A simple yearning for even a hint of summer

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Like a lot more of my country soul brothers, I’ve felt a bit cheated over the past week or so with the arrival of some inclement, wintry weather to usher in a month of the year that we usually associate with regrowth and rebirth.

On the really bad days of winter, when the wind and the cold rain blows in, you’ll notice the cattle turning their heads sideways as they face into the tempest. Well last Sunday morning as I brought a bag of meal to a very welcoming group of cows, I also found myself with the head turned to one side as a wicked cocktail of an east wind and biting rain blew in.

April does have a reputation for showers and variety and its first week and a half certainly lived up to its reputation – the ‘ould cow days’ brigade felt fully vindicated in their warnings about not under-estimating that first week or so of the fourth month.

After a good silage year in 2015, there was a good surplus of winter feed around the country but the way things are going, the reserves will be well eaten into before we see May Day. Back as a young lad in the 1960s, most farmers would always like to have one sheep-cock remaining in the haggard as they always feared that April could turn out to be a hungry month.

The winter feeding season is never really over until we’ve bade farewell to April and we were kind of lulled into a false sense of security with a near balmy fortnight in the middle of March that ushered in a real sense of spring warmth and rejuvenation. It didn’t last but what we didn’t expect was the dip in temperatures and the bitterness of a wind that wouldn’t be out of place in mid-December.

April can blow hot or cold, and last year it was a particularly friendly month with very low rainfall of well below three inches while in places across the West, the thermometer touched 20˚

Celsius. The good times though didn’t last in 2015 with some heavy rains in early May leading to one of the early summer race meetings in Ballinrobe having to be cancelled.

One of the intentions of Pope Francis for the month of April is that ‘small farmers may receive a just reward for their precious labour’ but here in the West of Ireland the toil of the winter season seems to have spilled over into the change in the year.

At least the thermometer should creep up by a couple of degrees this week and the soils hopefully will warm up to allow for some early growth. Temperatures wise, things have been a bit backways over recent months with a very mild Winter now being followed by a cold and hungry Spring.

There’s a lot of ‘old wives’ tales’ doing the rounds that we’ll have a good Summer after our hostile enough Spring but there really isn’t any evidence to back up those assertions.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.