Join us as we talk with Amanda - who loves life in the Yorkshire Dales 14 | www.minervamagazines.co.uk
means that there’s plenty of room for everybody to get some space outside. I enjoy the busyness and noise of family life in the house. But I can get away from it by walking out my front door. Plenty of people can’t as they leave their front door and if they live in a city, it’s still loud and busy when they get out. We’re lucky here to have the wide open spaces and the kids spend a lot of time outdoors. We’re working farm and that means that everyone mucks in - no matter what the age, it could be collecting hen’s eggs, feeding the horses, or helping find uniforms for everyone, also cooking. Real dough is just as good as playdough and the kids love learning to cook. The only time when we all come together is tea time at the farm, when we all come together to eat, it’s my favourite time of day, when I get to hear what everyone’s been up to on the farm and school. Your children must have a wonderful time and appear to have no fears with any of the animals. Do they each have a special one? I suppose they do. Quite a lot of the girls loves the horses. Violet loves the cows, she was excited recently that our pet cow, Ciara has now come in from the fields. Violet hand reared Ciara from a calf, so she thinks she belongs inside the house and doesn’t like the other cows. Miles is very taken with the hens and his flock of 30 sheep. Through the winter and up to lambing time Miles looks after his flock of sheep after school. Sidney has his own dog, Nell a sheep dog and she runs for him, so that’s quite a big thing for a young lad to be able to work his own sheep dog. It’s a level up from being a pet. The terriers are wonderful they are real characters, they are source of frustration as they will have fights with each other, or they wander off from the farm to the local pub quite a few miles away! The terriers, are Chalky and Sprout, sadly we lost Pippin at the beginning of lock down. Tony the pony (pictured above right) is loved by Annas, Clemmie and Nancy, they look after him, feed him, brush him and ride him. They also love the bigger horses Josie and Princess. Princess is very good with the kids and often two of them ride her around the fields. They also like to take the horses down to the river and give them a bath and wash and comb their tails. Will any of them follow in your footsteps? Yeah, I think so, at the moment Miles and Sidney are very keen on farming and Edith is a good shepherdess. That said I never place any expectation on any of them to follow me into being a farmer and a shepherd. You don’t know where life will take you. I’m not sitting here going: “I want you to be a shepherd”, because life goes through stages, and what you want to do changes, so I’d rather they make their own choices, they can do whatever they want to do. It’s a difficult thing to ask a child what they want to do with the rest of their life. They’ll figure it out as they go along. What is your favourite season and why? Summer. But really I mean June. June is my favourite month, because all the sheep have had lambs and been turned back out onto the moor and it’s before hay time and clipping, so there’s a lull and a pause in the farm work, and at the same time everything comes to life - the flowers, the birds on the moor. In June, the Curlews are back, as are the Lapwings, Golden Plover, Black Grouse. All you can hear is birds, wherever you’re walking. There are woodcock and snipe too - they are all ground nesting birds up here on the moor, so you get to see their nests as well - and it’s just beautiful. The flowers you see in June are marsh marigolds, globe flowers, all the hay meadow flowers, rare orchids - it’s really pretty. What made you decide to write this book? It is a delightful read and the recipes are a treat…. Celebrating the Seasons, came about because I wanted to answer some of the most frequently ask questions, how do you cater for such a big family? Tell us about the practicalities? What do you cook? It was really difficult selecting recipes for the book. I wanted to include forgiving recipes. Recipes that it was totally fine to get distracted in the middle of and would still turn out good. Recipes that were achievable with the most basic of ingredients, simple feel good food, that was nutritionally good too. My absolute favourite is the Tagine recipe, it’s a people pleaser, for me its so easy and the smell always brings everyone to the kitchen - which is helpful! Every time I cook it it’s different, sometimes chick peas, sometimes wild rice, some times couscous - it always comes out slightly different each time. In addition to the recipes, people have told me they loved my photos and images of the farm that I post on twitter and would always suggest I do a photograph book. If you go back to basics it was a photography book - Hill Shepherd - that inspired me to become a shepherd. So it’s nice to go full circle. I know how inspiring a photography book can be - how it can really steer you and how a picture can tell a thousand words. I really hope that when people buy the book, that they look at the pictures over and over again and still find something new in them, as I have with Hill Shepherd. What would you like to tell our readers about your life? I want people to know that Celebrating the Seasons is a book about going your own way. It’s not a blueprint for how you should live your life, it simply says this is what we do as a family this is how we do it, feel free to follow the recipes, or do them your own way. I want people to not let themselves to be stereotyped, to know that all things are achievable if you really want to do it. So many people said you won’t have time to write a book, you won’t achieve that. But I believe you can do anything you just have to start doing it. If you want to write a book, start writing. I got an E in GCSE English, and this is my fifth book. Anything is possible. Celebrating the Seasons with The Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen by Pan Macmillan, £20. www.minervamagazines.co.uk | 15
Change language