Sustainable rural living, organic growing and the slow countryside life.
Cherry Orchards began with a move out of the city and a long, steep learning curve. Swapping a flat with a balcony for an old cottage with a tired garden and an oil tank in the corner taught us quickly that living lightly in the countryside is a craft, not a given. This site is the field journal that grew out of that — a place to share what's worked, what hasn't, and what we wish someone had told us sooner.
We write about the things that fill our days here: feeding the soil and growing food the organic way, heating an old house without heating the sky, eating with the seasons, and finding the kind of quiet that only the country seems to offer. The thread running through all of it is the same — that a slower, gentler, lower-impact life isn't a sacrifice but a richer way to live.
The writing here is by L. Chen, a former city-dweller turned smallholder who has spent the better part of a decade learning to grow, mend and make do. What started as scribbled notes on seed packets and the backs of envelopes slowly became this site, an attempt to gather the practical and the reflective in one place. There's still a notebook by the back door and far more to learn than there is time to learn it.
We're not selling anything and we're not pretending to have it all figured out. We're here to swap ideas with anyone trying to live a little more thoughtfully in the countryside. If you'd like to get in touch, share a correction or suggest a story, we'd genuinely love to hear from you — drop us a line any time at [email protected].