The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

An old tyre protects a self-seeded sapling

Many of the trees in our garden are self-seeded saplings we’ve allowed to grow. We reckon we’ve added as many as 250 trees this way, some of which are now very large.

The problem comes when a seedling appears in areas of grass that we normally mow. If the grass grows too long before the first cut of the year, there’s a danger we won’t see the seedling and it gets cut down. We’ve tried to avoid this by marking seedlings with sticks. But even then, because we don’t have the time to trim around each seedling, and given that it’s difficult to mow very close, the seedling still gets swamped by a clump of grass.

Over the years, we’ve made very effective use of what the French call ‘toile de paillage’ (literally, straw cloth) – permeable plastic sheeting that suppresses growth while allowing water to penetrate. But it’s expensive. And when used in areas that we mow, there’s always a danger of clipping the plastic sheet, winding up with long threads wrapped around the drive shaft of the mower blades. This can cause a surprising amount of damage to the mower.

The plastic sheeting also needs to be held down by something. You can buy expensive spikes for this purpose – we used to have some plastic ones, but they’re all broken now. And with our rock-infested land, they rarely work well.

We’ve tried using rocks – we have plenty of those – or even faced granite stones from the long-demolished buildings that once stood on our land. But hitting them with the mower is no fun either.

One alternative is old carpet, if it consists only of natural fibres. This doesn’t need pinning down, but it presents the same mowing dangers as the plastic, so we use it only in areas well away from those we mow.

This year, we’re taking a recycling approach. I cut circles of the permeable plastic from an old sheet of the stuff we had lying around. These are held down by old tyres. These are easily seen – and thus avoided – when mowing. And if the mower does hit them, it’ll simply nudge them out of the way.

They’re not permanent features around the saplings: they’re needed only until the young trees are high enough to be clear of the grass.

As an alternative to the plastic sheet, we may also try using actual straw inside the tyres – we have an endless supply of this as we have friends who need to dispose of it when they muck-out their donkey enclosures.

End result: free trees that will grow faster because of this (free) protection.

The DH and I were having another one of those discussions over the weekend – how to reduce our bills and at the same time go more eco-friendly.

We are all for being green, as I’m sure most people are, but the primary push is probably going to be forced on all of us. For instance, we stopped using our tumble dryer a year ago in order to reduce our electricity bill, and for the same reason, we now wash up by hand rather than using the dishwasher. (In any case, it broke, and the part was a fortune, and we can’t afford a new machine.) So back we are (or rather, the DH is) washing up with a bowl and soapy water. It is not so bad, really, and at least enables us to use our nice raku dinnerware, which was too delicate for the machine.

A bunch of us girlfriends also wanted to try soap nuts, so we split a 20-euro bag between four of us (giving each of us enough nuts for six months). The verdict so far is pretty positive – the soap nuts seem to get your clothes as clean as old-style washing powders or liquids, and leave no residue in your clothes to irritate sensitive skin. The only drawback is that the clothes don’t smell fresh. They don’t smell dirty either, of course, they just don’t smell at all. Perhaps this is something we’ll all get used to – you can put a few drops of essential oil in the dispenser if you want, but I don’t like to do it too often because we have a septic tank.

Another thing that’s on our minds is lighting, because the old-style incandescent lightbulbs are being phased out now, and that will mean switching over to energy-saving bulbs, like it or not. Which is fine, even though they’re three times the price, because they last virtually forever and they use, say, 11 watts of electricity instead of 60, which will mean a massive reduction in consumption. But in our case, it also remains replacing all our light fittings, because our current ones won’t take eco-friendly bulbs.

We have a dimmer switch for the main lights, and that’s a no-no for energy-saving bulbs, so it will have to come out. This house is also French but the people who restored it from a ruin were British and they brought over British fixtures with them – crucially, these take bayonet-fitting bulbs. Try getting those in France. It’s hard enough to get incandescent ones, but in long-life, it’s virtually impossible. So every British light fitting in the house will have to come out and be replaced with a French one – that’s 14 fittings.

Oh la. It can’t be helped. It is what we call the Montcocher effect – we try to do the simplest thing, like put up a shelf, and it entails some massive palaver with drills and rawlplugs and special screws and I know not what. But once again, when it’s done, it will be done, and I’m sure we’ll be glad of it.