May 2008 News and Views
News & Members' Contributions from Countryside Connection Village
The response has been so wonderful since I began sharing excerpts from our members' monthly newsletters! After enjoying this month's issue, you will be able to read all of the February 2008 News and Views as well as March 2008 News and Views and April 2008 News and Views you might have missed by accessing the individual links. I will continue to provide access to all future issues in the same way so that you will not miss any of the news from our village. To enable you to enjoy past news and members' contributions from our Countryside Connection Village please simply click on the link to the appropriate month each time you visit our site.
Please Note : As one of our members, Artist Linda Leonard Hughes from Maine advised in our February issue, you will be wise to prepare a pot of your favourite brew before beginning so that you can sit back, relax and enjoy all of the exciting news as well as the latest adventures and offerings our members have shared.
I hope you will enjoy the excerpts from our Members' Newsletter. If you have a small business in Britain or America that you would like to see featured on our site and enjoy the full benefits of membership in our unique networking community, please send me an email and I will be delighted to make contact with you and answer all of your questions. Send your request to enquiries@countrysideconnection.com ~ I look forward to hearing from you, Heléne
Dear Visitors to Countryside Connection Village,
Snow, sunshine, showers and spectacular storms ~ this past month has brought every possible type of weather! I have been inundated with a steady flow of emails and calls from those longing for spring and summer and hoping that this year they will be filled with warmth and dry days and nights! The unpredictability of nature certainly hasn’t stopped many of our members who report spending hours gardening in England, Wales and New England whenever the weather allows. Until the very end of April, a month later than usual, many farmers were still unable to allow their animals to remain outside fulltime due to insufficient grazing conditions. As I write this, we are having heavy intermittent rain showers with heavier storms predicted for later in the day and no matter what you have heard, the ducks on the river do not look at all pleased!
Email and flower (thank you!) with birthday wishes from Marilyn Tippett of The Mill at Lloyney in Wales ~ Marilyn’s web designer is also working with her in redesigning her site: www.lloyneymill.co.uk
"Hi Heléne
Just wanted to thank you for the latest addition and let you know it arrived safely. All is well here but has been busy (a good thing!) over the Easter period, and it's still as busy as I like it to be now, hence this hasty email.
Congratulations on your first birthday.
Marilyn"
Email from Maine Artist, Linda Leonard Hughes who is recovering from her recent knee surgery. Note: Although Linda has had limited mobility this past month, she and her husband, John, have been very productive creating new additions and changes to her website. Please take the time to visit www.lindaleonardhughes.com and enjoy some examples of her wonderful work. We all want to send our congratulations to Linda who has just been accepted as a new member to both the Oil Painters of America and Portrait Society of America!
“Dear Heléne, I want to thank you so very much for remembering me in the April newsletter. It was kind and thoughtful to remember me. I do appreciate your kind words. My knee is doing much better and each day brings more mobility and strength! By next month I should be back to normal. Happy Spring and Warm Wishes to you! Linda Leonard Hughes”
Watch this space . . . Linda’s Maine home will soon be featured in our Bed and Breakfast Inns & Country Homes for Sale Category.
So many members telephoned or wrote to say that they were busy with new products and websites as well as decorating and gardening projects during April. Please take time to revisit the individual listings on our site and I know you will find inspiration and new thoughts of ways you can enjoy the unique offerings in all of our categories.
Karen Thorne and her family desperately needed a break from all of the construction going on at Hopton House www.shropshirebreakfast.co.uk so took off to San Francisco for a week. Here are Karen, Rob and Jessy at The Golden Gate Bridge ~ proof that some people actually did manage to depart from Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 on the first day it was opened AND their luggage was there waiting for them! After a fantastic time in the city and visiting the breathtaking countryside north of San Francisco , they returned home refreshed and able to face delays in new furniture deliveries, building materials and other similar problems. However, Karen reports that when the first guests arrived, all went smoothly and the new improvements were received with great acclaim. Visit Karen’s beautiful new website to see and read about all the new changes.
Also visit www.bedandbreakfastacademy.co.uk to learn more about Karen’s innkeeping courses. Karen’s accommodations and courses will be featured in the May Issue of Country Living magazine. With the next course having a waitlist, Karen has added two new dates on the 12th and 13th of July so contact her as soon as possible if you are interested in attending or want more information.
My note accompanying our Members’ April Newsletter began : “Here is your copy of our latest and longest newsletter to date!” At 19 pages, due not only to the introduction and features of our newest members and so much wonderful networking and other news and input from members but also the fantastic suggestions on networking as well as Martin Kay’s invaluable website help, received lots of feedback. I will quote from only one email, in my efforts NOT to repeat last month’s lengthy tome, as it was summed up in one simple sentence, by member Carla Boulton, www.naughtymutt.com immediately after it arrived in her Inbox:
“Thanks Helene
What a massive amount of information! Speak soon Carla”
During the first part of April, most emails were filled with delighted descriptions of a return to gardening; flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables ~ A follow-up email from Carla made me laugh aloud when I read the following portion “I have managed to get various veg seeds into the garden, so we should be well off for food in August time, last year there were groans at every meal when it was beans and courgettes AGAIN!” I hope the children appreciate her efforts!
Carla had a recent commission from a local school to create the graphics for the big bands music stands and is also busy preparing for her final art college project for the public show in June. She is also doing her part in helping the environment with plans for school courses drawings for canvas shopping bags. This is one of our typical members- always on the go!
Member Jinsy Robinson of Penyrallt Farm www.penyrallt.co.uk sent several wonderful and inspiring emails this month. Like Carla and the other members of our community, she is consistently working to ensure that we are all doing our part to follow the ethos of Countryside Connection. The work she and David do with local children and schools is so crucial, starting as early as possible to ensure our message of the importance of understanding and supporting local farming and small rural businesses.
Her first email early in the month was to thank me for the April newsletter “as interesting and pleasurable as ever” and to explain that she had been having email problems ( we all suffer from that at one time or another and Spam is something I dare not start on for fear of being unable to stop!) and had never received a March Newsletter. Thoughtful as ever, she was concerned that something might be wrong and I had not been able to send one. She went on to share their latest news on the farm “Things here are busy especially now that the weather is improving. I'm starting work in our new garden and we have a litter of Labrador puppies born last week, 6 yellow & 6 black...soooo sweet and growing fast. Lambing is drawing to close and they all look very decorative out in the spring sunshine.
Thanks again for the news of Countryside Connection and I look forward to further communications. All best wishes, Jinsy”
An immediate reply when another April Issue attachment was sent and the following reply came in:
“At last I'm finding a minute to thank you for sending me the March newsletter. I was surprised at how forlorn I felt when it didn't arrive as I was sure you must have written it. Anyway, I've had it now and all is well.
April is already turning into the most incredibly busy month with extra rehearsals with B Natural, a litter of Labrador puppies, Breton visitors staying in the house, a party of 70 Breton and Welsh for a farm walk and picnic, French friends visiting, the cottage full for the next few weeks, family visits, interesting meetings to attend etc. Penyrallt can never be accused of being dull.
Tomorrow we are off to a Soil Association meeting to hear Monty Don talk on local food. It should be fascinating. We , as food producers, are very conscious of the food miles issue as well as the environmental aspects of production and distribution, and are continually discussing with friends these matters and how they can be addressed. However, trying to talk with some friends from (My note I am replacing county with “another area of Britain” – as we don’t want to cause any offence or imply that all in that county are the same) about it all I was shocked to find that they were almost unaware of these issues and certainly felt that they had no relevance to their lives...these are intelligent educated people, science graduates in fact, who say things like ' Oh, but we always take our bottles to the recycling centre' as if that is the only thing they need to do whilst doing all their shopping in Tesco. While they were staying with us they did a 40 mile round trip to go to Tesco for their shopping ! (Sorry I'm climbng onto my soapbox!) 'Post-peak oil' was a phrase they were unfamiliar with, yet it is something we and many of our friends are constantly talking about.
We have an acquaintance who lives in a woodland near us who made a conscious decision to reduce his carbon footprint and so relies on public transport, has no electricity, heats & cooks on a wood burning stove and lives an incredibly calm, low-impact life. It may be rather extreme in some ways but it is an example to us all of how life can be lived without complete dependence on modern oil-reliant technology. Much food for thought.
West Wales is full of interesting people who are living 'alternative life-styles' (I hate the word life-style!) but of course to the majority of the population they are seen as cranks and 'hippies' whereas in fact they are doing a superb job of showing how things could be done in a post-peak oil world.
Diatribe over you'll be pleased to note! But I would be interested to know what you think.”
Jinsy asked the following and I would love to have input from as many as possible in the hopes of getting a dialogue going from readers of our newsletter as well as those in our community.
"What I'm trying to get at is, do you discuss these matters yourselves and try to find ways of reducing your carbon-footprint? I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this."
In Jinsy’s final email of the month, you will clearly see what I am referring to with regards to their work with local schoolchildren. As many of you know, my passionate beliefs for Countryside Connection and our community are long-standing ones, and in my professional career as an Education Specialist for Gifted and Talented Students, I worked very closely with students of all ages and their families, in schools, their homes and many other environments. Like Jinsy and David, I believe it is never too early to help our children to understand where their food comes from ~ many of you would be amazed at how many children actually believe cows and the milk they drink or chickens and the eggs they eat have no relationship at all. Many, looked very puzzled when asked about the source of these food products and simply reply that they come from the supermarket.
“As I've said in previous missives this month is just frantically busy and was made more so by a very short notice visit by 68 primary school children last week. We did have them spread over 2 days thank goodness!
It was such fun...one group was of 5-7 yr. olds and the other of 3-4yr.olds
Anyway, they all loved coming to the farm and the sad thing was that most of them had never been in a field before. Quite incredible considering that we live in such a rural area and that the school is in a small village near here.
They were shown the cows and ewes & lambs, and David caught one of the hens for them to stroke and see close to and while he was holding the hen, she laid an egg into his hand! We couldn't have set something like that up if we'd tried!
When I read this, I immediately sent it to my daughter Morgan and later that night we reminisced about the time, age 5, whilst sitting in morning circle at her school, one of the chickens wandered in from the garden and settled down to rest on her lap as the headmistress read to them. Morgan was so entranced in the story that she did not realize until the end of the gathering that the chicken had laid an egg on her lap. We also laughed remembering ‘Billy’ the school goat who seemed to hate everyone and butted the children whenever an opportunity arose! He was definitely not destined to last at the school and was sent off to a farm with lots of other goats ~ we always wondered if his attitude changed. Her next school, part of one of the University of California campuses, was appropriately called The Farm School and the children were able to keep small pets near the gardens they planted to help them learn another aspect of nature. At the time, we lived in a small seaside village but her understanding of the countryside was so important to me and has never ceased to be a top priority in her life.
Today, as many of you know, Morgan is continuing her postgraduate work in London and is working with young children in many city parks, helping them to understand the same principles and to be free to play and enjoy the land. She is always horrified when a parent panics over a bit of dirt that gets on their child’s clothing. One of her current research projects is designed to help others involve children in the outside environments available in their individual communities. On the last Saturday in April, she worked at one park for five hours participating in a ‘celebration of mud’ and mentioned getting some very strange looks as she travelled home on the bus covered in patches of dried mud from head to toe ~ not quite the same on a 26 year-old, especially when there aren’t any festivals going on! She has been invited by a person who heard her speak about the importance of play last summer after completing her thesis and will be speaking this month to a gathering of children’s care workers and play providers for the group, ‘Play Wales’ www.playwales.org.uk in Cardiff, as well as a number of others in the months ahead. Needless to say, she is hoping to be in contact with Jinsy as they certainly have a lot in common and many things to share!
To continue with Jinsy's fascinating email: The most interesting thing though I found was that when I asked some of the children , in both age groups, what had been the best thing about their day at the farm , expecting them to say the lambs or the big tractor, but no,they all said the soil!
David had shown them a field that had just been cultivated and had let them search in the soil for seeds; they were fascinated and just loved sitting and letting the soil run through their fingers. I found that quite moving & extraordinary.
These are children mainly from a large council housing estate where many of them get very little parental input and rarely play outside I think. The teachers do despair and so visits to somewhere like a farm are so important and one can only hope that the children go home with lasting memories and ideas beyond their previous experience.
The visit was under the aegis of Learning On The Farm, a local organisation set up by an ex-farmer who feels passionately about educating children about rural matters. www.learningonthefarm.org.uk
The dvd that we have made about the farm had been shown in the school that came to visit us and had really struck a chord which was wonderful and we've just had a shortened version done for schools and now that one school has actually been to see us I do hope that others will follow their lead.
We are now bracing ourselves for four days of Breton visitors. It will be fine though the language difficulties will be exhausting. Though saying that when we visited Brittany last year and met many of the people that are coming here we had amazing quadri-lingual conversations...English, French, Breton & Welsh!! And it all worked well! David speaks Welsh and English, but no French, I speak English with a little understanding of Welsh and a smattering of French, and some of the Bretons are learning Welsh which is very like Breton, and speak no English, so......! An interesting time!
Right, enough of my ramblings. I do hope everything is going well with you and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Hwyl (as they say in Wales), Jinsy"