Proto-prepping

I’m late with the blog this week, partly because we’ve been busy with visitors and socialising, but also because I’ve been struck by one of my all-too-frequent bouts of depression.

The news regarding the state of our climate is so awful I won’t attempt to regurgitate any of it here. Sometimes I am filled with a sense of sadness so complete it is though a deeply-loved family member has died. I will try to get up and do something positive but often all I can do is flop back down into my bed. I find myself obsessively reading Twitter or playing solitaire – anything to distract myself from my miserable inner monologue.

So thank goodness for the garden, for guests, for dogs, the sea and for Fiddian. Generally if I can get outside and do something – even if it’s just looking around or pulling up a few weeds, I feel better almost instantly. Sometimes whole afternoons can go by in a state of almost happiness. Shorter days make this harder, but we have discovered that the walled garden can be very pleasant at night, especially round the embers of a dying fire. We had an impromptu gathering there on Friday night, with an old friend and two new friends from the village who have been helping us with the garden. We sat around, sipping wine, giggling and looking at the stars. It is so nice to finally live somewhere where people can just “pop round” and stay for hours.

Then on Sunday my cousin and his lovely partner came to visit. They have lived around here for many years, and bought a generous gift box of seeds for the garden, home made marmalade and damson gin, and various other goodies. Again, it has been many many years since I lived anywhere close to members of my family – what ought to be normal feels like a strange luxury.

In the past, I took refuge from my depression in work, with a lot of success. Increasingly though, I find it isn’t enough. I used to love the intellectual puzzle of building a successful business. Now I wonder who on earth will want to pay for language learning on a dying planet? What is the point of speaking Japanese if there is not enough water, or the grain crops have failed again? I try to push these thoughts away, because I still love my job and the people I work with, but it gets harder and harder each month.

In an attempt to assert some control over my situation, I sat and made a list of the things we can do here to try and take care of ourselves in the event that droughts become more frequent in Cornwall and life starts to become significantly more challenging. It struck me afterwards that perhaps I am becoming a prepper – something I used to scoff at. Well, I stopped scoffing a long time ago. Here is my list, recorded for posterity. I have given myself a rough timeline of two and a half years, which will take me up to May 2025, when I will be almost 47:

• Finish work on the main house: make it watertight, well insulated, with ground-source heat pump controlling the heating, and a wood-burning stove downstairs (the goal is that firewood should be the only significant heating cost)
• Bio-digester installed for sewerage
• Stream properly investigated and managed (we have found part of the stream seems to be diverted into an underground channel, which means we lose a lot of water somewhere on the property)
• Water tank installed to supply the veg garden with water
• Potentially our own bore hole dug, or the mysterious well that is marked on some old maps recovered
• Veg garden established and productive
• Composting system built and maintained (kitchen waste, garden waste, household waste and leaf mould)
• System in place for harvesting and storing firewood, with some fallen trees remaining for bio-diversity
• Water butts installed around the property for harvesting rainwater
• Pond area planned and potentially dug
• Greenhouse built and functioning
• Poly-tunnel built and functioning
• Walled garden designed and planted with drought-resistant, low-maintenance plants
• Dangerous trees removed
• Native hedging planted in gaps around the perimeter to protect us from wind (and marauding campers)
• Orchard area cleared of bracken and fruit trees planted
• Plan in place for management of woodland area – starting to introduce more species diversity to the trees, hedging and ground cover.
• (Hopefully) start to be able to make some income from the place: could be through selling produce, F’s furniture or ceramics, hosting workshops or maybe working holidays for gardeners and artists. It’s too early for us to know what will be possible here.
• Plan in place for the pottery: we hope to be able to turn it into a local arts centre, but whether we can or not will depend on lots of things we don’t yet know – particularly how much all of the above will cost!

I have some sub-aims for the vegetable garden:

• By the end of 2023 I’d like us to have grown 15-20% of our fruit and veg for the year.
• By the end of 2024, I’d like this to have risen to >50%
• By the end of 2025, my goal is for us to be two thirds self-sufficient in fruit and veg (I don’t think we will ever be fully self-sufficient, as there are just so many standard crops like potatoes, onions and wheat, which we can buy cheaply enough that it makes most sense to use the space for more expensive produce).

Also important to record are the things I don’t want to do:

• Don’t destroy the wildness of the place: it should be managed, but not pristine or pretty
• Don’t destroy the biodiversity! There are so many insects here, as well as birds, bats and small mammals. Planting should encourage more insects, and careful management of the wilder areas (including leaving a lot of them alone) should help with this.
• Don’t destroy myself in the process. I only have limited energy. If I don’t get all of it done, it’s fine.
• Don’t hoard the place: we want to share it with other people, not keep it all to ourselves
• Don’t forget to stop and look around, and to just be: I want to do less work in future, not more
• Don’t give in to depression: in the end it doesn’t help me or anyone else.