More home: food production 1

I grew up with a dad who was enthusiastically bonkers about growing fruit and vegetables. Obviously I inherited the gene.

He was generous with his time and knowledge and passed all he knew onto his four children. We all grow fruit and veg, but, I’m the only one who - like him - grows enough to feed 35 people.

For many years my dream was to live in a cottage next to a Victorian walled garden, complete with a south-facing hot house, which I would cultivate to my heart’s content.

I did end up helping to rebuild and recultivate such a hot house on friends’ property when I lived near Dunblane in the 90s. It was magic.

All my adult life I have had a patch of ground on which to grow at least a few vegetables. Even as a student I had an allotment. And as I’ve got older the patches of ground have got larger and the production has increased. This has aligned with my increasing determination to be as self-reliant and as resilient as possible in the face of global crises, both actual and potential.

I added to Dad’s passed-on knowledge with years of my own trial and error, endless conversations with other food gardeners, plus a course in organic garden food production and later a permaculture course. The more I learnt the more I knew that all I wanted to do was to grow food for myself.

It was never going to be a commercial thing: this is far more fundamental to my life than something that earns money.

I need to point out that I also grew up with a Mum who could cook fantastic food from anything which Dad deposited on the kitchen table, as well as preserve the surplus. She too taught me all she knew. I am doubly fortunate.

The only thing on my mind when I gave up work in 2015 was to to find an acre or so of land with a decent house on it and to develop its growing potential and to be as self-reliant as possible.

I was ecstatic (but somehow terrified) when I found this place in early 2017. Everything looked too good to be true. But it was true. And good.

The photo shows the main production area. This paddock was initially covered in nothing but thigh-high weeds. I borrowed a local horse which ate them all down over his seven week stay, and provided me with lovely manure at the same time.

Then some hard work began.

Now, almost five years on it is the main production area on the property and contains the 13.5m tunnel house, which I constructed with the help of friends (tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers, peppers, chillies, basil, brassicas in winter).

Five of the total of 10 raised veg beds are in this paddock, along with a trio of compost bins, a feijoa hedge, the soft fruit cage (raspberries, gooseberries, currants, boysenberries) and a handful of young fruit trees (apples, plum, peaches).

Much of my time is spent here…