Wishing you a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year with love from The Secret Acre
Image
1
Category Archives: Good Life
It’s beginning to look a lot like Winterval
Sadly it’s turning into a Christmas Horribilis for us. More about this at a future date when we feel we can write about it.
But before the proverbial hit the fan, we were busy preparing for a happier, socially distanced Yule.
The Christmas tree arrived on a tractor, delivered from the farm a few hundred yards down the road, where we had often walked the dog past the field where it was growing.
Just six inches needed trimming off the top to get it in. Continue reading
Leaping into Leaves
Autumn, according to Winnie the Pooh, is “A time of hot chocolatey mornings, toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves.”
And who are we to argue with the great Tao of Pooh?
So all three have been enjoyed at The Secret Acre this autumn, while England endured its second Covid lockdown as you can see!
These autumn months always just seem to whiz by in a flash. Continue reading
Best in Show
Regular readers will know that autumn’s harvest season also brings forth the village show.
We have form, stating with some urban practise, and then some baby steps, before gaining experience for a successful all-out assault on a whole section last year.
To be frank, I didn’t think it could get any better, and along with the uncertainty around the virus this year, I doubted we would enter. Continue reading
Harvest 2020 – Part 3: Summer Holiday Helpers
August is always a manic month of harvesting and preserving, and our ongoing Harvest 2020 was no exception.
If anything things have been even busier this year with the unseasonal climate change affected weather meaning everything has been ready at least two weeks early, and some crops badly hit.
Continue reading
Timelapse Trials
Our new nature watch camera at The Secret Acre includes a timelapse facility that we have been playing around with.
Best so far has been a summer’s day in the paddock, watching the horses and their visitors come and go. Eighteen hours from dawn to dusk compressed into just 9 mins of film. Continue reading
Harvest 2020 – Part Two
Our harvesting continued apace in July and as we headed into August, traditionally the month of gluts on the veg patch.
The start of the school summer holidays also marks the traditional influx of child labour thanks to visiting friends. Continue reading
May Fever
Today is May Day, so happy Beltane.
It seems only yesterday it was Imbolc!
Facemasks may be the haute couture of the pandemic, but here at The Secret Acre they have nothing to do with the Good Life on Lockdown, but everything to do with Paul’s chronic hayfever. Continue reading
New Springwatch Kids on the Block
Move over Chris Packham! Because another advantage of the current Good Life on Lockdown has been spare time to finally play properly with the trail camera we received at Christmas.
Since moving in we have got used to observing the daytime wildlife, even when red in tooth and claw, but we really wanted a wildlife camera to also be able to capture the hidden nocturnal wildlife, in full on David Attenborough style. Continue reading
The (Good) Life on Lockdown
We are living in strange times indeed. But life on Coronavirus Lockdown at The Secret Acre could be a lot worse. The sun is finally out, and there’s no shortage of spring jobs in the garden to be done.
We know we are not the only ones to have taken the opportunity to start re-watching the complete DVD set of episodes of The Good Life again from scratch. We are just getting onto the start of season four!
Meanwhile, the time for other more practical projects has also materialised during life on lockdown. Here’s a quick pictorial run through our first two weeks on lockdown on the homestead…. Continue reading
