Back to Blighty

A spot of rain on the way to the UK

Having my head stuck in the clouds, I often find that my idea of something is nothing like what it really is. Take the idea of fish and chips: I think of big crisp chips splashed with malt vinegar, light crisp batter, chunks of delicious white fish, and a crunchy gherkin or two. What do you get in reality? A yellow soggy mess. Same with my idea of England: I think of cosy fires in pubs selling delicious beer, hearty simple meals, rolling green country, little winding rivers, etc, etc. Drove back to the UK last week, and was suprised at just how crowded it is, and how unlike my idea of it it really is - there were cars bumper to bumper from the Eurostar terminal to Lewes, solid. Compared with France it was like a termite mound. Also, all the houses are squeezed together right next to huge open spaces, roads are everywhere, and people look so unhealthy. The food is cheap and looks it, shops are everywhere selling nothing of quality, adverts shout at you from every available space, noise everywhere. Serves me right for going into Brighton!

Anyway, we saw our friends, had the British Food Trinity (fish & chips, sunday roast, curry), drank a lot of beer -which was a bit sugary to be honest- and looked in shops which didn't sell what I wanted. We then loaded up the removal lorry, and set off to the Tunnel because the thought of an overnight ferry journey in force 11 gales didn't appeal. Got to Mesle the next day, unloaded everything into the gite (except Pachypodium which went somewhere warmer), and came back to Bubry.

Three days of cleaning and sorting the house out here, then we're in. Two beams to replace in the gite, gas pipes to replace in the house, bit of a clean, unpack, and get on with it.

Reflections on the last few months

Three weeks left until the place is ours (as long as all goes according to plan). Here are my thoughts on moving to France:

1. If you want to live in France, then just go and live in France. You could spend years taking wee holidays and you still won't know what it's like to live there. Sell up, go over, and rent. Then settle in and take your time.

2. Forget agencies - they want your money. Go straight to a notaire and save yourself 7% of the asking price.

3. Never accept the asking price - offer a third less and negotiate. Prices are made up, and there's no rule as to what a place is worth.

4. Remember that a building can be altered but an aspect and location cannot. Better something needing work in perfect surroundings than a dream house near a proposed dechetterie.

5. Found a place you like? Take a good look around the place before committing -Google Earth's good to see what's around about- there could be a dirt bike track through those lovely trees at the bottom of the garden.

6. Land rented out to a farmer? You might as well not own the land: unless the farmer breaks the tenancy agreement you can't evict him/her, and some tenancies are generations old.

7. Local farmers get first dibs on land for sale over a hectare, which can delay the sale for months. This is why there're lots of farmhouses for sale with no land: the big boys and girls have nabbed it all.

8. Most stuff is nearly a third cheaper in the UK, and there's more choice. Ship it over.

9. Employ local tradesmen and talk to your neighbours who hold the keys to a lot of stuff you'd never know about - like the local farmer's distillery for example! Hic.

10. Old house? Keep off the modern building materials as they're designed to keep damp out, whereas old buildings are designed move damp out. Mix the two and you have condensation, damp and rot. Use matching natural materials and ventilate. Better for you and the planet.

Quick update.

Signed for the house yesterday, and the Notaire reckons (with a Gallic shrug) that we might be in by the end of November.

Better tell work I'm not coming back...

Hands are killing me: spent the weekend pulling up weeds, shovelling woodchip and bending wire at some friends place. Was rewarded by fantastic food and wine. Perfect! Wish I'd got a photo of K covered in mud and looking very pleased, but didn't.

Limbo

Now we've decided on a place and are signing the compromis de vente (spelt wrong) on Monday, we have more spare time to plan what to do when we get there. Been looking at polytunnels (which are a third less expensive in the UK), chicken tractor designs, and thinking about Christmas.



This all means that we're in a kind of limbo at the moment, as we can't do much until we have a hand-over date, so we're spending the time walking, reading, drawing (me), making a cacophony on the ukulele (me) and sitting in front of the fire in the evening.



Found out a couple of nice things: distilling your own is legal here (each farm is allowed one still) and there's an organic dairy farm up the road. So we're sorted for White Russians.

Went for a walk along the bay of Morbihan (meaning "little sea" in Breton) last week and came across this Ent. K's just behind it, within arm's reach.

A nice view to start the day...

8 o'clock and the sun's just coming up!

Thoughts on micro farming.

Kristina's convinced me that we don't need masses of land to feed ourselves, although it would be nice anyway!

I've been looking into the idea of "micro farms", which is an idea to help "third world" people who tend to be a bit skint be less dependant on soya from the USA. You have about a hectare of land and grow everything on it you need, plus extra to sell.

Here's an aerial photo of the field:

Here's my idea based on a 7000m2 field plus a bit of garden:

The red line is the property boundary - this is the plan of "house no.1" as per previous blog entry. We've put an offer in because it's the best one we've seen, and also the first!

Green line is semi-dwarfing fruit trees spaced at 4m intervals with hedging/large species like cherry along the bottom: that's 40 trees in total.

Red arrows are the direction of the rotation.

A: 2 weaner pigs chewing their way through Jerusalem Fartichokes sown last year.

B: Fartichokes growing for pigs the following year.

C: Pasture which has been growing for 3 years, which the pigs will clear when they've finished the fartichokes in the late summer or whenever.

D: Pasture which has been growing for 2 years and is being cut for hay. Should get 10 bales from it based on average yields of 2 tons an acre. Pygmy goats only need 1kg of hay a day.

E: New pasture growing and being nibbled by rabbits and chickens in arks.

F: Spring-sown barley, which will have pasture under-sown so when the barley's taken off, the pasture is already growing ready for the chickens, etc. Based on getting 1750lb malted barley per acre (which is the grain minus 20% for wasteage), I could get 360lb grain, or 6 pints of 3% bitter for every day of the year. Belters.

G: Root crop, which is sown on land that had pigs on last year so it's nicely dug up and manured already. As I will be hoeing like mad here, it will be hopefully weed-free for sowing barley/etc next year. If I sow cabbages 40cm apart in rows 50cm apart I should get 800 plants, and about 900kgs yield if they grow to about 1.5kg each. Cushty. That's the animals fed.

H: Perennial crops like asparagus, hops, etc, and polytunnels for habanero chillies!

I: Our veg beds, based on the normal rotation of potatoes-legumes-brassica-roots.

J: Bees in nice top-bar hives. See http://www.biobees.com/ for info. Definitely getting into this.

K: Soft fruit.

L: Herbs.

M: Pond and wild flowers, etc.

So, every year we could get (with some Divine Intervention on our behalf) 200kgs pig meat, milk and cheese from goats, eggs, chicken, rabbit, honey, more beer than I can drink, more veg than it's possible to eat, bread (if wheat is grown instead of barley?), more fruit than we can eat (cider press for Christmas please Santa), herbs, duck meat (smoked), and a Farmer's Tan. All on less than 2 acres.

This place has a nice old stone gite as well, so might be an earner in summer if we play a "Biologite" card with a veg box, fresh bread, etc, and charge cheap rent.

This week I have been mostly...

...house hunting for a change.

We've seen 31 properties now, and I am getting a bit exasperated as they nearly all have something significantly wrong with them, like a new incinerator being built in the area, near busy roads with trucks roaring along them, or wet no-good land, or not enough land.

Saw this on Wednesday. All lime render and posh tiles, but NEAR A ROAD!


We're thinking about the organic nursery we saw on week 1 again: was it so bad, or was it just superficial stuff? When we saw it we thought we'd be able to find something perfect and rejected it, but perfect isn't going to happen.


I think the location of the place and the land are the most important things, as everything else can be altered with time and effort. Next on the list is structural integrity. Estate agents are ok, but notaires are better: most property is with them, and they're easier to get along with as they're not on commission. But what matters is getting a place to live, so whoever has what we want wins.

So, new rules for house hunting: must be in a healthy place (no pesticide-laden fields next door, or noisy roads that will drive me mad), must be in an interesting place (no flat featureless plains), must not be about to fall down (or be too hideous!), must be able to grow enough food on the land (without digging drains/clearing conifers). The rest is superficial.

Got three more lined up for next week - all in Finistere. We're re-visiting the organic hippy place, and are looking at a farmhouse with 12.5 acres, and a longere with -ahem- 32 acres!


Whatever happens, this time next year we'll be eating what I've grown, and all this will have been worthwhile.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

PS - you know you can get paid for just being registered as an organic producer? Pay the Man E650 for membership and get a grant for E3000-ish a year. All that is required is that you keep off the Roundup - you don't even have to sell owt! Vive la France and it's wholesale consumption of EU funds.

Three days off and then back to the hunt

Breton working horse - who actually DOES work.

We stayed at a friends farm earlier this week and got some exercise at long last. O and J's place is fantastic: they bought an old dairy farm 15 years ago and have spent their considerable energies doing the place up, running organic veg to the co-op, farming comfrey for their patent fertilisers, wrestling their two kids, heading up an internet organic community of growers, playing in a band, hosting people with learning difficulties, and -I guess- occasionally sleeping. When they moved there, the place was still occupied by ancient Breton types in shawls and clogs, who hand milked their (30) cows, got their wives to dig boulders out of fields after ploughing, etc. Looked a bit more progressive now, but not much!

K sporting a fetching hat in the rhubarb

We repaid their boundless hospitality by weeding and hoeing the rhubarb and drinking all their beer. I was glad to be getting some exercise in the sunshine (in the morning before it got too hot anyway), and have realised that I am completely unfit and will have to suffer some sore muscles while getting up to speed on our own place.

Honey monsters getting ready

We left on the Thursday and then went and looked at 6 houses, all in one day. Must have drove 100 miles all in. All were disappointing, but for me, especially one which was advertised as an old farm with 13 hectares, for E170k. Some prat in the 70s had added a brieze block storey onto an old stone cottage and put the stairs up the outside (imagine going to the loo in the night in winter?), then extended the old stone barns with bare concrete blocks right across the front of the house. Then there was a gigantic steel hangar literally falling down opposite, and the next door neighbour had a shed in the middle of the complex for some reason. What did my head in was the land: absolutely beautiful rolling meadows and woodland that hadn't had a drop of fertiliser or pesticide on them for a decade. If I could take the land and build a wee house on it, it would be perfect. C'est la vie...

O & J's rather nice garden in the early morning

Off to see a smallholder from Pigs in France today to see what she does and doesn't do, then back to the hunt on Monday with another wad of houses to look over. 21 so far and counting...

Day off walking along the Blavet.

House of Dreams cancelled!

See the nice big field in the photo to the south of "our" place? That's maize for feeding to dairy cows, which is pre-treated with a pesticide called "sprinter", which is a nerve agent. Our water supply passes through this field, picking up lots of nice things to help our garden grow, like "sprinter", fungicide to get rid of mildew which grows on maize due to being grown in the wrong climate, and of course, nitrates from the excessive feriliser added. So, thanks to greedy and ignorant farmers, what appeared to be a near-perfect place ain't. Kind of resembles a tropical island surrounded by shark-infested waters!

Back to the drawing board. We've got another 3 places to see this week, so fingers crossed.

Finistere it is!

Went to a hobbit estate agent and viewed three places in or near to the Armorica National Park. Two we're seriously thinking about, one we ain't.

Place no.1: 1930s farmhouse with a hangar and a gite, on one hectare:

Place no.2: an organic farm with 2 hectares, polytunnels and a tractor:
Place no.3: an old set of cottages with outbuildings, on 2.3 hectares (a hobbit is opening the door):

The organic farm was too much work - the place was a dump, dark and damp, and some hippy had smeared the walls with ochre but had forgotten about the rotten sills, the tiles, and the hact the the hangar blocks out the sun. Fields were too wet, polytunnels were HUGE and needed reskinning, so "non merci" to that one. Suprising how photos don't tell the true story.

Place no.1 was perfect -apart from not enough land. There was a perfect neighbour who was also a smallholder, knew the area, knew everyone, and loaded us up with fresh organic veggies, but he told us that it would be hard to find extra land if we needed it, so unfortunately house no.1 was out.

This leaves house no.3. which needs a bit of work. We went for a second viewing and deicided to put an offer in, and it was accepted! So now we're panicking a little about the amount of work to do, and the fact that what we've dreamt of is about to happen... be afraid!

The secret garden.

View from house no.1 to front gate and spring-fed pool through trees.

House no.1 - a 70s interior decorator's wildest dream inside!

View from the houses to the third barn.

6 acres, mature oak and ash, some hazel and sweet chestnut coppice, 3 small barns, one big one, two houses, springwater on the land, nice and quiet and private. Large town of Carhaix about 10km away which hosts huge music festivals, near the national park, good deep soil, job done*.

Our new life starts this Friday when we sign for it!

*apart from the total modernisation of the houses, and getting a new wood and solar heating system, insulation, new kitchen and bathroom, starting veg beds from scratch, putting boundary hedges in, planting an orchard, building a greenhouse/polytunnel, making a dairy and brewery, and maybe having a cup of tea every now and again.

Bread

Want to keep fit but are sensible enough to realise that with gym memberships the only pounds you lose are the ones from your pocket? Better to do something that keeps you fit and has a nice tasty result. Buy a Country Living Grain mill from the States and a sack of wheat and mill your own flour. It's a bit like cycling for the arms, and you get something called fresh flour as a result, which makes good honest whole fresh bread, which is something I'm prepared to bet most people have never had before.

You need a beer after using this monster!

Our mill was bought after months of research, whereby I found out that most flour is milled by an industrial process which destroys all that is good about flour, and then made into loaves by an industrial process which destroys all that is good about bread. I've baked my own bread for years, from organic flour bought from shops with too many crystals and Hopi ear candles. However, I then found out that the oils contained in the grain go off as fast as milk does when exposed to air, so what I was buying was in fact stale food. As every time I'd eaten something commonplace which was fresh (i.e. hours old instead of weeks) and found out what it is meant to taste like - like turnips for example: picked when about the size of a golf ball and just boiled and eaten with salt and pepper, they're delicious; shop bought turnips are woody, bland balls - I decided to try using fresh flour.

Sooo, got the mill, and am now milling our own flour. It's like cycling uphill on a low gear using your arms. Takes about 15 mins to do enough flour for two loaves, which taste delicious. They have a nutty, rich, moist flavour and texture and it's definitely worth doing. Plus, you're getting all those amino acids, vitamins, and oils that you wouldn't be if you got shop bought stuff as an added bonus.

House hunting rant!

I'm suprised at how many estate agents there are here - every small town boasts at least two, and they each have at least a hundred places for sale on them. Seems that the whole of the department is up for sale! However, it's not such a good thing, for us anyhow.
Most of the places for sale are of two sorts: new build Lego box houses with small gardens comprised of builder's rubble, or what Time Team would imaginatively describe as a "post iron age farming settlement", an agent would describe as "maison a renover, beaucoup de charme", but which appears to the author to be a series of broken walls with brambles poking out of the roof for fifty quid.
To find a small house with about 2 hectares of land is hard due to the law here which says that land for sale must be offered to the local farmers first before anyone else can buy it. This has good and bad points. It's good that good land is offered to someone local who can produce food from it, and this keeps land out of the hands of prospectors and developers. However, this has meant that farms here get bigger and bigger, land is lost to small producers, variety in the landscape is lost (every other field here is maize), and you end up with large farm buildings cut off from the land they need, and therefore they just stand empty and falling down because no-one can use them.
Also, things ain't as cheap as they were. 5 years ago the British were over here in droves snapping up cheap places and renovating them. The Bretons (not French - bit like calling Welsh English) have cottoned on to this a bit and are asking for more. Also, the Brits are selling up due to various things (liver damage and divorce seem to be the most common reasons!), having spent small fortunes renovating -often badly- their homes and wanting some return on their labours. This means you can not get charming old farmhouses with a bit of land for under E200k these days, unless they're completely knackered, and have had the original occupants die of old age inside. Still, hope oft endures.
Also, I'm nowhere near an expert, but even I can see that repairing and rendering cob walls with concrete spells disaster! Around here is mainly cob, which is left unrendered traditionally, and patched as and when needed - but not nowadays. Brittany is famous for being wet, so you have lots of buildings that would be listed in the UK looking like sandcastles with the tide coming in around them. The method as far as I can tell is to patch holes with concrete blocks, put plastic double glazing in, and cover the lot with concrete rendering. Recipe for disaster there, like. Concrete is impermeable to water, so any wet inside the wall can't get out, and instead will turn the wall to mud. Voila - a mud wallow for the pigs where your house should be!
I guess the reaosn is that there are so many places here like this that it's not seen as important to conserve them. The Bretons seem to prefer something modern (i.e. clean, dry and warm!) and are not interested in these old places - maybe because they've grown up with them. In the UK most people are from urban enviroments with bad, boring architecture and want to preserve anything seen as unusual, or of quality, or with some history attached. Hence the National Trust, etc. Their towns are well-preserved on the whole though, and clean as a whistle. No litter, no billboards, hardly any traffic, the old buildings are still used, and not looking like they've been pickled and put on a museum shelf like ours have, and this is the most important thing: buildings are for people, not the other way around.

Off to the Armorica National Park today to see an organic farm, a country house + gite and 2 acres, and a wind-blasted corps de ferme (farm complex) up on t'moors. The first two might break the bank, the latter the spirit. We'll see...

The Trip Down

The last two weeks have been the most stressful of my life! We have been like mountaineers who, having climbed one steep slope, look up to find that they're not even half way up the mountain. We had to:

1. Find a home for our two cats because the woman who was going to look after them cancelled on us 4 days before we were to leave the UK.

2. I had to pass my driving test - first time - three days before leaving the UK

3. We had to pack the house, then move it all into storage the day before we left.

4. We then had to drive to the place we're renting in Brittany, via Calais.

5. Plus, I had to have leaving drinks with work the night before moving - although this was not much of a sore trial to be honest...

We're off - all missions accomplished.

We accomplished it all in the nick of time, but found that we needed twice the storage space we thought we needed, and what should have taken half a day took all day due to the layout of the storage place. Still, we did it, and collapsed exhaused on the deck of our friend's house the evening, then walked to the pub to drink the last pint of English beer I'll have in a long time. Then it was up at 6am, breakfast and goodbye to our friends and I drove to the Eurostar. I was a bit worried about the wieght of the car as we had packed enough chutney, tea, grain (for our mill - I shall rant about this later), and dried goods for the winter, as well as books and clothes, and my ukulele. We stayed at a very nice B&B in Normandy called Les Blotteries, and were bloody glad of the rest. Then after a nice breakfast of coffee, egg, toast and jam (home made thank God) we arrived at our home for the winter.

Les Blotteries - very nice jam.

We've spent the last few days on holiday, but from Monday we're doing what we're here for: looking for our own place, learning French, working on farms voluntarily, and sitting by the fire with good books.

So, next week we're looking at properties, cycling, walking, reading, and planning what we're here for - which I'll go into in my next post.

A new life beckons...

YAWN.

This will be the last time I sit in an office. I've spent the last 10 years working to pay the rent and dreaming of living by and working in woods, fields and water and finally it's coming true, thanks to K, who I met last year and wants the same thing as me.

Lewes High Street...

...which has a brewery down the end, which is the height of civilisation.

The UK is too expensive by far, where we live in the south eat is too crowded, is drying up (although you wouldn't believe it judging from this summer), and we are sick of living in debt. So we're off to Brittany because it's wetter, less expensive, less populated, the place is beautiful, the people are nice and they all seem to keep pygmy goats. We also have some family and friends there so we won't be totally in the deep end.

Ideally, we want about 5 acres with a small house on it, a couple of sheds, it's own water supply and some people nearby who have the same thing so we can all help each other. We will then slowly develop the place, about half an acre a year, until we have the whole place being farmed organically and well, with as much of what we need food-wise coming from it. Should keep me fit!

We're from Lewes in sussex, where they "enjoy a good burnin" as someone said in the pub once when he was trying to get me to join one of the bonfire Societies:

For some reason the previous day is spent boarding all the shop windows up...

The priests on the right have their backs turned because the crowd is throwing fireworks at them. Health and Safety? Ha!