If I had to list one thing that I miss about the UK it’s being able to sack off cooking the evening meal and pick up a takeaway. We were totally spoiled for a choice at our old house and being so close to the city and with so many densely populated suburbs around we…
It’s 6 months to the day that we left our old home in the North of England for the far sunnier Sud de la France so here’s the progress report on our five main tasks: House buying Settling into daily life Sorting out the paperwork Learning the French language Earning some money House Buying Progress […]
I was a passionate wildlife watcher back in the UK and was pretty good with the names of most species of plant, animal, or bird that I came across. Not so much insects, but I’m not an instect-y person. Anyhow, now I live in France there is sooo much that’s new as well as an…
There’s so much going on right now I have no time to blog about it! What with the classic Easter cold, taking us all down one by one, and a visit from my parents I’m only just starting to catch up on all things computer-based. I’ve got a bunch of part-written or planned and not…
In an earlier post I lamented about the state of this house and my efforts to clean the grotty kitchen worktop. Here’s a quick post about the result which was pretty good. I wiped the baking soda/peroxide mix away after about 30 minutes. The worktop, which looked more like this… Now looks like this! I’m…
Something that irks about not having our own garden space is not being able to make our own compost. At our last place we donated our food scraps to others’ heaps, which worked out just fine. We thought we’d got a similar arrangement going here but our new neighbour turns out to be a bit…
Today we ventured out to visit a few local farms who were taking part in the De Ferme en Ferme open day. I’d seen posters around for a few weeks then, after reading a really nice blog post about last year’s programme, picked up a leaflet that me, James, and DD talked about to decide…
It’s a long weekend here in France, as with much of Europe (I think), made longer for the us by the fact that DD came back from school on Friday with suspected conjunctivitis (joy of joys) so we’ve been busying ourselves in the garden. Today we worked on our new compositing solution, which I plan…
Before I write anything else I want to make one thing clear: I am by no means a clean freak. Friends will testify to this – a few, those with tendencies towards OCD on the cleaning front, sometimes found visiting our old house challenging; well, there was always something more interesting to do than cleaning!…
Here are the photos from our recent attempt to harvest some birch sap, which I posted about a few weeks ago. The first picture shows our respective His ‘n’ Hers setups: his is the green bottle, mine is the white. We both whittled sticks to use as “straws” to guide the sap from the cut in…