Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency: The Classic Guide for Realists and 
Dreamers by John Seymour (Dorling Kindersley, 2003)
http://home.clara.net/heureka/books/self-sufficiency.htm
True homesteaders will seek to husband their land, not exploit it. -- John 
Seymour

I once knew an old lady who lived by herself in the Golfen valley of 
Herefordshire. She was one of the happiest old women I have ever met. She 
described to me all the work she and her mother used to do when she was a 
child: washing on Monday, butter-making on Tuesday, market on Wednesday, and 
so on. “It all sounds like a lot of hard work,” I said to her. “Yes, but 
nobody told us then,” she said in her Herefordshire accent. “Told you what?” 
“Told us there was anything wrong with work!” -- John Seymour

It is amazing what can be packed into an urban garden. Even the smallest 
space can be made productive and what could be a more attractive that the 
sight of a well tended succulent fruit and vegetables right outside your back 
door. -- John Seymour

Nothing should be wasted on the self-sufficient holding. The dustman should 
never have to call. -- John Seymour

I first came across this book in its original incarnation The Complete Book 
of Self-Sufficiency at least two decades ago. Then I used to brew beer and 
make wine, grow fruit and vegetables in the garden. Since then the trees in 
my garden have grown too tall, shading out most of the garden, and it has 
been turned into a wildlife garden, although runner beans and tomatoes still 
grow, and in addition I have turned old and lazy.

My interest has recently been rekindled for several reasons: A friend has a 
small holding up in the mountains of Tenerife, he has built a house, terraced 
the land with dry-stone walling, planted at least a hundred fruit trees, 
possibly many more, keeps chickens, grows potatoes, maize and many other 
vegetables, many of which, if not all, in the future, will be heritage 
varieties, his bible is the original The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, 
plus his own practical experience, he toils on the land every day, weather 
permitting; another friend has been toiling away clearing a woodland glade in 
the Surrey Hills, the logs he burns on the fireplace in the winter; yet 
another friend has squatted a block of flats to prevent the local council 
destroying an estate of social housing housing in an area of acute social 
deprivation, the squatters are greening the estate, have so far created a 
wildlife area and are in the process of creating a community garden for a 
food co-op using traditional varieties; and from an entirely different 
perspective an interest in heritage seeds, re-kindled by Seedy Sunday, 
currently we are growing some of these with the help of a few friends. Then I 
happened on the updated book, The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency.

People today rush hither and thither. Have no time for anything, other than 
to drive to the local superstore, pick up a ready-meal and pop it into the 
microwave, and even that is going out of their way, compared with using the 
mobile phone to call for a pizza topped with its artificial plastic cheese.

We have forgotten what real food is. We have forgotten what it is to live.

    A true home should be the container for living real hospitality, true 
culture and conviviality, real fun, solid comfort, and above all, real 
civilisation. And the most creative thing that anybody can do in this world 
is to make a real home .... One of the essential characteristics of a good 
home is “craftsmanship”.

    It is true that our friends in the supermarkets have made many “advances” 
in the complexity of pre-prepared meals. But the sad fact is that our food 
now travels thousands – yes thousands – of miles between the placed it is 
produced and our mouths. Most people never get an opportunity to taste real 
local-grown fresh food – they do not know what they are missing ... if there 
is no quality in the food we eat, then we must just hope to get through life 
as quickly as possible ... the sources of our food are getting further away 
from our tables and the food goes through more and more industrial 
processing, the only quality now deemed important is long shelf life. Such 
food is dead food: all the life has been taken out of it. The best food of 
all comes from our own garden and our own land. Next best is food from a 
local farm, or farmer's markets, and then food from a local shop.

The best thing any of us can do is throw out the TV, that monster that 
dominates our lives and dulls the senses.

I used to be invited around to spend the evening with a lovely friend Estie. 
I'd bring a bottle of good wine, she'd prepare an excellent meal from fresh 
ingredients. We'd sit and relax and talk or listen to good music.

We can all start by learning to make our own things, repair that which is 
broke. When I was young, we used to build everything, repair everything. My 
father still does. He even repairs his own shoes. He was taught, I believe by 
my grandfather, and inherited his cobbler's last from his father. Sadly I 
have not acquired these useful habits

We don't have to have a small-holding, but we all have, well nearly all, a 
back garden, or lacking that, a few pots or a window box. We can start by 
growing our own food, or at least some of it. Nothing is as tasty or 
delicious, as the food we have grown with our own hands, picked from our own 
garden.

When we grow our own food, learn how to prepare and cook it, our sense of 
values change.

    We had never had any real conscious drive to self-sufficiency. We had 
thought, like a lot of other people, that it would be nice to grow our own 
vegetables.

    But living here has altered our sense of values. We find that we no 
longer place the same importance on artifacts and gadgets as other people do. 
Also – every time we buy some factory-made article we wonder what sort of 
people made it – if they enjoyed making it or if it was just a bore – what 
sort of life the maker, or makers, lead.

Seymour describes two Cretan villages. One high up in the mountains, remote, 
accessed by a pot-holed road, close to the cave where Zeus was born. The 
villagers farm in the traditional way as they have for generations, are 
self-sufficient, happy. Further down, a village is connected to the outside 
world by a new road. In has come TV, developers. The developers have ripped 
up the old trees and vineyards, grown olives as cash crops, the villagers now 
have to 'pay' for their olive oil and were dragged into the global cash 
economy, the TV tells the people what they are 'missing', the 'delights' of 
Coca-Cola. To the young of the village, the new road is the road to the city, 
to bright lights, to freedom. Seymour sees it for what it really is 'a road 
to sadness, wage slavery, and discontent, and one from which the youngsters 
could not return.'

Right up to and after the end of the Second World War, if you had looked in 
anyone's back garden, you would have found a well-tended vegetable garden, 
with a few fruit bushes. Then it all started to change. Vegetable gardens 
were replaced by well-manicured lawns with a flower border. Now it is all 
starting to change again. Gardens are being bricked over as though people 
have an aversion to soil.

    However limited the space available, you only need the determination to 
abandon your space-wasting lawn and flowerbeds in exchange for a programme of 
planned crop rotation for every inch of your garden to become a productive 
unit ... your end products will be fresh, and your garden will be a fine 
example of a dying breed: the cottage garden of yesteryear.

It was not uncommon to find where I grew up, people keeping chickens in their 
back gardens. Fed off household waste, fresh eggs for breakfast. So common, 
that new houses, and in particular council housing, often had covenants and 
conditions attached that prohibited the keeping of chickens and pigs.

What is interesting is that these age-old traditions are starting to be 
revived as people react to the rubbish found on the shelves of supermarkets.

Nothing compares to food fresh out of your own garden, especialy if you use 
traditional seed varieties. If you save the seeds and swap with your friends, 
as well as enjoying good food, you are also helping to safeguard endangered 
seed varieties.

There are two principles to attend to for a successful smallholding: maintain 
the vitality of the soil and crop rotation.

If you move up from a back garden, to a one to five acre plot, you should be 
thinking of a few animals, a few chickens, maybe a pig or a goat. Seymour 
does not believe you are entirely self-sufficient unless you also keep 
animals, and that animals be essential for the recycling of nutrients.

Nothing beats home made bread, brewed beer and fermented wine.

If you grow your own food, there will peaks and troughs. As well as growing 
it, you need to master the often neglected black arts of storage – pickling, 
bottling, freezing, salting, cold storage.

    It is autumn and you have a surfeit of all the crops you have been 
gathering through the summer. What more fulfilling than to bottle, pickle and 
preserve in all possible ways for for the dark days of winter ahead? ...

    ... [there is] a vitamin shortage in the dark winters, and those dark, 
cold days should be enlivened by nice tastes and odours beside that of salt 
bacon. So the self-supporter will wish to preserve certain things, preferably 
by a process which improves their natural flavour, such as bottling, 
pickling, chutneying, or wine-making. There is nothing more encouraging in 
autumn than the sight of shelves heavily laden with full jars and crocks. 
More than anything, they give you the feeling that you are likely to survive 
the winter.

Freezing is an aid to attempt to retain the freshness of the original. 
Seymour sees pickling, chutneys, jams, wines, not just a method of storing 
our surplus for the winter months, but a way of enhancing their original 
flavours.

Seymour recommends salting runner beans, but I have always found freezing to 
be preferable. A friend goes out and collects elderberries, freezes, then 
uses to top cakes in the winter.

Tomatoes can be bottled, but nothing else is worth bottling. Mushrooms can be 
dried, then used in winter soups or part of a casserole.

If you are self-sufficient, it isn't just what we grow, food is there for the 
picking in the wild. Who hasn't stuffed their face full of blackberries at 
the end of summer? But it isn't only blackberries, have you tried 
elderberries, hazelnuts, and what about some wild fungi in the autumn?

Shaggy Ink Cap, I have never thought much of, Field Mushrooms though are 
delicious. I also recommend Puffballs. Cook as Seymour recommends, in the 
oven. I will always remember finding a puffball whilst walking the coast in 
Cornwall, then walking with it all day. It was worth it though, when we 
cooked it in the oven that evening for supper. So were Horse Mushrooms that I 
found in a grassy field.

    Collecting wild food is part of our pleasure. If we go for a country walk 
we keep our eyes open for for fungi ...

    Giant puff ball is the easiest food in the world to prepare, for it cuts 
cleanly into lovely firm white slices which can be fried in butter; and then 
it is delicious. Parasol mushroom is another favourite of ours. It tastes 
similar to field mushroom, but is strangely flavoured and I think better. 
Champignon, or 'fairy ring' toadstools are fine if you can find enough of 
them to make it worth cooking them for they go down as cooks say 'to nothing'.

Sweet Chestnuts, as Seymour says, are smaller than those found in the shops, 
but infinitely preferable.

Sloes, eaten straight off the bush, make your mouth curl, but drunk on a cold 
Christmas Day curled up before a log fire after dinner as Sloe Gin, now that 
is an entirely different matter.

Nothing goes to waste when you are self-sufficient. Clay can be dug up and 
turned into hand-made bricks.

Willow can be used for basket weaving. My friend on his small-holding has a 
whippy, willow-like tree, only it is not willow. He made himself a small tool 
out of hard word, pointed, with three grooves. He slips this into the end of 
a thin willowy-like branch, and slips it through the branch, dividing it into 
three. Self-taught, with help from neighbours, he has made a range of 
baskets. Some are used in the house for fruit, others in the fields to 
collect potatoes. Nothing goes to waste.

If you are self-sufficient in food, you should also be self-sufficient in 
energy, or at least aim to minimise consumption and waste.

Don't go it alone. That is the advice Seymour ends with. He went it alone. 
Too much like hard work, no time for the pleasures of life, no time for 
music, no time for literature, no time for conversation. Cooperate with 
neighbours.

We can of course continue our pact with the Devil, work for global 
corporations, help them get rich and rip other people off, churn out useless 
crap in our mind-numbing routine, work our balls off to pay for the season 
ticket, our mortgage, to pay for all the worthless crap we buy to maintain 
our lifestyle, then when we retire, often early through ill-health or because 
we have been forcibly retired, find our pension is worthless because we too 
were ripped off, that we cannot pay off our mortgage because we were 
ripped-off there too ....

If we are successful at self-sufficiency, and to be successful we have to 
work with nature not against, and we learn but one lesson, it will be this: 
we are a part of nature not apart from nature.

The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency was the guide to self-sufficiency. 
Revised and updated, The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency is still the 
guide to self-sufficiency.

    * www.self-sufficiency.net

Also worth reading

Suzanne Ashworth, Seed to Seed: Seed Saving Techniques for the Vegetable 
Gardener, Chelsea Green

Jose Bove and Francois Dufour, The World is Not for Sale: Farmers Against 
Junk Food, Verso, 2001

William Cobbett, Cottage Economy

Brian Donahue, Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New 
England Town, Yale University Press, 1999

Archie Duncanson, Ecology Begins at Home, Green Books, 2004

Dominique Guillet, The Seeds of Kokopelli, Association Kokopelli

Corby Kummer, The Pleasures of Slow Food, Chronicle Books, 2002

Richard Mabey, Food for Thought

Carlo Petrini, Slow Food, Columbia University Press, 2004

Pauline Pears (ed), HDRA Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening, Dorling 
Kindersley, 2001

Julia Ponsonby, Gaia's Kitchen, Green Books

John Seymour, The Fat of the Land, Metatonia Press, 1991

John Seymour and Herbert Girardet, Blueprint for a Small Planet, Dorling 
Kindersley, 1987

Patrick Whitefield, The Earth Care Manual: A Permaculture Handbook, Permanent 
Publications, 2004