Some years ago when we were weighing up the pros and cons of making bigt bale silage for the first time, a neighbour advised us to give it a try, but to remember there's no magic in the black plastic bags: the silage we got out would be only as good as the raw ingredients, the grass, we put in.

Sound advice, and a principle which applies to so much in farming, food and life in general.

Spring work on the farm is very much involved with preparing the raw ingredients: ploughing, sowing weeding cereal and vegetable crops; harrowing, rolling and fertilizing grass for hay and silage.

In country churches, traditional Rogationtide services are held to bless the land, livestock and work of the farmer in anticipation of the harvest.

In parts of the West Country, another springtime tradition involved Whitsun cheese rolling competitions held on the village green to reaffirm the tenants' rights to graze their stock on the village common.

While there's no history of this in Cumbria, the right to graze sheep on the open fell common remains as important to the Lakeland hill farmer to day as it was to tenants in the Middle Ages. In those days shepherds would migrate with their flocks to spend the summer in huts, or sheils, on the hillside, returning to the farm in time for the harvest.

With lambing time now over, flocks of Herdwicks, Roughs and Swales; ewes with a single lambs, have returned to their hefts on the fells, but this Whitsun will see human migration of a different sort.

Old Lakeland farmsteads and villages will be repopulated by folk returning to summer in second homes, and to exercise their right to roam on the open commons. Meanwhile, farmers with in-bye fields safely shut up for hay and silage, and lambing sheds returned to the busy comings and goings of nesting sparrows and swallows, can turn their attention to other jobs such as attending the farmers' markets.

Jane Merritt

Stallholder on Kendal Farmers' Market