- And I had a house lined up
in Bruton nearby where the house was separate to the land,
and I had some misgivings about that,
but I was getting pretty close to buying it, actually,
and then withdrew at the last minute.
And the estate agent said,
"Are you sure because you're not going to find anything."
And then she had a moment of reflection,
and said, "Hang on a minute,"
and she had to rummage in her drawer
and found at the bottom
a dusty old document which was Homeacres,
and it had been sitting there for two years.
Nobody wanted it.
(gentle music)
This video is different to my normal ones.
It's a look at how Homeacres has evolved over 10 years.
It's 10 years almost to the day
since I arrived here in October, 2012,
and we're looking, first of all,
at what the house was like
and how that has changed the centre of the property,
and then we're going to look at how the garden started out,
how it's evolved, why it is like it is,
how I got so deeply into making compost,
and the different compost-making setups here.
And then one or two of the other buildings,
like the cabin on the edge of the property
that I don't talk about a lot, I want to show you that.
And then we'll look at the land I bought just 18 months ago,
which has extended Homeacres,
almost doubled the area which it comprises,
so it's now 1 1/2 acres.
When I arrived here, it was 3/4 of an acre,
and it took a bit of a job to find
because I was looking to start a new garden,
find a new home,
and the property market around here is quite tight.
There's not a lot available.
And when I got here, I found the house is quite basic.
It's okay, quite expensive, though.
It was nearly 400,000 pound was the asking price
for a not beautiful house, quite small,
but the land around it was nice,
and that's the bit I wanted, actually.
For most people, it wasn't desirable,
and I brought my spade with me to have a look at the soil,
and the estate agent said, "Oh, I've never seen that,
people bringing a spade when they view the house."
So I dug this little hole, and yeah, the soil was good.
I later found out this had been a market garden.
So, so far so good, and then the house, though,
when I arrived here, it wasn't particularly nice
to live in, quite cold and damp.
And I thought, oh, you know, it's quite basic here.
It'd be nice to have a building on the south side
and a bit warmer and dryer,
and I did a sketch and had discovered
that the guy living opposite, Mark, is a builder.
And I took it to him and said,
"You know, well, what about doing something like this?"
And he said, "Yeah, I could do that."
"Oh," he said, "You know,"
he'd only recently moved here,
and he said, "I was thinking of buying Homeacres."
He said, "And if I had,
I would've knocked the house down and built a new one."
So, oh, okay.
It's not a good reflection of what the house was like,
but it's okay, actually.
You know, I don't want to make it sound too bad.
It's a comfortable house,
but with the conservatory, it's just brilliant,
and that has become a bit like no dig HQ,
where with the changes in my life
over those 10 years as well, it's gone hand in hand,
the development of the property,
and my teaching work in particular,
and the reach, thanks to social media,
I made my first video here nine years ago,
and the development of my life
in that time has been significant,
and that's what I can show you a bit
as we look around the property.
So let's first have a look at starting out in the garden.
(gentle music)
I'm from a farming family,
and my life has been about market gardening
or it was until I got here,
and that's always going to be part of my life.
But when I came here,
I saw it as a chance to take that further.
There's two aspects of food production,
two strands, and one is farming,
and that's the real professionals, big scale,
and then there's gardening, smaller scale,
many more people doing it.
And because like my background was farming,
I always felt that was where I was,
but over time, I've come to notice
that I was talking a lot to gardeners,
and the no-dig method is brilliant for gardening,
and you can scale down very easily from quite large
or actually even scale up again quite a bit.
So this, I thought, when I came here, right,
this could be a teaching garden as well as a market garden.
I wasn't planning to produce a huge amount of food,
although I wanted to, still,
and then through my old customers asking for produce,
it has become quite a market garden.
But I feel actually now that the main emphasis is
on sharing the knowledge
and that's why I've set it up like it is,
like there's quite a few trials going on here.
These two beds, the dig and no-dig comparison beds,
they were the first two I made.
And so when I came, this was just empty field,
and it's like, oh, where do you begin?
You know, making the first two beds with a pathway
and orientation, that kind of gives you a template
for going out from there because it's the alignment.
And it was quite a lot of scratching my head,
and I was going to put them closer to the house.
I didn't have a plan.
I'm not a great believer in, you know,
templates and precise plans.
Have a vision, that's how I would put it more,
because that will carry you forward,
so you kind of need to know where you want to go,
but you can't know every single step
on the way until you get stuck in.
And I had thought, originally,
like these would be closer to the house,
and then I discovered this great lump
of concrete right there,
and then I discovered more
about how this had been a market garden.
In fact, I went up the road
because one of the neighbours said she had
an aerial photograph of Homeacres in 1968.
I was blown away.
It was like, oh, all those greenhouses
and actually, very little trees around the perimeter,
and when I got here, they had become huge,
so that spruce trees that were planted
sometime 50 years before,
and they had grown really enormous,
and it was the same neighbour who actually who I met first
because she walked up the drive
after I'd arrived here, it was Hillary.
And she said, "I'm your new neighbour."
I said, "Okay." She replied
"I hear you're going to have these trees cut down."
She didn't look that pleased about it.
And I said, "Yeah, tomorrow."
And she said, "Oh, well, I just thought
I'd let you know you're going to make
a lot of people very happy."
Oh that was good!
It really lightened up this side of the village.
But that's southwest, this is quite exposed here.
And so that did let the wind in rather, actually
my garage roof blew off that very same autumn.
So that's all part of moving
into a new place and learning a bit about it
and wind's all right, actually it's growing nice vegetables.
So anyway, these beds ended up here.
And then they were the template
for setting up the rest of this area in 2013.
It's not huge.
I wasn't taking in the whole property.
And then it gradually grew
over time and more trials developed
and that included what we're going to look at next
which is making compost,
Because when I came here, I'd always make compost
and it was very much part of what I do
but I wasn't as into it as I am now.
And that has developed with the whole thing
of teaching and communicating and like putting
out videos about making compost
are some of the most popular ones.
And I feel it's really helping to ignite a lot of interest
and passion about as well,
making compost such a central thing,
not only to no dig, but any kind of good gardening.
So let's have a look at the compost making
over here and the different setups.
One insight given to me by social media
about making compost has been the confusion
amongst gardeners about how to do it
and how to use it for that matter.
But making compost has, I feel
from what I hear, being made to sound really difficult.
People feel quite intimidated and then they end up
not doing it or also not happy
with the result and that puts 'em off.
And so I've been able
through different composting setups here to
explain the process and the principles,
so that people understand better what they're doing.
And when you understand something, you can
adapt as you go and succeed better,
'cause everyone's got a different situation,
different materials to add to,
making compost and that kind of thing.
And my teaching work also has come to talk
about other compost you can use, compost you can buy
if you can't make enough,
which for most us is the case.
If you're growing a lot of vegetables that is in particular.
In fact there are different composts here
we've just assembled as it happens this morning
because I'm doing a photo shoot later
with gardening "Which?" magazine,
"Which? Gardening" who are brilliant,
They are looking
at some of these fundamental aspects
of how to garden better,
stripping it down to the basics.
So making compost, you can use anything.
I won't go into details about how to do it now,
'cause you can have a look at my other videos,
which give lots of different insights to, you know,
how you can do it in different ways.
And this structure evolved, it wasn't planned
when I came here at all.
I started out making compost
in autumn 2012 down there just in front of my car.
And I just put up a very basic structure
with pallets and that was commonly how I did it.
Also, sometimes I'd use bales of straw or hay,
just something to hold a heap in place.
And then that gradually enlarged and expanded.
This is quite central to the garden.
That's something I really like
and recommend that you don't hide your compost heap
down in a distant corner.
It's a really important hub as a garden.
And this happened to have been a greenhouse actually.
And so there's a concrete either side
but the base is soil.
That's good.
And by 2016 I was kind of making more
and more compost and was thinking,
"Ah, I'd really like to have a roof over it."
I'd read a book written a long time ago in the 1930s
by a lady called Maye Bruce, "common sense compost making."
And she had a roof and I'd never really
seen that anywhere else.
And the idea is you keep the rain off
and you get more air, and your heap as a result
doesn't get so soggy.
And mine was getting soggy.
We had had some wet summers and winters.
So the roof arrived in 2016,
it was Mark Curtis, actually the same builder
who helped to make this,
cost about 2,500 pounds, to give you an idea.
It was quite big.
These bays are actually bigger
than most gardeners would want.
It's suitable for a market garden.
It's all handwork.
We're not using any tractors or anything.
And then I thought, "Wow, you know,
it's not appropriate for smaller gardens."
And last spring, I was starting work
on a new book with Dorling Kindersley publishers,
which has become the "No Dig" book.
And for that, I thought, right,
we could have something smaller in scale
and more garden related, so that was the origin
of the the three pallet compost setup,
which I've got over there.
And then also I bought a couple
of these plastic daleks we call them
from the "Doctor Who" television series in the UK.
I have American viewers here who say, "What are daleks?"
And so yeah, it's just evolved nicely
and it's still evolving
and I don't know what might happen next
but we're basically refining the compost making
and using these structures to help with that.
And we could now just have a look
at a completely different structure
on the other side of Homeacres' garden.
(gentle music)
I've always been fascinated
by small buildings and structures
and especially if they're in a garden, what could be nicer?
And when I saw this place,
this cabin I call it for sale in 2018, wow.
How could one resist?
I've been interested in having something
in the garden where visiting family and people helping out
briefly could stay and it's just so beautiful.
It was being sold by the builder who'd made it.
He was moving away and part
of the deal was he'd take it down,
bring it here and put it up again.
And you don't need planning permission
for a structure like this,
because it's lower than 2 1/2 metres.
It has no concrete foundations.
It's built on wooden pillars that go
into the ground under this decking.
It's all local wood and it's off grid.
So there's a solar panel, there's a car battery,
then that translates that
into electricity for the lights in there.
That's all it's got.
There's a wood burning stove,
so it can be cosy in the winter.
It's actually well insulated.
It's a really nice building.
I'd love to live in it actually,
but it wouldn't really be practical for my work.
Being off grid, you know,
Means I wouldn't have a router in here,
all that kind of thing.
So it's just a nice space to have in the garden.
Maybe I might live in here one day, who knows.
And we were running out of space, you know,
this actually fitted very nicely
into a somewhat derelict corner of Homeacres,
which has since become quite a feature,
Because we've also got the herb garden here,
which we created, and we made a video about that
with Jacob McVickar last summer in fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwy4U7kjtI
And then over there, part of my work
is always making new beds,
Because I want to be explaining
about no dig and how you can start out.
And I was running out
of ground in Homeacres to make any more new beds.
We managed to find a little very weedy
overgrown corner over there where we made a video
with Kevin of Epic Gardening a couple of years back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW2aVZkjJa0
And then, well, that led
onto the next part of Homeacres' development.
So let's go and have a look.
(gentle music)
It was just under two years ago
that the opportunity arose to maybe buy this field.
And it was from my neighbour Jenny Jackson
who lived just up there and I'd known her for quite a while.
It was her daughter actually who actually sold me
this property eight years before that.
And they had this field which had been part
of Homeacres before the market garden.
And so it kind of felt right,
but I was hesitating at first.
Part of me didn't want it.
It's like, oh, the big area of new land,
just under an acre, three and a half thousand square metres.
What am I going to do with it?
How am I going to find the time to justify having it?
And okay, so I did buy it,
just paid £42,000 for this plot,
which for me was actually really good investment
since it's right on the doorstep.
And I did not have a plan when I took
down some of the fence to come through into the field.
I looked at it, it was January, 2021.
Oh my goodness, what am I going to do?
I started cutting grass with the scythe actually
that first afternoon and realised I was not
making much impression on the size there.
So then we started mulching
with cardboard and black plastic to kill the weeds.
Turned out, there was huge amount
of bindweed here, Convolvulus,
and it's like, "Oh my goodness me,
that was quite a challenge."
A good one though, because it mirrors
what a lot of gardeners have to deal with.
And so I could explain how we managed all that.
No dig, not turning the ground at all,
just leaving everything in place.
And that's become a playlist of videos we made
through that first year of 2021 last year that was,
and you can find out here on YouTube.
So going forward also then,
what else was I going to do with this land?
We were just growing vegetables on one small corner of it,
less than 1/10 of the area.
So I thought, "Oh, I need a shed."
I got plan permission to build that shed.
That was Mark Curtis again, the same builder who did it.
Brilliant guy to work with, 'cause, you know,
he'll talk with you and it evolved,
and again through just a very basic plan
on a piece of paper.
And then I'd wanted a pond for quite a while.
And so, my son Jack, we had to get
permission again for the pond.
So we made that in January
of this year and it filled out with water.
That was a beautiful story.
And then it emptied again. (laughs)
That was the not-so-nice part of the story.
That's still evolving.
I don't know how that's going to go.
It's just got a little puddle in now
at the bottom of the pond at the moment.
I don't want to put a liner in it.
We'll see what happens.
So it is still too early to say how that will turn out.
And in the corner beyond the pond, there's some bees.
That's another nice part
of this field and it just keeps evolving.
So that's Homeacres as it is now.
What's going to happen next?
I don't really know, but I have a vision,
which is that this is very much the epicentre,
I feel the beautiful heartbeat
of no dig spreading across the world.
No dig meaning a really nice way
to treat the soil, to grow food,
to grow healthy food, more linkage.
I'd love to see between understandings of how to grow food
in this beautiful way and how nourishing that is
for health and wellbeing for us as well as for wildlife.
Very much, you know, no dig, I think's a brilliant way
of getting that linkage between soil
and food and health and even going, you know,
in a bigger way, even into the world.
The energy.
I like working with unmeasurable,
unmeasurable at the moment anyway,
soil energies, finding out how they interact
with soil and us.
So I see lots of possibilities and working
with scientists as well to find out in a more
precise way what's going on when you do no dig
and how that links to the health of plants you grow.
So watch this space
and it's been a pleasure to share this with you so far.
(gentle music)