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.