In the picture above you will see a water tap key and a normal padlock key. I obtained these today when I handed in my payment and signed tenancy agreement at my town council offices. So it’s official - I’m an allotment holder as well as a smallest smallholder! Am going to commission my Mum to make me a nice little keyring to attach these two small but very important instruments to.

My plot is literally right next to a tap, which is going to save me so much time and effort with the watering. I’ve only gone for a 5 pole plot, but I’m going to ring up next week when the lady in charge of running the allotments is back, and see if the plot next to mine is vacant too. I think it was originally a 10 pole plot that has been divided up into two. I’m hoping that I can get both, as I’ll lose a bit of space having to run a path all the way through the middle. If it’s already taken, it’s not such a bad thing. Kind of hoping it will be vacant though…

There seem to be shallots still in the ground, as well as some unpruned raspberry (possibly some other fruit) bushes at one end. The nettles have started creeping in, but there’s no thistles thankfully! So of course the first job will be digging and weeding. But it looks as though it’ll be a manageable job.

Here at the smallest smallholding I’ve started making trips down to my cousin’s best mate’s stable to collect some really well rotted manure. She’s desperate to get rid of it, and I’m only too happy to bag it up and bring it back. My existing plots are being manured, but as I’ve been told countless times not to manure where the root veg is going, I’m not going to manure the new plot (carrots, parsnips etc), just add some bulk to help the soil structure and some general (organic, if I can get my hands on it) peat-free compost. My compost on the compost heap isn’t ready yet, and the old compost bin I have really needs emptying and re-structuring, as a load of it got mummified last year. My composting skills consist of break it down, chuck it on, if it’s hot and dry water it a bit, don’t put too much of the same thing on, and if you can be bothered, turn it or move it around occasionally. It’s working on the other compost heap (mountain), but the compost bin was neglected and is basically a bit crap.

Whilst reading up about manure and poo, as you do, I found out that in Africa they use dried elephant poo (dung) to make paper. Amazing! Apparently herbivores produce much less pungent poo, which is virtually odourless when it dries. I’m guessing that in parts of Africa where there are herds of elephants, poo is in abundance.So it seems to me to be a very environmentally friendly and finacially frugal venture. Can’t see it catching on here though. What with the lack of elephants, general squeamishness and dettol-toting hygiene freaks.

I’ve been running a chat forum for a few months now. It’s basically a place where like-minded souls can chat about many subjects including green living, foodie subjects and recipes, rural issues and politics, smallholding, sustainable living and allotmenteering, arts, crafts and traditional trade skills, health & wellbeing, or just partake in a bit of random general chat! We currently have members from around the globe, as far reaching as Germany, South Africa and Australia, as well as a core of English folk.

The hope is that I’ll be able to expand the website to include a proper online magazine in addition to the forum. There will be articles covering subjects such as rural crafts, ethical shopping, seasonal produce, recipes, wildlife, hen and bee keeping as well as gardening tips and ways and means to live the good life. Some members have already volunteered their services to write articles on their specialisms, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting contributions. I’m also currently compiling a (free) business listing for anyone that has a service to offer or products to sell, and is a member of the website, or related to a member of the forum. The hope is that this will grow in time to provide a really comprehensive list that will prove useful for both country and town dweller.

The forum is called Rural Muse and can be found at www.ruralmuse.co.uk

As the winter is slowly but surely taking it’s grip, I’m starting to feel quite frankly, bloody cold in the evenings. Yet I will NOT have the heating on just yet! Whilst I can still work outside without the aid of a hat and gloves, I won’t put the central heating on. Plus the fact that I am really having to count the pennies at the moment (anyone need a freelance writer?). So we’ve started to use up the logs and kindling I collected from the half-fallen crab apple. It’s actually ok - doesn’t smolder too much and burns fairly slowly, and I think this might be due to the fact that I was exceedingly lazy and just left it in the (well aerated) laundry basket in the kitchen for a couple of weeks. So maybe my procrastination has paid off for once!

I managed to actually do some ‘work’ on the Smallest Smallholding this weekend. Not much - but it still counts as at least something. Ok, it was mostly tidying up again, but it needed doing. The hens absolutely love it when I’m out there, mostly I imagine because wherever I go, inevitably there’s going to be a newly uncovered patch of soggy grass, overturned soil or some other interesting oocurance that will lead to some nice nibbly bits. They have also been assisting me by following me around and systematically obliterating each nice neat pile of leaves I have raked up, or creating great craters in our attempts at levelling out and re-seeding the lawn. I still can’t help but laugh at their signature three-toed footprints that are left behind though, very artistic in their own little way.

We’ve started feeding them pasta in the evenings, on advice from someone in the Omlet forum (apparently pasta as a carbohydrate is calorific, just what Pokey needs), and Yoko seems to be getting better again after a brief couple of down days. I think going to bed with some pasta in her crop has given her the extra oomph she’s needed. She’s started shouting a bit again, which is actually a welcome sign, but I won’t feel like things are really back to normal until she starts shouting at the floor again.

Rich has been busy plastering in the kitchen, and despite his initial frustrations he’s starting to enjoy it as he becomes more proficient. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to (perhaps physically) steer him in the direction of some wood so he can make my greenhouse staging. I would give it a go, but I’m possibly one of the most accident prone and cack-handed people to grace the planet, and I think there is an unwritten rule in this house that LUCY MUST STAY AWAY FROM THE POWER TOOLS, UNLESS CLOSELY SUPERVISED BY RICH.

Next week I’m hoping to get some bulbs into the ground under the hedges in the Smallest Smallholding - alliums, daffodils (pheasant eye, lovely), and anenomes. Mum has also give me some verbena bonariensis seedlings to put in for next summer. The bees absolutely adore them so that’s just what I need to boost the wildlife through-traffic next year. Also on my Things To Do list is eventually tackling and pruning the trees and the last flowering gargantuan buddleia. The warm weather has been encouraging new shoot and bud growth and I’m really reluctant to prune it down just yet, on account of the bees that are still sporadically making an appearance. I wonder when we’ll start getting the frosts?

My local Gardener’s Association has an Autumn Show coming up. It’s just a shame that I don’t have anything to enter. I missed out on the Summer Show too, it just happened that I was at that ‘inbetween’ stage where I’d gobbled everything that I’d pulled out of the ground, and everything else was nowhere near ready. Maybe next year I’ll be more prepared and have a much bigger range to choose from. My flower growing has been a lot better this year, with my Cosmos being a veritable success. I gave some to my mum and now they’re almost as tall as houses, and like mine still going strong (”yey!” say the bees). I might even have a go at entering the photographic and cooking entries, although they don’t appear at the Autumn Show, so I’ll have to wait for next year.By that time I will be 25 and probably one of the youngest entrants there! I just wish more people my age had the same interests - growing your own veg and eating it is just SO good for your soul.

I’ve also been collecting some seeds from the garden - namely Hollyhock and sweet pea, those good old English standards. The bees just go mad for the hollyhock, and they loved the sweet peas this year too. It was so nice to walk past them on a slightly damp summer evening and catch the smell. Over the summer I kept cutting them to encourage the flowers, the bonus being that my kitchen was filled with their aroma. So I’ll definitely be trying to use those seeds again next year. There’s something really satisfying about cracking the sturdy brittle pods open and thumbing out the seeds. I think I’m going to make some handmade seed packets to store them in. Maybe even tins. I’ll add it to the list of the other twenty five thousand enterprises I’m planning on doing.

Today my other half Rich put the garden gate up. Or should I say hung the garden gate? Either way, we’re very proud of our garden gate. It might seem trivial to some, but Rich managed to build the gate entirely by himself, without any power tools. There was a lot of grumbling and the occasional bout of swearing, and owing to our distinct lack of useful power tools, it took a while to construct - but he managed it.

The gate is there to stop the hens from escaping from the top of the garden, making their way up the drive and onto the road, and from there - who knows! Before we had hen-proofed properly we did find them in the neighbour’s front garden flower bed, starting to dig a hole for some dust bathing. Luckily our hens are obsessed with any sort of running water, and a quick perfunctory splosh on the floor of Rich’s cup of tea managed to do the trick, and soon we had them herded back into our back garden.

But back to the beloved gate. The gap that had to be gated off was a tricky size, and all the pre-made (and somewhat twee) gates we came across were either too small or too vast. Not to mention ridiculously expensive. So the only solution was to create our own bespoke five-bar wooden gate to suit. Having put it all together on the kitchen floor, and avoiding the cat bowls and my attempts to cook dinner around him, Rich finally managed to get the structure into an upright position, ready for painting. On further inspection we decided it looked far too new - in contrast we fondly refer to our semi-detached cottage as rustic or tumbledown - and as such we felt the gate should match. So I took to it with a hammer and bolster chisel, thumping random impressions into it and rounding off the edges. It might sound like an odd thing to do, but I remember seeing a programme about a cockney crafstmen who used to construct everything from salvage, and this is a technique he used in ageing his rustic kitchen table.

Anyhow, it’s up there now, and once it’s weathered down from it’s new(ish) slightly orangey-just-been-painted-with-wood-preserver state, I think it’ll do very nicely indeed. There’s something extremely satisfying about being able to construct home-crafted pieces. Although Rich might just wish that he hadn’t proved how handy he is with a hammer and saw, as I have a few more projects for him up my sleeve now!