Hello and welcome to my weekly wondering, where I get to discuss or maybe ramble about the farm, something I find cool or maybe just a thought. Hopefully it will provide an insight into what the Happy Food Farm is all about and the trials tribulations of someone who is new to farming. Hope you enjoy.

This past week I discovered a term that has opened up and helped me release some of the internalised anxiety and sadness that I have been feeling surrounding the climate emergency. The term is ‘Doomer’. When I discovered it as I was mindlessly scrolling Instagram I felt a relief as I now had a name that I could put towards the type of dark mental hole I was digging for myself, I am a Doomer. A Doomer is a person who sees the climate crisis as a problem that can’t be fixed, as something so unfathomably complex and scary that they don’t see a chance that humanity can change for the better and that the runaway greenhouse effect will ruin everything that I find beautiful and precious. Being a Doomer is not a good person to be within a climate crisis because a Doomer is someone devoid of hope.

It’s not exactly easy to not be a Doomer in these days of constant news and media that tell us our world is quickly falling apart and that is why this particular post by the Guardian stood out so much from all the other noise. It was the slap in the face I needed that told me to start digging myself out of a hole of, quite frankly, self-pity. Yes, we are in a terrifying situation that needs to be taken with a degree of panic and urgency but what I don’t need to do is stick my head up my own arse and get angry, scared and annoyed that other people aren’t doing more to sort this shit show out and focus more on what I can do about it. It has been distracting me from being the best I can be on the farm and working on our own small solutions to the climate crisis.

So, this is me telling myself that I need to get excited about the 200+ maple and dogwood trees we planted the other day. To get myself sorted and collect the next 200+ tree seeds that I had planned to collect weeks ago so we can get the tree nursery planted as the forest our farm intends to plant isn’t going to plant itself!