Blog
Not fast, not furious: Learning to love slow compost
Once upon a time we were fully intending to follow the ‘fast’ or ‘hot’ composting method, where you turn your compost regularly to aerate it and speed up decomposition. That was the idea. We pretended to ourselves that we would diligently turn our compost every...
Get this garden started (PS. I hope you like lists)
We’re off, Gardening Bore Gang. I’ve sown the first seeds. I’ve cleared the veg beds of last year’s debris. I’ve been catching up on Gardeners’ World episodes… It’s safe to say I’ve recaught the gardening bug. It goes this way every spring. March rolls around and I...
Reducing our food bill. A thrifty soup recipe
I never used to pay attention to food prices. We live a frugal life, have old cars, go on cheap holidays, cut our own hair, and wear second-hand clothes. And because of that, I’ve always given myself licence to buy whatever food and drink I want, without...
Goals for our Bulgarian garden, 2023
Seems a little early to kick off my annual Gardening Bore witterings, but no. March is nearly here, and with it the ritual of starting new seeds and clearing last year’s mess from the veg beds. (If you’re one of those people who do a big garden tidy-up before...
Two packets of Bourbons and a packet of Hobnobs: The food journey of a Brit in Bulgaria
We talk a lot about how immigrant food has shaped British food for the better. We talk less about what happens – food-wise – when Brits move abroad. Which food traditions do we leave behind? Which remain rituals for life? I used to mock people who lived in expat...
How to survive January
How’s January treating you so far? I was livid – actually livid – to see that other parts of Bulgaria had a lovely sprinkling of snow in the past week, while our area is still a sea of brown. Brown trees, brown fields, brown roofs. So although we always ease into...
Worried about winter
Early January. Even though 95% of your body is under the duvet, you can tell it’s going to be cold when you get out. Cold wooden floors, maybe a thin film of ice on the single-pane windows. What little you can see through the window is bleached, the grey and white...
What to feed the vegan or vegetarian at your table this Christmas
If you’re anything like me, you start thinking about Christmas food in, oh I don’t know, September. By November you’re bookmarking more recipes than you could ever cook or bake in the one-week period that is Christmas. And by now, a week or so before C-Day, you’re...
It snowed without me
Greetings from the UK where I have been mostly screeching about the price of everything and wondering why there are so many people everywhere. So, you know, my standard UK experience. It doesn’t even feel that Christmassy here, and that’s my main reason for coming...
Lessons from the garden 2022
I’ve not been very Gardening Bore this year, have I? (On here, at least. I regularly bombard Instagram with pictures of tomatoes and courgettes.) Anyway, for those of you who come here for the garden porn, I apologise. Let’s give you a little fix to tide you over...
Putting on a show
How splendid has this autumn been in Bulgaria? The colour of the leaves has been stunning, and because the days are so warm (verging on hot, really), they’ve stayed glued to the trees for much longer than usual. A few years ago, we had a really hard frost pretty...
How we make cider
I say ‘we’ but this is mostly an annual Rob endeavour. I help out with the picking and chopping of apples, then I entirely check out of the process until it’s time to drink the stuff. Writing this post therefore meant shaking the details out of Rob’s head via a...