Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (12 page)

6

The Nature of Soil

We hold our first board meeting on 22 January 2006, sitting round our dining-room table after lunch. Charlie and I have now
invested £70,000 in the farm, far more than we had intended a year ago, but then the farm is bigger and more diversified than
we planned. It is clear that David's energies are scattering in different directions and we're worried that we're neglecting
our core business. Our income is still incredibly small: a few hundred pounds from Dillington House, the same from the nearby
Popp Inn, which buys our vegetables, and just over £300 that Kensington Place owe us for the eight geese before Christmas.
Our outgoings are shooting up. On top of David's wages of £250 a week, we're now employing Bob on a month's trial for a possible
full-time job at £180 a week. Adrian works a day and a half a week for £70, and David's mum, Anne, does six hours for £36.
That makes the total wage bill £536 a week. On top of that, our monthly outgoing on animal food is £42.50 for pigs and the
same for chickens, plus £21 on turkey food. Corn, which we buy in bulk from Dillington Farms, is an extra £20 every month.
We also have bills for seeds (£350 for the year), compost (£500), sawdust (£150), plus all the extra capital costs that have
been needed to build a second chicken shed, fence, gate, and prepare the new land, lay drainage pipes under the chicken run
and the extremely muddy parts of the pig pens, and buy a computer. Most of these are one-off costs, but, even so, January
turned into an expensive month, with Charlie writing a cheque for almost £6,500.

The immediate financial returns don't look good. We have very few vegetables to sell, the pigs aren't yet fat enough to go
to slaughter and the rare-breed chickens will not start laying till February. We've spent close to £1,000 on fruit trees.
Some have been planted round the walls, others are positioned to grow on to wires stretched between eight-foot-high posts,
standing in lines running north to south in the main garden. In years to come they will look beautiful, espaliered against
the wires, with vegetables growing in between. Right now, they're thin and weedy­looking and it will be three years before
there is any fruit to sell and any chance of a financial return. Our plant stock is growing too, small cuttings of box, bay,
hydrangeas, pitto­sporum and ivy, arranged in neat rows against the south wall. But, like the fruit trees, there's not going
to be much to sell this year and, as yet, we don't have an outlet which will take our plants. I phoned the local organic farm
shop to ask if they would be interested and they didn't even bother to return the call. It's clear that, certainly until the
spring, we will have to underwrite the wages. But David is still confident that we'll be breaking even by June and possibly
making a small profit. On paper at least, this certainly looks like a real possibility. But I can tell that Charlie is feeling
a little gloomy. The economy Mercedes has now become a top-of-the-range model and we're adding extras all the time. Between
ourselves we've agreed a limit of £80,000 as a total investment, but I also know that we will go on forking out money beyond
that. But till when? It is impossible to imagine not paying the wages one month, but the finances need to turn a corner soon.

The best news at the start of the year is that the chickens have gone from laying thirty-five eggs a day to seventy-five and
then over a hundred. It happened in a matter of days and the only explanation we can come up with is that the blue drainage
pipes which we've installed under the yard are doing their job and the chickens now have dry feet. I think they look happier,
but this is probably wishful thinking and more connected to the fact that I no longer see them as just a mass of feathers,
each bird indistinguishable from the other, but more as individuals. All animals are like that: the longer you watch them,
the more they emerge as themselves. Like the supposed silence of the countryside which you come to realise is always full
of the sounds of animals and birds or wind rustling through trees, or like the signs of spring, so absent from London but
all around us in January: the shoots of leaves, the pushing of bulbs and the first lambs standing in the chill January air.

Josh discovered that the chickens are keen on sprouts, of which we currently have plenty of rejects. Chuck one into a group
of birds and their heads bob up and down trying to find the small green ball. Then you notice that one bird has crouched down
and is running as hard as it can, pushing through the mass of legs and feathers towards the outside of the scrum. Bursting
into the open with the sprout firmly in its beak, it puts it down and takes a huge peck of leaves. By that time, the other
chickens have noticed and the scrum formation is reassembled round the lucky bird. The game starts all over again.

Along the back wall of the chicken coop, nesting boxes open on to lidded metal trays attached to the outside of the hut. It
makes for easy collecting. The mostly clean, sometimes still­warm eggs roll on to the trays, where it is a simple process
to collect them. In the last few days, I've picked up over fifty eggs in one go. Inside the coop, a few chickens still seem
to prefer sitting on the sawdust in the corner and laying there. Their black eyes study you fiercely when you go in to see
whether any eggs are rolling around on the ground. But it does seem to be the case that happy chickens are productive chickens:
not much different from human beings.

After the war, when servicemen were struggling to re-enter civvy street, one of their options was starting a smallholding.
I have a copy of a splendid book called
Livings from the Land,
written in 1947 by S. A. Maycock. Mr Maycock was the proud owner of a smallholding and he writes with affection about his
vegetables and birds. Even on his Sunday afternoons off he chooses to spend his time with his chickens. 'Having eaten our
modest meal of rationed meat, we don't rush around too much, but take an extra look at the baby pullets. Now, as we sit on
the floor on the peat-moss litter, my wife smoking her cigarette and I my pipe, the chickens jump all over us, and we are
all friends together - and this is the state of affairs when you get the very best results, for it is surely work for love's
sake.'

I am sure that the chickens would not appreciate having me in their midst smoking a cigarette, but at the end of the middle
week of January the eggs are piling up and we are suddenly confronted with a new problem: we have an excess. Dillington House
has over-estimated its egg demand. Instead of the 750 a week we thought they wanted, they have announced that they can take
only 300. So, on Saturday morning, I go to ask Mr Bonner if he wants the surplus. He doesn't: he already has an egg supplier
and it would upset the delicate status quo between producer and supplier if he started taking ours. I mill around in the busy
Saturday morning queue while he calls his friend at the Shrubbery Hotel, but it turns out that he has just done a new deal
with a local supplier and is happy with his arrangement. Feeling more than a little crazy, I go down the street to John Rendell,
the greengrocer. He doesn't want any either. I catch sight of my reflection in a store window: I look like a mad middle-aged
woman, in a muddy coat, having a bad hair day. What on earth am I doing? This is a pathetic way to run a business. We need
proper contracts: wandering around town like a travelling salesman trying to flog bibles is a good joke, but it isn't solving
the problem.

Rescue comes from Rowley Leigh, our friend who is chef at Kensington Place restaurant. He will have 300 and, if he likes them,
maybe this could become a regular order. So, on Sunday night, Charlie and I load 300 eggs on to the back seat of the Land
Rover and deliver them to the storeroom at the back of the restaurant on our way to our London home. I attach an invoice for
£40, deciding that I can write off the delivery costs as we are going that way anyway.

In early February some of the chickens fall ill. First one, then another, develops runny eyes and becomes weak and lethargic.
They stand around in the coop, heads down or under their wings, their feathers limp and dusty. Over three days, six die. David
isolates the sick ones, sixteen of them, in a separate shed and adds a broad-based antibiotic to their water supply. The vet
says we need to take one of the dead chickens to DEFRA at Langford House in Bristol for autopsy. We all have only one thought:
bird flu.

Avian flu had been making its way from Asia, to Turkey and into Africa. It seemed a distant problem, but then, in the middle
of February, the potentially deadly strain of
HSN
I was detected in four European countries, carried by swans who had been driven south by the freezing weather in northern
Europe. Over one weekend infected swans are found in Italy, Bulgaria, Greece and Slovenia. So far, the disease is confined
to swans and has not crossed over to domestic fowl. The Italian minister of health, Francesco Storace, says that the strain
of flu that has been responsible for more than ninety deaths in Asia has been found in dead swans in Sicily. Twenty­one swans
were infected by the virus, five of them with a virulent form. The Italians establish two-mile protection zones round each
of the outbreaks and all poultry within the zones must be kept indoors and moved only to travel to a slaughterhouse. The Italians
say they are not worried about human health, but avian flu is spread by migrating birds and we are just approaching the start
of the major migrations. Although February is early for birds to be taking to the skies, it is possible. I have a vision of
our little farm being screened off from the world, of men in white coats, with masks on their faces, wearing white wellingtons,
cramming our chickens into incinerators.

DEFRA takes three days to pronounce on the chicken: not avian flu, just a bronchial virus, which has most likely been caused
by the recen t long stretch of sustained very cold weather. The nights have been freezing for almost six weeks now, with the
temperatures going down to minus 6°C on occasions. Mr Rendell the greengrocer says that he can't remember such sustained cold
since the winter of '63 and, before that, the winter of '47, when his father's car had frozen to the road.