Oak Trees - Ships of the Landscape

We've been planting lots of trees here on the farm, hazels, willows, cherries, rowan, blackthorn, hawthorn and, mixed in here and there with them all, some oaks...

 

How amazing to hold in your hand for a moment a baby oak, which might grow into a mature tree and live for anything up to a thousand years, like the old oaks just found on Churchill's estate. How much human nonsense have they lived through? It also made me think just how wonderful these oaks are, like ships of the landscape. True treasure ships, roaring in the wind as they travel through time, sheltering such rich abundancies of life. True gold, not the vain gold of oligarchs, bishops and princes. Even after death these golden-hearted oaks go on serving us with their stout timber, in framework that can last for hundreds more years...

Towards a Deeper Reality

I often find myself encouraging people to be a wee bit more open minded.
The accepted, establishment, "scientifically proven" view of the world takes us through life like a train on tracks. We're supposed to sit docilely, like well-behaved children in class, looking out of the window, only seeing what we've been told we can see, so we'll be good little cogs in the establishment machine.
Well I for one sometimes want to get up onto the roof of the train or even get off the train altogether. So how do we do that?

Willow... it's so easy!

We've been planting hundreds of trees here on the farm over the last few years, fruit trees as well as oaks, birch, rowan, hazel and also willows which all started from a bunch of sticks that our friend, Azzi, gave us. We are planning a lot more tree planting this year so I've been getting some propagation on the go. Willow just must be about the easiest thing to grow so a great place for anyone to start. If ever you want to see the power of nature first hand just pop a fresh willow cutting in some water. Willow has lots of uses, as a fast-growing fuel, (maybe the fastest: www.thewillowbank.com, ) as well as a material used in all sorts of things from baskets to guitars. It has a lovely graceful bambooish look to it too.

The willow grove at the foot of of our plot, these ones are just a couple of years old and had a difficult start due to rabbit attack. All the same, some of them were reaching twelve foot tall. I've pruned them back and saved the cuttings to propagate more trees.

It's easy: you stick your cuttings in a jar of water and wait for a few weeks...

...by which time they start to sprout various shoots...

...and rootlets, ready to go into a pot or into the ground.

It's still a bit cold out so these ones have gone into pots in the polytunnel.

It seems to be working a bit more slowly with hazel too, which is a bit exciting as it's not the recommended way of propagating hazel. As Chris Dixon says, "The plants don't read books."

Lots going on in the polytunnel already.

GREEN BUILDING OPPORTUNITY IN SWAZILAND

The bigger picture

Pollyanna Lacey messaged me about her wonderful plans in Swaziland. She has about 200 acres of land there including perennial gorges and a river with the beautiful name, Umfula wo Thando, or “River of Love”.

Umfula wo Thando, "River of Love"

Her project really resonates with me as she’s connecting ecology and healing - she has a vision of self-sufficient, sustainable off-grid living, biodynamic gardening and farming, and a holistic healing retreat and Reiki school. She has no experience in building and is looking for help, ideas, contacts, and useful organisations for funding and information.

The best designs I've seen for low-impact, self-build homes are really the roundhouse-with-Earthship-features buildings of Simon Dale and friends at Lammas, I wonder how they compare with traditional local building in Swaziland.

Simon Dales house at Lammas - Simon's site here

Anyway, get in touch with Pollyanna through the RegenoScot Facebook group if you've got any ideas, useful contacts or would like to lend a hand out there.

INTRODUCING REGENOSCOT

I've started a Facebook page, RegenoScot, to help people and projects for sustainable living to connect up, help each other, learn, and share information, ideas and experience, a bit like the brilliant Off Grid Friends page. I've had lots of great help from there and it's good just to know that you're not the only crazy fool out there going against the established flow.
FLAG FREE
I wanted the RegenoScot header to reflect my own hopes for Scotland and all my family and friends up there. Dylan Thomas was once asked what he thought of Welsh Nationalism and he replied, "I've got three words to say about Welsh Nationalism and two of them are Welsh Nationalism", which is a bit how I feel about Scottish Nationalism...  I hope we vote Yes to independence and I hope it's a new beginning for Scotland but I'd love it if people everywhere around the world looked for what they have in common rather than what makes them different. So there's no flag on the RegenoScot header. We do have a lion but it's a lion with a lion cub to symbolise strength with gentleness, learning and caring.

A wonderful photo, "The Lion King" by Neil Agate: http://500px.com/photo/3972512/the-lion-king-by-neil-agate

NEW THINKING, NATURAL ECONOMY
I don't feel encouraged when the independence discussion revolves around oil production. It's reliance on fossil fuels that's brought the world to the brink of mass extinction. Let's make this an opportunity to build a new kind of economy based on the regeneration of real natural wealth rather than chasing illusory financial wealth at the expense of the environment. So there's a photo on the Regenoscot header of the reciprocating roof at the Cwm Harry community garden project, symbolising local initiative, cooperation, local food production, and the regeneration of natural resources.

The future's woody...

SCOTLAND THE BRAVE AND INVENTIVE
Let's keep our feet firmly on the ground and let's keep our heads firmly in the clouds, looking for local solutions to world problems, allowing a fresh flow of inspiration, new ideas, intuition as we look for local solutions to world problems.

ACCESS TO LAND - WORKING IN LIEU OF RENT

The little patch of Shropshire we're looking after

Ruth and I live and work on a beautiful hundred acre hill farm here in Shropshire, Treflach Farm. As well as acres of pasture and arable land there's a variety of woodland, from a lovely ancient area, to orchard, to recently planted mixed woodland. We're both so glad to be living out in the sticks amongst the birdsong and rustle of leaves. The access to land we have has made an enormous difference to the sustainability and quality of our way of life, though we still have a long way to go towards some of our goals.
We do some days of work on the farm in lieu of rent for accommodation and the use of the plot of about a third of an acre in the photo above. We also look after the orchard, polytunnel and veg gardens intensively and give some time to the whole farm in various ways.  I hope it's the sort of arrangement that may help a lot of people, farmers and individuals, make the transition away from a fossil-fueled destructive way of life to something regenerative.
If you think about it, everyone relies on some kind of access to land, it's just that for many of us our food, energy and stuff come mostly from elsewhere in the world. Powys in Wales only produces 5% of the food it consumes, that's only possible with cheap energy. So how do we get better access? Only a few people have the capital required to buy a small holding or farm and develop it. Farms are always short of help and will require more and more manual help as we power down. The work-in-lieu arrangement is a way for people with no capital to move towards long term low-impact living. I guess as more people work in this sort of way patterns and guidelines will emerge to help project owners and workers come to fair, practical arrangements as have been established in the WWOOF network, striking a balance between the workers being fairly rewarded and the owners getting a fair amount of help. It's sad when things don't work out and from my experience it's generally because of poor communications, people not making practical financial and work arrangements and not writing them down, and of course, personality mis-matches.
WASTE REDUCTION
This is probably our biggest success here on the farm. Ruth and I generate almost no waste. The compost loo and compost heaps recyle the bulk of our waste back into the land. Metal we recycle with the farm recycling. Glass waste, of which there is surprisingly little, we generally keep for future storage. Plastic, of which there is a lot, as we still buy a lot of supermarket food, we mostly keep, packing it up for insulation. That leaves the occasional item we can't deal with ourselves that goes to landfill. It's a far cry from living down by Brighton where the five of us put out two wheelie bins for landfill a week. That's all the whole farm produces in two weeks, including the food business.
FOOD
I'm surprised at how much time and work it's taking to produce more of our own food. Even after three years in the gardens and orchard here we're still getting loads of stuff from the supermarket. It's not just sorting out growing stuff either, there's all the storage side of things too and how to deal with the gluts of a few products that you tend to get from time to time. Ruth's been putting a lot of energy into preserving, jam making and, very importantly, brewing and wine making. Imagine the quality of life without a glass of cider from time to time...
KEEPING WARM
As you'd expect, we keep warm with a woodburning stove and logs from the farm. At least half a dozen big trees came down in the winter storms so there's plenty of fuel out there at the moment, it's just a question of chopping it up, bringing it make and storing it, which all takes time and fuel for tractor and chainsaws. I'm determined to get a better supply organised than we had last year when we were scratching about latterly and soon ran out of dry stuff. We're planning to be much better insulated for this winter too, partly thanks to our waste plastic. For the long term I'd like to burn much less and burn it at a higher temperature too as smouldering logs give out a lot of tars and toxins into the environment.

FUEL
We're keeping warm with wood but haven't escaped from fossil fuels altogether. We're still using calor gas for cooking and water heating and we're on the electricity grid through the farm's supply, though the farm does have a 20kw PV array. We have a car and still use petrol which I'm very uneasy about, especially with current events in Gaza. I wrote a post about complicity here which I don't imagine will be very popular. I don't think people generally understand just how much the whole industrial way of life is wrapped up in fossil fuel, the degree of change which is coming our way whether we like it or not, or that we all have individual and collective responsibility for everything. By all means let's protest about fracking but let's all make the transition away from fossil fuels too. So for myself that means developing small scale methane and other systems for cooking and water heating and finding alternatives for car travel. I find we have to take it one step at a time though or it just gets overwhelming.
EVERYTHING ELSE...
So what other things do our lives revolve around and to what degree can they be produced through access to local land? Shelter, clothing, medication, art, fun, it can all be done (and will have to be done) with what's around us, though maybe not as we know it now.  More soon.

THE TERROR IN OUR TANKS - COMPLICITY - TRANSITION

I have a very uneasy feeling that all of us who use oil, petrol and gas are complicit in the human and environmental devastation involved in producing it and controlling its supply. The Gaza resource massacres are bad enough, but by releasing the carbon stored in oil and other fossil fuels for millions of years over a few hundred years we are also destroying the Earth's ability to support much life of any kind. Do we really want to be respomsible for all that?
TRANSITION
Our transition to a life after the Oil Age is inevitable anyway because there's only so much of the stuff. All the easy-to-get oil is gone, exploting what's left, fracking, drilling in Arctic etc, will just mean ever more devastation and stave off the inevitable change for a decade or two. It will soon get to a point where it takes more energy to exploit oil resources than they produce.
IT'S EVERYWHERE
There's a fuel element in just about everything we buy, do and use, transport and heating obviously, but also food, packaging, chemicals: paints, medications... It's a huge task to make the transition to a sustainable way of life, so the sooner we get on with it the better. We can choose to make radical changes now and make the transition as smooth as possible or wait until change is forced upon us, the longer we leave it the more unpleasant it will be.
PROTEST
Protest is great, it's wonderful that people are waking up to the damage eg that fracking is causing. I think it will be even more powerful to stop using fossil fuels. It does mean a different way of life altogether, there is no sustainable way of using as much energy as we do now. Renewables are only a tiny fraction of the total.
WHAT'S A SUSTAINABLE WAY OF LIFE LIKE?
Well that's what this blog is all about. I've visited and worked on lots of different eco projects and met lots of inspiring people, I have to say I've only met a handful whose way of life could be truly called sustainable. Some aspects are easy, like dealing with your waste, others take more skill and experience, like growing your food, materials, medicines in your locality. For me, despite all the challenges it's a very exciting, fascinating time of enlightenment, of the evolution of a global super-consciousness and of the development of our psychic and energetic abilities. The greatest journey begins with a single step.