The Cottage Smallholder

Happy Halloween everyone! I was delighted when Sara from Farming Friends sent me this award and I am passing it onto five other bloggers to celebrate the day. Moonroot at http://moonroot.blogspot.com/ Primrosie at http://primsplace.blogspot.com/ KJ at http://crackinggoodegg.blogspot.com/ Leanne at http://somersetseasons.blogspot.com/ Pat at http://patsfoodblog.blogspot.com/ Meanwhile I will be rushing to John’s shop to stock up on Read More »

At the end of the church fete my aunt would nip over to the toy stall and buy a selection of knitted dolls for her Pekingese dogs. She never admitted the prospective future of these dolls to the old ladies who had knitted them and twinkled and bobbed, delighted to have made a sale. Generally Read More »

José Antonio ventured onto the site a couple of weeks go. He had been picking sloes in Spain, was planning to make Pacharan and wanted to find the English name of the fruit. Sloes. Having read our post The Great Sloe Gin Challenge – Three variations of our sloe gin recipe he decided to make Read More »

The kitchen is sweet with the smell of lemon scented geraniums. I finally hoicked out our two giant 3.5 feet plants and put them in the greenhouse. We are hoping that they will survive the winter and delight us again next summer. We are planning to plant them in the half barrels either side of Read More »

I enviously read the comments on our sloe gin articles from people who have exultantly harvested kilo upon kilo of fruit. I’ve been out on several mini forays where many large families have obviously harvested there before me and the remaining pickings were thin. Today, I was in our local shop, chatting to John about Read More »

We have just spent a nervous 25 minutes searching the garden for Inca. She is 21 months old and still “our puppy”. We realised that we hadn’t seen her for a while. Danny was cutting up our leftovers to divide amongst the dogs. There was a large gap in the attentive canine audience. Inca, the Read More »

A few years ago I was in Fred Fitzpatrick’s butcher’s shop and spotted a tray of oxtail. My mum was coming for the weekend and somewhere in the vague backwaters of my mind I connected her with oxtail. So I bought the oxtail and rushed home to ring her and announce that we were cooking Read More »

Despite being given the ultimate mushroom identification bible Mushrooms by Roger Phillips I still feel a little uncertain about gathering the mushrooms that I find in the garden and around the village. This is not to decry the book in anyway but a lot of mushrooms seem to look really similar to me. Our friends Read More »

When I went down to Mike’s house in Saffron Walden ten days ago, the garden was full of small groups of cyclamen. I don’t know whether they had just been planted or were an early flowering variety. His house is just off Castle Street in a small enclave of four Victorian houses. Set in a Read More »

For the past few weeks I have been having interesting email conversations with Rozanne Hall from America. Rozanne was a war baby born in the UK. Her father was a Canadian Army engineer serving in England and the continent who met her mother in Surrey, who was from Cork, Ireland. Rozanne grew up in Halifax, Read More »