The Brilliant May

This is the brilliant time of year here, when sunshine floods the countryside, the forest floor erupts with cowslip and bluebells, and the apple trees bud with their first flowers. The petals fall from the sloe trees, forming the hard green fruits that we will pick six months from now, and the hawthorn leaves are in their last days of tenderness before growing tough. Most importantly, we feel just a tiny bit warm, the chill in the air disappearing for the first time in several months.

Predictably, this being Ireland, my co-workers immediately begin lunging for the air conditioning, and the buses begin blasting frosty air over the passengers, to prevent us from enjoying the warm days. It also means they will stagger in from outside, sweat dripping from their flushed faces, panting from having to endure the luke-warmth.

We are also seeing the first of Ireland’s spring crop of nettles and dandelions – nettles for soup and beer, dandelions for fritters and wine.  We also found the first edible mushrooms of the year, which also became my lunch the next day.

Nettles are in their prime for picking now, and I have spent moments here and there down by the river gathering them into giant bags for freezing – and later for making into vegetables, tea, soup, wine, beer and other things. Fat hen, jack-by-the-hedge and Good King Henry should be appearing soon. 

Hawthorn leaves remain somewhat edible, although they are getting tougher and less tasty every day as they get ready to bloom. Dandelions are spreading across the fields, ready to be made into fritters, wine, salad, coffee and many other things.

Lime trees, also called lindens, are just beginning to leaf, and as their leaves come in they can be eaten like lettuce. The cowslips we need to pick for wine this year, along with the related primroses. In short, this is prime foraging season.

During every available moment, we’ve been transforming our garden; The Girl and I have been building a hedgerow along our back property to keep the cows out, and are replanting the apples from our grafting adventure a couple of years ago. We’re also replanting the gooseberry bushes and loganberry vines there, creating our own barbed wire.

The swallows have returned to our shed, which means I have to watch myself when I go in lest I be smacked in the face with an outgoing bird. Most months we have a heron who lives along the canal by us, and he’s been especially busy lately; we saw him with a fish just this afternoon. For a short time, we see two of them, as the usually solitary animals come together to have a family.

May’s sun and warmth offers a good opportunity for green manure crops like comfrey – its deep roots bring nutrients from deep in the soil, and its soft tissues decompose quickly in the compost. We like to take the comfrey that grow wild down the road and cut them, and bring them in wheelbarrows to our compost bin; in six months or so they will give us rich compost that we can add to our soil for free.

Our chickens are producing more eggs, but we’ll need to get more soon – we’ve had them a few years, and their shells are getting thin. We still have our rooster, which we never intended to have and whose noise we can never completely tune out. We’d like to let them out a bit to keep them fit and the grass well mown, but spring also brings mother foxes looking out for their cubs. Then again, perhaps one of these problems will solve the other.

The other problem with letting the chickens out is that they will start laying eggs for us – everywhere. Even when they were confined to the run, the chickens tried to lay in creative places – under the coop, for example – but when they’re free range I will find eggs in the vegetables, in the grass, with the lawnmower, and in the manure composter.   

These are the months that speed by too quickly, when we race against the clock to build, repair, weed, mow, gather … and enjoy, reminded that we don’t have an infinite supply of summers.  

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Each spring here sees a remarkable sprouting of indigo across the woods: bluebells, which bloom profusely until the overhanging leaves grow back in full, and the forest floor grows dark again. Other places in the world see such an annual blossoming, but few have such uniformity.

As glaciers a mile deep retreated from Ireland and plants and animals migrated up the the exposed land -- tundra, then conifers, then the cold rainforest that remained until humans -- the sea flooded in, cutting off England from the continent and Ireland from England. So England wound up with fewer plants and animals than the continent, and Ireland even less. Surprising as it sounds, rabbits and fallow deer are not native to either island -- they were brought by Normans less than a millennia ago. Red deer and roe deer made it to England, but the latter never reached Ireland. Neither, of course, did snakes.

Plants did the same: only some of the Continent's variety worked its way across the warming land before an ocean rushed in. The bluebells were one of the ones that made it.