House Hunting & Too Hot!

We’ve got the ‘for sale’ board up now, with the house freshly decorated and tidier than we’re used to. It’s so tidy we can’t find anything! If you’ve wondered about where we live, you can see the house on Rightmove here.

With the market as it is, we’ve no idea how long it will take us to move. It could be a matter of a couple of months or we could be sitting here at this time next year. So we’ll carry on as usual with the allotment etc. until we have a firm sale.

We’re hoping to buy a place with a little land in the country. Wales offers the best options for us. When we first thought about this, back in the 1970s, we were younger and fitter. Now the question is what can we cope with?

Friends who have had smallholdings have warned us that as you get older, things get harder. I’m a 20 year old trapped in a 55 year old body! Help!

It doesn’t take that much room to be self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables so a place with half an acre will actually allow us to carry on as we are, even expand a little, as well as keeping some poultry.

With 3 acres we’ve moved into the realms of livestock. That’s sheep, goats, pigs and maybe even a house cow. Not all of them, of course. A sort of pic’n’mix.

There is another option to productively using that amount of land. Permaculture. I must admit, I don’t know a huge amount on the subject so will be getting some books. Of course, books can’t tell you everything but they give a good starting point and you can go back to them until you know what you’re doing.

The attraction of permaculture to me is that it seems to offer a productive way of managing land and cropping that is both wildlife friendly and doesn’t need as much effort as conventional horticulture.

It’s funny how age creeps up on you. When you’re 20 or 30, life seems to stretch out forever but by the time you’re in your 50s the world looks different. I can’t realistically handle the same amount of physical effort as I did. That’s not just age, but the effect of years working in offices. Still tiring, but it doesn’t keep you fit or help your waistline.

Anyway, back to the allotment that does help keep the waistline from expanding to world dominating proportions.. a bit. It was actually too hot for me to do much. A little bit of tidying up and watering left me feeling like a used dish rag.

Sunday we nipped off to the local DIY shed and bought a cheap hosepipe for £12.00. It’s thin and easily kinks but I’m not spending a packet on a decent hosepipe that might decide to stroll off. It does the job, so good enough.

As you have probably found as well, most of the cheap fittings for hoses tend to leak, so I try and stick to Hoselock fittings. Now the one thing that bugs me is having to replace the bit that screws on the tap or joins two hoses together because the little black sealing ring has split or fallen off.

Found the answer on ebay – 20 O rings for £1.95. They’re going to save me pounds for pennies over the years.. as long as I don’t lose them!

Monday we went off to Powys looking at houses. Not a very productive day, sadly. We’ve seen one we like but it doesn’t tick all our boxes. I do love the way estate agents describe houses, they don’t tell you any lies but that’s far from telling the full story. On we go.