I've been spending a lot of time in this chair, drinking tea, reading, staring out of the window. It's turned pretty nippy here now, and rather than spending all of my free time outside, I've been spending more of it inside, plotting and scheming and hatching plans. I love the way the light moves around this room now the leaves have fallen from the elm tree by the back door. We've had visitors this weekend (they brought the delightful chicken mug in the first picture, and many other cheerful gifts). They've not been before, and it spurred us on to tidy up a bit, and to spend today doing not-very-much other than sitting around. I also made some bread, for what I think is the first time since we moved. It felt nice to do something relatively normal and weekendy. After they left, I spent an hour or two outside with the chickens, pottering around in the garden. I'll do a separate post about the garden, which is slowly evolving as I make plans for next year. It was cold today, and it felt quite autumnal. Definitely a day for warm scarves and woolly hats. It's been sunny though, in amongst the hailstones. I so much love watching how the landscape changes through the seasons. But now I'm back inside again, eating some of that soda bread and a friend's home made jam, drinking tea and making more plans. I was going to say this is the best place to be on a day like today, but the sun's come out again now and now the clocks have changed I won't get home before nightfall most evenings during the week so I feel I need to make the most of the daylight...
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People sometimes ask me what we're doing out here. Not many people have questioned our sanity in moving away from the city (although a couple have), but people often ask if we moved here with a specific purpose. After all, we have several acres of fields - we must have a plan? Livestock? Camping? Being completely self-sufficient? Festivals? Rewilding? And the answer is, I don't really know. When we started our search for a new house, we were looking for somewhere with a bigger garden. That wasn't difficult - our old garden was 92 square feet, much of it concrete, and was at the front of the house, bordering directly onto the pavement. As often happens, our search area got wider, we got closer and closer to the top of our budget, and eventually we found somewhere we fell for that had some ideal qualities (views, privacy, lack of neighbours) and some that we hadn't really counted on (11 acres of grassland and several outbuildings). We did wonder whether it was sensible, but we were game for an adventure. We didn't make too many plans in advance, because the process of buying took nearly eight months (shenanigans by the mortgage broker, the building society, another party in the chain), and we spent a lot of that time thinking we might not be able to move at all. When we did finally exchange contracts, we had nine days to prepare before we moved. Anyway, we're here now. Are we farming? No. Smallholding? I would have said no, but according to Wikipedia at least, smallholdings 'may not be self-sufficient but are valued primarily for the rural lifestyle that they provide for the owners, who often do not earn their livelihood from the farm', which is true (but I suppose could apply to any rural house). It also says 'a smallholding is a piece of land and its adjacent living quarters for the smallholder and stabling for farm animals. It is usually smaller than a farm but larger than an allotment, usually under 50 acres'. That's also true. Other definitions talk about land that is being used for agricultural purposes, but is smaller than a farm, and this is where I come unstuck. We're not doing anything remotely close to agriculture here. I grow some of our food in the garden, and we now have four chickens - does that count as agriculture? I don't think so. So are we smallholders? I don't know. In America this type of place would probably be referred to as a homestead, and in a way I like the sound of the word homestead better than smallholding. It's an old English word, but sadly for me it's associated with the questionable practices surrounding the 1862 Homestead Act, and it doesn't feel like a good fit. So where does that leave us? Acreage is, I suppose, technically correct but doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. I can barely bring myself to even say 'property'.
In reality, we don't need to call it anything other than home, and describe what we're doing in any other way than living here. There are plans, both short and long term, but they're not on a grand scale, and they certainly don't involve having our own farm animals or any kind of hospitality business. So next time someone asks, I think I'll just tell them we're hanging out. Learning to live here, to inhabit this space and have a life that in some ways is similar to our old one, but in other ways is oh so very different. Six months ago today we moved house. We were exhausted after two years of decorating, cleaning, packing and bureaucracy, and the night before moving day we only had two hours sleep. We both cried. We tried to sneak to our favourite cafe for a last consoling cuppa but it was full, so we got drinks to take away before driving, in two separate cars, over the hills to our new house. The removal men were already here, and had unloaded one van into the garage already, as instructed. We opened the house, and as the sky turned grey and a few flakes of snow started to fall, they (rather hastily) unloaded the other two vans into the living room while I rang the plumber and tried to turn the heating on. I can't say that first night was fun, and being snowed in for the next few days was adventurous rather than pleasant, but it gave us a chance to unpack, and to move all our possessions from the one warm room (which we'd intended to use as a temporary store) to a rather colder room (which we'd intended as a living room). So much has changed in six months, so I wanted to look back a little on the progress we've made. We moved on February 26th, and from then on through March, there was quite a lot of weather. We did some necessary work - filling potholes in the drive, and making a path across the lawn to the door - and the snowdrops arrived. March was a month of early mornings, sunsets, and not quite believing how lucky we were. We did some more practical things - started on the never-ending task of fixing our dry stone walls, reclaimed some of the stone from the collapsing old barn, put up a greenhouse, demolished an outbuilding, and spent yet more time staring at the view. And I finally achieved my dream of hanging washing out on my own washing line. In April it snowed (again), and then got rather soggy (again). I optimistically planted seeds (and rebuilt the greenhouse after it blew down), and we spent a lot of time taking wellies on and off in a futile bid to not have the house fill up with mud. Crocuses arrived, and then a parade of daffodils lined the driveway. I went on a dry stone walling course, and we acquired a proper glass greenhouse from a friend. We ate breakfast outside wrapped in blankets in the middle of the month, and by the end I was gardening in a t shirt. May was a month of grass and wild flowers. I acquired a push along mower, and a scythe, and we opened our fields to the cows from the neighbouring dairy farm. I planted raspberry canes and made raised (ish) beds and it was finally warm enough to take my socks off. June was lush. The garden grew faster than I could keep up with it, but by the end of the month the second greenhouse was up and stocked with tomatoes and cucumbers, and the courgettes and squashes were in the ground. We had our first salady harvests, I finally finished rebuilding my first dry stone wall, and socialising was done mostly outside. Oh, and we started dismantling two of the bedrooms on the first floor. July was hot. Too hot really. The surrounding grazing land turned brown, and the local farmers were feeding last year's hay to the cows. I traipsed back and forth to the greenhouse with watering cans, cursing myself for not plumbing in the water butts properly before the heatwave arrived. We dug in our first home made compost, and had our first harvests of raspberries, courgettes, cucumbers and beans. And now we're in August! The weather has turned a little - we've still had some hot days, but it's more like a normal English summer, and now I'm off work for a fortnight it's been raining rather a lot. We've been picking blackberries, harvesting more courgettes than it's sensible to eat, and our first calf arrived (and several more since). We had the excitement of scaffolding as the local farmer kindly removed our chimney from the roof, and Peter has been dismantling the chimney walls inside. We're also building a chicken coop ready for the arrival of our own mini flock next weekend. I don't think we've done too badly for our first six months. This was a big change for us, and we're finally starting to feel like we live here (probably a good thing as we've started dismantling walls).
I wonder what the next six months will bring? The local lanes are lined with bilberries. We've been watching them ripen over the last few weeks and in early July we finally got round to picking some. Bilberries are tiny, and they don't really taste very nice raw. It takes a long time to pick a worthwhile crop. But it's a pleasant evening's work pottering up and down the lanes in the sunshine, and it gave us a chance to inspect some of our dry stone walls. Eventually we picked a couple of tubs full and headed home. This lot went into the freezer, and then into a couple of batches of scones, which I seem to have neglected to take photos of.
Next up is blackberries, and I've already spotted a few ripe ones while out running, so I must pop down the field and check ours at the weekend. There's something cheery about eating food that just grows without being planted. We've had two lots of visitors this week - a friend on Wednesday and my mum this weekend. A good job really, as my ongoing list of Things That Need Doing was getting rather long. Fortunately both visitors were willing volunteers, and between us all we've managed to get a few more plants out of the greenhouse. I'm not digging the beds - just scything the grass, lifting the very top layer of tangled roots with a pick axe, and then loosening the roots before digging a small hole and planting into compost. It's a reasonable compromise as it's too late for no dig this year without buying in a load of compost (which I'd rather not do). We've had some wildlife visitors this week too, starting with a bird that flew into the window and sadly died. It's not the first we've had (although the last one survived) so we do need to investigate how to stop it. The second visitor happily didn't crash into anything - it was just basking in the sunshine on a blanket in the living room. I've never seen a lizard before so this was quite exciting. Our third interesting wildlife experience this week was a buzzard, perched on a fence post, with two crows either side of it. We often see buzzards round here, and I've seen them being mobbed by crows, but never sitting this close to them. You'll have to excuse the rubbish picture - my camera isn't great for far away wildlife shots. It's not all been wildlife-spotting and digging for our visitors - yesterday we went to a local village fete. Today has been rather sedate in comparison, with a trip to the local tip, some more digging, and my mum cut the grass inside the small greenhouse with a pair of scissors (it was nearly up to the second shelf, so it was in dire need of a cut). The sun's come out again now so I'm trying planning where to put a willow dome. At our old house we had a willow hedge in the garden, and I brought some cuttings with me - they've been busy growing in a bucket of water for the last five months so I really do need to plant them soon. I love willow domes, and never had room for one before, but I'm planning a nice big one now, maybe with a door facing east for the view, and west for the sunset. Oh, and I forgot about the most exciting thing - chickens! We've been on the list for rescue hens for a while now, and finally we've got a date. Our new ladies will be joining us on 2nd September, so before then they'll need a home. They're barn hens, so while they haven't been in cages, they also have never been outside before. I've wanted chickens for many, many years so I think I'll be quite unbearably excited over the next six weeks while we get ready.
Where did the last two weeks go? It feels like forever since I've posted here. As always, I can see what I've been up to by scrolling through my photographs... Hmm. But it hasn't all been entertaining visitors and eating. There's been plenty of pottering in the garden (although I'm saving all that for one post at the end of the month). I've also been creating us some footpath signs. We don't get a lot of walkers here, maybe four or five lots in total over a sunny weekend. Most of them can read a map, and it's pretty obvious that the main footpath runs straight down our driveway. The side footpath isn't so obvious though until you're right on top of it, and a couple of groups of young people have gone wandering off into the wrong field (from which there isn't an exit), or stood around looking puzzled. So I've added a couple of yellow arrows and hopefully that will clear things up (I always appreciate clear footpath signs when I'm out walking - I hate standing in someone else's yard not knowing where I'm going!) We've been making some progress inside the house too - although I use the term 'we' loosely as my involvement has mainly been providing the occasional cup of tea. We're still struggling to find a builder who will remove that wall, so in the meantime Peter has removed everything else, including a false wall, the door frames, built in cupboards and old wiring. We can't use these rooms until this work is done so the rest of the house is full of boxes of stuff that should be up here. You can see how wonky the floor is. All this sorting (and the sunshine) has at least given us a chance to air a few clothes that have been in boxes for a couple of years. In slightly less alarming news, I've been on a few local outings. First off to a quarrying trade show - not my usual nice-trip-into-the-countryside but fascinating nevertheless. The giant machines looked like toys inside the quarry. The main attraction for me though was this. This is The Man Engine, and it was both extremely impressive and extremely beautiful. The tour has finished now, but if you do ever get a chance to see it I'd highly recommend it. We've been to a couple of other localish events too - a school fair, and a Tudor fair, which I visited right at the end of the day, so was lucky enough to be given some home made butter to take home, wrapped in a butterbur leaf. It was National Meadows Day recently so we also visited a farm with a hay meadow, and had a tour from the local Wildlife Trust to show us how to identify various grasses and flowers. Quite a lot of the flowers had gone to seed because we've had such hot weather lately and so little rain. Everywhere here is dry (like much of the rest of the country) and we've had several moorland grass fires, which is very unusual round here. It's not often I find myself longing for rain, but lately I have been. So that's where I've been - wandering about the countryside, drinking tea and looking at the view. And digging and planting and being at work of course, and various other things that I'll save for another post. In the mean time, I'll go back to hoping for a bit of rain soon.
Gosh, it's a while since I've done a monthly 'in the garden' post. The last one was October, in a very different garden. After a lot of snow, and a bit of being very overwhelmed, things are progressing nicely in our new garden. Both greenhouses are full, and I've even started planting things outside. We've had our first harvest too - just pea shoots and lettuce, and some tiny unintentional potatoes we found in a planter. The next couple of months should be exciting. In the big greenhouse in pots we have tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, basil, coriander, and some climbing French beans that I'll plant outside at the weekend. Already outside we have some mystery beans, an an assortment of summer and winter squash and courgettes (the labels faded and they all look the same at the minute). And in the small greenhouse, which is an ongoing production line of things moving from smaller to bigger pots, we have more squash, more cucumbers, more tomatoes, plus kale, cabbage, cauliflower, rainbow chard, and beetroot. It won't all survive of course. I've already lost one batch of kale, and all of my spinach, and I didn't repot the chard in time so it's tiny. Some of my tomatoes are still the size of matchsticks because they haven't been repotted, and at this point I think they might have to be consigned to the compost (who needs 18 tomato plants and 20 cucumber plants anyway?) I do hate throwing things away though. My main garden success at the minute is the compost. This unpicturesque mess is actually a thriving compost making machine. The giant pile of hay was in one of the outbuildings, and is slowly being added to the compost. The left bay has a mix of hay, fresh grass, and free horse manure that someone was giving away in bags at the side of the road. The middle bay is where I'm mixing stuff from the left and the right to give it all a bit more air. And, to my surprise and delight, the right hand bay has actually rotted down into lovely, luscious compost. I genuinely wasn't expecting that. I was just turning both end bays into the middle one to mix them, and the bin we put our food waste in had barely any food waste left. Pretty impressive, given that I didn't build the bins at all til late March. Clearly I've just hit on the right mix of vegetable peelings, apple cores, coffee grindings, and old hay. Whatever it is, I'm ever so grateful, and now adding some of my own home made compost to the bottom of the big tubs I'm planting tomatoes and cucumbers in. In other kind-of-garden news, our cows are still here, and apparently have another couple of weeks before they give birth. We're getting rather fond of them as time goes on. Yesterday we noticed their water trough (filled from the spring) was empty, so we rang the farmer and he came and fitted a new trough filled from the water mains. My current favourite part of the garden isn't growing at all though. This is a metal swing seat that we acquired from someone who was throwing it away, and I love it. It looks ridiculous with that blanket over the top of course, but I assure you it's quite necessary to cast a bit of shade in all this heat we've been having. I'm spending rather a lot of time out there at the minute, staring idly at the scenery (and the cows). And as we have flowers in abundance at the minute, I've even been bringing a few indoors when we have visitors. Most jolly. I do love flowers in the house, and these roses, which are growing right by the back door, are so very fragrant they make the whole room smell.
So there we are, a snapshot of the garden in June. This has been fun, and I'll try to remember to do it every month from now on. It's already good to look back on how things have progressed in the four months since we moved here (four months, already?) Hooray! After much digging and carrying and swearing, the greenhouse is finally up! I already have the plastic greenhouse of course, but with the amount of outside space we have now I'm planning to grow as much of our food as I can, so I began to hunt for a second hand glass greenhouse. Fortunately, a lovely friend offered us hers, and we went to dismantle and collect it a few weeks ago. Since then, it sat in pieces in the garage while I pondered where to put it and dug a base. Needless to say, it was a bit of a fiasco and took far longer than expected (and two panes spontaneously cracked in the garage), but we're finally there. My other triumph took rather longer and rather more head-scratching - I have finally finished building the section of dry stone wall that collapsed not long after we moved in. I had to dismantle a fair bit before I got to a section stable enough to rebuild on. Slowly, over the last few weeks, I've been adding a few stones here and there, often late into the evening. This bit of wall catches the evening light, and I've often found myself out there at nine or even ten at night as the sun sets. Slowly, the wall grew, and the farmers next door said encouraging things like 'it's a good start' and 'I've seen worse'. Finally last night it was time to put on the top stones. I'm laughing now, looking at how short the grass is in that first picture when it collapsed - it's now nearly up to my waist and I had to trample a load of it down searching for the top stones which had all but disappeared. Already there's another gap in one of the fields, and several more places seem in danger of imminent collapse. Still, that's the way with dry stone walls - they stand for a hundred years then one day you wake up and there's a hole. It doesn't so much matter in between our fields, but I wouldn't want any of our cows escaping onto someone else's land, or to find someone else's sheep in our fields. So every day when I'm out, I cast my eyes around to make sure everything's still standing (the cows aren't helping by rubbing their chins on the top stones, pesky beasts). I could easily fill all my days, and several other lifetimes too, with pottering round here, although things feel slightly more manageable now we have the cows to keep the grass down, and the seeds planted and in the greenhouse, and some veg beds prepared, and wall fixed. I'm not even sure what the next job is. Possibly fixing the collapsed wall between the fields (it's good to practice on unnecessary walls, I feel), and the beans will need planting out soon - I've been hardening them off for a few days now, inside the greenhouse at night and out during the day. And chickens! I have promised myself that I'll be ready when the announcement comes for the next local rescue day, and I've decided where they're going, but I'm still being indecisive about hen house design. I'm leaning towards something simple and temporary which can be made more elaborate once we've established a bit of a routine. In the meantime, we're pottering about in the fields before and after work and at the weekend, becoming weather beaten and sore, and still vaguely like we're on holiday in someone else's life.
Last week our cows arrived. We're very excited. Of course, they aren't actually ours - they're on loan from the local dairy farm as lawnmowers. Apparently they're 'dry cows', eight months pregnant (not for the first time), and just lounging around in the fields waiting for their calves to arrive. I know pretty much nothing about cows, and am drinking in every little bit of information the farmers are willing to give me. This week I've learned that cows are pregnant for roughly the same time as humans (who knew?), that they won't eat buttercups because they're too bitter, that before they give birth they have sixty days of rest from milking, and that the price the dairy will pay the farmers for milk fluctuates throughout the year. Sometimes the depths of my ignorance knows no bounds. Yesterday the farmer dropped by with his young daughter, and I followed them into the fields to check on the ladies. They're surprisingly nimble considering their size, and wouldn't let us anywhere near them. The young girl was telling me about her pets, and when I said I didn't have any, she said 'well you've got these cows now!' Excellent - I now feel fully justified in giving them names and posting pictures of them on the internet. (Not that we've actually given them names yet...) For some reason I assumed cows would stay in one field until they'd munched all the grass and then wander to the next, but they don't do anything of the sort, they seem to wander about on a whim, sleeping first in one field, and then in another. When you think about it, why would they see the fields as separate spaces? Those walls are our boundaries after all, and while they'll keep a cow out, if the gate is open, why wouldn't it go through? After all, the grass might be greener over there. We should have calves in around three weeks, and I'm told I won't need to have any involvement in the birthing process, although I'm keeping a close eye out and have the farmer's number just in case. I do feel partly responsible for them (even though technically I'm not at all) and can't help worrying just a little bit.
The cows, of course, have been through it all before and aren't showing the slightest bit of worry. The sun has come out, and the grass has started growing. We have eleven acres of grassland, and no grazing animals. Matters were starting to get out of hand, so last week I bought a scythe. Gosh, it is such fun. We're both very taken with it, and have been lopping grass with enthusiasm. We won't be scything all eleven acres (thank goodness) as our neighbours at the dairy farm have lent us a few cows, who arrived yesterday (this is extremely exciting, and will get a post of its own). What we have been doing though is clearing a space to lay out some beds for growing veg. I'm trying to learn a bit about some of the grasses and wild flowers as I go along. These, I believe, are cuckoo flower, or lady's smock, and we have them in abundance. There will be plenty left after I've finished, as I'm only clearing the growing space, not the whole field. I dug out one small bed to plant my raspberry canes in - and decided instantly to use the no-dig method for the rest of the garden. There are plenty of ways of doing this, but we have an abundance of cardboard boxes, having just moved house, so that's what I'm starting with, followed by compost, and finally a mulch of grass cuttings, as we have an abundance of those too. I'm not sure I'll leave this on once I get plants in, as it's far too tempting for slugs, but for now it's rotting down in place and keeping the ground cosy (we did only get rid of the last of our snow three or four weeks ago, after all). Some of the grass is going into to make compost, so I don't have to buy any in next year. I always made compost at our old house, in one of those dalek-style bins towards the end, but here we have far more space, and far more garden waste, so I've created three bins, and can already see I might need more. The one in the middle is filled with dry hay, moved from the floor of one of the outbuildings. The one on the right is food waste from the kitchen, and each time I add some I throw in a handful of hay too. The one on the right I'm layering freshly cut grass and hay, and as it's now full, I'm covering it over and leaving it to rot down. My auntie bought me this book for my birthday, and it's (obviously) very enthusiastic about compost, and has many good tips. I confess I'm not sure I'll be making the special activator powder advocated by Maye Bruce, but I've already come across some of the herbs she uses in the fields so I might leave them to rot down in a bucket and pour it on. Can't do any harm.
Since the arrival of the lighter evenings, I've found myself heading outside for two or three hours after work, and then wondering why I'm collapsing into bed exhausted. It's not surprising really, two or three hours of wheelbarrowing, scything, walling, digging, on top of a nine hour day at work and two hours of driving would wear anyone out. Fortunately, I get to work at home several days a week, and at the weekends I don't work at all, so there's plenty of sitting about too, especially now the sun has started shining.... |
Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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February 2024
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