⁕ With a bit of warmer weather in recent weeks, it got us longing for summer evenings and al fresco suppers. This recipe from the Simply Beef and Lamb website, run by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, tickled our tastebuds.
Sticky Lamb Ribs with Tomato, Pasta and Pea Salad
Serves 4
Prep 30 minutes
Cooking 1hr 30 minutes
INGREDIENTS
1.3kg lean lamb ribs
FOR THE MARINADE
1 small onion, peeled and grated 300ml ginger ale or cola
30ml/2tbsp light soy sauce
30ml/2tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
30ml/2tbsp runny honey Freshly milled black pepper
FOR THE TOMATO, PASTA AND PEA SALAD
200g dried pasta shapes, cooked, drained and cooled
200g cherry or baby plum tomatoes, halved
100g fresh or frozen shelled peas, blanched in hot water
30ml/2tbsp freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley
FOR THE VINAIGRETTE DRESSING
1 small shallot, peeled and finely chopped
15ml/1tbsp white wine or cider vinegar
45ml/3tbsp extra virgin rapeseed or olive oil
METHOD
1. To prepare the marinade, mix all the ingredients together in a large non-metallic dish. Add the lamb and marinate for a minimum of two hours, or overnight if time allows.
2. Preheat the oven to Gas mark 6, 200C/400F.
3. Remove the lamb from the marinade and transfer to a large non-stick roasting tin. Roast for one hour covered with foil, turning once. Remove the foil, return to the oven uncovered for a final 30 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, prepare the salad. Put the pasta, tomatoes, peas and parsley in a large bowl.
5. In a small screw-topped jar with a lid mix all the vinaigrette ingredients together. Pour the mixture over the salad, then toss gently.
6. Transfer the ribs to a large plate and serve with the salad.
★ My son walked towards me with tears down his face and blood down his leg.
I had been stacking horse feed and he had been occupying himself by jumping from precarious bale to bale around the muck heap.
But then he’d fallen, shredding his thigh on a strand of rusty barbed wire that was sticking out from a tree trunk, the remnants of an old fence.
He was lucky; the wound didn’t need stitches and a year later only a silvery line of scar remains, but it was a reminder to us both that farms are not playgrounds.
Over the past year, the media has been full of debate about how childhood has been eroded, lamenting the fact children live in padded, overprotected worlds, ferried from school to structured activity to sofa.
Those of us with family farms feel smug at this point. This is no sterile, cotton-wool upbringing for our kids, we think, as we wash them down with a hosepipe before they are allowed back in the house.
Organisations such as The Wild Network advocate time outdoors involving healthy risk, with tree climbing and den building and the space to be free.
All of this makes sense and is a perfect antidote to the influx of technology into children’s lives.
Is it a mistake, though, for farming families to translate this concept of healthy risk to a farm setting?
You don’t hear proponents of wild play advising kids to explore a factory or building site.
Are we kidding ourselves that just because farms look pretty and idyllic, we have different rules to other industries? No one else takes their kids to work with them.
In the past decade, 45 children and young people have died on farms and more than 400 have been seriously injured.
The risks are very real, yet let us not forget that there are undeniably health benefits to farm life, too, including lots of exercise and time spent outdoors.
A study also found children raised on farms, most notably dairy farms, have lower rates of allergies and asthma than other children.
Farm life has not been immune to the changes seen in wider society. Overall, children’s roaming distance has decreased 90% in 30 years.
Charting my family over the generations, that holds true for us, too, although the level of perceived “reasonable risk” seems to have only decreased in the past 20 or so years.
In my father’s childhood, back 60 years, he got into plenty of scrapes including falling off a bullock he was bare-back riding, setting fire to a tree with fireworks and shooting stuff with a rifle.
I believe he also derailed a train, but perhaps it’s best not to go into details on that.
My own childhood on an arable farm was equally full of unsupervised fun. I made dens in the bottom of massive straw stacks, buried myself in grain and drove an old Escort round the stubble fields by myself, aged 12.
As a mother, I now look back on some of it with horror, but the memories also make me smile. It was a wonderful upbringing, but do I dare let my children recreate it?
At ages seven and five, their play is still fairly managed and controlled in a way that mine never was. We don’t live on site, but even if we did, I don’t think I would let them roam free yet.
If you do, it is about managing the risk points on your farm and setting in place firm rules for your children. It makes sense to secure areas that are unsafe for children and also educate them.
The government leaflet ‘Farms are not playgrounds – 10 ways you can get hurt on the farm’ is a good starting point for a conversation.
‘The risks to children are very real, yet let us not forget there are undeniably health benefits of farm life, too.’
AUTHOR’S PORTRAIT: PHIL BARNES PHOTOGRAPHY
The advice in this highlights slurry pits, grain stores and stacked bales as particularly risky areas. They are also some of the most appealing for children, too.
Meanwhile, the law states that no child under 13 may drive or ride on tractors and other self-propelled machines used in agriculture.
Have any farmers out there broken this rule? My personal view is that the situation counts. If a parent has a child in the tractor because childcare has fallen through and they are just trying to get work done, it is a recipe for disaster.
If it is a special ride around the yard for no purpose other than entertainment, then the risks are minimised (although do note this is still illegal).
When children have less farmwise friends round to play (and are showing off their “backyard”) the risks are likely to be higher.
Similarly, when there are contractors on site, or it is a crazy busy time of the year with lots of long hours and vehicular movements, then the chances of danger are increased. It is worth giving extra thought to how you keep your child safe at these times.
Growing up on a farm is a privilege. I believe if children get out of it in one piece they will have learned masses about risk assessment, their physical limits and established a deep connection to our natural environment.
It is a tragedy every time a child is hurt or killed on a farm, but it would also be a tragedy if kids were not allowed to enjoy the unrivalled lifestyle that comes with living on a farm.
★ Kate Blincoe is a farmer’s daughter, mother-of-two and a freelance writer and author.
CULTURA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
WHAT’S YOUR VIEW?
★ Tell us about your childhood experiences on a farm, and what you view as an acceptable level of risk for your children or grandchildren.
⁕ Hidden in our garden, almost totally camouflaged by rampant ivy leaves, is a dilapidated shed. Inside this hovel, a jenny wren’s nest.
This is the third year the shed has been her preferred nesting place and we are hopeful that, once more, she will bring off her chicks successfully – unlike in the robin’s nest that John found a few weeks ago in one of the haystacks under the barn. I fear that there was too much tractor/sheep/Land Rover traffic in the nest’s proximity for that little bird. The eggs were laid, but never sat.
Jenny wren’s nest, however, is safely lodged above a garden hoe. Very safely, as there’s not much danger of me using anything so strenuous in the garden as a hoe. So Mrs Wren is providing me with a wonderful, environmentally friendly excuse to not do a lot of gardening.
If by chance the door is opened, although being an old shed with other gaps for her to use as exit and entrances, jenny wren leaves her nest at speed through that opening. It can’t be good for the eggs/nestlings to be deprived of their mum at regular intervals, so I’ve decided I have no choice but to leave the garden shed, garden tools and gardening well alone.
At the front of our house, meanwhile, a flycatcher has made her nest in the branches of a rambling rose. Many years ago, another flycatcher constructed her nest entirely with the fluffy waste material that was used for my youngest daughter’s pet hamster’s bed.
ENTERPRISING
Each week I nagged Jo to clean out the hamster cage, and we discovered after a time that she was disposing of the bedding by simply throwing the cage contents out of her bedroom window. Who needs a waste bin? Waiting for the fluffy bits were a a pair of enterprising flycatchers. Not only did they have a pink and blue flossy nest, but they had also salvaged the remains of some old Christmas decorations I had put out for the bin men, and their nest was entwined with tinsel. Camouflage is apparently not a flycatcher’s chief concern.
Happily, our barn owls have returned to their tea chest home that is wedged high in a tree above a pond in one of our fields. Once again they have hatched three owlets and now both parents spend all the daylight hours hunting for food for them. They have remained oblivious to John in his tractor bringing muck from cleaning out the fold yards to be piled up ready for spreading at a later date.
Equally unconcerned by the tractor has been a doe with twins. They have been resting up in a field of barley and appear oblivious to the fact that a tractor is working within a few yards of them.
Curlews, too, sit tight on their nests and John has to pretend he hasn’t seen them either as he passes close by. It’s just a game of mass deception out there.
What we have not seen – or heard – yet is the cuckoo. But that will change. We are off up on one of our fishing holidays to Sutherland this weekend. Behind the fishing lodge where we stay, and just outside our window, a cuckoo has trilled its song, goo-koo, seemingly all through the night. It doesn’t get very dark that far up in Scotland.
Apparently over half the number of cuckoos that used to return to the UK are failing to appear. The time they spend in the UK is declining, with much of their year spent actually travelling back and forth to their wintering ground as far away as the Congo. That couldn’t be more different from where we are going in Sutherland. A real culture and climatic change for this bird. No wonder they don’t have much time to invest in building a nest for themselves. Much easier to pop one into a “here’s one I made earlier” model.
TERRITORY
And at home, with calves, lambs and chicks all doing well as spring morphs into summer, there has been another young family establishing itself on the farm. A litter of kittens, born to a cat who has dared to squat and make a home in the deepest recesses of a haystack under the barn.
It must be a very brave pussycat as Millie, our Jack Russell, does not take too kindly (putting it mildly) to any feline who dares to venture into her territory.
But this litter has become increasingly bold and now plays out on the hay, teasing and driving Millie to distraction as her little legs can’t get her far enough up the stack to catch cat or kittens. And as the cat is probably helping to keep down the rats, we are not helping Millie to make the ascent.
As a result, Millie is spending a lot of time barking, yelping, squealing and trying to persuade me to lift her up on to the haystack so she can have a go at the kittens. Sublimely indifferent to this demented terrier, mum cat perches just inches out of her reach, languorously licking and preening herself. The kittens ignore all the furore, although I think they may be in some danger when they do start to climb down from their refuge and into Millie’s territory.
At the moment, however, they are safe and developing their own evasive tactics to outwit her – a fierce hiss, an aggressive stance and a very sharp sets of claws.
BOBBI MOTHERSDALE
Bobbi and husband John own the 81ha Lowther Farm near York. They have a suckler herd, a flock of sheep and arable crops. Two daughters, three grandchildren, three dogs, assorted poultry, an overgrown garden and country pursuits also take up their time.
