Here’s the second newsletter reporting from a recent project on a farm in Reepham, Norfolk, featuring journal entries, scans of my scrapbook (made by Rosie Lee Wilson), photos and drawings, as well as an interview with Tommy, Helen and Meg from Salle Moor Market Garden. Here is pt1 if you fancy following.
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Shopping the farm
With any project, the initial period of settling myself must always include lots of non-judgmental exploring: walking, sitting, looking, observing, listening, noticing, poking, prodding, squishing, rubbing, smelling, tasting. It really helps to keep any ideas at bay, or making any comparisons which could instantaneously whisk me away from the life-space. This is a sort of active editing process, not repressing or rejecting thoughts, just letting them pass by quicker than usual. Training my brain in this way –shaking the desire to conceptually shape the environment– took lots of practise and was influenced by permaculture design. I feel like a field scientist mixed with someone who’s lost something; sporadically scavenging in the undergrowth then bolting up like a meerkat.
At my second day at Salle Moor, I recorded a list of vegetables, wild plants, fermentation and cooking techniques as a way of connecting materials and processes in a free-flow way. While this is sometimes useful for me to look back at, it’s primarily a sketched overview of my thought processes to visualise materials and potential connections. One of the ideas underpinning the exchange with Tommy, Helen and Meg was to try and create a picture of the farming project that drew on the personality their attitudes and methodologies cultivated. The ‘picture’ was not a literal image but an ethereal one that I could bring into focus by highlighting and shaping elements of the operations that spoke to me. I reckoned that against the background of structured chaos of the everyday, I may be able to eek out overlooked or underappreciated moments that could hold key information about their missions, aims and values, and how they interrelate as beings.
Observing and following the rhythms of the farm was a pre-determined exercise. As someone who is at times wildly disorganised yet (as I’ve been told frequently) perceived as very productive and rigid, I often doubt I could do anything as time-sensitive and reflexive as farming and then I remember I used to run a pub in south London and have been self-employed for 4 years. I think this says more about my relationship with ultra-personal expectations, refusal to relax or self-congratulate, and complex issues with labour sovereignty.
Not wanting to distract or disrupt the flow of work, I figured I would embed myself in the peripheries, using the edges and scooping up the leftovers. We assembled the test kitchen at the rear of the seedling polytunnel, under cover from incoming rain and separate from operations. There was already some solid shelving and worktops that Tommy had built from scrap wood, with a double-hob steel gas burner and some pots and pans. We moved some extra trestles and a solid larch top in and I spent a few hours gutting, cleaning and reorganising the new temporary lab. Sorting through stuff and moving it around brings me much joy, especially as there tends to be an internalised space logic at play that satisfies my Tetris and zuhanden sensibilities.
To complement the day’s harvest of vegetables from pots, patches and polytunnels, an array of wild herbs, buds, flowers, seeds and roots started making themselves known to me. As the oldsaying goes, “What grows together, goes together.” The proximity between plants that are traditionally, or potentially could be, used together in cooking suggested a few things to me.
Intercropping was employed – planting alternate species to encourage symbiosis ie. basil with tomato to deter blackfly, garlic with lettuces to repel slugs, calendula with aubergine to attract pollinators, beans with pumpkins to fix nitrogen. A classic organics technique to maximise yield and provide security.
Looking beyond crops brings into play the edges. Changing your body position and scanning around can easily uncover useful plants just out of eyeline that could provide a novel flavour-pair or texture-clash.
Exploring veg beds with all senses enhances can bring awareness to plant attributes that you didn’t previously notice ie. wild yeasts cover the surface of every single vegetable and appears as a smooth grey dust, crushing and smelling different parts of plants,
Volunteer species are amazing soil indicators, and we must stop banishing them (unless unruly, invasive or seeding). Rather than ripping them out, we can use them to deduce specific qualities of soil. A great article with further research here.
Diary entry
“Wed 16 June
Woke multiple times in the night, almost strangulating myself w my sleeping bag hood. Dozing interrupted by alarm I forgot I set. Started the day with an angry call to BT, then told them to piss off and did some yoga on a dirt track. Run through fields, past confused cows, up roads, the wrong way down an old train track & back thru an orchard. Cooked podge w leftover broth from last night, slammed a coffee with the team, showered under a goon bag (cold / nice).
Some farm friends w kids came for lunch, I got them picking flowers for balms & vinegars: daisy (bruises), cornflower (congestion), calendula (skin), clover (sedative), ground ivy (airways). This afternoon I deep cleaned & organised the outdoor kitchen, such an improvement. Cooked an ok dinner that was unquantifiably lifted by the delicious veg. Tomorrow I’m going to make some sauces, dips, marinades.
Currently reading a book on Eco-philosophy & it’s making me think about the particular type of embodied learning I’ve cultivated and (hopefully) propagated. In teaching scenarios I’m rigorous with processes & concept in a self-proclaimed “non-scientific” way. By distancing myself, I’m claiming an opposite and verifying the proximity of precise approaches to food in my eyeline. The purpose of clearing a runway for a more poetic methodology, finding rigour in reason, is to invite others into the microbial. To understand bacteria we need to think like bacteria. IMO the enforcement in recipes without characters is drab, the centring of human action misses a prime opportunity to dance with chance. We can’t converse with an alternative universe if we rush towards perfection.
Daisy – like arnica. Used to treat coughs & blood purifier. Balm - bruise treatment / minor bleeding. Edible flowers.
daisy oil
calendula oil
coridander vinegar
elderflower & rose vinegar
dried clover flower
debugging elderf.”