Chris Skinner's Countryside PodcastsEpisode 2.98 - Fat Hen Feasts and Hazel Catkins
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On a bright, blue-skied mid-November morning at High Ash Farm, with the sun still warm enough to light the falling leaves, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin stand beside a tall crop of overwinter wild-bird seed mix dominated by a plant Chris has long overlooked — fat hen. Running his hand up a five-foot stem, he reveals the tiny shiny black seeds that once formed the last meal of the Tollund Man, the 2,000-year-old bog body found in Jutland. Known to farmers as muckweed (and once grown as a vegetable under the old name milde), the goosefoot-leaved plant thrives on fertile or freshly mucked ground, defeats sugar-beet sprays because it is a close relative, and was even sown as drought-tolerant fodder for Merino sheep by Chris’s father in New Zealand. Along the crop edge, hundreds of stems have been cleanly nipped at an angle by hares; the village of Milden in Suffolk still boasts a six-foot cast-iron sign of the plant.
Five weeks from the shortest day, Chris offers his personal antidote to the gathering dark: the quiet promise already visible in the countryside. On a hazel planted by the children of Notre Dame School and later self-coppiced after rabbit damage, the male catkins are fully formed and ready to shed pollen in January and February, while the first female flowers show bright scarlet filaments. The bush is self-sterile, so the pollen must travel to another plant — a system so ancient that hazel pollen is preserved in peat from the end of the last ice age. Red campion is still flowering, snowdrops are already pushing through elsewhere, and Chris reminds listeners that simply watching sticky buds or a single bulb can lift the spirit through winter.
Listener letters bring news of red squirrels thriving on Jersey (introduced in the 1800s, still free of greys), a gentle correction that the Lowestoft platforms are for kittiwakes rather than gannets, details of next year’s Big Garden Birdwatch, and photographs of a hollow oak with a gnawed hole (tubes being one of nature’s strongest structures) together with early snowdrops.
This episode is a mid-November reminder that the year is already turning — ideal for savouring the ancient story of fat hen, the first scarlet filaments of hazel, and the small, certain promises that carry a farm through the shortest days at High Ash.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/20123864-episode-2-98-fat-hen-feasts-and-hazel-catkins.mp3?download=true
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