The cave

Yesterday was cooler so I tried to spend some time inside doing interesting inside jobs as opposed to the drudgery inside jobs that I do At Speed.  So I packaged up more postcards to be sent. 

Then I worked in my new Cave.  John calls it the Cellar. The local word for this room is the Fruit Room. As you know one of my goals is to be self sufficient.  One day I would like to try and go a whole year just eating from the farmy and buying dry stores like rice and flour and beans four or five times a year. I suggested this to John and he said he would go and live with his mother for that year.  

I said You do know that it will not be long and we will be building your Mother a Nanny Cabin down the bottom of the garden. She is in on this you know!  He shook his paper and remained behind it.  In my cave I have room for all the vegetables preserved in jars. The pickles, chutneys, honey, vinegars, jams and oils.  On the right of the image above you can see the cheese cupboards, there are three along one wall. There are three parmesan wheels in them now. I shall fill it this summer. My cheeses will age much better in there. 

It is all very well to preserve  the summer produce for the winter but it needs to be stored in a designated space.  And all the jars as they are emptied need to be stored somewhere other than the bottom of my wardrobe. This is a lovely old fashioned idea.  A beautiful store-room.  A whole winters worth of food is quite a lot of food. The cave is 8×12 foot.  It is made entirely of recycled barn timbers. And the scent from the wood is just sublime.

Naturally one wall is for the wine. This room is on the North side of the basement and it is very  cool down there. It has a solid door. The floor is the concrete of the basement and the ceiling is also sanded tongue and groove old barn timbers. There is one tiny window, that looks out into the feet of the plants in the garden above. 

This is the magnolia I planted to shade part of the verandah in the summer. I think it is called sunburst.  But I am not good with the names of plants.

I am now on the hunt for a door for the root cellar so I can store potatoes, onions and pumpkins, etc. Though the old people say to put the apples and pears in the well house because they will ripen and rot everything in the root cellar and if I cover them in burlap sacks above the well they will be fine in there.  So much to learn.

I hear of people going off the grid and filling their houses with batteries and gadgets and generators to make the electricity they previously pulled from the grid.  Solar that fills a bank of batteries. Wind turbines that have components made all over the world and shipped across to us. I wonder whether this does not leave just as big a carbon footprint. I sense that I am wandering off into a life that will eventually only need very little electricity and fuel to run it and I do not want to leave a huge pile of rubbish behind when I am gone. A little is OK.  A little electricity and fuel is OK. Sustainable.

Imagine if there was no dump and no garbage trucks and all the rubbish and debris we throw out each day was piled like an exclamation mark in our own back yards where everyone could see it.  Over the years it would be bigger than the house. I tried to explain this to my visitors last week when they were hunting for store bought water in convenient plastic bottles. I tried to do the maths for them.  I tried to explain that water in throw away bottles is a very new phenomena and we should be careful.  They just looked blankly at me and said well where do you get your water from then. I handed them the water jug and a glass.

Good morning. It is cool now but fine and will get warmer.  The sun is up and I will be outside again today! I love this weather!

celi