Cool FARMHAND Luke

So in my first entry I held off on telling you a few interesting things about the Hillmans’ smallholding, because I wanted to have extra stuff to talk about in the future. And now, WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!

In addition to an average septic system, they have a compost toilet. That is, it’s not simply an outhouse, but an outhouse wherein human waste is collected and composted into “humanure” (a word I have seen on the internet but, thankfully, not heard used by the Hillmans) for use as fertilizer. If there’s still sunlight, and it’s not lashing rain, you’re encouraged to use the compost toilet instead of the normal one. You simply use the outhouse and sprinkle sawdust into the hole after you. Looking at it from the outside, the only difference from a normal outhouseis that there’s a load of straw underneath the shed, which presumably is part of the compost process.

Also, in case you’re wondering, it doesn’t smell bad at all. It doesn’t smell like you’d expect an outhouse to smell, if you’re just used to the portajohns that are so prevalent these days. Somehow, despite the soup of blue chemicals inside those plastic things, they manage to smell like nothing less than a pile of sun-baked shit. This compost toilet, on the other hand, simply smells natural. Earthy. Almost enjoyable, and somehow right.

They also have, in addition to oil-based heating, a solar heating system for their water. So on sunny days they can leave the heat turned off and by evening they’ll have a full tank of hot water that, I’m told, will stay hot for a full day and a half or so. Pretty cool stuff.

Here is an incomplete list of the crops that they’re growing at the moment: sugar snap peas, broad beans, passion fruit, strawberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, garlic, onions, spring (green) onions, leeks, a few types of potatoes, butternut squash, Hungarian hot wax chilies, sea kale, curly kale, some kind of French kale, lettuce, spinach, two types of broccoli, the type of cauliflower that forms a beautiful fractal spiral thing, celery, celeriac (what is this?), tomatoes, dill, parsley, sage, coriander (cilantro), courgettes (zucchini), and sweet corn.

Don’t you wish you had stuff like that in your backyard? It takes a lot of time and effort, though, to keep a smallholding going. Neither Dan nor Rebecca has a regular job; they’re landlords, and most of their income is from tenants in their other properties. Dan makes (very cool) painted wooden hobby-horses, and Rebecca writes e-books. They also, conveniently enough, run occasional courses on how to run your own smallholding! Even so, most of their days are filled with the upkeep of the crops and animals. It’s interesting – and very tempting – to think that one can eschew a “career” in lieu of self-sufficiency and non-time-consuming work to keep an extra cash flow coming in. Will I do something like this myself? I dunno. As I said, it’s tempting, but I don’t know if it’s for me. Once I’ve got my own home, I would like to do some fraction of what the Hillmans are doing, but I doubt I have it in me to turn it into a way of life.

Oh - I got my first tick today. Knock wood I don't get Lyme Disease!