I will try to make this a quick update as I’m hoping to get some more sleep before the night is over having been up since 3.30 with too much on my mind to sleep.

The children and I have been having a wonderful time here on the farm since we arrived 8 days ago. We’ve unexpectedly had back-to-back visitors staying with us or popping over for day trips from their holidays which has made a huge difference to us. Not only have we had the comfort and good company of people who know us well but an additional benefit was having to show people round making the new environment instantly feel like we definitely live here and our friends and family are the new visitors seeing it with new eyes.

Thankfully the weather has been kind to us so despite some very heavy rain showers on the whole the two eldest kids have been out playing with their friends (comprising of other children living here but also the children who are visiting and staying with other residents here), we’ve all been on the beach a fair few times and happily harvesting fresh vegetables for dinners. My littlest child loves being outside to watch the ducks waddle around the courtyard, throw the pigs some tasty pea pods and visit the pet rabbit living in a hutch not far from us.

I keep finding myself signing up to be the chef for the main communal meal which is odd as it was the one thing I was really worried about but I guess you can’t keep a food lover out of the kitchen for long even if it does mean cooking for up to 20 people with an eighteen month old cling to your leg or exploring the contents of the recycling bucket. Last night we cooked ‘rainbow risotto’ with loads of different veg, I made a quick simple tomato pasta for loads of kids one night too. A massive joy of living in such a close community is eating the wonderful food that others cook with great care. On the night we had a utility bonfire to burn hedges trimmings we had such a outdoor feast of really simple but such delicious things – sausages made from the meat of home-reared pigs, macaroni cheese, fresh fresh salad and lovely bright purple beetroot.

The one thing that is totally wrong with the intentional community we have moved to is that my dear husband is not with us (he is sadly chained to his computer in Worcestershire while one of his client’s projects nears completion until the latter part of this week). The children are missing their daddy and keep asking when he will come. Bealers still has the settling in period to go through where I feel my transition to learning how the farm is managed and how the community ticks is well underway. But hopefully he will enjoy a few more summery days when he does finally arrive and enjoy spending relaxed cups of tea on sunny steps having random chats with the people who live here as they pass by as I have done since we got here.

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 finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy last week – an amazing novel for the ‘globally warmed generation’ – very dark and bleak tale of a man and his young son walking though a world destroyed by humans (I presumed a nasty combination of resource depletion + climatic change resulting in a global nuclear war scenario). The book was spellbindingly well written in very poetic prose but now I am left with terrible images and even more fear about the future of our species doing everything it can to ensure we destroy the environment which supports us.

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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.

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