21 One swallow, hatchlings, food crises & veganism, Brexit

plus not being on the Isle of Iona

In drizzle, one bedraggled swallow flips over the roof of the truck as we head for market day by the lake. I shout in jubilation, as I always do on seeing the first of the year.

It’s been almost entirely rain for month after month here in Brittany. Every excursion for so long has been wet and muddy; and of course the dogs too. But miraculously, almost, and I’m going to put it down to the arrival of that swallow, suddenly as we’re about to leave the lakeside café the spitting rain stops, the clouds lift a little, and there’s almost a glow in the south. I notice that many of the trees around the lake have started that green fizz; and as we drive home the sun emerges at last. Spring is in ferment, and the bluebells in the holloway are about to burst forth ultravioletly. Across on the opposite hillside, the birches are greening.

My mood shifts. It’s not that I actually mind rain: better that than drought and water stress; but it does bear you down after a while, especially when it’s chilly too and the seeds in the polytunnel are slow to germinate, and those that have struggled through are slow to grow. In the case of my broad beans, I’m constantly resowing, too, as night after night the harvest mice tiptoe in for a midnight snack, despite garlic oil and even chilli. I have a humane trap down there now, and have caught three; so beautiful, with their huge eyes, extra long tails and pale bellies. I feel bad about turning them out a distance away from their home, and separated. (See also post 7.)

An excess of hatchlings
My friend and neighbour, who keeps geese, has a young gosling who follows her around, even waddling down to the stream behind her, with a cat and one of the dogs. He or she will end up in the freezer; but meantime will have had the best life.

But the hatchlings here are not goslings. On the two sunny days here, planting out our broad bean seedlings to join the overwintered ones – very sorry-looking, the latter, after a winter of rain and extreme westerly winds funnelling through the gaps in the hedge where trees came down in the November gales – I spend at least as much time scrambling on and off a chair to catch the many tiny and very newly-hatched honeybees from the ceiling of the polytunnel to release them as I do actually planting out the seedlings.

Then back in the house, in the utility room, now beautifully revamped courtesy of TM, I was crouched cramped in a tiny space between the draining board and the low pitched ceiling catching and releasing a few dozen also very newly-hatched ladybirds clustered on the wrong side of the window. (And again the next day.) This was not aided by the fact that the window opens the wrong way for such a manoeuvre, nor by the fact that for nine months now I’ve not been able to kneel or squat, nor even climb on to a chair in anything other than a mad and inelegant scramble with the aid of a mop handle! – as something extremely painful suddenly happened to my knees, one after the other. But the ladybirds are free; and what’s more they will keep our veg plot aphid-free too this year, if they survive.

Birdsong
I’ve always lived in places off the beaten track, as they say. It’s bliss to me to hear nothing except birdsong and the stream; and here on a gentle Sunday not even a distant tractor. Nothing of humans at all.

Today: a blackbird, whose song switched to its before-rain-song (and then there were spatters of rain). A thrush. A warbler. The sparrow family – sparrows really do cheep. A bird I can’t identify, with a highish plangent note: tee-hue, tee-hue, the second syllable 2 tones below the first. Magpies, who have adopted a sweet cat-miaow; screeching jays, their yelling rivalled only by a heronry; two buzzards, high above, mewling; and a chitter of small birds bravely seeing off the local female sparrowhawk.

Growing

‘Everything depends on a few inches of topsoil and timely rainfall,’ said Ted Sherrill, a local farmer, to me years ago now when we were leaning on his Devon gate overlooking the confluence of the Tamar and Tavy rivers where I used to live. I have never forgotten, and I think of that phrase often in these times of drought, floods, avalanches, erosion of topsoil, overgrazing and deforestation, not to mention the assault of chemical farming on the land, other species, and us.

Everything at this time of year in our area is in full green surge. In our experiment in organic – veganic – subsistence here in harmony with the rest of nature, we are still awaiting our 12 tonnes of green compost to spread on our newer veg beds recently reclaimed from meadow. Our seeds and seedling plants really need to go out.

TM has worked very hard over the last few months at preparing the ground. The potatoes have been well-chitted (if you’re not a gardener, that means sprouted in trays to give them a headstart in the ground) and need to go out; my courgette and squash plants will soon need planting in their beds, as will the artichokes, chard, spinach and a multitude of others; plus this year we’re trialling new crops like soya, chickpeas, lentils, buckwheat and quinoa, to provide more protein for us and the dogs. If we and the crops succeed, larger areas in the North Field where our 25 new fruit and nut trees and our kiwi vines and sea buckthorn shrubs have been started will be allocated to them next year.

One of the several reasons we don’t keep livestock here, though I love being surrounded by animals and we do have the grazing land, is that ultimately, generally speaking, we as a species treat them as objects for our gratification, which means they or their offspring or secretions will end up being eaten (thinking about the gosling I mentioned above but not meaning to judge my friend). It’s as if they have no feelings or rights in relation to being continually inseminated, often artificially, so that we can take their children away and eat them, and/or keep them in milk for our benefit, and for me a non-consensual and exploitative relationship with animals is not OK and not necessary either.

There are other reasons, too, such as land use, and on a larger scale extreme animal welfare issues, water stress, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and therefore climate change, which I will address in other posts. There are also my own stress levels, exacerbated hugely by tending any sick animals.

Here, I would also rather rewild, reforest, those areas on which we are not growing. It’s imperative that this poor planet of ours is reforested as swiftly as possible if we want to preserve our own and other species, or any semblance of life as we know it. For that, it’s also imperative that we reduce our meat and dairy consumption, as most people must know by now. If only farmers were compensated more for growing trees than for growing sheep.

George Monbiot, as I write this, has written in The Guardian that ‘the government’s Climate Change Committee estimates that switching from grassland to woodland in England would eventually “increase the soil carbon stock by 25 tonnes of carbon per hectare” [that is, the amount of carbon stored] on average.’ He also mentions that we reduce land use for feeding humans ‘by an average of 76% when we switch to a plant-based diet’.

Extreme weather, plus Brexit – ‘the gift that keeps on giving’

Now, more than ever, growing some of one’s own veg doesn’t seem like a nice middle class weekend leisure activity, but an urgent and essential future survival skill.

When we hear the phrase ‘food crises’, it’s my guess that most people in the UK think of those heartbreaking photos from small sub-Saharan African countries such as Sudan in the grip of drought; or maybe Yemen. Deforested countries often in political turmoil where starvation is already an issue, or a disaster in waiting. Traumatic and upsetting but nothing to do with us.

It’s a different matter when we start to realise that in an interconnected world with a global weather system some of this is in fact very much to do with us and our agricultural practices.

But that’s not where I’m going. It has been shocking to watch from France the unfolding of a possible food crisis in the UK, largely the result of a combination of weather, and Brexit. The forecast is that potatoes – potatoes! That staple crop! – may fail this year in Britain, among other crops. We know what happens when the potato crop fails.

And the UK depends very heavily on European imports, most of which are intensively-farmed livestock, or the feed for them, on which humans (and their pets) depend. If you read The Guardian or Observer last weekend, you will know that in their wisdom the Tory party have decided to impose such a potentially huge tax on imported goods, mainly veg and fruit, from the EU that many of the smaller European producers will simply not choose, or indeed be able, to export to Britain. In the light of the next paragraph, one wonders if ministers actually understand how we feed ourselves.

Today, The Guardian reports that there will likely be shortages in the UK of many other homegrown veg, as well as wheat and possibly pulses. But we can no longer rely on imports from beyond the EU. ‘Amber Sawyer, an analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said last year almost a third of the UK’s tomatoes, and more than two-thirds of its raspberries and Brussels sprouts, came from Morocco… [But this year], production of fruit and vegetables in Morocco is being affected by drought. Morocco’s second-largest reservoir has dried up, meaning irrigating crops will be difficult. “As climate change worsens, the threat to our food supply chains – both at home and overseas – will grow,” Sawyer said.

‘Scientists have said this is just the beginning of shocks to the food supply chain caused by climate breakdown and that without rapid action to drive down emissions by ceasing to burn fossil fuels, the current system is unsustainable.’

The report goes on to say: ‘Dr Paul Behrens, an associate professor of environmental change at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said: “I expect huge turmoil and escalating prices in the next 10 to 20 years. When food prices spiral we always expect political instability. I wish people understood the urgent climate threat to our near-term food security.

“Fortunately, we know many ways we can make the food system more resilient while reducing food emissions. The biggest opportunity in high-income nations is a reduction in meat consumption and exploration of more plants in our diets.” (My italics.)

This lambing season in the UK, says the same article, has seen a lot of losses. We expect our ewes to lamb early, ‘for the market’; and a winter such as that we’ve just seen means continual cold and saturation for the newborns. Inhumane.

Have a look at this diagram, below, created by the National Food Strategy – the Dimbleby report – in 2021. It’s important to add that the areas shown are NOT the actual areas where e.g. all the UK’s golf courses are to be found! – but the relative size of the land given over to e.g. golf courses in the UK. See if you can spot the minute spaces for growing fruit, veg and orchards, and broadleaf woodlands. Figures from 2019 show that the UK imports around 90 percent of its fruit and vegetables, and currently grows only 50% of what is eaten nationwide.

A Harvard study concluded that the UK could be self-sufficient, including in protein, if the population were vegan; AND we could reforest the uplands degraded by sheep grazing. Of course, that’s not going to happen on any significant scale; but it is sobering enough for some people to make the transition – happily, more and more people, especially young people, are changing their diets to an animal-and-planet-friendly one. Obviously, this would take care of several problems at once.

Now, more than ever, growing some of one’s own veg doesn’t seem like a nice middle class weekend activity, but an urgent and essential future survival skill. My ‘Come the apocalypse’ semi-jokey phrase that I’ve used once or twice here in relation to our growing project doesn’t seem quite so throwaway.

On a different note…

No Iona but a day of meditation & haiku

Each year since 2000, in April and sometimes early May, I guide two intensive holistic writing retreats on the sacred Isle of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides. Although no one actually walks there, the retreats are very much led in the spirit of pilgrimage (for Iona has likely been a sacred place since pre-Christian times) and the Islands of the Heart retreats have been the high point of my own and many of the participants’ year.

However, it means that each year I’m away for a few weeks during the most intensive part of our food-growing year; and last year the 750-mile journey (each way) was extraordinarily stress-inducing, not helped by car problems and recurrent ferry cancellations both in crossing the Channel from Brittany and crossing to the islands from mainland Scotland, and I of course had a deadline to meet. I was ill while away, and a year later I’m not as robust as usual, so I’ve taken a break. Nonetheless, this year I miss enormously the people with whom I share the week and the depth work we do there.

It was good, therefore, to have a day of spaciousness with friends back in the UK yesterday leading a haiku and meditation retreat where participants were invited to spend time outdoors, where all that mattered for those moments was exactly that, those moments, in stillness and spaciousness and shared solitude, with each other and the other species with whom we share this still-so-beautiful planet.

Thank you for reading, my friends, and I wish you some of those moments – plenty of those moments – in these tumultuous times of ours. Later – soon – I’ll send over some plant-based recipes. Dig out a tin of chickpeas!