What a lovely idea: quit London and move down to Ilminster to run a small holding. It’s the subject of this book – also published under the title Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes – by former Express editor, Rosie Boycott.
Better-known for appearances on Woman’s Hour and Late Review, she took to the countryside – at the weekends at least – after being involved in a crippling car crash she was lucky to survive. Once there, she and her city lawyer husband rented enough space to raise chickens for eggs, pigs for meat and vegetables to sell to local businesses, and bagged themselves a stall at the local farmers’ market, where the sold herbs. Quickly becoming a fully-fledged member of the local community, she finds herself campaigning against a new one-way system and the construction of a Tesco store that threatens the viability of the town’s small local shops.
And that’s the trouble. This isn’t a book about running a small farm; it’s more an idyllic stroll through the author’s life, present and past. That would be fine if it were called ‘My Weekends in the Country’ – Peter Mayle pulled it off with A Year in Provence, after all – but it’s not. The title leads us to believe it’s the story of her farm, but it’s just as much about her thoughts on the afterlife, her past relationships and her children. It’s a pseudo biography where life on the farm often takes a back seat as she wanders off for pages at a time. It’s gentle and inoffensive, but it lacks structure and feels poorly-planned.
When the farm does come to the fore, it is a fascinating and bleakly honest look at the trials of setting up a small holding, and an expose of the small profits it delivers. For months she and her partner plough a small fortune into their crops and livestock with seemingly no end result, to the point where an eventual profit of just a few hundred pounds feels like a singular triumph.
If you’re looking to start up your own small holding, this is a refreshing reality check, and nobody who has ready it can undertake such an endeavour with anything but open eyes and a fully-informed mind. If you want a lighter, more easily digestible treatise on the evils of big supermarkets without reading Andrew Simm’s excellent, shocking Tescopoly, or a semi-biography of a one-time newspaper editor who has fallen into the Good Life, then this quickly-read volume could be right up your street.
Price £15.99
ISBN 074758897X
Author Rosie Boycott
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