This year has been a good year for apples, so it would seem. Our trees have been laden with them and our trusty cooking apple tree (possibly a Bramley) has produced baskets of large red and green fruit. We have now harvested them all and are slowly going through the many crates filling the floor space in the kitchen. We daren't light the woodburner in there so as not to spoil them before we have a chance to process them.

Today is Apple Day and I thought I would make a contribution to this 30-year old autumn celebration by giving …

As we move into August, we pass the half way point in the calendar between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox. The long days of Summer are drawing in and we are making our way towards Autumn. On the Wheel of the Year, this point is Lammas, a celebration of the first harvest, the Grain Harvest. The word 'Lammas' comes from 'loaf mass' and indicates how important and meaningful the first grain and the first baked loaf of the harvesting cycle are.

We are now at peak Summer when the harvest season begins in earnest. Growth of early Summer …

This week sees us reach an important milestone in our smallholding life, an event that we have seen coming and been preparing for for the last five months. On Monday, we took the concept of "homegrown" to a new level by taking two of our lambs to the abattoir.

It was very hard and, if I am honest with myself, I am not completely at peace with doing it. I feel conflicted as I wrestle with the ethics of it... is it right for an animal to be born and then slaughtered for meat a few months later? It feels …

One thing that attracted me to our smallholding was the fact that we are almost off-grid. It is only the electricity network that we are hooked up to and even with that we hope we feed in more electricity than we use.

One drawback of this as we discovered around Christmas is the maintenance of some quite complicated equipment, one being the sewage treatment plant. Gone are the days when your raw sewage was allowed to flow untreated into the local river and a good thing too for the environment. We have a system called a "Condor Clereflo EP05" which …