Our week started with the removal of our old yew tree. It had grown right next to our listed cottage and, at some stage had fallen over onto the cottage itself, knocking down the corners of the back lean-tos. It didn’t stop growing though, instead changing direction to grow right over the roofs of the lean-tos and causing ongoing damage.
There was no way we could restore the old building with the yew tree still there, and so decided to take it out before submitting our planning application (which hopefully is nearly ready!). Our neighbour also informed us that yew is poisonous, and with the upper branches hanging over his cattle yard, he was very willing to give our tree surgeons access to his land to remove it.
The tree itself is enormous! We’re planning to keep the wood and use it for furniture for the cottage – poetic justice for destroying part of the building, and nice to keep it living on in some way. Our next step is to get it sawn up so we can season it. We also kept the wood chippings so we can use them for paths at some point – the house is surrounded by gravel paths at the moment which sticks to our shoes and gets everywhere. We need to lift the paths to repair our soakaway and to bury our electrical cables, so good times to replace the gravel with the wood chipping.
The space around the back of the orchard and cottage has really opened up now – and we’re hoping that the extra light will improve our fruit trees. It gets so dark in that back corner that our harvests have been pretty dismal. And it’s lovely to be able to see more of the cottage – and see what we’re facing!
We’d planned to prune all our apple and pear trees this weekend – but bad weather on Sunday meant we only got 2/3 of the way through. As last year was our first ever attempt at pruning, we probably weren’t as severe as we needed to be – the trees don’t seem to have been pruned for a while, and the branches are all far too crowded. Almost all of the apple trees have canker (some worse than others) and so we’ve tried to take out as much as we can to try and stop it spreading further. There’s a strong likelihood that we’ll need to replace some of the trees at some stage, but we’ll do our best to restore them to full health.
The fruit trees in our front garden seem to be canker-free (touch wood) – but instead they’re infested with mistletoe. Which would be great if it wasn’t poisonous and if we didn’t have a curious dog… We’d let it get quite bad so cut back as much as we could before it got too dark, and before the ladder wobbled too much on the gravel. Something to look forward to next weekend!
Ley Farm Cottages 