OUR JOURNEY
How could we possibly have guessed we’d be running an organic herb farm and preparing to launch ourselves as a sustainability and wellbeing centre? Nine years ago, when we moved into the old mushroom farm with 5 families of friends to “start a school”, we even struggled to recycle our plastic water bottles.
Ironically, it was friends from inner city London who came to steer us onto the green path. They built a polytunnel in our field and taught our children - delighted to be in the dirt - to plant out their first vegetables and herbs. After our children came back from boarding school in India, we wanted to create a new style of home school, where we would learn all about lightening our impact on the environment and get ourselves ‘ecologically literate’. In theory we thought we were doing quite well - we managed to read quite a lot about solutions to environmental problems around the world, and we were maybe a little complacent. It was time for a little test of our authenticity, and so around that time, the Victorian cesspit disintegrated and leaked appallingly, threatening to pollute everything downstream from us. What were we to do? We’d literally never had to take responsibility for our own waste before! The most appealing solution by far, was a completely natural sewage treatment system - called a Wetland Ecosystem Treatment system, which has been built in half of one of the fields, complete with ponds, plants and plankton. The only down-side was our whole family had to get stuck in with the pruning shears to maintain it. Everything changed from drudgery to joy, once we were joined by a steady trickle of friends and volunteers coming to help with the willow harvesting and fruit tree planting.
The meadow in the back field had huge potential to become viable as an agricultural concern, once we got organic status on the land from the Soil Association. Again we saw how automatically children adjust to work with Nature, and camaraderie is the word of choice, the speed with which a small group of teenagers can harvest a row of calendula flowers is actually phenomenal.
For years we had struggled to keep up with discussions bursting with eco abbreviations, as experts from Leamington Spa to Pakistan, in all things sustainable and permaculture, kept arriving and inspiring us around our kitchen table. We digested books, field research trips and courses, and an energy started to build around creating something new out of the old dilapidated mushroom sheds, aquatic shop and pastures. We wanted a transformation of the farm, into the kind of place where more people could come and learn from each other, just as we had done.
OUR SITE
