Transition Sans Ghost Towns

What are towns?
Lots start with a Goldrush of some sort, a Klondike moment. Coal or Iron or the Railways or Wool, or some mix of such materials with a timely input of human genius.
That boom wanes or moves on. What is left is a honeycomb of redundant buildings, peopled by memories. Life goes on as a mutually supportive set of habitual rituals.


Others are planned.
Nucleations were a key part of the feudal fabric that the Normans established. The classic village, with it's pub, church and Green, is Norman in plan. Before then, a  village was often a scattering of dwellings, each with its own precious plots in between, and no obvious centre.

Their strategy for supplying the string of castles that proclaimed their power was to lay out an enclosed townstead and invite loyal victuallers to settle there.
That often meant excluding the local populace.
Towns such as Aberystwyth and Newport, Pembs, which I only pick out as I know them both well, are still more markedly exotic and English than their hinterlands.

Other designed towns more recently were planned to absorb the overspill of people from degraded city precincts.

It seems strange to base a movement to return us to a more resilient, local supply economy on such a motley bunch of remaindered buildings.
 True Transition should surely stem from Earth based initiatives, not towns.



The Norman infrastructure was not limited to towns. The Domesday Book was essentially a stocktake of taxable assets. From this reckoning, existing settlements were allotted distinct parcels of land sufficient for their needs and to pay a tithe to the Church, and meet taxation demands from the Crown.
These are still evident, as present-day parishes.
Obviously some have been lost and others have become urbanised.
But the basic structure is still valid as the basis for a network of ecoparishes.

These could be presided over by the ecological equivalent of a parish priest, whose initial aim would be to ensure the parish has a secure base supply of food, fuel and water. From this, a strategy to make tradable produce could grow. The autonomy of the parish leader would help his patch develop a distinct set of tradegoods.






Parishes could be monitored and taxed for their emissions and rewarded for maintaining ecological reserves.

Ideas and problems could be shared with other parishes through Internet networking.

Rural and urban parishes could 'twin', providing a ready market for one, and a refuge and sense of connection to the Earth to the other.



I have been bouncing this idea around in my head for more than a decade, and it won't leave me. I like the idea of a priestlike status for the leader, both to restore a local distinctiveness, and to bypass the petty wrangling that beset local politics.

Democracy is not a cure all. In some arenas it results in the torpor of the norm.



But the principal appeal is in it giving status and true worth to rural communities after generations of being seen as straw-sucking clod hoppers. The pastoral myth is over. Lets start the pastoral reality




Ooh Aarh.

Pestilence

Pestilence
I had forgotten about earwigs.
There was one curled up in my kitchen roll this morning. The blend of shock and annoyance that they elicit on discovery is their hallmark.
Where will the next one be?
I know people who make me feel like this too. This is the time of year they turn up as well.

And rats. They are getting outrageous.
We have hens and ducks, compost heaps and woodpiles - so provide food and accommodation. But have cats and dogs as an amateur policeforce. The Casual Arm of the Law.

But the rats.  Their behaviour is getting out of hand.
We see them in daylight now, fearless.
They are terrorising the hens, who are highly strung anyway. Now they have started felling and stashing the broadbeans. That is taking the Piss.

What should we do? They have overstepped the mark.
The consensus is that we should talk to them. Well, we are of hippy stock.
Within this debate is a whole spectrum of opinions, that probably reflect our personal pain rather than an effective strategy.
Some of us feel that signalling our feelings by setting traps or poison might add weight to this message. Well they don't have to take the bait, do they.
They are obviously in their power, so have the choice.


Is this a perverse fusion of New Age and Tory philosophy?

I like this line of thought. It implies that some of our protective feelings might stem from projected victimhood.

Maybe I should regard the Rat as a noble opponent.
The hunter/ trapper instinct in me is very strong at the moment.
I caught two lobsters yesterday so feel like a real Human Being.


And Rabbits. The quiet nibblers on things.
Luckily the grandmother of most of our cat tribe, Lyra, has a taste for them, and passed that on to her kittens by feeding them warm ones. So the vegetables are safe. Ish.

They are noticeably on the increase on the land generally though.

Even the blackbirds are behaving like serial burglars at the moment, bombing round the garden, drunk on the juice of the berries they are plundering.

Generally, there is a sense of profusion after a challenging Winter, as if Life Forces have been jolted into a new vigour.
I have really appreciated this Spring and Summer. Every day of it.
We are alive.

Maybe only the fittest survived. The fittest earwig.

The strongest midge.

The healthiest rat.



The happiest human

some links

http://www.seafishingforfood.blogspot.com   my fishing blog

http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk simon fairlie's pertinent magazine


http://thescytheshop.co.uk  where to get your scythe

http://implementations.co.uk bronze tools

http://valeriane-leblond.eu/Valeriane_Leblond/Valeriane_Leblond_%28art%29.html

http://driftwooddesigns.co.uk

Expialidoshus

Expialidoshus Infectious

Reading 'The Land', an occasional magazine about land rights, shows individual conflicts with Planning Authorities in a wider, cultural light.

Deep-set fears of travellers and incomers, of folk with strange beliefs and different aspirations well up.
European cities have been ever wary of the next horde from the East.

At a three day enquiry about Emma Orbach's strawbale huts in North Pembrokeshire, arguments were essentially about what facilities defined a dwelling, and it's extent.
As water was collected in jugs from a nearby stream, and the compost toilet was set discretely in a hazel coppice, and these resources were shared by three huts, the prevailing middle-class model of independent units just wouldn't equate.
It was even suggested that the definition of a dwelling might include hot running water!
- Tell that to any cottage-dweller up until the 1960's.

I came to see the National Park Planning Authority as successors to the Normans, re-enacting old feuds with the native woodland Welsh.

However, the love and care that Emma showed for her land, and it's impact was far nearer the wider aspirations of greater government.

The arbiters in the end were to be those modern priests in our damaged Eden, the ecologists.
But Ecology is a broad church. The ones who checked out the Roundhouse's impact on it's surroundings were real hair-shirters, who seemed to work on the premise that any impact was deleterious, even a walked path. Also, they declared Tony Wrench's timber use to exceed his supply > as if any rural woodworker was ever likely to have owned the land his trees came from!
Eventually some sort of sense prevailed, through the intervention of a more pragmatic and observant local ecologist, who saw the fundamental truth that the diversity and lack of damage on their lands was due to their loving presence, not despite it.
But until then the removal of a few discrete Eco huts in the Clydach Valley occupied the attention of the National Park as if western civilisation was at stake.
Cultural defaults constantly colour our attempts to be objective..

Each planning case involves another set of appellants and officials. Another set of legal technicalities.
But the urge to live back in some closer connection to the Earth is the common front.

The ludicrous data demanded of the Lammas project was epitomised by Paul Wimbush with his wheelbarrow stacked high with papers. Even now, residents are being stressed by time limits on their legal obligations; hardly conducive to a happy and creative settlement.

It does feel like there is a Dementor energy that seeks to stifle joyous, creative impulse amongst us: That whole 'jobs-worth, health&safety, insurance, precedent, 'what- if- everybody- did- that' line is it's toolkit.

Dreams get sanitised. Control for it's own sake. Authoritism.
We are all potentially guilty of it - one of those inherited abusive patterns.

I don't feel there's any hope of making things really different under continual official scrutiny.
There is a balance to strike. Everyone of us and every location is different. It's good to be discrete, but not to feel furtive. If the fear of being discovered becomes overwhelming, is the lesson not to invest such emotional capital in a structure?
Your path should lead to being strong and clear in your own power.
Any anger, victimhood, or righteousness will weaken your voice.
So does rejoinder in technical terms.

Speak a simple truth from your heart and all is well.

Compromise, and they are on you like a pack of ravenous wolves...

xxxx
john
xxxx

Here comes the Betony!

Abundance versus Scarcity

    Abundance versus Scarcity


Which is it? Is the Earth a place of finite and diminishing resources? Or is she a cornucopia, a horn of plenty.
The way you regard her is key to how to treat her, other people, and yourself.
This discrepancy lies deep. The Garden of Eden is a symbol of profusion, but one we were, supposedly, exiled from. The Church taught that Man had dominion over all the fruits of the Earth, a teaching that encouraged over-exploitation.


 

Yet the Norman feudal system, with which they colluded ( taking their 10%), inflicted a state of perpetual sufficiency upon the rural poor.
Perhaps the experience over many generations, of hardship and enforced frugality, instilled in us a collective sense of impending famine.
It is certainly in the interests of rulers that their governance is seen to be protecting us from such a fate.

Any tally of present-day Global resources shows a dangerous depletion and degradation, to the point where market panics and actual conflicts occur with increasing frequency.

Yet my observation is that when you tend a piece of Earth with care and love, it can produce a superabundance.



Last century, after forty years with two states of total world war, governments were so traumatised by the scarcities that had resulted, that they sought to secure supply-chains.
This was the time when the deep oceans were scoured by trawlers, farmlands worked on an industrial scale, and forests converted to exotic monocultures.
-When the centralized command ethos of wartime was focused ruthlessly upon natural resources.

Thus the worst depletion of the Earth's bounty ever was initiated by a sense of scarcity.

Is the trauma that we are engaged in actually the Result of the centralisation of our food-chain?



I have noticed that if I am niggardly with things, if I hoard them, some flow is curtailed; I get little back. That's true right across the spectrum, right through into the world of ideas and emotions.
So abundance starts with you!
With that goes faith in the Earth's willingness to support you in return for your love and respect.

Honestly, it's worth checking the bedrock of your beliefs before you potentially put yourself outside the Pale of mainstream expectations.

14>The Burgher Kings Are Dead

The way stuff is sold has never been so varied and volatile.



I suppose the original format was the Market, often an annual or seasonal event, where livestock and other agricultural commodities, including farm servants, were haggled over.
These were often the origin and life blood of a town. A public house and a yard sectioned out by hurdles was the nucleus for many a settlement.
High street shops were the more permanent successors to  temporary stalls. As 'respectable' ratepayers, shopkeepers came to fear, scorn and try to limit more casual trading activity. 'Fly pitching' became an offence. This attitude wasn't universal of course. Pubs and cafes thrive on market days, as do specialist shops.



The arrival of larger chain-stores  served to magnify the drawing power of the High Street.

It was when our social geography started to factor around the car that
its demands for parking space, and the impact of its congestion made out of town retailing an attractive alternative.
The retail outlets that evolved were larger versions of the in-town department stores, which then were often closed down. No imagination was needed: retailers just had to copy the American model; the world's first car-driven culture.
 Entire malls of shops, with banks and cafes and, above all, free and abundant parking were built on the periphery of larger towns.
Goods within were centrally sourced, and increasing from newly emerging distant industrial sources.
The chance of there even being a procedure whereby anything local could be sold there was slight.
Our role of the purchaser became essentially passive, walking through aisles stacked high with unrepeatable bargains to choose from, rather than daring to ask for particular things that we knew we needed.
We became Consumers. Milch Cows. Mouths on increasingly obese stalks.

The out of town manifestation of the grocer was the Supermarket.  Different ones competed for key sites and sought presence adjoining smaller and smaller towns. They would even agree to build schools and libraries in order to acquire a council's approval for a development. An increasingly intelligent and adaptable cancer..

Although the big supermarkets preside over most purchases of food now, there has been a noticeable resurgence in interest in local, more personal suppliers.
The main expressions of this is in street markets.



Supermarket supremacy is further challenged by internet shopping, whereby a retailer need have no physical retail presence to offer a rival service.
Once a company gets to a certain size, it's principal aim becomes immortality. Survival.



It is unlikely that the major Oil companies' main trade in fifty years time will be in oil.

 So the supermarket chains are morphing into myriad forms to weather the rapid changes in retailing. In-town convenience stores, cash&carry supply to independent shops, and  local internet shopping are growing.

Big Organisms are by nature, homogeneous.
The Earth is best served locally.
Amen.



I foresee the day very soon when supermarkets host a local farmers market instore, thereby being seen to support local produce and initiative.

Both retailers and producers embrace the semblance of the small, the local,  the friendly, and the personal.

The logistics of scale and production can breathe a clinical sterility over what started as a creative and exciting venture.
When you see one of your favourite brands get taken over by a faceless multinational company, it feels cold and predatory. Often it is done stealthily, to avoid this reaction.

 The trade in brand names is global.



An old trick was to give a brand a homely human face: Captain Birdseye and Mr Kipling loom out of my childhood. Celebrities now imply that some of their charisma will rub off on us if we buy from their signed ranges.

The plain fact is that if you buy something from a big store, it will have come from a big producer.

Of course there are co-operatives of farmers etc, but the discipline and sterility of that big contract will come to infect their whole business model. The arena of large scale retailing is rapacious and ruthless. The resultant agricultural landscape is a plastic desert, served by migrant slaves.

The only way to sponsor small scale land-use and artisanship is to buy from
outlets of similar size and outlook as their suppliers.
Don't kid yourself otherwise.



Farmers Markets are our most successful model of this. Town councils are coming to welcome them as a way to breathe new life into soulless, failing shopping streets.

They though, like any other shop format, can become hidebound or trapped in self imposed restrictions.
 They all tend to favour the local, but some restrict this to food. This is small minded and does not reflect a belief in a truly vibrant rural economy.
Some will only allow, say, one baker or jam-maker.
Such a market will soon fail.
-Both customers and producers need choice and change.  New people deserve a chance to start.
As they become more established, they can innovate. A space held open for a visiting stallholder from outside the catchment maybe. A space for a supplier with a genuine relationship to a third world source perhaps.

Markets must not become hidebound. Otherwise customers drift away. And then the suppliers follow.



I hope that their success and acceptance means that the lid is off.
Shops and Garages with spare frontage could host a covered table and a couple of hopeful artisans.

I am considering a more feral form of trading, from my van in a lay-by.
The visitors, who are the ones with the money, come in cars.

Is there something intrinsically Dellboy about this? Are we still imbued with deep-rooted town burgher propaganda? A nation of small shopkeepers indeed, defending their frontages against all comers.






We are new peasants, trying to negotiate a living with a new Earth, and have to be brave and claim our pitches.

Trade is a holy, and equal exchange.

 And money at its noblest, is a universal token of appreciation.

It's only shit if you treat it so,

13>First Mange Tout

I have only just got into Food Patrol.

- walking around the garden with scissors or a knife and a basket, finding things to eat.
There are no emergency waterings, weedings or stakings to do, just a wander around getting supper.
The slugs are no longer sliming in on nightly raids on my tender shoots.

My first mange tout, huh.

I feel like A Husbander, tending with clumsy care to his fine, wild bride..
Intoxicated by the sweet kiss of her Sugar Snap peas !




My hands are still tingling from grubbing out baby nettles that make up part of the army of weeds hiding amongst my crops. I embarked on a systematic weeding yesterday, starting on the onions and petering out amongst the beetroot.
Having sown the seed with such awestruck care, I still feel loathe to thin out  rows to allow the rest to fatten. The beetroot and the carrots have brought the necessity home to me though, as the least successful germinations are giving me worthwhile roots, while the thickly set rows are all leaf.

Have cleared my first rows, with the double satisfaction of a crop of new potatoes and turnips, and new, warm ground to plant up.
I have cabbage and swede seedlings, clamouring for new lands to occupy and settle in. I resettled a small tribe of Florence Fennel (some packets of seed are SUCH a rip-off) into half the space where my Annabel early potatoes has been half an hour before. I feel like the Hong Kong Housing Minister...


  I wonder how long it is before these start to interest the wood pigeons.

  -Have ben told that the way to tell when the sweetcorn is ripe is when the badgers have eaten it.


 


 John at Penymynydd above me, is suffering from the attentions of rabbits in his garden.
Is my reprieve from the local predators just that they are distracted by the General Abundance of the Summer?

I haven't heard the neurotic cough of a pheasant recently. Are their craws too well-stuffed with June's plenty to squawk ...

Pigeon, Rabbit, and Pheasant are all good eating .
  It's the tasks in between that are alarming or unknown.


 


No dread, mr spikes. Be here & now, mr spikes.
Predators and Winter are fear's fools.
Abstract terrors, which turn out to be unfounded or beautiful on the day.



I love the particularity of our weather and seasons. We should be thoroughly trained up as NOW- people to be living in such a bowl of possibility.
- Those Whether Systems that pile in from the Emotional Body of Atlantic.


Time to get up. The stove is lit and breakfast is on. Had my tea in bed. New potatoes and bacon and salad.

Salad with everything...


 

 Am going to market in St David's today.
There is a dark belt of cloud on the horizon .



Oh Well,
I always feel good after a trip there.

12>The Ogre and the Princess

When I came to live in the Clydach valley, I came to understand the nature of plants in a different way: that they all have a reason for their arrival and presence, and something to teach us. The original, round gardens at Brithdir Mawr were made from deep bracken mulch. That supressed the weeds, and fertilized the ground as it rotted down.
Cutting it from the fields, helped diminish it's dominance in the pasture.

Above us are the slopes of Carningli Common, which has an increasing cover of bracken.

This is the result of insufficient grazing by cattle, who are the principle crushers of it: sheep and horses will pick their way nimbly through it.
Also, sporadic burnings of the dead bracken litter in the Spring, have benefitted rather than hampered it's spread and vigour, as it's roots are too deep to be affected by such primitive responses, while competing herbiage is destroyed.

Amongst the more entrenched bracken, saplings appear, protected from grazing by a bracken wall. The most successful are Rowan and Birch, both I suspect because they are supple, and can be bent down by the bracken's autumn collapse without losing heart.(a lesson perhaps in not being too rigid).
So bracken can be seen as a restorative plant: providing humus to impoverished earth, and cover for trees. Grassland forms too impenetrable a mat for many trees to establish in.



There is another way bracken, in common with other 'invasive' plants, can benefit us and our dialogue with the Earth. It offers us an opportunity to make a social occasion of cutting it from key places, so celebrating common cause, and recognising often neglected places.
A gang of people armed with scythes and a picnic can effect great change.

Grassland is a specialised state of being, achieved by the continual chomping and trampling of an army of grazers (grass-ers),all of whom favour different herbiage.

Trees and bushes with prickly or crunchy leaves take any opportunity they can to walk out into it. Holly is only prickly, beech & oak only hold their dried up leaves, below the reach of browsing cattle.


Bracken is Earth's healing mantle that she casts over uncared for pastures and sheep-walks.



When I bought Allt Tabor, it was clothed in a thick layer of bracken, with patches of gorse, and occasional hawthorns, blackthorns and sycamores. That is, apart for one magnificent spread branched ash tree, Bless her.


The place is best described as a rocky hill, but with hollows and ledges. Near the ash tree is a large flat ledge, that I saw asy future garden.

My first act was to get a local diggerman to open up a gap in the bank above so that I could park my van. Having done that, he smooth scraped the bracken from the garden site. I don't recall asking him to do that, but it has been tranformative. It didn't hold the bracken back for long, but the great heap of waste that he had scraped, became a heap of rich, dark compost.
This had been the core source of soil for my garden.


Over the first two years of having the land, I ignored the idea of a garden, and tried to establish scattered clumps of trees on the main body of the hill.
Many succumbed to smothering by bracken. I was engrossed in other things and didn't flatten around them enough.
Where I had cut the mat of bracken though, it was smaller, and wiry grasses and bramble had crept in. So timely intervention was noticeably effective.
When you don't want it anymore, it will leave.
I heard about a farm where every field has been covered by it.
The new owners cut it three times a year, for three years, and it was gone.



I have no intention of getting rid of all, or even most of mine. A great tribe of snakes live there, and love it's cover. A friend pointed out to me that the adders' patterning echoes it.
I see it as a gift, mostly, that I will harvest into heaps, and carry the eventual compost to Favoured plants and trees nearby.

In the garden though, I find it hard work.

Last year I felt it was time to start.

Gardening has become an increasingly irrepressible instinct for many people.
A bit like that chap who took on the project to build an enormous floating zoo maybe..

I went halves on a large roll of plastic groundcover and rolled some of my bit out double over 20 feet of cut bracken, weighing it down well.
A month later, I rolled it back and spread a good layer of bracken compost before resetting  the cover. I then cut holes every twenty inches in that, and nestled seed potatoes in each one.

The resulting crop was meagre, but full of life. Being bedded in bracken, the potatoes were unblemished.

This year I decided to Garden properly. I tripled the area under ground cover. Bracken though is vigorous and persistent. It pushes up even in low light and that stretches the cover to let more light in.
I underestimated it's resources, regarding the ground broken by last years potatoes as only needing another feed of compost to be mixed in before I planted my onion sets and shallots.



I read avidly and planted as early as I dared.  My most consistent guide has been Allotment Month by Month, by Alan Buckingham .

As I extended the garden, planting my broad beans, and later a row of early potatoes,  I found myself looking back on a sea of bluebell tufts and bracken fronds pushing up amongst my onions.
I started to mattock the ground more deeply and came upon a dark kingdom of dead- looking fibrous tubers like an ancient sewerage system, laced thickly together, a foot down.
Like little pearls, bluebell bulbs nestled in their entanglement. Beauty consorting with the Beast.





Preparing new ground became an epic burst of effort. It was hard to remain systematic but the most effective way was to dig out a trench to claw the next spit of soil into. Even so, bluebell bulbs are tiny (thankfully they are bright white) and bracken tuber looks innocently dead, so both are easy to miss.


My recent tactic is to install raised beds. When I have cleared the soil, I lay cardboard below before refilling the bed.
I much prefer to grow plants in clumps rather than lines anyway, so this feels like progress.



I love bracken more now. I admire it's strategies, persistence and vigour.

I scythe the bracken around and pile it on the compost heap.

Foxgloves and campion and grasses are returning as it's hold weakens.

If I desist, it will return.

It is a gift.







Not sure about those princess courtesans,
the bluebells though...

11>Buy Two

The Great Assumption seems to be that we are all on mains supplies of water and electricity.

All too often, technologies that seem to offer opportunities to use water and electricity sparsely, and from local sources, are flawed.

It used to be that the facilities of 'advanced life'  emanated from the city, regarded as the hub of 'civilisation '.



With mobile phones and the Internet, the pendulum has swung.
Urban life, with its cafe culture, and live events, can be stimulating: For a price.
On one level, cities are elaborate one-arm bandits.

Now we can live in the corner of some foreign field, and yet still feel connected to a network of friends and information sources.

The conflict and choice of lifestyle is now up to you.



Many people who move into the country try to live as simply as they can. One quandary is that we are in a sense, pioneers, and have a responsibility, or maybe it's a messianic urge, to help others, even if it's just by showing that it can work.
When Tony Wrench engaged in the prolonged battle with the National Park to save his Roundhouse, he thus became a figurehead of a movement, expressed through the Internet, so his need for solar power was mainly for his laptop.



I am squatting on my deck writing this on my phone.

I observe that some, not all, those that turn the use of hand tools into a sacred choice, tend to scorn power tools and those that use them.
Now,  Righteous Scorn is not a feeling to hold in your heart. To me it smacks of Calvinistic sour grapes!


I enjoy our culture, and all the possibilities it's technologies offer us. I see the lifestyles we are trying to shape as the Future, not an awkward reverence for the Past.





led light bulbs>
are a great advance in offering a warm, effective light source that uses as little as 2 watts. It was only when I bought some that I found that they flickered. This it seems is because I have a quasi-sine wave rather than a pure-sine wave inverter. Pure sine-wave inverters cost loads more.

garden sprinklers>
are mostly made only to operate effectively on mains pressure, whereas many water supplies don't have that kind of head or volume. Again, that is not often apparent in the description.


cordless tools>
have seemingly improved remarkably with new Li-lon batteries. I have a very useful set with a drill, angle-grinder, and jigsaw, but have found the charger uses more power than my inverter can provide.
The manufacturers have focused on making a fast charger, so have built in cooling fans etc. Again, this was not obvious when I bought it.

Occasionally you come across something that is spot on.
I love listening to music as I garden, and have a ROBERTS solar DAB radio. If I face it towards the sun, is runs on that, but otherwise contains rechargeable AA batteries, which get charged up when I plug it in.


For cooking I have a powerful gas-ring for quickly getting pans up to heat, but as my main heat source, a magical wood-burner, that is efficient and also good to look at.



Then there are improved versions of old technologies that suit this lifestyle well.

AUSTRIAN SCYTHES  are lightweight and easily adjusted both to suit your size, and for different types of task.
 I cut a lot of bracken and bramble, so use a shorter, chunkier blade than a hay reaper would. The shortest is the 'ditch blade' which I find I use mostly to weed between saplings.
Scythes are Amazing. They make the whole rigmarole of cladding visors and other safety armour, and carrying a petrol can, for the noisy, isolate pleasure of spraying yourself with grass-juices seem an insane alternative to the graceful silent sweep of the scythe.



My favourite garden tool is a mattock. I have the queen of them all, a bronze TUZA mattock, supplied by IMPLEMENTATIONS.
Their tools aren't cheap but I can't describe how using them except to say that they  honour the earth and the art of gardening.

You can get good garden tools from antique shops and even car boot sales. I use a muck fork a lot to carry cut bracken to the compost bins. One of the best weeders I have is an ice-pick! Also keep your eyes open for a trivet, cast iron pans and a billhook. Billhooks are great for cleaving kindling.

You'll find things that are useful in bizarre places. I am a great fan of the central aisle of Aldi, which has been the source of most of my watering attachments. I found round gauze pizza racks there, that are ideal to put under pans on my wood-burner as simmer control. So be prepared to think laterally...



What a list of STUFF this seems.
My life is quite spartan, honestly.
Living in our spacious block boxes, it is all too easy to get buried under extraneous gadgets, whilst the cardboard boxes they came in are kept in the loft, for when they fail.
Which they do.




I don't want elaborate things that "save" labour. Just tools that make it enjoyable: that respect the task in hand.

Whether it's digging, cooking,
 or communicating.

10>Finding that piece of land

I sense that lots of us are feeling an urgent need to find land where we can relate more intimately to the earth.

'unofficial shanties stretching away across the country, down the generations' roger deakin.




The dream usually contains a heady mixture of yurts and vegetables.
Courses and communities.
Some see this as a symptom of accelerating Earth changes.

I feel these, both in the expressions of deep unrest, in the Earth's faultlines and weather moods, and in the increased urge to shift the priorities of our lives.
I wonder also whether we feel the need to reconnect, in proportion to our cultures disconnection, into virtual formats.

 Though I sometimes see my own life as like a computer game, where from my birth  and upbringing in that sterility known as the suburbs of Birmingham, my  mission was to get closer to that bountiful goddess, the Earth.

 

It takes a long time, or maybe I was just slow to change.
I am sixty now and so have spent forty years fully engaged with the project.
I bought land only about twenty years ago: until then I had spent my time in many places empty of people, gathering things to sell in the city.
Those years had taught me that that land get lonely, and actually appreciates our presence there. It loves us.

We can become like envoys, or message-bearers, passing between these fixed, but inquisitive places. Crazy children, dancing between sentient, fixed beings.

So the first lesson is not to get hung up on the need to OWN land. You can rent or borrow it in return for help. The Earth is yours to walk. You can walk it in celebration of its subtle response to each seaosn.

Ownership has a downside. The feeling of being tied, obliged and responsible for it can weigh down your spirit, which in turn affects the energy of the land. Also the burden of 'making it pay' can distort your decisions about what you do with it.
The need to Own, is a desire to Control, to Fix, to Guarantee things.  Away goes the energy of the moment, the lightness of a spontaneous encounter.

There are many steps on the way to paradise, and each one will teach you what you need to take the next one. You can bed down too early.

Nobody really owns land anyway.

Well, no more than the land owns them. That for me is another forgotten part of the dynamic. Land is not an inert commodity but a living being.
Each piece, each place is distinct. Often this has been recognised and strengthened by human use, in how it is enclosed as part of a 'holding'.
The places that express their character best are those that have escaped the attentions of mechanised farming, usually because fields are steep, too rocky or small. Also I suspect that some places are so powerful that they repel disturbance.

Here is another factor that we forget when looking for land to live on. There are people there already, some of whom have ancestral connections to the place. Even unconciously, they are protectors of it.
Also an increasing number of older or town-weary incomers live in the countryside, who may see any change as negative and threatening.
 As soon as you appear, wary eyes are on you.  

These are the REAL forces that will help or hinder your plan.
If you find a place attracts you, it probably feels the same about you! Likewise, the owner and other people around there can be so positive and helpful that it is as if they were waiting for you to arrive.

Of course there are other, more centralised impedances, such as the Planning Authority and Building Regs. But these are not key players. Like ownership, don't get hung up on legal approval as some surety of permanence.
I think that even to engage with them sometimes is like entering conversation with a mad aunt.

I don't want to dismiss them too glibly, but observe that attention to them can waste the creative attention that you should be engaging with the place itself.
Seek advice from people whom you respect, not from Authorities. They, like Governments generally, are always trying to design the future by reacting to what has already happened. So they are always suspended between an interpretation of the past and a projection of the future...
You need to enter the magnificence of the NOW.

We maybe will get to a time when they can confer and advise, but whilst they are trapped in prescriptive mode, I advise you to develop your own instincts and intuitions. That is really what this time is all about.

No one but you can give you back your power!

So how to find your place.
You have to just go and find it. Explore at weekends. Buy pathfinder maps of areas that interest you, and spread them out on the floor and gaze at them like a high-flying bird. Then explore on foot. The land you want probably isn't for sale.
It's up to you to initiate the sale, firstly by finding the owner. But don't be unrealistic about the likely price. (It's possible for a transaction to satisfy both parties)
-You could be setting a ball in motion which might be better left untouched whilst you get your spirit or finances in better shape...

A good strategy with a cautious or reluctant owner is to word it as a future proposition: 'if ever you felt like selling that piece of land,,,,'.
Also don't be afraid to ask in a local pub or village shop. Choose your approach carefully. It's probably not a good idea to express the extent of your ambitions too early.
Learn to listen to some instinctive part of you which knows what and how to say and to whom Spot-On.
Remind yourself that dialogue is a way to communicate effectively, not an arena to strut your stuff.

 A farmer feels fundamental disquiet about wasting or neglecting land, and so if you present yourself plausibly as someone who will care for it, and they for some reason no longer can, you are in with a chance. So get to recognise the signs of inattention. Ungrazed fields, with encroaching bramble or bracken. If you want undisturbed land ( though this is often protected by National Park or other heritage landscape status) look around open access tracts, depicted in pink on OS maps

Your attitude is key.  We all too easily ride on a float of youthful, moral, urban superiority, especially if we intend to initiate a 'Community', and can come across as braggart and stupid.
So try to engage with the people that you meet on their terms. Listen to their unhurried words.
It is you who wants to change, not them.

Also believe in miracles.

Otherwise they can't happen

Good Luck