A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things VII: The Smallholding

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

      VII.      The Smallholding 

This spring, we rehoused one rather bullied bantam and bought three new layer hens at some cost. Two days later, one was dead. A severe case of ventpecking had caused a severe wound. The bird expired in front of me. I felt guilty; chickens die, and I don’t find that upsetting, but I knew I had failed this bird. There is a reciprocal set of duties in animal and land care, where the beast and soil serve, and the human protects and nourishes. H1N1 regulations (a grim parallel to covid rules) meant the birds were inside their generously-sized run; nonetheless, the stress had plainly got to them. I resolved to solve that problem the next day.
 
First, I put the bird in a bucket, the only container to hand. I picked some smallish broccoli heads to make room for others growing beneath. I walked home, called a friend to come over with his toddlers, and began to learn how to butcher a chicken. Whatever my frustrations over the death – moral, financial – there was no use wasting the meat and the opportunity.
 

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The land has a way of exerting reality on the smallholder or farmer. Nature is intractable. A hen is a hen and a cockerel is a cockerel. Boulder clay is dense and stodgy, and buying enough compost to improve all of it at once is cost-prohibitive. Over a winter with record rain, you have no option but to get muddy and cold and dig drainage ditches through the clay, or else lose your whole spring crop. Death is inescapable – from played-out courgette bushes thrown in the compost to worms thrown to the chickens to, yes, those chickens dying – and that death is a resource.
 
Any one thing in the composition of Creation may and must alter, but the orchestra plays on. Engagement with the soil is the most primal and necessary form of learning Permanence. It was the first disciplinary lesson the Lord taught Adam, indeed – that thorns must grow, and serpents strike, and yet through toil and the grace of God, food comes forth.
 
The defender of the Permanent Things, then, must by any means possible build a smallholding. Where the family and house is the most immediate experience of Permanence (or the lack thereof), the smallholding is the most abiding. It ought not surprise us that just as the family and house is greatly debased in Western society, so the processes of agriculture are, too.
 
Chickens are cramped together in yawning Tarteran concrete boxes, cattle pumped with drugs that subtly poison their milk, vegetables doused in toxic mists. This is not the inevitable use of technological advances – praise God for technology that allows us to redeem the time for greater value! – but the natural end of a society organised on distance, not locality; on palming responsibility off, not taking responsibility up; and on economic organization that vastly favours sedentary service roles.
 
But how may we join the side of reality, and press back the boundaries of the Unreal City? (“Big Ag” is surely a City; the angular geometry, the poured concrete of the pens, the manufactured chemical supplements, the aversion to natural patterns of sun and moon and season.)
 
We ought each take one little pot, and fill it with good rich soil, and plant something.
 
The revolution – in the old sense, the return – begins with a seed, quite literally in this case. The smallest of smallholdings can start on your windowsill or balcony. A single small tray, a bag of compost, and a bag of mizuna seeds will do to begin to reclaim your corner of the earth from the dark miasma. Scatter the mustard seeds across the little tray full of soil, cover lightly, and water. In 14 days, and 21, and 28, trim some of the shoots and add to a meal – tiny nutrient bombs, made from sun and water and soil. Once all the shoots are cut, scatter more seeds.
 
Of course, you can grow more things than that, even in a small flat – grow some herbs for dinner, put a lily in the bathroom, perhaps even some finger carrots. You might even, if unencumbered by ordinary standards of taste, have a couple of bantam hens instead of a rabbit! A cramped, dehumanising box in a tower can, with really very little effort (mustard grows itself to great proportions – ask the Lord for His past statements on the matter), become an affirmation of reality, of life, and of gratitude.
 
But what if you have a small garden? Well, I have found that whilst my children do enjoy lawns to run around on, they can find those in parks, too; but small children love farming, too. Children believe, correctly, in magic, and see magic in the ordinary processes of the garden. Set aside your monocultural, sterile lawn; raise beds, plant dwarf plum trees, tear out the laburnum and replace it with sea buckthorn, set a pergola at the top, and look out upon your own orchard and kitchen garden, in an ordinary suburban garden.
 
That is an abundance you can share with your neighbours too; suddenly the small patch of Permanence you have dug back becomes an invasion of reality into the lives of others. Not only might they see the bulbs at one end and the onion stalks in the middle and the ripe berries on the bushes – but perhaps you could manage things so they can share the bounty, too. My own garden is divided from my house by a back road – I plan within the year to get thornless blackberries growing on the garden boundary, so passers-by can pick as they go. You could put bags of plums out the front in autumn. Indeed, if you give your children the responsibility of harvesting the fruit – or of managing quails in a shed, or whatever else – they could sell them for “pocket money”, giving them an investment in your shared ministry of the land, which is indeed as political and social a ministry as any.
 
But an important question may arise here; why worry about lawn monoculture? Why share? Well, of course, the Philosophical Conservative will have an instinct to variety and to shared bounty, but more detail may be of value here. Our great monocultures degrade soil – beef in one places, corn in another, vegetables of a limited variety in another. But the stubborn nature of Nature is that variety and succession produce resilience and abundance.
 
So we should enrich the land we cultivate. We do not come to it to draw from it, but to live with it; for Christians like me, stewardship of the land is a sacred, God-given duty. It is a resource given to me as gift, but also put upon me as duty. I look at my boulder clay soil, accept my financial limits, and plan within them to make it more fertile and better-draining year on year. This has at least three beneficial effects: it cultivates resilience and abundance in me, in my virtue, by a parallel process, by teaching me to value richness and health and a thing reaching its proper end; it fulfils that great stewardship duty; and it leaves the land in better condition when I move on, whether on my feet or in a box. The land ministry is a land-healing ministry (thus Joel Salatin).
 
There is a concomitant issue of scale. To talk of the “smallholding”, or even the American “homestead”, is to remind ourselves of the properly human scale of our activities. Soaring cathedral spires are proper – when they direct us to God. But the vast, inhuman scale of virtually every sector of our economy is not a blessing of liberty or a peculiar gift from God, as some have it. That inhuman scale is a warping and debilitating thing for the soul. Nowhere is this more true than in agriculture. The chicken is a silly and sometimes vicious beast, but there is a preternatural skill in its clawing, its spotting, its hopping, its scraping; somehow, even, there is empathy in the rooster’s gentle cooing when it finds food, and the startling moment it gives way to its hens, so they might be fed. None of that can happen in the battery cages, nor even, really, in the laying barns – if nothing else, because every young cockerel will be thrown to the pigs at a young age in such a situation, given their lack of immediate economic productivity.
 
This issue of the human scale affects not just quantity, but design – variety necessitates itself on such a scale, because your 0.05 of an acre of a back garden, or your 3 acre homestead, cannot possibly contain everything at a grand scale. You must both select what will be cultivated, and restrict it to what is balanced: three rows of potatoes, and no more, or there’ll be no space for the carrots and cabbages. Three feeder pigs in the 12x12 deep bed shed, because to pasture them would be too space-extensive. This confrontation with constraint, with the balance of interests, is tutelary for the soul. No Emperor or President has ever more practically grappled with an issue of state – of whether to send forces to North Africa or Singapore, or how to keep the currency afloat – than a gardener does every time the matter of culling a sick or barren hen arises. Most of us will never deal with the questions of contingency and constraint faced by the mighty, but we can find our own field of action on the smallholding.
 
We also learn from the necessary connectedness, the symbiotic rhythm, of a human scale and a regenerative purpose. My chickens provide me four services, at least: eggs, manure, tilling, and (rarely, as they are layers) meat. Nettles in the yard can be left as shelter for the chickens, or torn up and either composted, or crushed in water with dock leaves and other greenery to make “green tea”, that gloriously stinky natural fertilizer. The green tea ends up on the courgettes; the courgettes end up in my belly, their scraps end up in the chicken yard, and the worked-out plant ends up in the compost at the end of the season...as do the chicken manure and the eggshells and everything else that is organic but not edible. (Eggshells are edible and a good supplement for poultry, but we can’t be bothered to grind them up enough so that the chickens don’t try it on their own eggs.)
 
Those connections remind us, endlessly, that life is not transactional and none of us are an island. Of course there are cost-benefits to calculate. Part of governing the land is making decisions for the common good. But those decisions have to do with duty, and mutual responsibilities – me and the chickens and the land, dependent on each other – not the seeking of gain entire. This is a lesson of political commonwealth, transposed to the allotment. You were made for your neighbour, and your neighbour for you, and the economic and social norms that separate and alienate you are bent and corrupted, not true norms deriving from true, reliable normality.
 
Now, though I have said something of the small scale, perhaps you have been blessed to have land in quantity, or perhaps you aspire to that. None of these principles are impossible on the larger scale – they just require a greater labour force. Your family, your friends, your neighbours – the vulnerable or lonely known to you, the skill-seeking – there are many places you can turn for aid. Perhaps your abundance can be turned to mutual abundance – to job creation, to the granting of small plots for families to garden, to semi-managed woodland encouraging the flourishing of vulnerable animals. The Citadel of the Permanent Things takes in every outer grange, not just those within the castle walls.
 
The Citadel does not exist on its own, after all; no fortress is built for its own purpose. It defends – something. The Citadel we seek to build over the next decades and centuries is built to shelter the Permanent Things, the old good things in slightly altered dress. Those Things include the land; indeed, nearly every castle has first been built to hold land. What boots it to protect a set of abstract ideas, but have no place to live them? We may seek to salvage our family and home from the conflagration, but without space to grow (even a tray on a windowsill), we doom ourselves to be spiritual refugees.
 
Our vision of a rejuvenated civilisation – in the lives, perhaps, of our grandchildren, or great-great-great-grandchildren – cannot consist solely of an ornate church, some friendly private societies, and a village school with an integrated idea of learning the good old things. That would be an amputated civilisation, all head and no body. There must be land – green and brown in Britain, red in North Carolina, yellow in Arizona, and a thousand colours elsewhere, blue steppes grass and white calcite soils in Spain. Polychromal land for a various people, rich in nature’s many-branching createdness. You can imagine the view from the heavens in this speculation – the station commander looks down by day on the regreened Sahara, and by night on the less dense, greatly scattered lights of a land-living humanity. The commander knows, when he returns home, when he is accustomed to our gravity again, he will be able to return to his 3 acres, which his wife and sons and daughter have trustworthily farmed in the meantime. It is spring; lambs will be here soon. Every technological aid is his, but – spaceman that he is! – he only uses those which lead his land to its natural ends. The lambs have abundance; the fruit trees have abundance; his sons have abundance. And when he next takes watch in the stars, his children will look up, and then down, knowing their father hears the music of the heavens, and they know the rhythm of the earth.
 
It begins with a tray of mustard seeds, sown in faith, put on your windowsill.