Tales From the Home Farm E-Book

Michael Kelly

• Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Turn the doom and gloom into a better, more enjoyable way of living. Want to eat better, save money, work those muscles without the treadmill, know where your food comes from? This could be the new, recession-proof you! Five years ago Michael Kelly chucked in the corporate life to try his hand at 'the good life'. It's been the most rewarding thing he has ever done – and you could do it too. Make your back (or front) garden work for you; or maybe an allotment? Based on his own, sometimes hilarious experiences, Michael shares what he's learned, taking us through the year on his small home farm. - Included: - What to grow and when. What's worth it? What's not? - Hens and pigs – the ups and downs - Cooking and storing your bounty - The health benefits – physical and mental - Linking up with others - food swapping and markets, and the return of the meitheal

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am a great believer in the idea that if you ‘follow your bliss’ and do the things you are meant to do in this life, something seems to take over and order your affairs for you. Call it synchronicity, luck, coincidence – whatever. Things just seem to work, the ducks are put in a row, doors open, it seems almost too easy.

Setting up GIY Ireland was a case in point. From the very start, people got involved who seemed to know what to do next, when I most assuredly didn’t. We have made so many new friends in the past year among the GIY groups already in existence – thank you, one and all! Special thanks to all those who were involved in getting GIY Ireland off the ground for giving their time, passion and great ideas so generously. Thanks to our fellow meithealers – Feargal, Dave, Bryan, Ciaran, Caoimhín and Nicky – I can’t tell you how enjoyable you have made the past year.

I am enormously grateful to my publisher, Michael O’Brien, who shared a clear vision of where this book needed to go and continues to be such a supportive advocate. My wonderful editor, Ide Ní Laoghaire, once again showed razor-sharp insights in helping me convert manuscript into book – I think she may even have caught the growing bug herself along the way!! Thanks to all at The O’Brien Press for their unstinting support and hard work.

To Anne Cullen for helping me with the monthly Grower’s Calendars, and Paula Mee for her input on the nutritional value of vegetables. To my sister and organic grower extraordinaire, Niamh, at Maybloom Farm, for taking long, meandering phone calls from me when she should have been working!

If you like what you read in these pages there’s plenty more on offer on my website (www.michaelkelly.ie) – the reason it looks so professional is down to the sterling efforts of the team at Emagine Media, particularly Aaron Jay. Thanks also to Mick Brown for his unheralded work on the GIY site (www.GIYIreland.com).

Thanks to my friends, family and extended family for their continued support and encouragement. After all, what is life really worth unless you surround yourself with people you love? The greatest debt of thanks, as ever, is due to the person whom I am so incredibly lucky to share this life’s journey with – so, to Eilish, my anam cara, thank you.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Preface

A Note on the Seasons

1 The Attention-grabbing Opener – late winter: Januarythe hungry gap – spinach and chard – springsumautwin – kohlrabi

2 Living in Eggstasy – early spring: Februaryhens – beetroot – learning new skills

3 Spring Forward – mid-spring: Marchsowing seeds – seasonality – potatoes – daylight saving

4 Let Them Eat Cake – late spring: Aprilloving spring – the pork crisis – keeping pigs – traditional breeds – broad beans – pigs’ arrival

5 The Lusty Month of May – early summer: Maycrop rotation – pure-breed hens – piggy feelings – peas – lamb

6 The Guy with the Chickens – mid-summer: Junesalad leaves – cucumber – pigs again – our first ducks – home farm courses – home farm routine

7 Salad Days – late summer: Julytomatoes – conserving water – buying organic chickens – rearing chickens

8 Eats Shoots, and Leaves – early autumn: Augustslugs – other scavengers – slaughtering the pigs – the department inspector – elderflower and elderberry – peppers and chilli-peppers

About the Author

Copyright

PREFACE

I swear to God, I nearly fell off my chair. I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard an economist advising people to go out and start growing their own vegetables! I did a double-take at first, wondering had I heard him right – but yep, this expert in the study of supply and demand appeared to be touting vegetable growing as the only guaranteed way to survive the global economic downturn. If you grow your own vegetables already, as we do, you should feel pretty smug when you hear things like that, because it means that you are well ahead of the curve. A-ha, you might say, I have been growing vegetables for years!! At last, people have seen the light! Victory is mine! But strangely, instead of feeling smug, I felt absolutely terrified – if we’re relying on my vegetable-growing skills in order to survive in a world where even economists are advising us to grow our own, we are, pardon my French, completely shagged.

Let’s not even try to establish whether our economist friend is correct in his assessment because discussions of macro economics are just too depressing and this is not going to be a depressing book. Promise. It’s probably fair to say, however, that after years in which growing your own food was dismissed as a hobby for middle-class folk with too much time on their hands, there’s a feeling in the air that a revival is underway. The ability to produce food in your own garden (or allotment or community garden) is simply more useful than it used to be now that money is tighter. Growing your own vegetables has always been fun. It’s always been good for your body, mind and soul. It’s always made sense in terms of the flavour and the variety of your food, and it’s always been a good thing for the environment. But it hasn’t, for a long time, been necessary. I find it enormously comforting that in our hour of need these ancient skills are there for us to fall back on. They have been waiting patiently in the wings, smiling quizzically while we indulged our fascination with convenience foods, 24/7 Tesco and low-fat dairy spreads. They are not annoyed that we’ve been away for so long – in fact, they’re happy to seeus even though they are acutely aware that the economic downturn will assuredly pass in due course and we will become obsessed with other, more trivial stuff, all over again.

Our Home Farm is a windswept acre in rural Waterford in the southeast corner of Ireland. We moved out of the big city about five years ago, turning our backs on the insidious clutter and stresses of the rat race to go in search of a gentler, more simple way of living. We found ‘the good life’ almost by accident. It started with us sowing a few vegetables – garlic, onions and potatoes – in our first spring here, just for something to do, really, and it basically snowballed out of control from there. Before we knew what was happening, our vegetable patch seemed to be taking over the garden and our lives, like a particularly aggressive weed, and we seemed to have accumulated an array of farmyard-type animals – pigs, ducks, chickens and hens. And so, out of fairness to you, dear reader, I should mention right here in this opening gambit just how addictive the whole thing is. Once you’ve tasted the magic, there’s just no going back. If you are not currently producing any of your own food, it’s still not too late. You can put this book down right now and go and watch TV or take a nap – and save yourself a whole lot of bother. No harm done.

Still here? All righty then!

For us, abandoning the rat race was about trying, in some small way, to turn our backs on a society that is relentless in its pursuit of things. A society where marketeers continuously hold up the prospect that happiness is within our grasp if we would only consider shelling out some money on their particular product. We are bombarded with messages to this effect, morning, noon and night, on TV and radio, on the internet, on billboards. Driven half-mad with acquisitiveness, with the desire to have, to acquire, to possess, we spend our lives killing ourselves working at jobs we often despise, so that we can earn the money we need to fund these trophies – and, of course, along the way we become completely detached from what’s important and from the things that can really make us happy. We forget that we can be happy simply by being. I don’t claim to be completely fulfilled, or enlightened in these matters, but I do think that real happiness comes, not from owning stuff, but from not even wanting the stuff in the first place. It comes from being happy with what we have NOW, even if it’s not a lot. It comes from accepting things as they are. None of this is easy, of course, and to choose to live that way is to place yourself at odds with society as a whole.

When we moved here, we both gave up good, solid corporate careers to pursue our dream jobs – in my case, writing; in Mrs Kelly’s case, teaching nippers in the local school. The result was (eventually) a very welcome change of pace and a sense of fulfilment in our working lives. But there was also, of course, a dramatic downward shift in our income, mainly because writing doesn’t pay very well. It has taken a considerable adjustment in our thinking to deal with that change in our standard of living. But, thankfully, though our earnings are a little emaciated compared to what they used to be, we have found happiness in having more than enough. There is not even a sniff or a hint of self-denial about the way we live – quite the opposite, in fact. I like the term ‘elegant frugality’ as a way to describe a simpler and yet, ultimately, far more fulfilling way of life. When people think about ‘the good life’ they often think of poor old Barbara sewing a new leg on to her dungarees, and they assume that this way of life is about destitution and grinding poverty. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This life gives you something real – something that no government or boss or bank or bureaucrat can ever take away from you. It will stay with you long after our economist friend has decided that the solution to our economic woes is not vegetable growing, after all, but some other soundbite he is keen to bandy around to anyone who will listen. This lifestyle is about really living and being incredibly wealthy in all the things that are important. It is about trying to make sure that simplicity reigns in all things. It is about being happy and grateful in your work, in your partner, in your family, in your leisure time. It is about trying to be perpetually thankful for just having the ability to breathe in and out, or to get out of bed in the morning. It is about being grateful for the earth’s spectacular largesse and being in tune with the ancient rhythms of nature. It is about taking a childlike delight in the abundant variety of life – the sounds, the smells and the sights. It is about enjoying great food that you have plucked from the earth yourself and seeing food for what it really is: not a raw material to be thrown, unthinking, into the body, but a life-giving part of who we are, to be savoured and relished. This life is about enjoying the company of good friends, family and neighbours – helping them and being helped, giving our time and gratefully receiving the time of others. When a huge part of your life revolves around producing your own food, you are forced to slow down and be patient, because nature, as we know, simply refuses to be rushed. She moves along at her own inexorable pace and you have no choice, really, but to slow down with her. And, of course, in slowing down, you learn to appreciate. In appreciation you learn to be grateful, and in gratitude there is happiness.

So why do I call it the Home Farm? Well, basically, I suppose I am a frustrated farmer. In addition to our vegetable growing, at the time of writing there are thirty-three creatures to feed, morning and evening, around these parts – thirty-five if you count Mrs Kelly and myself as creatures, which I suppose we are. Though we have crammed our little acre with more growing/rearing enterprises than is really sensible or advisable, what we have here doesn’t constitute a proper farm by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think I am quite at the level where I can be described as a smallholder either. I don’t know how exactly you would define a smallholding, and I know there are smallholdings out there that would be similar in size to our garden, but still, the term just doesn’t really fit what we do here. To my mind, a smallholding is a fulltime project, with either a commercial aim or a view to complete self-sufficiency. The food producing that we do here is a way of life, but it is essentially a hobby – an incredible, life-changing hobby – but a hobby, nonetheless. We both have jobs to do each day and we have a mortgage to pay, and we cram in our ‘Home Farming’ around that whenever we can. In any case, we don’t have enough land dedicated to food production within our acre for it to be considered a smallholding. It’s more a regular garden with some food production going on within it – and I presume, since you are reading this book, that yours is similar or perhaps you would like it to be. In addition to our veggie patch, we keep some ducks and hens, and once or twice a year we get some chicks and fatten them for the table. For a number of years, now, we have also fattened a pair of weanlings (piglets) for six months or so each year. As far as I’m concerned, having a few animals around the place gives me licence to call it a farm, and because people usually laugh when I call it that, I add in the word ‘home’ just to put things in perspective. Whenever I go away for a few days I like to call Mrs Kelly and ask, ‘How are things on the Home Farm?’ I’m a strange boy, I know.

Ultimately, we are in a very fortunate position – we have an alternative source of income and so we don’t depend totally on what we produce, like real farmers do. It’s a terrible pity when a crop fails on us (as they often do), but we won’t starve. I would like us to be as self-sufficient as we can, but there’s also a part of me that recognises that trying to achieve a hundred percent self-sufficiency could be a straitjacket just as tight as the corporate life we left behind us. I love the work I do on the Home Farm and I don’t ever want it to become a chore. We don’t lose sleep over the fact that we will probably never completely achieve the aim of self-sufficiency. We frequent supermarkets more than occasionally – admittedly, less than we used to, and still more than we would like to. We buy things like oranges and bananas that have been shipped half-way around the world and we usually feel pretty bad about that – but we still buy them. Like a growing number of people out there, however, we see tremendous value in being able to sit down to a home-grown meal or even a meal that is partly home-grown. We worry about the quality and integrity of the food we buy in the shops, so we think that growing our own is good for our bodies. I think that having spent five years or so working the soil here and loving the produce that comes out of it, we have a better understanding of the relationship between good soil, good vegetables and good health. There are loads of layers in between, but essentially the link is direct – if you have good soil you have good plants, which lead to nutritious vegetables, which in turn leads to a healthy body. I can also vouch for the fact that producing your own food is incredibly good for the soul. I talked in my first book, Trading Paces, about how the Home Farm has been the location for some of the most enjoyable, honest moments of my life. Scientists now believe that soil actually releases endorphins when you dig it, which might explain why us food growers get so much satisfaction out of spending time with a spade – we are basically high all the time.

Now, you might be thinking: Hold on a minute, this guy has only been producing his own food for five years, what makes him think he’s qualified to write a book on the subject? This is, indeed, a very good question and one I have asked myself many, many times while writing it. It’s really important to mention, up front, that we are not experts and this is not an expert guide, so if it’s an expert guide you’re after, I’m afraid you have bought (or borrowed, or stolen) the wrong book. Don’t worry, there are loads of expert guides out there and I am sure if you talk nicely to your better half, or a family member or friend, they might get you one for Christmas. I have a shelf-load of them that range from the exceptionally useful to the not-so-useful, and I have to admit that sometimes I find the information in them a little daunting. The good news, however, is that you don’t need to absorb any or all of the information in those books before you get started. What you actually need to do is just get started. I mentioned in my first book that a good way to describe us is that we are waiting for our expertise to catch up with our enthusiasm – sadly, the wait goes on but, in the meantime, blind enthusiasm continues to make up for our lack of know-how. I like to think that the fact that we still manage to produce wonderful food for ourselves every year, even though we are not experts, will make most of the growing achievements in this book accessible to most people. It must be said, however, that in some cases there is probably a severe mismatch between the best way to do things and our way of doing things, as outlined in this book. In other cases, I do try to outline the best way of doing things, but you can be fairly sure that our own conduct on the matter probably falls far short of this ideal. So, essentially, I am a flawed messenger bringing you what I think is a really, really worthwhile message.

Thankfully, I had a lot of help in putting together the more instructive, authoritative parts of this book. Nutrition consultant Paula Mee was good enough to come on board to put some much-needed scientific meat on the bones of my amateur musings – you will find her contributions about the nutritional value of the key vegetables you can grow on your Home Farm in each chapter. Anne Cullen, from GIY (Grow It Yourself) Waterford, helped me put together the hugely informative and useful Grower’s Calendars which appear at the end of each chapter and the seed-sowing guide at the end of the book.

The million-dollar question, I suppose, is: what’s the motivation? Why bother with growing your own? Isn’t it just easier to buy food in the supermarket? Well, yes, it most definitely is. But before we go any further, let’s take a step back and take a look at some of the problems that exist within our food chain. Most readers would, I am sure, be familiar with the concept of ‘food miles’, which describes the journey your food has had to endure to get from the place it was grown to the place it will be eaten. The common way of measuring this is by comparing the energy we acquire from food in the form of calories with the energy required to cultivate that food in the first place and then ship it to our plates. For example, 97 calories of transport energy in the form of aviation fuel are needed to import 1 calorie of asparagus by plane from Chile to Europe, and 66 calories of energy are consumed when flying 1 calorie of carrot energy from South Africa. If a head of iceberg lettuce is shipped to Europe from the US by plane, 127 calories of energy are needed to transport every calorie of lettuce. These figures do not even include the energy consumed while growing these vegetables (which is considerable), or in their packaging, cooling and distribution. Nor does it include the energy we expend in terms of motor fuel by getting into the car and driving to an out-of-town supermarket to buy them. Most of us, I think, would accept that this isn’t really a sustainable way of conducting ourselves in the longterm and that, at some point, we are going to realise the error of our ways and go back to sourcing food locally.

While the environmental consequences of shipping food around the globe rather than producing it locally are, no doubt, very, very serious (our food chain really does tread far too heavily on our planet), I’m inclined to think that there’s another aspect of the food-miles issue that is even more pressing: when they ship a vegetable half-way around the world, how on earth do they keep it fresh? Say something is grown in South America or Asia for sale in Western Europe, imagine how many modes of transport that vegetable gets to ‘enjoy’ before it arrives on your plate! Imagine how many borders it crosses and customs it has to clear! Imagine all the ferry ports or airports it takes in and how much time it spends in distribution centres and storage! Imagine how many hours it spends rattling along in the back of an articulated lorry!

Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology carried out an interesting analysis of the food mileage of tomato ketchup and discovered that the cultivation, processing, packaging, storage, distribution and retail of the final product involved more than fifty-two individual transport and process stages. The commonly quoted statistic on these things is that the average distance travelled by your food before it hits your plate is three thousand miles. How should we feel about the fact that the vegetables on our plate are better travelled than we are? Full of admiration? Jealous?

After all that travelling, how on earth do the suppliers get these vegetables to look so remarkably fresh on the supermarket shelf? I don’t know about you, but I would look pretty jaded if I undertook a two-month haul from Peru to Europe in the back of a container lorry. The answer, of course, is that food suppliers have tricks up their sleeves to make the vegetables appear fresh. They pick them when they are unripe (and therefore not nutritionally complete) and spray them with preservatives so that they can survive the journey relatively unscathed. It doesn’t matter that when you bring them home they will almost immediately turn to mush, because, of course, the shop will already have your money by then. So, yes, it’s worth giving some thought to whether it’s a good idea to buy food that has done a few laps of the globe. And, yes, it is just pure lunacy to buy vegetables that have been produced on the other side of the world when they could just as easily be produced here. It’s even more important, however, to think about the impact that all this travelling has on the flavour and nutritional value of your food.

Here’s an experiment that you could try. Try growing some carrots this year. Get a deep container, fill it with compost and then buy a packet of carrot seeds and sprinkle them into it. I promise you that you will be blown away by their colour, crunchiness and incredibly sweet flavour. While you are enjoying your harvest of carrots, go out and buy a packet of carrots in the shop – this is what I like to call ‘death by comparison’. Once you have directly compared the taste, appearance and texture of the two in this way, you will find it very hard to go back to shop-bought carrots. And that’s the point – it’s the same with almost every other morsel of food that you will grow or rear on your Home Farm. It will always, ALWAYS, be of higher quality, and taste better than the shop-bought alternative. So what are we to do? Should we stop eating carrots when our own carrots are used up and we can’t get our hands on any local, and preferably organic, alternatives? Well, yeah – probably. Seasonality truly is a double-edged sword. The painful side is that you can’t eat every vegetable all year round. But the flipside? Well, the modern food chain has deprived us of the joys of seasonality, and these are considerable. The great moments of the growing year for any Home Farmer are the moments in which a favourite vegetable starts to harvest. The first crop of purple sprouting broccoli in March, the first new potato in June, the first tomato in July. These are payback moments that make all the hard work worthwhile.

Nature tells such a wonderful story with the bounty that she delivers during the year and we need to re-learn to trust that the food she produces is the best food for us at that particular time of theyear. Think about it this way: in the summertime, she makes available succulent fruits like melons and tomatoes that have a high water content to help us to re-hydrate in warmer weather; in the autumn, the hedgerows are laden with berries that provide a boost to the immune system before the winter. These are only a couple of examples of the vast bank of wisdom that we need to get ourselves attuned to. Amazingly, the food we harvest in each season seems to fit the mood of that season. A coincidence? I think not. In the melancholic winter, we have an abundance of root crops to go into stews and stocks to warm the heart, and nature equips those hardy vegetables with the tough skins they need to survive at this time of the year. In the spring, full of excitement and anticipation, we see shoots of recovery and get the first greens of the year in the form of peas and beans. In the summer, the garden is resplendent and we have our first strawberries, tomatoes and wonderful salad crops that we can eat while we enjoy long, lazy garden evenings. In the autumn, there is a pause in the grower’s year as we take time to enjoy the fruits of our labour during the abundant harvest – we enjoy those really ripe (not just pretending to be ripe) apples as well as squashes and pumpkins. In the context of this joyous culinary romp through the seasons, where exactly is the fun in being able to get any bland vegetable you like at any time of the year?

Our food chain, though highly advanced and efficient (arguably), churns out some really poor-quality product. Why? Because the focus of commercial food production is almost totally on yield, output, uniformity and profit. Taste, flavour, nutrition, variety – these things are scarcely given a thought. Tonnes and tonnes of the same vegetables are produced year-in, year-out on the same jaded patches of land (developments in agri-chemical technology mean that a single acre of land can produce 110,000 heads of lettuce in a single season). The soil becomes tired and emotional, and the vegetables produced become progressively less nutritious and flavoursome as time goes on. Fertilisers are required just to keep the whole show on the road. Diseases and pests build up in the soil and so the farmers have to use pesticides to keep them under control. It’s a vicious circle of chemical dependency, with you and me sitting just outside the circle with our knives and forks at the ready. Scientists are already starting to worry that pests and diseases are building up resistance to the arsenal of insecticides, pesticides and fungicides that are blithely considered the saviours of modern agriculture – for example, the fungicides that were once effective in controlling the wheat disease, Septoria tritici, are now virtually useless and scientists have nothing in their back pockets to keep the more aggressive forms of the disease from destroying crops. It goes to show that the idea of working against nature and trying to suppress her desire to express herself is the ultimate folly.

And then there is the trust issue. I don’t know about you, but I have no trust left whatsoever when it comes to commercial food producers (or if the truth be told, commercial entities of any kind) and this translates into an almost obsessive scepticism about the food that I buy. This is either completely OTT or just plain sensible, depending on your point of view. I reckon it’s the latter, especially when you consider that scams, hustles, tricks and deceptions are endemic in our food chain. Every time you pick up produce in the supermarket you need to think really carefully about what exactly it is you are buying. We can never assume that producers are just nice guys who have our best interests at heart. They don’t. They have profit in mind. And so they have been busy little bees, dreaming up increasingly elaborate ways to fool us into buying things – making things look or smell nicer than they really are and making things last longer than they really should.

In her book, Not on the Label, the Guardian’s consumer affairs correspondent, Felicity Lawrence, talks about ‘formed’ ham. As you know, a pig has just two hams – it’s basically the top of its back legs – and it is by far the most coveted cut of the animal. According to Lawrence, a lot of the supermarket and deli-counter ham does not, in fact, come from this part of the pig, but is ‘formed’ from other, cheaper parts – for example, muscle meat from the leg bones. These cheap cuts of meat are then put into a giant machine, rather like a cement mixer, which contains a solution of water, sugars, preservatives, flavourings and other additives. This process dissolves an amino acid, called myosin, in the muscle fibres, so the meat becomes sticky and can then be put into ham-shaped moulds – it comes out of these moulds looking like a single piece of meat. Sometimes the producers even go to the trouble of sticking on a layer of fat around the edge to make it look authentic. You really couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?

A friend of mine told me that he visited an apple farm in the UK one time and he climbed up on a large truck filled with apples, just to have a look; he was about to grab an apple to taste it when this guy started running towards him, gesticulating wildly. My friend was pretty annoyed – after all, he had paid to get in and here was this guy giving out to him for taking a single apple! But the guy wasn’t interested in petty apple theft at all – he was actually trying to prevent my friend from poisoning himself. The apples were about to leave the farm bound for a very well-known multinational supermarket chain and they had just been sprayed with a chemical, presumably one that would help prolong their shelf-life. ‘I wear a mask when we’re spraying them,’ he told my friend. ‘So it’s probably not a good idea to eat them just yet.’

If you’ve grown a crop of apples yourself (or anything else, for that matter), you will know that storage is a difficult proposition. Apples have the annoying tendency to rot and they start to lose nutritional value as soon as you pick them. It’s the same with most fruit and vegetables. To counteract this problem, producers and retailers use chemicals like 1-methylcyclopropene (known as 1-MCP) to block the naturally occurring ripening gases that fruit and vegetables produce, which causes them to soften and ultimately rot. This, then, is how we have apples on our supermarket shelves all year round – chemicals like 1-MCP can keep an apple ‘fresh’ for up to a year.

Scientists have come up with another neat trick to prolong the life of perishable produce – they pack it in a specially designed bag or pillow called Modified Atmosphere Packaging (or MAP) which creates a rarefied atmosphere in which the produce is stored. Oxygen levels within the bag are reduced to just 3 percent (regular ‘air’ contains 21 percent oxygen) and CO2 levels are raised correspondingly – the overall affect is to retard the level of deterioration and discolouration of the produce. A perhaps unintended side-effect, however, is that the process strips the fruit and vegetables of their nutrition. The British Journal of Nutrition found that packaging vegetables this way strips produce of vitamin C, vitamin E and other micro-nutrients. The consumer rights magazine Which? found that sliced, chilled runner beans stored in MAPs contain nearly 90 percent less vitamin C than fresh runner beans.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to eat ‘formed’ ham; I want to eat proper ham. I don’t want to eat fruit and vegetables that have been stored in a specially designed oxygen-free ‘tent’ so that they last longer. I don’t want to eat an apple that’s a year old but pretending to be younger. I don’t know what’s in 1-MCP and what impact it could have on my health, but I would prefer to forego the nutritional value of an apple-a-day all year round rather than eat an apple sprayed with chemicals. I don’t want to eat produce that has been boiled, irradiated, sprayed with additives and preservatives, or washed in chlorine to destroy bacteria. I don’t want to eat eggs from chickens that have had stuff added to their feed to make the yolks yellow. And, most of all, I would really, really like it if the supermarket had the good grace to inform me if an apple they are selling has been sprayed with chemicals, or that the ham in my sandwich is not ham at all, but reprocessed leg meat, or that the chicken breasts have been injected with water and animal proteins to make them look bigger than they really are. This all comes back to the trust issue – these examples of shady dealings and crooked practices are just the things we know about. What else are they up to?

Amidst all this bad news, there is, thankfully, some great news. The problems with our food chain are enormous and highly complex. But, unlike many other enormous and highly complex global problems, there is a very simple fix. GROW THE FOOD YOURSELF. Home-grown produce addresses all of the problems mentioned in the last few pages – every single one of them. Home-grown produce will not be sprayed or messed with, and since you have control over every facet of its production, you can trust the grub a hundred percent. If you practise some very simple crop rotation (more on this topic in Chapter 5) you won’t need any pesticides or fertilisers, and the resulting produce will be the tastiest, most nutritious food you or your family have ever eaten. There won’t be any wasteful packaging to throw away into landfill and, if you grow it yourself, there probably won’t be any wastage, full stop – many vegetables such as carrots, leeks, spinach and parsnips can be left in the ground until you’re ready to eat them and, in any case, after nurturing a vegetable plant from seed, you are not likely to want to waste a single morsel. Home Farming comes with genuine, in-built, pre-loaded seasonality – the food you eat from your own garden will always be seasonal, so you know you are eating the vegetables and fruit that nature intends at that time of the year. And food miles? Well, our vegetable plot is about thirty paces from the kitchen, so I guess that’s pretty much as close to zero food miles as you can get. Every time you tuck into a plate of your own, home-grown chow, you can congratulate yourself on your impeccably low carbon footprint.

That’s the beauty of turning your garden into a Home Farm – it is such an utterly proactive thing to do. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless about the world’s problems – climate change, global warming, health scares, terrorism, economic woes – because there’s practically nothing that any of us can do about these issues. The leaders of the world’s most powerful countries come together once or twice a year, closeted behind security fences to keep the baying mobs out, and they decide on policy that can make our lives a misery or a pleasure, depending on their mood. There’s precious little we can do about it. But, thankfully, there is something we can do about food security and food quality. We can do it right now, or later today, or tomorrow – stick a seed in the ground and watch it grow. Growing your own is not the preserve of any one social class. It’s not the preserve of country people or city people. It’s accessible to anyone with the motivation and access to even the smallest patch of ground. You would probably be amazed if I told you that most experts agree that a vegetable plot of 150 square metres (that’s 15m x 10m) would produce enough food to feed an entire family, all of the time. In Chapter 11 you will meet some urban farmers – people growing in small, and sometimes tiny, urban gardens who are, in many cases, more self-sufficient than we are here on our rural acre. So go on, take back control of the food that is going into your body. Become truly independent and take a rebellious step back from a food system that is inherently unstable, unhealthy and immoral.

One of the questions I am frequently asked is whether growing your own food is time-consuming. It’s tempting just to say, ‘Of course it is’, and leave it at that. It takes time to plan a vegetable garden and, initially at any rate, it takes time to execute it. Some of the work can be back-breaking, laborious, even tedious. Growing vegetables is not something that you do once – it is a year-round, year-in and year-out affair. I have been asked in interviews to try and quantify exactly how many minutes or hours a week we spend growing vegetables – and it’s always a question I try to dodge if I can because, of course, if I say ‘five hours a week’ or ‘four days a month’, or something like that, then at least some of the people listening are going to think, Well now, I don’t have time for that! Don’t you know how busy I am?Whether my answer to the time question is palatable or not depends entirely on the person listening. If I say that we spend ten minutes a week at it, and you hate spending time with a spade, then you are likely to think it is too much. If I say that we spend four hours a week at it, and you love your spade so much you would happily take it to bed with you at night, well then, you might think that is way too little.

Suffice to say that some times of the year are busier than others. There are usually a few large projects to get done over the year, which might take a weekend (like a major bout of sowing, weeding, harvesting or manuring, for example) and after that you’re really just spending time each day or every other day keeping the whole thing ticking over. For us, the growing year kicks off in earnest in February with the first sowings, and is in full swing until at least November. You could quite happily find things to do in the depths of winter too, if you’re so inclined, but we tend to take a bit of a breather from growing during December and January.

There are loads of ways for the savvy Home Farmer to reduce the chore quotient. Raised beds, for example (see Chapter 10) are increasingly popular because you don’t have vast tracts of open land getting overrun with weeds (weeding really is one of those necessary evil chores in the veggie plot that is almost never fun). We have gravel paths in between our raised beds, which keeps the whole thing looking neat and tidy, but, most importantly, weed-free t. Psychologically, it just seems less upsetting to have to weed one raised bed as opposed to an area of open ground. In any case, digging is a lot less in favour these days. It used to be that you had the dig the living daylights out of your veggie patch every year – and a stooped back was like a badge of honour among vegetable growers – but most growers that I know now prefer the ‘no-dig’ approach. The no-dig movement is made up of a rather unlikely coalition of really lazy growers, like me, and cutting-edge science, which suggests that walking on soil when you dig it compacts the soil and makes it impossible to grow stuff in. Therefore, the advice of the no-dig gospel is that you shouldn’t dig at all – yippee! – instead, pile on lots of rotted organic matter in the winter, which will then be dragged down by unwitting earthworms who are essentially doing the digging for you (only really slowly, one mouthful at a time). With raised beds, you don’t walk on the soil at all (just turn the soil over with a fork each year), which means it never gets compacted and an additional benefit is that it doesn’t matter what type of soil you have in your garden, because you basically get to bring in whatever soil you like from outside. Our house is basically built in a bog and our soil is terribly wet and spongy – but we have built about ten raised beds and brought in tonnes of topsoil, which we have then enriched over time by adding manure and compost annually.

We also do a lot of mulching (putting a compost or a manure ‘dressing’ around the base of plants) throughout the year, which has the twin benefits of reducing the amount of watering we have to do as it reduces surface evaporation, but also the amount of weeding, since it deprives weeds of the sunlight they need to take off. The mulch gradually rots down and incorporates into the soil, further enhancing its quality. There is still work to do, of course – like everything else in life, anything that’s worth having takes a little bit of time and effort. At the very least, you have to take the seed from the packet and place it in the soil; then you will need to look after it and water it (though lack of water hasn’t been a problem round these parts for a long time) and, of course, you have to pull it from the ground when it’s ready. But nature does most of the hard work – all you are really doing is loading up the arrow in your bow and pointing it in the right direction. This, then, is why I always find that question about how time-consuming (or not) vegetable growing is, to be so perplexing. To compartmentalise things this way is such a typically depressing, modern approach. Growing your own food is not something that you can break down into a chunk of time per week like that. It is not a chore that you can schedule in on your BlackBerry or shoe-horn in between the time you allot to watching your favourite TV soap and doing the ironing. It’s a way of life, and if you love doing it, it is no chore at all. There’s an old saying about work which is apt here – if you find a job that you love, you will never work a day in your life. The same applies to growing your own vegetables. If you hate it (don’t worry, you won’t), you will resent every minute you have to spend doing it. But if you love it, then you will happily spend a day up to your neck in muck getting a bed ready for planting – and you will rue the time you have to spend away from your beloved patch.

Looking back on the past growing year, there’s one thing that strikes me as particularly interesting. At the start of the year it was just the two of us, armed only with our enthusiasm and gamely battling against our own lack of expertise. But gradually, over the course of the twelve months, we ended up quite by chance (or was it by design?) surrounding ourselves with fellow Home Farmers. I don’t know whether this is because there are more people interested in the whole idea than there were twelve months ago (I suspect there are), or whether we’re getting more sociable in our advancing years. Perhaps it’s a bit of both. It started in July with the courses we started to run here in our garden for people interested in keeping some hens, and we began to realise just how wonderful and useful it was to talk to like-minded folk about their food-production experiences. Later in the year, we got together with other growers in GIY Waterford (you can read about it in Chapter 9), which basically replicates the camaraderie that you get on allotment sites. We meet once a month with other enthusiastic amateur growers like ourselves and talk about growing and rearing things. We exchange ideas and swap produce. We listen to and learn from each other. We make friends. The GIY network has helped to take the ‘self’ out of our ‘self-sufficiency’ and our isolation has slowly ebbed away. We are starting to get to know more and more people in the area (and beyond) who are growing their own food and we are discovering that there are lots and lots of us. By the end of the year, we had almost totally emerged from our splendid isolation and in the chapter on December (Chapter 12) you can read about meitheals (pronounced ‘meh-hills’), an Irish word for ‘working gangs’ – in this context, groups of us going around to each others’ gardens to help out on big vegetable-growing projects.

The amount that we have learned from our fellow growers is astonishing. We now know people whom we can call up or visit if we have a question, and so the projects we have taken on in the Home Farm this year have seemed far less scary – there is always someone who knows someone who has done it all before. Above all, we have made friends with people who share our interests and our passions – who don’t look at us strangely when we rave about a particular variety of potato or the unparalleled flavour of our tomatoes. They seem to understand. Maybe we all sought each other out to prove to ourselves that there are other people out there pursuing this lifestyle too and that we’re not alone (or mad). In these rather depressing times, there’s something very, very comforting about the idea of a meitheal, and of all the things that have happened this past year, that was by far and away the most exciting. So, without further ado, let’s get going on a journey through the Home Farmer’s year. I hope you find it interesting and enjoyable and that this book will be a good thing in your life.

Michael Kelly Dunmore East, Co. Waterford spring 2009

A NOTE ON THE SEASONS

One of the most exhilarating things about Home Farming is that you hitch your wagon, so to speak, to the venerable rhythm of the seasons – from the barrenness of winter to the hope and renewal of spring, the lushness and colour of summer, the abundance of autumn, and finally back to the slumber of winter again. You have a choice about how you feel about this relentless cycle of life: you can choose to be terrified, or you can take immense comfort from it. Personally, I love the fact that the seasons are so all-encompassing. They are quite obviously happening ‘out there’ in your veggie patch, but their moods are also reflected ‘in here’ – in your heart, your mind and your soul.

It is, of course, nature herself who ultimately decides when those seasons transition from one to the next, but down through the ages mankind has gamely tried to apply chunks of time (in the form of calendar months) to the task of defining when a season begins and ends. ‘In month X, it shall be season Y,’ we proclaim, attempting to be lord of all we survey. Mother Nature smiles to herself and thinks: We shall see.

There is little consensus among the denizens of the northern hemisphere about when the seasons start. Many countries use what are called the ‘meteorological’ seasons, where spring begins on 1 March, summer on 1 June, autumn on 1 September and winter on 1 December. The ‘astronomical’ seasons are broadly similar, but are based on the dates of the equinoxes and solstices: so, spring begins on 20 March (vernal equinox), summer on 21 June (summer solstice), autumn on 22 September (autumn equinox) and winter on 21 December (winter solstice).