Confused about the Good Life

Feeling jetlagged and confused. Once again, back in our old room at our parents' place at Upper East Coast Road in Singapore. It's 3.30am and we cant sleep because its only dinner time, the day before, back in the UK.

Have been feeling a dull mix of emotions and thoughts in the last 24hours or so.

When we decided, four months ago to come back home to singapore/bali to start making a living for ourselves. A simple life that suits us. Not earn too much money, not too much stress, not too complicated. Just enough for us to live by and have a Good Life. We decided that we could not 'faff' around the UK any longer and was just anxious to get started on our own project. But defining the project has been the main trouble. A million and one ideas have been thrown around between Bjorn and I in the last few months. So many. But none conclusive because we weren't in the location where we were going to be in to start this. To know the demands and needs of a market, one needs to be there. Many people leave their home countries, go abroad and get inspired by some business idea in that foreign country then take it back home. Coffee shops in Melbourne. Donut shops in America. But farms and country living? If only we were Taiwanese or Japanese. Then we could just start looking for a small holding in the countryside right after we return, and then just start already! We are deciding to try to do that in Bali now. Many people have started businesses there and make their lives there. I suppose, Im just feeling the fear of the unknown. An uncomfortable, yet necessary emotion that will hopefully propel us into something useful.

Time to get some shut eye now.

Turning water into wine

The biggest cost we can incur in our now very frugal life always comes down to providing ourselves with some form of entertainment, and entertainment in the countryside boils down to having copious amounts of booze. Making your own booze is actually not as hard as what many people make it out to be, fermentation is a natural process a gift given by god and a process undertaken by ancient civilizations for thousand of years . All it takes to make some alcohol is to leave some sugary fruits alone and volia alchoal is born! Making alchoal is easy, but making good booze is almost an art that requires a whole deal of work: getting the right equipment is the first step, demijohns, food grade fermentation bucket, campedan tablets, mashing bins, pressure barrels. Then focus has to be put into sterlising the equipment making sure that the solution coats everything!! Getting the proportion right, heating the mash, stirring it, straining it, pouring insane amounts of sugar, decanting it, racking it and bottling it. It is a long and arduous process and enjoying the fruit of your labour is still at least a year away, making your own booze is a true test of one’s patience. But I had none and sneaking a drink from the demijohn has left me with a groggy headache too often for my liking. Cheers to all!!

Picking dandelion for wine

Yummy flowers

1 more year, 1 more year

Beerfest

Yeasty mess

Green green vegetables

My mission the next 6 months was to focus on the vegetable production on the farm. Old chapel farm has 12 acres of land but only 2 acres were for vegetable growing, the rest of the land were dedicated to woodlands and grazing. The hills of mid Wales was one of crazy and unpredictable weather, which at times can be so harsh that only grazing of animals and potatoes stood a chance. Frost when the ground freezes over can happen as late as the 10^th of June. Vegetable growing thus is not an easy one to crack, the growing season was thus a short one and having to be always aware and in tuned with the weather. There was only so much planning that we could do, but in the end our fate was determined by mother nature.

The glass-house was my garden, a place of great importance but also one with much responsibility. Spring was a time where frantic sowing of seeds took place. I spent most parts of my days sowing the mighty brassica family, members of the solanace family bird eye chilies (hundreds of them) tomatoes, Aubergine, sweet peppers in pots,  peas in toilets rolls, lettuce in succession, calendulas in modules and dwarf French, broad, runner beans. It was a mad house, but mine to enjoy, BBC radio 2 in company I’m sure Ken Bruce added to the vitality of my little seedlings with his ever so monotonous selection of music and his boring banter with the weather and traffic girl Penelope fudge. Damn turn that radio off!!!!!