Not Renting Land Anymore And Where Are The Sheep...

Something I've been putting off writing is how last year, towards the end of the summer, I sold the sheep.

Removing gates and other bits from the rented field

I've been feeling guilty about not blogging about it but also I've not been sure what to write.

Vlog Episode 4 - Homestead Tour

It's been a while since I did a video and with so much going on at the moment I thought it might be good to walk you all around some of the homestead. 

This video is just filmed as it is, very little editing except where I ran out of memory as I was looking at my beetroots! 

Let me know what you think and what you'd like to see in the next one and I'll try to include it. 

Or let me know if you'd like a video on anything in particular.

Vlog Episode 2 - Extension Progress

My second Vlog is on YouTube now!

In this episode I walk you round the extension and show you what's been going on with the lambs and the chickens, as well as a quick look in the garden.

Let me know what you think! 

Vlog - Episode 1 - Garden Tour

Right so I thought I'd do another video and start doing a bit of a vlog (video log) as well as the blog. 

Let me know what you think and what you'd like to see in the next episode.

Do you like the intro?

A Quick Tour Of The Garden

Another shaky video tour around my garden on the 1st of May.

Not huge amounts going on but things will really speed up this month as the weather warms up. I've also got loads growing on the windowsills inside but they're almost worthy of another post by themselves!

How's your garden looking at the moment?

Homestead Outlaws?

I watched a video this morning from one of my favourite YouTube Channels American Homestead (Just so you know I had the name of my place years before).

The video is on "Homestead Outlaws" in America and the things that you can do that can class yourself as an outlaw all in the name of self sufficiency, a good video to watch if you've got the time. 

The rules over here in the UK are quite different but there are still many things we can do, either knowingly or not, to be classed as outside the law. In fact after watching this video I'd say that we have many minor rules that make less sense over here and are pretty easy to break.

Some of the rules that are things like feeding your chickens or pigs kitchen scraps and animal paperwork rules, home meat slaughter and butchery, to name just a few.

Oh course we've never broken a single rule over here (*cough *cough), but what rule annoys you the most where you live? Do you think there is too much regulation in these modern times?

Marks On The Drive

The other night I had a shock as I was getting firewood from the wood shed. Someone had put a white cross on the drive. Now we're some way from the road but we are on a public footpath.

 The worst things crossed my mind first. I instantly thought of the supposed marks that thieves leave to mark somewhere with something worth taking, marking a driveway or a gate and then coming back later. 

I went down onto the road and found this mark at the bottom of our drive. I wasn't happy. I scrubbed the marks off, leaving no trace whatsoever along with other marks leading away.

I have since found out that these marks were left by a group of ramblers that like to follow a trail to a certain goal. 

I'm sure they'd say they had the right to mark my drive because it's a public right of way but I disagree. They can walk on it but not mark it in my opinion and I hope I don't catch anyone in the act, it could have really upset and older person who was more paranoid than me (and I can be pretty paranoid) and I think it's irresponsible not to ask a landowners permission first and explain what it is. 

Hopefully they were rambling for quite some time that night. A little evil streak in me wanted to lay a trail going somewhere else completely, to the middle of a pond or something! 

What To Watch Over Christmas?

With a forced slow down ahead of me (baby due 8th of January) I'm wondering what I'll watch. I've been doing a lot of late night lately (11 O'clock last night on a job in Malvern - I must be mad) and I do plan on taking some actual time off between Christmas and New Year (finishing the porch is time off right?) and when the baby comes. 

I don't watch huge amounts of TV but as I've posted before when I do I tend to lean more towards YouTube than what's on the actual TV, so I thought I'd share what I've watched over the last few months whilst I've been cooking tea in the evenings and then maybe you guys could give me some good ideas what to add to my playlist afterwards.

Jas Townsend And Son Inc - This channel is about 18th century cooking and I find it really interesting as they use many cooking methods and recipes. I particularly like how they cook with wood fired ovens and the different cooking vessels they use.

Colin Furze - This guy was paid by Sky to do what he'd do if there was an upcoming apocalypse. He built a bunker in his back garden. The videos are quite good fun, with rock music playing, good editing and he doesn't do things by half! They will make you smile!

American Homestead - I'll forgive them for sounding like my blog name because their videos are so good. Based in the Ozarks these guys are proper off grid homesteaders. They do them as episodes over the summer months and each one is really interesting and you can pick up many tips from them by watching. Their aquaphonic system is a really impressive set up. all the videos have a good level of humour in them as well, I'm surprised they haven't been picked up by a TV company yet as I've been watching them for two years.

The Market Gardener - I know I've mentioned these videos and his book on here before but I think they're so good I'll mention them again. this guy does organic gardening with a scientific approach. I hope this is the future of how our veg are grown but I doubt it will be.

Ray Mears - I don't need to say much more other than that really, this guy is a legend and I particularly like his series on how the wild west was won, seeing it from the view of all sides and hwo hard it was for them to survive.

Chicken Moat -This video has given me an idea that I might be doing next year if I ever find the time. It could be the solution to the messy edges around my veg garden!

Rich Hall - This is an American comic who does well over here. A few years ago he did a series of documentary on the way we Brits see America. The one about native Americans is particularly good and done in a style that I find really entertaining, serious with a very dry humour.

So what does everyone have to recommend to me? I had some great recommendations last time I asked about this so I look forward to hearing what you say.

Homesteading TV?

Since Christmas I've avoided watching Frozen as much as possible, and watched some YouTube videos instead. 

One series I watched was Frontier House. I know that to the Americans reading this that this series is pretty dated (filmed in 2001 I think) but I hadn't seen it before and really enjoyed it. The families involved are pretty whiny, and they do grate on me a bit, but over all the series was really interesting and I learnt a fair bit from it. It's hard to believe how far America has come in that short time I think! 

One of my all time favourite TV series was the Victorian Kitchen Garden. 12 episodes split into each month show how a walled kitchen garden was grown and managed in the late Victorian time by an old head gardener Harry Dobson. I also have the book that accompanies the series and it's one of my favourite gardening books with so much to learn from it even though it all went out when I was still in primary school. 

I've searched on YouTube to see if I could find a link but it's not uploaded on there. There is, however, a later series set in WWII showing how they coped with the war in the large gardens and kitchens of manor houses, I've not watched these yet but if passed performance is anything to go by they'll be great! 

So my question to you all is what other series/programmes do you recommend I watch. Obviously most of you will know my interests and although I try to avoid watching too much TV it is nice to watch something interesting when I do!

My 2014

Sorry not many post over the last week or so - We've been busy with family and I've even managed to get some work in.

It's the last day of the year so I guess it's traditional to look back at the last year and see what we've achieved.

Children and family
The first major positive for this year was me taking over the full time childcare. I wasn't sure what to expect or even if I'd cope with it.

Making bread

 It's been amazing and I've loved the opportunity to spend more time with my children than I ever thought I would. We've done loads of things together, from days out, lot of baking (which has become a new hobby of mine), loads of time in the garden and visiting playgroups. Playgroups were tricky at the start as I was just the token dad in a room full of mums, but I've made some amazing friends with like minded people.
the children seem to have enjoyed the time with me as well (or at least I hope they have!) and this summer they were both sun kissed youngsters from spending so much time with me!

Lots of time spent messing around

We've also managed to spend time together as a family which is really important to us, having a great holiday in the summer and still managing to find time to do other things together like swimming and going to friends houses.

Work
I've done the least amount of paid work since leaving school this year but luckily interesting and varied work has come my way to fill up my weekends and school holidays. Only working part time can be tricky for customers to understand but luckily I've got a few good ones that keep putting work my way and are willing to work around the limited time that I can give them.

I've already got a lot of work booked in for the new year to keep me out of trouble and to bring extra money in. It seems that work comes my way a bit easier now so hopefully it will keep coming in.

Homemaking
This has been my best year ever for learning and using homesteading skills. I've had to get to grips with doing the housework and trying to keep on top of washing clothes and cooking dinner every night (and not messing around and ruining it). I've preserved lots of food, experimented with new ingredients and cut right back on the amount of meat we eat, increasing the number of vegetarian meals to make the most of the veg that we grow. I've also got into the habit of baking with the children a couple of times a week and that's something we all enjoy (plus I love cake).

Garden

This has been my best gardening year as well. Not only have we had a great summer but I've also been in it a lot more than usual to take advantage of all that good weather. 

We've grown the majority of our own veg and I've started to experiment with new and usual fruit and veg. I managed to get the new greenhouse up just at the right time so we had a bumper crop of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, cucamelons and chillies, I also managed to divide the garden up making planning, rotating and managing the veg garden much easier and making it look much smarter. We control was pretty good as well, next year I need to gain better control of the weeds around the fruit bushes and increase my growing area for unusal crops.

Animals
Well we didn't increase much on this front. I didn't manage to finish the fencing early enough so we've just stuck with chickens this year but I've been told by one little girls that she wants piggies next year so I'll have to try hard on that one! The chickens have been great though and except for a fox attack we managed to keep the numbers fairly constant, although eggs haven't been produced much this autumn. We hatched out five chicks in the summer which is a great thing for the girls to be a part of and keeps steadily replacing our stock.

Fields and trees
I managed to plant a lot of trees this last year, with a new 42m hedge being planted on one of the first days of the year. I also started a willow coppice (although growth hasn't been great) and grafted over a hundred apple, pear and stone fruit trees to either be planted here or sold to help cover the costs of my hobby.
I've managed to get all the fencing up (although I've still got quite few gates to hang) and we made some nice hay in the summer, as well as keeping the grass in good condition. Hopefully we'll get some stock next year to help with this.

Major projects
Well in short the one we need the most didn't happen - the extension! By doing private work this year instead means that we should be able to better fund it but it hasn't pushed the project on. I'm hoping that we'll start in the spring once the ground dries up a bit, getting the porch built and then starting the main extension, plus we've got many drainage issues to deal with as well!
I did do a few minor project to the house that I'm really happy with, I finished the living room by putting up shelves and a mantle piece and I did a few projects to increase our amount of storage in the house.

Summary
It's been a brilliant year and I've really enjoyed having this blog to document it, the good and the bad, and all your (the readers) input as well, plus I've loved reading everyone else's blogs. The comments never disappoint me, when I have a question or want advice I get just what I was looking for and normally a new avenue to explore, plus reading other blogs gives me new ideas and things to try and it's nice to know that all over the world there are people out there who are just as bonkers as me!

Thank you all for reading and I hope you continue to do so in the new year! 

Happy New Year!

Shipping Container

When we moved here I gave up the lovely workshop that I'd built at our last place. So to house all my "big" carpentry tools and the other things we'd need for a smallholding, we brought a shipping container until we could build something better.

Painted green and the with the ceiling insulated inside, its the perfect secure store.

I then went for planning permission to build a barn, this would have provided me with space for storage of things like hay and straw (and a tractor) as well as giving me somewhere dry to work. I got turned down - my own fault I think as it was probably too big for the area, although i had no complaints from the neighbours the council had the final say.

But now with my homemaker duties coming up in a few months, I could really do with a small workshop to make things in the evenings to sell (when the kids are in bed). So as a temporary measure I'm considering getting another container - this time an office type one so it will be ready insulated and have windows to provide some natural lighting. I like the place looking nice but sometimes you have to be practical as to what best suits your situation. unless anyone has got any other ideas on what I could do for a temporary workshop in the mean time?

Thoughts On Sheep

I wrote this a few years ago and just found it kind of fitting for a January night I think:

 

I never, ever, thought I’d say this.
But for the last few years around this time I always seem a little restless in the evenings, kicking my heels and not knowing what is wrong with me. Last year I worked it out and it turns out that I miss the one job that I used to moan most about!
We had, at one point, about 300 sheep on the farm. For as long as I can remember I’ve always helped with the sheep but lambing was the bit that took the most time and caused the most stress. Everyday was the start of a massive list of chores that had to be completed only to be redone the next day. When I was at school we used to feed twice a day and I used to help both times, sometimes getting changed out of my overalls in the school car park. Luckily in a rural community smelling of sheep isn’t the worst thing you can smell of!

When I started working we switched to feeding at night only, just chucking the sheep some hay in the morning to give them something to chew. I used to get home on a cold winter night after spending far too long on a cold (and probably wet) building site, warm myself up for half and hour then go and feed the sheep with Dad. This would take upwards of an hour but sometimes a lot more if we had a ewe on lambing, a lamb that wouldn’t suck or a ewe that wouldn’t “take”.
When I was doing this I didn’t realise how much Dad was doing it for me as much as the farm, because when I left home and moved 50 miles away he gradually got rid of all the sheep over a couple of years.
Now two years later I still think this is a little sad, with no sheep of our own left but he seems so much happier for it and mum no longer has to suffer the January and February depression that used to accompany lambing.
He’s much happier sticking to growing crops and selling machinery, now his business is expanding fast with two full time employees and my brother part time, he’s much happier talking to people than sheep. And less likely to find one of them has drowned in a water bucket over night (hope I’m not tempting fate here!).
Me on the other hand, I forever long to live in the past, where keeping sheep would earn you a decent living and to start your own farm you didn’t have to be a retired judge with ambitions of having a pony!
I really do love the upbringing I had, bottle feeding pet lambs, watching lambs race round the pen, the quiet that falls in the barn after the sheep have been fed. I hope that when I have children I can give them some of the same type of memories that I have and hopefully they can learn the work and effort that’s needed to raise animals for meat and learn to enjoy the process.

Well two more years have passed since I wrote that, and now I'm much closer to giving my child that upbringing with our own little homestead. Hard work and good luck have seen to that, but I'm sure there's plenty more of both to come!

New Blog

I've decided that with the purchase of our smallholding to start a new blog.
My blog "Keeping My Roots" was about the journey of moving away from the farm but making sure I was still connected with that way of life. Now we have our own little bit of the countryside I thought it would be good to start again so people can follow our new journey.


The view of our back garden - this is all going to change!

In England we call a property with a few acres a smallholding, but I think this word has lost its original value. It used to describe a way of life where the land helped to support your family and provide, if not income then food. Now its more the middle classes having somewhere to keep a few horses. This is why I decided to use the American word homestead, as I think this still has the meaning of describing a place where your land supports your family.
The "homestead" in question is a 5 acre patch split into three fields with a semidetached 3 bed house sitting at the top of it. I'm under no illusions of all the books written in the 70's about self sufficiency- I will not be earning my living from this piece of land. We've had to have a killer mortgage to be able to live this way, but I will be using it to lessen our bills and improve our way of living, hopefully with the help of family and friends along the way.