Colm O'Regan: memories of helping on the farm — and helping the re-wilding effort

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Pic: Denis Minihane.

It has been a good while since I helped on a farm. There was always plenty to do growing up. 

The glamour job was bringing in bales. It was glorious being on top of a load of straw going through the parish, swaying like Logan Roys on top of the Succession elephant. But it wasn’t always about bringing home the spoils.

You could work from home. Augering the gain from the grain trailer into the granary. The job involved spreading the grain around the shed to avoid it piling up and choking the auger. 

If you augered well, well… it augured well for you being given other jobs. Like painting gates.

Fine if the painting was all you had to do. But first, you might have to scrub them with a wire brush. An awful soul-crushing job. As if Mr Miyagi were teaching us wax on wax off long before we got to do the flying karate kicks.

When you’re small you paint alongside your father. He with the nice brush. You with the shite one. Him covering acres with the light wood-grained handled, swishy bristled, wide-gauge painting dream machine. 

You limping along after, one square inch at a time with the waste-oil-soaked toothbrush. Him using Google, you using Bing.

Although it wasn’t all glamour. There were thistles, nettles, dock and ragwort. The four weeds of the apocalypse. Thistles and nettles were cut with a slasher.

Out in the fields with only imagination for company, I would pretend the patches of weeds were rebels and I was the vengeful dictatorship mopping up any resistance.

Docks and ragwort were pulled. As if it were personal. Quite what Dada would make of his son now, explaining that ragwort are habitat for the cinnabar moth, I don’t know. That’s a tough sell.

Ragwort sicken livestock if they eat it accidentally. You’d nearly need a referendum to change the constitution to get people to leave it alone. So if we ever reunite, I won’t be starting the conversation with ragwort.

I think he’d like what I was doing last weekend though. Digging a pond with a big gang of others on Wild Acres farm and wildlife reserve in Wicklow, volunteering with Rewild Wicklow.

There aren’t many situations where someone useless like me can help out. You need skills or a place to learn. I can’t be turning up on a modern farm. 

The only way a softhanded uselessarian like me is useful is if the jobs are picking rubbish, moving a thing or digging a thing.

But I can help dig a pond. It’s physical exercise with a point. Most exercise is pointless. You’re just back where you started. 

A triathlon is great preparation for escaping from a castle across a moat, stealing a bicycle until you get a puncture, and then running the rest of the way to safety. But little else. A pond is a pond.

You can’t just dig any pond though. You need trial holes to work out the soil type. Also, there will be a pond boom and there’ll be dodgy pond companies going around promising everything in Pondsy Schemes.

But when the people of wild acres showed us One They Made Earlier, it was Eden. Teeming with birds, insects, and frogs. Ponds help with flooding elsewhere, they clean the water, wasps burrow in the banks. There is no bad thing about ponds.

Whether it's planting hedges or cutting back invasive species, or ponds, slowly but surely, wherever I can get the time, I have found a place to help where I can’t break anything.

And one day, I might be good enough to get to use The Good Brush.

• You can volunteer at r ewildwicklow.ie.
• At wildacres.ie, they are only dying to tell you about ponds.