Move to the country - a word to the country mole

Did anyone read the diary of a country mole in the Sunday Times? It chronicled the move to the country of a city girl and her family, a disastrous move which ended in their return to London. From the very first article her entire unsuitability for the project screamed out from every paragraph - self pitying, self obsessed, with a mind as closed as a clam and the resourcefulness of a used tissue. (Life being what it is, I shall now somehow meet her and she will be utterly delightful and I will be unable to look her in the face.)

So I thought I would have a try at some advice for those considering relocating: what is life in the country really like when the weekenders go home and it is raining again?

You spend a lot of time on your own so you need to like your own company. Days can pass without a soul coming along the track and you can find yourself hanging around in the post office, as desperate for conversation as the old lady on the bus who lives on her own. You need to use the internet, to email and to phone and to hold onto your friends. But you also need to get out and do things, not specifically looking for friends, most of all not seeking "like-minded people" - vile phrase - but being open and interested and ready to be involved. Building a new network will take time and you will likely end up being friends with older, younger, richer, poorer, different people to your city friendships. If you are not out there, it won't happen.

Paradoxically, along with more solitude than you are used to, goes less privacy, in fact no privacy at all. Everyone knows who you are and where you have come from. Everyone knows if you have visitors, where you shop, when your son in getting married. Sometimes your neighbours know more about your family than you do, or it feels like it. It's a reasonably benevolent interest: you have become part of this community and the interest just goes with the territory. Smile, answer all questions easily and openly. Never be secretive, it is a waste of time, and don't lie unless you have a fabulous memory. And never forget that the person who is interrrogating you in the newsagent is very likely to be related to the person you moaned to in the post office. There is no better advice than your grandma's: "If you can't say anything nice, say nothing."

The seasons are huge and overwhelming - spring so utterly beautiful it knocks you out of your socks, autumn rich and full, a summer's day a piece of paradise. But winter hounds you in a way it never does in the city: the dark and the wet keep you housebound and, when you do venture out, the world is mired in mud. You live in fleeces and wellies and you wear so many layers, even in the house, you look like a tennis ball on legs. You need a plan for winter: books to read, curtains to make, novels to write, friends to visit even though they would rather come in spring. You need to internet shop so that there is always a delivery van bringing lovely goodies in from the outside world. The marking of the seasons by festivals and ceremonies happened to help people to survive through the desert of winter so you need to throw yourself into Bonfire night and Christmas, stepping stones across the wilderness of dark and wet.

You really do need to like the things that the country offers you. If you love gardening, have always hankered to grow your own vegetables and long to prune apple trees and make jam, you have a focus for your new life. If your interest in plants is in looking at them and your passion for food needs delicatessens and fabulous new restaurants you would be better in the city.

One of the greatest privileges of living in the country is living somewhere beautiful. You know if you are the sort of person who responds to light on the hillside with a singing heart. You know if you were the kind of child who loved the nature table and have become the kind of adult who is interested in identifying which bird is filling your ears with song. If a tree is just a tree and all birds are indistinguishable shades of brown, there is not a lot of point in living surrounded by woods and wildlife.

There is not much consumerism in the country. The latest, newest, biggest and best tend to pass us by. Heels and handbags are an irrelevance. Botox and cosmetic surgery belong to another world. Cars need to go, to carry the load, to cope with the mud and the snow. An open topped Merc would get you laughed at rather than admired. Shoppping is not a pastime if you have to drive for an hour and a half to get to a shopping centre and if the audience for your fabulous fringed belt is a couple of incurious cows.

So that is about it really: no shops, restaurants, theatre, fashion, privacy; much mud, cold, beauty, beetroot, birdsong; silence, stars, buzzards soaring and circling, rain and wind in your face, snowdrops, roses, compost, log fires, chickens and a warm, perfect egg.

Take your pick.

New laid eggs and quince jelly

A blue and gold autumn day, balanced between the warmth still in the sun and the wind's slight chill. This morning I took my basket out to pick quince. I am stretching up into the branches of the little tree when Ian shouts for me. Amazement and excitement - the hens have laid! I was entirely resigned to having no eggs until the Spring but Ian looked in the nestbox this morning (instincts of a countryman he claims) and there were two perfect, but tiny eggs. Here they are in the dish with our walnut crop. We had bacon and tiny egg for lunch and they were orange yolked and delicious. I suppose the trouble with bantams is that they will produce small eggs, the upside of not tearing your garden to pieces. The bantam hens had been looking much more henlike for the last couple of weeks, their combs properly grown, their tails high and full. I would love their presence without the eggs, but with eggs as well, what's not to love?

When our friends came recently S and I decided that the beautiful little tree which sits on top of the bank overlooking the valley was a medlar. On the day of the Shropshire/Wales lunch mountainear had a look and was not so sure. She thought it was quince and after much trotting around on the internet so did I. SBS said I would know it was quince if I made jelly with it as the colour and flavour is so distinctive. The fruit is not large but knobbly and golden, like a misshapen apple.

All afternoon the jelly bag dripped gently into the pan while I pottered in and out, gathering all the red onions, planting the japanese anemone mountainear had brought, podding the borlotti beans. Late in the afternoon the juice went back into the pan with the sugar and then boiled away for what seemed like hours. The children from the farm came down to see the chickens and I wandered in and out of the kitchen, dropped teaspoons on a cold plate, left it in the fridge for a minute and pushed gently at it with my finger to see if it would wrinkle.

Now there are six jars of quince jelly glowing like jewels in the kitchen and it is time to get changed to go out for an invitation to eat booked weeks ago when the thought of England making it to the Rugby World Cup final would have made you choke into your glass of wine. Will we watch it? who knows. We are playing it cool.

A gardening blog

This one is a selfish blog: I want to record my bulb planting this year and I have got out of the habit of using a gardening diary, tending to blog instead. So this one is a personal record of the thoughts I have been having today on bulbs so that I don't lose them.

For years I didn't really bother with bulbs; too much planning and forward thinking for my younger, childrearing self. But over the last few years I have become passionate about them. I started with tulips for planting in pots but am now equally entranced by snowdrops, daffodils, bluelbells and alliums and this year have bought irises as well. In 2006 we planted 500 snowdrops in the green and another 200 in February this year. Last autumn I planted the native daffodil, Obvallaris, the Tenby daffodil and loads of tulips in pots. They were lovely, the pots glorious for weeks but there were nowhere near enough of the daffodils. I wanted them in the field around the bottom of the big apple tree and beneath the wild cherry by the swing. I planted 30 bulbs - quite hopelessly too little. The big thing to remember here, never having had this much land before, is that you need to think big and plant in quantity.

I also planted over 200 daffodils (Thalia, beautiful; Salome, flashy; Acropolis, pretty but ordinary) along the drive and that was much more successful. Alliums also went in - 100 bulbs of Purple Sensation and they were great. Looking at my list from last year I find I also planted 100 winter crocus which disappeared without trace. How on earth did that happen?

So here is this year's bulb order and thoughts on what to do with them:
120 Tenby daffodils to go in the new orchard around the new fruit trees (cherry, quince, damson, Victoria plum, white and black mulberry) and more for the big apple tree.

50 Tete a Tete daffodils (small and early flowering) already potted up with 25 Iris Katherine Hodgson in smaller pots for grouping by the benches by the cottage.

100 miniature narcissi (a free offer, can't resist them) for the edges of the flower beds in the side garden, the top of the bank, to mix in with the taller herbs (fennel, lovage, hyssop) in the kitchen garden and for the cottage garden with the wallflowers.

200 crocus Queen of the blues to naturalise along the base of the wall (already planted with snowdrops) in the side garden and also by the wooden gate at the bottom of the drive

I haven't been able to resist more of my first love, tulips. Some for naturalising and some for pots.

For the flowerbeds, another 30 Praestans to join the 75 planted last year. They are small and a vivid red, opening wide like stars in the sun. It sounds a lot but you would be amazed at how many disappear - squirrels? who knows?
15 Turkestanica (a species, pale yellow and early), 15 Sylvestris (yellow), 15 bakeri Lilac Wonder and 15 clusiana Lady Jane. I will try the species tulips on the bank by the side of the drive. It is a harsh environment with thin stony soil which bakes in the sun in the summer, but I think that might be ok for species tulips which, according to Anna Pavord, grow in similar conditions in the wild, althought I'm not sure they get as wet in winter as they will on a Welsh hillside.

For the pots 30 Orange Emperor, 30 Ballerina, and another unmissable offer has produced 6 Black Hero, 6 Shirley, 6 Flaming Parrot and 6 Angelique. Plus I have all the ones from last year - 30 Ballerina (I love this, you can tell - a tall, elegant, flaring flower in vivid orange), 30 Pimpernel (pink with green flare) and 30 Artist (orange with green flare). I attempted to dry off and store these in the traditional way last year but I have just read a very discouraging article in the paper which suggests that this is a waste of time and that the bulbs won't do much this year. Hmmm. Never mind, we'll see.

So if only it is dry enough we'll have a planting bulbs day tomorrow for the daffodils and crocuses. The tulips can wait until November. And the thought of the snowdrops waiting underground will console me as we turn the clocks back and get ready for winter.

Energy

I never understand those who are always the same: either always on the go, rushing and achieving and leaving you breathless with their lists and accomplishments, or always idling about, doing very little, very inclined to let you put their kettle on when they want a cup of tea. I have friends of both persuasions and find them lovely but exhausting in their different ways.

The achievers are like living in a wind tunnel. It's all terribly impressive but you can't hear yourself think. The idlers are like living through a veil. In the end it's all too misty and slow and you long to jump up and cry for "For God's sake, just do something!"

I understand both because I am a composite (an adler? an iver?). But I swing about and can be found either curled up by the woodburner reading old copies of Good Housekeeping, wandering through the garden vaguely kicking things or suddenly gripped with a frenzy, throwing off achievements like a toddler throwing off clothes.

Hopeless, idle, drippy, droopy day to day. Yesterday was the last day in a mad achieving couple of weeks. I leapt up early, determined to clean and shine so that the Shropshire crew would see my house at its best, not all covered in spiders' webs and crumbs. At nine o' clock I decided I hadn't bought enough food (I always do this, and with drink too) and whizzed about making soup and pastry for a quiche, picking the last of the courgettes, cleaning up the cat sick. At 11 I was laying the table and by half past I was ready. It was a great day, full of laughter and talk. The weather behaved itself and even the cockerel strutted his stuff as if to order. I should have gone to Welsh last night but at about 7 o' clock the stuffing ran gently out of me and I gave up.

This morning I have been working in a desultory fashion and this afternoon I was going to plant all the lovely things I have waiting, presents from yesterday: agapanthus, japanese anemone, inula, and cyclamen that I bought last week from the WI market. But it is a damp, grey day, neither raining nor really dry. I can't see the hilltop across the valley. From half way up the valley side the fields disappear, gently dissolving into murk. Ian has gone to a funeral and I am drifting about, settling to nothing, not even getting round to letting the hens out or to collecting the post. I don't like myself when I am like this but I have learnt that it just seems to happen sometimes. With company I might pull myself out of it but on my own I'll just weeble about. It's better just to let it be, to go with the flow, put another log on the woodburner and have another herbal tea, look up again how to look after penstemons and forget it by teatime, google mindlessly and blog, because that is the nearest today will come to an achievement.

The diet has gone sliding away too, put aside yesterday to eat banana cake and whinberry pie (yum, thank you CCA and SBS) but today it seems so hard to get back on the wagon. The bread is calling gently and insistently from the bread bin. It's a good job there is no chocolate of the dark, black variety in the house because I would already have yielded.

So here is the deal with myself: get out of my slippers and go to the village and sort some things out and I can have two glasses of bodran's rosepetal wine with Gardeners' World.
Done.
Hmm, moments have passed and I am still sitting here. Let's have another go.

An impossibly beautiful day

Our house faces south east across the valley and in the morning the sun streams in through the windows. The shadows are long on the far hill and the dew is deep and shining. I have a hundred and one things to do today but I eat my breakfast slowly outside in the sun under the yew tree. Then I take my camera and wander slowly around the garden. I hope I can share this morning and this place with you.

This is the house, tucked into the side of the valley, sheltered for four hundred years from the prevailing wind. There are massive yew trees on either side and beeches behind, in a protective curve.

This is the view out up towards the head of the valley where the Offa's Dyke path marches along the ridge towards Moel Arthur and Moel Famau. No doubt at all that this is the place of Arthur's burial to local minds.

The kitchen garden still holding onto its last abundance looking towards the big pigsty.

Cotoneaster, geometrical, perfect.

The house as you come up through the footpath, with the bakehouse and the small pigsties (just wood stores now) on the left. The little tree just seen on the right is a medlar, covered with fruit. In a couple of weeks I shall make medlar jelly with it.

Well I have chutney to make, if I can bear to stay inside. Ian has been away a couple of days and is back about lunchtime. The sun is pouring like gold into the kitchen. What a joy it is to be alive.