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
You could have a laurel hedge, taking up the sunniest spot in the garden. Or you could have a fruit cage, where the fruit might be as sweet as can be.
We chose the latter, and took a preverbal sledgehammer to the laurel. Well a chain saw and a mechanical digger to be precise. Continue reading
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
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
Hard to believe we’ve been living at The Secret Acre for three years now, and the still as yet unfinished greenhouse can’t believe it either!
Friends from the start might remember that clearing the greenhouse was the very first task we tackled over three years ago. Like an episode of Time Team if it involved only brambles. Continue reading
We moved to The Secret Acre to live the good life, so when the opportunity came along last month to visit Cerys Matthews’ Good Life Experience with friends and the dog, it seemed rude not to! Continue reading
If you were with us this time last year, you will know that Emma and I decide to dump the traditional first 24 wedding anniversaries – the rubbish ones like ‘paper’ and ‘glue’ which come before the serious bling – in favour of our own list of things we actually like.
So we wrote down 12 each and randomly assigned them into the 24 draws of a repurposed advent calendar, to be opened at the start of each year. 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
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
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
