Selfsufficientish.com

I've known a few people who never cooked in their lives. Most weren't rich. Most were men who'd first had their Mum to cook for them, then lived on takeouts until they found a girlfriend/wife prepared to cook for them. Having said that, I had a female boss who'd decided, at an early age, that it was...

Cushiest? The two occasions when I was on 'gardening leave' for six months. They didn't want me, but they didn't want anyone else to have me either. :D

I spent some time lying on wet, muddy grass, carefully angled between half a dozen cow pats, waiting for shots like this… http://stonehead.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/2011-12-22stoneheadsolstice-1.jpg The Stonehead Circle is just across from our croft and dates back 4,000 years or so. I wanted to ge...

Merry Christmas from the north-east of Scotland. We're still here, even if the wind is trying send us in the direction of Sydney!

But then some Morrisons foods can be far better than M&S... their in-house doughnuts and sausage rolls are ace, plus their german salami selection... and their pound a bottle beer and cider offers are worth looking at whenever they appear... they even did Zagorka (my fave bulgarian lager) for a...

http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l360/janlawther/IMG_0056.jpg I don't dispute they sell decent stuff but if anyone can point out where these two are similar I would be interested! Perhaps the rice? As for paying yer money etc, if you can't actually see the goods you have little choice really... W...

I'm a curmudgeonly old git. I'm happy with that. Therefore being grumpy and curmudgeonly is happiness. So where's the bloody problem?

No, we didn't find out how the hawk entered the run. He's definitely Houdini Hawk.

Yes, the sparrowhawk was just hanging there. We were very careful not to disturb him while I took a couple of photos. He dropped to the ground when I went into the run with a sheet of hessian to herd him out, so I stopped and took a few more photos. Our boys joked that the sparrowhawk had "issu...

I found a male sparrowhawk hanging from the roof of one of our chicken runs earlier this evening. I have no idea how he got in as the chickens were fine when I locked them into their houses at 4.30pm but the sparrowhawk was there at 6.30pm. I managed to get a couple of photos before shepherding him ...

Try Ronnie Gilbert's 1950s recordings of:

House of the Rising Sun

Spanish is a Loving Tongue

Simply beautiful.

Yes, you do need to bleed a chicken out. If you've killed it by breaking its neck, cut its throat from jaw hinge to jaw hinge and hang it up feet first, head down so the blood can drain out. If you've killed it by cutting its throat, just hang it up. The blood drains out quite quickly. And yes, they...

We have the same problem. In our case, it's because we have very acidic water that's high in iron and sulphur thanks to our local mineralogy. The only real cure is a decent filtration system but a short-term fix when it's really, really bad is to drop a chlorine tab down the borehole or in the heade...

We hang ours for a few days. The main thing is to keep the temperature between 0-5C. That's a fridge in the warmer months or in the workshop in the colder months (although it sometimes goes below -10C in the workshop and then we have frozen chicken). As for cooking, we generally go for slow-cooked c...

It's belting down rain here at the moment. Again. It's been a damp, cold, wet year and the land never dried out the way it normally does in summer. So whether it's a hard frozen winter or a mild, wet one, the croft is going to be even more of a mess next spring. And we're lucky—we're at the top of t...