We're having nettle soup for dinner tonight. It is a spring treat - healthy because it is full of vitamins and minerals, cheap because the main ingredient is free, easy to cook and best of all, we really like it. We called in to our friends' farm and raided their nettle patch for the young shoots. Those young lambs have grown amazingly in so short a time.

Back to school. I realise now how much I enjoyed being at home. We achieved quite a lot over the holiday but still had a rest and enjoyed ourselves. And now we're back at the grindstone. Without that grindstone, a smallholding could never become a reality. It is just that I get soooo tired and have no energy left in the evenings for anything else. I hate it when all I seem to do is sleep, get up to go to work, work, come home and do everything needful in order to prepare for work the next day, sleep, get up to go to work, work etc etc.

We went to look at that land for sale. It is an awfully big area (over 40 acres - what would we do with all that, asked my husband) and one end is only about 100 yards from the motorway. That means the air quality will be very poor and not good for my husband's asthma. Still, I'm encouraged by the possibilities of buying land and then building a house. Given the high prices for a smallholding/farm/house with paddock around here then a more DIY approach may be more affordable. But then there is the planning permission problem. Would you get the all important permission? And then, what would you build? As beginners, would we design it right? Anyway, we'll keep our eyes open for more land and see how things progress.