Aunite Beryl enjoying the warm September sun while Bealers does a spot of carpentry

We have a neighbour who is a lovely lady called Beryl. She is the elderly auntie of one of the people who first bought the farm we live at almost two and a half years ago. Beryl is in her late eighties and in a wheelchair but lives here instead of in a old people’s care home.

She joins us each night at the communal meal in the big farmhouse kitchen, she is always happy to receive visitors for a chat and is taken her lunchtime sandwich by anyone of us who are around during the day. Beryl ran her own hair salon for 72 years and so is fully qualified to chat pleasantly about anything and everything with anyone.

Having her here provides us with extra diversity in our group but also another dependent person who along with our small children needs looking after (she needs someone to get her up, washed and dressed in the morning and in the evening requires putting to bed like a toddler does).

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A quick post on the eve of my leaving our home in Worcs/Herefordshire to live with several other families in North Cornwall on a 30 acre smallholding with the long term aim of becoming as self-sufficient as possible.

We’re all very excited but also sad to be saying farewell to some of the most lovely people we have had in our lives since moving here just 9 months ago. In some ways our move here was necessary for us to realise that the rural life was something we wanted long-term. The people we have mixed with here are all people who have livestock and a deep love of country ways.

My poor eldest daughter has sobbed herself to sleep tonight so very sad about leaving the nextdoor neighbour’s cat behind so I have said to her that she may have a pet rabbit when we get the keys to the cottage we will be living in.

I am going down to the farm without Bealers but with the three children and will be staying in our caravan which is all rigged up and ready to be stayed in (washbags, toys, books, cot, pushchair etc all there and waiting for us). Next week the cottage which we are to live in will stop being rented out to holiday makers and so we will be able to walk across the courtyard and start sleeping in it. I have a little sketch on squared paper of where I think some of our furniture will fit when it eventually finds its way down to Cornwall but I suspect I have been over ambitious and will need to revise these plans a little.

I’m so excited about having so many interesting new projects to get involved in (permaculture design and the soon to be launched LAND initiative, seed saving and swapping, building projects, insulation projects, reed-bed water cleansing, rain water harvesting, The Soil Association’s Community Supported Agriculture program) and of course a ready made new community to enjoy.

One member of the community – Steve happened to be in our existing neighbourhood this week and came over for a brief cup of coffee. He is lovely and funny. It was great to see him but also for him to see where we currently are and see what kind of place we are moving from to be members of the farm community.

Very happy to be starting yet another adventure with my lovely husband and my three special littles and hope to keep people updated with interesting nuggets from time to time.

Next week I shall be moving away from our current home to start our new life at the recently formed south west of England eco-village. It is really very early days for the community because up until now although they have had great ideas and plans on how to become self-sufficient in food, energy and water but there has been a lack of people to do the work and finances to help shift things along.

We will be among a large ‘new wave’ of new people joining the group. Since the original eleven people bought the smallholding in 2007, two have moved out, a new family of three has moved in to become ’stage one’ members and a new baby has been born.

At the same time as our move down, another young family of five will be moving in as well as another family of three so the new wave influx will double the original population and will hopefully provide new energy, new ideas, new ways of getting things done, new finance and also just loads more muscle power (to weed the veg patch, dig a reed-bed water purification system, insulate current houses against the brisk Atlantic winter winds and to build office spaces in one of the barns, think about wind turbines, allotments for the local community etc).

We’re really happy to be moving in. The decision process for us has been a long one but now we are hoping to make the farm our new home for at least a year while the other community members and we decide whether or not it will be somewhere we will want to live permanently.

This week a couple who were very serious about moving in at the same time as us made what seemed to be the very sudden decision not to join the community after all. They were kind enough to share the reasons that made them realise that this community would not be a suitable place for them to make their home in a long email to us all.

Most of the reasons were around the fact that the community was not yet operating in a self-sufficient, sustainable manner. At the moment meals that are cooked and eaten communally are often made using some fresh veg from thew garden but also augmented by ingredients from the local supermarket, these ingredients often include meat products from a questionable source (ie. not organic), the rain water harvesting and reuse system is not yet in place and although we have plans to build lots of composting toilets for people to use in order to save  flushing litres of drinking water away each time the use the loo the system is still only in the planning stages. The couple (who I was very much looking forward to being neighbours with as they have so many years of gardening and woodland management knowledge) are also very concerned with the way that there is not a community work ethos and various people work on various land-based projects when they fancy but there is not a need for everyone on site to ensure they have spent some time working on a community project. For this couple who have spent many years living lightly on the earth as vegans and commune members this would have been to hard to bear.

For us, however, the fact that the community is a work-in-progress project is very much one of the attractions.

We are hoping to learn how to be self-sufficient at the same pace as the others who have decided to live there. We are hoping to gain huge amounts of rich experience by partaking in so many projects and hope that very soon with so many great minds and so much human energy available the community will move from becoming self-sufficient to being truly sustainable and can proudly call itself a well functioning eco-village.

I spent the weekend with the twins at Trelay for a ‘new wave’ weekend where all stage 1 members like us got together to discuss many things relating to our possible lives together there.

It was really exciting to see that all of the new members share similar aims in terms of sustainability and resilience and also comforting to find them all to be nice, warm & really interesting and skilled people in their respective fields.We had a judge, some professional gardeners, a woodsman, a nurse and a (sustainable) heating engineer plus of course someone with really useful skills like web development, erm, no…. wait.

5 couples were fully or partially represented (Ackers was in Weymouth doing the unpleasant job of sorting out her recently deceased gran’s house) so should they all move on site full-time as we intend to then Trelay’s population is going to almost double.

We discussed a range of topics on our own and with existing members including conflict resolution, managing community work, where we’d all live and plans for the eco hostel amongst many other things.

We all agreed that it was really luxurious being able to discuss these important but relatively simple topics knowing that the foundations for the community were already in place and working.

I came away exhausted – it was like a 3 day job interview whilst being responsible for two six year olds -  but also positive and hopeful in equal measure that it’ll all work out and we’ll all be moving in this year.

Albert Bates has produced a well written, very accessible and positive book. It gives an excellent summary of the accepted peak-oil theories but, more importantly, the majority of the text provides solutions and suggestions. The recipes don’t get in the way as they appear in the margins but they are interesting nonetheless. Though I’m not sure whether I’m ready to make grasshopper quesadillas yet.

Recommeneded if you’re looking for a positive and well-rounded introduction to peak-oil theory and permaculture.

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@hyperlocavore tweeted a fantastic interview with Albert Bates today.

He has a wealth of experience in the Intentional Community scene and has a lot of practical knowledge to share. But, most importantly to me, he’s also very positive about what may happen in the coming years. For example:

Q: I wanted to start by asking about something I’ve heard you say in other interviews.A lot of other people, even some of the cheery folks, tend to talk about peak oil specifically in really gloomy, sad terms.You tend to talk about it as a potentially positive development for humankind, and I wondered if you could talk about why.

A: There are a few reasons behind that I think everybody at some point has to go through the process of having the realization.That may come as kind of a rude awakening, or it may come as “Aha, I told you so!”, but at some point everybody goes through it. It tends to deepen as time goes on, and people have their own periods of weeping and gnashing the teeth, but then you have to cope, you have to get up and do something about it. I think the more important thing is to have an attitude that something can still be done. You can’t exclude the possibility that the future is still malleable, that there is still an opportunity for positive change if we exert our capacity or our abilities to do that.

….

The full interview is here. It’s quite long but well worth the read.

I am feeling very inspired after attending a LILI course on Low Impact Smallholding over the weekend. It was held at the LILI HQ which is a community called Redfield in Bucks and was run by Simon Fairlie of Chapter 7 and author of Low Impact Development.

It was a very detailed course covering things like planning law, how to choose a plot, what to do when you’ve got it and how to derive an income. All very essential information and delivered by someone with intimate knowledge of the subject in a very relaxed and informal manner. It was also good to hang out for the weekend with other people also looking to do similar things to us.

It was quite frankly superb and my heart has come away urgent for us to move onto our own plot of land and start planting. Head says that having three kids one of whom isn’t one year old yet it’s probably best to wait.

Either way it has become much more of a feasible option now with the biggest challenge being to find somewhere in this country that is even mildly affordable…

If you’re seriously considering setting yourself up with a  smallholding I’d highly recommend this course.

We’ve just come back from a weekend visit to an Intentional Community that’s a cross between an eco village and a co-housing group. The place is called Trelay, in Cornwall and it has totally thrown us; could we really move somewhere like this? It’s too weird to do something like that, right?

We came across the concept after seeing some reasonably priced flats for sale on rightmove that came with 10s of acres. Upon further investigation it was clear that the flats were a in a large subdivided house and that all residents had a share of the grounds that they were expected to help out with maintenance.

It turns out that there are loads of them around the world and plenty in the UK of varying ideological basis (religious, vegan, eco, singing etc) some of them are hard-core communes where you share facilities an income and others are a collection of private spaces with shared resources and a common view of the future.

Trelay fits into the latter camp. It’s a 30 acre farm with approx 12 private living spaces ranging from 3 bed houses to 1 bed log cabins) plus a barn and a range of outbuildings. The residents – who are all ‘normal’ – have an optional communal evening meal and share the work of managing the farm. Individual families have their own pet projects (for example the pigs, chickens or the sheep) whilst the allotment is shared labour. They have woodland, pasture and recently planted an orchard. It’s a new community so there’s still much to do but it’s clear that the people there are passionate about preparing for their future.

After three rather intense and busy days there we’re really not sure what to do now. The place was amazing and the thought of living somewhere like that near the sea and being able to share the burden of running a holding really appeals but do we want to move in with a  bunch of strangers?

More investigation needed. I’m attending my small holding course next week, also at a community, so that should give us some more insight.

UK related links

• UK co-housing network
• Diggers and dreamers
• Community network UK