We spent a great week at the start of July at Ceridwen, a wonderful smallholding near Holsworthy in Devon. It’s only 3 acres but incredibly productive with veg beds, 3 polytunnels, greenhouses, herbs, chickens, ducks, goats, nut trees and an orchard.
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
Its owners, Rob and Diana, bought it 14 years ago and have turned what was originally one blank field into a very carefully thought out, sheltered and well zoned smallholding. The way it’s laid out and run is based on permaculture principles so everything is designed to give maximum yield with minimum input. (We are going on a 2 week permaculture course at the end of August and are really looking forward to really deepening our understanding of this essential approach.)
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
Rob sells his produce each Friday at market, so the week has a regular rhythm of:
• Sat – Wed: sowing, planting out, weeding etc.
• Thurs: harvesting and boxing the produce ready to go. Here we are digging, picking, sorting etc
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
• Fri: market – a long day with a 6am start – Adam did this!
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
Diana is a medical herbalist, so sections of the garden are given over to lots of different familiar and less familiar herbs – chamomile, sage and borage being ones we could recognize. Diana taught us how to make tinctures (liquid medicines made by soaking plants in an ethanol/water mixture to extract their active ingredients) using Verbain, Borage and Californian Poppy.
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
She has a peaceful treatment room full of lotions, potions and amazing books and with a lovely leafy view out over the vegetable beds. The presence of all the flowers made the garden a really lovely place to wander around – and to buzz around for all the bees.
Rob and Diana couldn’t have been warmer, kinder and more willing to share their abundant knowledge with us – things we learnt included:
• How to make a raised veg bed that is mega fertile, with no digging involved at all – bonus!
• The wonderful benefits of home made comfrey juice as a fertilizer
• How to choose where to place your orchard, water systems and veg beds
• How to make yoghurt from their goat’s milk
• The best way to plant out leeks and cabbages
Here's Adam taking it easy as he tops and tails leeks ready for planting out:
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
WWOOFers are really essential for this smallholding as there is so much to be keeping on top of the whole time. This was great for us as it felt that we were really needed, and that each job we did was very focused and productive. Rob said that the nature of WWOOFers has changed over the years from foreign students wanting to learn English to lots more couples like us who are WWOOFing with a view to having their own smallholding one day.
The lovely Mulberry tree by Diana's treatment room:
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
Finally we can’t rate Rob and Diana’s library and conversation highly enough! There were walls and walls of books on everything, including lots on peak oil, sustainability, growing, food and climate change. Rob has very strong views on our economic state, peak oil, resource depletion etc etc so there was lots of in depth talking about the state we’re in. So not only did we learn loads of practical stuff here, we had meal after meal of good intellectual debate – Rob puts great store by ensuring that you keep your intellect alive to balance the practical nature of outdoor work – this is a great concept to take away with us, the importance of what he called ‘the life of the mind’.
Finally on the day we left, as we were waiting for our next hitch (we have been getting lots of great lifts!), we found ourselves by a field with this irresistible photo opp...
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| From Ceridwen Photos |
