This week really does feel like a long week – but maybe because it’s been so varied in terms of progress. We’ve decided to go down the route of a negotiated contract, which means that we choose our preferred builder and agree a pricing policy for materials plus a mark-up to cover people costs and profit. Before we sign any contracts, we’re doing some due diligence by seeing a couple of previous projects – on Monday evening this week we visited a completed project and spoke to the homeowners to hear about their experience; and next week we’re off to see one of their current projects. It was an incredibly useful visit – not only did we get a really good sense about how the builder and his team operates, but we also got a few design ideas to include in our build (it was an amazing project with some really clever solutions!).
Wednesday was taken up with a road trip to various family members to pick up different bits of furniture for our cottages – it’ll be a while before we need them but as we’d hired a van, it would have been a waste not to fill it! We just need to work out how we plan the different build phases to make sure we always have somewhere dry to store it.
As usual, our weekend was taken up with garden jobs – from general maintenance in the form of mowing, clearing and composting vegetable beds, and potting up seedlings; to repairing our storm-damaged fruit tree cover (taking the opportunity to make some strengthening alterations at the same time).
And then on Sunday we started our next big garden project! We’ve nearly finished the new vegetable bed that we started in the new year, but now we need to finish upcycling some cold frame windows before we can complete the project. As we can do that in the evening, we decided to spend the weekend daylight hours digging out our second veg bed, further along the side of the orchard. Last year we turned this patch into a temporary pumpkin/squash/potato patch, and so now we’re making it a more permanent bed. The soil seems to be a horrible mix of stones and clay, so it’s going to take some time!
Our final job this weekend was to feed our fruit trees and bushes. We’re quickly learning the different pests and problems that we’re facing with our fruit – one of which is bitter pit, caused by a lack of calcium. It’s a little hard to work out just how much fertiliser to use (the suggested amounts differ according to different books/packets, and how big the bushes/trees are) – but as we didn’t really apply much feed last year, we’re hoping any amount will help. It’s so demoralising to go to the effort of picking all the fruit only to find it’s damaged, so this may make all the difference.
Ley Farm Cottages 