Making that commitment

I underwent a lot of quiet reflection during our holiday.

We've been here for two years and during this time we have not made any major changes to the smallholding. The plans we had before we moved here revolved around making us as self-reliant as possible by growing our own food and producing our own energy. Smallholding, homesteading, pioneering, that has been a strong interest of mine for many years but I was having problems making it a reality here.

At the point we went on holiday I was drifting, wanting to do more but just not. I've felt a bit like we've been flirting around the edges of smallholding. I keep animals, but only during specific months; I don't keep them year round or breed them. I grow some fruit and veg but not extensively and in any great quantity. I harvest some of the existing fruit from the trees but not in any great quantity. We have wood burners but buy in logs instead of sustainably harvesting from our own property and finding free logs. We have a funky old (probably useless) well and plenty of roof space that yields thousands of litres of rainwater and sunshine every year yet we pay full whack for mains water and electricity. 

It took until almost the end of the holiday, nearly three weeks away from normality, for the penny to drop. Being interested in something is not being committed to it. For a long time at the old house I was interested but not committed to living well there because I never considered it my home. We bought the old house with the intention to renovate and move on within a couple of years but we got caught by the recession and ended up living there for 11. We decorated it with sale in mind, keeping colours neutral and never quite unleashing our creativity. Everything was done with The Sale in mind. I got used to being interested in how much I could make but not committed to living in the house and I brought that here with me.

There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses - only results.

KEN BLANCHARD

I haven't allowed myself to emotionally attach to this place, I'm still not committed to it. I'm not psychologically invested and this has translated into taking the minimal actions I need to maintain the smallholding, I haven't been putting in the daily effort needed to develop and deepen my commitment. I couldn't see it while knee deep in daily life here, I needed that time away to develop that perspective.

So, when we got back I took a look around. I actually do love this place. The peace, quiet and space, even though I don't always find it easy to live with my MIL which, if I'm honest, has contributed to me feeling unsettled.

I pulled out my plan for the smallholding. By now we should have: 

• a polytunnel in the paddock
• part of the front lawn laid to veg beds with the aim of achieving sufficiency in 90% of our fruit and veg for 5-6 months of year
• increased the energy efficiency inside the house to the maximum possible to try and get us to an EPC rating of B of above (currently D)
• completed some kind of resource generation activity, such as solar panels, a rainwater harvesting system or growing our own biomass to burn to achieve 50% sufficiency in energy. 

So far, all we've done is installed a new efficient boiler outside when the old indoor system became dangerous, and replaced a few halogen bulbs with LED ones when they blew. 

I realised I couldn't make up for lost time but I could make a start. 

Over the last month I found some cheap collar boxes on ebay and have begun arranging them to create an area of raised beds to the side of the house. The small patio garden will get higher beds and more soil. 

Over the last couple of weeks I have expanded the fruit trees in the paddock with raspberries, black, red and white currants, a gooseberry and a couple of tayberry bushes in front of that. All of these either came with us or were bought last year but never planted up.

The fencing is all temporary so I can make changes if necessary, but at some point over the next 12 months permanent stock fencing and a gate will go in. At the moment the chicken pen forms one side of the section, but I'll be moving that back by a pen length and adding a fenced area for chicken scratching. 

Talking of chickens, we now have three new ladies in the chicken pen, who moved in about two weeks ago at the ripe old age of 22 weeks old. They are part of the commitment plan, as they need daily care and attention. 

Finally, solar panels. I've wanted solar power for many years, but have never been able to take that step. Obviously at the old house my lack of commitment to living there wouldn't allow me to make that jump. It's not just the upfront cost but also because you commit to a) being settled in one place for a long time and b) changing your energy usage behaviour, which includes quite close monitoring of the system. A lack of commitment doesn't go hand in hand with having solar panels. 

MIL and I are both here during the day, and we tend to run our household electrical devices then. With solar, we could get quite close to the maximum benefit possible by running all our devices when the panels are generating electricity at the peak times during the day. In addition, there are the Feed-In Tariffs (FITs), which pay a householder with solar panels a small amount of money to generate and export their surplus energy to the grid. It's only about 9-10p a kWh but it is a handy little bit of extra money into the household and is index-linked for 20 years. However, this is coming to an end on 31st March.

I did a few calculations, working out the theoretical return on the money from the panels being drip fed into pensions vs just putting it directly into pensions, and while the panels just nosed ahead they had the added psychological benefit of the satisfaction from producing part of the energy we consume and lowering our bills. How much they lower our bills by is down to us and our consumption habits.

I took a deep breath, did some ringing round and quote gathering and a few days ago we placed an order for a 6kWp system for the south-facing roof of the barns. We're aiming to reduce our electricity bill by 50% through a combination of using what we generate, changing our consumption habits and the FITs. In addition, we decided to have an iBoost fitted to our immersion heater, which is a diverter system that directs a small amount of surplus electricity to our water tank to heat it instead of the boiler firing up. So we estimate that for six months of the year our boiler probably won't be firing at all, which will help lower our annual oil bill. 

So, the solar panels team is coming next week to put the panels up and by next weekend we will be generating some of own power. It's only a small step, but psychologically it feels like the biggest one to date because of the mindset shift that comes with it.

This smallholding is my home and I am committed to it.