Seven Years of Blogging

Make yourself a drink and pull up your chair this is a long one ...... because today is this blogs anniversary, seven years of posts.  Seven years of ups and downs but best of all seven years of sharing our lives with you .... our blogging buddies, friends, followers and readers.

In October of 2008 when we first placed this advert in the Farmers Guardian newspaper ... we had no idea of the adventure we were starting on.

Resourceful sea-dog (Engineer) and hard working city chick (Retail Manager) (Married) wishing a radical life style change, seek 3 bed property with space to live the ‘good life’ (veggies and chickens), ideally in a rural setting or on a farm in the Oxford, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hampshire area. 

Willing to upgrade and refurb property in return for a realistic rent. Contact the old sea-dog (Alan) on -----------

or e-mail -----------

This blog that has charted virtually our every move, escapade and family event since then, has been the backbone of all that we have done.  Keeping us accountable and being a permanent record of our wonderful adventure.

 Expecting this search to take six months at the very least we were shocked to be contacted within days of the advert going out and offered the chance to rent a farm, complete with it's own farmhouse, barn, derelict orchard and six acre paddock. We spent the next two months closing down my sweet little lavender shop, handing the notice in on our rented house, saying goodbye to family and friends and generally just packing up our lives. Over Christmas of 2008 we moved in and a month later this blog was born.  Each year has had a subtitle and 2009's was 'From Townies to Country Folk' as the pair of us swapped smart clothes and shiny shoes for mud splattered jeans and big comfy wellies ... 

...and kitted ourselves and the farm out with what we thought we needed.  

2010 was the year of 'Pigs and Chickens' and our initial flock of ten rescued free range White Stars was added to over the course of the year.  The pigs came in small and grew and grew, providing us with meat, piglets, a small income and lots of entertainment and hard work.

2011 was 'Our Year of Living Simply' and we knuckled down to building on all we had learnt.  Reining in the spending and learning to live as simply as we could.  Growing, storing and preserving our own food, reusing, recycling and mending what we had.

But we showed our soft side when we re-homed another big batch of rescue birds, doubling our flock of the time to over 50 birds.  As our three year lease was coming to an end we sat and discussed the future, did we want to go for this lifestyle full time or revert to our townie lives.

We decided to not just carry on but to invest in our own future and buy our own land.  No matter how much we loved the area we lived in we knew we couldn't afford to buy in Oxfordshire, but we knew we had to grow our savings as quickly as we could, so we ended the lease on our lovely farm and looked for somewhere over the border in Berkshire, near to Lovely Hubby's work to rent while we saved.

  So 2012 was the year we went further, with the subtitle 'From Simple to Frugal - and Beyond'. 

We found  a ramshackle little bungalow in it's last years of life, waiting to be demolished to make room for the owners to build their dream home.  In the meantime they were heading overseas and needed someone to rent their property ...

... and look after their cat.

The pigs were gone due to family circumstances, and we were not allowed to have any on the land we rented, so we decided to downsize and buckle down and save.  So it was just us the dogs, the cats, and the chickens ... and then we went to a farm sale and fell in love with a Hyline hen and her three fluffy babies.  The geese had arrived.

Harry, Larry and Mo .... the three Chinese Grey geese replaced the pigs in our affections and made wonderful 'guard dogs' keeping our chickens safe from predators and making us laugh with their antics.

It turned out that we had two girls and one gander.  Harry swiftly decided that I was the love of his life and whenever I was in Chicken World would follow me round fawning at my feet demanding cuddles and attention.  

Then it was 2013 and we decided it was to be our 'Year of Less'.  Our little two bedroom bungalow seemed overcrowded with the contents of our four bedroom farmhouse shoehorned in, even though we had sorted out and moved with less ...so we started to declutter.  We car booted, we donated, we gave away and if all that failed we threw away.  The surfaces became clear and the bank account grew.  We worked hard, saved hard and started to dream.  We started to look for our own place ... 

and we found it.

I teased you all with a snippet of a photo while the final details were sorted out by solicitors and then it was ours on 13th September 2013.  Our forever home.  We commuted weekly and started the decorating and preparing the house, and moved in for good on 21 December...

... and on 31st Mavis joined us.

The year of 2014 was our 'Back to Basics' year and  saw us starting the long but rewarding task of setting up our smallholding, we are too small to be a farm, with around 5 acres so this is how we think of ourselves.  We (this is of course being the Royal we) dug out the hillside to mark out the bare bones of the Veggie Patch, and I learnt how different it was to grow on the poor soil of this Welsh hillside compared to the soft growing conditions of Southern England.

We also found out the difference in the temperatures and kept our log burner in action much more regularly to keep the house warm.

Then 2015 was with us and the year of 'Needs Not Wants'.  We kept our spending in the house to the minimum and gritted our teeth and invested in the infrastructure of our future.  The polytunnel was up and I could once again get down to the serious job of growing our own food ....

... while I tried to ignore what was going on nearer the house!!

A full year of building, mess, muck and chaos, I never want to live through that again.  Now of course I think that it as worth it, but at the time I hated every single minute.  But it means that we now have garage space, workshop space and most importantly a safer and more usable access and exit to the property.  

Beneath all this we put in water drains to make our land and the road beyond it safer.  We put in a water harvesting system to catch the deluge of rainwater that falls in this Welsh valley which will cut our future water bills.  Above the garage and workshop we put a huge bank of solar panels to capture the energy of the daylight and this means we are self sufficient in electricity and it will also earn us an income during the longer, lighter days of Summer.

And now we are here 2016 and 'A Year Without ...', a year that we are using as our practice year to see how self-sufficient we can be ready for next year when Lovely Hubby makes the final leap and gives up the day job.  It's been a long time in the planning and you our lovely band of regular and newer readers have been on the journey with us, some of you since the very beginning.  

Some of you have taken the massive step of reading back, seven full years of blog posts charting our successes, our failures, our experiments, our triumphs and our sad times and I guess for you they are fresher in your minds at the moment, than they currently are in mine.

Each time I look out of the window and see this glorious view I know we were right to make this little patch of Welsh hillside our own.  We drink in the view whether it be clear and filled with sunshine, or more recently with the cottages on the hillside opposite shrouded in cloud, mist or heavy rain but we drink it in, breathe in the fresh air as we walk our dogs round our own paddock and look down and across at all that we have accomplished on our land.  We know that a lot of the dreams that we dared to dream really have come true since we found our very own place to put down roots.

So I would like to take the opportunity on this anniversary post to thank everyone for reading this blog,  and to say I hope you will continue to join us on this Our New Life in the Country.  There are even more adventures ahead.

Sue xx 

My New Book - Deliciously Ella

I know this year is all about 'Needs not Wants', but I decided I did need a couple of new books, which felt strange for me because usually I buy books because I see or hear about them and decide I want them.  These I sought out.

The other couple of books I am reading at the moment  are on the Amazon linky thing on the sidebar, so you can nip over and find out more about them, and read other people reviews about them if you want to.    It's unusual for me to have four on the go at once, but I am dipping into each as and when I have time.

This book, Deliciously Ella, is by a fellow Blogger whose blog of the same name is HERE.

I'm not going to go into depth about the book but if you want to read why she started her blog, healthy lifestyle and then eventually wrote the book you can read a little bit more about her here in her own words.

Needless to say after the effects a lot of foods I have been eating very regularly have been having on me recently, I thought reading a book like this could only be beneficial.  I wish I was so single-minded that I could transform my diet and lifestyle the way she did, but I suppose when you were as ill as she was it's easier, or maybe I should say more important, to just snap to and just get on with it.

Tutu's Ethiopian Table

At the weekend I went down to stay in Lovely Hubby's southern digs for a few days away from the old farmstead.  He had booked a treat that was right up my street.  I've found vegetarian options hard to find and the ones I have found have been pretty bog standard in cafes and restaurants since moving to North Wales, so he had sought out and tried out with his mates a brilliant Ethiopian cafe/restaurant in central Reading.  Most of the dishes were vegan, with a small selection of meat sides if required (how refreshing to have meat on the side for once).

The food was delicious,  we chose to try the Veggy Lover Sharing Platter, which came with 4 Injeras  which are pancake-like thin breads to scoop up the curried and spiced vegetables with, and a bowl of rice to share.  Although I asked Lovely Hubby if he wanted some meat he stuck with the vegetarian option and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Not being used to the amount of lentils, chickpeas and vegetables both our tummies were making strange noises late into the evening and for most of the next day, but the food was absolutely delicious and it has inspired me to play around with lentils and other pulses much more.

It ties in nicely with my new book then, and my hopeful switch away from dairy.

Talking of which I had a vegetable curry last night, I completely cheated and decided to use some frozen vegetables and a jar of Tikka Masala curry sauce, one of my old favourites ....BIG MISTAKE.  I had milder symptoms of the other night when I woke this morning, so I read the label of another identical jar that is in the cupboard .... guess what .... 6% Double Cream ... DUH.  I should have read the label first!!

You live and learn.  Less of the jars and more cooking from scratch for me from now on.

*** *** *** *** ***

Finally .... can I just say a big THANK YOU for all the fabulous comments yesterday.  They are very appreciated.  It seems there are a lot of us and our families too that have changed or are changing their diets to more healthy ones, either through necessity or just a desire to do so.

It makes reading my new book even more important to me 

*** *** *** *** ***

Sue xx

Unveiling the 'Almost Finished' Conservatory

I thought I would show you the 'almost finished' conservatory, yes we still call it that ..... the name has just stuck and I think calling it 'The Garden Room' as it was titled on the planning permission plans, just looks and sounds a little bit more pretentious than we are.  

I'm a Manchester girl don't forget  ;-)

The almost finishing touches went in last week when the oak worktops were added to the windowsills, they make a bench area around the dining table (which is also oak under it's spotty tablecloth) and a matching sill on the other side of the room.

It has really finished the room off ......

... well almost!!

The off-cuts from the worktops, because obviously we didn't need the full depth that a kitchen work top (counter-top) has, have been sanded and finished to make us some shelves to go on this bare bit of wall.  We actually got three shelves that will sit here perfectly and two additional longer ones, that we will find a home for in the future, if we need them.

The shelves in the conservatory will not be filled with clutter, but will simply hold some of the more decorative jugs and bowls that currently live in my cupboards.  I don't like ornaments as such,  but some of our things that we don't actually use everyday, but that do get called into use on a regular basis are just too pretty and too full of lovely memories of days out to simply languish behind closed doors.

The only new things we have bought for our almost finished room were the four new cushions, just in case anyone finds the oak benches a little too hard to sit on, of course they had to be in our favourite shades of green!!

Hopefully if the weather is okay later in the week, the tarmac that will be the finishing touch to the outside of the conservatory will be laid.  One day of groundworks and new edging stones laid where currently there are wooden ones, and then a day of tarmacking should see us looking a lot neater outdoors, and then at last there will be less mud and chippings walked in on our wellies and the dogs and Gingers little mucky paws.

Talking of clutter and loving the simple look of the conservatory as much as we do, I've decided to join in with Elaine's, over at Mortgage Free in Three  'February Fling Challenge'.

The idea being that you declutter one thing on the first of the month, two things on the second, three on the third etc, etc.  That will be a total of 406 by the end of February.  To help you keep tabs on what you have got rid of she has produced this brilliant little chart that I have just printed out and will be keeping handy to keep me on track.

Why don't you nip over to her blog using the link above and get yourself a copy and see how well you can do.  As I only need to find another 84 items for my 'Decluttering 365' this would take me nicely over and mean that we have lots of lovely items to sell at the one and only car boot sale of the year that we hope to do when the weather improves.  

Obviously some of the things are going to be little bitty bits but everything that we don't really need is clutter in my eyes, so it all adds up and in this year of 'Needs not Wants' it's good to be inspired to have a purge.

Sue xx

The Sealed Pot Money

Since opening the Sealed Pot on the 10th December the money has been sat waiting to hear of it's fate.  We were going to spend it on Christmas treats, but with our gift of a lovely hamper. lots of foodie goodies off visiting family and a couple of bags of chopped kindling off my eldest son, which has been very appreciated ...... they've saved me a couple of chopping sessions in the rain this week ...
we've been thoroughly spoilt.

  We think it's lovely that our family know just what to get us,  but between all these gifts and the things I had been buying week by week ready for our couple of relaxing weeks off work we simply did not need to spend any more money on things for Christmas.

So all that lovely cash is available for spending elsewhere, and in time honoured tradition it has spawned a Challenge for the next few weeks.  I think it will be a mini Challenge this time as there is only £61.21 (I don't know where the one pound coin is in the top picture but we definitely had one!!).

This Challenge fits in nicely as well with our new 'needs not wants' way of life, as we are going to spend the money on food for as long as it lasts.  As is my usual (but not for much longer) way there is foodstuff galore in the fridge, freezers and cupboards so before we spend any money on food we will be eating up what we already have in store.

I will only be buying what we need, ie.  milk, bread or any fresh foods that we require.  I will also only be buying the foods on my Capsule Kitchen list as this is something I have decided to go ahead with.  Things not on the list will not be replaced once they are used up.

Using up the foods in the fridge has been no hardship, in fact the other morning we had some freshly baked croissants, made using one of these 'ready to go' packs.  How easy and yummy was that, it made for a very special new years breakfast :-)

There is still some Christmas foods left in the fridge, a couple of large wedges of Stilton for example and all of these will be cut into usable sized smaller wedges and frozen for future use.  Many, many times as I'm sure a lot of you will remember I have made an effort to eat our way through the cupboards and always after a few weeks or months of serious effort things go back to how they were before, when bargains are spotted or mass baking sessions happen.  

Not that there's any harm in that it's just that this time I intend to get right back to basics, evaluate what we have and what we need and only keep in store in future a core stock of the real base commodities that will supplement and enhance our own home grown fruit and vegetables.

Back with more about my Capsule Kitchen tomorrow.

Sue xx

My Musings ...... and this Years Subtitle

I said at the end of the last post that I would share my 'musings' with you.  Well I've been missing an extra day purely because apart from being very busy, I've been doing lots of thinking about the coming year.

Every year I give the Blog a subtitle, the previous ones are always on the sidebar but as a refresher this is what they are -

2009 - From Townies to Country Folk

2010 - Pigs and Chickens

2011 - Our Year of Living Simply

2012 - From Simple to Frugal ... and Beyond

2013 - The Year of Less

2014 - Back to Basics

I was racking my brain to think of this years subtitle, and if truth be known I'm still not entirely sure.  We are still at heart townies on our way to becoming country folk although we have learnt so much over the last few years.  We still have our chickens, although there won't be any pigs joining us for the next couple of years.  We are still living simply, not as simply as I would like but we are working on that and the journey is ongoing.  

We do live simply and in some ways frugally but not entirely so, enough however for us. We do own less, less than we have for a long time, but this is still a work in progress, on a daily basis in fact.  Although last year was subtitled 'Back to Basics' we didn't entirely get there due to the planning permission taking so long to enable us to get the polytunnel and net tunnel erected.  They will be completed in the next few weeks thank goodness and this year we will be growing and eating our own food at last.  But I won't be repeating a sub heading.

So what to aim for this year?

My mind has been all over the place, my first idea was a year of not spending,  but Lovely Hubby pointed out we will be having the garage and workshop built and things are bound to be needed, and not spending in the house but spending on other things would make things 'bitty' and complicated.

I had other ideas, lots of them but one by one they were disregarded as too extreme, to time consuming or just two wacky.  What I have decided on after much deliberation is something that has been rolling around in my head for a long time, in fact since I put this on my sidebar!!

I don't need lots of things anymore, I don't need excess of anything.  I know what's important in my life and that is the people and the animals, and then much further down the list .... the things that I do truly need, the food, the clothes, the day to day household things etc.

So this year is going to be all about 'needs not wants'.

The picture at the top of the post and shown again here, taken from Google Images, sums it up simply and beautifully.  If you buy what you do not need you are stealing from yourself.  

If you go out and buy that lovely handbag whether it be with cash or on a credit card because you want it and not because you need it as you have no other, you are stealing money from yourself that could most likely be better used elsewhere.  Maybe an emergency will crop up and the money would have helped, or maybe you are plunging yourself just that little bit deeper into debt .... or in our case if we buy something that we truly do not need we are delaying by the hour, day, week or month the day our mortgage will be paid off and we will own our home and little slice of Welsh hillside lock, stock and barrel.

So for this year the subtitle of the Blog will be 'Needs not Wants' a reminder to me when I come on here to post each day that if I need it I can have it, but if I want it I have to think about it just a little bit more.

And in the time honoured tradition of me, this Blog and the new year I have already started a little Challenge linked to the Sealed Pot.  I've rambled on quite enough for today so I'll be back in the morning with my plan .... although I'm sure a lot of you will guess .... and it links quite nicely with the whole 'needs not wants' ethos.

Sue xx