Things we have learned since moving to a farm

We are keeping a running list. It began as complaint and turned, fairly quickly, into education. This is the first instalment, and everything in it happened.

Lesson one: a deer will go over a fence you were assured was adequate. They come through from the neighbouring parkland at first and last light, on their own routes, and a route matters more to a deer than a fence does. They cross where they have always crossed, land without ceremony, and carry on. You can move the crossing point. You cannot argue with it.

Lesson two: grass ignores the calendar. The meadow is cut once, late, after the seed has dropped, and the date of that cut is decided by weather rather than by us. A dry week you did not expect is worth more than a plan you made in February. Everything else on the farm queues behind the same question: is the ground fit today.

Lesson three: the oast cowl is the most competent thing on the property. It turns on the wind's instruction to keep its opening on the sheltered side, and it has been doing so, without maintenance meetings, since long before we arrived. When the wind gets up and the cowl swings round, it is not being picturesque. It is adjusting the draught, which is more than can be said for the rest of us.

Lesson four: it is not quiet. Buzzards call above the fields more often than they are seen. Chiffchaffs start before anything else in spring. Woodpigeons and carrion crows hold the bass line, pheasants wander about at field edges with comic self-importance, and for a few short weeks in summer the swifts come back from Africa and scream over the yard. People who move here for the silence find something better and louder.

Lesson five: robins supervise. Pick up a spade and one arrives within the minute, at a distance of about a metre, with opinions.

Lesson six, and the one underneath all the others: land ignores spreadsheets. You can cost a project, sequence it, and set it out in tidy columns, and then the ground is too wet, or the deer have made their own decision, or the week you set aside turns out to be the week it rains. What the farm rewards is the willingness to redo the plan without treating it as a defeat.

There will be more of these. We have written down only what we have actually watched happen; when something else teaches us something, it will go on the list.