life on the hill (IX)

Few sights are more satisfying, I find, than a tractor putting some ordnung on a messy piece of land.

The soil on the Hill is mainly clay and stones – hard, fissured and dry in summer; boggy and slippery in winter, clinging to one’s boots in layers till they resemble a pair of sticky, leaden snowshoes.

A plant prospers there in the wild, the false-yellowhead (Dittrichia viscosa), along with thistles, giant reeds and all sorts of weeds. And the thing about weeds is that – like icebergs (and library mice, I am told) – there are hidden depths to them: extensive radicular systems which positively thrive on stress. In other words, the more you weed on the surface the stronger they get.

The solution is to keep at it – relentlessly. But also to work the land so the topsoil eventually becomes more inviting to sweeter more delicate grasses and flowers. This takes the form of a man in a tractor coming in twice a year, towing a tilling implement to break and scarify the soil, though in the beginning it did little more than keep throwing up stones – small, medium, large, huge. At one point, a backhoe even had to be engaged to remove the very largest ones.

But for the rest it was a case of Mr Villa Real, the aristocratically named tractor driver, driving and occasionally turning back in the seat, imperiously pointing down his nose at the more bothersome ones, for the Fool, trudging behind in a sea of mud, to pick up and pile on top of the others by the side of the field (did you say "gentleman farmer"? Yeah, right). The first couple of years it looked like there would be no end to it, and it nearly killed me – a brace of stents inserted in the nick of time kept the juices flowing, but it could just as easily have been game over.

But eight years and sixteen tractor drives into our tenure, there is light at the end of the tunnel. A couple of weeks ago Mr Villa Real and I (by now fast friends, united in a common endeavour) sowed the first crop on the Hill: just four rows of broad beans, as an experiment. We hope it will be the harbinger of great things to come (there is talk of sweet peas, potatoes, asparagus – and on another tack, if I manage to catch the Begum unawares, chickens and ducks and geese. And bees). So, here’s hoping!

Nature is all very fine and dandy, but never lovelier than after a bit of judicious tinkering by men in tractors and fools in boots.