Category: Newsletter

The subject of watering highlights many of the issues facing anyone who wants to grow their own food in today’s world. Where to Get Gardening AdviceThe first point is that the degree that you really need to water your garden will be highly specific to your particular location. Some soils dry out a lot faster… Continue reading Watering

This month, I expect my time to be taken up with cereals – planting rye, perhaps preparing the ground for the winter wheat, and probably harvesting the buckwheat (which is not strictly speaking a cereal, but plays a similar role in the diet). I know that we are in a small minority even amongst keen… Continue reading Cereals

How much grass can you remove from a field before you start to reduce its fertility?This seems like a simple question, but the answer depends on what one means by fertility, and what sort of vegetation you want to see in your grass fields. Cutting Once Per YearAbout twelve years ago, we acquired a one-hectare… Continue reading Cutting Grass

When we moved to France thirty years ago, I brought with me my old English gardening tools. It was quite a comprehensive collection, and included several versions of the sort of hoe that you use for weeding in the vegetable garden – a sharp blade of some sort on the end of a wooden handle.… Continue reading What sort of Hoe should I get?

One of the most common questions that we are asked, is what do we do about slugs? There is no simple answer. Last year we had a more serious slug problem in our rye field than ever before. Plants sown in October germinated and started to grow well, but were then slowly devoured by slugs… Continue reading Slugs

Subsistence gardening is not just about growing food – it involves getting a whole range of products from the land, including fuel, building materials, and fibre for making cloth – but growing food is the obvious starting point, and, particularly if space is limited, the vegetable garden the obvious starting point for growing food.Vegetables are… Continue reading The Vegetable Garden

Probably, the majority of readers of this newsletter are people who would be described here in France as néo-ruraux (or aspiring néo-ruraux), i.e. people who are essentially urban in their upbringing, but who aspire to a more rural way of life, with a closer connection to nature. The label can be slightly off-putting, because it… Continue reading Neo-Rurals & Country Dwellers -Who Knows Best ?

Alongside the hoe and the sickle, the billhook is one of the basic tools that made it possible for people to live in Europe prior to the industrial revolution. Whereas a sickle is used to cut grass, rough vegetation, and the cereal harvest, the billhook is used to cut wood, usually green wood, up to… Continue reading The Billhook

For the first few years that we were gardening in Brittany, we had very few problems with deer, then we started to notice that something was eating the raspberry and strawberry flowers in the spring (so that we got no crop), and there started to be sporadic raids on the vegetable garden, such as a… Continue reading Fences and Wild Animals