News from our farmstead #16

Plumageddon (how you can homestead without a homestead)

What would you do with 22kg of plums, if you only had access to a five cubic centimetres (or thereabouts) of freezer space? Just how many ways ARE there to eat courgette, and what kind of foods have a low enough water content that they can be dried in a couple of days on the dashboard of a car?

I think these are Damson plums?

These are the kinds of questions which have been keeping us busy lately. Yesterday I finally made it through the plums (hello plum chutney, plum jam, stewed plums and prunes). I thought I had made it through the courgettes but a couple of courgette plants I’d forgotten about had other plans for me. And don’t get me started on the grapes!

As everyone says, growing food is the easy part - preserving it is where the real work is! This is something I really wish I’d taken more time to learn in the past, before we even had land, because it takes a while to master the skills and learn how to preserve safely (and tastily!). It’s something I could have been experimenting with a lot more, using supermarket-purchased food, and then I wouldn’t have felt so bad if I messed something up.

This got me thinking about how lots of the skills I’ve been learning over the last year and a half can be easily learnt and practiced even without access to land. If having a little patch of land is a dream or goal of yours, you don’t have to wait until you get there to start working on the kinds of skills that will help you make the most of it. Or if you’re concerned about the number of plums that seem to be developing on your plum tree and are anticipating with dread the day they all start coming crashing down around you, it’s never too soon to start being a little more prepared. Preserving, fermenting, canning, growing in pots, mending, working with fibres, cooking seasonally, basic DIY, plant identification, foraging…. all of these things can be practiced and explored without access to your own land.

Maybe it feels a bit pointless to be working on these skills if you’re living in a flat without access to a garden or terrace, or are stuck in a daily grind that barely affords you the time to heat up a ready-meal, let alone tend to the 48-hour proving needs of a loaf of sourdough bread. That’s definitely how it felt for me when we lived in a flat in Manchester, and that’s probably why I didn’t start on some of these skills as early as I could have done. But Mauro and I did join a shared allotment in our neighbourhood, and for about 6 months I set myself the challenge of baking all our own bread. I figured out how to mend a bunch of clothes (even though it would have been SO much quicker and cheaper to just buy replacements) and I started learning to identify all the trees on our daily dog walks. In spring we picked huge handfuls of wild garlic leaves from the park over the road, which everyone else completely ignored, and in autumn I walked Tofu EVERYWHERE trying to find an oak tree to collect acorns from.

In the shared allotment, Manchester (2019)

It didn’t feel like much at the time, and I definitely could have done more, but even these simple things began to open up a new way of seeing the world - a different awareness of the seasons, a closer attention to the details surrounding me, an appreciation for things I’d previously been blind to. Every new observation sparked dozens of questions. Why is this hawthorn blooming while the one next to it isn’t? What is this thing which looks like wild garlic but isn’t? Who dug this hole? Can I eat these mushrooms? (no).

Even if having your own little bit of land doesn’t look like a realistic possibility (at the time, it certainly wasn’t clear that it would be possible for us), I really do think that anything that draws you closer to the natural world, the seasons, and to doing practical things with your hands is hugely beneficial regardless of the “end goal”. These activities in and of themselves are grounding and purposeful and feel so good. And of course, you never know when you might have 22kg of plums which you need to deal with.

Half of the plums…

So in short, whether you expect an upcoming Plumageddon or not… this is your sign from the universe to start now, with whatever is it that you feel a longing towards doing. There is never a better time 😊

From Harriet & Mauro 🐾