Our squash bank is finally done!

This weekend has mostly been about finishing big garden jobs off. The long days of sunlight keep catching us out and we’ve been working quite late – tiring but at least it means we’re getting things done! The greenhouse is now complete with the final panes of glass and a lovely big wooden shelf that was built for it – if only we hadn’t chosen the hottest day of the year so far to spend a strenuous hour or so fitting it! 

We’ve finished digging the top side of the orchard too – and moved in with squashes, pumpkins and potatoes. The bank was originally a mass of brambles and nettles (first photo below), and it’s taken us a couple of months (on and off) to dig it out – not a particularly easy job with the amount of stones we took out (the fourth photo is only partway through). This year is going to be an experiment – if we manage to grow our larger vegetables there then we’ll look at building a more permanent bed that’s not reliant on lumps of concrete and cardboard! And of course – now we’ve dug that, we’re contemplating another bit just further down. The sleepers we dug out of the greenhouse are no good for a base anymore, but would make a great vegetable bed wall… 

Our frustrations with the planning process continue. We’ve heard nothing for several weeks – understandable given the anecdotal volume of applications the council are receiving – but today we heard that they want to discuss the Grampian Clause – essentially it means we’ll be committed to renovating the Tudor listed cottage at the back of the site, at a particular point in our development. It’s always been our plan to renovate it and restore its original features, but only once we’re up and running, and earning the income to fund the work. It sounds like the council may want us to complete the build in the same timescales – which would mean burning through our available funds without completing the first set of cottages, and also attempting to rent out cottages on a building site as we’d need to phase the work over a few years. So it means further discussions with the council to find something that’s more realistic. We just hope that doesn’t drag out the process for another couple of months while we wait to hear back from them, it’s already been five months since we put the application in, and it would be wonderful to be open by next summer… (hopefully not just wishful thinking!) 

We did have our third and final bat survey last week though, which feels like another small step completed. The second one was too cold for the bats to be out – but this time it was a little more exciting with a lesser horseshoe bat discovered hanging out in our cement mixer! Sadly it had gone when we went to show this week’s visitors, but we live in hope that it’ll reappear. Now we just need to wait for the final report, and then our bat licence to allow us to move the bats from their current locations into our newly-installed bat boxes. 

Our other major job this weekend was to plant our various seedlings into the kitchen garden, but we’ve still got plenty more to put in, so may cover that in a future blog. We’d love to think that we could be self-sufficient for fruit and vegetables for parts of the year, but based on our current success, we’re not sure how realistic that is!