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

Blowsy late summer seeps into the richness and edge of early autumn. Field margins are heavy with grass seedheads, hedgerows richly hanging with blackberries, rosehip, haws, sloes. Jack rabbits look fat and prosperous, foxes well covered, the buzzards well grown and lazy – meat is easy to find. They take off heavily from a branch as you walk along, do they get too heavy to take off if they eat to much?

Cutting a field as part of its prescription for wildlife, Simon came across some chicken wire covering some cannabis plants. He cut all but one plant, left it standing alone in a cut circle. We got the police in, not wanting to be complicit in a crime. They were a little disappointed only to have one plant to take away. It felt very cheeky of someone to do that on our field; I hope there are some happy slugs, mice and rabbits on the cut and minced up plants. That’s one harvest that won’t get brought in.

CROPS – We harvest the maize – everyone eyes up the cobs – not sweet, but starchy. They are only sweet while the grain is green and liquid: then it is intensely sweet, almost like chewing sugar cane. The cob sheath and silk get hard and inedible (though more attractive to pests). Slowly, the grains ripen, going from squirting juice, to soft chese to hard cheese to just penetratable by your finger nail on enough plants far enough down the cob. Then, usually around the end of September, we call in the forage harvester, huge machine with great metal fingers dividing the rows, feeding them with ratcheting teeth into the great maw of the machine, its steady high pitched whine audible across the parish. We cut it direct into trailers, and whisk it back to the pit. This year we put it onto top of the whole crop wheat silage, a rich feed for the dead of winter, when the grass has forgotten the sweetness of summer. Sheet it soon enough, and it ferments into a clean, complex, delicious feed. Let the air in, and it becomes that rank stuff that people associate with silage – lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds, as the old saying goes.

GRASS – grazed and cut and grazed again, it forgets it wanted to set seed and starts being leafy again, in the cooler weather and a little rain, giving a welcome autumn flush of grass to feed the autumn calving cows. Late summer sun means it’s not so sweet or rich, but still the best feed we can give the cows, even when night gets longer than day at the end of the month. We have some Breton farmers coming this month to see what we are doing – they have some really interesting ideas about making the best of clover that will be great to catch up with.

COWS – spring cows are milking on, calves now growing, coats shiny, those lines on their flanks to show they are putting on a little cover before the winter (I know that one too). The autumn calvers are nearly finished calving, and everyone settles into milking. We had a shortage of people to milk the cows, so have been training up a number of lively young people to milk, my son Mikey included – great skill, portable all over the world. I had a farm visit from some young secondary school girls, and Mikey came over to say hi after milking; they sent me a thank you card, asking me to tell my son he is fit. There was me thinking they were fascinated by my presentation on farming & cheese.

CHEESE – Back making cheese after ourclosedown, where we do all the checking of equipment, and steam pipes, painting, ceiling repair, floor mending – all the things we can’t do when we’ve got cheese in the dairy. We hope we are set, dairy and people refreshed to go forward for another year. We are sending cheese to America for Thanksgiving & the holiday season there – lovely to think of our cheese making its way into peoples’ home for their special celebrations.

I’m very excited about our ewes’ milk cheese, now 6 months old. We’ve worked hard to get a cheese that’s rich and balanced, without the fleeciness of some sheeps’ milk cheese. We’ve also got our Unpasteurized Cheddar now made with Cornish Sea Salt now 10 months old and getting mature, another subtle twist on that additional complexity of raw milk cheese.

RECIPE – Cheddar rolls

My sister-in-law Gina Quicke showed me this recipe of Dan Lepard’s. She’s trying out recipes for her teas at Sherwood Garden, which is good news for all of us.

550g stone-milled strong white flour
1tsp powdered mustard
300g Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar
1 medium onion, finely chopped
300g warm water
2tsp fast action yeast
1 medium egg
Oil for kneading
Beaten egg, to finish
Freshly ground black pepper

Put the flour, salt and mustard in a large bowl, add the cheese and onion, and toss together with your fingers.

In a jug, whisk the water, yeast and egg unitl smooth, then pour this into the flour/cheese bowl and mix everything to a soft dough. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and set aside for 10 minutes. Lightly oil a worktop and knead the dough on it for just 10 second. Return to the bowl, cover and leave for an hour. Divide the dough into six equal pieces, shape into long sausages and place into a tray lined with non-stick baking paper. Cover and leave until risen between half again and double.

Brush with beaten egg, grind black pepper over them, put in a pre-heated oven (220°C) for 20-25 minutes until evenly golden all over.

MARY QUICKE

Quickes Traditional Cheddar is the most widely available cheddar matured in a muslin wrapped truckle still to be made and matured on a single farm. Every cheddar is hand made by one their nine skilled cheese makers on their farm in the village of Newton St Cyres in mid Devon, 170 miles south west of London in England’s West Country.

Read More…

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