How many greens can there be? The landscape changes every hour, fields and hedges and trees cloth themselves in more and more leaves. High spring springs forth everywhere. Daft baby rabbits tumble out of hedges, easy meat for hard pressed foxes, feeding an earth full of hungry cubs. Hen pheasants make nests too visibly in open hedges, and they and their eggs succumb too – the cock pheasants display to each other, with all the ladies gone, puffed up feathers and stiff legged stance.

CROPS – the wheat and barley look so prosperous, each plant now 4 or 5 plantlets, leaves bold and green, at the end of the month sending the flowerhead, the ear soaring upwards. One winter barley field that the deer hammered is looking a bit sorry for itself, very open, you can see the individual plants, not a mass all together. The oilseed rape mostly got away fine, and is doing that amazing growth – flowers sent out on the end of stalks branching in every direction until it becomes a tangled web almost over your head. The maize emerges, pale green against the soil. We’ve got a lot on the clay ground: we are banking on newer varieties than will grow OK on the colder, heavier ground, close to the deer in the woods – a gamble that I hope we win.

We wanted rain – but be careful what we wish for – was the dry spring our summer? Weather seems to come in chunks – long stretch of dry; will we have an equally long stretch of wet that leaves us grumpy – there is no pleasing farmers!

GRASS – the peak month for grass growth, especially now we have had rain. At the beginning of May, some paddocks outgrow the cows’ ability to eat it, even though they are at their milkiest and hungriest. So we walk the grass, measure it, guess how it will grow over the next few weeks, and lay aside the paddocks that will grow too long for the cows to eat right down, to make into winter feed. Then out comes the silage caravanserai, a metal team of mower, tedder with its long whirling prongs to spread the grass to dry it a little, then row it up for the great beast of a forager with its hungry mouth to pick up, chop and throw into a chasing trailer. Back to the clamp with the chopped grass, roll it down tight and sheet it to exclude air, and wait for the magical fermentation to take the green leaves, so fleeting, to a feed that will last the cows through the winter.

It’s a joyful, purposeful time, lots of driving big machines, getting the work done against the weather, the fields turned white and the silage clamp filled. The silage team take off to the next farm, eagerly awaited in turn. A full team is a lot of money for a few brief days a year, so we share contractors who drive the biggest and speediest kit.

COWS – At the beginning of the month the spring cows are all empty, and all cycling like crazy, an erotic frenzy like Friday night in a student town. Knots of cows ride each other, bunt each other – where’s the bull? We start serving in early May, and by the end of the month it’s much quieter – maybe three quarters of them are in calf. We use AI during May for all the most fertile cows. We watch who is riding and who is ridden, and serve them. We defrost the straw of semen from liquid nitrogen, and stick it in the end of a very long (2 foot) stainless steel blunt syringe. You stick a gloved arm up the cow’s back passage (a few ears back at that), and feel which ovary is ripe. You then ease the syringe up into the cow’s uterus – if she’s good and ready, it’s open to receive it, and gently find the correct horn and discharges the semen in just the right place. Not so much fun for the cow, but it does get the best bulls for grazing and cheesemaking from round the world into our herd.

CALVES – The products of last year’s service are frisking in the fields, confident, curious and playful. They’ve recovered from the tummy upsets they had – the fertility was so good in May last year, so many calves came at once, we struggled to keep the calving area as clean as we should have. If we do as well getting the cows in calf, we need to make sure the maternity ward is big enough for the deluge of calves. We are working out what we can sensibly do.

HEIFERS – The 15 month old heifers are now big enough to conceive. Different breeds start cycling at different ages; Friesians when they are far too small, even cycling at 6 months old; if they conceived, a calf would split them apart. Montbeliards and their crosses don’t cycle till they are a safe weight. We anxiously wait for them to get going, they show no interest in sex whatsoever, then when they start, they get in calf at once.

CHEESE – we are selling a little milk out at the peak to avoid making too much – no point in having more than we sell and also handling so much cheese puts huge extra pressure on everyone with such a physical process and our half-hundredweight cheeses. We started weighing each cheese when we make it, to avoid making some big and some little depending on who punches the curd or how much curd in the vat. This is to make the weight people are lifting as reasonable as it can be, but it means suddenly the shelf full of new cheeses look like peas in a pod – a real satisfaction, like looking at a tidy room, not a teenager’s bedroom.

The milk is steering a course between too creamy and rich giving too rich a curd, and too proteiny, curd that is heavy and grainy. We’ve a great interchange and interest between the cow and cheese teams: each side interested in having just the right milk to make the right cheese. I can’t wait to get to the grading at 3 months and find out whether the cheese is as right as the curd feels. Last year’s May cheese is coming through with a rich buttery note in the back of the flavour that is very luscious.

RECIPE – Nettle pesto: I love the satisfaction of foraging for food. Nettles are a rich vegetable, introduced into Britain by the Romans. They are uncomfortable if they sting you, so we might as well make use of them. With gloves, pick the top 5 leaves from a nettle patch before they flower – I keep a little patch picked to stop them flowering. Wash in salted water, they are a rich home for insects.

Put in a pan with a little boiling water to blanch the nettles (why is it called that when it makes them go bright green?), drain and puree. Pound garlic, cobnuts/hazels rapeseed oil and Quickes Traditional Goats Cheese. Use as pesto, on pasta or as a sauce on slices of chicken.
I apologize, I can’t remember who gave me this recipe at a show – if you read this, please let me know, so I can credit you.

MARY QUICKE

Our beautiful farm is stepping into its most beautiful garb – light, lacy, luminescent leaves, newly unfurled on the trees. Spring blossom makes dark branches a graceful backdrop. You can see why the Japanese hold cherry blossom festival, and party as the petals drop on their picnics. The hedgerows explode with Queen Anne’s Lace, cow parsley, white umbrella flowers on long stalks that suddenly make the lanes very narrow. After it rains the heavy flowerheads lean in and brush your car, leaving petals on the side. The birds get busy nest building and egg laying: not the peregrine falcon that the pair of goshawks nesting over the hill devoured. The peregrine was being trained, but escaped from the next village, but got no further than here.

CROPS – The spring barley we put in last month is up, leaves like shot silk against the brown earth. We cultivate the last of the overwintered stubble for maize, good to collect summer sun in plant form to feed to cows into the winter – time shifting the summer bounty. Wheat and barley sown last autumn now starts to look like a crop, plants turning into little clumps. Each plantlet will produce an ear so we want enough to make a good crop, but not so many that each ear is poor and each grain will be starved. Now as the ears start running up the stems, the deer grazing starts eating yield; we look hopefully to see if the stalkers’ work over the winter has dented numbers (no).

GRASS – The grass is the centrepiece to feed the cows. It grows faster every week, which is lucky, because the cows get hungrier, needing more to fill their bellies, restored in size now they’ve got them back to themselves after calving. All the green gold fills the milk tank. We obsess over the grass, measuring the growth in each paddock, putting the cows into them at just the right time for them to take good mouthfuls – the heart of getting enough grass into them to fill their bellies and udders.

It’s a brave sight to see the whole herd grazing, companionably spread out across the paddock, each cow harvesting her little area. For the first couple of hours, all heads are down. Each cow takes several mouthfuls for each step, each mouthful a full one – you can audibly hear the grass torn & chewed. They eat the grass as short as they can, leaving the sward clean to grow back again, giving us leafy spring-like grass right through the season. That’s the heart of grass feeding. At the same time, we check to make sure the cows have recovered from calving. Next month, in May, we want to get them into calf, to make sure they calve next year to harvest this glorious rapidly rising green tide.

The calves and youngstock are all now old hands at grazing, no longer nervous, skittish, jumping at shadows. We bring milk to the youngest calves until they are strong enough to do without. The milk bar, hauled along behind the buggy, behaves like an ice cream van to children, magnetically interesting. They will follow it months after they are weaned, trotting eagerly after it, very useful to move groups of animals between fields.

CHEESE – The rising tide of milk hits the cheese dairy. We are making 3 times more cheese a day than in winter. Suddenly the work multiplies – making the cheese today, all those 27kg, 60lb cheese in press for three days, all that young cheese to be turned every week. It needs as much love and attention as each winter cheese, only suddenly there’s a lot more of them. Don’t ask for any extras, don’t ask for long chats, till the tide of milk recedes, but the team will make sure each one is perfect.

DEVON COUNTY SHOW – Amazing to hear the line up for the food. All the menus and all the prices, even of the most humble burger van, is vetted to be good quality produce from the South West wherever possible. I’d always had great food at good value at the Show; I’d thought it was always a lucky chance, or my good choice. It’s because the doughty catering committees make sure it so – that the food at the Show reflects our beautiful county of Devon, and is a joy to everyone who goes – see you there!

RECIPE – Line caught Pollack with Quickes Traditional Cheddar Cheese Sauce. I love all fish, but white fish, even delicious line caught Pollack from Gibsons Plaice, needs a little added cheesy interest. Make a white sauce in your normal way, add a reasonable amount of Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar and let it melt in. Add a tiny squeeze of lemon juice and some finely chopped tarragon. Stir in a little cream if your waistline can stand it, season, and pour over the Pollack. Put a few breadcrumbs on top. Bake in medium oven for 20 minutes until the fish it just cooked and the topping is just browning.

MARY QUICKE

The spring resumes after the January flush was so rudely interrupted by that cold weather in February. The birds that dawn chorused from January carried on rather thinly through the frost, and now are looking busy, mouths full of nesting material. Walking in a field, I kept coming across great handfuls of deer coat, a couple of inches long. I’ve never seen it in such lumps before, but handy for birds lining nests. Soft growth of leaves and flowers that got singed in the frost are recovering – will their growth be any different given they had a false start and this is their second go at roaring away? The little egrets are back on our dirty water lagoon, rising pure white from the mucky, nutrient rich water, a miracle of purity.

CROPS – the growth that stalled now starts again. The frosted soil takes on that lovely frost tilth – that soft, open quality that allows roots access to every particle, all the nutrient waiting to be taken up into the plants. We’ve grown oilseed rape for the first time for a while – mostly we’ve been able to keep the deer off enough for this remarkable plant to start its extraordinary spring growth. It starts flowering, then more flower shoots leap out, more flowers, more shoots until plants six inches high and just leaves become four foot high with straggling branches tangling with its neighbours. You can almost watch it grow over the weeks of spring.

GRASS – we delayed calving this year till the middle of February to allow the grass to catch up, to avoid the scary dearth of food where hungry cows eat the new spring growth into the ground. Hamish, from New Zealand, where our grazing system comes from, told us ‘why make things more difficult, delay calving then there will be enough grass’. It didn’t look right as the grass was growing in January, but at the start of March, it’s good not to have so many fresh-calved mouths to fill as the grass is still looks wan and chilly.

DEVON COUNTY SHOW – I’m delighted that Mole Valley Farmers, our great Devon farmers’ cooperative, has got their grass plots up and running. Devon is one of those rare lucky places in the world where grass grows so well, and that grazed grass gives such huge benefits to beast and people, meat and milk. But what is the best way to tell the story? Grass sits there, sweet and leafy, but not an amazing spectacle, tells its story more quietly. As President of the Show this year (yay!) I so want farmers and the general public to wonder at this green miracle under our noses.

CALVES – Now the calves are turning up as fast as we can make pens to hold them. We keep them under cover just while they learn to drink from a teat, and feel confident with their herdmates. As soon as they are up and bouncing around, it’s healthier to have them outside, as long as the weather isn’t both cold and wet – one or they other they can cope with, but not both.

COWS – The cows are starting to get into their milking stride. For the first few days after calving, cows produce the beastings, colostrum, which we feed to calves to help their immune systems take off. That’s the first milk that comes from those tight sore just-calved udders. Relief starts by the calf suckling, then continues when we milk them – so soon the heifers learn that the milking parlour is a place of food and comfort. To begin with, of course, it’s scary, but if we’ve been kind to them while we’ve reared them, then they give us the benefit
of the doubt and trust us long enough to get the milking cluster on their udder. The odd sensation can provoke a startle, but then – ooo, that’s ok, mmm, food in front of me. Anyone who’s been a mother will know what I’m on about. It is a time of bruised arms, too, as you get in close to fidgety cows, sore and battered by calving. A week or two later, almost everyone settles in, as their innards clean themselves up, their appetites return (shrunk stomachs, squeezed by a hundredweight of calf), and the pleasures of the herd replace the sweet intimacy of mother and calf.

MILK – this year we’ve kept a good balance in the milk all the way through winter, the fats rarely going so high to make too soft a cheese. Now, the new milk, cows firmly on grass comes through – rich enough for a luscious flavour, proteiny enough to make a good firm body in the cheese to hold the flavours as they develop.

CHEESE – The grass-fed milk immediately gives another dimension to the cheese flavour, as important to my mind as the additional complexity in raw milk cheese. Now the curd is easy to get to the correct firmness. That makes life easier just when we need it – the milk volumes rise very rapidly, from a full vat at the beginning of March to two full vats by the end. Every extra cheese needs making, pressing in our three day press, bumped out each morning. We got some new mould, stronger to have flatter bottoms to keep mite out – oh no – one and a half kilos heavier – already the cheese and mould is 35+kilos, the best part of 80lbs, an extra 3lbs matters. Extra strength is extra thickness of steel, and that weighs. We are looking again at how we can help people do the lifting, as it is savage, especially as the number of cheese made each day rises, and each day we deal with four days make. At the same time, the young cheese all needs turning every week in store – so the work suddenly mushrooms.

STORE – All credit to our cheese champions, I struggle to find any mite in the store. The mite busting team have triumphed….oh no, we have turned susceptible cheese a little less often, and any cheese that sticks, lifts the cloth off, giving an open pathway for mite to gain harbourage under the cloth. We suddenly started seeing damage at the flat end, the base of the cheese, and tracked it down. Pride comes before a fall, and we’ve never beaten mite, just got it under control.

RECIPE – It’s surprising in my vegetable garden what survived and what didn’t, what bounced back from frost damage, and what just sulked and died. I’ve been growing the crazy oriental radishes, up to a foot and more long. The top half got frosted, but the bottom half kept OK (how does that work, the frost bit is between leaves and roots?). Half a radish is still a lot, so I’ve got inventive about how to use them. My favourite recipe is mandolining the radish, peel and slice an orange as finely as you can, then quarter the slices. Mix with the radish in a bowl, slice some Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar thinly, add a sprinkling of walnuts or pecans, a quick slurp of yogurt, squeeze over some lemon juice and a twist or two of pepper. You can replace with a head of celery chopped finely, or mix celery and oriental radish, sold as mooli radish in Indian shops.

MARY QUICKE

We had daffodils at New Year, grass growing, birds sounding spring-like.  The winter has still got some bite, but every succeeding day has the sun higher, the day longer, driving winter down to the bottom of the year as we slowly and surely climb out.  Tiny signs of growth peep out – snowdrops, so modest and quiet, little red female hazel flowers, and the lambs’ tails like male flowers that have been slowly developing and lengthening, suddenly bursting out.  Oak flowers give a purple look to the woodland on the other side of the valley, darker and richer on the ends of the twigs.  I saw a buzzard sit quietly on a post on a tree guard for some apple trees we planted.  Suddenly he dropped heavily on a clump of grass only four feet below, then laboured away in his heavy flight with a little speck in his talons.  One bird’s feast is one vole’s spring gone.

CROPS  -  the warm winter has kept grass growing on the headlands, and deer haven’t hammered any crop too much, although there are plenty of bitten leaves. On the wheat, that keeps mildews down, as new growth is clean, just as long as the crop can just keep ahead of the grazing.  There are deer hoof prints every maybe 18 inches; in hard winters, I’ve seen them every 6 inches, and the crops just can’t keep pace with the nibbling.

GRASS  -  the grass growth depends on soil temperature, and also air temperature.  It won’t grow if its feet are too chilly, and then soft growth can be burnt off in a sharp frost or a biting wind.  We usually have a cold few days that brings grass growth down to a crawl – 5kgs, the weight of 5 bags of flour across somewhere the size of a football pitch a day – even going backwards in a sharp frost as growth gets freeze dried.  Then by the end of the month, the whole great stampede of growth will just be gathering pace just as cows calve down and want feeding.  Our farm team make best use of the grass available throughout the season, where possible, we want the cows to graze themselves rather than the expensive process of making, storing and feeding silage. The team recently had their expertise recognised, finishing runners up in the Grazing category of the Mole Valley Farmers, Forage for Profit Awards 2012.

COWS  -  This year, we’ve delayed calving, after the last two years of hard winters had the cows pecking away, turning pasture to lawns.  Cows need to wrap grass round their tongues to bite it, so if the grass gets too short they have to work much harder to get their food, and when they’ve just calved, a girl doesn’t want to struggle.  Calving later, the grass will be easier to harvest for them.

CALVING  -  The cows calve, as far as possible outside as it’s cleaner and more private for them.  The calf starts the cow milking, those first unbelievable steps, driven to find that teat by instinct.  They stagger their way around their mothers, butting their heads, helped by a gentle nudge in the right direction (no milk between my front legs). Suddenly and it looks randomly, they’ll touch a little tongue on a teat and bang, we’re latched on, slurping noises and the palpable sound of relief from all sides.  Sometimes you’ll get a heifer whose udder is a little tender and that first suck is a shock, but soon everyone realizes that the way to comfort is being suckled.  Then that parting as we take the calves to their pens, cow and calf lost and bereft for such a short time, before their herd mates become their world.

MILKING  -  Then we bring the cows into the parlour, where they need to learn for the first time or remember for the older cows, that the milking machine will give the same relief.  That’s where we are keen on more placid animals, as quite enough new stuff is happening for a heifer (first calving cow) for them to be flighty and untrusting of people – our faces are too close to their hooves for that to be fun.  The work suddenly expands hugely – lots of animals inside, plus calving, night checks, tending calves and newly calved cows, lots of cows to parlour train and milk. 

CALVES  -  We have to teach the calves how to suck from a pink rubber teat.  It’s easiest to teach them in a shed: first they sit out of the way feeling orphaned, so it’s easier in a little pen.  You go in, encourage her to get up and explore the interesting pink shape – come on baby, there’s something nice there, push her close enough to the teat, open your mouth, squirt of warm milk in, what’s that, latch on, and away we go.  You can turn them from ‘where’s my mum?’ to a sassy calf in a day, so quick.    Depending on weather, we’ll get calves outside as soon as we can – much cleaner and healthier, and take the mobile milk bar out to them with the buggy.  Soon the buggy becomes the high point of the day, chasing after in, then twenty little tails waggling as they all slurp at once, and we just check everyone’s got a teat.

HEIFERS  -  We check the older calves and yearlings are growing on – for last year’s calves, the late winter is the time to check weights and feed on any that are a little light so they are big enough in May to go to the bull.  At this stage, 3 months away, some look too small, but it is surprising how much they will grow.  Most of them are starting to bull, frisk around and ride each other, showing they’ve reached puberty, but some of the heifers with a Montbeliarde sire are a little slower off the mark, keeping us waiting till the last minute (15 months).  Oddly enough,Holsteins (we don’t have them, but are the standard dairy breed) can start bulling as young as 4 months, and no later than 10 months, which  looks scary as it is far too young to conceive a calf.

CHEESE  -  At the beginning of the month, we are on one small vat, finding jobs to doing, repairing racks, washing cheeseboards, making lots of the little truckles for next Christmas.  By the end of the month, the new milk start pouring in, and every day the vat is deeper, so we’ll have a full vat, wondering when we’ll be on two vats and on.  First it’s a relief to have more work, then we know it’s the long pull to the peak in May.

DEVON COUNTY SHOW  -  I’m very excited to have just been elected to be President of the Show this year: it’s the best party in Devon, and put on by farmers to show off farming and the countryside at its best to farmers and everyone else.  It’s such an honour, and great to see how we can tell the tale of farming in ever more interesting ways.

RECIPE  -  We’ve been interviewing talented young students from Harper Adams University to show our cheese off to delis.  We’ve been asking them what cheese they enjoy, and one, Emily Osborne, came up with this simple but enjoyable recipe.  Mature Cheddar toasties:  Briefly toast bread, then slice some Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar and grill till soft.  Add a splash of Worcestershire Sauce, then put back under the grill for a few seconds.  Lovely as a snack or a light lunch with salad.  The Worcestershire Sauce just adds another layer of flavour.  Student cooking at its best!

MARY QUICKE

Autumn is really here.  The high winds, residues of American hurricanes, have let us know summer has gone.  Now the gathering dark in the mornings & evenings shows we are on the long switchback journey down to the shortest day.  The consolation prize is those bright autumn days of colourful leaves vivid in the sunshine, every sunlit detail highlighted by the shadows as the sun gets lower in the sky. 

There’s still plenty in the hedgerows and orchards.  The summer birds left late, our house martens chattering, endlessly discussing the coming journey in the warmth, darting around harvesting flies, but they’ve finally gone.  The little fox cubs in the lane are now bold young foxy gentlemen, confident and deadly, fattening on the ever-daft rabbits. The woods echo to fallow bucks’ roaring pursuit of does. I’m glad our badgers are looking healthy, even chubby.  We welcome the government’s resolution to deal with the scourge of TB in wild and farmed animals and will look to vaccinate to keep our badgers healthy, as we can’t vaccinate our cows.  Healthy badgers police their territory and keep out unhealthy badgers, outcast from their setts. 

CROPS  -  We have sown oilseed rape, the first time for a while, it’s up and growing in the moist warm soil.  Now we’ve got to keep the deer off it, as they love the whole cabbage family.  We are growing more winter barley, as Adam noticed that while our ripening wheat was hammered by deer grazing, the barley seemed untouched – they don’t like those hard whiskery awns that stick in the back of your throat if you’ve ever tried nibbling barley ears.  Most wheat ears are soft and papery, just the thing for a deer snack.

Grass grows fast in the last of the warmth, stocking up the grass that will keep the cows grazing as late into the winter as we can manage.  It’ll keep growing until frosts come and chill the ground, giving fresh grass to flavour the milk and keep the cows out.  We work out which are the first fields to stop grazing , which will be the first fields to turn the cows out to graze in February.  So oddly enough, we shut up the driest fields first, because those will be the easiest to use at that difficult time of year, so important to getting the cows out early and getting the grazed grass flavour into the milk. 

COWS  -  The autumn calved cows are settling into milking, just at that frisky stage where they’ve recovered from calving and are letting us and their herd mates know that they are in to gentlemen callers, please.  They practice on each other this month.  We watch to make sure everyone is ready for serving next month.  Left to themselves, they would try to get back in calf immediately, but we wait until at least 6 weeks to let their innards settle down.

The calves come in first out of the wet and cold, then each group of animals by age.  We’ll sort them out by size and how fast we want them to grow – we can let a few of the smaller heifers coast on to calve at nearly two and a half, rather than having them calve under two years.  They need to be big enough, or the calf can damage them, so we check who will make the correct weight for serving, and feed accordingly.  Our animals are fertile as they are cross-bred, and we don’t push them too hard, so we also have some to spare to sell.

CHEESE  -  Milk tends to rise in cream at this time of year, so we work the curd to keep the fat and the moisture down to keep the richest and most complex flavours.  The temperature is not too hot for the cheese or the people, and not too cold to chill the curd.  Our cheese stores stay a good steady temperature, so cheese can get on with the good steady job of maturing. 

With a lot of hard work, our stores are looking perfect – just the right mould growing on the rinds, the right humidity and cheese mite free.  I’m proud of how the cheese looks, and proud of the flavours as we send them off on their travels across the world. 

PRIZES  -  September was a classic month for prizes  -  we won the prestigious Best Speciality Producer in the Great Taste Awards, showing that we have consistently over the years put award winning cheese in over and over again.  At the Frome Cheese Show, we also won the Best Traditional Cheddar for our Mature Cheddar, and our Extra Mature also won a Gold, and the Best Goats, Buffalo and Ewes Milk Cheese for our Hard Goats Cheese.  Our Ewe’s milk cheese won a Gold.  At the British Cheese Awards, Stuart Dowle won Cheese Personality of the Year, Mild Cheddar won Best Cheddar, Goats won Best Export Cheese, as well Gold for Vintage, Silvers for Mature Cheddar and Double Gloucester and Bronzes for Ewes Milk Cheese and Extra Mature Cheddar.

RECIPE  -  I met the gorgeous Madam Fromage at the American Cheese Society Festival, who does  wonderful cheese blog.  She sent me this sandwich made with our cheese in the Wedge and Fig in Philadelphia:  http://madamefromage.blogspot.com/2011/08/wedge-and-fig.html

She said: “I am not the sort of person who can walk by a cheese shop without going in. That’s what led me through a red door to discover the perfect sandwich: Quickes Cheddar, Marmite, avocado, and watercress pressed into a crusty baguette.

At Wedge and Fig, a new cheese shop and cafe in Philadelphia’s Old City, this is called The Ex-Pat. It could also be called The Diary of Mary Quicke, after the British cheesemaker who makes this gorgeous clothbound cheese on her family’s 450-year-old farm and blogs about it.”

MARY QUICKE

July, and the year tips into high summer, furious growth limited by dry weather and plants seeding.  Animals and plants have that well fed look – house martens wheel around the house, giving us freedom from hornets coming in in the evening –  do these tiny birds take those huge insects?  I drove back from talking to the Exmoor Women Farming Group across Exmoor, expecting to see wildlife along the way – not much – as soon as I got onto our farm, I saw fallow deer, a fat badger, and two roly-poly fox cubs.  Squirrels are eating my strawberries; last year I was getting a colander a day, this year just a handful.  I’ve got electrified chicken wire and two nets around them, and they are jumping the wire and breaking the net.  Next is to completely encase the strawberries in a cage of chicken wire.  Too much wildlife!

CROPS -  we watch for rain after the dry spring.  I went to Helen’s wedding on Dartmoor , lots of farmers, and it rained as the bride came out of church – all delighted, hoping that we had rain at home too.  Deer have taken their bite of the tops of the ears.  Now they aren’t keeping leaves clean of mildew, but are taking crop from us – no wonder they look fat and gleaming.  We’ll know more what they’ve taken as the combine rolls later this month.

GRASS -  it’s easier for the cows to keep grass clean and tidy when it grows less fast, but we watch and wait to see what we will harvest for winter.  We put the long grass on top of the whole crop wheat silage to make a rich feed for the winter – how much more will we get? Will it be enough? We water the pasture with all the washing water and manure we collect, hoping to keep grass ahead of the cows.

COWS -  The autumn cows are going on their summer holidays to the further parts of the farm, the fields and orchards they can’t reach when they need to walk to the milking parlour every day.  I love to see them, content as their calves grow large inside them, almost invisible in the dappled shade, in the wilder bits of the farm, looking as if they are sharing a secret as you come upon them.  Spring cows are now alone on the cow pastures, luckily as the grass growth reduces.

Calves are now experienced adventurers.  One, too white, has got sunburn and needs rescuing as she stands under a little field bridge to keep out of the flies irritating her skin.  The heifers are having their last adore of Mr Angus Bull, clustering around him, before he goes on his celibate holiday next month.

CHEESE -  a lovely milk at this time of year from the drier grass with that tinge of clover.  Beautifully balanced, so we don’t have to work to get the right texture.  Last year’s cheese has that lovely candle-like texture of the cheese-iron bore that lets you know it will be a classic.  Hard work in the cheese dairy as it gets hot, spare words as people endure heat , weight and humidity.  The cheese store, turning young cheese weekly, still heavy work but cool, and turning and blowing older cheese monthly, becomes popular.  I’m so proud of our mite busters, keeping our stores free of the mite plague, keeping cheese clear of internal mould, while letting the mould grow and the cheese breathe to give our complex balanced flavours.

RECIPE -  A lovely recipe from Merle Warner, who with her husband Raymond won the prize to name our first calf of the season, they called her ‘Frieda’, which just suited her down to the ground.  She gave me her beautiful recipe book ‘From the Heart of Devon: Countryside Garden to Kitchen’ , with this recipe for Bread & Cheese Pudding.

4oz stale white bread with crusts

¾ pint milk

4oz Double Gloucester cheese

4 rashers back bacon

2 spring onions, finely chopped

3 beaten eggs

1tsp mustard

Salt & pepper

Frieda

Remove rind from bacon and slice in half lengthways.  Cut bread into cubes including crusts, place in shallow 2 pint oven-proof dish.  Cut cheese into cubes and sprinkle over bread and onions.  Beat milk, eggs, mustard, salt and pepper and pour over bread and let it soak for 10 minutes.  Lay bacon rashers over the top.  Bake until golden and crispy for 45 minutes, 200oC, gas mark 6.  Garnish with chopped fresh parsley and serve with fresh peas

MARY QUICKE

When spring starts, I always get a sense of relief and surprise that it really is happening again. Now it’s May, that initial disbelief is replaced by complete amazement at how much life, growth, wild energy suffuses everything I can see.

Every hedgerow has gone crazy, sending out the cow parsley that grows visibly day to day, suddenly the lanes are too narrow for cars to go down without the delicate flowers stroking the sides.  The thorn hedge that I laid, worried it would kill the blackthorn and hawthorn, is flowering for England on its side.  Pairs of birds fly flirtatiously together, absorbed in each other, oblivious of predators for the only time in the year.  The dazzling succession of greens in the woodland deepens and starts becoming one great motor of growth as all the leaves have unfurled from their delicate winter protection and open themselves, like photovoltaic cells, to harvest the sun’s energy.

CROPS -  Wheat, anxiously watched all winter through the icy winter, grows, sending out strong stems that will hold the ears of wheat.  Too many ears, the grain will be small and uneven, too few, there won’t be enough ears.  Will it be just right?  Seem about the right number of plantlets, we’ll need to see how it goes.  Now the deer that graze can start eating baby ears that are moving up the stems, like tiny bunches of grapes.   It’s the close season, so they graze contentedly and we watch.  Mostly the crop outruns the grazing, throwing up leaf for them to eat not ear, but it means crops can be thin on the quiet parts of fields where they graze in companionable herds.

The maize starts growing, pale green lines on the red soil, looking pale and chilly in cold weather and growing visbly in warm – the rows will meet next month, astounding from a standing start.  Spring barley again dashes to make up for lost time.

GRASS -  The grass is the crop I watch most – cows graze, and instantly, overnight, there is a sweet shoot thrown up from the root reserves.  So we keep cows off (that shoot is the softest and sweetest, no fibre, soft enough for people to eat) to kick start the crazy growth, that has the grass grown well over your ankles, in 10 days.  Even our brave mob of cows can’t keep up, so as grass gets too strong for them to graze to a lawn, we let it grow to cut for silage at the end of the month.

SILAGE -  Then  the great caravanserai of metal, tractors, trailers, mowers, forage harvesters and tedders turns up.   Fields suddenly look like machinery conventions.  Please be understanding of farmers in their tractors and trailers, seizing the weather window to get the crop into the pit in the dry weather.  Please forgive the forage harvester, great header at the front, inching out of fields and along lanes to harvest whole parishes of farmers’ grass for cows.  Many farmers ran short of the vital winter feed last year, so this year’s first cut silage is very important to us.  It’s the time of year when farmers, who normally take a huge pride in reversing massive trailers a long way up lanes, would prefer cars to pull into the layby if possible.  They are focussed on harvesting the best feed for their animals.  Silage in and tucked up under the plastic sheets and quietly fermenting, then the lanes go back to their normal quiet and tractors go back to their normal manners.

COWS -  The cows are leaping out in a flurry of mating heat.  We start serving cows in early May, and until they are pregnant, every twenty-one days you get chins alluringly rested on bottoms, riding – heads, back, anything.  I  remember my horse’s huge surprise and indignation a few years back when a heifer jumped him with me on his back, and the odd sensation as he slithered out from under the flailing feet and leapt away.  Then for the cow, the peak of desire, standing stock still to be ridden, fluttering eyelashes to attract a rider, contented enjoyment when ridden.  To begin with, in May, we serve them with the bulls whose daughters will make the best milk – the highest protein Friesians, the milkiest Swedish Reds, the handiest Monbeliards, to make the calves who will be the future milking herd in 3 years’ time.   These pregnancies are the ones we want the most, and watch and record who’s hot and whose not.

CHEESE -  All this energy and vigour gives a good firm curd that sets beautifully, making the structure of protein that is the bones of cheese.  Last year’s grading gave a lot of even, creamy, balanced, complex, long finish cheddar that we are coming into now, and this year the curd looks even  better.  It’s a busy time of year, and we are making truckles, little cheeses to back up cheese that unexpectedly was selected to go on British Airways First Class.  The menu gives a lovely description of the cheese, and it’s wonderful to think of cheese from our cows, our pasture, our village, making its way across the globe.

RECIPE -  My daughter Jane has been adding our cheese to my taboulleh, that lovely and easy Middle Eastern dish, and it turns into a complete meal.

Wake up cous cous or bulgur with boiling water. Use more parsley than you could imagine, a bunch unchopped as big as the woken up cous cous.  I like to add chervil and coriander for interest as I’ve got them all growing and needing eating, but it’s optional.  Chop finely or it becomes too hard work to eat.  Chop up spring onions or onion finely, and some fresh tomato for colour.  Add enough lemon juice so that you can start to taste the lemoniness, not just acidity, again, more than you expect.  Add olive oil or virgin rapeseed oil – the more the more delicious, but the more calories.  Season with salt and pepper.  It will last for 3-4 days in the fridge, getting tastier.  Serve it with grated Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar with a salad for a light lunch or a yummy first course.

DEVON COUNTY SHOW -  I have the privilege and honour to be the President-Elect of the Devon County Show, 19^th – 21^st May.  It’s a wonderful event, that has farming at its heart, as Devon does and reminds us that Devon is the heart of farming.  It’s also a wonderful party that farming throws for the whole county of Devon, farming, rural and urban.  It’s a hugely generous gift of the dedicated team of the Devon County Agricultural Association to anyone who wants to come along – please make it to the Show this year, it would be lovely to see you: I’ll be going round in a posh frock and fine hat, see you there!

MARY QUICKE

MARY QUICKE