Wet Woodland
-
Rivers and streams, not stinking drains please
Here’s a topic very close to our hearts. We’ve experienced at first hand, the inconsistency, unfairness and impotence of token gestures by responsible authorities who are afraid or unwilling to tackle the real culprits and instead pick on easy targets. In our case, small, self-builders. The issue in question is river pollution by raw sewage. The source, as outlined in the following article, is overwhelmingly from livestock farming but local authorities have recently taken a hard line stance on any planning applications for private homes. We have a small river flowing through our land and we feel an enormous sense of protective guardianship towards it. Any suggestion of upstream corruption…
-
Let’s go foraging
Even though we can’t yet live on the land, we have been exploring any possible ways to interact with, observe and nurture it. It’s an opportunity to exercise some permaculture ideas and understand its rhythms and cycles. This seems like a very good approach as several different habitats can be found within these three acres, including wet woodland, river, mature beech trees, paddock and hedgerow. One of our early aspirations has been to make wine from foraged flowers and fruit. There are numerous species of wild berry on the way but the first and obvious source was to target available elderflowers and dandelions. As it turned out, I missed the…
-
The Nature Spectators
It’s tough waiting for all of our planning and other preliminaries to be resolved before we can build anything. We’re not even able to construct rain-water harvesting systems to enable us to grow on the land at this point. One consolation has been the chance to use the first permaculture principle, OBSERVE and INTERACT. For at least 6 months during COVID-19 lockdown, we were physically separated from the land and relied on our powers of recall (with some help from Google Earth) to visualise our interactions with it. We had only recently discovered that we had purchased more than we had realised in the form an area of woodland at…
