My mother was a self sufficiency nut in the spirit of John Seymour with whom she corresponded, a believer in a sort of communitarian way of thinking. I spent a, not entirely happy, summer on a Welsh agricultural commune with her. Even then, aged six or seven I guess there must have been a latent capitalist and libertarian within me because I remember that I sensed unhappiness and impending implosion. There were loud arguments among the adults. Some folks worked hard in the fields while others listened to folk music and dreamed of the revolution. In the end those who worked walked and those who did not had to go and find someone else to sponge off.
For me the self sufficiency dream, the homesteading, is in the tradition of the Ingalls family, of Little House on the Prairie fame. I realise that these days Laura Ingalls Wilder has, like almost everybody else of note born before 1980, been denounced as a racist and it is only a matter of time before her books start getting burned. But not before my kids have read the lot!
The books are a story but also a statement of how the Ingalls family sought freedom, heading West, but also worked to come together with a wider community when it suited all but in a way that restricted nobody’s liberty. And in writing them Laura drunk her own medicine. She was ruined by the 1920s stockmarket crash and the depression that followed and yet she opposed the big Government handouts of FDR. She knew that there is always a bill for such endeavours in the end. Instead Laura wrote the books that made her famous and thus recovered her fortune.
So, I am a fan of the Ingalls family. The plan is to get chickens within a year, inn fact as soon as I have had an asbestos ceiling in the chicken house removed, and thereafter goats. Pro tem I enjoy the fruits of the land I have turned from a jungle to a large garden here at the Welsh Hovel. Tonight’s supper of peas, carrots, potatoes, roasted in Greek Hovel olive oil, and courgettes topped with cheese is all from the garden as was yesterday’s meals of beetroot, beetroot salad, a salad of radishes, tomatoes, onion and spring onions, and potatoes with a couple of shallots.
Okay the cheese is bought in but when I have goats! Okay there is Greek yoghurt from Tesco in the beetroot salad but when I have goats!
Throughout the day I have been splitting logs and stacking logs from a tree chopped down by a chap called Robert. But it has been raining for most of the afternoon: after all this is August in Wales. And as the rain intensified my inner Charles Ingalls weakened. I know that he would have carried on working in the wet to get his winter store of wood ready. But I am no Charles Ingalls.
I reckon that I now have about six weeks wood stacked. There is another 10 weeks supply outside the barn either waiting to be split and/or stacked. Or in the case of some old beams to be chain sawed by Robert. I am afraid that I am just terrified of chain saws. That leaves another stack of branches for me to manually saw. My aim is to break my writing three of four times a day to, each time, go saw a plank or branch or two into half a dozen logs for the fire. It is good exercise for the blood sugars and should see the wood pile big enough to last five or six months by the time I start to use it.
The longer global warming delays the winter the less wood I need and the more logs I saw. There is a stack of fallen trees at the end of the larger field and I know that I could start bringing that back to the woodshed if winter holds off long enough.
Charles would be way ahead of me and onto the next job, weeding where the peas and garlic were planted and planting chard as a crop for the winter. Meanwhile tomorrow’s jobs also include harvesting the blueberries so the kids can make blueberry muffins (which I can’t eat), hilling the second crop of spuds and making preparations for turning the early fruiting apples I planted into a first batch of juice in time for Sharestock.
Of, course, Charles Ingalls did not have a day job of publishing a website so there is, for now, some excuse for my slacking.