In search of The Good Life

I suppose I've always hankered after a little slice of The Good Life. In fact, I can remember watching it with my parents as a teenager, when I should have been more interested in watching Top of the Pops or Going Live! or Knightmare. (Actually, I loved Knightmare - which 80s child didn't want to don that ill-fitting, over-sized helmet that prevented you from seeing anything other than your feet? And who can honestly say that they weren't a tiny bit worried that the contestants actually dropped into oblivion and were left to languish there for all eternity?)

In our last house, I tried and failed to create a little bit of a country retreat. Technically, we lived on the outskirts of a town, but our secluded position down by the river in a quiet cul-de-sac known as 'the island', thanks to the river that looped around it on all sides, meant that we felt much more rural than we actually were. But our garden was relatively small, and I knew nothing about gardening. I planted a few fruit bushes down in a particularly shady and damp part of the garden, so they did nothing in the five years we lived there. I had two small fruit trees, whose reluctance to crop while kept in pots resulted in exactly zero pieces of fruit. And I had a small cold frame with which I managed to produce about three courgettes, and a couple of low planting beds that grew me precisely one beetroot and one twisty carrot - it wasn't exactly the Garden of Eden.

Here at Redhall we have more space. Lots more space. And the garden is in many ways much more amenable to growing things. There are a few things already established - a huge blackcurrant bush that gave me a couple of kilos of fruit shortly after we moved in last year (netting me 3 whole jars of jam - what is it with the disappointing fruit/jam ratio?), a few fruit trees that seem to decide from year to year whether they fancy producing fruit that particular season, and a huge section of unchecked land that we call 'the mound' and that I hope will eventually be home to a slightly more meaningful orchard, in which Andy plans to nestle a little music 'studio' (read = sound-proofed shed).

We also have a little wooded copse up the top, where we've added a chicken coop, and we can let the hens out to free range during the day. If one of us (Andy) forgets to close them up at night, however, a fox will come and take one away for his dinner, leaving us with three rather traumatised hens who will give up laying for at least a couple of weeks (that's one mark deducted from our Good Life tally).

But the best bit is round the side of the house, where the former owners used to house a large trampoline. It's a good size, south facing, sheltered on three sides by fencing/the house and is hence the perfect location for raised beds. At last, my dreams of becoming Barbara can come true...

The only snag is that to make raised beds, I was going to require some assistance from my husband. And Andy really doesn't care about gardening. I mean *really* doesn't care. Thankfully, his sister had a great idea: buy some great big, sturdy potato boxes from a local farmer and use these instead - bingo. That's exactly what I did. I sourced four 6' x 4' x 3' boxes at £15 a pop from a farmer in Larbert, had them delivered for about twice the price (a total palaver - let's not dwell on that bit), left them languishing on the drive for a few weeks and then, with a bit of help from a friend and her husband, got them into place in the aforementioned sunny spot.

The boxes were far deeper than I was going to need, so we* cut about a foot off the tops, then I lined them with permeable membrane, and filled them with top soil. Two tons of top soil. I'm quite proud of the fact that Andy and I managed to shift all of it in two 45-minute sessions on consecutive evenings after the kids had gone to bed. I dug in a bit of compost and - hey presto - raised beds.

A few days later I planted two courgette plants and some rhubarb, and sowed everything I could that the books told me I wasn't already too late with: salad leaves, rocket, spring onions, beetroot, carrots, chard, cabbage, radish, mange tout and green beans.

Two weeks later and things are starting to grow, so I'm hopeful that we might manage to eat something home-grown over the coming months. Given the outlay, something more than a single beetroot and a twisty carrot would be ideal.

So the morals of the story are:

1. Potato boxes are a cheap, effective and time-saving way of creating some raised beds
2. With a bit of grunt work you can do it all yourself, and don't even necessarily need your extremely helpful husband to do it for with you
3. Don't use the same people we did to deliver your potato boxes if you want to save yourself time, money and unnecessary spousal arguments
4. It's never too late in the season to sow some vegetable seeds (right? right??)
5. Don't leave Andy in charge of putting the chickens to bed.


*Ok, I admit it, I managed one corner. Andy and my Dad did the rest.

One year on - and a new home

It's funny how having two children, moving house and returning to work have seen 12 months elapse since the last time I wrote. I've just re-read my last post and I honestly can't remember writing it. Not a single word of it. I must have written it in those heady, sleep-deprived early days of Edith's first weeks when my world consisted of little more than the four walls of our house.

Our old house. Since I last wrote, we've moved. No longer the owners of an eighteenth-century chocolate-box cottage in Penicuik, we are now the owners of a rambling farmhouse in rural central Scotland, somewhere south of Falkirk and not very close to anything. It's totally idyllic. We have sheep on one side, cows on the other, and it's 2 miles to the nearest shop. We have chickens, raised beds, a big range cooker, off-grid heating, and a little bit of land with a copse - where the chickens live. Ok, so we also have foxes that steal chickens, an inconvenient tendency to run out of oil in the middle of winter and rather slow broadband. But let's focus on the positives.

Over the past 12 months, our view has ranged between this:

And this:

Our neighbours look like this:

And just down the road we have this:

There are downsides. We had to move away from some wonderful friends, although they are still only 45 minutes away. And we all now spend a lot of time in the car. The round trip to take Alec to nursery is 50 minutes, and my commute to work (on the 2 days I have to do it) has doubled. But Andy's has halved, and he has to do it every day, so that is a huge plus. And driving home down windy country lanes, gazing out over the hills, with little else on the horizon but lush green fields, forests and the occasional wind turbine, truly makes it all worthwhile. I can't think of anywhere else I would rather be right now.