Sharpen your knives...it’s time to talk turkey carving
Carving the bird is a rite of passage and it’s easy to mess up with a blunt blade
It used to be perfume, lingerie and fine wine. Now give me a dehydrator?
Our Christmas gifts have been getting more pragmatic and that’s fine by me
My child’s art has pride of place on our walls – my prized pictures are behind the sofa
Unhung paintings have just become more clutter around the house
From rural sowing and reaping to dreams of urban return
‘I can’t deny a secret yearning to escape the country and return to Stoneybatter’
A new mattress was sprung on me but what to do with the old one?
There had to be a better way of disposing it than flinging it into landfill
The garden is not abuzz. I want the bees back
Leaving things to nature – and lawns unmowed – pays its own dividends
The cherry tree in bloom reminds me of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone
Striking a balance between surrendering the garden to nature and precision strimming
Lesssons from the Californian drought: nature has adjusted, humans not so much
Despite living in a predominantly wet environment, we are mindful of the water we use
Hens are short lived, like my henhouse
I need to construct a new henhouse and this time I ought to properly consider its design
I could get used to 21st-century apartment living
After a month in a high rise in Chicago, life back in the countryside seems quaint
Butter curlers and melon balls: the kitchen utensils I can’t throw away
The drawer is packed like Tutankhamen’s tomb but we won’t dispose of anything
Big field, small cottage, lots of wellies and my carefully crafted solution
The ‘welly tree’ didn’t pass the taste test
In the mood to make marmalade
Seville oranges are in, but I need to go shopping to improve this year’s batch
‘Lay off our books, Marie Kondo’
The bookshelves in our cottage are full, but some day there’ll be space for more
‘It’s vulgar, but our Christmas tree is full of memories’
Philip Judge’s tree is adorned with years of decorations, both tasteful and tawdry
Let me tell you about the wet-weather woes of our leaky country cottage
Accumulated years of Irish winters mean crumbling plaster, sweaty floors and wilting newspapers
Home Theatre (Ireland) review: An innovation with life-changing potential
Dublin Theatre Festival: Intimate snapshots of life in Dublin 15 pair actors with locals. The results are top-notch
Help! We have far too much stuff in our ‘hobbit’ cottage
‘I often regret my lack of interesting socks – but they’re there. I just can’t find them’
Our life is fossilised in the geological strata of our tea towels
We have dozens, some for making prosecco look like champagne, others for extinguishing fires
Ground rules for the vegetable patch
You want to grow to love your garden, not hate it. I adore my vegetable patch – but it is too large
Nostalgia is getting in the way of our cottage conversion
Extending could mean letting go of olde worlde touches like headbanger doors
‘We got lazy and let the gazebos blow away’
A strong wind took away the cheap gazebos, but a cherry tree gives us just the right shade
The sinister smell of a septic tank gone very wrong
Whenever our neighour asked about the troublesome tank I would shrug and think of butterflies
Our 100 year old Wicklow cottage is full of memories of other lives
Writer Philip Judge is sometimes visited by the relatives and descendants of others who have lived in his home
Technology is the farmer’s friend, but at heart, farming still requires human labour
I have no technological tools for my small-scale husbandry, but I get a never-failing thrill when I fork over a ridge of dark clay to reveal a spill of new potatoes
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