Greg said: “I can’t wait for you to stop pickling things. I’m sick of the smell of vinegar. I think I’m turning into a gherkin.”
I am contemplating pickling his head. I do like pickling things. I don’t know why. The pickled things mostly sit in the pantry because, really, how often do you use a pickled thing? I have a cupboard stuffed with vinegary things in jars.
How often do you really show off with a platter of posh ploughman’s, aged cheeses and cured meats, pickled things, fancy crackers and sourdough loaves?
Our neighbour Tony, apropos of God knows what, once announced to me that he “doesn’t understand crackers and cheese”. When he wants a snack, he says, he has a peanut butter sandwich.
We live in Masterton.
I seem to have become my grandmother, who, Depression-raised, pickled things and saved string and paper bags. She spent Boxing Days cutting up the usable bits of Christmas cards to be reused as gift cards on jars of pickled things for the next Christmas.
One way to empty the cupboard of pickled things is to make them someone else’s problem. We went right around the bend early on Saturday morning to Janet and Andrew’s place. It was 6°C. They had had a proper frost overnight. It was the most beautiful morning. Bright and clear, and the first day we’ve had for a week without the foul northwest winds. We all looked appropriately sartorial. I wore a puffer jacket patched with silver gaffer tape to cover the hole the sheep had made.
I took pickled offerings: red capsicum jelly – the green capsicum jelly looked like puréed cow shit and went down the drain – and capsicum and Granny Smith apple relish. All bounty from their magnificent garden. I put tags on the jars. They were cut from cards Janet had given me.
We were there for a master class in pruning. The master pruner was Steve. Blokesy Stokesy said: “He charges $70 an hour. So don’t distract him.” I got distracted and wandered off looking for things to pickle. I pinched two eggplants and a handful of cherry tomatoes. I snuck into the berry cage and surreptitiously stuffed my face with Janet’s autumn raspberries. Greg pointed out that I had red juice all over my face. I looked like Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy after a drunken snog.
Janet said she’d walk us to the car, to make sure I didn’t loot anything else on the way out.
On the way back home, I spotted six little rams in the next door neighbour’s paddock. “Stop the car!” I shouted. “That’s Reginald.”
He came trotting over. I hadn’t seen him in six months. He knew me. I knew him. I patted him. He waggled his tail. If I’d had a tail I’d have waggled it back.
The last time I saw him he knocked me to the ground. I adore him.
On the day we first came to look at what would become Lush Places, we met Miles the sheep farmer and Blackie. She is the daughter of his best-ever sheep, who is buried on his farm. I call this Home Farm. This is a homage to one of my favourite authors, Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose The Cazalet Chronicles are set around a country family estate, Home Place. My hand-reared lamb and now enormous ewe, Elizabeth Jane, is named after her.
Blackie is elderly now, and after years of producing beautiful lambs, she has been retired from breeding and what she was bred for ‒ being milked for Miles’ Kingsmeade cheese. She is now living here, in Apple Tree paddock, with our retired sheep, Xanthe and Sper’iment, to keep them away from the ram who is very busy with his girlfriends in the Pear Orchard paddock.
The elderly sheep are redundant. They produce nothing. They are a cost to the farmer. They still require worming and vaccinating and supplementary feeding and shearing and having their hooves trimmed.
Blackie will live out her long life with Miles. He is not a sentimental farmer; no farmer can be. But a good sheep farmer knows the value of a long and loyal partnership. That is what makes a good farmer.
