Although loving our country life as it was, husband and I longed to live the life of a country smallholder. Having spent years enthralled by countless repeats of River Cottage, My Dream Farm and It’s Not Easy Being Green, we were charmed by the magic of growing our own vegetables, eating our own eggs and maybe even rearing a few sheep and pigs.
To be fair it seemed out of reach, as another dream and miracle had come true for us. We have been blessed with two baby girls, twins! To say the baby years were intense is an understatement and we were somewhat preoccupied for the first year of their precious lives.
After year 1 however we decided to make the bold move and move house. Now or never! The girls would be coming up to their second birthday and we would need to know where we were living to ensure their new nursery and school.
After many viewings we were optimistic but a little bit hit by the financial reality of our dream. We saw many beautiful detached period cottages in big manicured mature gardens, but the exercise really honed our checklist. We wanted no street lights, in order to enjoy the perfect inky black skies and bright stars of the Tamar Valley, we actually loved the area we were in already and wanted to stay there and we needed space for chickens to scratch around in and make a mess, a space where you could have a pig roast and dance about with corn in your hair. We needed an acre really. The house itself was way down on our priority list. Thing was, to meet the criteria on our budget was extremely rare.
Until … our new home came on the market. A period house, built in 1840 of stone blocks, much like our beloved old cottage, but my god way bigger. It had an enclosed safe garden for the girls and wait for it … a 1.5 acre plot just behind the garden! Yippee! It was however, a pigsty. I kid you not the place stank to high heaven as it had been so neglected, it was damp, sticky, dirty and had been home to more animals than Bristol Zoo. However despite the stench and filth we both loved it. Weird I know but luckily we both saw through the muck to it’s romantic potential, and my god the view from the field was amazing, worth the trek up the sharply steeped terrain – well … it’ll keep us all fit!
The day of the move was intense. We had to stay in a nearby self-catering annex on a cow farm for several days to give a team of contract cleaners time to blast out the residue of the past. We moved in on day 3. What a mess, but we were all excited. The girls, now two years old, had great fun running around and losing mother in the extra rooms we now had. We were so used to an open plan small miners cottage that we lost them several times in the rambling floor plan of the house. We walked around the field as much as we could drinking in the ruralness of it, but year 1 was consumed by make do and mending the house to make it at least habitable. We painted the interiors white to ‘make clean’, fixed all of the radiators, plastered walls, corrected damp spots and ripped up carpets, cleaning and linseeding floorboards as we went. We felt the pull of the land, after all that’s why we moved in, but simply could not fit in the time to set-up a smallholding alongside the mammoth task of making good the house. Not fancy, just liveable.
Christmas year 1 came and went and ushered in 2018. A freezing cold icy start to the New Year that went on way into April, but as soon as the frost broke we started planting vegetable seeds in the greenhouse, Hoorah! We were off the mark. Once that first broad bean hit the soil we were on our way, our smallholding journey had begun!
Work on the sitting room
The girls helping!
It’s white and clean!
White!
Cleaning the greenhouse
View from the top of the smallholding.
Looking onto the woods.
Brights skies.
Ever faithful labs.
River Cottage Collection DVD: We loved this series, well worth a watch for the would be smallholder, the genuine Dorset neighbours featured in it really made the series magical, available from Amazon
River Cottage All Seasons DVD: Great follow up, available from Amazon
My Dream Farm with Monty Don