April 2006

Smallholdings “21st Century Smallholder” is a little book with a big agenda – as much as we yearn to be free, most are pinned down by lives, jobs, families, fears, inside our urban or suburban homes. So what can we do instead? How do we turn a negative into a positive? This book tells you what to do if you have a small flat and want to grow food in window boxes, as well as a giving you a month by month guide to running a full-size garden or an allotment as a bio-diverse, organic fresh food resource. Click here to buy book Food writer Paul Waddington has turned his own urban back yard into a mini market garden, and this brand new book starts with a good rant against the mega food corporations – supermarkets and agribusiness. But as Waddington reminds us, we have become de-skilled in this specialised, industrialised and commercialised world, and we don’t know how to the things which came naturally to our parents and grand-parents – growing and preserving vegetables and fruits, perhaps keeping a couple of chickens (enough for an egg a day, if not more) or a larger creature. As a result we not only lack skills, but also implements, and even the little bits of land we own are not set up to produce food. So there are start-up costs, and sacrifices. But the rewards are a sense of pride and the taste of your own food, picked a few seconds before it goes on the table. And there is an element of survivalism if you are lucky enough to have half an acre of land at your disposal – because some time in the next few years the food supply could be disrupted by anything from an energy crisis to Bird flu pandemic to a terrorist alert to weird weather. Even the average garden is big enough to produce a phenomenal amount of food if you manage it right.

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