Food?

It’s wet. Again. I’m repeating myself. Reporting the same old things every week. It’s just that it’s wetter than ever ever before. Certainly in my memory. The ranch as always, is the as above, so below barometer. The track runs non-stop like a mini river. The actual spring gushes like a real river. The drain has burst halfway down the track and water flows onto the road below. The areas outside the muck midden and leading into the field to the sloping beds are slutchy mud baths.

I had a dawning realisation a few years ago, that because of the natural damp climate round here, it’s probably the best place in the country to live. It might not seem like it at the moment with all this wet but I think I’m right. The ranch is both flood and drought resistant. The long downward sloping beds in the field certainly get hammered, but only the relatively new top layer of woodchip manure gets washed off – the water naturally forms rivulets along the lower paths between the beds.

I had no idea when I was planting the mammoth twin hedges and digging a well in the boggiest area, that I was designing a flood management system – that’s just an accident. The overflow drains from the well are both running like full-on taps and the spiralling run-off around the outside runs like a river into the fledgling terraced watercress beds then drains down the field. The rest of the field is wet, but not boggy and I’m hoping that it won’t affect the growing season too much.

Meanwhile, large swathes of arable land down South are flooded which surely will affect forthcoming crops? 60% of our veg is imported from Europe and surely prices wil increase. The argument for growing clean food locally vs importing it from arable land strengthens by the day.

The last month has been a whirlwind of gig organising – first the punk gig at the library, then last night, our vegan street food pop-up at Jim’s vegetarian cafe in Colne, with us and Leon playing. Gwen and I have been planning it for ages and she in particular put a vast amount of work into preparing the food. I just helped out a bit and sorted the music and other bits and pieces. It was a great night. Jim’s has been going for 38 years and is a great place to put on small scale gigs – it has a lovely atmosphere. Ruth compered and did her poetry. We played our achingly quiet and slow songs (finishing with Notsensibles Because I’m Mine), some of them for the first time then we backed Leon. Hip hop in a cafe? Cool as fuckety-fuck-fuck.

Like the punk gig at the library, it’s a joyous thing bringing the renegades, mavericks and lateral thinkers together. That surely is our way forward in the face of the madness in the wider world?