Signing off from Mother’s Garden

Flushed cheeks, brow and nose are the consequence of failing to notice the mid-morning February sun in the crisp mountain air.

Bonfires are lit and fed while there is still a dawn chill or damp, misty beginnings to the days. We prune, we drag, we saw, we lean on rakes and listen to the woodpecker and watch our two resident ravens ride the blue.

January was bleak for reasons of deep doubts about health. I sank into pitiful thoughts. I did as I was ordered (mostly) and stayed in bed, but for excursions to be studied to a most undignified degree by doctors from Colombia, Argentina and Asia, to be told ultimately and with a comforting degree of certainty that I have a painful but operable condition, nothing more.

The prognosis added to the beauty of the season. I like wooding, the labour and the reward. I am made as happy by stacks of logs as I am by a mosaic of books randomly waiting on a wall of shelves.

It is blowing a bright-sky gale that has randomly cast our piles of prunings back across the farm. Yet, for the most part, our tenth year here is unfolding with the gentleness of a fond embrace that allows us time to spend great chapters of the season outside.

It is always good to step away from the weight of news. We may not have a television, but the radio and internet bridge the divide. The electronic world that streams facts and fictions incessantly has so truncated attention spans that even I, part recluse, have to fight the sensation of staring at key world events as I would a pile of logs.

Yesterday, while waiting for my son to saunter out of junior school, Arab, Catalan, English, Romanian, Dutch, Belgian, South America and Spanish children fizzed around me en route to homes and, perhaps, disparate cultures.

I was an island, static in a current of colourful youth that has yet to feel distance and contrast.

The pink pills they are making me take for my ailment have made walking a breeze once more, but I have recalibrated my stride and am inclined more than ever to stand and stare.

Back to the land and the seasonal tide of awakening gently floods across the red earth. The sands of time are fringed with the froth of almond blossom that hums with nectar gatherers.

But the spring-water flow is worse than feeble. I will have to squeeze once again down the narrow shaft to the source. I know that, but I keep putting it off.

Now is a good time, for Americans Thomas and Grace, from Minnesota, and Oregon, are helping on the farm and they can lower down tools to me on a rope. Thomas took some of these photograps.

They are our seventh and eighth HelpX volunteers, through a website suggested by a friend, formerly of Bradford, who has an olive grove in Italy.

We have just waved off Tamsin and Andrew, from Cornwall, who have fed 70 of our olive trees with pony muck, while also tidying the top vineyard in readiness for pruning.

Before Tamsin and Andrew left, we treated them to one of those barbecues where you can’t go wrong. Calcots, some of you may remember from a few years ago, are a variety of onion that look like leeks and are meant to be burned to a cinder on an open flame, before being wrapped in newspaper to sweat prior to the feast.

This Catalan tradition afforded me ample time to leaf through some old newspapers. With Biba the dog snoring among the irises and frightening the chickens, I did a masterful job of incinerating everything while sipping a small ale and browsing an article about the unhappy childhood of someone called Angelina Jolie.

High behind the barbecue, the surface of the balsa was calm for a change. The indefatigable grey heron which kept coming back like a boomerang to feed on our goldfish, has been displaced by a cormorant, our first and, hopefully, our last.

At ground level, there has been a delightful and rare flash of white tail, Lewis Carroll-style. Rabbits may be characters in Wonderland and in your neck of the woods, but here in The Priorat they are scarce, perhaps due to the presence of so many carnivores, Catalans included, and the limited grazing.

But flash by it did, as if late, and we quickly gathered up the radar-nosed dogs and headed in the opposite direction.

There was once, many years ago, the trauma of our old springer spaniels, retrieving from goodness knows where, a great number of very young bunnies, all killed.

We tried to track the dogs back to the source, off our land and into the abandoned almond grove that borders us, but found nothing. I don’t think we have seen another rabbit at Mother’s Garden, until now.

Maybe when we have finished thinning the main area of pine wood that already resounds with much more birdsong, we can focus on the ditch in the north-western corner, where there is about half an acre of dense undergrowth, including highly flammable cane, abandoned hazels and at least 10 more olive trees waiting to be freed.

This wilderness could contain all manner of inhabitants, boar included. They come and go at night, as you know, along set paths worn to bare earth, then fan out across the farm, leaving trails in the soft ground.

You have them in Yorkshire, too, of course, in an enclosure at Bolton Castle. I’m loath to disturb our boar or any other creature, but we cannot take the risk of leaving the area untended through yet another tinder-dry summer. Our power line, trip switch and meter are on the edge of it and it is not so far from our neighbour’s house.

Away from the farm, I have just completed a typically manic spin back to the old briar patch, to run some olive oil tastings and also to work on the Moon Daisy film project with the small English production company that kindly bought the rights to my book.

Writing for the big screen has been a joyous but steep learning curve and a humbling one, as the book has had to be dismantled and reconstructed to function as a screenplay. Meanwhile, I press on with another novel.

Unlike the sun and serenity seekers on the flight, my hand luggage was not bulging with beach essentials. Mother’s Garden essentials more like.

“May I look in your bag, sir?”

“Um, sure.” “Chocolate bourbons and one, two, three... 18 boxes of Yorkshire Tea?”

“Not easy to find good tea in Spain.” “Justin Bieber book –”

My hands flew up in innocence, not surrender.

“Not mine! My son’s Christmas present from his Nana. We don’t get back much and it’s too expensive to post – oh gawd.”

The security man is unravelling my long-johns. His eyebrows are doing the talking. “I feel the cold, okay?”

“And what do we have here wrapped up in the middle of them, sir?”

“Ah, now that’s a jam-making thermometer..... Honest.”

Once last thing to declare. This is, indeed, my final Mother’s Garden chronicle for the Yorkshire Post. What a privilege and happiness it has been to write for you over recent years, and, in signing off, send all good thoughts to those of you who have followed my accounts of life on the wild side, sprinkled with opinion of life, the universe and everything.

To the great number of readers who have either written or visited, whether olive oil foodies, walkers, birders or book readers, please stay in touch. One way is through our website where I post happenings and thoughts on a regular basis and you can keep track of the sum of all we do.

My writing will continue, of course; meanwhile, keep the window-boxes, allotments and gardens blooming with goodness and colour. Encourage the bees and forever defend our wonderful natural world.

May the glorious character, humour and rhythm of Yorkshire, embodied in this newspaper, go from strength to strength. Keep well.

Shaking The Tree by Martin Kirby, is published by Pegasus (ISBN 9781903490594).

Website – www.mothersgarden.org