There’s a move in America to bring back the washing line – the quaint habit of pegging out laundry in the fresh air being all but extinct. But the tumble dryer is a profligate consumer of energy – six per cent of the average domestic carbon footprint – and an outfit called Project Laundry List (www.laundrylist.org) is rebranding a line of flapping whites as the pennant of eco chic. So far, no one has suggested a return to the boiling copper and the mangle, but it may be only a matter of time.

As a small child I was sent to stay with my aunt each time my mother had a baby; on Monday mornings I stood beside her in the wash house as she plucked clothes from a steaming copper with a pair of giant wooden tongs and fed them through the fearsome rollers. I was allowed to turn the handle, watching joyfully as water streamed into a gully in the floor. If it was a good drying day, the wash would be hung out in the garden; otherwise it was hoisted by pulleys onto a wooden rack above the solid fuel stove in her kitchen.

I’ve just bought one of these racks for the Granary from www.ironmongeryonline.com, whose sales have risen steadily in the past six months – fuelled possibly by the boom in real nappies and face flannels, the on-trend alternative to expensively packaged cleansers. Other straws in the wind of a new austerity are long waiting lists for allotments, soaring sales of packets of vegetable seeds and compost bins, and a tiny, valiant shift towards buying locally produced food.

Trish Marsh is the “sustainable development officer” for our local authority and has vowed to live for a year eating only food grown in the county, or fair-trade produce such as coffee, olive oil and bananas (http://herefoodshire.blogspot.com). She started in February – a tough month when you’re so over root vegetables you could cry. The American novelist Barbara Kingsolver recorded a similar, even more rigorous experiment in her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, recalling the thrill of discovering, on a dour, cold morning at her farmers’ market, a stall selling bright pink bunches of forced rhubarb amid the turnips and ancient wrinkled apples.

Now well into the rewards of early purple-sprouting broccoli, asparagus and baby salad leaves, with strawberries and broad beans just around the corner, Marsh says she has learned to shop with an open mind, like a French housewife. She keeps a tally and finds that, though she might spend more on meat than she did when she bought it at the supermarket, the family wastes much less. “I do think about people on low incomes, of course,” she says, “but if a quarter of the county’s population diverted £2 a week to local food, it would bring an extra £4 million into the local economy. We could make ourselves – both growers and consumers – much more food secure.”

What next in the search for eco-purity? Bottling, I fancy. Darning, possibly.

valleygirl@thetimes.co.uk

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