An interview with Di from the Wild Harvest School of Self Reliance, by Becky
“Our mission is to empower you to provide for yourselves using the natural resources around you”
Di Hammill Page grew up in a small coastal town in the North East of England with her grandad, ‘a war man’ so it was ‘make do and mend’ and her dad was ‘a hippie’ so again it was ‘make do and mend’. Although from two different angles, they shared the same ‘thrift’ values. Di learnt the idea that if you couldn’t make it or grow it, it didn’t happen. She remembers breeding rabbits and making hutches from old furniture and was taught woodwork by her grandad in the back garden. She even has a photo of her grandad doing some bricklaying and she was helping him - she was 2!
I was amazed to come across Di through a friend and via the Wild Harvest School of Self Reliance Facebook page where you can watch her weekly 20 minute videos ‘Potter around Wild Harvest’ which offer some free content during lockdown every Thursday at 4pm; she has quite a following with a different topic each week. I was really happy watching her video about the importance and uses of the great Oak tree, she has another one on her favourite topic on making natural toiletries and how we can reduce imports and toxic chemicals with the things that are growing around us and it’s leather work this week. Last week was home 'made' salt and in the video below, of our interview, you can hear more about it. I was pleased to hear our coastal waters, that once had a bad reputation, are not as bad as they used to be as there has been a lot of work done to clean them up. She will use her ‘home made’ salt for cooking!
Di set up the Wild Harvest School of Self Reliance 15 years ago when she lived on the moor before she went off grid. She had been selling candles, beeswax, hedgerow cordials and herbal teas from the cottage door and through the ‘Moors Centre’, National Park Centres and local cafes. She is a qualified teacher and started teaching wild food walks gradually adding more content as she learned more skills and crafts herself. Any craft courses she taught were from her kitchen table! Since then her business has grown and grown.
“It gives me hope for the future of the world that people want to learn this kind of stuff now.”
She later moved to York, for her children’s Steiner schooling, which helped as she was then more accessible to people who wanted to join her courses. Living on the North Yorkshire Moors meant that there weren’t a huge number of people living near her. Her new farm in York has enough space for her to run ‘Wild Harvest Tipis and Activities’ offering glamping and activity breaks for groups looking to get away for the weekend, and has both a national market and people coming from abroad. Offering accommodation either on site, or with other affiliated glamping sites around the country means people can come and stay and learn some skills and crafts such as learning to make natural toiletries, instinctive archery, foraging to name a few.
She also runs the Wild Harvest School of Self Reliance on site where people come on local day courses for things like making rag rugs, learning natural navigation, natural toiletries making and basket weaving, or for local wild food walks like the ‘York Wild Food Walk’.
Last year Di organised ‘The Off Grid Survival Show’ bringing self-reliance skills and crafts into the mainstream. It was set for this Summer, and has been put back to next year now. I’d heard about this from an old friend of mine who I used to go to the Air Cadets with as teens, who has an interest in bushcraft and off grid living. I was just about to volunteer to go help out for the weekend as it is obviously something I am interested in, and then it was cancelled because of the virus. So I decided to contact Di anyway, and am glad I did! I’ll be definitely meeting her one day!
“I thought it was time for a national show. I’d seen such a resurgence of interest in the desire to upskill and downshift that we are ready for a national show in it now.”
Di wanted to take it into mainstream instead of it only staying in the existing 'alternative' community, and to take the possibilities to the masses - and I’m so glad to see this. We need to be able to look after ourselves and agree everyone has a right to be able to access this information and these opportunities! It’s good to see people who keep these necessary skills alive no longer seen as being in the ‘fringes’ and be in the ‘mainstream’. If you ask me, the need for events and opportunities to learn such basic life skills highlights the extent of our loss of skills, knowledge and our dependancy on things which we could possibly produce ourselves given the time and know how. The benefits of this are huge all round.
The first ever Off Grid Survival Show will be at Newark Showground which is pretty central and accessible and has a big indoor space, Saturday and Sunday 1st and 2nd May 2021, with camping from Friday 30th. It’s an education based show helping people to upskill so that they can downshift, maybe this sounds like a paradox but, as Di said, it means the more skills you have, the less things you need. The ideas are based on forming communities around that, there will be people selling plots of land too, and she even mentioned talks about communal living, I guessed in the sense of sharing resources and sharing skills such as rearing livestock, ways to make energy, first aid, foraging, some bush craft, with a very interesting line up of speakers including Fraser Christian - Coastal Survival Expert; Lisa Cutcliffe – Wild Mushroom Talk; Jason Ingamels – Expedition Leader; Paul Dore – Leatherworker; Paul Harvey - Bush Cooking Expert and Graham Wood – Aquaponics and Permaculture System Designer to name a few.
I was interested to learn from Di that there is even a Government policy in the UK called ‘Domestic resilience’ to promote exactly that at a national level, for our safety and security. During and after the 2nd World War, our country’s level of resilience was at a high. People could bake, knit, rear animals, grow food, light fires, repair things. I despair to think about where we are now… I dread to think what would happen if all the lights suddenly go out! – I need to learn some of these skills! I’m not worrying this is going to happen, but I really do think I will have fun learning, which is reason enough.
As a qualified teacher, Di is also currently writing 2 books, one of them ‘Barefoot Self Reliance’ about everything Di knows / a biography, and the other book to accompany a 4-day residential course she runs called ‘Teach Foraging’ where she teaches teachers to teach! Lockdown has helped her to be able to get on with this as she had to cancel a lot of courses.
“I’m very passionate about getting structure to wild food walks and getting safety and sustainability built into the teaching of wild food”
The video below is my interview with Di where we chatted in more detail about all these wonderful things she is involved in, where she learnt her skills, her resilience and drive, some of the things she has lined up to do next, her black belt in Taekwondo, her love of books as a way of learning, thoughts on self-sufficiency and her wish for self-reliance knowledge to be passed on to help people in the future and also the need for us to also take care of ourselves, so we are able to take care of others! And we both ended our interview with a sense of optimism as we leave lockdown because more people are signing up to learn these skills!
