Merry Christmas

I wish everyone a well preserved, pickled, spicy, fruitful and spirited festive season.

Ours certainly will be!

Floods

Well, not quite. But it did pour down - like rain in Africa! - most of last night, and this morning the river Torridge was flooded, up and nearly over the road at the little bridge at the bottom of the hill.

Memories of two years ago. We moved here in late November 2012, when there had already been a huge amount of rain in the area. Exhausted from the move we spent an unbelievably dark, moonless night (with no ambient light it was so dark we couldn’t find the light switch in our new bedroom!) and were wakened early the next morning by an urgent call from the landlord to say the river had flooded the bottom pasture.

Sheep were swimming! Being swept downstream! All hands were needed.

We hurried out, flapping around uselessly, with no proper clothing and no proper footwear. We hadn’t a pair of wellies between us! Fortunately, the landlord and the farmer who leases the pasture had already rescued all the sheep. They don’t just have wellies, of course, they all have waders. Later on we all gathered over a hot cup of tea and congratulated ourselves that none of the flock had been lost, everyone kindly pretending that we’d been of some use.

The flood waters in this picture from 2012 cover the entire bottom pasture where the sheep were floundering about trying to swim. It hasn’t come that high this season - yet. The actual course of the river is beyond that second line of trees.

* An update on the creature.... I’m sorry to announce that the war has finally been lost.

Despite my best efforts, Febreze, slates, bricks and all, two new holes were burrowed into the bin. Conceding defeat on that skirmish, I closed the visible, front one, and left the back one open and thought - let her get on with it, as long as she doesn’t make a nuisance of herself. But no, it’s never enough, she had to re-dig the front burrow, and the landlord spotted it this morning. Hardly surprising, with straggly bits of cauliflower, clementine and banana skins, potato peelings and pumpkin seeds scattered in an untidy mess in front of the bin.

Well, of course, it is not a mouse, or a vole or any other sweet little creature. It is a RAT. Or, worse still, RATS. Hands on hips, head wagging from side to side, he told me this with the grim satisfaction of one who has finally been proven right. They’re after the food waste, he says. I told you so, he says. Well, considering how much food was left lying around I don’t think they (the RATS) were interested in eating them. I’m still convinced she (the mouse) simply wants a snug nest. But there’s no point in arguing. I humbly agree not to put any more food waste in the compost.

A little help from my friends

We are great believers in the simple life and making as much as we can ourselves, but we’re not averse to getting all the help we can. Apart from the bog standard conveniences most of us have there are a few other contraptions that have made quite a difference in our lives. I'm not much into gadgets, but I do like machines.

In the kitchen...

The bread machine - Is there anything more divine than a loaf of freshly baked bread? Perhaps, but not much in my book. We bought the bread machine for £15 in the British Heart Foundation charity shop and we’ve had many dozens of loaves. This one, made today, has black olives and rosemary and I can tell you now, it is utterly scrumptious - with lashings of butter. 

The coffee machine - this also came from the British Heart Foundation and cost £25. It was missing the cappuccino jug so I bought that separately on line for £10. Mike is mad for freshly made coffee, which he drinks every day, always strong and black, and endlessly experiments with different types of coffee. I’m more of a tea drinker but do help myself to the occasional diluted cup with lots of milk.

The slow cooker - donated by my brother, who doesn’t like to cook - by any method. I love this machine. It gets a huge amount of use for curries, bolognaise meat sauce and pot roasts. I always make a large quantity and then freeze the extra portions.

The yoghurt machine - bought from Lakeland for £19 and it has been worth every penny. Using a spoonful of the previous batch, a little powdered milk and a litre of UHT (preferably full fat) milk I set the machine to run overnight (on the cheaper band of electricity) and there’s a litre of fresh yoghurt ready in the morning. We both love yoghurt and eat lots of it, especially with fruit and/or honey or home-made syrups - hedge picked blackberries, preserved ginger, that left-over citrus syrup.... Delicious.

The juicer - not the bargain of the century, I bought this on line for £24 including postage. (And then I saw one at the auction on Tuesday that went for £3!) I wouldn’t recommend this brand, not that I can compare with any others, but we have found it very messy and labour intensive. The instructions say you can put a whole apple into the feed, but this is not true as it literally grinds the skin, pips and all into the juice which adversely affects the colour and taste. However, after peeling, coring and chopping the apples, it does make a very fine tasting juice. One can obviously make juice with other fruits so I am waiting for another glut.

And elsewhere...

The wireless headphones - this is just about the best thing we ever bought. Good German brand name and reasonably inexpensive at £56 on ebay including postage, but we then had to buy the special batteries for £20 and a sound jack to connect to the television for another £10 - so £86 and totally worth it. The charger system plugs into the tv and the headphones work remotely. The headset is comfortable and the sound quality is excellent, not just increasing the volume of sound but somehow improving the voice track only. Mike is a little deaf (tinnitus) and likes the television louder than I do. He also likes watching television more than I do. So, when he wants to watch sport (Mike will watch any sport) or one of his interminable war films, westerns or action movies - the more ancient the better - he wears his ‘ears’ as we call them and I can get on with other things. They are especially useful when I am on the phone or have a friend around for a chat without having to leave the cosy fireside. These earphones haven’t quite saved our marriage, but you get the idea.

The GPS sports watch - £74 including postage from Amazon. My nephew came visiting wearing one of these clever contraptions and Mike was so impressed he had to buy one himself. It’s really designed for running, but works equally well for cycling. It tracks your pace, monitors laps, tells you where you are, blah blah, and it’s also a watch, of course. Mike loves it so that’s all that’s important.

* Update on the creature in the compost. The Febreze and/or the well-dug-in slate barricade seem to have worked. No sign of the little darling and it's two days now.

An accidental glut of lemons

We have our own lemon tree, bought about 18 months ago from Aldi, and it has done remarkably well in a climate that doesn't really suit. In the winter months we bring the shrub into the conservatory. On the day I bought it, it was bearing one large ripe lemon, and since then it has flowered almost constantly and produced lots of baby lemons. Unfortunately, most of these fell off almost immediately (I think we were over watering and under feeding the tree at that time) but a few did survive. Finally, we have a second lemon that is almost ready to pick, and quite a few half grown lemons from this year’s crop. They take 8 to 10 months to ripen so we are hoping they will be ready next year. But this hardly constitutes a glut!

However, the recipe for the apple wine called for lemons and since I was multiplying out the recipe five times to get my 25 litres, I accidently multiplied the lemon quantity - my brain is not what it used to be, I’m afraid. I needed five lemons and bought 30! We made the apple wine on Monday and in the final stages I was cutting the lemons and Mike was squeezing them when it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake, fortunately before adding the lemon juice to the wine!

Thus, the accidental glut of lemons.

Having taken what we needed of the squeezed juice for the wine I used the rest to make some lemonade concentrate which sits in the fridge. Very nice, specially diluted with soda water. I love citrus peel and hated the thought of throwing away all those skins, so I trawled the internet for a preserve recipe and found one that soaks the peel (stripped off with as little pith as possible) in salt water for three days, wash, then boil in syrup for 10 minutes every day for three days, then drain, roll in extra sugar, dry and store in bottles. Yumm. Mine is still in the boil in syrup every day stage. The syrup has a lovely slightly salty flavour.

There are still ten lemons left, so now, of course, the Limoncello. 

(At this point you are probably thinking we are a bit too keen on our booze, but not really, it’s just that I like a little something different every now and again and I have friends and family members who like me to share these experiments. Mike sticks to wine and beer.)

I’ve had a recipe for Limoncello for years but never got around to making it. Now I have no excuse. I have bought the vodka and had hoped to find a zester. It is imperative here that no pith is used - only zest. I had no luck with finding a zester so I’ve done it with a sharp knife - very labour intensive. I hope it will be worth it.

And still in the citrus mood, I found an interesting looking recipe for preserved clementines in Mike’s favourite newspaper on Saturday. Clementines are available and reasonably cheap at the moment so why not? I made them last night. They look so glamorous in their bottles with the spices, I thought this would make a nice gift for someone special. There was some syrup left over which is lovely drizzled on ice cream.

* Update on the creature in the compost. It is all out war with Mrs Mouse I’m afraid. I’ve thrown all the carefully removed compost back in again and the bin is now thoroughly barricaded with scraps of slate and bricks and then sprayed with Febreze. Holding thumbs. 

Peggy's Moonshine

We’ve had such fun making moonshine! On our first visit down to Devon in October two years ago to view this property and meet the landlords, we stopped on the way back and spent the night with Mike’s cousins who live about an hour away. To our delight, they had apple wine bubbling in glass demijohns all over their house. With dinner we had some wine from the previous year’s harvest. It was very good and not too alcoholic as we all happily drank plenty of it that evening and no one had a hangover next morning!

Imagine our joy when we moved here the following month to see those apple trees in the kitchen garden - still laden with fruit. We did nothing that year as we had no sooner settled into our new home than we went away for five weeks to Turkey. But the following autumn (2013 produced a bumper apple crop) we collected over one hundred pounds of fruit and made 60 litres of apple wine following a rather casual recipe given to us. It was a long winded and tiring business, divided into two batches. I later read a book on wine making and discovered that in the first batch we did almost everything wrong! We rigged up our own primitive fruit press that was more trouble than it was worth, the wine got oxidized, we added far too much sugar so it continued to ferment for ages - in fact I think the last few bottles are still fermenting!

For the second batch I tried to follow a better recipe with less sugar and no bother of pressing the fruit. It ended up clearer, drier and less fizzy. Mike preferred the first batch and I preferred the second. Both were perfectly pleasant, but neither was very alcoholic. When I spoke to a friend who used to run a brewing company, he told me that the ordinary brewer’s yeast that I had used would never produce alcohol! Well, we got a happy little buzz from the wine, but perhaps we imagined it.

None the less we enjoyed it all and later on that autumn I made four bottles of Sloe Gin which were ready for Christmas and then I put the used sloe berries over brandy and made a bottle of Sloe Brandy. The Sloe Brandy is like a sweet liqueur and rather nice.

Years ago while we were sailing in New Zealand someone gave us a recipe for Saki (rice wine) which we tried and were rather happy with. Remembering that and inspired by all this moonshine, I made a new batch of Saki and in June this year we invited our neighbours to a drinks party. The party was a success in that our guests arrived and appeared to enjoy the booze, but it failed the real reason, which was to get to know the neighbours better. Not one of them has returned the hospitality. Never mind, we know the English are difficult to get to know.

This year, we got more organised and went to the wine shop and bought proper yeast, nutrient and other special ingredients. A charming young man in the wine shop gave me a recipe and lots of instructions for making apple wine and I have followed them to the letter. This year we have only made 25 litres. Much more manageable. It is fermenting ‘vigorously’ under the table in the kitchen. I admit last year’s batch didn’t burble anything like that.

One of the neighbours who came to our summer party gave us a big bag of red grapes late in the summer and we have made about six litres of wine. I don’t know how this will turn out, but they ferment, very quietly, next to the more boisterous apple wine and the serenely still Sloe gin.The Sloe Gin was so popular last year, I have upped the quantity.

I can’t mention it yet, because I haven’t made it yet, but I’m in the process of making Limoncello - watch this space!

A glut of Apples

We have had a glut of apples on the farm this year. Last year was also a good year, but this year was extraordinary. We have two trees, just on the other side of the fence between our garden and the kitchen garden. This is the view of these two trees from our bedroom window in the autumn. They are both cooking apples - we think the reddish ones on the right are Bramleys but we are not sure of the green ones on the left. Equally good.

And here's an idea of windfall for just one week! We put large tubs of them at the top of the farm road for people to help themselves, the landlords gave bags to their horsey friends and we have taken pounds and pounds for wine and juice, chutneys and jellies, sauce, crumble and cake, and we still have had to throw away or compost hundreds!
I think apples must be the most versatile fruit there is and we are lucky to have so many. We recently attended the 2014 Cider and Apple festival at Killerton House in Devon. It was an entertaining day out, tasting cider and juice and viewing their enormous 200 year old hand press. A most impressive and efficient piece of equipment which they still use. We took a couple of bags of our own apples which they pressed for us on their more modern smaller equipment, and we've never tasted anything so delicious. It is completely natural, with a dark reddish brown colour - stronger and sweeter than commercially produced apple juice. So impressed were we that we bought our own juicer and have made plenty more. Why not, since we've got apples coming out of our ears?
My autumn has been very busy making jars of spiced apple jelly, mint jelly and Mike's favourite apple and chilli chutney (which he eats with almost everything). In the freezer are ice trays of apple sauce and bottles of juice. There are three trays of perfect, unbruised fruit stored in the stable and two bags of windfall in the kitchen to make more chutney. Good thing we like apples!
And then, of course, there's the apple wine - but that is the subject of the next post.

There's a creature in the compost!

I think it is a mouse, or perhaps even a dear little vole or perhaps a shrew. Anything but a rat, please.

My dear landlord (no one could ask for a better landlord) has been giving me dire warnings ever since we moved here two years ago about rats, and it was only after much wheedling determination that I persuaded him to allow me to have a compost bin. He said it would bring rats and I argued that there are rodents everywhere you look (according to Mike’s favourite newspaper there is a rodent within 3 feet of you at any time in the UK) and that rats would be after somewhere warm and dry for their nest, whereas my compost heap would be cold and wet. I even sent him an internet link to that effect, but I could see he wasn’t convinced. He used to have traps spaced all over the place in the farm yard, the kitchen garden and greenhouse, much to the dismay of me and his wife, and the mortification of their weekly gardener who loves all creatures big and small and is willing to share all and any plants. To everyone’s relief these traps never yielded any mutilated little bodies, so we were finally given permission to start the compost. Last year’s effort was successful so this year I got a second bin going.

So why, I wonder, in what has been a particularly warm and dry autumn, do I suddenly have  a creature in the compost? I suppose because my compost is warm and dry rather than wet and cold. She set up camp a couple of weeks ago and made a neat little burrow under the ground and into the bin and thereafter proceeded to chuck a pile of compost material in a heap outside. Well, like the gardener, I really don’t mind sharing space and Mrs Mouse was very welcome to have a small cozy home at the bottom of the heap - but no, she has to have an enormous mansion! Every day there was more and more debris pushed out of the bin and onto the surrounding lawn area.

First time around, I enlisted Mike’s help and we turned over the entire bin - good job anyway - and then we dug the edges into the ground as hard as possible and I placed sprigs of holly to deter her. Ha ha. Pathetic idea that I read on the internet which didn’t work. Determined little soul, she just found another gap and did it all over again. And again. Each time I scrape up all the discarded bits and dump them back in again and re-secure the edges. It’s boring and tiresome though I suspect it has been rather good for the compost - it’s looking very dark and crumbly. I thought I’d defeated her with bits of slate and bricks dug in all around the bin, still ridiculously decorated with springs of holly. But no, the tenacious little creature has just gone under the brick. This is how it looked this morning.

She (I presume it’s a she making a home for her babies) is unbelievably determined and I feel rather poor depriving her of a winter home but she’s making an unholy mess and it’s just too much. The landlord hasn't noticed yet, or if he has, he hasn't said.

To add insult to injury we took the car into the garage today because the handbrake light on the dashboard kept staying on. When we lifted the bonnet there was a small pile of nuts and seeds nestling on the radiator. ‘Ah ha’ said the mechanic, ‘you have a boarder in the engine. He’s probably been eating your electric wires!’ It turned out the brake fluid was also low so they topped that up and the light problem appears to have been solved, but now we have to worry about the creature sleeping in the engine and chewing all the wires. Any suggestions?

Having filled the car with petrol, I left Mike to go cycling on the Tarka Trail while I browsed around the Hatherleigh market, which is on every Tuesday. I bought some broccoli. 

I’m ashamed to say I have no such fresh produce still in my garden - all that’s left now is the leeks, plenty of leeks, a bit of spinach, a few salad items and some very sad look cabbages - we don’t even like cabbage! But... I must admit fresh baby cabbage thinly sliced and wilted in a pan with a little butter and seasoning is delicious.  
Hatherleigh market also has an auction every week and we have bought some incredible bargains there. Today I bought a portable hanging rail for clothes for £5. Not the bargain of the century, but I am happy with it. The bargain of the century was a man’s mountain bike in perfect condition, covered in rusty looking dust and grime, which Mike bought for £3. He gloats over that bike every time he uses it.

It's all about personal priorities

This frugal (my Father would have said parsimonious) life style is all about personal priorities. We save money and get an amazing, perhaps ridiculously disproportionate, amount of pleasure in the challenge of so doing on areas that are not important to us and then we have enough to spend on the things that are. I’d rather spend £10 on a four and a half hour coach ride from Exeter to Victoria than £40 - £70 on a two and a half hour train ride. I have more time than money and I can think of so many better things to do with that money. My choice.

Mike and I live on the state pension only and we have no savings. We live in a two bed cottage on a working farm in Devon though we don’t work on the farm. (We don’t work at all for good reasons that will not be discussed in this blog.) In 2008 we bought a decent second hand car (for cash) which we can afford to licence, repair, MOT and insure every year and we use it frequently, most importantly to get from the farm to our nearest town. Depending on the convenience of timing, we try to use the bus service from there which is excellent. It is free, of course, and we have plenty of time on our hands.

The rent on our two bed cottage with conservatory and that beautiful garden (in yesterday's post) is £100 more than our housing allowance allows, but in compensation we have all the free firewood Mike can chop to use on our wood burning stove plus access to a large kitchen garden to grow our own fruit and vegetables. We love our home, it is warm and comfortable, adequate for our needs and perfectly reflects our character and individuality. 

There are a few precious items that escaped the blitz when we went sailing (paintings, mirrors, a kist, two teak garden chairs), and we have bought a few new things (our double bed and mattress, the 32 inch television), but otherwise everything in our home has either been given new or second hand by family and friends, or bought at charity shops and second hand shops. 

For the conservatory we bought these two dead comfy cane chairs with cushions (which needed a wash) for £15 at the Okehampton recycle yard. Not only is there no shame in buying second hand but we positively love the idea of re-cycling everything and keeping as much as possible out of the landfills that blight our countryside.

The wood burning stove is very effective and warms the whole house meaning we use very little oil for central heating.

I do a lot of cooking on the wood burner - potatoes and rice, steamed vegetables, slow cooked curries and pot roasts, chutneys and preserves - and we keep a kettle on the stove at all times so there is always a pot of hot water handy. I am a good cook (well, Mike thinks so!) so we eat very well, mostly at home.

We buy special offers in supermarkets, particularly stuff in the ‘reduced for quick sale’ section that is close to the sell-by date. After seven years at sea in a small boat with no refrigeration and never getting ill, we take very little notice of such things. Some fresh stuff is eaten straight away, but most dairy based products only improve after their sell by date, as does red meat. Chicken, pork and fish we freeze if not immediately needed. By contrast we pick our own freshly grown fruit and vegetables straight from the garden for next to nothing. Seeds are cheap, we make our own compost, there's plenty of free manure lying about and the work is a labour of love. We only buy what we like and need and rarely throw anything away - what we don’t eat goes to the birds or in the compost bin. We need a dog!

Almost all our clothing is bought at charity shops (drawing the line at underwear and nightwear) including shoes, boots and hats. We buy on Amazon and ebay and occasionally sell, though our stuff is usually so worn out by the time we have finished with it no one would want it!

But we don’t feel deprived at all. We have so much! Apart from our lovely home environment, we have a BT Vision package with broadband. Mike has a Pay & Go phone, which he never uses, and I have a Samsung smart phone (£10 per month contract), which I do use. I also have (and love) a laptop which was a birthday present from my family. We entertain a lot. We travel around the countryside and like to dine in a restaurant about once a month. We both like a couple of drinks at night (me whisky and soda, Mike red wine or beer). Mike’s hobbies are cycling - he has two racing bikes and two mountain bikes, and all the gear, some of it rather expensive - and painting pictures in oil on canvas, which is less expensive. His paintings are wonderful and fill our home. These four were at a local exhibition recently. You can see all Mike's pictures here : http://bannersvision.blogspot.co.uk/

My hobbies are much cheaper - gardening (actually saves us money) and writing (just the electricity on my computer). Mind you, now I am blogging I suppose I should include the cost of broadband in that!

Why live on a Shoestring?

Why indeed? But it's not always an option, is it? This is how we live on our shoestring.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently in the papers about poverty in this country, particularly among pensioners, but being state pensioners ourselves we can’t see it.

Most of the great prophets of our time have extolled the virtues of being poor, claiming it is the only way to freedom and true happiness, and though most of us pretend to believe this we don’t really go along with it. Because, it is only the voluntarily poor man who gets a shot at that happiness. The involuntarily poor man is often deeply dissatisfied with his lot, envious, bitter and resentful of others who have more.

We humans like to have the money to spend on the things we want and many of us are prepared to sacrifice a great deal of time, energy and stress to that end. People say ‘I only want enough to live comfortably’. But enough is a relative thing and for many people living with little money isn’t something they opt for or not. They simply don’t have the ability to earn more so they have to make do with what they have. The trick is not to mind.

So, the simple answer is to down-size your life to suit your income rather than the other way around and live within your means. As Mr Micawber from Dickens’ David Copperfield so famously said:

‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’

First, you have to assess how important stuff is in your life. For some it is absolutely vital; an exponential indication of their status in society. Most of us are or have been like that. We certainly were once upon a time, but no longer. Our breakthrough really came when we sold our pub in 2000 and bought a 35 foot yacht.

Though the yacht itself was not worthless, we did have to give up a lot of security - an income, our place on the property ladder and most of our ‘things’. A bit scary, perhaps, but actually incredibly liberating. The less you have the less you have to worry about. It may seem trite but it’s true and it makes life so much simpler and more straightforward. It took a while to deal emotionally with the loss of many cherished items - inherited from our parents, wedding gifts, bought ourselves over the years - but we never think about them now. During those years abroad, we had to live on our continuously depleting capital and additional cruising money earned as we went (marina yard work, cleaning boats, pruning fruit, teaching English), and we learned never to spend more than we had or could earn. They were the best years of our lives and we don’t regret it for one moment. You can read all about it on the blog I wrote after the event.  http://theslowtracktoeverywhere.blogspot.co.uk/

After our seven years of cruising and having achieved Mike’s incredible dream of sailing around the world, and having completely run out of money, we returned to the UK and made a feeble attempt to re-enter mainstream life just as the recession hit in 2008. I spent two years in the care industry and then a brief and unrewarding stint at a bank before retiring. We managed to sell our boat for half its worth, paid off a few debts, took a couple of great holidays, and invested the rest in the name of Mike’s daughter. So, now we are penniless and remarkably happy for it. I don’t judge people by their possessions and feel that those who may judge me by mine are not likely to be my kind of folk, so no loss there.

Of course, it helps that I love gardening, growing fresh produce, cooking, preserving and generally making my own things. And it is true that I have entered this new life from a very privileged position. I had a wonderfully free outdoor childhood in Africa followed by some youthful travelling in Europe, four decades of hard work in rewarding and interesting careers, seven years at sea cruising around this fabulous world of ours and, most important, I have the man I love to share it with. I have been lucky enough to achieve much in my life, so it is easy for me now to sit quietly in the countryside and practice self sufficiency. It is a whole new challenge.

I invite you to join me (from the sidelines of course) in this interesting new journey.