Once the potato plants have died back, the postal sacks are easy to tip out, the spuds collected through and sorted into relevant sizes.  Big ones for mashing and jackets, small for boiling and average size for roasting.  

One of the points in our mission statement is that we want to be as eco friendly and as environmentally sound as we can be.  We have therefore looked at many of our everyday items and reevaluated what we need, and what alternatives we have available to us.
 
We think that the less we send to the landfill the better and identified plastic as being our number one enemy. In an attempt to purge ourselves from this man-made material which takes anywhere between 450 and 1000 years to decompose we noticed that the one plastic thing we can’t do away with is a toothbrush. As my dentist is always reminding me, I should change my toothbrush every three months - that is over 300 toothbrushes that I would expect to send to the landfill in my lifetime!

So what are the options?  Short of not brushing our teeth, we needed to find a toothbrush that was 100% natural and disposable in a suitable way. After a little looking and researching we finally chose an environmental bamboo toothbrush. It is fully biodegradable, quickly renewable and costs about the same that a plastic toothbrush does! And it comes in a biodegradable packaging too!

​Everyone's a winner!

Six hours later and wow, the light is so cosy and warm! The light from a single oil lamp fills the room casting dancing flickers into each and every corner. Verdict is in: one, maybe two of these lamps is definitely enough to carry out most evening hobbies, however, care will have to be taken with some night time activities as to not topple the lamps over!

A smallholding in Britain seems to have quite an ambiguous meaning, and is defined as “an agricultural holding smaller than a farm”. How big is a small farm, and where do we draw the line between a vegetable garden and a small holding.

The feel I have towards a smallholding is that of the land and not the home, it is about the range of goats, pigs and sheep that you rear and not about the meals you cook from them nor the wool you spin and the hides you tan from the animals. ​