Leaving London and downshifting to become a full-time parent and rural homemaker
We listened to the local radio station to hear the long list Worcestershire schools who were unable to open due to to overnight snow & the kids were thrilled when they finally heard the name of their pre-school.
The kiddies and their Daddy wolfed down some steamy porrdige and Horlicks before making an enormous snow woman [...]
Our friend Janet popped in to see us yesterday which was lovely as we hadn’t seen her since before the Christmas holidays. As usual she passed on all manner of fabulous gardening and cooking knowledge and before long had the children outside ‘helping her’ take down a wire fence from our vegetable garden to use [...]
What a great start to the day - Bealers got up before me and got the kids breakfasted (rare which makes it even more special when it happens!) while I snoozed on unaware that the day had begun. He brought me a nice cup of coffee about 20 minutes before he had to leave for [...]
Now this is exactly the sort of thing I hoped to see more of when we left London 7 months ago to start our new green, thrifty and environmentally aware life here in the West Midlands - a heron on the local duck pond at Hanley Swan (so is it officially a swan pond?).
According to [...]
We started messing around with our new vegetable plot this last weekend by digging overa couple of square metres and planting a couple of different varieties (artichoke for roasting and silverskin for general cooking) of garlic in the patch where potatoes were grown last year by Miss Dennly. We planted about 30 cloves each about [...]
The plot of land we’ve had added on to our tenancy at the back of our garden has been a vegetable patch for many years as it was owned by the keen gardener next door neighbour and landlady. Emily Dennly had lived here since she was 5 years old when she came to live with [...]
Janet (my legendary new aquaintance) tells me that when I pick the apples from our tree (Cox’s apparently according to Janet) or the tomatoes & chillis from our plants we should keep a bit of stalk attached which will help the fruit to keep.
Removing the stalk when picking creates a wound in the fruit and [...]
Little boys love sticks. They have their caveman ancestors right with them as they find yet another and declare ‘Look, a stick!’ and then bash, whack and twirl.
Apparently according to my new friend Janet who seems to know everything about everything the first thing to do when attempting to do a rural walk with small [...]