Boots

So: boots polished, shirt ironed, suit ready.

This afternoon, our plans for opening Otter Farm up go before the planning committee and I get three minutes to speak.  I ought to be spending time on what I’m going to say rather than scribbling away here, but you know how displacement works.

131 people took the time to write in support on the local authority’s website – thank you: this has made a huge difference to how the application has been considered. It is highly unusual, if not unprecidented, to get so much support. And not a single objection from near or far.

If we get a YES, Otter Farm will be able to throw its doors open, to do what it does better, and with people coming here for whatever interests them along that journey from plot to plate – and whatever else there is that my tiny mind won’t instantly recall first thing in the morning. Otter Farm is unlike anywhere else, and it will only be more so.

The plans are to make something lasting. To create a place that attracts the brightest minds (to counterbalance mine) – cooks, growers, designers, innovators – to speak, demonstrate and to share with whoever wants to visit.

I fully intend to become food for a mulberry tree here at some point, but hopefully not for some time yet. In the meantime, the more children we can encourage to step through the gates and take away some of our enthusiasm for growing and cooking the better. It’d be a fine thing if the next generation has food back in the centre of their lives rather than it being simply the cheap fuel for it. And we need a better food system and our generation is mostly too snoozy to come up with one: let’s hope they’re not.

But whatever the big aims might be, I’m mostly excited about planting a few more of these: Big Golden Star hawthorn. I baked the first few we’ve had from our solo plant last night and they are like the child a good cooking apple would have after a drunken night with a strawberry.

It’s nine and half years since I planted the first tree here – it was one of the local apple varieties that will keep us in fruit, juice and cider for years to come. Followed by some walnuts I planted in the wrong place, but we’ll draw a dark veil over them. Planting is still the bit that gets me most excited. It’s why I earn a poor living.

I may come back with my tail between my legs today.  The odds may have been against us but I have had a quiet sense of positivity about it. As if it is meant to happen. That there will be a way. And as Brian Eno said, nothing ventured nothing gained. As I’ve demonstrated repeatedly, I’m not much good at a regular job, so fingers crossed.