocking fillers, Tim Relf from Farmlife rings me up to ask me for my resolution. My mind is always blank; I never seem to remember that he will be writing his seasonal article and I have never any idea of what I might aspire to in the following year – apart from maybe surviving both physically and mentally for the next 12 months.
Yet I am now rather convinced of the worth of setting myself a target for the year. The first time Tim asked, my resolution was to buy myself a bunch of flowers every week and, by and large, I have been doing that for the past three years. Last year I made a big declaration – no flies in the kitchen – and indeed, we are now a fly-free zone. I have started this summers preparation early and my first bag of gunge is already "cooking" on the clothes line getting ready to hang in the cherry tree in the next few days.
This year I have resolved to try harder at recycling – and I am struggling. I am a great believer in the school of thought that says the world wont be changed by a few determined fanatics, but rather change will happen if all the ordinary folk do a little to help it. All those small things will then add up to a major difference in the way we treat our world.
Even so, I am still finding it hard to make even small changes. Now, I have been good about taking the bottles to the bottle bank, and food waste has never been a problem for me – theres always some animal that will eat what we leave; but rubbish disposal is a nightmare, especially since the open farm is back in business.
We throw out a mountain of bin bags every day, none of it sorted, all of it bound for landfill, which is threatening to engulf Northern Ireland. On top of this we have to pay for it to be dumped – and it is now priced by weight rather than volume, so Johnstons trick of squashing the contents of the skip with the digger bucket doesnt help much. We do try to have different bins for cans and plastic, but its not much fun trying to sort these out when someone has thrown an ice cream or dirty nappy in the middle of it.
Somewhere there has to be a serious solution to this, on a wider scale than me using empty meal bags as bin liners to save on the amount of non-biodegradable plastic we use. Anyway, Tim, I am still working on my resolution – but I have a long way to go.
The open farm is well and truly back in business and with the lovely weather recently we have been pretty busy. It is great to hear so many people saying they are glad to get back into the countryside after last years closure due to the foot-and-mouth restrictions.
Of course, Northern Ireland – indeed the whole island, really – did shut the doors in the countryside so for many, this spring has been a long-awaited chance to get back to the open fields. And the countryside has not let us down. I have rarely seen the place look so well as last weekend when Johnston, Helen and I took the camper out to North Antrim. The golden whins were spectacular against the green hills, dotted with sheep and their lambs and with the backdrop of the sparkling blue sea beyond, I was
genuinely moved by the
beauty of the glens. Perhaps I was looking with rose-tinted spectacles, but I didnt even see a plastic bag fluttering in the breeze.