About Me

I'm Rachel and I live with my partner, Ian, in the centre of Cambridge.  Difficult spot to live 'the good life', right? 

Well, we try.  Our tiny front garden has become an insect paradise, and is the source of many jokes centring around people arriving at our front door under a swarm of bees.  Our back garden has several fruit trees (cherry, apple, pear) and we grow herbs in pots raised up on the fences.  Why raised?  Well we have also registered our house as a smallholding with DEFRA and now have two wonderful pygmy goats.  These are castrated boys and are purely pets, or 'practice goats' as we think of them, allowing us to perfect our goat pedicures for when we finally have space to add some ladies to the herd.  We periodically hatch chickens to raise for meat, and swap any girls among the hatch for boys that have been hatched by our neighbours who are interested in raising chickens for eggs.

Our main smallholder experience happens away from our house, at Hempsals farm.  A Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project in Willingham, north Cambridgeshire.  Here we work with several other families to raise sheep and pigs and meat, milk goats, and collect eggs from the hens and ducks.  We also have a large vegetable plot which produces veg boxes for us all throughout the growing season.

We make cheese, we preserve, we cure, we pluck we skin and each time we learn something new. 

Ian and I both have a background in science, with PhDs in Chemistry and Biology respectively, and we both work in science-related professions today.  We like to spend time working out *why* things work - or more often why they fail, and how we can make the next time more of a success.

Our not-so-long-term plans involve taking the next step and making a move to a full-time smallholding lifestyle... watch this space.