A small farmer in England / first ploughing, first fatigue

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Whenever we mention to our friends that we want to rent a piece of land to grow vegetables in London, it is always regarded as a joke. However, based on the expanding fantasy, we were not afraid of the challenge and rented a piece of farmland from the local Household Municipal Government Office.

No wonder my friends mocked that Mr. Buffalo and I were not experienced in farming. Each of us was deeply cultivated in the academic field, and we were faced with either computers or heavy books every day. Until one day I accidentally switched to the BBC horticulture channel and saw the green finger activity of "Citizen farmland" (Allotment). Feeling very interesting at the moment, fantasizing about the blue sky and green space and a beautiful hand-ploughed life, we two urban laymen immediately decided to try.

So, in the early autumn of 2017, Mr. Buffalo and I readily paid off a year's rent to begin this life-changing green journey.

It's just that the experience of going to farmland for the first time is very different from the happy life we imagined. There are no birds and flowers, only weeds. In fact, the newly leased land is much larger than we thought, covering an area of 100 square meters, which is more than three times the back garden of the average family. Mr. Buffalo and I looked at each other and finally understood the reason for my friend's dissuasion, but it was too late, so I had to do it with my head.

(photo: RHS website of the Royal Agricultural Association)

London is wet, cold and rainy, and the soil is thick and heavy, and the clayey soil is poor in drainage, but it is nutritious, but when digging, the whole soil often sticks to the shovel, making the already heavy shovel even harder, with two or three kilograms each time you raise your hand.

Although it was early autumn and the air was quite cold, under the fierce early ploughing, we had beads of sweat oozing slightly from our shoulders, neck and chest, repeatedly waving sickles and shovels, and unwittingly entering a blank state of our heads. the body honestly removes unnecessary thoughts from the head, which is a bit like an out-of-body experience. It's just that when we hadn't even sorted out 1/10 of the farmland, the sun had already gone down. looking back, we found that the weeds pulled up were piled up like mountains, and then we bowed down, and finally we could see the original state of the farmland a little bit, and there was an indescribable shock in our heart. everything seems to have a new order.

When I went home for the first time, I was hungry. I picked up chopsticks to eat, and my hands trembled. I couldn't feed the rice I had dug up. I remembered that Eileen Chang described the feeling of hunger in Yangko, between toothache and sadness. after a day's work, the body feels real hunger and fatigue, but the heart gets enough rest, which is also an unexpected harvest.