Back to the land with John Seymour
From dependency to self-sufficiency
I was inspired a lot by John Seymour when I first decided to create a vegetable garden. The working area was the abandoned backyard of an old farmhouse me and Griet used to occupy for some time.
It was 2008 and we had just returned to Belgium after travelling Australia for a year. We needed a place to stay. The house used to belong to Griets grandmother and after her passing away it stood empty.
However, this was not your typical romantic countryside place. The street, probably once a little country lane had turned into a busy road. Development hadn’t stopped either: the road being lined up by suburban houses competing for monotonousness and ugliness. The little farmhouse thus was a last reminiscence of a lost past which, of course, would also be torn down in the end.
The garden however lay secluded in the back. Overgrown plum- and apple trees surrounded the property, creating a fruit-forest like environment. High-grasses and weeds covered the spaces in between. Here in the backyard, the street-noises seemed to disappear and fade into the humming and singing of insects and birds.
Thus, we decided to reinstate the garden and grow some of our own food. Yet, without any major gardening knowledge this task seemed overwhelming. We needed some guidance. That’s when I turned to John Seymour.
Back to the land movement
John Seymour was on the forefront of the back to the land movement of the seventies in England. In 1954 he went to live in a remote cottage in Suffolk, together with his wife Sally and their newborn child pursuing a self-sufficient life. Seymour documented this journey in search of an independent, self-reliant life in The Fat of the Land.
Written with a gusto for life the Fat of the Land tells an inspiring tale about working and living on the land. Yet it is more than simply an account of meeting the ends by doing some husbandry and small-scale farming. It’s a down to earth practical and philosophical guide for living a live away from mass-consumption, outsourcing and dependency. It’s a realistic view into the possibilities of creating a simple, meaningful life. It’s full of joy, good food, friends and hard work.
The book inspired a whole generation of back-to-the-landers, exchanging the mind-numbing uniformity of the city for the countryside, following in the footsteps of Seymour. And that’s how John Seymour came to be known as a pioneer of self-sufficient, simple living.
Relearning the basics of life
So, in search of some advice for turning our wildered backyard into an allotment I bought a copy of his 1976 work The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. However, I got way more than simple gardening tips, I got an inspiring guidebook, a complete philosophy for living.
Seymour thought it to be madness to be dependent on some vast “Thing created by the Merchants of Greed” and urged his readers to cut out what they don’t need and live more simply and happily.
“The only way this can happen is by ordinary people, us, boycotting the huge multinational corporations that are destroying our Earth — and creating a new Age — an age of Healing in place of the current Age of Plunder” he wrote in the 2003 foreword to ‘The self-sufficient life and how to live it’.
And the way to achieve this is by relearning the basics of life. Doing things ourselves instead of outsourcing to corporations: growing and conserving our own food, learning crafts and skills that increase resilience and independence like building, woodworking or forestry.
Do what you do because you love to do it
Reading Seymour is a vivid and lively experience. He was a bread-writer after all, calling himself a word monger. Making the ends and surviving in an economic system based on money: paying rent, taxes and bills without a 9 to 5 job and a fixed paycheck each month meant that he had to write to make a living.
Still, money would never become a main driver in his doings. Indeed, the moneymaking was a necessary evil to facilitate the families endeavors on the land.
“For every time we engage in any trade with the industrial world (…), it becomes harder to live by our own peasant economy. We are beginning to be more and more convinced that it is better to stay quietly at home, only do such writing as we really feel is worth doing for its own sake as well as for the sake of the money we get from it, and keep our trade with the industrial world at a minimum.”
Seymour was a big believer that we should do things because we love to do them, not because they have any specific outcome like money, status or fame.
I believe the same thing to be true for writing itself: let it be a necessary part of our life, regardless of the monetary revenue we might earn from it.
Work then, should be a means to facilitate the life that I want to live: quiet, contemplative and simple, surrounded by creation through working the land and writing.
Our garden
Anyways, that’s how I got inspired by John Seymour. We started our vegetable garden based on the detailed plans, and beautiful drawings in the Self-Sufficient Life and how to Live it. But the main inspiration was not some practical advice, neither was it some abstract, philosophical insight. The ultimate inspiration then, is the life of John Seymour itself, his celebration of a simple, frugal life full of fulfilling work and joy.
There is no need in becoming completely self-sufficient, yet it can represent an ideal we should strive to embrace.
As Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall states in the introduction of the 2017 edition of The Fat of the Land:
The ideas John Seymour espoused are timeless: self-reliance, resourcefulness, connection to the land, the rejection of greed.
