When the Land Calls, the Only Answer Is Yes
Why Leyla Kazim is uprooting her life in London to farm the land in Portugal (Q&A)
One of the most popular interviews I have done here on Substack was called Leyla Kazim Is Choosing A Slower Life.1 Leyla is a co-host of BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme and writes A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living, here on Substack.2
Leyla is back because she is out with two books at once—Pathways to the Land and Pathways to Purposeful Living—that chart her decision to uproot her life in London and answer what she says is a "call to the land." In her case, the land is a three-acre patch of countryside with a ruin in Portugal, where she and her husband are building a house powered by the sun.
I feel like Leyla and I are living parallel lives. Her description in Pathways to the Land of feeling a magnetic pull to a particular piece of earth is exactly what I experienced when I stepped onto the six acres of farmland in Southern Italy where I am in the process of making my home.
Where we diverge is that I am not becoming a farmer. Other than a small vegetable garden, I won’t be living off of my land the way Leyla will. When my husband started making noises about keeping chickens, I was a hard no. Though I have to say Leyla makes a very compelling case for this kind of life and has given me a lot to think about.
Both of Leyla's books are being released by The Pound Project3, which means they are only on sale until May 27th, so get your copies now!
I hope you enjoy the Q & A with Leyla, which is lightly edited for length, about these new books and the exciting adventure she is undertaking.
Moving from London to the countryside of Portugal is a pretty big change. How did you end up here? What was behind your desire to live on your own land?
I have been driven by a desire to flee the city and pursue a more self-sufficient life for several years now. It’s something I feel deep within the marrow of my bones.
Nothing I do feels more worthwhile or vital than when I’m outside under the sun, doing things I identify as living ‘richly’. Like growing vegetables, saving seed, fermenting food and making bread.
I think we need to stop outsourcing so much of our lives. We have become ‘de-skilled’ since the world industrialised, losing our ability to live off the land and exercise agency over our own health and wellbeing.
We are now instead obsessed with instant gratification and superficial connection. The yawning chasm this disconnection and de-skilling has left is filled by corporations selling us things and services.
An Italian mother in the UK recently told me, in horror, that her daughter orders (overpriced and awful) coffee that is delivered to her front door by an underpaid driver, rather than walking a few feet to the kitchen and making one herself.
What have we become?!
I recently came across this quote by James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits and I was all, YES TO THIS:
The cost of convenience is vitality. You can have a lot of things done for you in the modern world — and many of them are great time savers! — but the feeling of being alive comes from being fully engaged in the right task, not free from all tasks.
Sure, you can automate and delegate all sorts of things, but the more interesting question is, “What fills you with so much liveliness that you want to do the work yourself?”4
Was there something wrong with London or the UK that made you want to leave? Why not buy land closer to home?
There is nothing wrong with living in London or the UK. I mean, apart from the weather. Although, this year has been an anomaly so far in that we’ve had weeks of unbroken sunshine since March. So I can’t even complain about that.
The reason we are leaving it is quite simply because – we are not rich.
We tried pursuing our dreams of land-based living in the UK. For years, we searched. We would monitor plots of land up for auction, that were mere scraps of fields with zero prospect of planning permission. And yet, they would sell for double the asking price. Hundreds of thousands of pounds, for a piece of grass. Cash.
Unless you are loaded, inherit land or you’re prepared to live somewhere isolated and cold (which is not optimal for growing), it’s almost impossible to pursue this kind of land-based living in the UK. We didn’t have a hope in hell, so we looked elsewhere.
Are you really prepared for farming life? Do you own overalls? Do you have a "farmer mentor"--how will you know how to do this??
I love this question! Kirsten, I feel like I’ve been preparing for this life forever.
I started teaching myself how to make wine and cheese years before Portugal was even a seed in our imagination. Because I knew I wanted my future life to involve these activities. It was me sending out a clear message to the Universe of where I was headed, whether it wanted to join me or not.
I also spent two weeks at a spiritual eco-village up in the wilds of Scotland on a Permaculture Design Course. Implementing what I learnt on that course will be integral in the design of the land.
Last year I spent two weeks working on three different farms in central Portugal to check if I was cut out for this life. Which included my participating in the slaughter of a sheep on my first day, a profoundly emotional and reverential experience (talk about being thrown into the deep end).
I returned home with sunburnt shoulders and a bump on my forehead from walking into a low hanging olive branch that nearly knocked me out cold. A small caterpillar fell out of my hair on the flight back. And the dirt under my fingernails was so embedded, I had to use the eye of a needle to scour it out.
And yet, I could not have been happier during those two weeks. It affirmed everything for me.
I have also already shared a shot of homemade Ginjinha with the local wild boar hunter, been invited for lunch by my two closest neighbours who are also farmers, and the owner of the local organic vineyard is now a good friend who’s helped me in so many ways.
There is soooooo much about farming and this way of living I still need to learn; I am extremely lucky that my community have been so welcoming and eager to share their knowledge.
Also, these are the kinds of books I have been reading for a few years now:
But books aren’t enough! I recently came across a great quote by the co-founder of Netflix, Marc Randolph: ‘You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it.’
I couldn’t agree with this more and I am chomping at the bit, desperate to get stuck in! I’m as ready as I’ll ever be!
What was the hardest part of this process? What would you say to people who want to embark on an adventure like this but are too intimidated or scared to make their dream a reality?
If I’m honest, I haven’t perceived much of it to be hard.
Probably because we want this so much, so all the challenges (of which there have been, and continue to be, many) have felt like smallfry in the grand scheme of things.
Sure, we had to wait 2.5 years for our planning to get approved.
But if that’s the price to pay to follow this big dream, we’re really talking about a handful of coins. Perspective is everything.
I think it’s really easy to make excuses that stunt our own dreams and paralyse us into inertia; we get in our own way. It’s easier to do than taking responsibility for our own lives and having the courage to follow what living purposefully means to us.
This is where I hope book 2, Pathways to Purposeful Living, will be particularly helpful for people. Chapter titles include, ‘What’s the best that could happen?’, ‘Seek out the scary’, ‘Identify true wealth’ and loads more.
Are you going "off grid"? Will you be completely self-sustaining on this land?
We will be building a house powered by the sun and we will also have our own water source. But, we will still be connected to the mains,5 just because the connections are already there - it would be silly not to. This will be the back-up should there be consistent overcast weather for many days or weeks, which is thankfully pretty rare in Portugal.
As for crops, we intend to produce much of our own food in a way that regenerates the soil. The plan is to transform it into a productive, abundant, climate-resilliant oasis that is biodiverse in plants, crops, wildlife and funghi. With careful planning and research, we hope this terrain will sustain our bodies and spirits for decades.
We will have a low-impact sewage treatment where liquid effluent percolates across a drainage field on the land, on top of which comfrey6 will grow to suck up all those rich nutrients, which will then be harvested and chopped up to feed the crops. I just love the idea of the goodness that is our human waste being recycled and staying on site!
We will have two large tanks that will hold 7000-10,000 litres of rainwater for land irrigation. We are choosing to not have any heating or cooling systems in the house, instead ensuring the building is extremely well insulated to keep it warm in winter and cool in summer from natural airflow alone. We will have a natural pool that is kept clean by the power of plants, in which I will grow some aquatic edibles. I am also considering farming tilapia in this pool.
You've released two incredible books--Pathways to The Land and Pathways to Purposeful Living that go into more depth about this experience. What do you hope people will take from these books?
Thank you! It’s very exciting and also completely nerve-wracking to be putting this news and the accompanying book out into the world. This is my first book and it’s crazy to me that people are actually ordering it; there are copies going as far from London as North Carolina! Wild!
I describe Pathways as part memoir, part manifesto and part guide. If people resonate with the books and they help anyone make more sense of this crazy world we live in and how to live with more intention and purpose, even just a tiny bit, I would be completely thrilled.
I recently expanded on the reading list that can be found at the back of Pathways. Those nine books impacted me way more than your average good read. I would go as far as to say they altered the course of my life in some way. A couple of them, extremely so.
I don’t expect my two little books to have that kind of effect on people. But
(who wrote the foreword) has described it as a book she had been longing to read, and one that is about ‘celebrating life’s plot twists’ as well as an ‘introspective piece’. My friend said, ‘It’s compulsive reading.’ Someone else told me it’s an important read.I am currently in the middle of signing the pages that will be bound into the books for those who purchase signed copies and I am writing out one of my favourite life mantras for each. Which is giving me serious RSI but I want to make them extra meaningful!
Order both “Pathways” books before May 27!
I didn’t know what “connected to the mains” meant, so I asked Leyla to explain:
If you are connected to the mains, you are connected to the national network, whether that be the national electrical grid or national water supply. Must be a British specific term!
Leyla explains what comfrey is (I hadn’t heard of it):
Comfrey is a well known plant to homesteaders as it's one of the best nutrient accumulators. It has deep roots which mines the subsoil for nutrients, sucks it all up into its foliage. Then you cut the plant, chop it up and spread the chopped pieces around the base of your crops and it is the best fertiliser. Then the comfrey just grows back and you keep harvesting it, like a cut and come again lettuce!
Or you can make a liquid comfrey fertiliser, where you steep chopped up foliage in a bucket of water for 3 weeks, when it smells like hell, strain out the liquid and you have the absolute best fertiliser for fruiting crops like tomatoes. That's how I Feed my crops in London atm. Comfrey is basically essential to the smallholder. It is also edible, but most people use it as a natural fertiliser.