They say that death and moving house are the two most stressful experiences in life. Whoever “they” are have obviously never had the builders in. The team we have here are doing an incredible job. Our house is not located in the easiest of places and there is a lot of heavy work to be done...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I don’t know about you but as much as I love Christmas I do breathe a sigh of relief when it is all over. Both Christmas and New Year were filled with far too much food and far too much mulled wine so all in all it was a resounding success. I’ve...

It was pointed out to me that I didn’t need to plant my lambs lettuce in rows but instead the seeds could be scattered liberally over a patch of ground. Armed with this new information I went and liberally scattered some more seed in amongst my existing neat rows. I’ve just read my...

Ok everyone, it’s time for mulled wine, I’m calling it. I spent Saturday afternoon looking for recipes online. There are loads to choose from but none seemed to fit my simple criteria of 1. must involve satsumas (of which I have a tree full) 2. must not involve too many...

If you’ve ever tried to eat an olive straight from the tree you will have realised that in their natural state they taste like $%@!. There is a process involved between olives come off a tree and appearing on the table covered in oil, chilli and garlic. My mother has given me a recipe...

I am thrilled to report that we managed to complete our olive harvest last week and take our load to get pressed. As usual D and I had a guess the weight competition and as usual my more optimistic guess won. We picked 130kg of olives which gave us a 13 litres of delicious, thick, peppery...

Our One Acre has been a hive of activity over the past few weeks. So far we have picked around 80 kgs of olives from our trees. Not bad, but we are aiming for 120kg so not quite complete. I’m sure our neighbours would be horrified with our olive picking method! We aim to have this...

This year we are staying in Portugal for Christmas. On the one hand I’m horrified to be watching syrupy Christmas adverts already and hearing the same old Christmas hits everywhere I go, but on the other hand I’m quite excited about decorating the house and eating turkey. I want it to be...

It was a trip to Chrefchauen in the Rif Mountains that did it for me. I fell in love with Moroccan design then and there. I don’t think I am the only one however because you can see touches of Moroccan design all over Spain, Portugal and other parts of Southern Europe too. It seems in fact...