Last summer, Tim and I visited Devon to see the Hoskings’ farm which is featured in BBC2's Farm For The Future. The farm dramatically contrasts the neighbouring barren, over-ploughed agricultural desert drenched in fertilisers. On her farm there are huge ancient hedgerows full of nesting birds and old standard apple trees, pastures that haven’t been ploughed for 500 years full of orchids, buzzing with life, nesting birds, and a stream meandering though muddy flats full of yellow flag irises. I haven’t seen a farm like this since I was a very little girl visiting Connemara in Ireland in the sixties. Every summer, my family used to stay on a mixed farm by the shore of Loch Corrib. The land teemed with biodiversity and the loch was full of wild brown trout, perch and monstrously large pike. Rebecca Hosking asked me how I saw permaculture developing on the farm. She also told me how many of the neighbours thought the family were crazy for farming this way, without huge inputs of NPK (agricultural ‘whizz’ she calls it), encouraging foxes on to the land to keep the rabbit population in balance and quietly encouraging as much fauna and flora on to farm as possible. I hope the time is coming when they will be appreciated as genuine pioneers. I didn’t tell her how to run her farm though I did encourage the family to open it to the public so that they can take a tour and appreciate the intelligent dedication and vision of her father who refused to farm ‘conventionally’.
After the Hoskings’ Farm we visited Martin Crawford at the Agroforestry Research Trust. My cup of happiness overflowed as I walked his two acres of forest garden. At times, it was like walking through a subtropical jungle full of edible, medicinal and useful plants. I was struck by the beauty of trees like the Chinese Dogwood and the majestic grace of the Rhubarb Australe. Tim and I came away empowered. We planted a forest garden/wildlife garden in the early nineties but raising children and publishing have rather got in the way of its development. We realised we hadn’t done a bad job, however, and had developed similar techniques to Martin. Hard work this year has brought the whole garden on enormously and planting more ground cover and some additional trees and shrubs in our forest garden this autumn will almost complete the design. Martin deeply inspired us.
My other preoccupation this year – as my long-suffering family will agree – has been growing food under glass. It’s easy to grow fruit and veg in summer and autumn but how are we to feed ourselves all winter and spring if we are truly planning a transition away from imported food? I set about entirely renovating our storm damaged greenhouse and making cold frames, inspired by Vera Greuttink-Ichova’s article about extending the seasons in PM59.
I have learnt that before we had fossil fuels to heat greenhouses, the Dutch were experts in growing under glass. Introducing a cold frame over the greenhouse border allows all year growing. This autumn I planned to grow oriental stir fry vegetables like tatsoi, mibuna and mizuna, and plants like hardy cornsalad and winter carrots. The weird things is, my tomatoes, peppers and chillis are still producing and I haven't the heart to pull them out yet so I may have missed my chance. The warm weather has also made the veggie patch more productive in late autumn.
My growing under glass research has made me ponder on just how much knowledge previous generations had – in other words a lot. In our oil scarce future, we will have no choice but to undertake a journey of rediscovery and rekindle our lost skills. It will be like exploring a collective unconscious that we currently only vaguely acknowledge but which is vast and powerful. The future is waiting for us and I refuse to imagine that it is tormented and dark.
Maddy Harland and the Permaculture Magazine Team
www.permaculture.co.uk
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Low Impact Development
Patrick Whitefield has just sent me a review of the new edition of Simon Fairlie's Low Impact Development book. I have already published a review by Dawn Houghton in the new issue PM62 out next week so I thought I would share his thoughts with you here.
Low Impact Development, planning and people in a sustainable countryside, Simon Fairlie, Jon Carpenter, 2009, 233x155mm, 174pp, £15, ISBN-13: 9781906067076, available from The Green Shopping Catalogue.
A majority of the people who come on our permaculture courses declare that their long-term aim is to ‘get a piece of land out in the country’, and this probably goes for permaculturists as a whole. But there are many pitfalls between the intention and the reality, not least the planning system. If you want to live on your piece of land in the country and aren’t rich enough to buy an existing smallholding with house – ie very rich – you have a struggle on your hands. Placing a dwelling, however modest, on agricultural land constitutes Change of Use and permission for this is not normally granted.
For over a decade now Simon Fairlie’s book, Low Impact Development, has been the bible of people who want to build a low-impact, sustainable dwelling on their own land. Not only is it a mine of useful information but it actually makes something as intriniscally dry and boring as the planning system into a good read. Simon not only knows his subject inside out but has a very readable style and a subtle wit. He’s also scrupulously fair, understanding where he could be partisan and mild where another writer might explode with anger. The book is more than a how-to for people who want to build a dwelling in the country. It gives an overview of its subject which is both balanced and visionary.
The new edition is not a re-write of the old. It just has two chapters added. One concerns the historical background to the planning system, the plotland movement of the inter-war years. The other brings the story up to date from the time of the first edition in 1996. Simon sums this chapter up in his opening sentence: “A lot has happened but not much has advanced.” There have been some notable successes by individual low impact builders and groups but policy has changed very little. The book came out before the recent success of the Lammas project but the front cover speaks volumes. It shows members of the Lammas group delivering their planning application – a pile of files that was too big for a single wheelbarrow.
Simon is a consultant on low impact development and has had a hand in most of the cases he describes. An interesting part of the latter chapter concerns a section of his clientele he describes as aspiring to the ‘three acres and a car’ lifestyle. These are people with another source of income who would like to have a smallholding in the country in order to live more sustainably. He points out that many of them do little more than grow their own vegetables, and the amount of land available per person in this country is one acre. He does not regard this as a sustainable use of land and expresses little sympathy with this group. If we’re going to live in the country and occupy land we need to think very carefully both about car use and about how much food we produce from the land which is entrusted to us.
Simon can be contacted at his consultancy, Chapter 7
Patrick Whitefield is permaculture teacher, the author of many bestselling books, the most recent being The Living Landscape and a consulting editor to Permaculture Magazine
www.permaculture.co.uk
www.patrick-whitefield.co.uk
Low Impact Development, planning and people in a sustainable countryside, Simon Fairlie, Jon Carpenter, 2009, 233x155mm, 174pp, £15, ISBN-13: 9781906067076, available from The Green Shopping Catalogue.
A majority of the people who come on our permaculture courses declare that their long-term aim is to ‘get a piece of land out in the country’, and this probably goes for permaculturists as a whole. But there are many pitfalls between the intention and the reality, not least the planning system. If you want to live on your piece of land in the country and aren’t rich enough to buy an existing smallholding with house – ie very rich – you have a struggle on your hands. Placing a dwelling, however modest, on agricultural land constitutes Change of Use and permission for this is not normally granted.
For over a decade now Simon Fairlie’s book, Low Impact Development, has been the bible of people who want to build a low-impact, sustainable dwelling on their own land. Not only is it a mine of useful information but it actually makes something as intriniscally dry and boring as the planning system into a good read. Simon not only knows his subject inside out but has a very readable style and a subtle wit. He’s also scrupulously fair, understanding where he could be partisan and mild where another writer might explode with anger. The book is more than a how-to for people who want to build a dwelling in the country. It gives an overview of its subject which is both balanced and visionary.
The new edition is not a re-write of the old. It just has two chapters added. One concerns the historical background to the planning system, the plotland movement of the inter-war years. The other brings the story up to date from the time of the first edition in 1996. Simon sums this chapter up in his opening sentence: “A lot has happened but not much has advanced.” There have been some notable successes by individual low impact builders and groups but policy has changed very little. The book came out before the recent success of the Lammas project but the front cover speaks volumes. It shows members of the Lammas group delivering their planning application – a pile of files that was too big for a single wheelbarrow.
Simon is a consultant on low impact development and has had a hand in most of the cases he describes. An interesting part of the latter chapter concerns a section of his clientele he describes as aspiring to the ‘three acres and a car’ lifestyle. These are people with another source of income who would like to have a smallholding in the country in order to live more sustainably. He points out that many of them do little more than grow their own vegetables, and the amount of land available per person in this country is one acre. He does not regard this as a sustainable use of land and expresses little sympathy with this group. If we’re going to live in the country and occupy land we need to think very carefully both about car use and about how much food we produce from the land which is entrusted to us.
Simon can be contacted at his consultancy, Chapter 7
Patrick Whitefield is permaculture teacher, the author of many bestselling books, the most recent being The Living Landscape and a consulting editor to Permaculture Magazine
www.permaculture.co.uk
www.patrick-whitefield.co.uk
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Dramas at Permanent Publications
I got home from a conference in the early hours of Monday morning. Tim wasn't home. He'd been called out to check our offices at the Sustainability Centre as the alarm had gone off. It was a pitch black night with only a slither of a moon and no lights were on outside the building... Tim let himself in through our front door and walked through to the rear of the office. It wasn't until he got through another two doors that he began to see evidence of damage and then the awful thought struck him that the burglar could still be in the building. Luckily, the intruder had made his escape and what an escape that turned out to be.
The burglar had managed to break his way into our shop with a jimmy. The door automatically closed and unbeknown to him it had an electronic lock. Whilst riffling through drawers the alarm went off, triggered by a movement sensor, and panic – sheer, gut wrenching panic set in – he realised he was trapped in the the building. He smashed his way through a door that was locked with a mortice, ran into the ladies loo looking for an exit, smashed through another locked door and broke a small window light (that actually had a handle that is easy to open). Below the window is a twelve foot drop onto tarmac and that was his exit point. It's amazing that he didn't break his legs. He did, however, cut himself, tore off the latex glove used to prevent finger prints at the scene and ran for it.
We came into work early the next morning and set about sorting out a glazier, locksmith and the alarm system engineer. By the end of the day our security was not only repaired but enhanced. Nothing was stolen except the Sustainability Centre's cashbox. It had paltry takings of £20. Frankly, there isn't much to steal. We don't have wads of cash here and I can hardly imagine dodgy deals down the pub with ripped off copies of the Earth Care Manual. It's hardly appropriate fayre for the black market. I can only conclude the burglar was rather thick to bother with us here.
It is weird how the burglary made us feel. We felt violated, that a dark presence had broken into our happy, cooperative little space and the debris of violence scattered into all the crevasses. We'll be finding broken glass for ages, buried among boxes of How To Make A Forest Garden. The incident also makes me feel how fragile we are. Our daily lives are such a distance away from this kind of violence and theft seems an anathema to us. I know these feelings are common amongst 'survivors' and we got off lightly, thanks to the alarm that is linked to the local police.
On the gleeful side, we called in the Crime Scene Investigator, a rotund, cheerful copper who obviously loves his job. I went outside with an envelope and a plastic bag earlier in the day and, Poirot-style, picked up the glove with its DNA sample without 'contaminating' the scene. The CSI also took glass samples (apparently they have 14,000 types of glass on their forensic database) and recorded the smutty bootprint that was firmly displayed on a number of smashed doors. PC CSI left us smiling, rather thrilled by all the evidence. This was a good case, he told us, in the fight against crime.
We quickly settled back to publishing and sent issue 62 of Permaculture Magazine and our new 'best of' The Green Shopping Catalogue to press, dark shadows dispelled by creative publishing, proactive investigating and new on-site security procedures at the Sustainability Centre. Now we are working on the final stages of a joyful book by Jackie Singer called Birthrites: rituals and celebrations for the birthing years. It's the beginning of a new phase for us, developing books that will be tools for building community and practically finding ways of looking after ourselves and each other. 'People care' as the permies call it. Good and timely medicine for us all.
Maddy Harland
Permaculture Magazine www.permaculture.co.uk
The burglar had managed to break his way into our shop with a jimmy. The door automatically closed and unbeknown to him it had an electronic lock. Whilst riffling through drawers the alarm went off, triggered by a movement sensor, and panic – sheer, gut wrenching panic set in – he realised he was trapped in the the building. He smashed his way through a door that was locked with a mortice, ran into the ladies loo looking for an exit, smashed through another locked door and broke a small window light (that actually had a handle that is easy to open). Below the window is a twelve foot drop onto tarmac and that was his exit point. It's amazing that he didn't break his legs. He did, however, cut himself, tore off the latex glove used to prevent finger prints at the scene and ran for it.
We came into work early the next morning and set about sorting out a glazier, locksmith and the alarm system engineer. By the end of the day our security was not only repaired but enhanced. Nothing was stolen except the Sustainability Centre's cashbox. It had paltry takings of £20. Frankly, there isn't much to steal. We don't have wads of cash here and I can hardly imagine dodgy deals down the pub with ripped off copies of the Earth Care Manual. It's hardly appropriate fayre for the black market. I can only conclude the burglar was rather thick to bother with us here.
It is weird how the burglary made us feel. We felt violated, that a dark presence had broken into our happy, cooperative little space and the debris of violence scattered into all the crevasses. We'll be finding broken glass for ages, buried among boxes of How To Make A Forest Garden. The incident also makes me feel how fragile we are. Our daily lives are such a distance away from this kind of violence and theft seems an anathema to us. I know these feelings are common amongst 'survivors' and we got off lightly, thanks to the alarm that is linked to the local police.
On the gleeful side, we called in the Crime Scene Investigator, a rotund, cheerful copper who obviously loves his job. I went outside with an envelope and a plastic bag earlier in the day and, Poirot-style, picked up the glove with its DNA sample without 'contaminating' the scene. The CSI also took glass samples (apparently they have 14,000 types of glass on their forensic database) and recorded the smutty bootprint that was firmly displayed on a number of smashed doors. PC CSI left us smiling, rather thrilled by all the evidence. This was a good case, he told us, in the fight against crime.
We quickly settled back to publishing and sent issue 62 of Permaculture Magazine and our new 'best of' The Green Shopping Catalogue to press, dark shadows dispelled by creative publishing, proactive investigating and new on-site security procedures at the Sustainability Centre. Now we are working on the final stages of a joyful book by Jackie Singer called Birthrites: rituals and celebrations for the birthing years. It's the beginning of a new phase for us, developing books that will be tools for building community and practically finding ways of looking after ourselves and each other. 'People care' as the permies call it. Good and timely medicine for us all.
Maddy Harland
Permaculture Magazine www.permaculture.co.uk
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