The mood on the smallholding changes at this time of year. After a busy summer (with B&B guests and lots of successful courses) where the fields have literally been buzzing with life, things start to quieten down, plants and mini-beasts all enter a period of dormancy and we begin to see the holding in a […]
We have had quite an adventure with our four lovely British Saddleback pigs recently. We have three pig pens and we try to use them in rotation (alternating with planting green manures and vegetables) as pigs can be very hard on the land with their rooting behaviour and fondness for digging wallows. We keep our […]
We are SO excited about the Coracle Building Experience this month. It’s called an ‘experience’ because it’s so much more than a course. The Lint Mill enjoys a beautiful riverside location and so it’s the perfect location to build a boat! There will be camping and we will celebrate the joys of cooking and eating […]
I wish we’d had a fiver every time someone had called us Tom and Barbara over the years! But believe me, we’re really no Tom and Barbara and those that know me, will know I’m often fighting off my inner Margo! Nonetheless, the idea of a sustainable life was always a good one and when […]
Lately, there have been some strange sounds around The Lint Mill, terrifying demonic screeching sounds like this! At the very least we thought it was one of our goat kids being attacked by a predator. The sounds weren’t confined to night-time, we heard them mostly at dusk and we couldn’t connect the sounds with an […]
It’s at this time of year that I start to wander round the cottage garden looking for signs of which border perennials have survived the winter. I dust off my shaky Latin and begin my little memory game of intoning the botanical plant names, ‘Lysimachia, Filipendula, Alchemilla Mollis, Aconitum, Cephalaria Gigantium, Digitalis’, and so on. Every […]
We keep three breeds of goat at The Lint Mill but only two of the breeds are milked to make our soap. The Bagots are a very rare breed that we keep to contribute to its survival. The prefix (family breeding name) for the goats we breed is Medwyn (after the river that boundaries our […]
I have become a bit of a soil geek and I have been doing a lot of watching grass grow! Do you know that in the places where the thatch is dense, the soil keeps its temperature and the grass continues to grow, even in our Scottish winter! But why is this interesting you might […]