Homesteading Part I

The gurus of the self-sufficiency

This is the first week it has felt and looked like a New England winter, and seed catalogs are arriving along with the snow. I’ve been wondering how the seed companies will prune their mailing lists of all the people who ordered for the first time in 2020 and have now gone back to their old pursuits. Raising your own food, going back to the land, the bucolic cottage life - these aspirations seem to arise naturally at a certain stage of civilization. But with climate change, there is good reason to think about our food supply, and ways to eat locally and seasonally.

Should we, as part of home ecology, be growing our own food? Let me tell you about my journey and maybe it’ll help you decide whether to place that seed order. I’m dividing this into three parts. First, some background history about a few influential people and books. Second, things to consider depending on your location and priorities, again with some useful sources. And third, suggestions for seed starting (and saving) and an introduction to the concept of permaculture. Here is Part I.

I started dreaming about homesteading when I was a young teenager. I had bought a copy of Living the Good Life by Scott and Helen Nearing at the Cupertino Health Food Store, which was walking distance from my family’s suburban house (and walking distance from what is now Apple’s global headquarters).

The book was first published by the Nearings themselves in 1954. A new edition by a commercial publisher became the bible of the sixties back-to-the-land movement. It transformed Vermont, in fact, because so many educated young people came here, and a lot of them stayed - Ben and Jerry among them. I’m writing this letter in Burlington, a city that once had Bernie Sanders as its mayor. He too was part of that migration from the cities to rural Vermont.

The Nearings’ appeal was in part their high-mindedness: the manual labor, the political activism, the raw vegan diet. Here is an example:

We would attempt to carry on this self-subsistent economy the following steps: (1) Raising as much of our own food as local soil and climatic conditions would permit. (2) Bartering our products for those which we could not or did not produce. (3) using wood for fuel and cutting it ourselves. (4) Putting up our own buildings with stone and wood from the place, doing the work ourselves. (5) Making such implements as sleds, stone-boats, gravel screens, ladders. (6) Holding down to the barest minimum the number of implements, tools, gadgets a machines which we might buy from the assembly lines of business. (7) If we had to have such machines for a few hours or days in a year (plough, tractor, rototiller, bull-dozer, chain- saw), we would rent or trade them from local people instead of buying and owning them.

. . . We aim to earn a livelihood, as far as possible on a use economy basis. When enough bread labor has been performed to secure the year's living, we will stop earning until the next crop season. Ideas of "making money" or "getting rich" have given people a perverted view of economic principles. The object of economic effort is not money, but livelihood. Money cannot feed, clothe or shelter. Money is a medium of exchange,—a means of securing the items that make up livelihood. It is the necessaries and decencies which are important, not the money which may be exchanged for them. And money must be paid for, like anything else. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in Men and Books, "Money is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or stint ourselves, like any other. And there are many luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination."¹

But like many movement leaders, their walk didn’t always fit the talk. They in fact had trust funds and made “trips to warm places to escape the cold Maine winters, despite tough public personas.” Neighbors composed “a song about the high - but often unreachable - values the Nearings were supposed to stand for, though didn’t always meet themselves. . . . Each stanza detailing the various Nearing commandments was followed with the refrain: ‘Likely it’s not, with Helen and Scott.’”

I believed the Nearings’ story, and read everything I could find about organic gardening and natural living. Then I ran away from home in the Silicon Valley to a tiny commune in Oregon. I had just finished 9th grade and was 14 years old. Pretty much everything I knew about life was something I’d read, but I was keen and willing. I was given the task of feeding the goats and chickens and gathering the eggs. I worked in the garden, hauled water from the well, cooked on the woodstove, and chopped wood for it, too. By the end of a few months, my confidence had grown but my idealism had been tempered.

Both the book covers below show Scott Nearing at work. On the later book, Helen Nearing appears to be relaxing, in surprisingly clean gloves, while admiring her manly mate. (Who was in fact much older than she, and a domineering figure who, I suspect, did not make her life all that pleasant.)

When it came to writing Home Ecology, I was twice as old and a little wiser. I lived in south London and loved the city, but that hankering for a rural idyll was still there. And there were plenty of people trying out what the English called smallholding. (A smallholding is the delightful term for a small farm rented or owned. It’s used in many parts of the world but I came to know it in the UK, and there are plenty of smallholdings for sale today.)

One evening I was at a pub on Camberwell Grove with Rodney, who was also involved with the Green Party. “I’m saving up to move to Wales,” he said.

I tried to imagine this. He was a vague literary chap who didn’t seem like he’d be much use in a kitchen, let alone in a field. “Have you ever even had a garden?” I asked.

He bristled. “I have all the John Seymours!”

John Seymour, another peppery eccentric beloved by the intelligentsia, was the guru of self-sufficiency in England. I too had some of his books, full of instructions for shoeing horses and choosing whether to grow swedes or turnips.

It’s only recently that I have really taken in John Seymour’s success or seen how he could have provided me with another career option. He had written a review of Home Ecology that was more pointed than I realized at the time:

“Not only is Home Ecology extremely well researched, it is informed with rare common sense and has the ring of actual experience about it. If we all do what Karen Christensen advises, the world will become a better place.” —John Seymour, author of Self-Sufficiency

When I wrote the proposal for Home Ecology and sent it to a small publishing house called Arlington, I was actually employed, indirectly, by Seymour’s publisher, Faber & Faber. I worked for Valerie Eliot, widow of the poet T S. Eliot, in her Kensington flat, but my invoices went to Faber & Faber, which was then and still is an eminent literary publishing house with many Nobel laureates on its list.

I saw my poetic literary work as light years away from writing an environmental book, and so did Mrs Eliot, but I really ought to have sent my proposal to Fabers, because,

If one book kept Faber & Faber going during the most difficult inflationary period in the 1970s, it was The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. Riding a wave generated by the TV sitcom The Good Life [1975-78], it and its sequel sold over a million copies in various formats.²

Here’s a short and amusing 1975 BBC film about John Seymour:

Four years ago I was, like many, thinking about growing my own vegetables and getting chickens. But I took advice from friends who already had chickens. To a woman, they said it wasn’t work that would suit me. Fortunately, next door’s chickens have thrived, in a beautiful coop with a run that protects them from the hawk that perches nearby and the fine-looking fox that takes a regular route past our houses. My household has been a beneficiary: a dozen eggs each week, laid fresh within a few feet of my barn.³

Since the pandemic, homesteading, the common term here in the US, has become trendy amongst younger climate activists. I have a whole new crop of books on the subject on my shelf, along with the old stalwarts, and there is even a website and podcast called Urban Exodus. More about this my next letter, Homesteading Part II.

And for some fun, and some history, too:

Homesteading through the apocalypse

1. This Life is in Your Hands by Melissa Coleman. The Nearings’ success in promoting a way of life they didn’t fully live themselves would be harder to pull off today. It’s like politicians’ mistresses: the media didn’t talk or write about them, and no one wrote about the Nearings’ winter trips to the Bahamas. But by the time I was writing about green living, journalists were watching. I had a neighbor who was a journalist at The Telegraph. She said she knew someone who had seen Jonathon Porritt at a McDonald’s - perhaps to put me on warning!

2. Faber & Faber: The Untold Story by Toby Faber.

3. Calling it a barn isn’t accurate, actually. This bit of land was not a farm. The building was a carriage house during its early decades, with rooms upstairs for servants. Once the automobile appeared, it became a garage. But we still call it “the barn” - more of that rural life myth-making?