Category: Newsletter

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