country living for dummies

And now, the end is near....

Apart from jumping from the good ship Corporate, 2009 will be remembered by me as the year we tried living a little more rurally. I'm a townie by birth but when in Rome, or Cornwall for that matter...

Blackberry picking hardly makes me a son on the soil but we took it a little more seriously this year, spotting the best upcoming crop, far from prying eyes. True, we had to buy in the cooking apples but the crumbles were delicious and blackberries freeze well.

Elderflower champagne is loved by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and said to be a very easy drink to make. Essentially, it's Elderflowers (for flavour and yeast), water, sugar, some vinegar and fermentation. We also call it the 'exploding bottle trick' now. The first batch we made did not meet the expectations of friends and neighbours. One bottle given as a gift was returned to us the next day, barely touched. Another has never been commented on again - for all we know, it's still sitting in someone's cupboard, ready for the big bang. We learned a lot from batch number one and batch number two was a triumph - for us. It's definitely something we'd do again, especially now we have a demi-john and wide shouldered, thickened glass bottles.

The chickens had been on the horizon for a little while. Anne chose two (while I wondered if we should have got a dog after all). They eat vegetable scraps, porridge and any snail within a 10 yard radius. In return they give us eggs and chicken poop (a great accelerant for the compost). The two chickens easily supply our egg needs and any surplus is sold on, to pay for their corn and feed.

Sloe gin is another 'country drink' which I'd heard of but never experienced. As we have sloes in the vicinity, we thought we'd give it a go. It's another really simple drink to produce, involving gin, sugar, a quantity of sloes and some vigorous sloshing around every day. Opinion is divided on the results. I think it tastes like medicine - and not in a good way - but Anne is more forgiving. In theory it'll be a nice drink to share with Christmas visitors but in practice it's more likely to live in the cupboard.

Wood, glorious wood, we're anxious to find it... We use two wood burning stoves for our heat downstairs and get through a lot of kindling in the cold months. It's not expensive but, when you see a ton of wood (okay, so I exaggerate a little) in a skip ready for the landfill, it does seem a criminal waste. Naturally, we sought the householder's permission then bagged up the goodies and lugged them half a mile back to home. More recently, we've done the same with a local builder's skip, with his blessing.

All the above are fun-sized pigeon steps towards a different sort of life. Next year we'd like to have a go at mushroom growing, nut gathering, growing more chilli peppers and putting the small greenhouse to better use than being a store for kindling. Vive la green revolution!