Michael Kelly - Tales From the Home Farm: Live More, Spend Less, Grow Your Own Food

I swear to God, I nearly fell off my chair. I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard an economist advising people to go out and start growing their own vegetables! I did a double-take at first, wondering had I heard him right but yep, this expert in the study of supply and demand appeared to be touting vegetable growing as the only guaranteed way to survive the global economic downturn. If you grow your own vegetables already, as we do, you should feel pretty smug when you hear things like that, because it means that you are well ahead of the curve. A-ha, you might say, I have been growing vegetables for years!! At last, people have seen the light! Victory is mine! But strangely, instead of feeling smug, I felt absolutely terrified if were relying on my vegetable-growing skills in order to survive in a world where even economists are advising us to grow our own, we are, pardon my French, completely shagged.

Lets not even try to establish whether our economist friend is correct in his assessment because discussions of macro economics are just too depressing and this is not going to be a depressing book. Promise. Its probably fair to say, however, that after years in which growing your own food was dismissed as a hobby for middle-class folk with too much time on their hands, theres a feeling in the air that a revival is underway. The ability to produce food in your own garden (or allotment or community garden) is simply more useful than it used to be now that money is tighter. Growing your own vegetables has always been fun. Its always been good for your body, mind and soul. Its always made sense in terms of the flavour and the variety of your food, and its always been a good thing for the environment. But it hasnt, for a long time, been necessary. I find it enormously comforting that in our hour of need these ancient skills are there for us to fall back on. They have been waiting patiently in the wings, smiling quizzically while we indulged our fascination with convenience foods, 24/7 Tesco and low-fat dairy spreads. They are not annoyed that weve been away for so long in fact, theyre happy to seeus even though they are acutely aware that the economic downturn will assuredly pass in due course and we will become obsessed with other, more trivial stuff, all over again.

Our Home Farm is a windswept acre in rural Waterford in the southeast corner of Ireland. We moved out of the big city about five years ago, turning our backs on the insidious clutter and stresses of the rat race to go in search of a gentler, more simple way of living. We found the good life almost by accident. It started with us sowing a few vegetables garlic, onions and potatoes in our first spring here, just for something to do, really, and it basically snowballed out of control from there. Before we knew what was happening, our vegetable patch seemed to be taking over the garden and our lives, like a particularly aggressive weed, and we seemed to have accumulated an array of farmyard-type animals pigs, ducks, chickens and hens. And so, out of fairness to you, dear reader, I should mention right here in this opening gambit just how addictive the whole thing is. Once youve tasted the magic, theres just no going back. If you are not currently producing any of your own food, its still not too late. You can put this book down right now and go and watch TV or take a nap and save yourself a whole lot of bother. No harm done.

Still here? All righty then!

For us, abandoning the rat race was about trying, in some small way, to turn our backs on a society that is relentless in its pursuit of things. A society where marketeers continuously hold up the prospect that happiness is within our grasp if we would only consider shelling out some money on their particular product. We are bombarded with messages to this effect, morning, noon and night, on TV and radio, on the internet, on billboards. Driven half-mad with acquisitiveness, with the desire to have, to acquire, to possess, we spend our lives killing ourselves working at jobs we often despise, so that we can earn the money we need to fund these trophies and, of course, along the way we become completely detached from whats important and from the things that can really make us happy. We forget that we can be happy simply by being. I dont claim to be completely fulfilled, or enlightened in these matters, but I do think that real happiness comes, not from owning stuff, but from not even wanting the stuff in the first place. It comes from being happy with what we have NOW, even if its not a lot. It comes from accepting things as they are. None of this is easy, of course, and to choose to live that way is to place yourself at odds with society as a whole.

When we moved here, we both gave up good, solid corporate careers to pursue our dream jobs in my case, writing; in Mrs Kellys case, teaching nippers in the local school. The result was (eventually) a very welcome change of pace and a sense of fulfilment in our working lives. But there was also, of course, a dramatic downward shift in our income, mainly because writing doesnt pay very well. It has taken a considerable adjustment in our thinking to deal with that change in our standard of living. But, thankfully, though our earnings are a little emaciated compared to what they used to be, we have found happiness in having