1. Perfect Communication
A perfect farm wife must be an excellent communicator. She must be able to interpret whether a grunt means no or yes and of course, understand his farming lingo particularly when he asks her to pass ‘that yoke there’. It also involves being able to understand his gestures without returning hand signals of her own!
2. Avoiding Divorce
Accurate paperwork is extremely important in farming now: births, deaths and sales have to be registered; medicines purchased and administered have to be recorded; purchases of sprays, feed and fertiliser have to match what was used and that’s even before you get to the invoicing. A common cause of shouting is the misplacing of important scraps of paper, complete with scribbles, even if left on the kitchen table three weeks ago. If she hates book-keeping and paperwork, the answers are a shoebox and a book-keeper. Delegating and outsourcing are much cheaper than a divorce.
3. Tea Making
A perfect farm wife has to be able to make a nice cup of tea. In fact, she will never take no for an answer and any visitor to the house will be offered a cuppa and a slice of homemade cake. She must be able to wield a large teapot at any social event, including any neighbouring wakes. Indeed, she believes a ‘grand strong cup of tay’ will cure all ills.
4. Adept Recycler
A farmer rarely throws anything away and a perfect farm wife is skilled in recycling, long before recycling became fashionable. If a welly has a hole, she won’t throw it away but will use it for a welly wall by attaching the holey welly to a wall, making a few more holes for drainage and fill with soil before planting flowers or herbs. The more colourful the wellies, the more attractive the wall.
Finding uses for baler twine will also mark her out as a perfect farm wife. Use them as a temporary belt, to mend a halter, secure a broken fence, act as a lead for the dog, tie the navel cord of a newborn calf if it is bleeding, tie the tops of bags of meal, tie gates, twist to make firelighters ..
5. A Weather Girl
Yes, being a perfect farm wife means knowing exactly what the weather is going to do especially when his PST (Pre Silage Tension) or PHS (Pre Harvest Stress) have set in. Her ability to get clothes dry outside also indicates her skills in predicting the weather. Never ever should the same clothes be left on the line to dry, get wet, dry, get wet and dry again.
6. A Perfect Signature Dish
To earn full respect in the community (not to mention with the mother-in-law), she must have a ‘signature bake’ to bring along to all parish, school and community events. It must look impressive and be considered delicious by all adults and children. It should be unique in type, taste and appearance. No one else should bake the same type of dish if the perfect farm wife’s dish is to stand out. While this dish must surpass anyone else’s efforts and indeed, be capable of winning a prize at an agricultural show, it must not exceed the quality of her mother-in-law’s baking though.
7. Be Prepared
She must be prepared for all eventualities. Examples might include being able to grab the necessary equipment in seconds when informed that livestock are out. These will include wellies and a stick, be wearing a sports bra, have a belt on her trousers to ensure they stay up while racing along and have her mobile phone fully charged in case of a communication breakdown. She also knows that if help is requested for ‘five minutes’, that it will take at least an hour.
8. Extra Income
All perfect farm wives will bring in additional income be it a full-time salary or selling her delicious cakes or farm produce at the local farmers market. A teacher brings the best of both worlds – a salary and yet is available during the school holidays to look after the children, help with the harvest and feed the contractors.
9. Making Memories
A farm is the ideal location for creating the most wonderful memories for children: picking mushrooms and blackberries, making jam from the crab apples picked in the autumn, sliding down snowy hills on old galvanised sheeting, going on farm picnics to the field and naming the first newborns of the year.
10. Keeping A Clean House
Keeping a farmhouse clean and tidy is more difficult than it sounds. As the farmer walks through the house, all manner of things can drop from his clothes: straw, hay, bits of calf or sheep feed, flaking of dried muck, grass seed, corn ....... if she goes away for a few days the floors might look like they need a mower rather than a mop when she returns. A perfect farm wife will have ‘farming’ and ‘non farming’ laundry baskets and will, of course, check all pockets for screws, nails, baler twine and important scraps of paper before tossing clothes into the washing machine.
How To Be A Perfect Farm Wife, by Lorna Sixsmith, is available in all Irish bookshops, on www.lornasixsmith.com, Amazon and Book Depository.
