We have a couple of jackdaws that come to nest in the wall of our workshop every year. The first couple of years we lived here they drove me crazy, I was only aware of them when I came out of the workshop door and they suddenly flapped away. I’m a bit squeamish with flappy birds (ironic for a Duck I realise) and the fact that I forgot every time and then it gave me a sudden fright meant that I often ended up swearing and cursing them.

Then I learned something that changed my approach entirely. I learned that jackdaws mate for life and that they return to the same spot each year to have their babies. I learned that they are so clever (in my arrogant human terms) that they recognise specific people and choose to trust them. In this I learned that they trusted me, despite my cursing, and that they felt ours was a safe haven for their precious young.

I also learned – or rather realised – that this was a seasonal thing, that their arrival marked the beginning of spring and that their arrival would be quiet at first but as the weeks went on we would begin to hear little chirps of their babies and those chirps would get louder as the babies got bigger.

I still get the occasional fright if my mind is elsewhere when I go out that door on a May morning, but this is totally diminished now by the delight in hearing those little chirps, a delight my 2 year old daughter shares. We are now very fond of Maw and Paw Jackdaw as we call them and I hope we’ll keep seeing them for some years yet.

This annual ‘event is part of a host of things that are now now becoming rituals in our life on a rural smallholding. Before we moved up here we had imagined all the things we would be doing – planting, growing, keeping chickens and goats, making our own preserves etc etc. And then life intervenes with all the things it brings to interrupt our fantasies and we do not have goats or chickens, my veg patch is currently ¼ it’s intended size, the greenhouse is out of action and the polytunnel is full of aphids causing blackened cucumber plants, so sometimes I don’t think we are ‘smallholders’ in a true sense at all.

However, with my kinder eyes I see the little rituals that we have developed that my kids enjoy getting involved with and how, gradually, without our forcing them, they have become annual events that mark the passing of seasons, the children growing older and are little touchstones for us. And also fun things that keep us well oiled, fed and juiced for the rest of the year 😊
Some of these are:

• Picking elderflower in May and making cordial for drinking or making ice lollies
• Picking roses from our wonderfully aromatic rose bush in June and infusing oil that lasts the rest of the year for my skin
• June brings strawberry harvest and the beginning of pea season that has us all popping pods obsessively for a good couple of months, or more depending how well I did at planting stage!
  
• Picking Calendula that I started growing in 2018 and it now self-seeds rampantly with a beautiful array of yellows and oranges scattered through the veg patch, then using this to make calendula oil (equally vibrant in colour) for baths and skin and a fantastic calendula salve for cuts and scrapes that we also call ‘bum balm’ as it is a great nappy rash protector / healer
• July also brings the ripening of raspberries that are littered through our garden and as we get to the end of the month the gooseberries kick in – we have some enormous bushes so we eat these daily, and use them for jam as well as blackcurrants and redcurrants
  
• If we’ve left enough elderflower heads there’s elderflower syrup to be made in late summer as the brambles get going and we come home from walks purple with faces and fingers
• Apples are next and these go to eating straight up and then we’re into crumble season and some apple jam
• My husband, Wayne, is the jam maker and he also makes wines with brambles, apples, rhubarbs and gooseberries
  
• I’m the veg grower and preserver, so if I’ve gotten on well with squash we get some of this baked so we have pumpkin pie filling ready for Christmas and I get stuck into preserves in Autumn – usually some tomato chutney with whatever is left and then fermented chilli sauce and pickled beetroot are favourites

Add to this the ‘opening up’ of early spring when we start planting seeds and preparing beds and the ‘closing down’ of late Autumn when we clear older crops and mulch the beds for next year and we do really get a sense of living with the seasons and the passing of the years.

From discussions with the WNT team and exploring the idea of rituals as more enriching than habits,  my yearning now is that these annual events or duties can be firmly approached as rituals so that we are doing them with intention and attention and reaping even more reward than soothed skin and tasty preserves 😊

The festive season is upon us as the year of 2021 is rapidly drawing to an end. Again a new covid variant threatens to upset and thwart carefully made plans of festivities. Remembering last years sudden disruption to celebrations and disappointments is perhaps not what we had in mind gearing up to Christmas. But being prompted to look back into the year we have just had is good in order to see where time has gone. Revisiting good moments reinforces the feelings of joy/wonder/love in life and fills our source of strength. Equally, acknowledging difficulties and hardship and persevering in this crazy unpredictable thing called life develops this source of strength. Reflection can also help in seeing what direction we are traveling and becomes an opportunity to adjust direction.
 
We need moments to rejoice, to experience abundance and generosity. Connect, congregate and break bread together. Nurturing our seeds of happiness. The true spirit of Christmas contains all that. The trouble is we easily slip into excess, stressing out and inadvertently creating the opposite. Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.
 
Reflecting on questions such as ‘where does it all come from?’ and ‘where does it all go?’ might bring connection to our impact on our planet and maybe bring more of a sense of being part of our environment. It might also be a bit uncomfortable.
 
This year we have become reminded what complex logistical network we live in and how fragile the chains of distributions are.
 
The mind boggles thinking of all the parts that comes together in order to create a simple plate of food. From pretty straight forward seeds that have been watered, nurtured into a plant and then harvested, to animals that have had their food grown and harvested to be feed them then their life taken and turned into cuts. The tools and cutlery we use was made somewhere by someone and ended up in our kitchen. Resources we use for cooking, cleverly arranged so we only switch on the hob. The person who shopped and cooked the food. You quickly create endless complex webs and chains of all that came together to create one meal. It is quite remarkable what we are capable of and how interconnected we are.

Before digging in to your plate of food, pause and give thought and thanks and gratitude towards all that had to come together for the meal to manifest. Some say grace before a meal and thank God. I was brought up in an atheist environment and particularly my father thought it ludicrous to thank God as it was his hard work that paid for the food. My mother who did the cooking and shopping probably wanted to be thanked for that. I think they missed the point. Saying grace is a way of thanking all that came together for the meal to be there, regardless of belief in God or not. Pausing and express gratitude before feasting heightens the sense of wonder and respect.
 
Where does it go? What do we leave behind?
 
Definitely less pleasant to think about but non the less necessary - the food becomes energy for our bodies and waste. The waste bit we generally don’t like to give that much thought to: go to the loo, flush, gone. But where does it go? (We have been reminded this year that more often then we like to think it gets dumped in our rivers). We have our rubbish collected as a part of our council tax payments so we pay to not have to worry about it and - when it works - it’s very efficient and convenient.
 
Currently there is an exhibition at the Design Museum in London titled Waste Age. It’s focus is on solutions. I have not yet seen it but read about it in this article. It sounds optimistic and interesting. Generally, I despair about the state of waste in the world and particularly attitude to littering in this country. (The writer and comedian David Sedaris explored this topic years ago and I will refrain from going into a rant, but it is very noticeable when returning here from abroad.)
 
I believe there is a natural desire in us to make a mark or leave a trace that we have existed. Cave paintings contain handprints likened to a signature. Carvings in stones and tree trunks leave a mark of our presence to posterity as graffiti paintings do. Monuments and graves are, to some extent, also markings that we have been here. Perhaps we fear being forgotten, that our life’s were insignificant and unremarkable and that feeling drives a need to mark our existence and create a memorial. But I doubt anybody likes the notion that we will be known in history as the era of waste so this flame of desire might not need more encouragement and instead some temperance.
 
I thought of wild camping. Not so much as a venture but the ethos of it. Leave no trace. You set up your camp discreetly, bring all you need with you and leave nothing behind. If you need a poo you carefully select a spot to not contaminate water, dig a hole and cover it. You don’t scare the ground with fires but take your stove and fuel with you. Visiting a place without engraving your presence on it.
 
“If you see the suffering in the world but you haven’t changed your way of living yet, it means the awakening isn’t strong enough” – Thich Nhat Hanh

When we live many together as we do, almost everywhere in the world we have found support for our existence by providing infrastructure for amenities. But we may have lost the connection to the impact this has on our Earth. By considering how interwoven we are and what impact we have we might be led to tread more lightly while still celebrating life and so begin to change the course from becoming the age of waste.

Some ideas for Christmas stocking fillers: litter-picker,  ticket to Design Museum, Thich Nhat Hahn book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet.

It’s wet in Scotland today. Very wet. The river outside our house is flowing with force after a relentless 36 hours of rain. Not the best day to be working in the veg patch but first chance in a while and there is plenty of old vegetation to remove, relentless weeds to pull and gazillions of slugs abounding. They seem to thrive in the wet and this morning I found tens of them, ranging in size from a couple of millimetres up to a couple of inches.

Then I began to explore yoga principles, to reflect and shift toward living more aligned with considered values. The yogic concept of ‘ahimsa’ - the idea of living in a non-harming way - presented a challenge and I began to wonder how that could work in a veg patch. We are an almost-vegetarian household and conscious about where and how we source any meat or dairy products we use and yet I was crushing slugs willy-nilly in the name of nicer looking kale.

This year my attitude has been somewhat more laissez faire. I have transported slugs to the compost heap rather than drowning them with the weeds or squishing them. I have been less diligent with weeding, giving them more places to hide and more leverage to get up to the nice juicy leaves. They have gone rampant, the compost heap is obviously a brilliant place for them to breed and a brilliant place for them to work their way back to the veg patch or over to the greenhouse…

July is ‘Plastic free month’. Its purpose is to raise awareness and encourage people to reduce their plastic waste. Sounds like a great idea and it might just be the reminder and call to action that some of us need to make a change in our plastic consumption and subsequent waste. But how easy is it?
 
Not so easy. I challenged myself to not buy any new plastic in the month of June. Using plastic products that I already had was okay, I just couldn’t buy any new plastic for a month...I lasted a week. Which in hindsight is quite impressive. I hadn’t realised before I set myself the challenge just how much plastic is EVERYWHERE. Not to mention that in the month of June I was having work done on my kitchen so my only food options were ready made meals or takeout: cue the plastic.
 
Kitchen work aside, I still thought that if I made the conscious decision to avoid buying plastic, I could. For that first week I deliberately bought take out food from places that I knew used cardboard boxes or, even better, compostable packaging. Another relatively easy choice, which I’ve already been making for several years, is taking my own cloth bags to go shopping. I also buy dry goods and toiletries such as hand soap and shampoo from a zero waste refill shop - more on that later.
 
All of the above aside, it is quite literally impossible to buy milk (dairy or alternative) without plastic and oat milk is something I consume daily. The only alternative there would be to make my own, and quite frankly I just don’t have the time! The other thing that is impossible to avoid is tags on clothing. I am an avid charity shop goer and I feel that reusing clothes that otherwise would be thrown out is a great waste saver, but you can’t avoid the plastic price tag! It’s in the little details that I got caught out (and those are just a couple of examples) and if I wasn’t doing the challenge I probably wouldn’t even notice them. It has really opened my eyes to just how much plastic is used. We don’t even realise our consumption of it on a daily basis.
 
If we can’t cut it out completely, thankfully, there are ways that we can REDUCE our plastic consumption and waste. Starting with zero waste refill shops. You bring your own container and fill it with ingredients or products that the shop buys in bulk, therefore reducing plastic packaging needs. Granted, there are some in London that only stock very expensive organic products and ingredients and charge extortionate amounts for them. However there are a few gems in and around West Norwood:
 
Sustenance - West Norwood (pop up at Portico Kitchen)
Healthier without - Streatham → apparently they now have their own oat milk dispenser!
BYO - Tooting market

 Some other great ways to reduce are:

• Bringing your own bags to go shopping
• Choosing to buy fruit and vegetables from market sellers or loose in the supermarket
• Buying oils and sauces in glass bottles and then refilling them where you can!
• Using shampoo/conditioner/soap bars rather than liquids in bottles
• Choosing to buy takeout food from establishments that use biodegradable packaging
• Avoid ordering online where you can, reducing the need for delivery packaging
• Make a packed lunch!
• Bring your own reusable coffee cup to a cafe
• Consider switching from tampons/pads to reusable menstrual products such as period pants and menstrual cups

 
Where you do need to purchase plastic containers see if you can reuse them before recycling them. If you have kids, plastic containers can become all sorts of arty creations! If you are a keen gardener, plastic bottles or lids can become germination pots and plastic bags or sheets can become cloches. Paying a little bit of attention and being more conscious of your decisions in regard to plastic consumption and waste can make a big difference.
 
Start small and build habits. Good luck!