: Debbie Kingsley
: The Complete Guide to Smallholding
: The Crowood Press
: 9780719842160
: 1
: CHF 20.30
:
: "Landwirtschaft, Gartenbau; Forstwirtschaft, Fischerei, Ernährung"
: English
: 208
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Essential advice from finding your plot to selling your produce and everything in between Growing your own food and living off the land is an aspiration for many, but where do you start and how do you make it work? Providing a truly comprehensive insight and packed with practical guidance for the 21st century smallholder, this book is for anyone considering, starting out or in the throes of smallholding. Addressing the challenges and pitfalls, as well as the joys, and with over 400 illustrations.

Debbie Kingsley has been smallholding and farming on a small scale for more than 30 years. Thousands of people from across the world have come to her farm in Devon to attend the smallholding courses she runs with husband Andrew. She has written for smallholding publications for many years and lectures in smallholding. Debbie's other titles for Crowood are Keeping Ducks and Geese, and Keeping Goats.

1 Introduction

COMING CLEAN

If you’re looking for a bible for complete self-sufficiency, this isn’t it. Just the idea of knitting my own toilet roll or roasting dandelion roots to create a coffee substitute to succour my friends makes me chuckle. I’m not interested in eating cabbage at every meal because it might grow well in our soil, or eating slices from a loaf that sounds, tastes and looks like a brick.

No one could ever give me the epithet of being worthy. I want to eat asparagus cut fresh, moments before the spears go in the pan, and suck raspberries off each finger in greedy glee. I also want a store of stunning beef in the freezer to make a meal of sirloin steak accompanied by field mushrooms gathered that morning and peas fresh from the pod, or a thick slice of gammon glazed with mustard and honey alongside a duck egg pillowed on mayonnaise and scattered with chives with newly dug salad potatoes. I want (I want a lot, don’t I?) vats of cider glugging away in the store room for drinking and for cooking with rare-breed pork with chunks of apple in a casserole, and for turning into cider vinegar that will mutate into blackberry vinegar to accompany salad leaves grown in the polytunnel.

I want, when all’s said and done, to grow, rear and make delicious things and have an interesting, seasonal, nature-observing and enhancing way of life.

A smallholding idyll.

There are so many different ways of smallholding and being a smallholder, and it should not be a way of life that makes a rod for your own back. Just because someone in the next village or on one of the ubiquitous rural life television programmes finds joy in keeping rabbits for the pot, or grows an acre of wheat that they thresh by hand and mill for flour, doesn’t mean you have to. You might yearn for charcuterie without nitrates and have a fancy for pig-keeping, love eating chicken but have a fear of birds (in that case buy oven-ready quality ones from another source and don’t keep poultry), or have a passion for jams and chutneys and be keen to grow fruit and vegetables.

This way of life should not be about wearing a hair shirt as if it only feels real if there’s some suffering in the mix. Stuff that: life is hard enough. If producing the majority of your own food is an all-absorbing ambition, that’s something we share; you have so many possibilities ahead of you, so choose the things that bring you joy.

What I hope this book will give you is a comprehensive insight and guidance into the various elements of a possible smallholding life. Pick and choose the bits that feel right a