Almost finished.

After over three months, at last the front porch is almost done. The windows are in,

the glass painting completed, all that remains is for our builder to put in the ceiling ,plaster, and to lay the tiles, this he is doing tomorrow. This is all work that Simon would normally have done but as we have such a gem of a builder we decided to let him do it.

The cats have inspected this new 'room' and have given it their seal of approval, it faces south west so gets the afternoon and evening sun, just right for a cats sun bathing spot.

 This is the last thing we can do to make our cottage as energy efficient as possible. The roof space is insulated up to the hilt, cavity walls filled with insulation granules, solid walls insulated externally with four inches of polystyrene block. The Stanley range provides us with all the hot water we can ever use, it also does the radiators and the cooking  and is fuelled by wood. We are still debating producing our own electricity.
 It always surprises me that in new houses  little attention is paid to  insulation. Last year when we were out driving after snow so many of the new houses were devoid of any snow on their  roofs,  a sure sign that roof insulation was missing or insufficient.

Yesterday we received the  last wholefood  order for the year, we are now well stocked up with various herbs and spices, bulk buying saves a lot of money on most things and it is almost impossible to buy a reasonable size pack at a  reasonable price from health food stores, supermarkets just don't stock organic herbs and spices, just small jars of Schwartz at silly prices.
 Our order comes through a friend, a long time organic farmer who is now giving up farming and putting most of the farm into forestry. She lost her husband suddenly five years ago, the first thing to go were the pigs as they were too much work for her and her daughter, she continued with the sheep, but  there is very little money in lamb production ,a  lot of hard work for an animal who main objective in life is to try to find new ways of dying. We would agree with her, we used to keep sheep, but they really are more bother than they are worth.
 Her daughter is a fully qualified permaculture designer, and has tried very hard to get some community based enterprise started but has been unsuccessful, so yet another well establish organic farm is going, along with the wealth of knowledge that they both have. It seems that to have a community spirit and to want to grow your own food you have to live in a town or a city where land is at a premium. It wasn't always like this, up until sixteen years ago we had a very active organic growers group, we met once a month formally, but would meet up in between times, we swapped produce, plants, ideas and marketing leads. We were all smallholders, some with a few acres and some with considerably  more, all earning a living from the land. Then the new boy arrived, fresh back from the  U.S to take over his fathers farm, he decided to 'go' Organic, not through any belief  in the movement but he thought it would make him money. Well it has, through grants he set up a co-operative, he is very well paid, through grants, yet there is no one that we know that has gained  any benefit from this except him.  Our happy little group disbanded. I think our friend was the last remaining member to still be farming as a certified farm.

This month is proving to be very wet, we live two hundred metres from a river and normally we cant see it from the cottage, the last two days we can, maybe we should build an ark, just in case. The hens are not impressed with this weather, the ducks love it. Me, I just want to hibernate, but I still have loads of bulbs to plant when the land has dried out a bit.