I wish I knew

We've been on holiday for a week in Cornwall, and for some reason, I thought I'd come back with the whole plan sorted out in my head.
I didn't.
I still need a lot of pieces to fix this puzzle.
The time off work was great, but I know I'm going straight back into a very stressful week, with a lot of high pressure stuff going on.

The land is bare at the moment - the sheep moved over a village while we were away to be watched over by a dear old friend who is a retired shepherd.

Little girls with goats - 2006?

This land, on which we have done so much - on which our children played, and rode, and worked. On which they grew up, from toddlers to grown women. The land where they kept their first cute ponies, and I my last, loved horse. The land where we started a business and it grew and fed  people. The land where we grew a big flock of beautiful jacob sheep, and then they were sold. It's still ours - well, the tenancy is still ours, for another 8 years - and it's still there and it's still precious and just now and then when I get to stand at the top of it and breathe, it still makes my heart sing. But it's doing - nothing. It's ungrazed, unworked, unloved. The hay crop which should have come in last month in the heat now stands overgrown and damp. Waiting to know what we will do.

Tall girls far away - Cornwall 2017

It feels quite horribly metaphorical. It's a metaphor for ... well, me.

On the edge of change, with change behind me, struggling to give voice to a new life after all this. After they go away in September - both of them this time - to build their own lives at University. After the long sweet years at home and on the land, trying to come to terms with years locked away indoors. It's a good and worthy job that I do, but it's inside.

I feel the weight of the deep wet hay. Tears rise to realise it had no purpose. It just stands wilting. There is no one needing the shelter of the barn, and the nurture of its provision this winter. For our two goats and half a dozen sheep, last year's surplus will more than suffice.

Where once were lovely, pretty sheep, and goats and kids, and sweet milk and soft cheese. Where once were row upon row of succulent peas, and chubby fingers picking and popping. Where once when we called, heads raised, and nostrils flared, and tiny hooves came thundering. There is an open green space. It's not malevolent. It's blank. It can be what it wants to be?

Surely? It can be something new? Something worth being? Can't it?

As I stare at the blank canvas, sorrow is slowly making space for hope.  I've signed back up to finish my Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design, and booked onto a course in October to explore new livelihoods.

Something will have to be done with the hay.

We, Who Have Compromised?

I wanted to attend a screening of We The Uncivilised - A Life Story, before it was released as a download, but never quite got the opportunity.
We live in social economy black spot. No one believes us until they look at the map of just about any membership organisation and go 'oh there's a big hole, right there'. From beekeepers to WWOOF hosts, goat societies to smallholder co-ops,  calculate the biggest gap between willing participants, and we'll be smack bang in the centre.
Anyway tonight we downloaded and watched the film.
Motivating myself with this as the payoff, I closed out April's budget with a will of iron. Then started May's. I am, in one sense, happy to report that all our corporate and entreprenuerial diligance is making a difference. We will soon be closing the gap.

On another level, how hopelessly sold out and useless do I feel?

If you haven't seen the film (- do -) it's made by a  young couple desperately seeking place, community, sustainability, responsibility ... and they talk to many of our friends and heroes : Sarah Pugh, friend, hero, innovator, people lover, trainer, teacher, inspiration. Mike Feingold, the Royate Hill pixie, such a genius of a man, and so kind. Neil's guiding light, Simon Fairlie ... and above all, they talked to Patrick. Not long before he died, they captured his closing remarks, his legacy, his extraordinary funeral, his wife, Cathy's, poems, I will not lie, there were tears in our sitting room, and they weren't all mine.

On an unbelievably cold day, in February 2002, Patrick came to see our land. He walked it with us, talked to us about it, drew up some plans, and gave us some advice. Thereafter he never failed to support us, love us, have faith in us, and help us. He often gave us things because, he said, 'he believed in what we were doing'.

Tonight, I wailed, 'But we're not now, are we? We've let him down.'

'Not yet, we haven't' Neil replied grimly. I think that's  the man version of my response.

Patrick Whitefield 1949 - 2015

Arranging Violets*

I rather like Ali over at Currant Cottage ' s idea to keep a track of all the small homesteading triumphs we part timers manage, amid the madness.
I've been a part time farmer for a long time, but always felt something of a full time homesteader. I can't maintain that illusion any more, with a full time job on the horizon, and the sell of livestock ongoing.
Today in my non office day, I mostly drove the car.
Boo had a school trip which was on/off and time changes for days before hand, which resulted in my taking her in early, only for it to be cancelled again at the last minute, so I brought her home, to fetch her school stuff, then took her back.
H was over at the yard and needed a lift home, and then a lift to Swindon to take her Driving Theory Test, which she passed.
Then home - yard - Lidls - yard and onto supper and some budget rustling and putting stuff up for sale.

Today the two younger nannies have gone on Farming Ads, along with Neil's pressure washer - a purchase he needed for one job which has stood idle ever since.  Feeling scared but motivated.

Now for my round up of the good stuff

• I watched Mary Berry's Easter Feast again last night. Both episodes have lifted my spirits no end. Good old Mary! She has firmly but without too much fervour ('enthusiasm' is so American!) put across the christian festival, with heartfelt faith, and openness.  What a lovely reminder of what it is to be a no nonsense English christian! And the recipes weren't too shabby either.
• I spent an hour in the garden, clearing up a section of the flower border, and raking over the veg bed which will soon house the broad bean plants currently in pots, as well as becoming the 'seed bed' - I don't actually plant much from seed, the weed population around here, teamed with the slugs, the pigeons, the pheasants and the cats, mean it's better to get a head start, but my brassicas still need a nursery bed.
• I conceived of a plan for Easter celebrations (while sat in a car in Swindon waiting for the Theory Test Victim)
• I spent a quiet half hour with a coffee and my 'permaculture pad' planning out how to get from where we are, to where we want to be.
• I planted out a small clump of larkspurs. Maybe too early? We'll see.
• I tried to separate a clump of Motherwort, to donate a bit to a lady at church, but it went quite badly wrong, I ended up with a handful of - at best - cuttings - and I've plonked them in a pot with a bit of rooting powder in the hope they'll make a start.
• A bargain sewing pattern purchased online arrived - mainly to venture into making 'tops' for work, but also has a jacket pattern and trousers. Now all I need is time.

Well, I'm back to work tomorrow, and I have to wrap up year end, because I'm on leave the following week - yes, a whole week off! Looking forward to a spring clean, a clear out, some gardening, hopefully some sewing, and a proper Easter celebration!

What are you doing for Easter?

*as a child, I remember trying for ages, probably with my tongue out to make a 'flower arrangement' out of about three teeny tiny violets, and few bits of grass, in a silver (oh yes, precious metal, the only bit I could lay my hands on) egg cup which had been a christening gift. Sometimes, this determination to keep hold of every tiny triumph, to keep on being a 'homesteader' or 'cottager' or whatever on earth one is, in England, is just the same - the desperate determination to make a pretty arrangement of a very few, very tiny, bright spots. These are my violets.

Another Day

Up at dawn, to dwell in the word, to pray into silence,  to wander round the animals, on land we own, surrounding my home.
Meaningful work in a thriving,  beautifully designed garden, work for the draft pony, a full order book, a market stall to fill, a packing shed to sort, baskets of sustenance, flags fluttering. Chattering customers, talk with like minded producers, a web of stuff happening.
Quiet work on writing, useful articles and dream-filled stories, blog posts and business plans, epic histories and shopping list-eries. Walking dogs by rivers. Lunch on a log with salad in situ.
Busy, happy family,  full of health and wealth and fiery eyed ambitions. Coming and going, team working and building bridges to futures.
Outdoor food together, with twinkling lights and candles, a crackling fire and hot fresh pizza from a cob oven. Sweet elderflower wine and laughter. Friends, associates, and passers by.
The clean smell of fresh-painted walls and billowing clean curtains,  bats in the darkness,  a yard or two of yarn, smokey cocoa and blessing goodnight.
Sleeping early with the promise of another day of great  heart filling work.

That. Is my dream day.

Now here you see through our baby forest garden, a path, mown along what, in permaculture, we call desire lines.  (I took this photo for Mel, following the sad removal of her own desire lines, in a tragic though well meant neighbourly act of generosity incident)

Desire Lines are paths you observe, the paths you take, the ways you tread to go about your days, and as permaculturists, we observe and observe, and when we design the space, we choose to place paths where those paths want to be, where we want to walk.

Now interestingly, my dream of a day, is like a kind of life desire line. That is where I want to walk. It's not so outrageous. The elements are mostly here, I lack a little faith and a lot of application, but my desire lines are true.

What's gone wrong, is I have laid the paths in other places. I have not observed and interacted,  I did not watch where my feet fell in dreams and aspirations, and carefully carve out happy, firm foundations, dressed with firm square herringbone bricks of work and study, attention to detail. I did not look up. I walked onward and onward, and my feet wandered on and off the path.

Sometimes my harried steps linger for an hour or two on those hallowed paths, and oh! the relief! To walk on the short grass, to tread the path of intention.  Too often though, the paths I've carved are off in the rough, full of thistles and nettles, damp and clinging round my knees, slowing me down, holding me far far from those  desired days.

However. I believe it can be done. I can get back to the old paths. I must surely believe it.

Where are your Desire Lines trodden? Do you walk them daily? Or have you wandered away from your dream paths?

Well, here's the dead hedge, bumbling along, turning itself quietly into a wildlife habitat.

It is hard to think about leaving here, but we do think about how we really must try to bust a gut to buy some place.

We're applying for shared ownership properties in town - we'd keep our rented land, and keep our life, but start with the Big Girl Knickers and buy the roof over our head - and although this time around it seems unlikely, it's giving us a feel for what we need to do.

I've been looking at budget planners, and following Frugal Queen's new webinar series. The problem for us seems to be the complicated nature of our outgoings. There are a hundred columns on my spreadsheet. So I'm going to address that somehow, because we need to pay down debt and get ourselves into our own home some how.

Meanwhile I've been selling at the local Country Market. If you're not familiar with Country Markets please look up your local one and take a look. Really wonderful locally grown, baked and crafted goods are on sale at fabulous prices, plus friendly faces and (I can only speak for Pewsey) fabulous coffee.

We take along wonderful small culinary herb plants for a pound a pot, as well as some bigger and more exciting herbs, some baked goods including our signature Homity Pies, and I plan to start to take along some crafted items too.

Diploma work has ground to a halt. I just don't seem to have the hours in the day.  However it is half term, and it's a great joy that H is out working with her dad - who is now back into the family business of painting and decorating - as well as studying hard for her exams.

Boo is also studying, learning clarinet and gearing up for the new sheepdog trial season.

Well, that was a bit of a random round up.  Focus on the finances coming up!

So, what IS Permaculture?

A question I am often asked!
And as today, which is already tomorrow, I am slightly banjaxed, I will offer you an intersting summing up, from the Designed Visions website.
Designed Visions comprises four permaculturists, including my Diploma Tutor, Aranya.
This is as good a summing up as any.

Has anyone considered an Introduction to Permaculture course?

We had one planned for last year, but it fell through for all sorts of complicated reasons. I'm definitely up for rescheduling, though.

Any takers?

Together

When you believe, you have to do. Not you have to as in you must, but you have to as in, you can’t help yourself, kind of like James meant, I think, when he said, show me your faith without works. He didn’t mean the law says you’ve got to do stuff to qualify. He meant, where your heart truly leads, your feet can’t help but follow.

For a decade or more, we’ve believed in our homestead, our family farm, our living land. Have we done all that we should? No. By a mile. Sometimes we’ve done some of it well, sometimes other bits, sometimes nothing.

On the brink now of knowing, how we will carry on, we do know we will.

My online presence has tended to be fragmented – we have a storefront, and a personal diary. The one has felt local, the other global, yet so personal. Now i feel like that has to end. On the edge of this new era (and all good permaculturists know edge is productive) I know I need all the help and support I can get. So over the next few days, as and when I can work out the technology, I’ll be consolidating the blogs, and there will be one place, one me, one us, one dream.

It’s hard for me – I fear the different areas of my life getting muddled up – but hey, what’s the worst that can happen? You know me in real life and you never knew I was this crazy? So you do now. You’ve known me online forever and you never knew I could be this mundane. Welcome to me.

We are Christians who attend an amazing church of gloriously flawed and faithful people. I’m studying for the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design, Neil drives a taxi, and a tractor, keeps Jacob sheep, British Toggenburg goats, and bees. We grow our food. We rent our land, and we dream amazing dreams of farming. That’s what we do.

If you follow either, please come with me – the adventure has been going on for so long, there are bound to be quiet spells, and one of those just passed, but trust me it was the calm before the party.


Next Generation



If you dream of your fingers in the dirt on a spring morning, your head against the flank of a dairy goat at dawn, your own wool, and honey, and cheese and eggs, a life of stubborn independence and relentless seasons – if you have a heart for creation, believe yourself a steward, believe there is more in less, believe the earth was created for all of us, not just a few - you may as well step inside. There’s no known cure. But we have therapy. The cry of the buzzard over the Downs, the sturdy Jacob ewes and their Biblically mottled lambs, the taste of fresh sweet raw milk.

Tomorrow, for me, another new chapter may begin – because I’m looking into pony power. Oh yes. The greengrass combustion engine. Between starting that one going, mastering the technology of blog merging, and the vigorous progression of the evil couch grass through the veg plot, I’m going to have my hands full.

A new year?

Right before Christmas, we received a letter from the Crown Estate, or at least their agents, giving notice of the end of our Farm Business Tenancy on the land - a notice to quit. Or not. There is a paragraph which says, it may be up for renegotiation (trans: a rent hike) - it isn't clear to us whether that paragraph is standard or bespoke - in other words, we don't know if they want us off, or just want to take more money off us.
We had a beautiful, quiet Christmas, with much joy and laughter, prayer and gratitude.
Yesterday, we took the dogs and walked up on the high downs, went to visit our rams, and generally wondered ...
We can't know anything more until the proposed meeting on 5th January.
Should we fight for it? We've had it nearly seven years. We have a year's notice. When we look at it, although once it held a lot of promise - I ran the box scheme from there for two years - it is now pretty unkempt and provides some sheep grazing, and a LOT of hay. The hard truth is, we haven't done what we intended to do with it.
A harder still truth is that we have knowingly or not, offended, upset, and generally peed off a lot of people in the last decade, living here or hereabouts.
The psycho nutcase who got Neil chucked out of his last farm job down in the village, and threatened to rip his head off if he showed it around the farm again (because I did not run Brownies the way his wife liked!) is only the part of it. We started life at the school, Neil was a governor. We left the school and homeschooled our children for six years. That went over not so well.
We started life in the village CofE church, again, Neil was a church warden. Then we realised things were wrong, moved churches, found God, and received the greatest gift of all. It did not come with local approval.
The people over the road don't like us. Because our cockerel crows.
The family Neil used to work for who, when he was friends with the psycho nutcase, he was hoodwinked (by the p-n) into leaving without notice - they're not over fond of us.
The guy in the village who made an official complaint because I told his Brownie daughter to 'shut up' (in jest, we say 'shut up' all the time in our house! apparently, she had never, ever been told to 'shut up' in her entire life (which was actually self evident) and it destroyed her self esteem totally) whereas, I had no redress for the fact that she blasphemed almost continually, and I was pretty offended by that.

Is this really the place for us to try (yet again) to launch a community project?! Is this not maybe time to move on?

I have just begun with my Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design - and as part of the process, the Learning Pathway, I am going to have to figure out where I am going. Where we are going. Are we staying here? Or moving onto new horizons? What do you reckon?

Catch up with our antics

on www.chestnutsfarm.com

We spent most of the day today at the Devizes Food Festival, and despite an early soaking had a good day, handing out information about our Permaculture project and Veg Box Scheme.

The girls got their photo taken for the local paper, and I had a chat with our local MP about sustainability and Transition Towns.

We're running an Introduction to Permaculture course in October, and all the goats are about to kid.

More in depth thoughts when I've recovered from today!

What I learned at Ragmans - Part One

The title has a ring of 'What I Did in My Summer Holidays' - one of those first day back at school essays which my mother swore were just a not very subtle way of checking out your family circumstances, and spying on your parents. My sister once spent an entire summer doing the most exciting, stimulating things she could think of with her youngest daughter, to give her some real fuel for the fire, and come open evening, opened her book to find she had written 'we went down the pub and I played on the swings'. You can lead a horse to water, and all that.

This was no holiday. What I learned on site was one thing, and what I have learned, having sat back and thought about it over not quite a week, is another.

Ragmans Lane Farm is in Gloucestershire - I referred to it as the part of Gloucestershire that should be in Wales and nearly got shot for such a political statement - what I meant by 'should' was not in any sense meant to trigger a border conflict. I didn't mean politically. I meant logically - in other words, it's the far side of the Severn Estuary, where almost everything is Wales, but the Forest of Dean isn't. It's England. Which is OK. Breathe!

The Permaculture Design Certificate course I was attending was tutored by Patrick Whitefield with the assistance of Sarah Pugh. If you're asking, 'what is permaculture?' - well, that's a huge question, and you can find some answers here but the real answer is to go on an Introduction course, and find out for yourself, what permaculture is to you - because it's not a dogma. It's easy to condemn it out of hand as 'not for you' because it can appear to belong to a 'tribe' - a converstion I had with Ciara Cullen all too briefly as we were leaving Ragmans - but it doesn't. The more diverse the people who become engaged with permaculture, the more possible things become. If you think permaculture is not consistent with christianity, you and I will have to agree to differ. Unless perhaps by reading this you can see where I'm coming from?

So rather than the actual course material, I'm thinking about what I learned about myself, I suppose, and what I'm thinking now.

Firstly, living in community. This has been something of an obsession of mine since I spent the briefest time with Marthe Kiley Worthington probably 30 years ago on Mull. Although the experience of actually living in community at Ragmans was halved by the fact that in the end, Patrick asked me to take the caravan as extra accommodation for the first three weeks and my own for the last two, it was still a taste of what it is like to share all your meals, your bathroom, and all the living spaces.

I think, as I have said earlier, that the time has passed for me to do this - my community now, is my family, and living in it is at least as complex as an intentional community. I thought about how, when we are sharing our space with non-family, we consider at great length how we will get along together, how we will make decisions, how we will respect each other's differences, how we will capture a vision, come to concensus, solve disagreements, put plans into action (framework shamelessly nicked from the above-mentioned Sarah Pugh's communications session. Thanks, Sarah!) and yet, in our family home, we fail dismally to think these things through. We simply expect that because we are tied by blood, all will be well. Big food for thought.

I also learned, finally, how to make sourdough bread by the really wet method, with a long lived starter shared by Ciara and skills shared by the lovely Olivia Heal - which in turn I shared with my daughters, of an evening, upon my return. Again, we share skills consciously, and with care, among strangers, but as our children grow older, if we are not careful, we just expect them to absorb what we do, and we lose the pleasure of sharing, as much as they lose the joy of learning, traditionally, from mothers and fathers, the sustaining skills we value so highly.



We visited Royate Hill Community Orchard as well as St Werberghs, Eastside Roots and Easton Community Allotment on a day field trip to Bristol, and it got me to thinking - the city can be a vibrant and wonderful place. Towns can be good. We still live quite an isolated life, in the countryside, which, on balance we prefer. We have considered of late, moving into the small market town where we go to church - because of the ages of the chidlren, and because, you know, sometimes, a change is a challenge, and a challenge wakes you up and gets you going all over again. We've thought about it all quite long and hard, and it seems maybe we won't do that (always worry when I commit such things to black and white ...) but the experience of the hidden green spaces and brilliant community feel of Bristol, made me view the idea quite positively, rather than with fear and dread, as previously.

Well, this has lumbered on long enough, and has earned the extension 'Part One' to its title. I hope there will be a part two - I certainly feel like I learned a lot!