about six years ago um i was working for
a professional rugby club
and it became increasingly obvious that
i was getting quite unwell but i
couldn't
quite put my finger on what it was i
just i didn't feel right
by the time that contract ended i was
actually so ill
i there was no way i was going to be
able to find another job
i just i needed to go to the doctors and
say what's going on
i walked into the doctor and said look
i've put on all this weight i don't feel
very well
i'm happy for you to tell me i've got a
severe case of cake
but i think my thyroid's gone so a few
tests later and they confirmed that my
thyroid was misfunctioning dysfunction
and whatever and also that i was
desperately low in vitamins and minerals
in my body
and i actually was at the point where i
felt so ill i just went to bed
basically i was in bed for about 23
hours a day for
about four and a half months and
mr and jay and i were also in the
process of trying to find
a new place to live so we were in a
rented house
that we'd rented together just to see
whether we could stand living together
or not um and we agreed to to live
together for six months and see how that
worked
two and a half years later we thought
well perhaps we'll buy somewhere
together
so during that time of feeling so ill
and so awful we saw this place
advertised
and we came to see it and completely
fell in love with it
and i walked around here using walking
sticks
to get me around and wondered whether
it was something that i could take on
whether actually i was just being mad
thinking that
i could take on something that was a bit
over three quarters of an acre
when i could hardly walk around the
house let alone around the garden
but you know belief and faith in
in that you can do things goes an
awfully long way
and so we went through the process of
buying this
and all the time i was still getting
more and more poorly
and probably about three weeks before we
bought it i slept in to turn a corner
and my health started picking up very
slightly
and we started our new life here in a
pretty precarious situation of
what do we do if i don't get any better
than i am now
and i think both of us just believe that
you know that that i
having turned that corner and very
slightly started
getting better that that living here
would improve my health
um exponentially one of the key things
of our relationship
is that when we got together we agreed
we would divide everything 50 50. so all
our bills are split down the middle even
our food bills
and being that poorly i i knew i wasn't
going to be going back to work in the
same kind of work that i've done before
which has always been fairly stressful
um
peculiar hours and i i knew that i was
going to have to be kinder to me
so i said why don't i
commit to producing our food
as my equivalent to putting in cash
so rather than having to go out to work
and have two cars and pay for
clothes to work in and all of those
things to earn this bit of money to buy
food why don't i grow the food
[Music]
so mr j was really happy about that and
i
i think we both kind of understood that
that wasn't going to be an instant fix i
wasn't going to be
instantly putting money into our joint
account but that over time
that would come that would it would come
in terms of
we would be paying out less on food and
maybe
eventually down the line i'd find a way
of creating an income from this site as
well
i think i had really unrealistic
expectations of how much i could achieve
i was
i was thinking of how much i would have
achieved before i got ill
in any given day and and i just wasn't
factoring in that now everything was
going to be much
slower to to develop and for me to be
able to do things so
i kind of thought oh it will take me a
couple of months to
create this raised bed garden but
actually
you've got to get from a to b and the
process
of of building that vegetable garden
was much longer and
and yet it was better that the fact that
it took so long
meant that we actually had time to learn
much more that the wind doesn't just
come from one direction there are
different times of year
that it comes from another direction so
i couldn't just say well i'll put a
windbreak here
because actually i needed one on that
side as well for the few weeks a year
that it came
the wind came from that side and
the the plan on paper started to unfold
but
as that process happened we were able to
build in all the other things that we
were learning through
through observation and through
experience so it's
five years since i first went out into
that field
and looked around it and i now produce
all the fruit and veg for our family
apart from the other thing
that we can't grow here but i'm not just
growing
for our family i've now been running a
csa
community supported agriculture
vegetable scheme for the last two years
i trialled it last year that absolutely
micro
scheme of seven veg boxes and this year
i'm doing 20 boxes and that's for uh
for a 20 week season so it's not all
year round but for 20 weeks a year
we're feeding 20 other families too
working outside
in the garden all day long could
potentially be a really lonely life and
i am alone a lot of the day
or alone in terms of other human company
a lot of the day
but it's far from lonely i i think
there's a big distinction between the
two
and in terms of being alone it's quite
easy to network
social media nowadays allows us to do
that really easily
but i actually quite like being alone i
quite like being
alone with my own thoughts or just
having a bit of music playing on
in the background but actually spending
time with myself and having that room to
think and to breathe and
and not to have a multitude of messages
being thrown at me all the time from
from every which way media
i think is really healthy and
and i'm not lonely in as much as
i think i think loneliness is a
different state of mind
and i think being alone is where i want
to be a lot of the time
um and the cat's always around there are
other
there are other living things so monty
the cat is around the ducks the chickens
are all around
so i'm aware that there's other uh other
living beings around and then a much
smaller level
there's there's a constant chatter of
birds and insects and
and being able to lose myself and lose
my thoughts in watching those
is such a privilege and it's and it's
such a joy
that i don't actually have time to be
lonely
i'd never have imagined five years ago
when uh when we were first looking
around here
that i would then be writing a book
about our experience
and it's less about my experience or mr
jay's experience here than
a biography of the field of the
transformation from
just a paddock to this living breathing
food producing space
and it's been it's been such a short
journey and yet it's been
a really exciting one and there are some
days it's felt like it's been a very
long journey but overall that process
has been
it's been really interesting and it's
been
exciting and i'm really pleased to have
a chance to share
share just how we've done that the
process i've gone through the thinking
behind it
and i've included lots of of why i chose
to do one thing rather than another
and i share my mistakes
and my successes and
and there's just a lot of celebration in
it of
of the changes that have happened uh to
that
that field that was just it was
looked like just grass when we moved in
and it had had alpacas and a pony on it
and it was just it was a paddock for
animals
and to to be able to see it now looking
so different and having such
a hugely different function it's
it's very it feels like a privilege to
be able to share that
and to be able to to take
take you along with me on that journey
to where it is now there's quite a stark
contrast between what's happening
here and what's happening on the other
side of the
the hedges around us where it's
we are surrounded by industrial
agriculture
um with the monoculture crops
and i'm very aware of it because i see
the farmers out there
with their combine harvesters and their
sprays and notions and potions doing
whatever it is that they need to do
produce
massive amounts of food
but it's all one thing and and with it
there are
all the uh issues that come with
industrialized agriculture
and i wish there were more small
producers
i wish that i wish just even just on a
local level there were more people
producing
small amounts of food you know three
quarters of an acre is not
it's it's a large a large large garden
and i'm not going to dismiss
that in terms of just being a garden
it's a huge space but
in terms of food production it's a
really small space
and yet the diversity of food that we
can produce
for the number of families that we can
produce it without
using artificial chemicals
it's just a huge difference and and i
wish so i wish there were a lot more
smaller producers
members of our veg bot scheme are
are also thrilled at knowing exactly
where their food
came from and they all say how much
nicer it tastes now whether it actually
tastes nicer or not i'm
i'm not going to argue that one but if
it's perceived to
and i think there's a lot about knowing
where your food came from
that then satisfies other needs in your
in your brain about this is being this
is good for me
and if you feel like you're doing
something that's good for you you'll
feel you feel better
in that cyclical way but each year i
have
developed a new area so i sort of i've
created an area and i've got comfortable
with
the production the food production in
that area and then moved on to
another project the next year and part
of that is because i wanted to complete
that area how
how i imagined it would be
it's nothing like i imagined it would be
at the beginning
it's way way better which is lovely i'm
really pleased about that
but there's a part of me that constantly
wants to learn
and change and develop and see
how much i can push the boundaries or
not
so that area has been evolving and i
kind of feel like it's complete
in terms of its structural development
now
and the next set of changes are about
how how if more how much more
efficiently i can use that space so
uh my next set of of
of expansion to some extent is less
about expanding the area
and more about concentrating on
particular areas
and expanding what i'm growing in them
because i think the time will come when
there isn't any room to physically
expand
but emotionally mentally that's an
ongoing journey