Living the Green Dream

Hands up if you have ever dreamed of escaping to a rural idyll, where you grow your own veg, and rear your own chickens.

Yes, me too.

But how many of us will actually live that dream?

In the second of our Big Green Heroes features, we meet Danette, mother of twin girls and someone who has made that Big Step and is living her dream in a gentle, green way. In a truly inspiring article, we find out if it is really everything she hoped it would be.

What inspired you to move to rural Dorset?

It was a combination of things. We were increasingly aware that where we were wasn't where we wanted to be! We started chewing over emigrating to New Zealand but hubby wasn't keen on such a big move. The chap he worked with knew this cottage was empty and then very quickly things fell into place. It was a ‘jump now or never' situation so we jumped and I am very glad we did. With hindsight we would have ended up in a sticky situation with the mortgage and other escalating bills and it would have been a case of me having to return to work. If there was a choice to be made between servicing a mortgage or spending every day with my precious daughters, well it's no contest. If we had stayed where we were we would have both been exhausted, never seeing the girls and falling into bed each night wondering what it's all about. OK, I fall into bed exhausted each night now...but that's from being outside all day!

I am a definite Do It person, to me there's little to be gained from talking things over and over. Too many people do too much talking and not enough doing in my book! Just do it, you can always do something different if it doesn't work out.

How did you find the cottage? How does renting it work out?

The chap hubby was working with did the maintenance and repairs on all the estate cottages for our landlord and he knew this one was empty. He mentioned us to the landlord and it went from there.

Renting has such a negative image in this country. I see lots of folk wanting desperately to live what they see as a greener lifestyle, yet they write it off because they can't afford to buy in the countryside (there's no way on earth we could afford to buy out here) so they bust their guts to buy a place in town that offers very little of what they yearn for. I know towns suit a lot of people but it frustrates me when some really go on about living in the country yet have a bee in their bonnet about renting.

You only get one life, this is it, right NOW. Sometimes you have to work out what's really important. For us, being in a place we love, an ideal place to raise the girls, and giving them a precious and gentle childhood rated way higher up the list than home ownership.

At the meeting with the landlord we asked specific questions: Could we install our Clearview woodburner? What could we do with the garden - did he mind hens etc? This led to a discussion about more growing space and for the princely sum of a pound a year we also took rent of a corner of a field a few hundred yards away.

My advice if you are going to view a rental is to speak at length with the landlord, and get a clear understanding of how you plan to live in the property. Communication is key.

How easy was the move? Especially with two small girls!!

It wasn't too bad, I wasn't driving then so hubby did the moving and endless trips back and forth with the van poor thing! The cottage had been left in a shocking state by the previous tenants so the landlord gave us a few weeks rent free in view of us having to sort it out and clean it. Ugh did I have to clean! Hubby stayed in Bournemouth that night as he was still packing things up that end so I stayed there alone. I kept getting up to check on the girls but they were blissfully unaware of the chaos and were fast asleep! Sleep for me was another matter... the darkness out here astonished me. Really, I was stunned. I had never been in such a pitch black place before. There's no streetlamps and no light pollution, glorious for star gazing but boy that first night I was startled by it. I laid there gripping the torch, listening to all manner of beasties scrabbling around, inside and out. I have never known such a noisy place! Why on earth did anyone describe the countryside as quiet??!

Things didn't get any easier straight away as two days later we had a chimney fire. It was caught in time thankfully and I was secretly quite thrilled to have had my tiny cottage swarming with firemen!

What green features do you have?

We have insulated the bathroom extension and we had our woodburner installed here. The cottage had oil fired central heating, a big no-no for the environment and the purse. Having our efficient woodburner fitted transformed the cottage in a cosy dwelling. It put the heart back into it, you could really feel it. So far one tank of oil has lasted us over 18 months, as we just use it for water heating and the occasional blast on the central heating when it gets really perishing. The woodburner runs 24/7 in the colder months and keeps the whole cottage really snug. We get a lot of powercuts out here and with the woodburner we can pretty much carry on regardless as we can cook on it, heat water and keep warm.

I had curtains with thick linings made; the windows are all tiny and ancient so no over- the-counter ones would fit. They help keep the warmth in.

We built a huge log store and a shed, erected two greenhouses and installed five waterbutts. We turned the back garden into a kitchen garden and have hens out there too. Using the field plot we planned to see how far we could go with being self-sufficient in vegetables.

What really inspired me last year was reading Barbara Kingsolver's ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'. I read it and thought that's how it should be! Back in the late summer we dropped the Riverford organic veg box I had had for years and we have been eating just our own veg: freshly picked parsnips, leeks, kale and celeriac at the moment, and frozen cabbage, peas, carrots, dwarf and runner beans. Our stored potatoes ran out a few weeks ago as did the freshly picked cabbages. We have pickles, chutneys and jams. All I buy veg wise at the moment is broccoli. This has saved a small fortune on food shopping. I spend less now with three adults and two ravenous smalls than I did years ago when there was just hubby and me. In fact even with rising prices, I have never had such small shopping bills. Hurrah!

What have you found yourself doing that you never thought you would?

The biggest surprise to me at the moment is developing a love for running. My dad lives with us and at the moment he does the bulk of the gardening, certainly the heavy digging. It dawned on me one day that everything he does now, I would one day be doing. I realised being overweight really wasn't reflecting very well on the values I have for fresh seasonal food nor was it going to do me any favours in the future. I started cycling the lanes and when the weather got too rainy and the lanes too slippy for a bike I started running. So far I have lost 30lbs and have so much more energy to throw myself into what is a very physical lifestyle.

One of my hens went broody last year and in the end we hatched one egg - it was a cockerel. If someone had told me when I was stuffed behind a desk in an office years ago that I would go quietly out one morning after realising that cockerels do indeed crow very loudly and very often and take it calmly into the shed and kill it, I would have said no way, I could never do that. Yet I did. I read all I could on the matter and was quite confident I could do it properly and quickly and without any stress to the bird. The aim this year is to raise some birds specifically for the table. A big step. Of course it won't provide anywhere near enough meat for the year, but to have even a small amount of home-reared is something I will be proud of doing.

I have also become a dab hand at dealing with game as we are lucky enough to be deep in game countryside here and have a lovely friendly gamekeeper.

I would say it is empowering to have such a connection with some of the food we eat and it's certainly empowering being the fittest I have ever been!

How have girls settled into life?

I had a lightbulb moment the other day when I realised they had been here longer than at our old place! So really this is the only life they know and that makes me so happy. They are joyous children and seeing life though their eyes is something I am very blessed to experience. They are great at identifying animal tracks and animal poo and spend many a happy hour up the field following the trails!

They have an awareness of the countryside and the seasons that I think some adults lack. One thing I am very proud of is they are very aware of where their food comes from. They see it from seed tray to plate every day, it's such a big part of our lives here. There's a great sense of community here and we have some fantastic friends in the village who the girls adore. It's a great place for them to grow up.

Describe your daily life

I wake just after 5am and either head out for a run or sit with the computer and a cuppa for a bit and then go and get some bread made. I deliberated long and hard about getting a breadmaker as it was ‘another appliance' but since buying it last May I haven't bought a loaf of bread. It's greener for me to make my own bread than get in the car to go to buy one and a breadmaker uses a fraction of the units compared to an oven. Plus we get fresh homemade bread every day!

Soon as it's light there are the four hens to let out and the coop to clean.

There is no typical day here and they vary greatly with the seasons which thrills me no end. You feel so much more connected when you live life by the seasons. Back in September for example I lived in the kitchen from dawn to dusk dealing with processing the vegetables and fruit as it came off the gardens, chopping, blanching, freezing, pickling.

In the winter months there is less kitchen work to be done. Making delicious marmalade was last month's highlight so there is more time spent on other things: long wintery walks and long afternoons curled up by the woodburner.

Household chores tend to get done in the morning. I let the smalls help with whatever I am doing, which has until recently been pretty counter-productive, but as they get older they are getting to a stage where they are becoming great little helpers. I am working hard in the front garden here at the moment, aiming for a very bee friendly environment as getting a hive is an ambition of mine. I have just dug a huge new border and am looking forward to seeing it in all its midsummer glory later in the year.

We eat dinner around 5pm and once the girls are in bed, all worn out from the busy day, it's again very dependent on the season as to what I do. I watch very little television but hubby and dad are news addicts so I tend to sit quietly and get on with some knitting. I am an early riser so that's followed by an early night - I go on up just before 9pm. In the lighter evenings we live outside as much as possible! I adore sitting in the garden hearing the cows pull the grass and watching the barn owl float past in search of a meal.

Every day is different here but the common thread running through the days is a quiet life. We do go to town but I prefer to do what shopping I have to do in the nearby villages, it's much more interesting and folks know us to say hullo to.

Would you ever move back to the town?

Never.

I heard a discussion on Radio 4 this morning asking if the economic climate was turning people away from green. Happily most ringing in and being interviewed echoed my feelings. With a very few exceptions like a woodburner or solar panels, green isn't something you buy, to me it's about doing without. People may think this makes you miserable but far from it!

It's about seeing that almost everything out there is aimed at taking your money by convincing you that you need one, want one, have to have one, can't live without one, heaven help your children if they don't have one! Without one how can you be happy, funny, pretty, clever, popular, sassy, funky, admired? Every shop you set foot into, every website you click on, is aimed at taking your money.

I am far from perfect, I go into wistful swoons when the Cath Kidston catalogue arrives and have a passion for Emma Bridgewater pottery. My fingers click all too happily on the BUY! button on Amazon saying to myself that books are kind of neutral on the ‘Buying Things Scale' and most are second hand!

But I can't help thinking there is a danger with green issues that some folks happily switch over to them and then tick that box. ‘That's done, that's ok, I'm green.'

But surely there's issues with someone buying Bio D washing up liquid and using a bottle a week, or buying a Faith in Nature bubble bath and pouring half of it in a tub. How does that compare to the person that buys a bottle of Fairy Liquid and makes it last six months?

Is it better to eat vast quantities of organic meat every week, or would people be better off dropping meat from their diets apart from a very small amount? What about those that switch energy to a greener tariff yet don't count their units weekly or try to lower them?

I don't have the answers but in my heart I feel that the key to a better, greener future is ‘less'.

I have been blessed with the most lovely neighbour. She's nearly 80 and has lived here since the early 1960s. She gardens voraciously, growing vegetables, flowers and trees, she cooks and makes everything herself, very little is bought in ‘ready done'. She bought some sturdy well-made clothes decades ago, wears them graciously and takes great care of them. She follows no fashions or fads. She has no television preferring instead to listen to the radio. Her belongings are treasured and hard-earned and still all in use, whether it's a kitchen implement or a garden tool. She puts out the tiniest packet of rubbish for the landfill collection you have ever seen and when we have powercuts she doesn't even notice. She doesn't have a ‘green' branded product in her house yet she is the greenest person I have ever met and has become a complete inspiration to me.

I think it is time for us all to strip back our lives, to discover a gentler way of life. Find things that make your heart sing and a big smile spread across your face. Find a faith and nurture it, hold it close. Stop chasing 'things', you are never going to be drawing your last breath saying I am so glad I had the latest telephone/television/shoes/computer game/car/holiday.

So no green isn't something you buy, it's something you do by choosing less.

All photos (c) GTM 2009

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