Selfsufficientish.com

Thanks for the quick and excellent advice. My partner says the current owner has his nest in a wine barrel, which sounds like a great idea. She also says the grass needs cutting short before you let the on it - the rested half of the orchard is yay high in grass, so I guess I'll be doing a bit of ha...

Hi all, Just been offered a breeding pair of geese for FREE, as long as we don't eat them. Which seems fair enough. Now, being a lazy person, what do I need to know? We have a 20m x 20m orchard split down the middle, with 29 chickens in one half (resting the ground in the other half for a few months...

We've just been re-watching The Good Life and were inspired to create a Good Life Week on our Dordogne smallholding. From April 14th (that’s in just over a month), would-be Toms and Barbaras can get gloves-on experience of a whole range of skills, like: o Animal house construction o Bread making o B...

Thanks everyone. The showers are conspiring to make me work unnecessarily hard - forecast at 7 this evening and 7 tomorrow morning. So it looks like I'll be turning it a few times before I put it away. Ah well, it's not as if I didn't have anything better to do...

Our first foray into hay production, so a beginner question here: I cut and turned about half an acre of hay yesterday while it was over 30C, only to have it rained on by three unexpected showers. Today it's mid 20sC and overcast, with reliably hot sun (32C) tomorrow and the day after (35C). Can I l...

We do our own butchery, too. Had someone come the other day to kill and clean the pig in situ (in the woods) and he charged €40. So your prices are amazing.

That's my feeling too. Her Outdoors just found some info on a guinea fowl forum that suggests it might have been a build up of fat in/on the liver as a result of corn in the diet - an apparently common problem in laying hens. Intuitively that gets a bingo from me, but we'll feed a transplanted shrub...

Welcome to pigland. I read somewhere, if there's food left after 15 mins you're feeding to much and if it's gone by 15 mins, you're not feeding enough. But either way, it seems pigs will squeal and come running whenever they see you, on the offchance you're bringing more food. We've had them for a f...

I just found one of our three guinea fowl dead in the orchard. I suspect it may be the female, which would be very sad as yesterday she just laid her first egg. My question is this: How can we find out if the bird is safe to eat? It would be a shame to discard the bird, but I will if I must. Thanks ...

Thanks se-isher. We've been fully booked, as it happens. We got a mention in a The Observer piece as one of the top 10 eco luxury campsite in Europe, or something - and were pretty much sold out in three days. Which was superb. We've had an unbroken run of excellent guests and still more to come. Ma...

Thanks Mike. I'll put the word out.

Back to me again. I think the recipe was John Seymour's. I know Her Outdoors and another friend have looked for recipes with yeast in them and found none - online and in books. If you've already posted one/some, can you point us towards a link? Ta very much. (The 'another friend' lost half her batch...

Hey, other half here. I think that poor sterilization may be the problem. I washed the bottles and just used boiling water to sterilize them.It definitely looks like blue/white mould floating on top of some strange brown stringy substance. They were bottled a week ago.I will try the taste test and t...

Argh. Two of our four bottles of elderflower champagne have mould on the surface. What should we do? Drink them anyway (except the mould)? Rebottle? Discard?

Please don't say discard.

Alex

We moved to 10.47 acres of undeveloped grassland and woodland in the Dordogne in August 2007. The idea: To set up a super-eco yurt campsite for people and families interested in self sufficiency. The result: Ran into a bureaucratic brick wall. Very French. We learnt to shrug. We cracked on anway, fe...