Would you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge a retired journalist set himself on Radio 4 this week. Max Cotton lives on a five-acre smallholding near Glastonbury in Somerset with his wife Maxine, two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cross named Brenda. [Wicked Leeks]
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Radio 4 has been to the West Country this week, looking at how one man has tried “Growing Solo“…
Max Cotton, a retired political journalist, leaves behind the weekly shop, supermarkets and the modern world to find out if he can grow and produce 100% of his food on a smallholding near Glastonbury. His only import for a year is salt.
Yesterday’s episode looked back at this time last year, the so-called Hungry Gap:
In this episode, life on the farm starts getting hard as the reality of seasonal food production in England begins to bite. Early spring is the hardest time to produce fresh vegetables – it’s called the hungry gap. We hear how Max is trying to bridge that gap. The irony is that the news has been full of stories about shortages in supermarkets while Max is living off swedes, milk and rationed potatoes.
Would you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge a retired journalist set himself on Radio 4 this week. Max Cotton lives on a five-acre smallholding near Glastonbury in Somerset with his wife Maxine, two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cross named Brenda. He also has six adult sons who, as far as this project is concerned, ‘prefer to pontificate than help very much.’
My name is Max. I’m 58 and I live on a scruffy smallholding just outside Glastonbury. I left my job as a political reporter at the BBC ten years ago to live off the land. I wanted a plain pastoral existence that a chap like me in Saxon England would recognise for its stoic simplicity of purpose.
It didn’t really work out like that. Mainly it didn’t work out like that because living a simple subsistence farming life in 21st century Somerset is just a game. I was growing food for fun. None of it mattered because if I failed, say my cabbages all got eaten by caterpillars, then I could just go to Sainsbury’s. So living off the land was just pretend.
The Saxons were growing wheat and if they cocked it up then they might starve. Meaning and reason in a pastoral life comes from necessity. So I decided I would cut myself off from the modern world as far as food was concerned. I would only eat and drink what I could produce from my small farm and nothing else for a whole year. Nothing. No tea or coffee, no supper with friends, no pasties at the petrol station, not even any foraging in the village hedgerows.
I would have to produce everything or do without. I would allow myself two imports: salt and water. I had decided I wanted to test the idea of eating locally and seasonally to destruction…
