The nature of compromise

Cor and I consider ourselves to be reasonable exponents of eating well, that is, eating animals and vegetables and fruit that have been produced with a high level of care and consequently, a high level of flavour.  But we compromise.  Everyone does it, and on a recent road trip I was given cause to consider the drivers of compromise, staring down at the decidedly non free-range bacon and egg sandwich from a roadside café that was to be my breakfast.

We get a lot of lecturing.  People telling us we should eat organic, free range, biodynamic, RSPCA inspected, local, sustainably caught, responsibly farmed, the list is endless.

But all too often these lecturers don’t try to understand or respect why people compromise when it comes to their food.  As far as they are concerned, there is no excuse for not eating food that falls into the aforementioned categories.  Or if they do look for a reason, it is all too often blamed on the big food retailers, for stopping the march of the citizenry towards better food.  Actually, the first time I have really seen compromise even acknowledged was in this great Milkwood post: http://milkwood.net/2013/12/23/the-ethics-of-almost/#comment-22982.

The reasons we compromise, as I see them, are threefold.  I believe they are:

1.       Time

2.       Information

3.       Money

Time

So you are, like us, on a roadtrip, looking for a quick breakfast on the go.  You don’t have time to seek out the one backstreet café in town that serves locally made bacon on their sandwiches.

Or you have a couple of kids, you and your other half leave for work at 7am and get home at 7pm, eat, put the kids to bed, steal a couple of private moments in front of TV before falling asleep.  And weekends are no better, ferrying kids around to sporting or social engagements.  When are you supposed to have the time to seek out this wonderful food you are being told you should be feeding your kids?  If it isn’t packaged in flashing lights at the supermarket when you do the Saturday afternoon shopping trip, it doesn’t make the pantry or even the trolley.

Of course, like everything, this driver is one of choice.  You could spend your weeknight spare time tracking down these producers, or restaurants, or markets, but sometimes you would rather spend the time decompressing, or if you are the road, driving on (I personally love it when we “make good time”).

Start out with some herbs like we did....

Information

This one is related to the time driver, because it takes time to understand our food.  The way things are these days, with an endless stream of jingo-istic food phrases thrust at us, it takes time to follow each of them through to what they actually mean.  Organic?  When it comes to meat that doesn’t mean free range, just that it has been given feed grown with organic chemicals (though there are some approved non-organic ones too).  Free range?  That just means given access to an outside run, not necessarily for the whole life of the animal nor one that allows the animal to scratch, or root around, or do what it does naturally.  Most citizens don’t know this stuff.  The simple information they have been provided is: organic/etc = good & expensive; everything else = not so good & cheaper.  Hell, even people who sell organic stuff don’t know that an organic certification actually allows the use of chemicals and some drugs, nor how dangerous some 100% organic chemicals can be.

So if you don’t have the time to research all these things, you aren’t going to be informed.  And labelling, contrary to what the demagogues think, is not the be all and end all answer.  Labelling will never explain fully where a product comes from, the conditions it was grown or raised in, and whether the grower is receiving a fair price for the product.

Solving the information problem takes time, and I know that there are lots of people out there trying to help in this regard.  But I will make two easy suggestions for those not sure where to make a start.  The first is to borrow or buy a copy of the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  It is incredibly compelling while being very informative (think Bill Bryson), and goes a long way to explaining how food is produced in modern America, and many of the techniques that have been adopted elsewhere.

The second suggestion is to buy go back to buying your meat from the butcher.  It isn’t any more expensive than the supermarkets (unless you want it to be) and when you are looking in that glass case at those pork chops, you can ask the simple question “where did those chops come from?”  The butcher won’t be offended by your impertinence, he will relish the chance to share some of his knowledge of his supply line.  Whether it is from commercially farmed (confinement) large white pigs, or free range Berkshires, or something else entirely, you will have in a few seconds increased the amount of information you have about your food, and taken a valuable first step towards knowing your food.

The other important element of information comes to flavour.  Not knowing that certain types of produce taste better, and thinking that “a tomato is a tomato and a chicken is a chicken” is the one of the greatest information obstacles that we must overcome.

Money

I left this one for last, because it seems to be the most sensitive one.  The fact is that yes, food that is produced in a caring manner, and that gives a good return to the farmer usually costs more.  But, and here, is a big but, it doesn’t have to.  That’s right, it really doesn’t have to.

Sure, if you don’t have the time to make the effort or the information on where to go, and you want to buy your high quality food from the supermarket, yes it will always cost more.  However if you do your homework, and change your buying habits, you can get it for the same price as you would pay for the food you normally buy.

You find that person in your area with their own free-range chooks, you won’t pay $6.35 a dozen you will pay $4-$5.  You find a few people with a similar outlook, and you can buy a side of beef, cut up, for $8 a kilo.  There is no way the supermarket is going to beat that price.  Same thing works with pork.  Sure, you have to stock your deep freezer, and order in advance, and do some running about, but this comes back to the time consideration.  Find the market gardener in your area, maybe at your local farmers’ market (if you have one).  Buy a week’s worth of veges from them and then compare it to your normal bill.  Pleasant surprise almost guaranteed.

Overcoming the Drivers

So those are my thoughts on the compromises we make.  I will finish this post by charging my fellow food-lovers with a challenge.  When next you find yourself saddling up the high horse (as I too often do, I admit it) get down for a minute and think about which of these compromise drivers you can help your audience to overcome.  The more we all pull together to do this, the closer we will get to what I believe will be a “tipping point” in our society’s relationship with food, and restore the relationship between the citizen consumer and the farmer.  I am going to try and do my part, want to give me a hand?

...and end up making your own sausages!

Big step, our first animals!

Since the last post we have been very busy, doing all the things that you do when are buying a farm at the end of the month.  Like pruning on these beautiful, changeable Spring days.

But we have also been doing some other things, like working for Matthew and Sadie at Fat Pig Farm, and attending Matthew's excellent book launch, complete with scrumptious food put on by Michelle and a great BBQ at Nick's place afterwards.  As you would expect, these guys know how to eat (and drink) well.  Such a great event, and a privilege to share in it.

But it has now been dwarfed by an even bigger event in the life of Our Mates' Farm.  Our first animals.

We have 2 dozen chicken eggs in an incubator, and some duck eggs about to go into an incubator of their own, but they won't hatch until the end of the month so it isn't them....

Regular followers of this blog will know about Bob, the bottle lamb we looked after while farmsitting for friends in Cygnet, and Duane and Joan brought him over today, to be our second animal.

But the first?  This beautiful girl:

We have named her Princess.  We had a whole bunch of names from myth and fable ready for her.  Names like Freya, and Sif, hell, even Xena (Warrior Princess).  But instead we end up just naming her Princess, because that what she is, a gorgeous, affectionate, calm little princess.  She is a Maremma sheepdog, and anyone who knows this breed knows that we have let ourselves in for quite a lot, but that if we look after her right, in a little while she will be looking after our farm, and all the animals that are to come.

We owe Julz and Shane from Backfatters a lot for bringing up such a wonderful puppy, plus my Mum and Dad for their help getting her to us.  We just love her to bits.

Introducing Princess and Bob to the farm, and doing some lead training.

She is a farm dog alright, sleeping under the tractor while it is being worked on!

On the home front we have been trying to become as self sufficient as we can, so have lots of cuttings of herbs from Mandy, bought our first citrus trees, Cor has successfully made yoghurt and cheese from Elsie's milk, as well as baked her first loaf of bread, and we are eating mushrooms growing on compost in the garage (and no, they aren't the "funny" kind).  It is brilliant and all happening very fast.

So for now we roll on, getting things ready to takeover the place for ourselves, enjoying great food, and trying our best to get it going.  All for Our Mates' Farm.

Taking the tractor for a drive - that brought some memories back!

Getting what you pay for

Yo bitches, we be famous.

OK, maybe not Gourmet Farmer famous, but the 23 people who listen to Food Fight on radio 3CR in Melbourne have heard our dulcet tones on the radio again.  (Sorry Jonathan, I am sure you have more than 23 listeners.  Really.)  The link to it is here: http://podcast.3cr.org.au/pod/3CRCast-2013-04-30-68243.mp3

So it is time for us to use this amazing position of power for good, not evil.  And here is my contribution…. please stop complaining about the cost of food.

Hear me out.  The average Australian spends $14 a week on fresh fruit and vegetables.  That’s right, $14.  And the supermarkets talk about price inflation in the press while the cost of unprocessed food in Australia is lower now than at any point in the last 30 years.

Some tasty quinces going into making quince jelly!

But more than this, for most people the axiom “you get what you pay for” doesn’t seem to apply to food.  People are happy to apply it to so many other aspects of life but when it comes to food there seems to be the view that cheaper is always better.  And this low price has costs that you are paying, but you just don’t see it on the price tag.

Follow me on this..... just like these goats!

Let’s take a few seconds to follow this idea….

The farmers get squeezed by the large supermarkets pushing cheaper food and the spectre of food price inflation – telling farmers to become “more efficient” while paying them less.  Google Queensland dairy farmers and Lion Group, or Tasmanian potato farmers and McCain, or King Island beef and JBS.  These farmers going out of business put real strain on our economy, as any corporate replacement doesn’t employ the same number of people, nor contribute to our community (unless you are a shareholder).

These farmers, trying to avoid going bust, told to produce more for less, have to use chemicals like 24D and other pesticides that are aerially sprayed, increasing incidences of cancer and lymphoma in their communities, the costs of which we all bear.

They also have to use capital-intensive farming techniques that treat animals like commodities, subjecting them to terrible living conditions in the name of efficiency.  They also have to use antibiotics and steroids to allow the animals to cope with these unnatural intensive systems.  This profligate use of antibiotics lead to more and more resistant strains of bacteria, affecting your family’s health and your tax bill as health costs rise.

Who wouldn't want to pay a bit more to see more pigs kept like this?

If none of the above arguments have swayed you (and if statistics are anything to go by, they haven’t), then try this on for size: the good stuff actually tastes better.  If you don’t care about the conditions a chicken is raised in, try eating a true free range chicken and see how it tastes compared to cage-raised bird.  You will find a whole world of flavour that is well worth paying the extra money for.

And if you think the answer is going vegetarian or vegan, think again.  Every cow that is being milked will have its calf killed this year (why do you think they are producing milk?).  Egg-laying chickens don’t get a nice retirement scratching around the farmyard, they are killed after 3 years and put into meat meal.  Farmed salmon is fed Chilean fish meal made from their rapidly vanishing sardine-run (in a ratio of 5kg of meal to 1kg of farmed fish).  Even fruit and vegetable farmers have to shoot possums and wallabies to protect their crops (I have heard tell of one apple farmer having to kill 150 possums per year).

Some wild caught salmon we smoked - great tasting stuff and no added Chilean fish meal.

The answer is not to eschew all food, but to spend that little bit extra money at the checkout, and a little more of your internet time (over lunchtime perhaps) looking for where your food comes from.  Make contact with a direct marketing farmer (they do exist!) and really get to understand what it takes to produce food ethically and sensibly.

Trust me, when it comes to food, you truly do get what you pay for.

Oh yes, Autumn is here!

"The Gourmet Farmer" meets "The Apprentice"

We have been working with Matthew (the Gourmet Farmer) and Sadie at both their home farm and their new farm for two weeks.  As with all our volunteer work we have learned a lot.  There have been challenges, like helping host 16 corporate people from SBS for a 4-course lunch at the farm, splitting a few tonnes of firewood (if you saw the episode where they built the smoker, we split the parts of that tree they didn’t turn into planks), and holding an ewe that was trying to escape the yard while we were trying to get her onto a trailer.

Our accommodations in the "pickers hut"

And despite my belief to the contrary, getting up on those cold mornings have been challenging.  We are staying in an uninsulated, unpowered, unplumbed and unheated pickers hut, and it has made for interesting night time discussions along the lines of:

“Is it too cold to get up and go pee?”

“I don’t know, how much do you need to go?”

“Quite a bit, I shouldn’t have had that cup of tea after 9pm.”

“You know that always makes you need to pee in the middle of the night.”

“Yes but it isn’t always this cold!”

And this goes on until the person caves and goes outside to pee.  OK, who am I kidding?  Until I go outside and pee.

But it has been great as well.  We have learned a lot about rare breed pigs, about milking cows, and about rotational grazing (management intensive grazing using electric fences that are moved regularly).

Oh yes, and we have been taking these cute little guys off to the abattoir too

And Chuck the Truck is being used for what he was meant for.  Towing trailers, lugging timber, four-wheel driving across paddocks, carrying fertiliser and straw.  And in one case towing a porta-loo! Which I certainly never anticipated using him for, but he is like Chuck Norris in Walker Texas Ranger, whenever people need him he is there to help.

Meeting some of the people who Matthew works with has been one of the best things that we have experienced.  He has a great network of people and they all have a unique energy and approach to life.  We are very lucky to get to meet some of them, and even more lucky to work with them.

With a work environment like this, it's no wonder we want to be farmers!

Now, onto the property situation.  We started looking in earnest this week.  We have revised our previous plans somewhat.  First, the size.  You see, quite a few people we have met have started with 10 to 20 acres and then had to buy additional land to accommodate new plans when livestock come onto the scene.  The fact is that 10 acres, after putting a house, a garden, some fruit trees, a dam or two and a shed doesn’t leave much space for grazing animals.  Trying to put half a dozen cows or pigs onto the remaining space creates an overgrazing situation and a horrible mess in winter.  So we have upped our planned area to 50 acres, and are struggling slightly with the consequences of this on our initial property budget.  We will keep you posted on how this works out.

Secondly, the house.  We were talking about getting a place with an existing house on it, but this feature appears to add at least $200K to the price of any property.  The problem is that no house we have seen is actually up to scratch in terms of design or insulation.  Most are weatherboard places built in the wrong part of the block with no scope for grey water reclamation or solar energy utilisation.  To retrofit one of these houses even slightly would add significant additional cost and negate the usefulness of paying that $200K premium in the first place.  It would therefore be much better to build a new passive solar, straw bale, double glazed house, despite the significant grief that this would cause us.  And by grief I mean having nowhere to live in addition to the much trickier matter of dealing with Tassie tradies.  Cue a number of late-night conversations regarding whether Cor would be prepared to live in a caravan on a building site or, as Matthew is pushing, a converted shipping container.  This chat is normally over before the peeing conversation starts.

Our source of warmth..... when we can wait for it to get going!

And finally, we have had the surreal experience of watching an episode of the Gourmet Farmer sitting on the couch with the Gourmet Farmer.  Very odd indeed, kind of like turning on the director’s commentary feature while watching a DVD, except this one is brilliantly interactive.

So that is where we are.  We will be back in Queensland in June for my sinus surgery and a biopsy of my cheekbone, but in the meantime we have another couple of weeks of work here, then onto another farm for more learning for May.

Until next time, dream of the Good Life!

The mornings that make it all worthwhile

Back to school!

Palya folks!  How is it going?

Sorry for the lapse in posting, it has been such a whirlwind month, it has been a little hard to know where to start!

Since we last posted our plans we have had lots of support from our friends, and we have been hard at work trying to expand our knowledge before heading out and buying a farm.  This has entailed talking to lots of people, an appearance on community radio, reading lots of books, plus a stint volunteering on a small-scale farm to get some experience.

The main thing we have learned is that we are almost unique.  Most people buy a place, with all its problems and issues, and then try to figure out how to fix it.  We are trying to find out what we should be looking for, and what pitfalls to avoid, before we buy, as opposed to after.  This is not to say we will be able to avoid the problems, but we are trying to go in with our eyes as open to these as possible.

Eyes open, something like this.

So in this learning process we have learned a little something about permaculture.  When my sister went off to Costa Rica to start her “Permaculture Design Course”, I must confess I thought permaculture was some hippy-dippy word for what is essentially organic farming, with some grey-water recycling and straw bale house building thrown in for the smelly dreadlock crowd.  I have to apologise to her and the dreadlocked, because after doing our homework we have realised that permaculture covers a whole lot more, and doesn’t just apply to the tree-hugger set.  It is a system set up around a good yield/diversity/energy equation, among (many) other things.  For me its essence is lazy farming, building a holistic system to produce the best output for a given input of energy.

Now some perma-heads will disagree with my analysis, but I have only just started this journey, and that is my beginner’s interpretation.

Norman here was born the day before we left our volunteer farm.

So to give other budding treechangers/perma-beginners/suburban escapists a feel for the path that our learning is taking, so far we have read:

- Permaculture 1 by Bill Mollison & David Holmgren – good intro to the concepts, though 30 years old;

- Permaculture 2 by Bill Mollison – good expansion of some concepts, particularly structures;

- The Chook Book (1^st edition) by Jackie French – good no-nonsense book, 2^nd edition looks expanded and even more useful with photos and more illustrations;

- Natural Cattle Care by Pat Coleby – brilliant book, good ideas, and a great help with our first experience dealing with cattle while we were volunteering;

- Going Bush by Edward Mundie – a little disappointing, a couple of vital lessons and some useful tips but too dated to have just been written in 1994, ignores efficient systems;

- The Permaculture Handbook by Peter Bane – just started reading this, American based so not sure how useful it will prove in Tassie, but the principles are there.

I have the Permaculture Design Manual by David Holmgren to read, and Cor is halfway through Backyard Self-sufficiency by Jackie French, whose informal writing style is a joy to read.

At the moment we are at my sister’s place before starting a 3-day course this weekend at Milkwood Permaculture up near Sydney.  The course is called “You Can Farm” by Joel Salatin and should give us an opportunity to ask some practical questions of someone who is working daily with the principles that interest us.  Joel has appeared on shows like 'Food Inc' and in the bestselling book, Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Then we are heading to Tasmania on 25^th February, to do some more volunteering on farms via the WWoOF system as we begin to look for a place to buy.  A word of warning on WWoOFing - it appears to have become less about the "willing" workers on "organic farms" and more of a way for backpackers to see Australia on the cheap.  Not that there is anything wrong with this, but be prepared to find yourself in hostel-style-accommodation renovating the owner's house if you don't do your homework.

We will be crossing on the ferry with our new dual cab Ranger “Chuck” and a friend we met diving in Micronesia for a bit of road trip fun in Tassie before starting to work.  Not looking forward to the crossing – apparently it can be a bit bouncy!

If you are interested in hearing more about our motivations and what we want to achieve, check out the podcast of our radio interview here: http://podcast.3cr.org.au/pod/3CRCast-2013-01-29-61152.mp3.  We aim to do a regular bit with Jonathan on this program to keep folks updated on our progress.  Our goal with this will be to show people that if even a couple of putzes like us can make a go of a big change in their lives, then they can too!

Thanks going out to Jonathan and Jane, Barbara, Fleur, Anna and Dave, and of course my sister Elisa and her family for putting up with us whenever we are in northern Victoria.

Stay tuned!

The Crazy Plan

I hope everyone had great Christmas and New Years’ celebrations, and that now you are excited about what 2013 holds!  Every day is precious, make the most of it.

OK, now something that has been on my mind for a while (forgive the word-heavy post!).  I know we have set up this blog ostensibly as a place to talk about our journey to find our own corner of the world to grow our own food, and we haven't really been talking about it here.  But that doesn't mean that we aren't thinking about it.  And I mean a lot!

Plus, we haven't really told many people what we are planning to do.  Why?  Mainly because they will almost certainly think we are crazy for chucking a couple of well-paid 9 to 5 careers in for this madcap notion of growing our own food with any “real” work fitting in around this.  But then the people who read this blog have read the "why" in my Meaning of Life post earlier in 2012, so now I am going to put some of our ideas out there.

Here is the crazy plan:

1.  Buy a property with the qualities listed below.

2.  Get cracking growing our own food, focusing on heritage and heirloom varieties for a focus on the best taste (we are all about great-tasting food).

3.  Year one - chickens, a couple of weaner pigs and my personal challenge: bees.  Have a crack at making cider/perries with our first fruit harvest.  Start a farmer's market stall selling any surplus produce we don't barter away.

4.  Year two - a goat for milk, another couple of pigs, plus a beef steer.  Mead-making anyone?

5.  Year three - ducks, a sow that we will use for breeding, with a couple of pigs, another beef steer, and some lambs.

6.  Year four - sheep, and perhaps a heifer for milk and breeding (depending on how we go with the goat!)

7.  Year five - commence farmstay.  Actually we may start this sooner as we get going and need extra hands but growing enough food will be the focus.

We will supplement our food as much as we can with whatever we can get for free from nature - fish, venison, rabbit, duck, goose etc.

It is a very rough plan at the moment, and we have no idea whether we have enough cash to actually last that long, or whether we can make enough at farmer's markets to pay the bills that are inevitably going to arrive.  As an accountant I would do a budget, but I have no notion as to what things are going to cost, so it won't be that useful!

So, what do we want in a property?  We have quite a list worked up, and each point has been the result of much discussion.

In no particular order we want:

- lots of space.  We don't want to be able to see our neighbours and we need enough land to grow our fruit and vegies plus enough pasture for animals.

- a mix of native bush and pasture.  We want to have some bush that is suited for camping and generally giving the native fauna a place to live.

- our own water supply.  We know that water is precious, so a creek and a dam or two, or maybe a spring, would be ideal to ensure we can keep our garden growing and putting food on the table.

- established orchard.  It takes a long time to get fruit trees up to full productivity so an apple and pear orchard, with other fruit trees, already established, is a must.

- north-facing block.  Plants like sun.  We like sun.  Enough said.  Oh, and keep in mind we are talking the southern hemisphere here people!

- a house, of no particular quality.  We would like to build our own house.  I have a lot of ideas in mind for a very energy-efficient house that is incredibly cheap to run and is very self-sustaining.  But before we can build it we need somewhere to live, and we will also need a house or cottage for the farmstay business component of our plan.

- outbuildings.  No real rocket science to this one, if there is already a chicken coop that is one less thing for us to build, plus we will need somewhere for the vehicles.

- in the right area.  This should really be number one.  We need a place that is in an area where people are either doing something similar or have experience at doing it.  We don't want to reinvent the wheel, we want to use other people's knowledge as best as we can on our journey and also not try to do everything.  Why try to get into making goat's cheese if the family down the road are making award-winning stuff that they are happy to trade for some pork products?  Plus we need an outlet for surplus produce.  We need a town with a farmer's market or something similar within reasonable distance to allow us to shift all those things that you suddenly have a glut of. And we can't be an excessive distance from an airport.  When we progress to the aforementioned stage two this will be more important.

- reduced chance of bushfires.  We aren't spending years building a place and a business up to support us and then having it go up in smoke in 30 minutes and have to start from scratch when we are older and less able to do the hard physical labour.  This may be hard but we will be looking for properties with plans in place to manage this risk.

So that is it, pretty demanding I know but we can trade a few things about, and we will probably end up adding to this list.

I don't know where in here we would have time for anything like building a house, but we will see how it pans out.  We know that we are not really going to get vacations in the first few years, hence the massive trip now, but we have a few ideas for how we can get holidays once things are ticking along and I'll flesh these out in another post.

So what do you think?  Are we crazy?  What would you suggest we change or plan differently?  Would you pay to come stay on our farm and eat our quality food, and maybe help out around the farm if you feel so inclined?

The Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything...

...is 42.  Everyone who has read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy knows this.

But this post is more about what the meaning is for us, or in other words why Cor and I are on this journey in search of "the good life".  We are often asked why we left good careers, a happening place like London (in an Olympic year), and all our friends, to go off travelling the world.  Well, actually that part people understand, but what they don't understand are our plans of buying a smallholding / hobby farm and growing our own food.  That seems just like a crazy amount of work, right?  Why go to all that trouble?  So a post to explain a bit seems in order.

Back in December 2010, Cor and I were back in Australia on holiday driving from Ingham to Albury when we had a nasty car accident on the highway between Mackay and Rockhampton.  We aquaplaned off the road at about 105 - 110km per hour headfirst into a ditch and flipped the car over.  We were lucky, and for the most part walked away mostly unscathed.  I had a broken nose (check out the Disaster post for the issues this is causing now), whiplash, a gashed leg, a busted head plus some soft tissue bruising courtesy of the seatbelt, while Cor had a tiny scratch on her foot.  But more than anything else it was a wake-up call.

If we had come off the road 5 metres earlier we would have hit a massive gum tree and be dead.

There was lots of water on the drive and if there had been just 1 to 2 feet of water in the ditch, we would be dead (upside down, it took us a while to get out).

Take a good look at the photo of the inside of the car.  See that small tree above the driver's seat?  6 inches lower and one of us would be dead.

See what I mean about wake up call??

We owe thanks to our family Justin Burnside and Vayne Monzeglio for coming to our rescue after the accident.

At the time we were living in London going through the motions, but after this we decided that it was time to reassess our lives and live where we could engage in what made us happy, which is being outside.  Whether it is climbing, running, diving, fishing, camping, hiking or skiing, we love being outside.  So we decided to move somewhere we could do that from home, rather than living near work and commuting to what made us happy.  Our friends Tim and Lynne had done this with their new massage business and were an inspiration.

The other thing we love, though, is food.  We love growing it, cooking it and eating it.  We had an allotment and a great garden in London and were largely self-sufficient for fruit and vegetables 8 months of the year.  It had always been our dream to do a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Gourmet Farmer, raise our own animals and be self sufficient in food as much as possible, but that was always off in the future in a semi-retired state.

Well, after our wake up call, we aren't putting it off anymore.  Bucket list?  Doing it now.  There is no point being rich but dead and therefore unable to dive Sipadan, or climb El Cap, or ski some insane off-piste.  The time is now.  And as for a smallholding, well why wait to do the things we have always dreamed of?  Some people ask if we have enough money to do it, and as anyone who has followed their dreams will tell you, you can keep chasing "just a bit more" but you will never have enough.  Far better to get out of the comfort zone, and see what happens.

I hope this goes towards explaining why we seem a little crazed, and perhaps inspire a bit of craziness of your own.  Perhaps we'll see you on that dive boat this year or maybe coming up the drive of our little farm one day for a cold cider and a warm welcome.  Palya!