The last leaves are shredded from the trees by gales.  It’s been a splendid autumn, so I guess we may have a damp winter.  There’s that lovely rich smell of damp vegetation getting on with the business of rotting.  I went to the funeral of a dear friend and champion of food and farming, Carol Trewin, at a farm burial ground on a little hillock with a splendid view of Dartmoor, and as that lovely poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover, about a kestrel, was being read, a buzzard was wheeling above us. She’d wanted flowers, wild and picked, so we had brought berries mainly, sloes, spindles, hips and haws and ivy flowers and teasel seed heads.  The damp summer brought a lot of fruit in the hedgerows, now disappearing, birds startle from the hedgerows when you walk past, but there was enough to give her some colour.

CROPS  -  The winter sown crops are all growing slowly.  Now is a test for the soil structure: in the rain, will the neat rows of sown wheat stay neat and even, or will patches of damp or poor structure start making it look uneven: yield comes from evenness, enough grains on each ear, enough ears on each plant, enough plants in each row, enough rows in each land between tramlines, enough lands in the field.  There’s that lovely look like fine embroidery when the crop is perfect.  At this time of year, slugs and rabbits, deer and pigeons on rape all start eating into the perfection, next year’s harvest.  We’ve left plenty of areas for wildlife, but often ours are juicier and more appealing.

COWS  -  The spring calving cows will be out in December, we hope, if the rain gives us a little break.  There is a good amount of grass from the open autumn, and the tracks and paddocks give us the opportunity to graze even when it’s quite wet, as the grass growing actively takes moisture out of the soil.  We want the cows to eat it down, if it’s too long, you can get winter kill, though healthy leaves, free of mildewy damage, seem quite resilient.  I love the sight of cows grazing out in the winter, they seem so content. 

When it gets too wet, and the grass short enough to leave, we bring the cows in, and leave the grass to slowly grow on, in preparation for the next calving in February when the cows will go out again.  Then there is the warming sight of the herd in their cubicles, or wandering out to eat at their troughs.  We’ve put mats on their beds, and it’s lovely to see the heifers, young cows acclimatizing in the cubicles before they calve for the first time, who’ve only ever had straw to lie on, gradually find them and choose to lie on them.  We have had them lie on silage they’ve spilled from their troughs, which makes them very dirty, but they are all coming in and lying in the right place this year.

CALVES  -  The calves and bulling heifers are all tucked up in their barns on straw, very even this year.  We are checking their weights with a weigh band, to check to see if any (or the whole group) are falling behind.  So far, almost everyone looks perfect, just the odd one in each group that looks a bit scrawny.

CHEESE  -  We’ve been battling cheese mite, the little pests that live on traditional cheese.  We turn the cheese and brush it all the time and put an extra cloth layer on, and do everything we can think of to do to protect the cheese.  We have had more damage to the cheese than we want - they eat the mould that helps develop the rind, then eat the lard on the outside of the cheese, which dries the cheese out, so it cracks and lets mould in.  We were ageing some cheese to 3 years old to sell in Australia (judge’s comment in the Taste of the West Awards, ‘Life doesn’t get better than this’).  We can’t do it any more, the mite are too destructive.  The stock that we can’t send is in the farm shop, catch it while it’s there, it’s magnificent.  We’ve all been feeling a bit gloomy about the cheese mite, because we work hard to make and store the cheese, only to cut it out when we come to pack it, but we’ve just got to get on with doing everything we know to do.  I’m sorry if you get misshaped bits of cheese or blemished rind or little bits of mould (blue green mould is delicious), but we are working hard on it.

SHOP  -  Short of Christmas presents?  Come to the shop for baskets you can choose or order cheese and butter on-line from our website, www.quickes.co.uk. If you want us to send them, the last day to order them for us to get them to a UK delivery address is Wed 15th December.  Please order your Christmas meat and cream to make sure we’ve got it in stock.

The shop will be open until 3.00 on Christmas Eve and will be open on Tuesday 29th and Wednesday 30th Dec (normal opening hours) and then on Thursday 31st Dec 9.00 to 3.00 and re-open on Saturday 2nd January 9.00 – 1.00 after which normal trading hours continue.

RECIPE  -  I was in London at the Slow Food Market on the South Bank, and a chef was demonstrating nettle pesto with our goat’s cheese.  I didn’t quite believe it would work , but it is delicious.  Find some unblemished nettles from a warm corner , and pick the tops and wash them in salted water (use washing up gloves to protect your hands). Boil nettles in a small amount of water till tender, drain and puree with generous amounts of garlic, cobnuts or hazelnuts and rapeseed oil and Quickes Traditonal Goats Cheese grated.

Use as pesto – its delicate and complex flavour worked on pasta, and also as a sauce on steamed mixed winter vegetables.

MARY QUICKE