Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes

by Rosie Boycott

  Two years later, we had restored the main flower garden, planted an orchard, created a vegetable garden, and embarked on an ambitious scheme to transform a wildly overgrown wood into a woodland garden, complete with a large pond, paths, a living willow house, willow arches and huge sofas carved out of fallen oak trunks which had been positioned to look out over the park. Then in the autumn of 2004, just as the main work was completed, David asked us if we would be interested in investing in a plant nursery, which he would run as the full-time manager.

  We didn't think about it for long. Both Charlie and I were already spending some of our happiest weekends digging, pruning, sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings. Charlie loves growing plants and vegetables and he seems to have a knack of making them flourish. Green fingers, my father used to say, as he'd watch Charlie tidy up his much loved and once immaculate garden on the weekends we used to spend with him.

  We were too old to have children together and, even though we had the dogs - my daughter Daisy's old Battersea rescue dog Bingo, and Dylan, the Labrador that Charlie had bought as a puppy for his daughter Francesca - there was something hugely appealing about the prospect of a project which we could build together. We had first met in 1965, in Ludlow, where I spent most of my childhood. Charlie was an old school friend of the vicar's son, Robin, and when his own parents divorced he became a regular visitor to the tall Georgian vicarage which stood beside the River Terne in the village of Ashford Bowdler. My own father, frustrated that he had never had a son, liked organising cricket matches on the village green and one summer Charlie pitched up for a game. He turned up every summer after that and when Charlie and Robin decided to travel round America in the summer of 1969, I asked to go too. I was only eighteen but, after a great deal of persuasion, my protective and cautious father decided to embrace the proposed adventure with surprising gusto and helped us plan our trans-continental journey with military precision.

  Before I left, he handed me a Greyhound bus ticket, valid for three months, for use in any state of the union. In the event, I was the only one with such a ticket and, after travelling over the New Jersey Turnpike to Indiana late one night, bundled together on the back seat of an overcrowded bus, I was easily persuaded to ditch all ideas of the Greyhound bus network in favour of sticking out my thumb. A mutual friend flew out to join us and Charlie and I found ourselves hitchhiking together, crossing the vast plains of the Midwest in an old green Chevrolet with a group of dope dealers, being marooned on a rattlesnake-infested mountain outside Salt Lake City by a gun-toting cowboy, and meeting up with a Harvard student who, weeks later, would be joining Charlie at Cambridge.

  My late teenage years were promiscuous in the extreme, but those weeks with Charlie were special because they were wholly platonic: ours was a deep friendship which had been well tested by frustrating hours on lonely roadsides and moments of real danger. We developed the easy-going camaraderie that results from days spent in someone's company: neither of us can recall having a single argument in all those weeks. But when we came home, Charlie returned to Cambridge and I went off to Kent University, to begin a course in pure mathematics. In my second term I dropped out, fled to London, found a job on an underground newspaper and, a little over a year later, founded Spare Rib magazine. Our lives diverged: he married, had Franky and Alex, and divorced. I married, gave birth to Daisy and divorced. Twenty-seven years later, chance - this time in the form of a nudge from George Carman - brought us together again.

  My father was delighted. He didn't like growing old and seeing his youngest daughter as a single mum, and, though by the time of our wedding Alzheimer's was steadily claiming his sanity, he made it through the day, cheering hugely as George stood up to make a speech. Charlie's son Alex was our best man, his daughter Francesca and my daughter Daisy were bridesmaids. Luke, my stepson from my first marriage, was an usher, as was Charlie, the husband of my stepdaughter Miranda. Robin, who had introduced us all those years ago, was also an usher. Bingo followed us up the aisle with a huge yellow bow pinned to her collar.

  Now, almost five years later, those two teenagers who had once thumbed lifts on interstate slipways were setting out on another adventure. Charlie had discovered both his love of plants and his skill in nurturing them; my own interest in the politics of the countryside was growing. The more I discovered about the stranglehold of the supermarkets, the insanity of 'food miles' (the distance that food travels from where it is grown to where it is bought), the lazy greed of our consumer society which demands strawberries and green beans in January without thinking of the environmental consequences, let alone the taste, the more I felt a sense of anger and sadness. It seems to me that we live in increasingly schizophrenic times: wanting our countryside to remain for ever like the pictures Constable lovingly painted so long ago, yet standing by while agri-business, responding to our demands for ever cheaper and more available food, rips up hedges and chemically destroys our wildlife. Every year, twenty-one square miles of countryside, an area the size of Southampton, is lost to developers. Investing in a nursery seemed a good way to start to redress the balance.

  David is a proud and conscientious single parent, and lives with his nine-year-old son, Josh, for whom he is the primary carer. They live in a sprawling village called South Petherton, which is about four miles from Dillington and boasts a fish shop and a deli. He did have his eyes on a floundering nursery there, but it quickly became apparent that buying an already existing nursery made little economic sense. Over 50 percent of the £90,000 asking price was for the plant stock, which would have been hard to turn a profit on. The idea lapsed, but not for long. At the end of November 2004, David arrived one Saturday morning with a new idea. Across the park, to the north of Dillington House, was a Victorian walled garden almost two acres in size and unused since the early 1960s.

  In the pale, late autumn sunshine we walked over to inspect the site. The walls were made of mellow old red brick, marks still visible where once ornate glasshouses had stood. It was built on a slight slope, angling downwards to the north, which allowed the heat of the day to pool into its corners. Even in the thin November sun, the bricks on the north wall were warm to the touch and as we leant back we could feel the heat stored within. To the west the wall had collapsed - a previous estate manager in a hurry had driven straight through it to provide easy access to the lower pastures - but apart from that they stood solid and intact.

  Inside the old tumbledown potting shed, a wooden door was covered with spidery inscriptions, records of the weather and the movements of migrating birds, dating back to the 1850's: 'April 12, 1851, first swallows arrive.' They had been written by James Kelway, then the eighteen-year-old head gardener at Dillington House, later to become one of the great Victorian gardeners and founder of Kelway's Nurseries at Langport, breeder of peonies and irises and inventor of the cineraria plant. When Kelway came to Dillington the house was owned by an ancestor of Ewen's, Vaughan Hanning Vaughan Lee, a keen gardener who built two grape houses and grew peaches, melons and even bananas in the walled garden. He was particularly partial to his grapes, and one day while shopping in Jackson's of Piccadilly his eye was drawn to a display of large, especially succulent ones. Recently, he had been annoyed that his own grapes weren't as perfect, so he decided to buy them to show Kelway just what really good English-grown grapes could look like. On enquiring where they came from, he learned that these were the 'famous Dillington grapes', possibly the best in the whole of England. Later that night, Kelway was unceremoniously sacked for stealing.

  Ewen was happy to extend a long lease on the walled garden and the surrounding five acres, which comprised a very old orchard, and two wooded areas to the north and south. Our rent was set at a nominal £1 for year one, to compensate for the amount of work needed, rising to £3,000 by the third year. Old fridges, dead sheep, countless plastic sacks, bits of metal and other assorted rubbish had been dumped in the area immediately outside the garden over the last few decades. Occasionally local peo
ple, like David's brother Mark and his girlfriend Louise, had arranged to keep their sheep in the garden, but apart from that the whole area had remained untouched and derelict since the early 1960s.

  The clearing began in earnest in January 2005: Mark and David borrowed a digger from the estate, and the rubbish was soon safely sunk twelve feet down. We rotavated the rest of the ground. Inside the nursery, years of couch grass broke up under the blades into tiny little white roots, each one a new weed. There was no option but to delay planting while we zapped the weed with Round-up, the most powerful weedkiller on the market. What to do with the woods? We all wanted to keep pigs, so the wood to the north was fenced off, a timbered house erected and muddy wallows dug out along the path of the underground spring. The first three Gloucester Old Spots, Bluebell, Bramble and Guinness, arrived in early April. Chickens were the next, seemingly logical, step, so a half-acre site outside the walls, once an old orchard but now just an unused area with a walnut and chestnut tree, was fenced off and secured from foxes by an electric wire circling the enclosure a foot above the ground. More huts and coops needed building. We didn't stop at chickens: twenty noisy geese, seven ducks and an assortment of 'rare breeds' arrived at regular intervals over the next three months. Josh Bellew's grumpy angora rabbit, Gus, moved in as well, as David couldn't cope with having yet another animal needing feeding and cleaning at home. Most days Gus sits with his back to the assembled throng, occasionally joining in round the feeder when he's hungry.

  Inside the walled garden, the old shed was stripped down, re-roofed and re-pointed. We divided it into a tiny office, storage and potting shed. We bought and erected three poly­tunnels inside the garden, where tomatoes, cucumbers, cour­gettes, melons, peppers, chillies and three types of lettuce were soon sprouting in the almost tropical heat contained in the plastic frames. Seed planting began in earnest in the spring and by June there were rows of carrots, beans and onions outside the garden walls, sandwiched into the space between the chickens and the pigs.

  And, of course, with more animals and more vegetables, we needed more help. By midsummer, David's mother Anne had quit her job as a cleaner and was working in the nursery twenty hours a week. His father Dennis looks after the small blue tractor and the electrics, feeds the animals when his son is not there and helps out with the planting. Since Dennis was waiting for his hip replacement, what he could do was initially circumscribed. Ian, a fireman from Taunton, helped out periodically and Stuart, a friend of David's, did shifts. Charlie and I made some fifteen hundred cuttings over the summer, starting the long, slow but ultimately rewarding process of building our own plant stock. Hydrangeas, boxes, bays, different herbs and herbaceous plants were snipped off at the growing point, the leaves trimmed back, the stems doused in rooting powder and planted in potting soil in seed trays.

  There was a moment in July when it looked like our little farm was growing out of control, too many small feet moving in too many directions and all too fast. Certainly that was the view of many of our friends, who saw our hobby, as they called it, turning into a hugely expensive exercise that would ultimately go nowhere. But it wasn't as haphazard as it sounds. It seemed to Charlie and me, as it seemed to David, that to make a smallholding work in the twenty-first century you have to try everything and be prepared for some things to fail. We weren't just looking at intensive farming of a small five-acre plot, we were looking to make every square inch become as productive as possible and we were looking to find as many ways as possible to generate an income.

  On a monthly basis the costs in early July 2005 worked out like this:

  David is paid £1,000 (but this obviously needs to increase as soon as possible).

  Anne is paid £384, as is Dennis.

  Animal feed: £80

  Electricity: £25

  Insurance: £62

  Water: £25

  Phone: £50

  Fertilisers: £100

  Vet: £30

  Car: £134

  Tractor: £5

  Jam jars, egg boxes and extras: £50

  Total: £2,329

  The set-up costs, to date nudging £60,000, have included:

  Clearing: £2,018 (although this work went on till autumn)

  Rental of digger: £550

  Timber for fencing: £815

  Sand, cement, props, fixings: £1,140

  Rebuilding wall: £641.75

  Timber for office: £802

  Purchase of small cement mixer: £236

  Roofing sheets for shed: £275

  Polycarbonate sheets: £457

  Tractor and rotavator: £2,100

  Tractor shed: £500

  Trailer: £50

  Polytunnels (3): £2,900

  Tractor delivery: £40

  Day-old chicks from Piggots: £290

  Grass seed: £38.98

  Putty and glass for windows: £48

  Seeds from Thompson and Morgan: £258

  Pigs: £225

  Greenhouse: £1,789

  Digger rental: £669.75

  Heated benches and watering system for potting shed:

  £1,693

  Water pipe: £106

  Tozer seeds: £777.69

  Timber for fencing: £2,019

  Compost and wheelbarrows: £443

  Box plants: £800

  Vets' bills: £42

  Office furniture: £140

  Chickens: £267

  Rare-breed chickens: £235

  Lavender bantams and Apricot ducks: £50

  Electric fencing and installation: £900

  Seven Gloucester Old Spots: £450

  Fencing for pigs/chickens: £1,509

  Timber: £950

  Chickens: 200

  Rare-breed chickens: £86

  Two Berkshire pigs: £140

  Timber: £907

  NFU insurance: £741

  NFU membership: £188.49

  Egg boxes: £73.70

  Fruit trees: £493

  Fruit trees (soft): £195

  Roof for new shed: £327

  Straw: £35

  Egg stamp: £47

  When we first embarked on the venture in the early months of the year we approached Wayne Bennett, the manager of Dillington House adult education centre, and secured his agreement that we could supply his chef with vegetables and, in due course, with 750 eggs a week. Dillington House runs courses in everything from local history to tracing your ancestry, from art classes to three-day sessions on looking good. They serve roughly two thousand meals a month. Until we started selling carrots to them in July, all their carrots had been imported from Spain. Now their food miles are a short walk up the garden path.

  The income from Dillington House underpinned all our calculations about how we were going to break even. The initial financial forecast looked like this:

  Dillington House: £1,500 worth of vegetables every month

  Eggs: 750 eggs a week will yield £320 a month

  Pigs: Selling one pig a week from May 2006 makes £150 a week, £600 a month

  Vegetable boxes: 20 a week at £7.50 a box makes £600 a month

  Rare breeds: should start breeding in spring 2006. Each pair can produce 20 pairs a year, selling at (average) £50 a pair

  Plants: plant stock to build up over the next two years, earning £5,000 a year

  This makes it sound very easy; it wasn't. To start to pay back the capital and to increase David's salary to a reasonable level we had to be making almost an extra £1,000 every month. By July 2005 we had earned virtually nothing and by the end of October, nine months after the project began, we had earned the following:

  June:

  Sale of plants at a Garden Open Day at the Dairy House: £120

  July:

  Sale of vegetables to Dillington House: £70

  August:

  Sale of vegetables to Dillington House: £202

  Sale of vegetables to Mr Rendell (the local greengrocer): £120.00

  Sale of vegetables to individual
buyers who visit the nursery: £1 8

  September:

  Dillington: £202.90

  Dillington Open Day: £126

  Individual veg sales: £26

  October:

  Dillington: £252.55

  The Popp Inn: £229 (a local pub with which David had done a deal)

  25 dozen eggs to local households: £37.50

  Other vegetables: £28.35

  Chickens: £30

  Vegetables to Kensington Place restaurant in London: £82.50

  Total: £1,544.80

  I am continually taken aback by how much hard work goes into making just small amounts of money. Eggs are a good case in point. We bought our first day-old chicks in May. They cost us £1 a piece and began their lives balanced on their spiky little legs, huddled together on sawdust under the warmth of a heating lamp. Six weeks later they were ready to go outside into their pen. Another two months elapsed before they were ready to lay. Even then, and very endearingly, they had to take a few practice runs, producing eggs that were small, sometimes minus the yolks, sometimes containing two. Every day they need feeding in both the morning and the evening. The electric fence means they don't need locking up at night to protect them from foxes; they just go inside of their own accord into a warm huddle. Twice a day, someone has to collect the eggs. They need washing if they are dirty, they need checking under a sharp light for cracks and they need to be stored in a specially reserved place. Every chicken needs an inoculation and inspection before we are allowed to sell our eggs commercially. Now we have a certified number and this must appear, by law, on the side of every box of eggs we sell and on the egg itself, to certify that we have been inspected for cleanliness and hygiene. Seven hundred and fifty eggs earn us £80.

  I am, of course, approaching this with the sensibilities of a Londoner who works in the media and who can earn considerably more than that just for showing up at a radio station and talking about what I happen to think of something in the arts or in politics. If I contribute to a lunchtime radio show, talking about an issue of the day, I can earn fifty quid in a few minutes; a similar item on TV nets much more. So I reckon I'm probably very blase when it comes to evaluating financial worth, but, whichever way I look at it, it still seems incredibly tough that going through that exhaustive process still nets you only eighty quid.