Humble by Nature
Life, Lambs and a Dog Called Badger
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Narrated by:
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Kate Humble
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By:
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Kate Humble
About this listen
In 2007, after 20 years of living in London, Kate Humble and her husband Ludo decided it was time to leave city life behind them. Three years later, now the owner of a Welsh smallholding, Kate hears that a nearby farm is to be broken up and sold off. Another farm lost; another opportunity for a young farmless farmer gone. Desperate to stop the sale, Kate contacts the council with an alternative plan - to keep the farm working and to run a rural skills and animal husbandry school alongside it. Against all odds, she succeeds.
Here, in Humble by Nature, Kate shares with us a highly personal account of her journey from London town house to Welsh farm. Along the way we meet Bertie and Lawrence the donkeys, Myfanwy and Blackberry the pigs, and goats Biscuit and Honey, not forgetting a dog called Badger and his unladylike sidekick Bella. And we are introduced to the tenant farmers Tim and Sarah, the locals who helped and some who didn't, and a whole host of newborn lambs.
Full of the warmth and passion for the natural world that makes Kate such a sought after presenter, Humble by Nature is the story of two people prepared to follow their hearts and save a small part of Britain's farming heritage, whatever the consequences.
©2013 Kate Humble (P)2021 Orion Publishing Group LtdListeners also enjoyed...
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We're all a little sheepish
- By Pam on 12-23-14
By: Catherine Friend
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Coop
- A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
- By: Michael Perry
- Narrated by: Michael Perry
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood - his city-bred parents took in more than 100 foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm - for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.
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Meh
- By dpenney on 12-22-16
By: Michael Perry
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The Farmer's Son
- Calving Season on a Family Farm
- By: John Connell
- Narrated by: Alan Smyth
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. Until, one winter, after more than a decade away, he finds himself back on the farm. Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid.
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Beautiful.
- By Kindle Customer on 05-22-19
By: John Connell
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A Year in Provence
- By: Peter Mayle
- Narrated by: Peter Mayle
- Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins
- Abridged
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Peter Mayle and his wife had been to Provence as tourists. They had dreamed of one day trading the long, grey winters and damp summers of England for the blue skies and sunshine of the coast of southern France. And then they made it happen. They moved into an old farmhouse at the foot of the Luberon mountains and embarked on a wonderful, if at times bewildering, new life.
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Ban abridged versions
- By marlowe on 03-30-15
By: Peter Mayle
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My Gentle Barn
- Creating a Sanctuary Where Animals Heal and Children Learn to Hope
- By: Ellie Laks
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Founder Ellie Laks started The Gentle Barn after adopting a sick goat from a run-down petting zoo in 1999. Some 200 animals later (including chickens, horses, pigs, cows, rabbits, emus, and more), The Gentle Barn has become an extraordinary nonprofit that brings together a volunteer staff of community members and at-risk teens to rehabilitate abandoned and/or abused animals. My Gentle Barn weaves together the story of how the Barn came to be what it is today with Ellie's own journey.
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Gratitude
- By Kindle customer on 08-29-16
By: Ellie Laks
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Farm City
- The Education of an Urban Farmer
- By: Novella Carpenter
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Novella Carpenter loves cities - the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways.
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Hmmm.
- By THoward on 09-30-09
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Mr Doubler Begins Again
- By: Seni Glaister
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Baked, mashed, boiled or fried, Mr Doubler knows his potatoes. But the same can’t be said for people. Since he lost his wife, he’s been on his own at Mirth Farm - and that suits Doubler just fine. Crowds are for other people; the only company he needs are his potato plants and his housekeeper, Mrs Millwood, who visits every day. So when Mrs Millwood is taken ill, it ruins everything - and Mr Doubler begins to worry that he might have lost his way. But could the kindness of strangers be enough to bring him down from the hill?
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Fantastic book
- By Cole M Miller on 12-07-19
By: Seni Glaister
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Dirty Chick
- Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer
- By: Antonia Murphy
- Narrated by: Antonia Murphy
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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One month into our stay, we'd managed to dispatch most of our charges. We executed the chickens. One of the cats disappeared, clearly disgusted with our urban ways. And Lucky [the cow] was escaping almost daily. It seemed we didn't have much of a talent for farming. And we still had eleven months to go." Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliché, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner.
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Loved it!
- By kara-karina on 02-11-15
By: Antonia Murphy
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Animal Farm
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture, quoted so often that we tend to forget who wrote the original words! This must-read is also a must-listen!
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If you hate spoilers, save the intro for last.
- By Dusty on 02-18-11
By: George Orwell
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The Woman of the House
- By: Alice Taylor
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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An enchanting and nostalgic tale of Ireland in the 1950s by Ireland’s favourite writer, Alice Taylor. The Phelans have owned Mossgrove for generations. The small, rural Irish farm has been the pride of them all until Ned's wife, Martha, arrives and begins to undermine generations of hard work and happiness. She resents the deep history of the place and sets about making it her own, shutting out what is left of Ned's family. She is particularly jealous of Ned's sister, Kate, a local nurse and doting aunt to Martha's children.
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Brings you right there
- By Amazon Customer on 08-26-20
By: Alice Taylor
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Nurse, Come You Here!
- More True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle
- By: Mary J. MacLeod
- Narrated by: Jill Tanner
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary J. Macleod and her husband left the London area for an idyllic place to raise their young children in the late '60s, and they found the island of Papavray in the Scottish Hebrides. There they bought a croft house on a "small acre" of land, and Mary J. (also known as Julia) became the district nurse.
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Great book!
- By Catt Pataky on 09-02-17
By: Mary J. MacLeod
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Deep Creek
- Finding Hope in the High Country
- By: Pam Houston
- Narrated by: Pam Houston
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the Earth, the ranch most of all.
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The most beautiful book I’ve ever read
- By KFratt on 04-26-19
By: Pam Houston
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The Electricity of Every Living Thing
- A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home
- By: Katherine May
- Narrated by: Katherine May
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In anticipation of her 38th birthday, Katherine May set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path. She wanted time alone, in nature, to understand why she had stopped coping with everyday life; why motherhood had been so overwhelming and isolating; and why the world felt full of expectations she couldn't meet. She was also reeling from a chance encounter with a voice on the radio that sparked her realisation that she might be autistic.
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Perfect!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 10-20-22
By: Katherine May
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The Wolf Border
- By: Sarah Hall
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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For almost a decade, Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric Earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the grey wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District. The earl's project harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness.
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Marvelous.
- By V on 05-27-15
By: Sarah Hall