The willows I pollarded in the Winter are covered in newgrowth and the dead hedge is anything but...
...
The willow plantation is beginning to show some decent progress too (it seems that the yellow willow sticks we planted didn't make it* but the osier is doing well and should make for some decent weaving/structural material)
* actually, they were a bit slow on the uptake but grew quite well in the end
Despite wanting a woodland, for fuel and somewhere to wander about in, I hadn't given the subject much thought after that.
It was during a bored moment that I was surfing YouTube and stumbled across a video that changed my life:
I don't normally watch videos that are that long but this one scared me. Scared and inspired. For the next few days, all I did was watch video after video and read countless pages of information. I've been introduced to the work of Martin Crawford and Geoff Lawton, amongst others.
As the title of this blog suggests, I'm no hippie. I have a job, run several cars and heat my house (partly) with fossil fuel. I shop in supermarkets and buy a lot of stuff from China and elsewhere. I eat meat, processed foods and imported coffee. I wash fairly often (through laziness rather than design) but have my hair cut, by Donna.
It struck me that when I hear of people using the term "organic", it conjures up images of patchouli scented, pot smoking hippies who say "man" a lot whenever they're not hugging trees. Why should someone who doesn't wish to spread chemicals on the ground be labelled like this? By the way, if you've never hugged a tree, I can recommend it - it was a surprise to me how wonderful it feels, you can really sense the permanence of this huge, living thing. To love nature isn't a bad thing.
I realised that what I really wanted in life was a forest garden. I'm very fortunate to have the land available and hopefully the time too. Being a prepper is all very well, but how much food can one realistically stockpile? To survive long term, we need to grow more food locally. England is well placed to take advantage of this. We have plenty of water, as most of us experienced this Winter, the Winters are generally quite mild - no snow this time around, in the South East - and the Summers aren't too hot.
As Martin Crawford and others have pointed out, any piece of land in this climate is trying to revert back to forest. It's only by putting in large amounts of effort (using oil based machinery & fertilisers) that we can stop this process. By taking advantage of this inclination towards lush woodland, we can live more in harmony with the natural world, whilst still taking advantage of what it can provide.
