20 Working with the earth: low-impact gardening

plus guest post: the Subsistence Gardener

All images Samuel & Gareth Lewis

‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach…’ H D Thoreau

1
One of the things that has drawn us here, The Man and myself, is the potential for living in a hands-on way that is deeply connected with the earth. Also, like Gareth Lewis, my guest contributor below, we could afford land here where we couldn’t in the UK. We love the space, the slowness, the lack of traffic.

I’ve long believed that a significant source of meaning and connectedness in our lives comes from a felt relationship with the earth and other species. With industrialisation and increasing urbanisation, we have more and more removed ourselves from the land, the other-than-human species, and the production of our food. I suspect that many people feel deracinated, in a very literal sense; though it’s not always obvious what the problem, and therefore the solution, is.

Both cause and result of this deep sense of alienation from earth and the other species who share this journey round our star tends to be an objectifying attitude. We think of ourselves as being separate from it and them; and, crudely put, it’s easy to assume that basically these others exist for our benefit, desires and appetites.

It doesn’t help that our culturally-reinforced view tends to be that all other species are in some way ‘less than’ us, and not really animate. (Descartes thought that animals were sufficiently inanimate as to experiment with skinning them alive.) That is, we objectify them and see them as a ‘resource’. It’s only very recently, for goodness’ sake, that the idea of animals as being sentient has passed into British law.

For many years now I have challenged this view in my writing and living (and see my book A Spell in the Forest for the truer truth of our intertwinement). Increasingly I’m devoting my energy to living this out in every aspect of my life.

The solution? Spend as much time as you can outdoors, among other species; and get your hands dirty, in the soil. There’s very little more satisfying than eating fresh veg you’ve just grown yourself.

So here on the land we tend we’re trying to put all this into practice. We are growing organically and veganically via the principles of:

being kind to the earth
not exploiting other species
working in harmony with local and wider ecosystems.

We would list among the people who have inspired us and influenced the way we are trying to grow our food: friends Paul & Pam Macdonald at Druid forest garden on the edge of Dartmoor, near where we used to live; visionary and rebel George Monbiot, veganic market gardener & woodchip nerd Iain ‘Tolly’ Tolhurst, ‘Miraculous Abundance’ Charles & Perrine Hervé-Gruyer, Charles ‘no-dig’ Dowding, and Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust (just down the road from where we used to live. There are others, including early exponents of the Soil Association.)

Closer to home is Gareth Lewis (‘Tim the Gardener’) of The Subsistence Gardener. Gareth fits no category except that he, in my view, exemplifies a productive, harmonious practically-non-mechanised food growing system based on hoe gardening. He uses the old ‘bocage’ system, and below you can read about it. Samuel, Gareth’s son, and Bethan, his daughter, also work this land.

Gareth has written this piece below for me. If you are local to Finistère and Côtes d’Armor just over the border, The Hoe Farm has an open day on Sunday 14th April. You can sign up for his monthly practical newsletter on his website, at the bottom.

2
Recreating a Traditional Farm in Brittany

We (my wife and I, and our three children) moved to Brittany in 1994, mainly because the property prices made it possible to buy a few acres of land, which would have been impossible on our budget in the UK. Previously, I had had an academic training in agricultural science, but had never worked professionally in the farming world, having taken issue with the way in which the subject was being taught fairly early on my studies.

Even though Breton farming was undergoing a rapid process of modernisation, when we arrived in Brittany we had many elderly neighbours who had vivid memories of how the land had been farmed prior to mechanisation and the advent of intensive farming methods; they were able to describe a system of agriculture that had quite different roots to the French and English systems.

A little research confirmed that the traditional Breton system dated back to pre-Roman times, and was focussed upon sustainability and autonomy. It involved dividing the countryside up into a complex network of subsistence farms, grouped together to form self-sufficient communities. Fields were small (small enough to be worked by hand) and surrounded by banks of trees. Houses were gathered around reliable water sources, the land around the houses was cultivated, and the land between the settlements was grazed or planted with more trees, which were used as an extra source of wood.

This type of agriculture appears to have suffered badly during the Roman era but was at least partly restored when a Celtic administration was re-established after the Romans’ departure. Subsequently, Brittany was the only part of modern-day France to successfully resist occupation by Charlemagne, and the centuries that followed are regarded as a golden age of Breton self-rule and prosperity – even though the economy was based upon a very traditional form of agriculture.

Inspired by what we were learning, we decided to extend our vegetable garden into something more closely resembling a traditional Breton farm. Our farming neighbours were sympathetic to the project, and sold us one or two fields adjoining our existing garden. We divided them up into small plots of around seven hundred square metres, making rudimentary banks on which we planted a mixture of local trees – hazel, oak, willow, chestnut, beech, yew, and holly, plus a few fruit trees. We worked the small fields by hand, and rotated rye, buckwheat, wheat, beans, potatoes, and flax around them. To build up soil fertility, we covered the fields with a thick layer of mulch (cut from fallow areas) after the harvest. We found that, over time, perhaps because we started to become more skilled at what we were doing, the work involved diminished, and was quite compatible with pursuing other, professional, activities at the same time – in our case running a small publishing company.

Something that we had not really expected was the way in which wildlife has responded to the initiative; wild flowers are starting to grow round our field edges, and, each year, we have noticeably more birds, and these are helping to establish a natural balance in the crop fields, keeping insect populations under control. Deer have been attracted to the farm, and we have had to build a woven-hazel fence to keep them off the cultivated areas, which makes the whole area very attractive.

Because our aim has simply been to supply some of our basic needs (plus having something to share with friends and neighbours), there has never been much motivation to mechanise any of the tasks: the land is prepared with a hoe, the crops are weeded by hand, and harvested with a sickle, the grain is threshed with a flail, and wood is cut with an axe and a billhook.

In many ways, our land is more like a large garden than a farm, in the sense that the word is now used. I am, of course, familiar with the widely-held belief that working a farm by hand is synonymous with the most abject form of poverty, but this has not been my experience. Our little farm yields vegetables, cereals, firewood, wood for craftwork, and flax; the work involved is enjoyable and healthy, and it has created an environment in which it is a pleasure to live and welcome visitors.

I formed the opinion when I was quite young that modern farming methods were unsustainable. The basic idea of a small minority of people producing food for everyone else seems flawed, and the catastrophic environmental consequences of mechanised farming are now becoming apparent. I am happy to have found an alternative to being dependent on this system for my own personal needs, and am convinced that if other people followed the same course upon which we have embarked, many of the problems with which we are confronted in the modern world would start to be resolved.

Gareth Lewis

Author of An Introduction to Twenty-First Century Hoe Farming – an antidote to globalisation

http://subsistencegardener.com