Barn renovation update
work in progress (tea break not withstanding)This week I ’ave been mainly freezing my n**s offrenovating our barn. It’s a slow process because there’s only me working on this building site but then...
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Feline museThis week I ’ave been mainly writing magazine articles. I’ve a couple of articles appearing in a French gardening magazine in May and that involves some correction of my hesitant attempts...
View ArticleYou Can Spoon
This week I ’ave been mainly carving wooden spoons. With 11 acres of woodlands green woodworking has long been on my list of things to learn about but, like so many things in our busy smallholding...
View ArticleA leap year was never a good sheep year
newborn Ouessant lambSae much fur auld wisdom. Luckily fur us an' uir woolly flock, thes auld Scottish sayin' is clearly a load ay balloney. Had they instead said, “th' heed gaskit is gonnae blaw oan...
View ArticleWhen a man is tired of blogging, he is tired of life …
squeaky-clean new kitchenSamuel Johnsonas that prodigious wordsmith Dr Johnson might have said if he hadn’t died over 200 years before the advent of the blog. Anyhow, this is just an unnecessarily...
View ArticleGabrielle has taken up smoking again …
Gabrielle, she's smokin' ...… but happily, we need not concern ourselves with her health as she’s not inhaling the little puffs, directing them instead at bees. As I’ve written many times, we have a...
View ArticleWildlife
Inspired by Tim’s educational Aigronne Valley Wildlife blog, here’s a slice of the wildlife that we share our bit of Brittany with. First up, a recording made back in March this year of male and...
View ArticleOld Queens and virgin queens ...
Our venerable Britannic majesty has just celebrated 60 years on the throne. Royalty is a subject I’d best avoid when visiting our neighbours, recently retired farmers Paul and Christiane. Christiane...
View ArticleThings that go ‘screech’ in the night
Zied swung by our permaculture smallholding the other day to ask us if we could help him identify a type of owl that was living in one of the old outbuildings at his dog kennels. There was a big pile...
View ArticleFaces
Back in 2008, our talented, artistic friend, Alastair, painted us a man sharpening his scythe of one side of our house. We live in an agricultural barn, converted into a dwelling by the previous...
View ArticleShearing Sheep
Weather to shear. The whether-or-not depended on the weather and as we’d ‘enjoyed’ le temps pourri (rotten weather) since some super days back in March, I thought the sheep would be glad to hold onto...
View ArticleStinking canine phallic fungi
A kindly coincidence brought tree surgeon, Duncan Smith, back to our village. A near neighbour had asked him to tame a leggy leylandii hedge and he had a ‘problem’. As a commercial enterprise, the...
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