About me

Hi! Welcome! Pull up a chair and make yourself a cup of tea.

I’m Rachel, mum to three teens, 2 dogs, several chickens and wife to my patient husband. We live in rural Oxfordshire on a small, smallholding with an allotment conveniently attached.

I am a music teacher by profession and a wearer of the titles: baker, musician, eco warrior, yoga lover, silver jewellery maker, writer, traveller, photographer, knitter, bodge seamstress, student, home maker, family girl (stick amateur in front of most of those and you’ll get the picture!).

We have lived in a few different countries as our children grew up, one of which was New England in the US, you may have arrived here from my previous blog that I wrote as the children were growing up (Across the Pondlife). We moved to Oxfordshire back in 2011 and have been working on our home and trying to reduce our footprint and develop our self sufficiency ever since.

I teach clarinet and piano, which I love, but I also thoroughly enjoy mooching around at home, finding new recipes to try, making alterations to our elderly home, teaching myself to play the cello and generally just being a homebod.

Our three children are grown now, so this blog will not have them feature very much as I respect their privacy, suffice to say, they are our hearts and the inspiration for who I am and what I do.

I hope you’ll enjoy browsing through my site. I do not take any compensation for anything I might recommend, just purely tried and tested. I hope you’ll find me honest, if things go wrong (which they often do!) you’ll know it’s gone wrong, I don’t profess to be an expert at anything except my day job. I take my photos myself and enjoy messing around with them. Please don’t lift and take them without crediting them back to me. If you like to comment, please do, I enjoy knowing that people have visited, but remember, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. We’re real people.

Bye!