Living rural is not easy, rewarding, but not easy. There are a lot of false advertisements out there for this life choice, often in the form of glossy magazines that might as well be the printed version of Instagram when it comes to extolling the virtues of the “Lifestyle Block.”
It’s all Nadia Lim, garlic aioli, perfect gardens, heritage chickens, organic, and sustainable.
And it’s pretty much all bullshit or batshit craziness. In this episode, dear reader, I translate the Instagram world of perfect lifestyle to the actual farming reality. And it is farming, sure, it’s a lifestyle, but once you get over a couple of hectares with stock, you are working hard.
So let’s take a light-hearted look and expose the ugly truth of small block farming.
How to create the perfect rural garden!
In this puff piece, you insert a picture of the perfect garden, a middle-aged woman front and centre, holding a basket of flowers and produce (from the said garden), the a beatific grin on her handsome face.
The reality is quite different. Managing a garden on top of a small farm is often the last thing you want to do. Most of the time, it ends up in slaughtering overgrown parts of the garden by weedeater, followed by vigorous spraying to keep the damn plants from taking over the entire home paddock.
Then, just when K has got the garden looking fantastic, the heifers teleport through the fence and eat the good stuff.
In spring, triffids spring up overnight, so even if the garden is in perfect order, it resembles a jungle village from Raiders of the Lost Ark by dawn the next day.
Here’s our advice: Don’t plant a garden. Buy plastic plants instead. Spray everything. Kill anything that hurts a weedeater, including flax, the very satan of a garden. Fear spring growth. If you live in the Wairarapa, call Sparrow from Ambush gardening and get him to do it. He’s twice as fast as you, ruthless, and charges accordingly.
How you can transform a cold, old, drafty country house
In which the article does a before and after of a broken-down country cottage renewed into a gleaming black and white super-european house. Add one ex-banker, a partner who is a “designer” (any type will do), and include at least one picture of a fire, and another of a solar panel.
Unless you are an ex-banker with a million dollars in cash lying around, never fucking attempt this. You’ll go broke, or the farm stock will starve, or some other catastrophe that results in you never having money again.
You’ll learn to live with the leaking chimney that drips in just the right amount of precipitation, with the wind at a certain angle, but only in winter, which thankfully is when the fire is going, so it doesn’t create a puddle; it just periodically hisses at you.
You learn to love the wetback, and its persistent leak, which is impossible to find because it was installed two hundred years ago, and no one knows how to service a wood-fired stove. That’s ok because when it does start to leak, lighting the fire for twenty-four hours seems to seal it up for a few weeks. Of course, lighting the wood-stove in temperatures over thirty degrees celsius is a challenge in itself.
All your money will go into farm stock, feed, tools, fuel, significant capital expenses such as tractors, more tools, more feed, and fixing everything that continually breaks.
You will never afford an air conditioning unit. Give up now. Buy a fan.
Five ways to go off-grid
Solar panels gleam, Tesla battery packs are tucked snuggly into modern cottage walls, windmills glisten, small hydro turbines lie submerged in bubbling streams, and proud smiles declare “I got off grid, so can you.”
You can’t. Just forget it. Stop that dreaming right now! Unless you are an ex-banker of course.
First of all, you’re going to need about 50,000 dollars. Minimum. Just to run the lights. A windmill, probably another 20,000 dollars, makes an excellent paddock ornament and ensures that the wind never blows again, ever.
The Tesla battery is several thousand dollars in addition to that, and you can keep adding to your list as your financial reserves are burned.
Running the farm “electric”, tools, implements and will generate an average power bill of $750 a month.
Instead, take all the money that you have and buy shares in power companies, so at the very least, you are offsetting your astronomical power bill, which is twice as expensive in the city because you are zoned “rural.” At a minimum, this will pay for you to remove trees that grow within a spitting distance of powerlines.
Or, buy the largest generator that you can with the money you have available.
How to become a lifestyle handyperson
Photos of smiling people holding tools and wearing branded designer overalls. A vintage tractor. The premise is that you can become a fencer, mechanic, plumber, sanitation specialist, electrician, and every other trade profession known to man. This will make you happy and it will be easy.
This is a necessity and perhaps the only article in a designer magazine that I can agree with. You won’t have a choice. You’ll have to do this because even if you are an ex-banker who can pay contractors for repairs, you won’t be able to find them.
When you move onto your block, everything that can break will break. This is an immutable law.
This is because you will have an ever so slightly different way of operating machinery and doing general maintenance. This minor change in operation will cause the machinery to revolt and stop working.
Thankfully, K has excellent mechanic, maintenance, and other handyperson skills. The work comes with a high level of frustration followed by immense satisfaction. The maintenance gods are fickle.
One day, K could not get the tractor started. This resulted in quite some time to diagnose and coax the mighty beast back into life. Success happened.
The tractor was taken out to do farming things and returned in the afternoon. I spotted K walking over from the sheds and the tractor happily running in the background.
“Bloody thing wouldn’t start this morning, and now it won’t bloody stop!”
K says that a good tip is to carry spares. Farm gods will smile on you if you have spares. When you do not have a spare, they will smite you, and you’ll have to make a thirty-mile round trip to get a replacement.
Chickens are the path to happiness
Queue cute chicken photos of heritage breed chickens romping gaily through perfect gardens of flowers and vegetables on a sunny day. Show a picture of a chicken palace and a golden basket of shiny eggs linking to articles on how to make the perfect mayonnaise.
Chickens will shit on your deck, get into your house, shit in there as well, hide their eggs from you, and destroy your newly planted garden if they get half the chance.
Worse, they will do the same things to your neighbours.
First thing in the morning, as you try to have coffee on your deck and enjoy your rustic outlook, they will charge madly across the paddock and accost you until you feed them.
They will not learn to use a self-feeder, but the wild birds will, sending your feed bill sky-high. They will also learn to escape from the chicken coop no matter how you reinforce it.
Chickens are a useful pain in the arse. They do keep bugs under control and provide eggs, which are quite delicious. They are demanding and take time to look after, just like all livestock.
Wicked aioli and other party favourites
This article looks at how to make the perfect aioli and other fancy treats. Often it has a guest chef of some fame. Everyone is happy. The food is perfect. The party is very nice.
You are always guaranteed to have forgotten the one ingredient you need to make the perfect meal.
Therefore, whatever goes into the perfect aioli will be missing, necessitating a thirty mile round trip to the nearest market, which probably won’t have what you wanted.
You will rarely have a party. Trust me. You are more inclined to get drunk on the lawn and eat some toast by the end of the week. If you do organise a party, to make it pleasant, you only need three ingredients.
Meat. A lot of it. Rural people like meat, and let’s face it, it’s wandering about everywhere. Make as many meat dishes as you can and use potato chips, cheese, crackers, and saveloys to accompany.
Cards. Old school cards, not fancy card games, and a favourite game to play is “President.” This is a sure winner.
After cards are dealt, the scum must hand over the best card in their hand to the president, and the president passes back any card they do not want.
You’re intrigued, aren’t you? You should be. At three am in the morning, playing President is an art form of the highest order.
Finally, it would help if you had alcohol—a lot of it. The only craft beer that is possibly tolerated is Monteiths. Any other craft beer is banned. Bourbon must be available.
When you find yourself at four in the morning, the last person standing with a bourbon in one hand, the President’s cards on the table in front of you, and a cold sausage in your left hand, waving it menacingly at the scum, then, AND ONLY THEN, can you say, “I HAVE CREATED THE PERFECT PARTY!”
Optional party games can include “I’m a stunt performer”, demonstrating that you genuinely are a stunt professional, and “Let’s cleanse this house”, where you wave burning sage to reduce the smell of burning meat.
Summary
Lifestyle magazines, social media accounts, and other such nonsense paint the rural lifestyle as some grand wonder. Money endlessly flows from invisible sources, everything is pretty, and the entire system works as designed. This allows you to sit on your deck, drink gin, and probably shoot skeet or something similar.
This is not true, and one should be cautious consuming such advertising material, for indeed, all it is, is advertising material.
Postscript: For the record, K is a fantastic gardener. Honestly, the Queen could surprise visit and everything would look amazing.
Pro-tip: In all seriousness, when you buy your small farm, make sure you get all the money you need at that point added onto your mortgage.
This is because once you have bought rural, a bank will never, ever lend to you again.