farming

Coppicing and Faggot Making

Given that so much is said about sustainable energy resources, it is perhaps surprising that the ancient art of faggot making is more in the public eye – until forty or fifty years ago, millions of people across Europe used faggots to fuel their homes and their businesses, without causing any depletion of energy resources [...]

Gardening and Good Health

August is traditionally a month in which to sit back and enjoy the garden, especially if the weather is hot. Hopefully there will be plenty of vegetables to pick and flowers to admire, and, in Brittany, one can be sure that there will be a marvellous assortment of insects to watch busily going about their [...]

Zero Nitrogen Footprint

Fritz Haber: 1868-1934, the troubled German scientist responsible for the chemical production of nitrates.
Brittany attracted a substantial amount of negative publicity in the European press, and particularly the British press, at the end of July 2011 due to several wild boar being found dead on the beaches to the east of St Brieuc. The death [...]

The Life of a Peasant – Past & Present

Almost everyone agrees that the economy of Central Brittany is experiencing difficulties: there are not enough jobs, young people leave the area, and the only major industry is agriculture – but modern agriculture is not economically viable and depends on European grants for its day to day survival. These problems inevitably lead one to ask [...]

Trees

A conventional view of history has always assumed that prior to the Industrial Revolution people lived a relatively impoverished existence, and were reliant on quite primitive technology.
The development of environmental sciences is leading to a reappraisal of this view, and an understanding that people in the past were in fact making intelligent use of [...]

Coppicing

It is remkable how little one reads on the subject of coppicing in modern literature. Not so long ago, coppicing would have been one of the main Winter activities of people living in this area – and one of the main sources of wealth. Coppicing involves cutting down trees such as ash and hazel in [...]

The Environment – Who Cares?

It is understandable that people living in cities sometimes forget that human life is dependent upon the natural world of which we are just a small and relatively insignificant part, but residents of rural regions, such as Central Brittany, cannot help but be aware of the importance of nature. The question is, who is caring [...]

Eco-Gardening

The idea of eco-gardening might seem slightly unusual, especially as most people would consider that all gardening is essentially an ecological activity. However, something very strange started to happen in the world of gardening around a hundred and fifty years ago. There has always been a slightly competitive side to gardening – it seems to [...]

Andre Pochon

Veteran farmer and environmental campaigner, Andre Pochon, gives a personal account of the evolution of Breton farming over the past forty years.
I was born in 1931. At that time my parents farmed a large farm of forty hectares in St- Mayeux.
In addition to my parents, there were two farm workers, and my three older sisters [...]

Growing Wheat in Brittany

As a keen gardener, one question that has always been present at the back of my mind has been ‘How feasible is it to grow a crop of wheat in the garden?’. Research into the subject would suggest that almost every household in Brittany grew enough wheat for their own personal use up until around [...]