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
“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
So the house is finished and the vegetables are growing.
Surely time now then to simply lay back in warm summer sunshine and enjoy the good life!
The American humorist, S.J. Perelman, apparently once wrote that –
“A farm is an irregular patch of nettles, containing a fool who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.”
Little did he know that this fool has a hammock!
Of course the first thing the novice needs to tackle, when getting going on veg growing, is the sowing of the seed. A timeless wonder of nature explained so well in The Young Ones I seem to remember. Continue reading
So that’s decide then, we’ll make a start on this Good Life thing by getting going on the veg growing this year, and worry about getting animals next year.
Time is pressing…
“Delve in! The year’s before us. Spring’s promise fills the air” – Frederick Frye Rockwell, “Invitation” Around the Year in the Garden, 1913. Continue reading
Amid the stresses of moving in, unpacking and snagging it can be easy to temporarily lose sight of why you wanted to chase a more balanced life in the first place. So it has something of a relief to almost immediately get the first glimmers of the promised Good Life.
My top three so far have been – Continue reading
It seems hard to believe, but just over six months into the smallholding’s eco-makeover, the excellent builders had stuck to both the timetable and the budget and we were ready to move in.
So after lots of internal finishing in September, and a disappointing lack of readily available Triple A rated energy efficient appliances, we finally booked the removal van for the start of October, worried only by the alarming amount of stuff we had to pack up.
Now safely in, we are starting to work through the inevitably long list of snagging issues, top of which on day one was the alarmingly absent manhole for the bathroom sewer! Continue reading
Four weeks further on and Stevenson the builders continue to make amazing progress in the sunshine on our smallholding’s eco-makeover.
The timber frame extension shot up almost overnight, so now the whole building is in place just awaiting the windows to get us water tight. In the original part of the house the first fix has been done and the walls beautifully re-plastered. Continue reading
Since finding The Secret Acre, what to do with the paddock field has been, and remains, a matter of hot debate.
Donkey cheese was an early favourite with Emma, but it appears to only have a market of one, a Wimbledon tennis player, and the Alpaca and Llama market now seems saturated. Friends even suggested planting woodland or vines. But sheep and/or goats seem the most likely eventual choice. Continue reading
I could say it started recently with the dog, but that wouldn’t really be true.
Emma has already written about her motivation for finding our Secret Acre. For me I guess it started watching The Good Life television series at an impressionably young age, which helped foster a lifelong passion for our environment and living a happier, more self-sufficient life. Continue reading
The Secret Acre 