Happy Sunday all!

I'm sitting here with my third cup of tea writing the coming week's to do list. I usually have two lists, one for the week and one for the weekend, and the weekly one is split into work and personal tasks. 

There was a time I'd get upset if I couldn't complete everything on every list, now I'm a bit more mature and relaxed and split the list into priorities. It won't hurt if washing the inside door mat is bumped to another day but it could hurt us if I don't check the credit card for errors or scammers' activity. 

If the adverts are to be believed Christmas is almost upon us, which translated from retail speak means it is absolute eons away. Is anyone else fed up that autumn seems to have been completely disregarded, like an inconvenience to be rushed through to get to the glitter and spangles? It's like the message of mindfulness that was started on social media during the first lockdown has been completely forgotten. 

Don't get me wrong I am shopping for Christmas presents, I like to be prepared after all, but I'm not putting up decorations or filling the house up with festive paraphernalia. I'm trying to appreciate the colours and smells of autumn, enjoying toasting my toes in front of the log burner and the clear crisp nights with visible stars. I've switched over the summer textiles to our autumn/winter coloured ones. I'm cutting up logs and stashing kindling. The boiler is serviced, the oil is topped up, the radiators tested and sticky thermostats fixed. My summer clothes are packed away and the autumn ones are out. 

At the same time I'm slowly building my prepping stores, as I have some concerns about what January and Brexit will bring. Any hold ups at the ports will impact on fresh goods coming in from abroad so I have been adding a few bits of frozen, tinned and dried fruit and veg to my shopping for some time now, and making some freezer store meals. I've also been drying some tomatoes and mushrooms, as I've found them nice additions to simple meals. We have a few leeks in the garden and some root veg, which will help plump a few meals out, and of course our freezers are full of meat and veg from our previous livestock and harvests.

With mum gone and COVID and lockdowns making it difficult to see family, Christmas won't be a massively festive affair for me. It will be quiet and reflective, a time to appreciate what I still have.

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Steel Kitten

Making that commitment

I underwent a lot of quiet reflection during our holiday.

We've been here for two years and during this time we have not made any major changes to the smallholding. The plans we had before we moved here revolved around making us as self-reliant as possible by growing our own food and producing our own energy. Smallholding, homesteading, pioneering, that has been a strong interest of mine for many years but I was having problems making it a reality here.

At the point we went on holiday I was drifting, wanting to do more but just not. I've felt a bit like we've been flirting around the edges of smallholding. I keep animals, but only during specific months; I don't keep them year round or breed them. I grow some fruit and veg but not extensively and in any great quantity. I harvest some of the existing fruit from the trees but not in any great quantity. We have wood burners but buy in logs instead of sustainably harvesting from our own property and finding free logs. We have a funky old (probably useless) well and plenty of roof space that yields thousands of litres of rainwater and sunshine every year yet we pay full whack for mains water and electricity. 

It took until almost the end of the holiday, nearly three weeks away from normality, for the penny to drop. Being interested in something is not being committed to it. For a long time at the old house I was interested but not committed to living well there because I never considered it my home. We bought the old house with the intention to renovate and move on within a couple of years but we got caught by the recession and ended up living there for 11. We decorated it with sale in mind, keeping colours neutral and never quite unleashing our creativity. Everything was done with The Sale in mind. I got used to being interested in how much I could make but not committed to living in the house and I brought that here with me.

There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses - only results.

KEN BLANCHARD

I haven't allowed myself to emotionally attach to this place, I'm still not committed to it. I'm not psychologically invested and this has translated into taking the minimal actions I need to maintain the smallholding, I haven't been putting in the daily effort needed to develop and deepen my commitment. I couldn't see it while knee deep in daily life here, I needed that time away to develop that perspective.

So, when we got back I took a look around. I actually do love this place. The peace, quiet and space, even though I don't always find it easy to live with my MIL which, if I'm honest, has contributed to me feeling unsettled.

I pulled out my plan for the smallholding. By now we should have: 

• a polytunnel in the paddock
• part of the front lawn laid to veg beds with the aim of achieving sufficiency in 90% of our fruit and veg for 5-6 months of year
• increased the energy efficiency inside the house to the maximum possible to try and get us to an EPC rating of B of above (currently D)
• completed some kind of resource generation activity, such as solar panels, a rainwater harvesting system or growing our own biomass to burn to achieve 50% sufficiency in energy. 

So far, all we've done is installed a new efficient boiler outside when the old indoor system became dangerous, and replaced a few halogen bulbs with LED ones when they blew. 

I realised I couldn't make up for lost time but I could make a start. 

Over the last month I found some cheap collar boxes on ebay and have begun arranging them to create an area of raised beds to the side of the house. The small patio garden will get higher beds and more soil. 

Over the last couple of weeks I have expanded the fruit trees in the paddock with raspberries, black, red and white currants, a gooseberry and a couple of tayberry bushes in front of that. All of these either came with us or were bought last year but never planted up.

The fencing is all temporary so I can make changes if necessary, but at some point over the next 12 months permanent stock fencing and a gate will go in. At the moment the chicken pen forms one side of the section, but I'll be moving that back by a pen length and adding a fenced area for chicken scratching. 

Talking of chickens, we now have three new ladies in the chicken pen, who moved in about two weeks ago at the ripe old age of 22 weeks old. They are part of the commitment plan, as they need daily care and attention. 

Finally, solar panels. I've wanted solar power for many years, but have never been able to take that step. Obviously at the old house my lack of commitment to living there wouldn't allow me to make that jump. It's not just the upfront cost but also because you commit to a) being settled in one place for a long time and b) changing your energy usage behaviour, which includes quite close monitoring of the system. A lack of commitment doesn't go hand in hand with having solar panels. 

MIL and I are both here during the day, and we tend to run our household electrical devices then. With solar, we could get quite close to the maximum benefit possible by running all our devices when the panels are generating electricity at the peak times during the day. In addition, there are the Feed-In Tariffs (FITs), which pay a householder with solar panels a small amount of money to generate and export their surplus energy to the grid. It's only about 9-10p a kWh but it is a handy little bit of extra money into the household and is index-linked for 20 years. However, this is coming to an end on 31st March.

I did a few calculations, working out the theoretical return on the money from the panels being drip fed into pensions vs just putting it directly into pensions, and while the panels just nosed ahead they had the added psychological benefit of the satisfaction from producing part of the energy we consume and lowering our bills. How much they lower our bills by is down to us and our consumption habits.

I took a deep breath, did some ringing round and quote gathering and a few days ago we placed an order for a 6kWp system for the south-facing roof of the barns. We're aiming to reduce our electricity bill by 50% through a combination of using what we generate, changing our consumption habits and the FITs. In addition, we decided to have an iBoost fitted to our immersion heater, which is a diverter system that directs a small amount of surplus electricity to our water tank to heat it instead of the boiler firing up. So we estimate that for six months of the year our boiler probably won't be firing at all, which will help lower our annual oil bill. 

So, the solar panels team is coming next week to put the panels up and by next weekend we will be generating some of own power. It's only a small step, but psychologically it feels like the biggest one to date because of the mindset shift that comes with it.

This smallholding is my home and I am committed to it. 

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Steel Kitten

Keeping warm and well fed

It's been a pretty big week. We had a new boiler fitted outside the house. The previous boiler was sited inside the utility room and while legal when installed 23-odd years ago, in 2018 it broke just about every regulation there is. 

Now instead of something that is only 73% efficient we have something 98% efficient. That should make our oil go a bit further. It looks a bit unsightly,but I'm going to put a freestanding fence panel in front of it next year to hide it and then grow some climbing beans. 

It was a big job. Part of the oil line still sits in the house, as the previous owner ran the oil line from the utility room underground to the paddock and then later built a porch over the top. None of us fancied exploratory digs on the drive or taking up the floor of the porch to find it so the line was looped out through the main wall. Then we had all the radiators flushed, which took an entire day, new controls and thermostats fitted, a magna-filter (to collect the iron filings from inside the radiators so they don't block the new pump fitted in January), new valves from the pump,and a special soakaway built for the boiler condensate as it is acidic and could damage the septic tank ecosystem if discharged into there. It took two men three full days and one of them is coming back on Monday to sort out one remaining niggle over a reduced flow from the bath hot tap. 

We didn't have any heating during the week, although we did have the immersion heater for hot water, and that was fine until Thursday night. We caved that night and had the first open fire of the autumn as the temperature dropped to 7 degrees. 

So, it's done. At last.

I've been following the Brexit stockpiling story with some interest. You know me, I've always been a bit of a prepper, mostly for personal reasons which I talk about here and here. 

Brexit could result in higher food costs and perhaps delays to food deliveries if lorries get held up at ports (although supermarkets switching to a 4 or 5 day just-in-time system would help). While I won't be able to prevent higher food prices affecting us in the long term, I can delay the process a little and smooth the transition by making sure my stockpile is in good shape. It will also come in useful in case we get snowed in again this winter as we did earlier this year. 

So this week I did a quick rekkie of the stockpile and started the process of filling some gaps. I had stuff squeezed in everywhere so spent some time arranging things a bit better. Really it needs to come out of there though so only the currently used packets are in the circulation but that is a project for another year.

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Steel Kitten

Keeping warm in winter

Our house is not on mains gas, so we use kerosene to fuel our (ancient) boiler backed up with log burners.

I quickly realised when we moved here that the price of heating oil fluctuates depending on the season, and when you need it the most it will be the most expensive. Generally, winter prices can be 10-15p more expensive than summer so it pays to buy as much as possible in the summer.

Our tank takes, when full, 2500 litres and I have a monthly saving plan with a heating oil brokerage called Boilerjuice. Whenever I want a quote, I plug in the figures into its online calculator and it collects prices from local suppliers. Generally, I find the quotes are pretty competitive when compared to ringing round the suppliers and the longer you can leave it before needing the oil the cheaper it is.

So, this year as usual I waited until August to get my quotes for 2000 litres delivered ready for winter, only to find that the heating oil prices have gone barmy. Last year at this time I paid 33p per litre. This year I am being quoted 49p per litre. I paid £660 last year and this year it will cost £1050 for the same amount of oil. That's a whopping 60% increase.

So, I got up at 5:30 am this morning to do the figures and come up with a different strategy.

First, I'm going to get a list of suppliers and go direct to see if I can get a few pennies off a litre. I can also get the money in my Boilerjuice plan account refunded back to my bank account if I need to pay for fuel elsewhere.

Second, depending on what prices I can get direct, rather than fill the tank up I'm going to get the minimum order quantity of 500 litres and watch the prices like a hawk to see if they come down. My research this morning tells me that in three of the last five years October-December has had lower prices than the summer.

Third, we're having a new boiler fitted in September, which should be a lot more economical with fuel consumption than the current 23 year old one so hopefully what we do have will last longer. I'm also having new accurate digital thermostats put in so combined with the new system pump I had fitted in January, our consumption should be lower.

Fourth, I'm going to add to our stockpile of wood and order some smokeless fuel so we can delay putting the heating system on for a bit longer this autumn.

Fifth, I'm going to thoroughly prep this house for winter. I'm going over to Moneysavingexpert forum to have a read of their Preparing for Winter thread to pick up some ideas. Every week I can keep this house warm and delay putting the heating on is money in our pocket.

Finally, I'm going to pray that this heatwave continues well into the Autumn!

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Steel Kitten