Living in rural England | a simple, cosy life in the countryside

Today I am going to take a really slow start to my Sunday morning by just enjoying being at home with our animals and yeah just taking it nice and slowly. This time of year as we all know we spend so much time at home and indoors and I think it's such an important thing to be able to spend the time making our homes cosy and comfortable and lovely. For me it is such an honour and such a privilege to be able to have you know a lovely home that I enjoy spending time with. Don't get me wrong it came with a lot of hard work and dedication and long hours of working but we got there in the end and I'm so happy to be here but you know I would gently encourage you to do that for yourself you know even if it's just lighting a candle giving things a little bit of a dust just taking your time to enjoy your space and your home and you know these things absolutely don't happen overnight it takes years and years to cultivate a space that you enjoy living in and that you appreciate feeling homely and cosy in and I'm so grateful to be able to have that I really really do enjoy my space but you know my hobby is to make our home a reflection of who we are and what we enjoy and this is what I like spending my time and my energy on and you know what it makes me really happy so I feel like these this time of year when it's dark and cold outside there's all the more reason to you know make your indoor space as beautiful as you can make it and as much as you want to even if it's your bedroom or if it's just a corner in a living room or maybe just your balcony outside if you live in the city everything is possible with a little bit of love and a little bit of care and you just have to maintain a positive happy attitude during this time of year because don't get me wrong I know it's a struggle I know it's dark and it's cold but don't worry spring is well and truly on her way so I am starting to prep for spring over at the allotment which is super exciting I'm really looking forward to start growing things so I'm actually sorting out my seeds here by sowing dates and whether I want to take certain seeds to the allotment which is mainly all of this veg and some of the seeds I'm going to keep at home and plant in our garden so those include things like the cornflowers so I'm super excited to get going with that the local market is a beautiful place I like to come when I can I like to come here on a lunch break or maybe pop over on a Saturday and you can absolutely see the signs of spring are coming you can see the beautiful bulbs that are coming up and all of the spring flowers that are ready for sale which just makes me feel so happy inside seeing all of this beautiful colour and new life and growth and yeah I'm so so gearing up for spring starting which is super exciting I think it's really important where we can to support our local farmers and local businesses so you know when I can make it absolutely well because it is such a beautiful experience to come here and just yeah enjoy being in this beautiful town in this little market but the real reason that I did come into town was because I wanted to join our local library so I haven't joined a library for a really really long time I remember going a lot as a kid and I did really enjoy it it was kind of like a really peaceful quiet sanctuary so I came to our local library and I would absolutely recommend it I really enjoyed it it was super quick and easy to sign up and there are all sorts of amazing digital apps that come along with the membership so you have access to magazines and audiobooks and all this wonderful stuff so yeah pop down to your local library if you're interested so I am not fully ready to embrace all of the spring decor and completely you know deck out the house well I don't completely deck out the house but I wanted to introduce really subtle nudges of spring basically into our house and I thought that this was a really low-cost really easy thing that you could do to introduce some spring bulbs into your house so I picked up this pot of three bulbs I think it was from Lidl and I think it was like $1.99 so it's super affordable and yeah really cheap and accessible and then I just found these three containers around my house two of them were from old candles and then the green jar is just a storage jar and I just took off the cork lid to use it for this and yeah I basically divided the bulbs up it was I had to do it very gently I've kind of edited out all of the gentle teasing because it might have got a bit dull but I pulled out the bulbs obviously and I twisted them into the jars because it kind of made sure that the roots stayed intact and they weren't kind of crumpled I gave them a really really good water and then popped some moss that I found in the garden just around the top so it kind of finishes it off really nicely and that you don't see the the soil and it's so nice to just see these lovely pops of green around our house and hopefully the flowers will come out soon so these are hyacinth bulbs and I don't know about you but hyacinth is one of my favorite smells it is absolutely glorious it is so perfumey and so delicate it you know it really knocks your socks off when you walk into a room and there's some hyacinth blossoming so I'm really looking forward to these coming out and yeah I would highly recommend this little craft it was super cheap super quick and easy to do and I'm really looking forward to watching the bulbs grow so I wanted to pop over to the allotment on a Sunday because it's obviously my day off and I can spend some time here for once it wasn't raining which was an absolute miracle in Britain it's been a very very wet start to the year so yeah I wanted to make the most of a little bit of sunshine and just kind of give the allotment a little bit of TRC and I wanted to start with the polytunnel area so you'll see me setting up the trestle table which I actually found a second hand shop for five pounds so I thought that that was a really good deal obviously when things are gonna be in this polytunnel they're gonna get warped they're gonna get like water damage and soil all over them so I didn't want to spend a lot of money but I thought that that was a really nice bench for me to start planting up all my seedlings which is really exciting and then I just took off like the top half of the growing shelves there as well so I could tuck it up against the wall a bit better so yeah just a little bit of love and attention and now I'm gonna start planting my seeds which is super exciting so I'm actually starting with some chilies we really love chilies we cook with them quite a lot especially in the winter time for some you know warming stews and soups and that kind of thing and I really want to make some sweet chili jam this year so yeah I'm really looking forward to getting going with that if you have any tips or tricks on how to plant seeds or just generally running an allotment please let me know in the comments below I'd love to hear any ideas or suggestions so what I'm doing here is turning over the soil and actually putting wood ash from our wood burners on it to the soil so I very much am aware of the no dig kind of movement that's going on but when we took over this polytunnel the reason why I haven't been able to go for that is because the soil was really really compacted in the polytunnel and it was just not gonna be like diggable if that's even a word and also it would have cost a lot of money to have gotten a load of fresh compost and cardboard and all that sort of thing and get it delivered to the allotment so that's why I'm turning over the soil and using some wood ash to help fertilize it so next up on the to-do list was planting our three fruit trees that we bought from a local garden center so we got cherry apple and pear trees and we made sure that they are the self-fertilizing type because if you didn't know sometimes with the old heritage versions of fruit trees you need to plant them in pairs so that they can fertilize each other from you know the bees and the pollen and the wind and all that sort of thing but luckily these were self-fertilizing and I kind of want to create like a little orchard area in this part of the allotment which I think will be really sweet I'm kind of envisioning you know the trees about 10 foot taller than they currently are but we will get there this is gonna be a long slow process and I am very very much looking forward to that so I need to give these trees a very good water and head on home but that is it for this week's video please don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel I believe there is also a hype button if you're on mobile so you know feel free to give that a go it really helps little channels I hope you have a lovely rest of your day stay happy and blessed be