Today is officially the first day of spring, if you’re a northern hemisphere type of person that is.
Of course the early signs of spring have been popping up everywhere already, but today the sun has done its stuff, at 10.28am to be precise if you were in the UK. Continue reading
We’re guest tweeters of the week all this week on Twitter @SmallholdersUK
Followers of this Blog get their updates in one of three ways. Either you’ve signed up on the website for direct email alerts, or you see posting on Facebook or Twitter. Continue reading
Welcome to Fastershire said the postcard through the door recently, announcing that our local phone cabinet has finally been wired up for the prospect of faster rural broadband!
See what they did there? Nice. Continue reading
Here’s something inspirational for the New Year, to balance my depressing New Year thought about the IT Industry’s contribution to Child Slavery. Forget your black landfill wheelie bin, this is the landfill jam jar!
Thanks to fellow Good Life bloggers at Home Grown Heaven, I was recently introduced to another inspirational Irish blog, Simple No Waste Life. They spent 2016 going hard core on Zero Waste. Continue reading
A cheery thought for New Year! But the fact is many of the devices we use to access the internet, and read this blog, contain materials that are mined on some of the planet’s worst conflict zones. Continue reading
We didn’t just grow vegetables in our first year at The Secret Acre, we took time out to get married too. In our own field, at our own boutique, indie style festival for family and friends. But that’s a whole other story!
However, like many modern marriages these days, we met later in life. Which got us thinking about how we would celebrate our anniversaries. Continue reading
“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself” – May Sarton.
Personally I like to think my life so far has fortunately been a series of triumphs set against a few disasters. But the jury is definitely still out when it comes to our new veg beds!
Certainly in this first year, there have been more triumphs than losses, which is nice. But this is probably mostly because we are still easily pleased! Continue reading
And another year goes by. So last month I put up two curtain poles and a washing line at The Secret Acre. Because October marked our first year anniversary of moving in. And rather embarrassingly these were the last of the ‘quick’ jobs still undone from that very first month!
But missing curtain poles aside, October was a chance for us to reflect on the good and bad points of our first year. Fortunately, perhaps, our positives and negatives were remarkably similar. Continue reading
We’ve been away from The Secret Acre for two weeks on honeymoon. Before we left we took the precaution of picking and eating all the courgettes. But these buggers grow fast, and on our return we were greeted by four massive marrows already the size of torpedoes!
In August’s issue of Home Farmer magazine their advice on growing courgettes to marrow size was simply “don’t do it!” So faced with our honeymoon marrows, anyone else got any good (and preferably tasty!) suggestions?
“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land” – Abraham Lincoln
If Abe, the dollar bill guy was right, then we ought to be celebrating our heroes of self-sufficiency.
But who are your own personal heroes?
Take our poll and let us know! Continue reading
The Secret Acre 