Anyone for tennis?
The only sport that I’m actively engaged in is killing flies. I have a good collection of swats. The blue one works the best. Not being a athletic type, I’m delighted that I’ve found a sport at which I shine. I did win the Junior Doubles Tennis Championship at school. But that was only because Petronella Lovegrove played heroically for two, whilst I skulked by the net. Now my weedy backhand and embarrassing dolly drop serve have been supplanted by a well honed whoosh and the happy click of fly on plastic. The fly killing...
read moreI found a smoked ham hock nestling in our freezer
Yesterday, I decided to go treasure hunting in the freezer. Usually I find loads of stuff with freezer burn. Today I spotted a smoked ham hock. Not just any old ham hock. This discovery shifted Danny from the swing seat. He had to check that I wasn’t teasing. The dogs were alarmed. I don’t think they’d ever seen him run before. We enjoy Mark Hix’s Saturday column in The Independent. He comes across as a thoroughly good bloke and his recipes work well. He also occasionally recommends suppliers and last year pointed us to...
read moreDon’t forget the herbs
Most smallholders and self sufficiency enthusiasts are harvesting madly now. Our kitchen is full of apples, damsons, greengages and plums. The large sweet blackberries that cover the end of the chicken run must be picked. I love the fructulence of this season, the boughs of the apple trees weighed down to the ground with fruit. But sometimes the sheer volume of produce can be overwhelming.It’s so easy to overlook the herbs. We leave the hardy evergreen herbs alone, such as rosemary and bay leaves. Rather than face a winter of having to...
read moreSheds
A couple of years ago Danny bought a very fancy shed from Freddie, who was selling up to go and live in Cromer, on the Norfolk coast. Freddie had bought the 10′ x 8′ shed as a spacious apartment for his wife’s rabbits. And as the Cromer site wouldn’t accommodate large sheds, the rabbits and shed had to go. Freddie had found a good home for the rabbits and Danny assured him that we would provide a great home for the shed. Danny told me that this shed would finally solve his storage problems. As an addict of the eBay...
read moreRats
The rats are back.As soon as the corn is cut the rats return. It’s war. We’ve tried everything to keep them away. One year we supplemented poison with rat traps (a giant version of a mouse trap) but they were very difficult to set. Then we hosted a rat shoot. Great fun but not effective. Another year we just hoped that they’d get fed up with living here and did nothing. We spent Christmas with rats that threw wild parties in the kitchen ceiling. Now I’ve found a poison that works quite quickly. We keep a large drum of...
read moreWe replaced the city commute with the good life
I found the cottage fourteen years ago. It stood quite a way back from the road, with dormer windows and a low terracotta pantiled roof. The plot was a third of an acre with most of the land lying behind the cottage. Everybody said that I’d be mad to buy it. The ceilings were too low, less than six feet in places.Tall friends stood hunched silently at the back door gazing at the long garden. Shaking their heads, they would explain that maintaining a garden of this size would kill me. Back then, it was nothing more than a field with a...
read moreNewts
The newt pond lies in an overgrown corner of the garden. It wasn’t planned as a newt sanctuary. Initially the pond was installed for treating sick fish. At six feet across, the pond holds roughly 100 litres of water. The big pond holds about 8000 litres. I reckoned that it would be much cheaper to treat ailing fish in a small space until the fish experts at Byways Water Gardens pointed out that a sick fish can be treated in a large washing up bowl. So I put a couple of goldfish in the pond to keep the mosquitoes under control. When the...
read moreSweet peas and wood pigeon, the most evocative scent and sound of summer
There is nothing to compare with picking the first posy of sweet peas. The heady scent from something so delicate. The fragile flowers, at best with buds. We have a special vase for them. I think it might have been home to a scented candle once but it is now perfect for these flowers that fade so fast. When the vase is off duty it sits on the windowsill with the other special things: the Buddha, the basil, my frogs. When I first came to live here a friend from London used to stay regularly at weekends. Her grandfather had been Head Gardener at...
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