Patience is required. Although I wish that spring were here, it stubbornly refuses to be anything other than winter. For every beautiful, frosty morning, there is a day like today, when the clouds hang low and dew forms in my beard when I step outside. I can confirm that it does, indeed, drizzle in France….
Builders and Beehives
Winter is all about preparing for spring. We tidy and dig and prune trees and wait and wait. We choose and buy seeds, and I’m already planning what to cook, preserve, and ferment with the produce we’ll grow. Next year we’ll save our own seed, but this year we buy what we need from the…
Concerning Chickens (and a Recipe).
The mornings are cold. Frost clings in sharp little lances to everything, the sky is a pale blue blanket, and we all shiver underneath. My morning routine is a chilly one; let chickens out, defrost chickens, feed chickens, stare at the sunrise until my eyes freeze over, drink tea. I worry that the chickens are…
What We Learned From the Flood.
When I was a child, we had an orchard. I remember the day we moved in to that house like it was yesterday. Me and my sister paced the length and breadth of the field, wading through grass as tall as we were. We’d never seen so much space. I remember dragging an old plastic…
Mushrooms.
We awake early to a foggy morning, wrap up warm (it’s cold now, summer didn’t last forever after all), and let the chickens out. They, as is their wont, stare at us, gurgle weirdly, and then proceed to continue digging to China. They seem to have settled in nicely. The last few days we have…
The Chicken and the Egg.
The chicken run is finished. Finally. It became something of a personal Hadrian’s Wall. (Hen-drian’s Wall? Anyone? No?) This is the first fence I’ve ever built, and it’s a surprisingly satisfying thing to do. We found a chap in a village about two miles away who makes and sells acacia fenceposts. He has a massive…
The Quantum Reality of Hazelnuts
Two weeks in, and our new life has settled into a kind of routine. We have both returned to work (a necessary evil until we go completely off-grid/the zombie apocalypse happens/Trump gets in to the White House and presses ‘launch’ instead of ‘snooze’), but we are able to do this from home. A run in…
Endings and Beginnings. And Bourbon.
We did it. We’re here. Les Augères, in deep rural Burgundy. Now what? Well, we’re certainly not going to be bored. We bought the farmhouse about a year ago, having been planning to move to France for a good few years now, furiously working and saving and saving and working. We moved from Bristol, UK,…
