Steps to the Garden. I've been repairing a few of these as the wood has rotted.
We have a curious half-acre of land to work with here at Limpets Folly. The house is a small wooden bungalow at the bottom of a steep south facing hill. Managed sycamore, oak and ash woodland lies to the west, while our neighbours have a similar property, also bounded by woodland.
Neither of us are complete newbies at the veg growing lark, though Dave has more experience than I do, due to his mother having trained as a horticulturist in her youth. She still grows the vast majority of her own fruit & veg needs in a garden far smaller than ours. Personally, until Spring 2008, I hadn’t touched a seedling since I was a child.
Still, it can be quite addictive, watching a plant grow from the tiniest seed into something bearing edibles. For a city girl, that first home-grown radish can be quite an emotional experience.
But we have no particular expectation of self-sufficiency or anything close to it. If we have a goal, it’s probably self-determination, the desire not to be under the authority of bosses. We’ll live as frugally as we need to in order to be as free as possible from wage-slavery. Yes, there’s also the desire to live with a low environmental impact, but speaking personally, this comes second as a motivation. It probably shouldn’t, but it does. At least it comes second.
Polytunnel under construction. It's actually a lot further along than this now. Nearly ready for the polythene sheeting.
So far, since we moved in after Christmas, most of the work we’ve done here has been outside the house. Inside, Dave’s put up some shelving and installed the plumbing for our washing machine, but it’s outside where most of the effort is going. The shed was falling apart due being soaked in Welsh rain, so Dave weatherproofed it and redid the felt roof. We have a new water butt for rain collection, with plans to install a pump to take the water up the garden (about 10m head to the polytunnel). The polytunnel itself is Dave’s primary project right now. He’s nearly finished it – the structure is up, it just needs some final strengthening and then the plastic sheet can go on. I’m very impressed with it.
While this has been going on I’ve been digging the veg beds and repairing paths and adding steps. Some garden archeology reveals olde steps winding their way up the garden (which shows signs of serious cultivation in the distant past), but these steps are now overgrown and moreover are partially obscured by a patch of raspberries, which we’d rather keep in situ. So I’m making some new woodland steps, which I’m rather proud of. And in front of the house another patch of ground has been reclaimed for a herb garden. I had to cut down a eucalyptus tree to get light onto that particular area. This was particularly tricky as the tree was quite large with many stems, and was quite interwoven with the power cable feeding the house, which had me nervously checking the lights inside every time I sawed off another branch.
The small herb garden / radish plot in front of the house.
Two veg plots have been planted so far. The aforementioned front-of-house herb plot has thyme and rosemary and sage and parsley. I filled the rest with radish seedlings. I am a big fan of the radish. I can eat them like sweets. The second veg plot is full of onion sets. You can never have too many onions. They go in just about every meal.
The third plot is just about ready for planting. This will be split in two I think. One half will be broad beans, while the rest will be leeks and spring onions. I’m not an expert yet at the proper rotation of the four main crop types, nor do I know much about which vegetables like to be close to others, and which dislike it, but I figure best just to get the stuff in the ground at first and figure out how to finesse the system later. I am an optimiser by nature. When I was a software developer, everything was done by gradual iteration, and I still like to work that way. Try and design it all perfectly up front and either nothing will ever get done, or something will go wrong anyway.
Veg plots 2 & 3, part way through the digging.
I like the idea of permaculture. It makes sense to me to take the waste of one system and turn it into an input into another system. I sometimes wonder how many of the clever permaculture ideas one hears about have actually been proven to be efficacious in practice, but it’s the thinking process that counts. Once you start to think along those lines, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. I figure, the more experience we get, the more naturally we’ll start to develop and enhance the way we lay out our garden for optimal food yield.
And it’s not all about food of course. I may have a fascination with small scale food production, because of the possibilities it holds for escape the dominion of The System of owners and wageslaves, but I’m not without an eye for the pretty. There are some obvious areas of the garden which are just begging for flower beds. Most notably the raised bank that the polytunnel sits on would look stunning in flower, especially from the bottom of the garden as one looks upward. I can imagine putting a bench up there, and maybe digging a pond just below. We have a tiny pond already, not much more than a bath, which is presently full of tadpoles. Such wonderful wildlife could do with a more salubrious home methinks.
Before I go, I’d like to recommend if I may, an article by Charles Eisenstein called, “Money and the Turning of the Age” which is a long but interesting analysis of the role of money in society. I particularly like the following quote:
No matter how highly paid, if you lack the opportunity to fully apply your gifts toward a purpose that inspires you, any job eventually becomes soul-destroying. We are here to express our gifts; it is among our deepest desires and we cannot be fully alive otherwise.
This kind of post-modern critique of civilisation intrigues me a lot. I imagine the people around Marx felt the same way about his ideas, as if the whole damn elitist kaboodle had just been laid bare for everyone to plainly see. Still, more of the philosophical side of things in another post I think.
~Tess