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

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

June is rich and luscious, leaves dripping from the trees, all new unfurled and perfect. Everything has a prosperous look. The badgers scuttle away from us every time we go down the lane at night, fat and mercifully healthy looking. The red hinds feast on the broad flag leaves of wheat, with the sweet ears just emerging. They are so well fed that they are inattentive, and jump out almost on top of us out of the hedge. I scramble up the hedge to see a herd of 40 hinds looking at me indignantly and quizzically wondering why I disturb their feast. They seem to know that it’s the close season and trot over the skyline in an orderly formation: I can smell them on the wind, there are so many of them, so they are still grazing just out of sight.

CROPS – the wheat ears are flowers first, pouring pollen out into the wind. Heavy rain at pollination can mean a poor set of seed, but there is so much pollen and usually some dry weather in the critical few days in Wimbledon week (a landmark for wheat as well as tennis) to fill the ears well. Then the flower starts filling – it looks exactly like a full green ear of wheat except it is stalky not starchy. It fills first watery ripe, then milky, then doughy then cheesy towards the end of the month depending on weather. The flag leaf, the one that waves in the wind, is the main motor receiving the sun’s energy. The dry weather is keeping it healthy and clean of mould, although deer are chewing away at them. The crops always look magnificent and thriving now, only later as the plant ripens do we see if the luscious growth results in harvestable grain – will we get enough rain to fill the grain – we’ve had more than other people. This year the crops are worth more money, and it has cost us more to grow, so we watch and wait anxiously. Wheat looks expensive, although it’s only half again what it was when I started farming in the early 80’s – most things have gone up 5 or ten times as much or more, think about a pint of beer or a gallon of petrol or a house.

Our maize is looking good – the plants go from looking small and chilly to growing almost visibly as we get into summer, leaves meeting across the broad rows.

GRASS – we’ve cut all our grass silage, winter feed, and we anxiously wait for rain to push on grass growth. The cows are eating more because we are really pushing to see how much milk and what quality for cheese we can get just from grass, with very little else. So we are eating the grass that formerly we made into silage, so we have to keep kicking ourselves to remember the emptier silage pits would just contain the silage we would be feeding next year at this time if we didn’t trust the grass as much. But now the grass growth has slowed up with no rain.

COWS – The cows look well on this tighter regime. The August calving cows are just coming to the end of milking, and we are using them to tidy pastures up, instead of mowing it tidy – better the grass is in a cow’s belly. I walked across a grassy field to one they were tidying up and they clustered around the gate, asking politely but insistently if they could go and have some of that nice grass please. But just like people, calving is easier if you aren’t too fat, so I had to equally politely tell them they couldn’t have it, it’s odd to see a herd of cows collectively look disappointed.

The spring calvers are now about half or more in calf, by the end of June they will be mostly in calf, and we will put the bulls in to catch the last few shy ones. Very fast the furious frolic of mating gets much quieter.

Calves are now growing in confidence, coats shining as they settle into grazing. Their big sisters, a year older, half grown, are just now at long last seeing Mr Bull, and just like a gorgeous man with a group of teenagers, he becomes the centre of attention. We hope lots are already in calf to a dairy bull, but for ease of handling, for the real thing, we use an Angus bull, so the calves will be very tasty.

The milk now settles into a lovely clovery balance, and more clover comes into the sward and it starts flowering – I like to think you can even taste the clover, but I may be adding that idea in to the flavour.

CHEESE – We did an exercise where we looked at our cheese gradings compared with the fat and protein content, and we can now make cheese that makes very well from milk that is a little too fatty or a little too proteiny by carefully adjusting how we make the cheese – cutting the junket finer, or working the curd to keep the right amount of moisture in. But the cheese that was made from the milk of the correct ratio had a perfect quality about it, which showed up particularly in the beautiful ‘candle-like’ appearance of the core we take with the cheese iron that presages a perfect cheese. So we keep to our aim, to have the cows produce the perfect milk for cheese, which always seems easier the more they rely on grass – not surprising as it’s the natural food of a cow.

In the store, we carry on our cleaning of cheese, each one being cleaned all over about once every 4 weeks. All the work is paying off, as we are looking at about one-tenth of the bluing inside the cheese – a huge relief after very damaging levels of internal mould – not bad for you, just not what people expect from our cheese.

PRIZES 2011 -

Devon County Show

Long Service Awards
Stuart Dowle, Graham Woodman, Alan Westward – 100 years combined

Royal Bath & West Show

RECIPE – Cauliflower Cheese Soup – Montpelier Basement, a supperclub in Bristol:- http://supperclubfangroup.ning.com/profile/TheMontpelierBasement or Twitter@MontpelierBsmt gave me this recipe on Twitter – amazing when your phone gives you a recipe. The amounts serve 4:

I small cauliflower, 1 large potato, 2 garlic cloves, 850ml milk, 25g butter, 175g Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar, Maldon salt & freshly ground black pepper.

Trim, wash and finely chop the cauliflower, core & all. Peel & finely chop the potato & garlic. Put cauliflower, potato & garlic into a large pan, cover with the milk & put on a low heat. Simmer until the potato is very soft. Add the butter and the cheese and, using a stick blender, blend till totally smooth. Season to taste. Serve with fresh bread for a light lunch or a delicious light first course.

Alan Westwood, Mary Quicke, Stuart Dowle, Graham Woodman

MARY QUICKE

Too quickly the days shorten, the year speeds away from the summer. Summer’s last richness hangs on the hedges and trees – blackberries, catch them this month before they go fly blown, apples, you know which variety is ripe now because the wasps start eating them, making their odd cuts into the apple, eventually hollowing it out. If you pick an apple with wasps in it, they are gorged and dopey, although I get cautious about which apple I sink my teeth into. I pick wild rose hips and haws, making a delicious jelly (wonderful with cheese). There’s plenty for the birds – next month, uneaten fruit will drop on the ground or rot on the bush.


CROPS – There has been good keep left in the field after harves: chaff and shrivelled grains that dropped out of the combine harvester, or ears bent over and missed by the header (the hexagonal arrangement at the front of the combine, that can’t pick up anything that falls underneath its steel fingers set in a line). When we ploughed, all that disappeared under six to eight inches of soil, just giving food to the birds that follow the plough to pick up the worms suddenly visible, but nothing for the seed eaters. This year, we will scrabble the soil to induce the weeds and that dropped corn, now a weed, to germinate. Later, we will use our minimal cultivator – deep tines to move but not turn the soil, little blades to smooth it back, discs to drop the seed into a cultivated slot, then tines to smooth it back down, and markers to know were the rows are. It will be interesting to see if our arable fields will feed more wildlife with this new method. It’s not that ploughing is bad for wildlife, it’s just that modern machinery means it happens all at once at the perfect time to grow the crop, and the wildlife have had a six week famine amid the plenty of autumn. In the old days, a man ploughing an acre a day with a horse, the job took all winter, leaving plenty of time for wildlife to find new food.


We will take our last harvest, the stately rows of maize, their cobs so temptingly like sweet corn, but starchy, not sweet. For the last time, the great harvesting procession comes onto the farm. The forage harvester is stately with its eight wicked large spikes jutting out of the front to cut the crop, tractors and trailers holding fourteen tonnes to take the cut crop to the pit, the great big rough terrain handler and the largest tractor to squash it all all down before we lay the plastic that keeps it safe, beautiful feed for the cows in the hungry months to come. Lots of farmers are short of feed this year, with the dry spring. With a reasonable harvest, we’ll be all right, but feed will be expensive. Harvest has been completely obliterated in the furnace of a summer they’ve had in the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets.


COWS – The autumn calving cows are now nearly all calved, just a few heavy girls in the field waiting for their udders to fill and the calf to come, patient, curious, crowding around when you come to see them, standing in a tight group to try to keep the flies off. There’s always one who barges forward, the others making way, then she’s there right in front of you, she’s feeling out on her own and exposed in the little circle around you, and you trust she’ll stop before she barges into you, obedient to the fiction we establish with cows that we are stronger than they are.


The milk is good, settled in composition from the new leafy grass that follows rain and the clover that still gives its scented flowers to the grazing.


The heifers are still outside on the grazing, getting wilder, more a herd, as they graze and grow. While they are outside, they are feeding on grass, so they don’t look to people for food. They see the point of us more when they are inside and we turn with dinner.


CHEESE – I like September’s cheese, of course the mature cheese we are eating will be last September’s. It has the benefit of the stalky late summer grass and the leafy autumn grass, a balance and richness that I love. We are in our newly spruced-up cheese dairy after August’s closedown, where we do the work that is too dirty or intrusive (scaffolding and so on) to do when we are making cheese. In the store, we carry on with our blowing of cheese, our solution to our cheese mite problem – fork lifting racks of cheese to where I have a dust extractor sucking, then my champion mite busting team blowing air from an air line to blow off cheese. It’s not a pleasant job (mite and noise) but it means we can keep the mite down to low levels, and we are starting to see cheese come through without mite damage at a year and more old. Now we are getting all cheese that will age onto fork-liftable racks, a big shift round of all our cheese stocks, but worth it to be able to manage this devastating problem.


PRIZES – At the Great Yorkshire Show we won 1st for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar and 2nd for Quickes Traditional Vintage Cheddar.


At the Taste of the West Awards we won Gold for Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Extra Mature Cheddar and Bronze for Quickes Traditional Hard Goats Cheese.


RECIPE – There’s such a lot of tomatoes, courgettes, onions, garlic and now in Tom’s polytunnel, basil, aubergines and peppers. I like this vegetable lasagne, from Philippa Vine, a version appeared in the Farmers Weekly:


Cut the vegetables up into wedges or thick slices except the tomatoes and roast in a pan with olive oil and seasoning, add the chopped garlic just before the end of the cooking time. Make a cheese sauce with butter, flour and milk, and add grated or chopped Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar. Layer the softened roasted vegetables, lasagne sheets, then sliced beef tomatoes, chopped marjoram and torn basil then cheese sauce, I like to top with a little more cheese and dried breadcrumbs. Bake in a lower oven for around 30 minutes, and serve with salad.


MARY QUICKE