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My father gave me a pig for my eighth birthday. He didn’t believe in pocket money; the idea was that the pig would be the first of many and an introduction to farming and business. My pig faithfully produced thirteen healthy piglets twice a year but I didn’t share my father’s passion for pig-keeping (for forty years, as so many farmers moved towards factory farming, his enthusiasm was trying to develop an ethically acceptable way of keeping them), so I moved onto sheep, then milking cows before finding my vocation with vegetables.
As I write, a ridge of high pressure is edging in from the Atlantic and threatening to build into the high pressure system we have been waiting for all summer; too late for most schoolchildren’s holidays, too late for many a fair, festival and fête; too late for our stunted pumpkins and sweetcorn, blighted potatoes, mildew-stricken onions and rotten strawberries.
The sun is out, I’ve just swum in the reservoir and I have instructions to write my 400 words without moaning. If I carry on with my weekly liturgy of doom, my sister Rachel, who looks after marketing, is going to give this job to someone more cheerful. Back in April, with a drought threatening and the reservoir dropping, I was cursing myself for not fixing the leaks, but as I write this, the water is lapping at my feet.
The rain has abated, the ground has dried up well and it’s time to gather in and make the most of what has survived the deluge. No one will starve, indeed the carrots and parsnips are doing pretty well, but we will have only half the projected yields of potatoes.
25 years ago, having given up my brief career as a management consultant, I returned to my father’s farm for Christmas to rethink my life. Milking cows in a family partnership hadn’t worked for me; nor had the urban hedonism of 1980s London and New York. I concluded that I was unemployable and so would start my own business.
Issue 12: Fairness and five years.
Find out more about Wicked Leeks and our publisher, organic veg box company Riverford.