The wheel of the year is definitely turning. When Joli and I go out in the morning to drive to school, there’s a hint of light in the sky instead of it being pitch black. This morning, the sky was flooded with hot peach light, reflecting off the icy fields. It was like driving through heaven…Even though everything is still icy and muddy and only the tips of the daffodils are showing from the frozen earth, it’s time to start thinking of spring plans. February is the month that seeds need to be ordered, so that they can be planted out in the green house. The plants should be eight weeks or so old by the time it warms up enough to plant them outside or in the polytunnel, come April or May. 

When I first came to this country, I had the arrogance of a California girl, where you could grow anything, anytime. I harvested my own roses to put on the table for Christmas…so I thought, oh, just plant it and see. It will be fine. All these fussy rules and schedules…ridiculous.

A couple of failed seasons here taught me better. The sharp grey pressure of the weather means that the growing season is short - miss the window for planting your tomatoes out, and they won’t be big enough to produce for you before the season closes down again.

I thought it was restrictive, at first, but now I quite enjoy the restrictions. Like writing a sonnet - the limitations can free you to do whatever you want inside their constraints. Total freedom can be paralyzing, as well - I remember being overwhelmed by the advent of spring in California, feeling guilt that I wasn’t growing everything, since I could grow anything..

In Wales, you can only grow certain things, and only at certain times. It’s reassuringly ringed with tradition. 

working in the polytunnel

So I’ve been making out my seed lists - tomatoes, of course. I love to grow cherry tomatoes in different colors - so wonderful to just pick a bowl-full and throw them into a salad without even having to cut them up. And nothing as divinely sweet as the taste of a home-grown tomato that has never been in the refrigerator. I love them smell of the tomato plants, as well. Spicy and tangy and deeply satisfying, somehow - a completely unique scent.

Then spinach, kale, lettuce leaves for salad. A courgette plant, runner beans - I love them for their bright scarlet flowers, as well as the beans that you can boil and eat. Radishes and turnips. Strawberries we already have in the polytunnel, although they’ll probably need pulling out and replanting this year - they get tired after about three years. Some early carrots, maybe…

I won’t be growing potatoes or onions - I buy those in huge sacks from the farmer’s market, and they’re so cheap there, and taste so good, that I can’t really justify spending the time and effort to grow my own. I’m going to concentrate on the things that you really can’t buy from the shops - like the fresh lettuce, tomatoes and strawberries that taste nothing like the cardboard-y ones that have been sitting on shelves…

The other things I’ve decided to do this year are chickens! Taid has his own chickens, that he faithfully shuts in every evening and lets out every morning.But I’ve taken a fancy to have my own chicken project. I’ve ordered some Buff Orpington eggs, and an incubator, and I plan to put the eggs in on Thursday! We’re very excited. The eggs taken 21 days to hatch out. 

Buff Orpingtons are beautiful birds, heavy bodied and fluffy, with lovely golden feathers. I thought about having the less beautiful (in my opinion) but probably more practical Black Rocks. They’re hybrids, tough as old boots, massive egg producers. But style won over substance, as it often does with me, and I plumped for the luxuriant Orpingtons. Old traditional birds, with a good British history…

Rich, endlessly indulgent of my whims, was patient with this one. He did ask gently whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to get some grown chickens first, to see if I really like them, before launching into the whole incubation project. 

But, having always been a bit of a whole-hog-jumping-off-the-cliff kind of girl, I preferred to do it this way. 

He asked the same thing about ordering the tomato seeds. “Why not just buy in the plants when it’s time? They’re dirt cheap, and so much easier…”

I couldn’t answer, right away. He’s right, of course, and his common sense farm experience is hard to dispute. He’s already done all of these things - grown his own veg, raised his own chickens. He knows how it works, and he’s in it for the food value - as all good hard-headed Welshmen are. 

But after some thought, I’ve decided that it’s not all about being practical, for me. I’m also interested in the poetry of the process - ok, a city-girl thing to say, I know. But for me, there’s a certain grace in engaging with the entire cycle. Planting seeds, and watering them, and growing on the resulting plants until they produce tomatoes - which you eat, and then compost the remains, to turn back into mulch, to put around the base of new tomato plants - well, that’s as close to a religious experience as I really need to get. 

It’s the same with the chickens - hatching the eggs, watching over the chicks, seeing them turn into grown chickens that produce eggs, eating the eggs, putting the chicken droppings back onto the garden, to produce greens that get fed to the chickens - it just sets me in the center of an eco-system. It’s a spinning wheel that has its own momentum, like a water wheel turning slowly, its vanes pushed and pulled by the relentless weight of the water…the growth of things pulled by the warp and weft of the seasons, slowly and inevitably.

Like the reliable miracles of the pansies blooming in winter, or bread rising with live yeast, or water and vegetables and meat bones turning, magically, into stew. I count on these slow and replicable magics - I need them.  

They are my mysteries,  luminous and self-contained. It’s like putting your hand through a waterfall and touching the hidden thing that lies behind it…