Growing Food with No Land!

 “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” 

Tom Paine 

You may have got the idea by now that simple living consists only of growing, cooking and eating your own food; while this is true for many, others live a simple lifestyle without recourse to their own land. Before humans were farmers, they were gatherers and, in the way, history tends to move in cycles, many find themselves to be gatherers in the twenty-first century.  To this end, why not explore other ways to live simply for those without land, and even for those who live in the middle of a city with no access to land.  

First let us look at the options for those who do not have land but would still like to grow their own food, or at least grow some of their own food. You may grow food on land that is not owned by you, or you need to consider other simple means of feeding yourself and your family. 

Allotments 

"Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?" 

~Gerrard Winstanley (Digger) 

The seventeenth century in England produced a large number of radical groups who questioned the status quo and looked for new answers. The Diggers held that the land belonged to all, irrespective of wealth, and that it should be shared amongst all people to grow their own food. In many ways the allotment movement draws on the spirit of these impressive and inspiring pioneers. 

In much of the English-speaking world, a small parcel of land, no bigger than a suburban back garden, is called an allotment. In Britain, the need for people without garden space to have access to land for food production is recognized in law in the Small Holdings and Allotments Act 1908, as well as further legislation in 1922 and 1950. Other areas of the world have similar legislation, so it is well worth checking for local provision where you live. In World War II, allotments were an important part of the ‘Dig for Victory’ movement (called ‘Victory Gardens’ in the US) in which everybody was encouraged to grow their own food and help feed the country. I feel that the need is still here with us today to make food production an important part of everybody’s commitment to solving the world’s environmental and economic problems. 

Local Authorities usually have a waiting list for allotments; how long that list is depends very much on the local population and how fashionable allotment holding is at any moment in time. Over the years allotments have occasionally become the ‘trendy’ thing to have, but such surges of public interest often wax and wane, with allotments again becoming desired only by those who want them to grow food over a sustained period. 

If you are lucky enough to get to the head of the list and gain the tenancy of an allotment, please take care; most have clauses that if you do not look after them properly, and allow them to become overgrown, then your tenancy will cease, and the land be re-allotted to the next person on the waiting list. You need to take your responsibility carefully, and while the land is under your stewardship you must look after it as well as you would land that you owned. 

A great many things relating to an allotment are down to luck, the position and direction of your plot, the immediate neighbours on other plots (sometimes people can be so friendly that you cannot get the peace and quiet you need to work the land), and the way it was left by the previous tenants. I was once tenant of an allotment and had to work on it early in the morning to avoid some of the more ‘chatty’ folks on plots nearby who never ceased giving unsolicited advice at great length; you may be luckier! My allotment had the added disadvantage of having plots not adequately fenced off from surrounding countryside; herds of vegetable-lusting deer would regularly visit and strip the plots of anything green.  However, many find that renting an allotment fully compensates them for not having land to grow at home, and allows them a degree of self-sufficiency that would otherwise prove impossible. 

“On 1899 May 23, the Aston Clinton Parish Council held a meeting to allot allotments and smallholdings, not exceeding three acres, to labouring inhabitants of the parish. There were five labourers anxious to take the land at Stanbridge so lots were drawn; the winners were Reuben Lovegrove….” 

(Forgive me a self-indulgent quote about my great-grandfather ~ RL) 

Community Gardening 

In many towns and cities, the idea of allotments has been superseded by community gardens; an area of wasteland, publicly or privately owned, is taken over by a community who jointly use it to produce food. These gardens may be run as a cooperative venture or run by a committee, but the idea is the same; you give up your time to work on the community garden and in return you get a share of the produce. The really good thing about community gardens is that those working in such schemes are usually very committed, and the sight of a community garden in full flourish is a wonderful thing. You may need to do some homework to find a scheme operating close to you, and if you live out of town you may find that such schemes are much less popular. 

“For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.” 

~ Virginia Woolf 

Shared Gardens 

You may be part of a large family with no space to grow your own food, while not far from you may live someone who is unable to look after their garden due to old age, disability or even a lack of interest. In many towns and cities, schemes are operating that get people from the two groups together; the garden is worked to produce food and a good share goes to the owner of the garden and the rest goes to the family who have put in the work. Assuming some degree of goodwill and communication is present, the scheme seems wonderful; those with large gardens that they are unable or unwilling to tend get maintenance and some fresh food, whilst the landless workers get to care for a garden and attain a degree of self-sufficiency. If such a scheme does not operate close to you, could have a go at setting it up yourself with any neighbours that are amenable. 

“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”  

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

Guerilla Gardening 

Guerilla gardening is the possibly illegal (though unlikely to be challenged in most areas) act of finding some derelict ground, publicly or privately owned, and growing food on it. The risk is that you may not get to harvest your crops as the land may be cleared by the rightful owner or your produce will be stolen, but chances are that at the end of the season you can harvest and enjoy your produce. 

The act of guerilla gardening itself may be as simple as sowing some seeds and then coming back at the end of the season and seeing what has come up, or seriously cultivating the land as one would on an allotment. Some local authorities in the UK have been very supportive of this idea and have cooperated to the extent of helping to identify possible sites.  Others have been less impressed and taken to destroying any site found. You can try to find out whether any organized guerilla gardening goes on in your locality, otherwise you just have to do it yourself, but please don’t grow food on any land that is heavily polluted. Again, for obvious reasons, this seems more of an urban than a rural pursuit. 

I am not a guerilla gardener myself, but have certainly sown seeds of ‘bee friendly’ wild flowers in many areas of wasteland, hoping that this will help feed pollinators and that the flowers will seed themselves at the end of the season. In fact, if you have ever tossed an apple core into the hedgerow you might be a guerilla gardener yourself! It can be argued that the American settler ‘Johnny Appleseed’ may have been the most successful guerilla gardener of all time! 

Foraging

“Then red ones inked up and that hunger 

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots 

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.” 

~ “Blackberry Picking”   Seamus Heaney 

Nothing is as wonderful as coming home with a basket of fresh, free food and enjoying it; foraging can be done by anyone but perhaps those with land to cultivate are too busy in the late summer and autumn to take full advantage of the bounty. To some, foraging is a pot or two of blackberries in late summer, but to many others it is a year-round activity that involves the whole family and can provide real food of value. What you can forage depends very much on where you live but be sure that food is out there for you to find. A very good guidebook is essential, especially at the start of your foraging career (see suggestions at the end of the chapter), but as time goes on you will develop an eye for free food. 

Generally, you don’t have to worry about the organic nature of foraged food but do take care when harvesting near heavy traffic; it is best to take nothing too close to the road, and take care if you are foraging in fields that have been sprayed with pesticides. Other dangers in foraging all involve not researching your target crops well enough.  In the UK in recent years there have been deaths resulting from mistaking deadly nightshade berries for blueberries and eating toxic fungi in mistake for field mushrooms. Again, your insurance against these problems is in using an excellent guidebook or going foraging with an expert. 

As well as foraging for food you can look for firewood, kindling (including dry pinecones), bean and pea sticks, and some pick up scraps of wool in sheep fields for spinning and weaving. 

Growing Food Indoors 

If you have and windows in your house or a dark cupboard, then you can grow some of your own food with very simple equipment.  No one is suggesting that you will become self-sufficient by doing this, but you can supplement you diet with fresh green herbs, sprouting seeds and bean sprouts pretty much throughout the year. 

Some seeds are very easily grown in seed sprouters - a container that can be rinsed through with fresh water several times a day; more ‘sticky’ seeds like cress and basil are best spouted on paper in a small tray. 

Despite having enough land to grow food for the family, I still sprout seeds on a windowsill, especially in early winter and spring. 

Those with the space to do so can also grow a much wider number of crops indoors, but be warned, if your home gets damp in the winter months then growing anything more than sprouting seeds indoors is not for you. 

(C) Ray Lovegrove 2016 2022

Your Outside Space

‘When we are at home in the garden, tending and nurturing all its plants, animals and minerals, living with them through all the seasons and days, then healing comes upon us like a gift and makes us whole.’ 

~ Christopher Bamford. 

In 1854 Henry David Thoreau published his book Walden, or a Live in the Woods. Thoreau, a Unitarian and transcendentalist, spent two years two months and two days living alone in the woods near Concord in Massachusetts in a self-made wooden house, foraging for and growing his own food. The book has been influential, both as a pioneer work of self-sufficiency, but also as a work of literature. Critics of Thoreau will always point out that his experience was not quite as ‘back-to-earth’ as might be believed, Concord was no too far away from ‘civilization’ and he did ‘send home the washing’ to his mother each week, and he had a steady stream of literary and philosophical visitors, but criticisms aside it is a wonderfully documented experiment. Thoreau did simplify his life and did use the experience to shape a philosophy of self-sufficiency which helps those of us attempting the same thing today.

Few of us have the means to do as Thoreau did and go out into the woods and ‘do our own thing’, but any of us with some land can have a pretty good attempt at a degree of self-sufficiency. Growing food is not just a process of producing food to avoid having to buy it, growing your own food is a way of connecting yourself with the land and with the seasons, it is as much a spiritual thing as a practical exercise and the  fulfilment of harvest is a rich one even if your crop is small. Even those without land can share in this bounty (Simple Gathering)

"I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green" 

~ Henry David Thoreau 

How to Grow Food 

Growing food changed humans from nomadic hunter gatherers into agriculturalists, so you could argue that it was the very beginning of what we call civilization. As you start on the process of growing your own food you may think that the deciding factor in success is how much land you have, this is very far from the truth. Geography, climate, weather, sunlight, soil, water and luck all exert a powerful influence on what you can grow on your land, and how effectively you grow your food. My old house stood on one acre of land which is about 130metres above sea level on the border between Wales and England, on moving here from the Thames Valley my first growing year was an education in what I could no longer grow and it took me a couple of years to realize that, early first frost, and late last frost, combined with a wet and windy climate and a vast rabbit population, would dictate many of my crop choices. It will be the same for you, wherever you grow your food you must take into account the constraints offered by nature; gardening books and television gardening advice can give you the rough direction, but you need to travel the roads and byways of your land yourself. Whatever land you are blessed with, it will give you food and that food will be good, give it time. Since moving to Sweden the new challenges involved with growing food in a shorter growing season have been many.

Of course it could be that your land is greater than a garden, you may have a smallholding or even a farm. Again success is not won easily and having the land is only the first hurdle in feeding yourself and your family. 

What to Grow

The answer to this is simple, it just may take some time to uncover the answer. Firstly, look at your area and see what others are growing successfully. If your neighbour can grow asparagus well then it should be a crop that you can consider, if you can walk for miles before coming across a decent soft fruit crop, then perhaps it is just not the area. This should not stop you trying to grow what you want, but it should be considered.  

Your local climate may be difficult, late frosts, early frosts, dry summers wet summers, slugs, deer, rabbits! Climate change is adding to the unpredictability of the whole process of growing food. This is one good reason for growing a wide range of crops, whatever the weather some things will succeed, and other things fail, monoculture is never the right path to self-sufficiency. 

If you have limited land you may want to consider not growing crops because they are available to you at low cost elsewhere. If you live a potato growing area; I would be foolish to give over great areas of your vegetable plot to grow potatoes if the farmer down the road will sell them to me at minimal cost. Likewise, if you have the taste for an expensive crop, like asparagus or globe artichokes, then growing them in your plot might save you more money over the years than growing crops that can usually be obtained cheaply like carrots or swede. 

Keep careful notes, nothing is more fun than using an ‘appointment diary’ to keep a record of what you sow, you can also smile to yourself that you have no appointments to keep! In this way you can keep a record of your successes and failures over the years and eventually have a good selection of reliable varieties that do well for you, this will help prevent you from being seduced by the descriptions offered in seed catalogues that are, at best highly ‘imaginative’. Whatever you grow determine to try two of three new things each year, in this way you're growing will never lack interest nor will you miss out on exciting new crops. 

“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only ten percent of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.” 

― Bill Mollison 

Vegetables 

Obviously the first thing that you will want to consider is growing vegetables, these are not the only crops that you will want to grow so don’t use all of your land up for them without some careful thought first. Summer vegetables are fine, but don’t fall into the trap of growing more than you can eat, preserve, or freeze. Give over a good proportion of your growing area to those crops that produce a harvest at other times of the year particularly winter and early spring. Unless you live in a very cold area you should be able to find varieties of sprouts, kale, cabbage, and leek that will ensure your plot is productive throughout the year. Digging and the correct use of manure and lime are important for your crops, so plan your year as well as your space carefully. Seed catalogues will frequently tell you that a new variety is better than all its predecessors, however, this is rarely true and, as far as I know only time will tell. 

Trees with edible fruit and nuts

Apples, pears, plums, damsons, cherries, hazelnuts and walnuts are all worth growing if you have the space. In addition to the food they may provide you with sticks for growing peas and beans and perhaps some firewood. Trees can also provide you with useful windbreaks which have a very important role in your growing area. While all of these trees take a few years to become productive the investment is worth it, an apple tree can repay you its original cost in its first two years of apple production. If you do not have fruit trees growing near you then you will have to plant more than one of each species to provide a pollination partner. If you live in an area where spring can come late, then choose late flowering varieties where possible. 

Soft Fruit 

One of the best things to grow in any garden is soft fruit like raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, red-currants, gooseberries, blueberries, wine berries, etc. Not only are they much less time consuming than vegetables, but they can be easily reserved, in a number of ways so overproduction is rarely a problem. Again the cost of the plants is soon covered by fruit production and careful planning will provide you with years of cropping. The different species of plant listed above all, have some special growing requirements so do your research well before planting. In almost every garden you will need to protect your crop from birds, I like to keep mine under netting and then, when I have harvested all I need I remove the net and let the wild birds move in for a feast! 

Herbs 

You can grow herbs in any sized garden and it proves to be very profitable indeed, not only do you have fresh herbs to cook with when you want them, but you can also grow some to treat minor ailments With a few notable exceptions (like bay for instance) dried herbs are very disappointing, so preserve them by freezing or making herb pesto’s which can be then be used in cooking throughout the year. Some herbs are perennial and need a sheltered spot in the garden, but others can be grown annually very easily. When I first moved to my current house I carefully planned an herb garden, but now I have planted herbs all over the place, in vegetable plots, containers and flower beds, you can find clumps of chives, sage and various mints in all kinds of corners. Plant some of your favourite herbs close to the house in pots so that you can pop out and harvest them while cooking (and find them in the dark). Pots can be moved into a polytunnel or conservatory in the winter to prolong the growing season and protect them from frosts. You should certainly consider chives, mint, sage, thyme, oregano/marjoram, parsley, rosemary, winter and summer savoury and, if you have the space and your winters are no too harsh, bay. 

Decorative Plants 

However large or small your growing area is, please don’t forget to grow flowers, shrubs and trees which are beautiful, but not necessarily edible. Flowers will do much to encourage valuable pollinators to your garden so please choose those that have open structures which allow for nectar and pollen to be taken. Flowers can make your garden more beautiful and can also provide you with cut flowers for the house and dried flowers for the winter months. Some flowers are very useful to grow in your vegetable plot because they either smell so strongly they put pests off the scent of your crops, or they act as a breeding ground for friendly predators, or they act as a decoy for predators. Pot marigolds and nasturtiums are very useful and, self-sown, germinating nasturtium seeds is a very good indicator that the soil is warm enough to sow many vegetables.  

Shrubs, bushes and trees all have a use in providing hedging, windbreaks, hiding the unsightly and protecting your privacy. Most importantly a garden which finds room for beauty, as well as food production, will be a wonderful environment for you and your family to work and relax in. 

Protected Growing 

For most of us the biggest problem we have in growing food is the shortness of the growing season. This can be extended by a number of means, for instance starting seedling off on a windowsill indoors will have your plants off to a rapid start when the weather is warm enough for them to go outside. If you are lucky enough to have a conservatory, or greenhouse attached to your home, you can take full advantage of lighter and warmer conditions than outdoors environment for much of the year.  

Polythene is a cheap, easily recycled, and very useful material for making protected areas outside, either on its own over metal hoops, or shaped into a polytunnel. Polytunnels are not as effective as conventional greenhouses, but are very useful for protecting crops. The night time temperature in my tunnel is never less than four degrees above the outside temperature, so in spring and autumn you can extend the growing season by up to four weeks, and in summer you can raise crops, like tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers which may not grow well outside in your area. 

Take care to choose your tunnel and its position carefully and be aware that in some areas they require planning permission, so please check with your local authority before you get building.  Every few years you will need to change the polythene on your tunnel so be sure to recycle the old cover and fit in with your obligation to recycle wherever possible. 

Organic or Not? 

Obviously a simple grower will want to use the soil in a way that does not contaminate it for future generations, and will want to protect animals that have as much right to the land as you do. On the other hand, if you do nothing all your crops will be lost and your work in vain. The answer is to select a form of growing that has minimum impact on the environment. For most of us organic gardening is the way, but before we fully accept the concept we might like to consider a few points. Firstly ‘the organic movement’ has had a tendency to go back in time to the agricultural methods of a time before World War II. If you read books on growing written before that time you will find it quite common to kill weeds with concentrated sulphuric acid and to spray fruit with terrible substances like arsenate of lead, because something used to be done doesn’t mean the environmental impact was not significant, it was just unmeasured. I have also seen organic gardeners widely accept volcanic ash as a fertilizer because it is ‘natural’ whereas in fact, it contains dangerous levels of selenium compounds, very toxic substances. Err on the side of caution before using a product just because it is labelled as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ both words are widely used in advertising and seldom have much meaning.  The ‘real way’ of organic gardening is to use any way you can come up with without resorting to harmful chemicals. 

In my garden I apply the following rules to help conserve the environment and get a reasonable crop; 

• If crops seem to be doing fine then don’t use any pesticide on them at all! 
• If you have leaves attacked by insect pests like then try spraying with water to remove them, or a solution of soft-soap applied regularly. If you are driven to use something more powerful use a spray that is biodegradable and non-toxic to humans like pyrethrums of a suspension of rape oil in water. 
• Net, cover and protect your crops as effectively as you can. 
• Make a scarecrow, but be careful they can give you a terrible shock if you look up from your work to see them standing above you! 
• If slugs are a problem, then try trapping them in beer traps, or collecting them at night. You may have some success with biological controls like nematodes, but these can prove very expensive with a large area to treat. If you have to use other manufactured remedies ensure that you use well tested, biologically friendly, products and use them very sparingly. A pet duck, if you can tolerate the mess, will eat itself silly on slugs and happily spend the day finding them. 
• Encourage wildlife to your garden that feed on pests; hedgehogs, frogs and toads get looked after very well in my garden, it’s the least I can do! 
• Ginger cats are excellent at getting your garden free of rabbits, rats and mice; in my experience they are better than any other shade of cat at doing this. 
• Homemade compost is the best way to feed your plants. 
• Growing plants can benefit from regular spaying with a seaweed solution. 
• Proprietary organic fertilizers are, in my opinion, very useful on occasions and I do use them to boost growth on plants that will not succeed otherwise. 
• Weeds are kept under control by hand weeding and hoeing. Clearing grassland to convert into food growing areas is very difficult without the one-off use of a biodegradable weed killer, but success can be had if you cover the area with black polythene for about six months prior to digging. Perhaps the best approach to weeds is to find those that are good to eat, and those that chickens like to eat and tolerate them to some extent. Other weeds of the perennial kind need to be dug out. It is wrong to expect a weed free garden, but it is bad gardening to let the weeds take over. 
• The golden rule is that whatever substances you use on your garden, don’t use them more often than necessary, and store them safely. If you can avoid using them altogether, then that is the simple way. 

The Large Plot 

If your plot is large the best way to manage it is by conventional growing using crop rotation. For instance divide you plot into four and use them as 1 Potatoes, 2 Brassica (cabbage family), 3 green leafy vegetable and beans, 4 roots. Every year you chance the order of plots that no crop grows in the same place for four years. You will need to also find space for fruit trees, soft fruit, and herbs, but these generally don’t get included in the rotation. You might also like to consider a polytunnel. Large plots do require a lot of work, especially if your locality has unpredictable weather and you find yourself with late frosts and summer droughts.  Larger plots do not allow the kind of micro-management that smaller plots allow so you have to space crops very generously to allow for hoeing, smaller plots allow for more hand weeding. If a large space is available to you, but your time or energy is limited, consider fencing a smaller area off for food production and leaving some of you

The Medium Sized Plot

For any medium sized plot of land the best and simplest way to use it is a traditional kitchen garden. Vegetable plots are positioned with some suitable paving, or gravel, paths to separate them. Crop rotation should be used and flowers and fruit bushes incorporated into the general design. Intensive cultivation is much more manageable than on a larger plot so plants can be spaced a little closer and crops can be raised by sequential cropping; as soon as one crop is harvested the next crop goes in (autumn/winter crops like leeks are quickly followed by summer cabbages, or sprouts followed by potatoes). If your soil is poor, or you are unable to dig easily, then you should consider the use of raised beds, these are expensive to set up, but are very effective ways of maximizing your food production. 

The Small Plot 

To my mind any realistic ideas of crop rotation are inappropriate for a small area, though you should still avoid growing things in exactly the same place as last year. A better way is to start a potager style garden. Here vegetables, fruit, herbs, and flowers are grown together in a way that both produces good crops and looks beautiful. This does mean that your garden does not need to have separate flower beds, the flowers are simply mixed in with the vegetables. Even large gardens can gainfully introduce a potager style for the area close to the hose with large scale vegetable production in the main plots. 

A potager needs to be looked after well and the gardener needs a lot of time on hands and knees, but such a beautiful result is possible in the first year. You can make your potager very ornate and geometric if you want, but keep in mind that it’s a simple life you want! 

A Wok Garden 

If the space for you to grow vegetables is very small consider starting a ‘wok garden’. Simply grow very small numbers of vegetable plants by successional sowings. Every evening, in the summer months just visit your garden and collect the small amounts of vegetables ready for eating; this might be just a few pea pods, half a handful of green beans, a pepper, spring onions, some spinach leaves and a few radishes, whatever is just right to eat. Back in the kitchen chop the vegetables and cook them, with rice or noodles in a wok. You simply don’t need large harvests to do this and you can carry on cropping all season. Salads can also be grown this way, everyday just take what is ready to crop and eat it. If you live alone, or as a couple, this method of gardening and eating will provide you with really fresh food for a good part of the year, in winter months you can grow many vegetables indoors in pots. It may not be self-sufficient, but it is a way of growing and eating your own food. 

Stocking your Plot 

You can buy seeds for your garden or you can buy young plants, but both of these are increasingly expensive. If you are in a community of growers then the sharing of plants can work wonderfully well, you simply sow a tray of cabbage, transplant as many as you need to your neighbour. Don’t ask for or expect, anything back in return, but after a while a community of ‘plant passers’ will be established. Saving your own seed it an excellent way of saving money, just leave a plant or two go to seed, collect and dry them for sowing next year. You can save seeds from most plants, but be warned, you will not get what you expect by saving the seeds of F1 plants, and even if your plants are not F1 you can expect the occasional surprise. Beans, peas, sweet peas, all members of the onion family and beetroot are especially easy to collect seeds from. I leave parsnips to seed themselves in the garden and look for self-sown plants the next year. 

As an experienced grower, you will find that it gets easier to spot self-sown plants in your garden. To the inexperienced eye, these are weeds, but once you can recognize them simply transplant them to a more convenient spot, you will be surprised how effective the collection of these free plants can be. 

Compost 

Whatever the size of your garden you will need to make a compost heap. Ideally, your compost will be a wonderful and nutritious supplement to your soil, but in reality it will vary in composition and quality. This is not a terrible problem, whatever the quality of your compost as long as it is well decomposed and fibrous it will be of use to you in the garden. Uses weeds, animal manure, grass-clippings and biodegradable waste from your kitchen, try to layer the heap carefully and don’t include large items without chopping them first. In summer your heap will be useable quite quickly, but in cold weather it may take some months. If you are unhappy with the quality of your finished product then layer it with fresh material in a new heap. You can add wood ashes, but not ashes from coal fires, if you add too much of one thing, then mixing the heap up will help material to decompose. You may need to cover your compost heap in very wet weather. 

(C) Ray Lovegrove 2016 2022

Radically Change How You Eat

 

Basic Changes you can Start Today

• Make sure that everyone in the household knows who has responsibility for getting meals (either one person or a rota)
• Make certain that meals are balanced - protein, fats, carbohydrates, a mixture of colours of vegetables red and green
• Ensure that the dietary needs of those you cook for are always catered for
• Take care that your kitchen is arranged in an effective way
• Try to be adventurous in your cooking
• Always cook with seasonal produce (save money)
• Always cook in an energy efficient way (save money)
• Induct your children into the processes of food preparation
• Keep a kitchen notebook of recipes and other things you don’t want to forget
• Keep a kitchen scrapbook
• Avoid using too much salt and sugar in your cooking; start to reduce the amount you use, and you will alter your family’s taste for these things

Some Changes you might like to consider for the Future

• Cook as many meals as possible ‘from scratch’
• Include as many fresh vegetables as you can
• Include more beans, peas and lentils in your cookery (even if you are not a vegetarian!) 
• Take the time to preserve the foods that you grow or forage by canning, pickling, drying, and freezing
• Bake your own bread as often as you can

Some big radical changes you may want to move towards

• Only cook ‘from scratch’ using as many home-produced or locally produced ingredients as you can (save money)
• Banish all pre-prepared foods from your kitchen 
• Keep a kosher kitchen
• Preserve and store enough food in the summer and autumn to tide you through the winter and spring months (save money)
• Consider a vegetarian or vegan diet for yourself or your family

How do I learn new skills?

Ask neighbours, friends, family. In particular elderly people may have lots of skills they are willing to pass on to anyone interested. In your area you may find evening or weekend courses you can attend. YouTube can provide easy free access to experts! 

(C) Ray Lovegrove 2022

See Also,

Radically Change how you Live

Radically Change how you Dress

Simplicity when Cooking

Simplicity when Eating

 

Simplicity when Cooking

"Happy and successful cooking doesn't rely only on know-how; it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life." 

~Georges Blanc 

Cooking is at the very centre of a simple life.  Whether you live alone, in a family or a larger community, cooking food is a major interaction with the environment around you; it gives you the chance to cook healthy, environmentally sustainable and ethically produced meals in your own home. Cooking uses many skills and effectively done, will save you money, and allow you to have a major input into the health, happiness and well-being of those you cook for. 

Not to cook food is not to be connected with what grows, and worse still, to lose a very strong point of connection with your loved ones. Cook well for them and they will carry those memories with them forever and you will define for them the very basic ideas of home, being part of a family and peace as a concept that starts at the meal table. 

Cooking at home should not be so different now as it was in the days of your grandparents, in fact it should be even better, given that we have a wider range of ingredients and better technology. Unfortunately, many have given up real cooking in favour of something that resembles science fiction home economics ~ the simple fact is that cooking real food takes time.  It does not save time to go for the ‘instant’ alternative because the end product is nothing like the real thing! 

The Kitchen 

Perhaps it is a matter of matching your aspirations to the facilities you find yourself with; it can be hard to cook meals in a kitchen that isn’t designed for serious cooking and radical self-sufficiency. If your kitchen is too small, then consider swapping its function with another larger room in your house, or less dramatically, try to get everything out of your kitchen which is not associated with the cooking, storing and consumption of food. . It is great to enjoy family meals in the kitchen, but if you really don’t have the room you will have to content yourself with a dining table in another room.  There is only one thing worse than eating around a table that is too small and too low ~ that is eating without any table at all! Simple living demands a table to eat at in comfort! 

Appliances, although helpful and possibly timesaving, also take up room, so limit yourself to what your basic needs are in terms of a cooking range and a refrigerator and, if you can banish washing machines and dishwasher to another room, so much the better. If you can’t do these things then you will cope, with careful planning.

“Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light.” 

- Nigel Slater 

Take a good look around your kitchen and see what you can do to make things better; the centre of any simple home is the kitchen, so spend time making it a place of light, a place of joy and a place of shalom. 

The ‘Kosher’ Kitchen 

Unless you are Jewish you might not see the significance of a Kosher kitchen, but the idea is a sound one for Jews and Gentiles alike. Have rules for your kitchen and be clear about what is allowed in it and what is not allowed.  This usually has to do with cleanliness but can also fit in with your own dietary rules. For instance, ours is a vegetarian house, so we have no meat or fish in the kitchen, neither would we want any utensils, pots, pans or crockery in the kitchen that has come into contact with meat or fish. Pet foods are not kept in the kitchen, nor are pets fed on meat products in the kitchen. You might want to run a similar routine if someone in your family has an allergy to nuts or strawberries; keep the kitchen absolutely free of these foods.  

Before you dismiss this idea out of hand, consider that it only relates to your kitchen, your family and your food; you make your own rules as they apply to you. 

"Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration." 

-Charles Dudley Warner 

The Store Cupboard 

A store cupboard should be large enough to hold the ingredients for tasty meals between your normal visits to the shops. It may also contain extra provisions to see you over periods of very bad weather, or short periods of illness. Apart from this it may also contain larger amounts of food that you have preserved from your garden or from foraging. There is a tendency, which I willingly admit to being guilty of, of storing a little too much in the way of provisions in case of catastrophe.  This should be resisted; it probably won’t happen! Food that you preserve yourself will be dealt with later, but for now we will consider the main classes of provisions that you will want to keep. 

• Flours for the making of pastries, cakes and bread. Consider using wholemeal flour as your default; wholemeal wheat flour is available widely as plain, self-raising and strong. You may also wish to stock rye, spelt and other flours for bread making, as well as oats and breakfast cereals. Of course, if you have problems with wheat/gluten, the items in your store cupboard will be very different from this. Avoid bleached flour at all costs. Why add a chemical that reduces the nutritional content of your food? 
• Dried goods including various beans and lentils, rice, pasta, yeast.  You will also need noodles and the like, as well as tea, coffee and sugar if you use them. 
• Canned goods; you should be able to eliminate many processed canned foods from your kitchen but canned plum tomatoes, chopped tomatoes, pasata, and baked beans are good. Canned chickpeas and one or two other varieties of legume are good for when you forget to put beans in to soak the night before. 
• Jars and bottles of ketchup, soy sauce, mustard, peanut butter etc. (If you are British or Australian, you will probably want to add yeast extract to this list.) 
• Salt, spices and herbs. Don’t use dried herbs unless you really have no option, grow your own. 
• Cooking oils of your choice; I keep sunflower oil, extra virgin olive oil and extra virgin ape oil. Don’t buy oils that have been heat treated as the important fatty acids will be lost. 
• If you live in an isolated area you may wish to keep a few items in case you are unable to shop for some time, such as dried milk. 

The Refrigerator 

Exactly how much refrigerator space you need depends on the size of your family and how far you are from the shops. To save on refrigerator space, avoid keeping things in there that don’t need to be kept cold, such as open jars of pickles and, for most of the year, fruit and vegetables. Some fresh vegetables keep much better in a refrigerator, but others definitely do not! Tomatoes are much better brought out of the cold to room temperature the day before you are going to eat them. Avocadoes soon develop a king of stringy brownness when kept too cold; it seems that the ripening process is upset in some way. Operate some kind of system in your fridge so you don’t have to be constantly rummaging and searching for things. If you eat meat, fish and dairy produce, this is the place to keep those things. 

Keep your refrigerator clean, but you don’t need to use chemical sprays.  You can just wipe down the insides and the shelves regularly with a damp cloth; you can use some washing soda (sodium carbonate) in the water if necessary. You also need to keep cooked foods at the top and raw foods at the bottom, especially if you keep meat, fish and dairy in your refrigerator.  This prevents any drips from the raw food contaminating the cooked food below. 

Freezers can be incorporated into the refrigerator or be “stand alone”. In my early days of self-sufficiency, I would have recommended the largest freezer you could accommodate, but I have changed my mind over time. Freezers are expensive to run and do encourage hoarding of items that would be better consumed soon after they are prepared. A good refrigerator and a careful planning of menus to use up leftovers is a better idea. To further reduce the need for freezer space, learn some more traditional methods of preserving foods. 

The Range 

The simple life requires of us that we do without unnecessary complexity in our lives.  If you are halfway serious about simplicity you will want to cook as much as you can from scratch and leave prepared foods at the supermarket! A good oven plus hob, or a good kitchen range is essential for this. You can select a range that uses wood, coal, gas, electricity or any combination of those and you need to make your decision carefully. A good range may well be the most expensive item in your house so look after what you buy, and you should never need to replace it! If you don’t have a piped-in gas supply, you may want to consider using bottled gas (LPG) as an alternative; many Amish families do this. The ‘dark green’ solution is to use gas produced from a methane digester using waste materials.  However, if you find yourself in a small kitchen and unable to buy new equipment, then you should find that the equipment on hand can still be used effectively to produce home cooked meals. 

Remember that whatever cooking facilities you have, they must be used effectively and with one eye on the environment. Don’t have the heat up higher than you need to; learn the gentle art of simmering. You can often turn off the heat for the last few minutes of cooking with the heat from the pan finishing the job. Use an oven just big enough for what you have to cook and, if you have empty space in the oven, cook something else for later in the week and then just reheat it.  For example, putting a cake in to bake after removing the roast from the oven is the sort of thing that you can do very easily – it just requires a little thinking ahead.  

Work Surfaces 

Whatever your work surfaces are made from, always aim to keep them as clear of clutter as possible.  Cooking takes space and the more clutter you have, the less working space is left. Modern kitchen work surfaces often get filled with toasters, microwave ovens, coffee makers, kettles etc.; consider which of these you can do without or consider keeping them in a cupboard when not in use. 

Work surfaces need to be kept clean, but again, powerful chemicals are not the way.  A clean damp cloth with some washing soda on hand is all you need. If you have wooden surfaces you will need to keep them regularly oiled. Wooden chopping boards or plastic chopping/preparing mats are a much better thing to use than preparing foodstuffs directly onto the work surface.

Who does the cooking? 

Real cooking from fresh ingredients needs planning and preparation time, so it does not matter who does the cooking as long as everyone knows in advance who has responsibility for getting a meal on the table. In some households one person can be in charge of cooking the majority of meals, either because of ability or availability, but if this is not the case then some kind of rota needs to be drawn up. The worst thing is for meals to be badly planned and rushed because of not being sure who should do the cooking on any particular day. 

In terms of who should be able to cook, the answer is very simple ~ everybody. Children need to be introduced to the process of food preparation as soon as they are able, and adults who claim not to be able to cook need to learn.  It’s not that difficult and nobody should abdicate responsibility by claiming they ‘can’t’. If you have a big family or live in a community then for every meal you can appoint someone to be a ‘cook’s aid’, so the uninitiated can eventually become the experienced. 

What to Cook 

In Britain, it seems, we buy more cookbooks and watch more cookery programs on television than any other nation on earth, and yet when it comes to cooking, we have a limited repertoire.  The average family seems to limit itself to between ten and fifteen different meals! Before you decide what to cook, consider the following points. 

• A meal must be balanced; it should contain portions of protein-rich food, some oils and some complex carbohydrates. If the meal is of more than one course, these portions can be spread between the courses. 
• At least two meals a day should contain fresh vegetables; try to go for differing colours to ensure a good mix of nutrients. The rule ‘something red with something green’ is a good one as long as you remember that orange is as good as red. Vegetables, for the main part, are essential in the diet to provide fibre, minerals, and vitamins; eat enough of them and you will reap the long-term health benefits. 
• The meal should not contain too much salt, sugar or fat and wherever possible would contain wholemeal grains instead of white refined products (pasta being a good case in point). 
• It should take account of various likes and dislikes around the table but should not go as far as any individual getting an entirely different meal unless for ethical or medical reasons. (The vegan at a vegetarian meal or the person who has a wheat or dairy allergy for instance, will need separate consideration.) 
• The choice of food should be based around availability and seasonality. If it is summer and your garden is full of carrots and French beans, then it’s a dish with carrots and French beans for supper! 
• Meals on the same day should not repeat what was had earlier, try to be different. 
• Throughout the week try to vary meals as much as possible; use cookbooks to help you but don’t be intimidated by them, and don’t be afraid to experiment.  
• Try to take into account how hungry everyone is going to be; a very cold day or everyone working outside will result in some pretty impressive appetites. 

How to Cook 

Know, at least roughly, what you are going to cook tomorrow.  Avoid having to shop for one or two missing ingredients; if you don’t have what you need for a meal, then cook something else! Some foods need longer planning times ~ if you want to cook beans from a dried state this normally involves some overnight soaking. (You can reduce this time by cooking the dried beans boiling, unsalted water for about five minutes, then leaving them to soak for about twelve hours). You may also need to bake bread in advance. Many meals benefit from a long slow cook and this may have the beneficial effect of heating up your kitchen in cold weather.  Whatever you cook, always aim to bring things to the table in a freshly cooked state.  In particular, vegetables need dishing up at the very last minute. When cooking, always keep a close eye on energy consumption.  Don’t boil things on the top heat setting, just bring them to the boil then gently simmer.  

Plan your week so that food cooked in the oven doesn’t waste energy.  If you can fill up the shelves with dishes for later in the week so much the better! 

Bread Making 

However busy you may be, always find a little time each week to bake bread. If you are busy being self-sufficient in the summer you may have to designate a weekend day for making bread, but in winter months try to bake bread regularly.  You’ll warm your house and give it that wonderful smell whenever you do so.  You need to experiment at first, but you can soon develop a range of recipes to keep you and those you live with happy; these can be everything from rustic sourdoughs and soda breads to everyday loaves for making sandwiches. While many prefer oven cooked bread, I think that a bread-maker, if you have the room, is an especially useful item of technology.  It saves you having to be involved at every stage and ‘frees up’ time for other things; perhaps most useful of all, the timer setting allows those who are out all day to come home to home baked bread. The choice of flour is important, the stronger the better for most purposes.  Natural flour improvers like soya and vitamin C can help you in producing excellent loaves. 

If you have problems with digesting conventional bread, do experiment with sourdoughs. A bubbling sourdough starter will soon become a important part of your kitchen and your routine. 

“I would say to housewives, be not daunted by one failure, nor by twenty. Resolve that you will have good bread, and never cease striving after this result till you have effected it.” 

- Marion Cabell Tyree (Housekeeping in Old Virginia) 

Waste in the Kitchen 

This is a suitable time to remind ourselves that to aim for simplicity is good but if it does not match up to the highest standards of environmental sustainability, then attaining it will be a hollow victory. The job of all in the kitchen is to provide good, wholesome healthy food for all, without creating lots of waste. The following points should help you consider what you can do to avoid waste. 

Don’t buy more than you need; if the shops are selling fresh produce at a reduced rate, buy only as much as you can use and then preserve the rest. If you can’t see how to use it, or don’t have the time to process it, then don’t buy it. 

Don’t cook more than you need. Get so good at estimating amounts eaten at mealtime that there are few leftovers. If you get it wrong and people are still hungry, have bread and butter and some fruit at hand to fill them. 

If you do have leftovers, store them safely for use in a day or two. Remember that if you have leftovers at the end of the day, plan mealtimes so that they are used up. Don’t add leftovers to more leftovers!  

If you keep chickens or have friends in the neighborhood who keeps chickens, keep a small covered bucket of scraps to feed them.  Scraps for chickens cannot contain very salty foods, and very ‘stringy’ food may need cutting up, but apart from that, they are not too fussy. Don’t keep the scraps longer than a day before you use them as chicken food. 

If you have plants growing outside, you can collect waste for compost. Again, a small bucket with a lid on it to keep out flies should be always at hand in the kitchen. Any vegetable peelings (those not suitable for chickens), tea bags, coffee grounds, crushed eggshell, banana, and citrus peel etc. can go in. You can add a reasonable amount of used kitchen paper as long as you have not used it with cleaning chemicals. 

At table you should consider using serving dishes; this means that leftovers are in a fit state to use in other meals. This also stops ‘loading up plates ‘and prevents people from eating more that they want or need. 

Monitor carefully the energy you use in cooking; constantly try to arrange your cooking so that the best possible use is made of hot ovens. 

Make Notes 

If you have ideas and they work out well, then make a note to remind you next time. Also keep notes on recipes and the modifications you make to them. Don’t spend so much time doing this that it takes time away from the cooking itself; a small hardbound notebook that has a home in a drawer is enough. Also keep your annotated recipes clipped out of magazines and newspapers in a scrapbook. 

Preserving Food 

If you are growing your food or doing some foraging, then you should have excess food ready for preserving. The point of preserving is to make good use of excess crops and to provide food for the winter months when fresh food is scarcer. It is easy to get carried away and preserve more food that you need, so take care. 

“Preserving was almost a mania ….....When there was nothing to preserve, she began to pickle." 

-Willa Cather 

Bottling (Canning) 

Bottling fruit and vegetables was once an essential part of kitchen work and has always remained popular in rural areas of Europe and North America (where it is called ‘canning’). You probably need a good guide to do this and some are recommended at the end of this chapter. Above all, you must use fresh foods at the start of the process and take meticulous care during bottling, to make sure you are not contaminating your food or jars. The only way to start on this process is to use acidic foods only (most fruits and tomato based foods), and to use jars with ‘click’ indicators to show that you have a good seal. When you come to eating the food, please reject any that come from ‘blown’ jars on which the metal depression of the lid sticks out. The internet is full of people telling you how to bottle all sorts of foods, but you needed to be very experienced before you can feel confident enough to do this; stick to fruits and tomatoes, then no problems should occur. You can add citric acid to improve the acidity and therefore the safety of your produce. Avoid bottling food with very low acidity such as French beans, unless you have attended a class on how to do it safely. 

Pickles and Chutneys 

The high acidity of these foods makes them very safe indeed for home production. In fact, you can use pre-used jars with lids that have been very well cleaned to make pickles, but you need to watch metal lids for signs or corrosion. The basic idea is to remove as much water as possible from the fresh produce by soaking in brine for about twenty-four hours. Following this, you rinse the produce careful, but quickly, and then cover with vinegar which replaces the water. Don’t pickle too much at once; while they do keep for a long time the quality, taste and crispness start to fade after a few months in the jar. Chutneys are really just savoury jams, perhaps not quite as sweet, but watch out for over-consumption if you are trying to avoid sugar in your diet. 

It is easy to get carried away with pickling and chutney making following a good harvest; if you produce far more than you can eat, consider using excess jars as gifts while they’re at their best. 

Jams and Conserves (that’s Jellies in North America) 

It’s nice to think of jam making as a link with the past, but until the 19th century when sugar became mass produced and reasonably cheap, it probably was rarity in most households. The idea behind jam is simple; boil fresh fruit with sugar until enough pectin (a natural gelling agent in the fruit) is released and reacts with the sugar, causing the mixture to ‘set’. In theory this sounds easy, but in practice many fruits do not contain enough pectin for this to happen and the jam never sets properly. You can add pectin during the cooking process to improve the setting of the jam – either purchase it or use the juice of a high-pectin fruit such as crab-apples or redcurrants.  Conserves (sometimes called by the very silly name ‘extra jam’ in the UK) use less sugar than regular jams and the result is a fruitier and runnier product. You can also strain the fruit juice before boiling with sugar - even in Britain, the result is called a ‘jelly’.  

A few points to remember when jam/jelly/conserve making; 

• If you add the sugar before you have heated the fruit then that fruit will remain firm and solid in a way that makes the final product difficult to spread. 
• The whole process involves a fairly long ‘rolling boil’ of very hot fruit and sugar mixture. Keep young children well out of the way as you do this. Some people like to use a jam-making thermometer to help them decide whether the ‘setting point’ has been reached. 
• Put your hot jam into jars that have been sterilized in a hot oven. You can use all kinds of paper and wax sealing for your jars, but I prefer the metal lid with a ‘safety button’. 
• Jam will last a long time, and generally, the flavor improves over a year or two. If jam is ‘goes off’ it is usually just a mould growing on the surface.  Scrape it off and tuck in! 
• The fruits with lowest pectin include strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. Those with good pectin levels include blackcurrant, gooseberry, redcurrant and anything using apple juice. 
• You can make excellent jams by mixing low pectin fruits with higher pectin content fruits, or the juices thereof. For instance, raspberry jam made with redcurrant juice; helpfully, both fruits are in season at the same time. 
• Jam is a very high sugar content food, even the ‘low sugar’ kinds. Eat it sparingly and if you want to avoid sugar, then cut it out of your diet altogether. 

Home Made Drinks 

Excess produce can be made into wine, ciders and beers by those who drink alcohol. Please note that the alcohol content of these drinks can be very high ~ so take care. In most countries it is illegal to distill the products of fermentation to make spirit. Home winemaking and brewing is very popular, and you should be able to source ingredients locally. 

Very low, or no alcohol drinks can also be made and, if they are acidic enough, will keep for a month or two. The best way to store these drinks is in bottles with a wired stopper; you can use soda bottles but take care when you open them.  

Try lemonade, ginger beer and other ideas, but remember, don’t make too much otherwise you will be wasting ingredients and time. Again, sugar is an ingredient of these drinks so avoid if you need to. 

Freezing 

Freezing was once considered the best way to preserve produce and it still has its uses, but the drawbacks are many.  The most important drawbacks are that freezers take up space and use up energy. Anyone who has defrosted the freezer and found uncomfortable looking bags of material that presumably used to be food, or those plastic tubs that have lost any labeling and result in some very unusual suppers will realize the limitations. As far as produce from the garden goes, freezers are best use for storing peas, beans and occasional asparagus spears. Be very tight on the management of your freezer and do not allow a buildup of forgotten meals. If you have cooked too much of a meal and want to freeze the rest that’s fine, but make a note on the calendar to eat it up in a week or so, a month at the longest, otherwise it will become a lost cause.  

Perhaps the best use of a freezer is for those who are at work, or otherwise away from home all week.  You can bake bread at the weekend and still enjoy it all week long. 

The Amish generally do not use fridges or freezers, but they are famed for canning all summer and enjoying all winter. The more you get into bottling food, the less attractive freezing seems;  the finding, defrosting and reheating process all take longer than taking a jar from the shelf and opening it! 

Drying 

Drying is an excellent way to store apples, pears and other fruits as well as mushrooms and some herbs. I say “some” herbs, because with the exception of bay, sage and thyme, very few others are worth the effort.  It’s better to try and grow them fresh through the winter. You can dry them in the sun if you are lucky enough to have sunshine in abundance, or you can use a drying oven or an ordinary oven at low heat. Fruits can also be turned into the ominously named ‘fruit leather’ which is very good. 

“The keynote to happiness within the four walls that make any home is plain, wholesome, well-cooked

food, attractively served.” 

-Louis P. De Gouy