Steel Kitten

It's all got very real

 

Our cat Georgie when he first saw the chickens

Something odd happened last night (by the way, the photos on this post are just ones I happen to like, rather than specific to the post!). Our retirement dream took a step closer. Nothing physical happened bar a bit internet surfing, but a major shift happened where it needed to happen first: in our minds.

We've batted around ideas before about what we want.

• somewhere with a small detached house to live in
• a few decent outbuildings for Martin to tinker with cars in peace
• probably rural for privacy
• an attempt at smallholding

But that's been it. Batting ideas. Nothing concrete had actually been decided and by when it would happen. So we used to wander round remarking on how lovely it would be to have more outbuildings. How lovely it would be if we were retired. How lovely it would be to grow our own food, including the animals for meat. How lovely it would be to have a smaller cosier house.  Or worked from home.

It was almost like if we said it often enough we would come to believe it might be possible. Because we didn't really you know. Not really. Things like that don't happen to little people like us, they happen to people with money and grand plans and confidence. People like us get a gold carriage clock for 30 years service and sit in front of a one bar fire watching daytime TV as inflation eats into our meagre pensions.

So as well as our minds putting up irrational fear-driven obstacles, we were also wrestling with the real practical obstacles. A rural detached house with outbuildings is expensive everywhere you go. Every time we looked we found more than we were willing to spend. Much more. Somehow we thought Wales would be cheaper, but we weren't even close. Run-down hovels with outside toilets and postage stamp gardens are going for big money. Around £100k more than we would have after the house was sold and that's just plain disheartening. It would mean more mortgage. Which means going backwards, not forwards.

We got three meals-worth out of this onion

And then there's smallholding itself. It's no secret I like the idea of having a smallholding, but I've been changing my mind about it as time goes by and never really admitted it. I've been lurking on forums for years, reading people's posts about how difficult it is, how they live hand to mouth and never break even. Being in cold and draughty houses, not knowing how to pay big vets bills if they came in. A few enjoyed the life but on the whole people seemed to be really struggling.  I don't want to do that, but still I wandered round talking about getting goats and geese and being self-sufficient. 

Anyway, everything shifted yesterday. A chance surfing session before I cooked dinner led to us finding a way to have the small house and the outbuildings in the country for what we would get for this house, if not less. Suddenly the gold watch has disappeared (or in my case a meagre whip round in the office with a speech and some Marks and Spencer vouchers) and a plan appeared before our eyes.

It was like the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz - suddenly there is a very visible path in front of us that would be difficult NOT to follow.

My favourite colour - tomato red

Now, it won't happen for at least three years. We have the car to rebuild which takes us to August this year and then we want to spend a two years paying down the mortgage (so up to midsummer 2014). We also want to test how it might work if I carried on working and Martin retired by him taking a year's sabattical across 2013 and 2014 and learning how to generate income from some of the things he loves doing. So realistically, we won't be go anywhere until mid-2014 to the beginning of 2015, but the point is we have a date when we could start the process.  

And then it clicked that I actually was doing smallholding skills voluntarily and with a lot of enjoyment...like making cider and liquers...cooking from scratch...keeping chickens...growing fruit and veg...well...

...suddenly it's all got very real. And very do-able.

Beware the lure of free kindle books

Oh Dee Cee what have you started?!

A couple of weeks ago DeeCee commented about kindles and how amazon has a discussion board which features a post with free kindle books every day.

Beginning of the end really!

Every day I go on there and download the most interesting non-fiction books I can find. I now have in excess of 70 free books. Some I'm glad I didn't pay money for and some are just fantastic.

If you have a kindle and don't know about this place yet you can click here and go straight to it.

Also, last night I found this site with free kindle books and unlike the kindle forum you can search by genre and filter to get the newest. At the moment there are over 1500 books on there.

Be careful though, free ebooks are addictive! While I was writing this post I downloaded another 10 books - six on various cooking recipes and four on financial matters. 

How do you organise yourself?

This post is prompted by a comment I left over on the Down to Earth blog recently. Rhonda was asking how everyone kept organised, whether people had routines or kept lists etc and I replied by telling her about my diary and about the list I keep in my head.

First my diary. I have one of those page to a day diaries and it's become a Godsend to me over the last few months while juggling a job and the preparation for us restoring the racing car. 

The diary has a small list of things that have to be done (so I must post off that letter, get the washing out of the machine and hang it up etc) and these are things that would be important to do on a weekly basis to ensure the basic things of life get accomplished. It makes sure there's always clean underwear in the drawer and bills get paid on time, that sort of thing. 

However, there is a second list of 'nice to get done' items, which might be washing a settee cover if I get a few moments to pop it in the machine, or clean a couple of shelves in the fridge. If I don't get them done, it's no biggie - I just move them onto the next day's list and see if I have time or energy then. The 'nice to get done' things can float across several days, but sooner or later they will get done. Nothing has ever been on the list longer than a week.

However, in addition to these two lists, I also keep a lot of information in there, such as things that happened that day I want to remember (sometimes even things that Martin wants to remember), the dinner I'm cooking that evening and sometimes things I copy down from websites or magazines. I keep track of days when I felt off colour so I can track if it is a recurring pattern. I stick in supermarket receipts so I can keep track of our spending and food price rises and sometimes I also stick in emails or post it notes of recipes I find. It's got to the point where I'd find it very difficult to be without my diary.

The list in my head is something different. It's a revolving list of things that I need to focus on to accomplish mini goals. So if I'm about to go upstairs, I remind myself to take something with me that needs to go, which will help keep the place cleaner and tidier and stop me running around like a headless chicken doing things later. I actually have a stair basket that you can take up and bring down with you. If I'm waiting for the kettle to boil, I give a few items in the sink a wash or wipe down a surface or something so it looks tider and cleaner. 

I've found doing it this way on a consistent basis starts to open up chunks of time where I can relax of an evening and (gasp) go to bed early. In the winter this is essential for me as it's tough to battle seasonal affective disorder when you have to be up at 5:30am and don't get into bed until midnight. I might have taken that too far last Thursday though. I had a whole evening free as I'd already had dinner cooked and just needing heating up, so I was in bed by 6:20pm with my Kindle and asleep by 8pm!

How is the budget doing?

So how are we doing with the big goal, the ones that will put us in the poor house ;-)

Pretty good so far! We are 23 days into January - our fourth week - and are bang on budget. I set my groceries budget for £160 a month, and so far we have spent £114.51. This includes cat food and cleaning stuff. In fact, we have eaten better this month since being on a strict budget than we do normally because I’m trying to be very careful to ensure we get our five portions of fruit and veg a day and make the food as flavoursome as possible.

I base the food for the week around a roast dinner on Sunday evening. Whatever I cook, Martin has the meat from it on Monday and Tuesday for his sandwiches. Tuesday night I then make up something else for him to eat for the rest of the week, usually some kind of pasty or large sausage rolls with pickle or peri-peri sauce inside depending on whether he wants a traditional one or spicy little number. Then on Wednesday I cook up a Chinese. He seems to be addicted to green peppers in black bean sauce at the moment, so I thinly slice up whatever roast meat is left and do that with noodles and/or egg fried rice.

This all works of course because I don’t eat meat at the moment.

If I were eating the roast dinner along with Martin, there wouldn’t be enough meat to last for sandwiches or his Chinese on Wednesday. Instead I have the largest Yorkshire pudding known to man made in a cake tin. Then I pile a load of veggies and roast potatoes into the large yorkie with gravy. Occasionally if I’ve done some kind of pastry based pudding for Martin, I’ll do a veggie slice with cheese and have it without the yorkies and just vegetables and potatoes. This is a mushroom slice with a base of onion relish that I found ‘seasoning’ in the back of the fridge.

I do have a tendency to be a little lazy during the week with my food. If we’re having a big casserole with lots of veggies, I tend to have it too but only put in enough meat for Martin. Then I’ll mix my meat-less portion with couscous. I’ve found that rather than eat a lot of protein in the evning, I tend to eat quite high protein foods during the day, which fills me up and helps me avoid snacking.

So over the last few weeks I’ve alternated cheese and crackers, hummus and pitta bread, egg or cheese salads, lentil soup, beans on toast or in a jacket potato. I also try and have a coffee every day made with milk, as milk has valuable proteins in it too. I don’t like tofu or meat-alternatives like quorn, as I think they are very expensive for what they are and I don’t like the texture when I’m chewing it. For obvious reasons being allergic to nuts has taken out quite an important source of proteins for me. I’m a little concerned I’m not getting enough iron so I want to start taking a multi-vitamin on the days when I don’t think I’ve had enough.

Apart from that, food-wise we’re doing ok!

Any ideas what this is?

 

I was turning another compost pile yesterday and I found this perfect circular hole when I accidently sliced a hard clay crust off it.

I've been wracking my brains trying to work out what made it? Can't be a mouse, rat or hedgehog - it's too big and it's very damp and cold. There are individual indents on the wall (bites?) and a pattern on the underside of the crust almost like - well - something has regurgitated the mud.

That just left me with toads really and I found a couple of likely candidates further into the pile. So, hopefully them being the originators of the little damp nest and potential parents, I left that area without turning it, re-made a cap for the top on top of some twigs as a scaffold leaving a small hole to enter and leave it, then placed the two of them about 6 inches apart orientated towards it and covered them up. 

Hope they weren't two boys...and that it wasn't someone else's hole.

Ooops. 

EDITED TO ADD 24/1 - it does belong to someone else!! It's an old wasp nest! Poor toads...

Anyway, willow. I decided to have another bed, a much larger one this time. I planted two beds last year and one bed failed. All but one plant died, which I think was due to two conifer trees about 6 feet away which were probably using all the available water and nutrients.

This time, I'm going to do an extended bed on the site of the old chicken pen...

I was going to grow potatoes there, but then I realised that potatoes are so cheap now that it wouldn't be worth my while growing them. I'm better off growing some of the more expensive fruit and veg we eat. So instead I'll plant the willow there. 

I have a few leftover whips I can take two foot cuttings from, plus when I trim the main willow supports of my willow fence there'll be around 3 to feet from each of those, so there's plenty of new willow cuttings to plant. Hopefully that will be next weekend, althought the building of this might get in the way!

Yes, we started on the greenhouse today and found out it is 11-sided, not 10-sided, and because of this is actually fits around all of the fruit bushes! I'm still not 100% convinced I will leave the fruit bushes in,as it cuts down the space for growing tomatoes, but the grape vine will stay in and be trained into the roof space in a way that lets light in and its tendrils can get good air ventilation.