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...